Vincent Bennidetti and his crew flew the Sky Priestess on twelve missions and sank six Japanese ships before a fusillade from a Japanese destroyer punctured her wing tanks and took out her right engine. But even as they were limping back toward Tinian, trailing smoke and fuel, the crew of the Sky Priestess knew she watched over them. They were, after all, charmed. For the price of a blown kiss or a pat on the bottom, the Sky Priestess had ushered them into battle like a vicious guardian angel, shielding them even as the other bombers in their squadron flamed into the sea around them. She had shown them where to drop their bombs, then led them through the smoke and the flak back to Valhalla. Home. Safe.
The copilot chattered over the intercom to the navigator, airspeed, fuel consumption, and now descent rate. If they lost any more airspeed, the B-26 would stall, so Captain Vinnie was bringing her down into sweet, thick lower air at the rate of a hundred feet per minute. But the lower they flew, the faster the fuel would burn.
“I’m going to level her off at two thousand,” Captain Vinnie said.
The navigator did some quick calculations and came back with: “At two thousand we’ll be short of base by three hundred miles,
Captain. I recommend we level at three thousand for a safer bailout.”
“Oh ye of little fucking faith,” Vincent said. “Check your charts for somewhere we can ditch her.”
The navigator checked their position on the charts. There was a flyspeck atoll named Alualu about forty nautical miles to the south. And it showed that it was now in American hands. He relayed the information to the captain.
“The chart shows an uncompleted airstrip. We must have chased the Japs out before they finished it.”
“Give me a course.”
“Sir, there might not be anything there.”
“Ya fuckin’ mook, look out the window. You see anything but water?”
The navigator gave him the course.
Vincent patted the throttles and said, “Come on, sweetheart. You get us there safe and I’ll build you a shrine.”
Sarapul was heading for the beach and the men’s drinking circle when he heard the drums welcoming the Sky Priestess. That white bitch was stealing his fire again. He’d been thinking all afternoon about what he would say at the drinking circle: how the Shark People needed to return to the old ways and how he had just the ritual to get everyone started. Nothing like a little cannibalism to get people thinking right. But now that was all ruined. Everyone would be out on the airstrip, drumming and chanting and marching around like a bunch of idiots, and when the Sky Priestess finally left and the men finally did show up at the drinking circle, all they would talk about was the wonderful words of Vincent. Sarapul wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise. He took the path that led away from the village and made his way toward the runway. After all, the Sky Priestess might pass out some good cargo and he didn’t want to miss out on his share.
Sarapul had been permanently banished from the village of the Shark People ever since one of the chief’s grandchildren had mysteriously disap-peared and was later found in the jungle with Sarapul, who was building a child-sized earthen oven (an oom) and gathering various fragrant fire woods. Oh, the men tolerated him at the nightly drinking circle, and he was allowed to share in the village’s take of shark meat, and the members of his clan saw to it that
he got part of the wonderful cargo passed out by the Sorcerer and the Sky Priestess, but he was forbidden to enter the village when women and chil-dren were present. He lived alone in his little hut on the far side of the island and was regarded by the Shark People as little more than a monster to frighten children into behaving: “You stay inside the reef or old Sarapul will catch you and eat you.” Actually, scaring children was the only real joy Sarapul had left in life.
As he emerged from the jungle, the old cannibal saw the torches where the Shark People waited in a semicircle around a raised platform. He stopped in a grove of betel nut palms, sat on the ground, and watched. He heard a click from the PA speakers mounted on the gate across the runway and the Shark People stopped drumming. Two of the Japanese guards ap-peared out of the compound and Sarapul felt the hair rise on his neck as they rolled back the gate and fifty years of residual hatred rose in his throat like acid. The Japanese had killed his wife and children, and if there was any single reason to return to the old ways of the warrior, it was to take revenge on the guards.
Music blared out of the PA speakers: Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls.” The Shark People turned toward the gate and dropped to their knees. Pillars of red smoke rose from either side of the gate and wafted across the runway like sulfurous serpents. The distant whine of airplane propellers replaced the big band sound from the PA and grew into a roar that ended with a flash and explosion that sent a mushroom cloud of smoke a hundred feet into the night sky.
And half-naked, the Sky Priestess walked out of the smoke into the moonlight.
Chief Malink turned to his friend Favo and said, “Excellent boom.”
“Very excellent boom,” Favo said.
“There it is,” the copilot said.
The B-26 was sputtering on her last few drops of fuel. Vincent nosed her over and started his descent. “There’s a strip cut right across the center of the island. Let’s hope we didn’t bomb the shit out of it when the Japs had it.”
His last few words seemed unusually loud as the engine cut out.
“No go-around, boys. We’re going down. Rig for a rough one and be ready for extreme dampness if we come in short.”
Vincent could see patches of dirt on the airstrip, as well as fingers of vines and undergrowth from the jungle trying to reclaim the clearing.
“You going in gear up?” the copilot asked, thinking that they might have a better chance of survival going over a bomb crater if they skidded in on the plane’s belly.
“Gear down,” Bennidetti said, making it a command. “We might be able to land her gear up, but she’d never take off again.”
“Gear down and locked,” the copilot said.
They glided in about ten feet over the reef. A dozen Shark men who were standing on the reef dove underwater as the airplane passed over them as silent and ominous as a manta ray. Bennidetti flared the B-26 to drop the rear gear first and they bounced over a patch of ferns and began the rocket slide down the coral gravel airstrip. Without the engines to reverse thrust, Vincent had only the wheel brakes to stop the bomber. He applied them gingerly at first, then, realizing that the runway was obscured by vines that might be covering a bomb crater, laid into them, causing the wheels to plow furrows into the gravel and filling the still air with a thick white cloud of dust.
“We still burning?” Vincent asked the copilot over the rumble.
The copilot looked out the window. “Can’t see anything but a little black smoke.”
The bomber rolled to a stop and a cheer went up from the crew.
“Everybody out. Now,” Vincent ordered. “We still might have fire.
They stumbled over each other to get out of the plane into the dust cloud. Bennidetti led them away at a run. They were a hundred yards from the plane before anyone looked back.
“She looks okay, Captain. No fire.”
That set off a round of cheering and backslapping and when they turned around again they saw group of native children approaching them from the jungle led by a proud ten-year-old boy carrying a spear.
“Let me handle this,” Vincent told the crew as he dug into his flight suit pocket for a Hershey bar.
“Hey, squirts, how you doing?”
The boy with the spear stood his ground, keeping his eye trained on the downed bomber while the other children lost their nerve and backed away like scolded puppies.