The guns would work — I knew they would.
POTTINGER:
We know the Japanese sailors are there — they are blissfully unaware of us up here in the darkness. Right now they have their sub on the surface, recharging batteries and running southeast, probably headed for the area off Guadalcanal … to hunt for American ships. When they find one, they will torpedo it from ambush.
We call it war but it’s really murder, isn’t it? Us or them, whoever pulls the trigger, no matter. The object of the game is to assassinate the other guy before he can do it to you.
We’re like Al Capone’s enforcers, out to whack the enemy unawares. For the greater glory of our side.
Modahl climbed to the west, with the moon at his back. He got to twenty-four hundred feet before he tickled the bottom of a cloud, so he stayed there and got us back to cruising speed before he started his turn to the left. He turned about 160 degrees, let me fly the Witch while he used the binoculars.
“We’ve got it again,” the radioman said. “Thirty degrees left, right at the limits of the gimbals.”
“Range?”
“Twelve miles.”
“Come left ten,” Modahl told me.
I concentrated fiercely on the instruments, holding altitude and turning to the heading he wanted. The Catalina was heavy on the controls, but not outrageously so. I’d call it lots of stability.
The seconds crept by. All the tiredness that I had felt just minutes before was gone. I was ready.
“I’ve got it,” he said flatly, staring through the binoculars. “Turn up the moonpath.”
I did so.
“Okay, everybody. Range about eight miles. Three minutes, then we dive to attack.”
I tried to look over the nose, which was difficult in a Catalina.
“Still heading southeast,” Modahl murmured. “You’ll have to turn slightly right to keep it in the moonpath.”
The turn also moved the nose so it wouldn’t obstruct Modahl’s vision.
Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I wondered about those guys on that sub. If we pulled this off, these were their last few minutes of life. I guess few of us ever know when the end is near. Which is good, I suppose, since we all have to die.
The final seconds ticked away, then Modahl laid down the binoculars and reached for the controls. He secured the autopilot, and told me, “I’m going to run the trim full nose down. As we come off target, your job is to start cranking the trim back or I’ll never be able to hold the nose up as our speed drops.”
“Okay.”
He retarded the throttles a little, then advanced the props to the stops so they wouldn’t act as dive brakes. Still, nose down as we were, we began to accelerate. Modahl ran the trim wheel forward. I called altitudes.
“Two thousand … nineteen hundred … eighteen …”
Glancing up, I saw the conning tower of the sub and the wake it made. I must have expected it to look larger, because the fact that it was so tiny surprised me.
“Twelve … eleven …”
The airspeed needle crept past 200 mph. We were diving for a spot just short of the sub so Modahl could raise the nose slightly and hammer them, then pull up to avoid crashing.
I could see the tower plainly now in the reflection of the moonlight, which made a long white ribbon of the wake.
“Six hundred … five … four-twenty-five …”
We were up to almost 250 mph, and Modahl was flattening his dive, from about twenty degrees nose down to fifteen or sixteen. He had the tower of that sub bore-sighted now.
“Three-fifty …”
“Three hundred …”
“Ready,” Modahl said for Varitek’s benefit. He shoved the throttles full forward.
“Two-fifty …”
Modahl jabbed the red button on the yoke with his right thumb. Even with the shielding the blast tubes provided, the muzzle flashes were so bright that I almost visually lost the sub. The engines at full power were stupendously loud, but the jackhammer pounding just inches from my feet made the cockpit floor tremble like a leaf in a gale.
HOFFMAN:
I could see the sub’s tower, see how we were hurtling through the darkness toward that little metal thing amid the swells. When the guns beneath me suddenly began hammering, the noise almost deafened me. I was expecting it, and yet, I wasn’t.
I had been pointing the thirty at the Jap, now I held the trigger down.
The noise and heat and gas from the cycling breechblocks made it almost impossible to breathe. This was the fourth time I had done this, and it wasn’t getting any better. I could scarcely breathe, the noise was off the scale, my flesh and bones vibrated. The burlap under me insulated me from the worst of the heat, yet if Modahl kept the triggers down, he was going to fry me. I was sitting on hellfire.
And I was screaming with joy … Despite everything, the experience was sublime.
“One hundred.” I shouted the altitude over the bedlam. Some fool was screaming on the intercom, the engines were roaring at full power, the guns in the nose were hammering in one long, continuous burst … I had assumed that Modahl would pull out at a hundred. He didn’t.
“Readeee …”
“Fifty feet,” I shouted over the din, trying to make myself heard. I reached for the yoke.
“Now!” Modahl roared, pushing the bomb release with his left thumb, releasing the gun trigger, and pulling the yoke back into his stomach all at the same time.
I began cranking madly on the trim.
We must have taken the lenses off the periscopes with our keel. I distinctly felt us hit something … and the nose was rising through the horizontal, up, up, five degrees, ten, as the guns in the blisters and tunnel got off long rolling bursts. When they fell silent our airspeed was bleeding off rapidly, so Modahl pushed forward on the yoke.
“Hoffman, you asshole, did the bomb go?”
“No, sir. It didn’t release.”
“You shit. You silly, silly shit.”
“Mr. Modahl—”
“Get your miserable ass up here and talk to me, Hoffman.”
He cranked the plane around as tightly as he could, but too late. When we got level, inbound, with the moon in front of us, the sub was no longer there. She had dived.
“You fly it,” Modahl said disgustedly, and turned the plane over to me.
Hoffman climbed up to stand behind the pilots’ seats while Modahl inspected the hung bomb with an Aldis lamp. I tried not to look at the bright light so as to maintain some night vision — the light got me anyway. When Modahl had inspected the offending bomb to his satisfaction and finally killed the light, I was half-blinded.
Hoffman said, “Maybe we got the sub with the guns.”
Modahl’s lip curled in a vicious sneer, and he turned in his seat, looked at Hoffman as if he were a piece of shit.
“Which side are you on, Hoffman? Your shipmates risked their lives to get that bomb on target, to no avail. If that bomb comes off the rack armed while we’re landing, the Japs win and our happy little band of heroes will go to hell together. I don’t care if you have to grease those racks with your own blood. When we make an attack they goddamn well better work.”
Hoffman still had pimples. When Modahl killed the Aldis lamp I could see them, red and angry, in the glow of the cockpit lights.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Modahl asked without bothering to turn around.
“No, sir,” Hoffman stammered.
“Screaming on the intercom during an attack. Jesus! I oughta court-martial your silly ass.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It just slipped out. Everything was so loud and—”
Modahl made a gesture, as if he were shooing a fly. But that wasn’t the end of it. “Chief Amme,” Modahl said on the intercom. “When we get back, I expect you and Hoffman to run the racks through at least a dozen cycles on each bomb station. I want a written report signed by you and Hoffman that the racks work perfectly.”