Standing in the space behind us, between the seats, the radioman also studied the sea’s surface. His name was something Varitek … I hadn’t caught his first name. Everyone called him Varitek, even the other sailors.
The noise level in the plane was high; the headsets made it tolerable. Barely. Still, the drone of the engines and the clouds flamed by the setting sun and the changing patterns on the sea were very pleasant. We had cracked our side windows so there was a decent breeze flowing into the plane.
One of the sailors brought us coffee, hot and black. As Modahl smoked cigarettes, one after another, we sat there watching the colors of the clouds change and the sea grow dark. A sliver of the sun was still above the horizon when I got my first glimpse of the moon, round and golden, climbing the sky.
The other members of the crew were disappointed that they didn’t see any trace of Snyder’s plane. I hadn’t thought they would, nor, apparently, did Modahl. He said little, merely smoked in silence as the clouds above us lost their evening glow.
“Watch the moonpath,” Modahl told me after a while. “Anything we see up this way is Japanese, and fair game.” He adjusted the cockpit lighting for night flying and asked the radioman for more coffee.
MODAHL:
I couldn’t get Joe Snyder and his crew out of my mind. A fellow shouldn’t go forth to slay dragons preoccupied with other things, but I liked Joe, liked him a lot. And whatever happened to him could happen to me and mine.
The Japs were staging ships and supplies through Buka and Rabaul as they tried to kick us off Guadalcanal. They were working up to taking Port Moresby, then invading Australia, when our invasion of Guadal threw a monkey wrench in their plans. Now they were trying to reinforce their forces on Guadalcanal. A steady stream of troop transports and cargo ships had been in and out of those harbors, not to mention destroyers and cruisers, enough to put the fear in everybody. Then there are Jap planes — they had a nice airfield on Rabaul and a little strip near Buka. The legs on the Zeros were so long you just never knew where or when you would encounter them, though they stayed on the ground at night.
If they could have flown at night, the Cats couldn’t. The guns in the side blisters were poor defense against enemy fighters. When attacked, the best defense was to get as close to the sea as possible so the Zeros couldn’t make shooting passes without the danger of flying into the water. If a Japanese pilot ever slowed down and lined up behind a Cat a few feet over the water, he’d be meat on the table for the blister gunners — the Japs had yet to make that mistake and probably never would.
I sat there listening to the engines, wondering what happened to Joe, if he were still alive, if he would ever be found.
VARITEK:
If you didn’t believe you had a good chance of living through the flight, you would never get aboard the plane. Somebody said that to me once, and it was absolutely true. It took guts to sit through the brief and man up and ride through a takeoff, knowing how big this ocean was, knowing that your life was dependent on the continued function of this cunning contraption of steel and duraluminum. Knowing your continued existence depended on the skill of your pilot.
On Modahl.
Modahl. If he made one bad decision, we were all dead.
These other guys, I saw them fingering rosaries or moving their lips in prayer. I didn’t buy any of that sweet-hereafter Living on a Cloud Playing a Harp bullshit.
This is it, baby. This life is all you get. When it’s over, it’s over. And you ain’t coming back as a cow or a dog or a flea on an elephant’s ass.
I tried not to think about it, but the truth was, I was scared. Yeah, I believed in Modahl. He was a good officer and a good pilot. Sort of a holier-than-thou human being, not a regular kind of guy you’d like to drink beer with, but I didn’t care about that. None of these officers were going to be your buddy, and who would want them to? Modahl could fly that winged boat. He was good at that, and that was all that mattered. That and the fact that he could get us home.
He could do that. Modahl could. He could get this plane and his ass and the asses of all of us home again, back to the tender.
Yeah.
HOFFMAN:
These other guys were so calm that afternoon, but I wasn’t. Tell you the truth, I was scared. Waiting, waiting, waiting … it was enough to make a guy puke. I tried to eat and managed to get something down, but I upchucked it before we manned up.
I knew the guys on the Snyder crew — went to boot camp with a couple of them and shipped out with them to the South Pacific. Yeah, they were good guys, guys just like me, and they were dead now. Or floating around in the ocean waiting to die. Or marooned on an island somewhere. The folks at home saw the pictures in Life and thought tropical paradise, but these islands were hellholes of jungle, bugs, and snakes, with green shit growing right down to the water’s edge. Everything was alive, and everything would eat you.
And the South Pacific was crawling with Japs. The sons of Nippon didn’t take prisoners, the guys said, just tortured you for information, then whacked off your head with one of those old swords. Gave me the shivers just thinking about it.
If they captured me … well, Jesus!
No wonder I was puking like a soldier on a two-week drunk.
I just prayed that Modahl would get us home. One more time.
POTTINGER:
This evening the wind was only a few knots out of the west-southwest. Our ground speed was, I estimated, 102 knots. We were precisely here on the chart, at this spot I marked with a tiny x. If I had doped the wind right. Beside the x I noted the time.
Later, as we approach Bougainville, Modahl would climb above the clouds and let me shoot the stars for an accurate fix. Of course, once we found the island, I would use it to plot running fixes.
I liked the precision of navigation. The answers were real, clear, and unequivocal, and could be determined with finest mathematical exactness. On the other hand, flying was more like playing a musical instrument. I could determine Modahl’s mood by the way he handled the plane. Most of the time he treated it with the utmost respect, working the plane in the wind and sea like a maestro directing a symphony. When he was preoccupied, like tonight, Modahl just pounded the keys, horsed it around, never got in sync with it.
He was thinking about Joe Snyder’s crew, I figured, wondering, pondering life and death.
Death was out there tonight, on that wide sea or in those enemy harbors.
It was always there, always a possibility when we set out on one of those long flights into the unknown.
The torture was not combat, a few intense minutes of bullets and bombs; torture was the waiting. The hours of waiting. The days. The nights. Waiting, wondering …
Sometimes the bullets and bombs came as almost a relief after all that waiting.
The Sea Witch was Modahl’s weapon. The rest of us were tiny cogs in his machine, living parts. We would live or die as the fates willed it, and whichever way it came out didn’t matter as long as Modahl struck the blow.
But the men had faith he’ll take them home. Afterward.
I wanted to believe that. The others also. But I knew it wasn’t true. Death was out there — I could feel it.
Modahl was only a man.
A man who wondered about Joe Snyder and probably had little faith in himself.
Was Modahl crazy, or was it us, who believed?
Nothing in this life was as black as a night at sea. You can tell people that, and they would nod, but no one could know how mercilessly dark a night could be until he saw the night sea for himself.