“Yes, sir.”
“Pottinger, bring your chart to the cockpit. Let’s figure out where we are and where the hell we go from here.”
I was still hand-flying the plane, so Modahl said to me, “Head northwest and climb to four thousand, just in case we are closer to Bougainville than I think we are. We’ll circle around the northern tip of the island and approach the harbor up the moonpath.”
Modahl took off his headset and leaned toward me. “Hoffman’s getting his rocks off down there.”
“Maybe he’s crazy, too,” I suggested.
“We all are,” Modahl said flatly, and nodded once, sharply. His lips turned down in a frown.
I dropped the subject.
“When you get tired, we’ll let Otto fly the Witch.” Otto was the autopilot. After a few minutes I nodded, and he engaged it.
MODAHL:
Of course Hoffman was crazy. We all were to be out here at night in a flying boat hunting Japs in the world’s biggest ocean. Yeah, sure, the Navy sent us here, but every one of us had the wit to have wrangled a nice cushy job somewhere in the States while someone else did the sweating.
It’s addictive, like booze and tobacco. I just worried that I’d love it too much. And it’s probably a sin. Not that I know much about sin … but I can feel the wrongness of it, the evil. That’s the attraction, I guess. I liked the adrenaline and the risk and the feeling of … power. Liked it too much.
It was two o’clock in the morning when we approached Buka harbor from the sea. Jungle-covered hills surrounded the harbor on two sides. A low spit formed the third side. On the end of the spit stood a small lighthouse. In the moonlight we could see that the harbor was empty. Not a single ship.
Pottinger was standing behind us. “How long up to Rabaul?” Modahl asked.
“An hour and forty-five minutes or so. Depends on how cute you want to be on the approach.”
“You know me. I try to be cute enough to stay alive.”
“Yeah.”
“Before we go, let’s wake up the Japs in Buka. Why should they get a good night’s sleep if we can’t?”
“Think the Japs are still here?”
“You can bet your soul on it.”
Modahl pointed out where the town lay, on the inland side of the harbor. It was completely blacked out, of course.
We made a large, lazy circle while the guys in back readied the parafrags. We would drop them out the tunnel while we flew over the town … they fell for a bit, then the parachutes opened, and they drifted unpredictably. This was a nonprecision attack if there ever was one. It was better than throwing bricks, though not by much.
We flew toward the town at three thousand feet. We were still a mile or so away when antiaircraft tracers began rising out of the darkness around the harbor. The streams of shells went up through our altitude, all right, so they had plenty of gun. They just didn’t know where in the darkness we were. The streams waved randomly as the Japs fired burst after burst.
It looked harmless enough, though it wasn’t. A shell fired randomly can kill you just as dead as an aimed one if it hits you.
“One minute,” Modahl told the guys in back. He directed his next comment at me: “I’m saving the five-hundred-pounders for Rabaul. Surely we’ll find a ship there or someplace.”
“Thirty seconds.”
We were in the tracers now, which bore a slight resemblance to Fourth of July fireworks.
“Drop ‘em.”
One tracer stream ignited just ahead of us and rose toward us. Modahl turned to avoid it. As I watched the glowing tracers I was well aware of how truly large the Catalina was, a black duraluminum cloud. How could they not hit it?
“That’s the last of them.” The word from the guys in back came as we passed out of the last of the tracers. The last few bombs would probably land in the jungle. Oh well.
We turned for the open sea. We were well away from the city when the frags begin exploding. They marched along through the blackness, popping very nicely as every gun in town fell silent.
“Rabaul,” Modahl said, and turned the plane over to me.
FOUR
Rabaul!
The place was a legend. Although reputedly not as tough a nut as Truk, the big Jap base in the Carolines, Rabaul was the major Japanese stronghold in the South Pacific. Intelligence said they had several hundred planes — bombers, fighters, float fighters, seaplanes — and from thirty to fifty warships. This concentration of military power was defended with an impressive array of antiaircraft weapons.
The Army Air Corps was bombing Rabaul by day with B-17s, and the Navy was harassing them at night with Catalinas. None of these punches were going to knock them out, but if each blow hurt them a little, drew a little blood, the effect would be cumulative. Or so said the staff experts in Washington and Pearl.
Regardless of whatever else they might be, the Japanese were good soldiers, competent, capable, and ruthless. They probably had bagged Joe Snyder and his crew last night, and tonight, with this moon, they surely knew the Americans were coming.
I wondered if Snyder had attacked Rabaul before he headed for Buka, or vice versa. Whichever, the Japs in Buka probably radioed the news of our 2 A.M. raid to Ra-baul. The guys in Rabaul knew how far it was between the two ports, and they had watches. They could probably predict within five minutes when we were going to arrive for the party.
I didn’t remark on any of this to Modahl as we flew over the empty moonlit sea; he knew the facts as well as I and could draw his own conclusions. At least the clouds were dissipating. The stars were awe-inspiring.
Pottinger came up to the cockpit with his chart and huddled over it with Modahl. I sat watching the moon-path and monitoring Otto. I figured if Modahl wanted to include me in the strategy session, he would say so. My watch said almost three in the morning. We couldn’t get there before four, so we were going to strike within an hour of dawn.
Finally, Modahl held the chart where I could see it, and said, “Here’s Rabaul, on the northern coast of New Britain. This peninsula sticking out into the channel forms the western side of the harbor, which is a fine one. There are serious mountains on New Britain and on New Ireland, the island to the north and east. The highest is over seventy-five hundred feet high, so we want to avoid those.
“Here is what I want to do. We’ll motor up the channel between the islands until we get on the moonpath; at this hour of the morning that will make our run in heading a little south of west. Then we’ll go in. As luck would have it, that course brings us in over the mouth of the harbor.
“They’ll figure we want to do that, but that’s the only way I know actually to see what’s there. The radar will just show us a bunch of blips that could be anything. If we see a ship we like, we’ll climb, then do a diving attack with the engines at idle. Bomb at masthead height. What do you think?”
“Think we’ll catch ‘em asleep?”
He glanced at me, then dropped his eyes. “No.”
“It’ll be risky.”
“We’ll hit the biggest ship in there, whatever that is.”
“Five-hundred-pounders won’t sink a cruiser.”
“The tender was out of thousand-pounders. Snyder took the last one.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We can cripple ‘em, put a cruiser out of the war for a while. Maybe they’ll send it back to Japan for repairs. That’ll do.”
“How about a destroyer? Five hundred pounds of tor-pex will blow a Jap can in half.”