Just as John Kari surely had, back on Choiseul with Silas Porter.
I’d been right about Kari lying when he said he hadn’t met Daniel on Pavau, but for the wrong reasons. Even if he were an unrepentant thief, that didn’t make him a triple murderer in my book. I couldn’t blame him for putting the past behind him and trying to start over, all the while hoping the war would cut memories short.
I tried to sleep. Even with my eyes closed, I could picture the natives melting into the bush. One second they were there; the next, they were gone. There and then gone. It felt important, but I had no idea why.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was skimming the horizon, and the cook-or I should say the poor slob assigned that duty-was distributing Vienna sausages and pickles for dinner.
“Sorry about the fare,” Cotter said. “We got more pickles than anything else for some damn reason.”
“I have been to Vienna,” Kaz said, eyeing the short, canned hot dogs coated in something that might have been tomato paste. “And I can tell you, the sausages there are nothing like this.”
“A delicacy for us, Baron,” Gordie said. “Or it will be in memory, after the first month of taro and sweet potatoes every day.”
“I never knew how brave Coastwatchers were,” Kaz said, forcing himself to chew and swallow.
A few minutes later, the engines started up, a deep rumble signaling our departure. Cotter eased the boat out from shore, negotiated the narrow channel, and headed northwest. The sun was down, the far horizon lit by the fading light, the sky above already sparkling with stars. A clear night. A dangerous night.
We tightened our life jackets as a crewman distributed helmets and weapons to the four of us along for the ride. A Browning Automatic Rifle for me, a Thompson submachine gun for Gordie, and M1 rifles for Archer and Kaz. We were instructed to take up watch aft, on the lookout for Kawanishi or anything else that followed the luminescent trail the propellers would leave.
“Be careful,” Cotter warned us when he came down from the bridge. “Don’t go off half-cocked. If you fire at anything, everyone else will, too. We’ll be lit up like a Christmas tree and visible for miles, so be sure before you shoot. Best to signal a crewman first if you’re not certain.”
“Remember, the bastards will cut their engines and glide in along our wake,” Archer said as Cotter returned to the bridge. “By the time you hear them, it’s too late, so stay sharp.”
Kaz and I squeezed in next to the rear torpedo tube, port side, while Archer and Gordie took up position starboard, all of us facing aft, along with the twenty-millimeter gunner amidships. I hefted the BAR, aiming it skyward. The thing weighed a ton, but I figured that wouldn’t matter if the lead started flying. Kaz did the same with his M1 and nearly lost his balance. It was one big rifle for a little guy.
“Brace yourself if you fire that,” I said. “The recoil might send you over the side.”
“Very funny, Billy.”
“I wasn’t joking,” I said, and then grinned to show him I was. Sort of.
As we cruised on, the dusky light at the horizon faded into black, and all that was left was the twinkling of more stars than I’d ever seen. This wasn’t like being offshore on Massachusetts Bay, where the lights of civilization glowed in the distance. This was pure darkness. No moon, no electric lights, nothing but inky-black velvet heavens draped around us, blending into the dark ocean, the play of starlight on the waves making it impossible to see where air and water joined, the horizon an invisible thread.
The engines rumbled, the vibration felt in the deck beneath our feet, running through my body until the sound became one with the wind whipping my face and the blood pumping in my chest. It was loud and soft at the same time, a monotonous drone that soon became little more than a backdrop to the grandeur surrounding the boat as it sped through the night. If it hadn’t been for the wind, I might have thought we were standing still, suspended in blackest night, wrapped in a cocoon spun from the warmth and darkness, alone in the universe.
“It is profound,” Kaz gasped, staring up at the dome of stars.
“Look,” I said. Our wake was bright greenish-blue, almost neon, spreading out from either side, a giant V-shape that pointed right to us. It stretched out for more than a hundred yards, impossible to miss. “Now I know why Jack was idling his motor that night.”
“It does leave little doubt as to our position,” Kaz said, gripping his rifle even tighter, leaning against a funnel for balance, and scanning the night sky. “I never considered I might leave this world because of plankton churned up in the South Pacific Ocean.”
That had never crossed my mind either. I kept my eyes busy looking for Japs on the surface or in the air, trying to avoid thoughts of death due to miniscule sea creatures, or any other cause, for that matter. I’d seen a lot of death already, more than most guys my age. There were corpses enough in Boston, and since getting into this war, plenty more from Norway, North Africa, and Sicily. I’d fought, killed, been wounded, and lived. I’d been scared plenty of times. But it never seemed I had this much time to think about it, to wait for death to come swooping down or roar over the waves, out of the inky darkness.
I’ll admit it: I’d never been so scared. There was something about being out here, trailed by a glowing arrow, alone and awaiting an attack from any direction, that unnerved me. I felt sweat drop down my backbone, as a pit of fear opened up in my belly. My hands went clammy and I wiped them one at a time on my trousers, gripping the BAR and wishing I’d never met up with any of the Kennedys.
I blinked.
I thought I’d seen something slide across the sky, a disturbance in the stars, a blackness, there and then gone. If it were a plane, where was it? I cocked my head, turning an ear toward where I’d seen it. I didn’t hear a thing, didn’t see anything out of place. I blinked again, once, twice, trying to clear my vision.
Suddenly I understood.
The plane had spotted us, banking and momentarily blotting out the twinkling stars.
I couldn’t see it silhouetted against the backdrop of stars since it was heading straight for the boat, giving us its smallest profile. Narrow wings, tip of the nose, machine guns. I strained to find it, worried about being wrong, not wanting to sound the alarm and light up the night with our gunfire. If there wasn’t an enemy plane, there would be soon enough.
Then I saw it.
I raised the BAR and sighted in on the blank space coming at us, no doubt in my mind, unable to speak, knowing there wasn’t time for it anyway. I fired a burst, then another. By the time I squeezed the trigger again, the twenty-millimeter had joined in, followed by every other gun on board.
Cotter turned the boat hard to starboard and I emptied my clip at the dark form, which seemed to snarl back at us, its four engines starting up and the forward machine gun answering our fusillade. We clearly outgunned the Kawanishi, but Cotter knew the big threat wasn’t from machine-gun rounds. It was the bombload we had to worry about.
Water erupted off to my right, about where we would have been if Cotter hadn’t quickly altered course. The Kawanishi roared overhead, filling the sky, its wings enormous, blocking out the light of a thousand stars.
Everyone kept firing. Kaz had himself well braced, taking aimed shots at the plane, pulling the trigger calmly and quickly. Archer was spraying the air with his tommy gun as Gordie loaded a new clip in his rifle. The twenty-millimeter kept pumping out shells as the plane turned away and gained altitude. I shook Kaz by the shoulder, signaling he should stop firing. The Kawanishi was out of range for small-arms fire and becoming invisible again against the heavens.