“Holy …!”
Fortunately, they were all firing straight up or randomly. Nothing aimed our way.
The tracers were so bright I would clearly see everything in the cockpit. The Japs had heard us — they just didn’t know where we were. Why they didn’t shoot away from the moon was a mystery to me.
“Eleven … ten … nine …”
Even the shore batteries were firing. The whole area was erupting with tracers. And searchlights. Four searchlights came on, began waving back and forth.
A stream of weaving tracers from one of the destroyers flicked our way … and I felt the blows as three or four shells hit us trip-hammer fast.
“Five … four …”
Modahl was flattening out now, pulling on the yoke with all his strength as the evil black shape of the Japanese cruiser rushed toward us. The airspeed indicator needle quivering on 255 …
“Three …”
“Help me!” he shouted, and lifted his feet to the instrument panel for more leverage.
I grabbed the yoke, braced myself, and pulled. The altimeter passed two hundred … I knew there was some lag in the instrument, so we had to be lower … The nose was coming up, passing one hundred …
We were going to crash into the cruiser! I pulled with all my strength.
“Now!” Modahl shouted, so loud Hoffman could have heard it without earphones.
I felt the bombs come off; two sharp jolts. Dark as it was, I glimpsed the mast of the cruiser as we shot over it, almost close enough to touch.
As that sight registered, the bombs exploded … right under us! The blast lifted us, pushed …
Modahl rammed the throttles forward to the stops.
The Witch wasn’t responding properly to the elevators.
“The trim,” Modahl said desperately, and I grabbed the wheel and turned it with all my strength. It was still connected, still stiff, so maybe we weren’t dead yet.
Just then a searchlight latched on to us, and another. The ghastly glare lit the cockpit.
“Shoot ‘em out,” Modahl roared to the gunners in the blisters and the tail, who opened fire within a heartbeat.
I was rotating the stiff trim wheel when I felt Modahl push the yoke forward. His hand dropped to mine, stopping the rotation of the trim wheel. Then the fifties in the nose lit off. He had opened fire!
Up ahead … a destroyer, shooting in all directions — no, the gunners saw us pinned in the searchlights and swung their guns in our direction!
Modahl held the trigger down — the fifties vibrated like a living thing as we raced toward the destroyer, the engines roaring at full power. With the glare of the searchlight and tracers and all the noise, it looked like we had arrived in hell.
And I could feel shells tearing into us, little thumps that reached me through the seat.
We were rocketing toward the destroyer, which was shooting, shooting, shooting …
Another searchlight hit us from the port side, nearly blinding me. Something smashed into the cockpit, the instrument panel seemed to explode. Simultaneously, the bow fifties stopped, and the plane slewed.
Modahl slumped in his seat.
I fought for the yoke, leveled the wings, screamed at that idiot Hoffman to stop firing, because he had opened up with the thirty-caliber as soon as the fifties lit off and was still blazing away, shooting BBs at the elephant: Even though we were pinned like a butterfly in the lights, in some weird way I thought that the muzzle flashes of the little machine gun would give away our position.
My mind wasn’t functioning very well. I could hear the fifties in the blisters going, but I shouted, “Hit the lights, hit the lights” anyway, praying that the gunners would knock them out before the Japs shot us out of the sky.
We were only a few feet over the black water: The destroyer was right there in front of us, filling the windscreen, strobing streams of lava-hot tracer. I cranked the trim wheel like a madman, trying to get the nose up.
The superstructure of the destroyer blotted out everything else. I turned the trim wheel savagely to raise the nose and felt something impact the plane as we shot over the enemy ship.
More shells tore at us, then the tracer was arcing over our wings. One by one the lights disappeared — I think our gunners got two of them — and, mercifully, we exited the flak.
The port engine was missing, I was standing on the rudder trying to keep the nose straight, and Modahl was bleeding to death.
He coughed black blood up his throat.
Thank God he was off the controls!
Blood ran down his chest. He reached for me, then went limp.
Three hundred feet, slowing … at least we were out of the flak.
The gyro was smashed, the compass frozen: The glass was broken. Both airspeed indicators were shot out, only one of the altimeters worked …
Everyone was babbling on the intercom. The cruiser was on fire, someone said, bomb blasts and flak had damaged the tail, one of the gunners was down, shot, and—
Modahl was really dead, covered with blood, his eyes staring at his right knee.
The port engine quit.
Fumbling, I feathered the prop on the port engine. If it didn’t feather, we were going in the water. Now.
It must have, because the good engine held us in the sky.
We were flying straight at the black peninsula on the western side of the bay. We were only three hundred feet above the ocean. Ahead were hills, trees, rocks, more flak guns — I twisted the yoke and used the rudder to turn the plane to the east.
We’ll go down the channel, I thought, then it will be a straight shot south to Namoia Bay. Some islands north of there — if we can’t make it home, maybe we can put down near one.
The gunners lifted and pulled Modahl out of the pilot’s seat while I fought to get the Sea Witch to a thousand feet.
Varitek had caught a piece of flak, which tore a huge gash in his leg and ripped out an artery. The other guys sprinkled it with sulfa powder and tried to stanch the bleeding … I could hear the back-and-forth on the intercom, but they didn’t seem to think he had much of a chance.
Dutch Amme climbed into the empty pilot’s seat. He surveyed the damage with an electric torch, put his fingers in the hole the shell had made that killed Modahl. There were other holes, five of them, behind the pilot’s seat, on the port side. Amazingly, the destroyer hadn’t gotten him — someone we had passed had raked us with something about twenty-millimeter size.
“Searchlights … That’s why Joe Snyder didn’t come back.”
“Yeah,” I said, refusing to break my fierce concentration on the business at hand. I had the Cat out into the channel now, with the dark shape of New Ireland on my left and the hulk of New Britain on the right. From the chart I had seen, that meant we had to be heading south. Only 450 nautical miles to go to safety.
“The hull’s tore all to hell,” Amme said wearily. “When we land we’ll go to the bottom within a minute, I’d say. You’ll have to set her down gentle, or we might even break in half on touchdown.”
Right! Like I knew how to set her down gently.
Amme talked for a bit about fuel, but I didn’t pay much attention. It took all my concentration to hold the plane in a slight bank into the dead engine and keep a steady fifty pounds or so of pressure on the rudder, a task made none the easier by the fact that my hands and feet were still shaking. I wiped my eyes on the rolled-up sleeve of my khaki shirt.
The clouds were gone, and I could use the stars as a heading reference, so at least we were making some kind of progress in the direction we wanted to go.
“Tell radio to send out a report,” I told Amme. “ ‘Searchlights at Rabaul.’ Have him put in everything else he can think of.”