“Wouldn’t that be great?” Pfaff said.
They both woke before sunup. The Russians were shelling the snot out of the German line somewhere not far enough north of where they were. Ivan hadn’t tried a summer advance before this year, but he had his tail up now. Baatz and Pfaff and the rest of the Landsers filled their mess tins from the goulash cannon one more time and emptied them as fast as they could. Then they started tramping west again. Pfaff said nothing more of math problems. Arno Baatz thought about them anyhow.
The Japanese Navy had flown more G4Ms in to Midway. They replaced the bombers destroyed by American air raids. Revetments protected a plane against blast and fragments. Nothing protected it when a bomb burst right on top of it. All you could do was get rid of the wreckage so you could use the revetment again.
Hideki Fujita didn’t like seeing what a bomb could do to an airplane. It made him think about what an antiaircraft shell could do, or a burst of heavy machine-gun bullets from an American fighter.
He didn’t want to think about such things, but he didn’t have much choice. If more G4Ms had come here, they’d come to be used. Before long, the Japanese would likely be dropping more germ weapons over Oahu. That meant he would have to climb into one of those bombers and do some of the dropping. He’d chosen such things when he volunteered to come to Midway.
G4Ms had enormous range. They could fly from here to Oahu and back. As far as bombers went, they were fast. That was the good news. The bad news was, they were nowhere near so fast as the latest fighters. And, to get that great range, they were as light as possible, which meant they were flimsy. They caught fire easily, too. If you got intercepted, if you got hit, you would die. It was about that simple.
Fujita marveled that no bomb had smashed the bacteriological-warfare unit’s little tent compound. That was luck, nothing else but. Some kami watched over rats and fleas and test tubes and the men who tended them.
Whether it was a good kami or one of the other kind, he wasn’t so sure any more. A few days later, sweating like a pig in his flying togs’ fur and leather, he climbed into a G4M’s bomb bay and hooked himself to the oxygen line. The engines thundered to life. The plane bounced down the poorly repaired runway and lumbered up into the air.
Off to the west, in the direction of the Home Islands, the sun sank toward the Pacific. It soon set. The G4M droned on through the darkness. America and Japan raided each other’s bases at night. The quarter moon spread sparkles of light across the blue-black water.
Tonight, the pilot flew south of the usual course. American carriers sometimes lurked partway up the chain of islets that led from Midway to the main Hawaiian islands. Their fighters would come up at night, hunting for bombers. Every once in a while, they’d catch one. But what they couldn’t find, they couldn’t catch.
Fujita shivered. Now that he was at altitude, he was glad for the gear in which he’d sweltered on the ground. Even in these subtropical latitudes, it was frigid up here at six or seven thousand meters. He wished he had more clothes, thicker clothes, to put on.
The pilot’s and copilot’s voices came faintly back to him through the speaking tube. They had nothing to say to him yet; they chatted with each other about how the plane was doing. As far as he could tell, it was doing fine. Listening to them gave him something to do while he sat there shivering in the dark. He hoped they had their navigating in good order.
They must have been about halfway to Oahu when the two men in the cockpit suddenly exclaimed together. The moon had shown them a string of bombers flying north and west. As they were going to hit Honolulu, so the Americans were taking a fresh whack at Midway.
“Zakennayo!” Fujita muttered. If the Yankees cratered the runways again, landing would be an adventure. He couldn’t do anything about that but worry. Worry he did.
He also hoped the American pilots hadn’t noticed the G4Ms, the way the Japanese pilots had seen their planes. If this raid was like the others, the Americans would have far more bombers in the sky to notice.
If the Americans had seen them, they would radio the news back to Honolulu. Then the night sky would light up with even more fireworks than usual when the Japanese flyers came overhead. Fujita hoped the moon was down by the time they arrived. They’d be harder to see then. It would be close. Moonset should be somewhere near midnight, which was also about when they were supposed to reach Oahu.
Nothing to do but wait and brood. Every so often, Fujita would check the luminous dial on his watch. He kept thinking forty-five minutes or an hour had gone by since the last time he’d looked at its radium-painted hands. He kept finding out it was only ten or fifteen minutes.
At last, when he was sure he’d spent a week in the air and the plane would either fly on forever or run out of gas and crash into the Pacific, the pilot’s voice came metallically through the speaking tube: “Be ready, Bombardier! We are nearing the target.”
“Hai!” Fujita couldn’t help adding, “Good to hear it, sir.”
No response to that. A few minutes later, though, the pilot said, “Open the bomb-bay doors.”
“Hai!” Fujita repeated. He cranked them open. The moon wasn’t quite down. He could see ocean far below, and then dark land. Freezing wind tore at him. The American blackout got better every time he flew over Honolulu. If he wasn’t wrong, they were coming up from the south. Raiding from that unexpected direction might keep the Americans from realizing they were there till they’d dropped their bombs and headed back toward Midway.
Or, of course, it might not. In fact, the thought had hardly passed through Fujita’s mind before lights winked on, all those thousands of meters down below. Some of those were the muzzle flashes of antiaircraft guns. Others were searchlight beams stabbing up to pin the Japanese planes on their bilious blue beams so the gunners could see what they were shooting at.
The G4M started jinking violently, going faster and slower, higher and lower, left and right to confuse the gunners. Gulping, Fujita feared his stomach was a few jinks behind the plane. Then he gulped again, for a different reason. Not far enough away, the antiaircraft shells began to burst. Fire and smoke lay at the heart of each explosion. Fragments flew much farther. And the blast from the bursts threw the bomber around, too.
“Bombs away!” the pilot shouted. “Let them fall!”
“Bombs away!” Fujita echoed. He yanked hard on the levers that released the pottery bomb casings full of fever and death. At least one of the G4Ms flying with his had ordinary explosives aboard. He saw the bombs burst down there as he closed the bomb-bay doors to make the plane more aerodynamic. The faster they got out of there, the better their chance of making it back to Midway.
By the way the pilot gunned the bomber’s motors, he didn’t want to hang around here, either. All the Japanese in the Midway garrison said the flat little island was a hellhole. Fujita had said so himself. When the other choice was getting shot down, though, the hellhole seemed heavenly by comparison.
Near misses shook the G4M for another long couple of minutes. One fragment tore a hole in the plane’s thin aluminum skin a meter behind Fujita. Had it hit him, it would have gutted him like a salmon. The wind screamed through the hole. No fluid leaked out of it, though, and no torn cables writhed in that wind. The bomber kept flying.
Fujita stayed nervous till the cockpit crew’s chatter told him the plane had got past Kauai on the way back to Midway. That meant American fighters were unlikely to come after them. They would probably make it back … and find out what the U.S. bombers had done to their base.
Or they would unless they met the returning American bombers head-on. The Yankee planes bristled with machine guns. The G4M might be able to outrun them, but it would never win an air-to-air gunfight.