For the next fifteen minutes, the captain pleasured her with his tongue — not an eel this time but a wet, fleshy brush, painting the mansion of her body. None of this will make a difference, she swore as he drew out a second Supersensitive. Even if I fall in love with him, ran Cassie’s silent vow, I’ll continue to make war on his cargo.
WAR
“GlVE ME PANTS that entrance” chanted Albert Flume as he herded Oliver, Barclay, and Winston into the Enterprise’s rusting passenger elevator.
“Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter.” Sidney Pembroke pushed the button labeled HANGAR DECK.
“A frantic cape,” said Flume.
“Of antic shape,” said Pembroke.
“Drape it.”
“Drop it.”
“Sock it.”
“And lock it at the pocket!”
“Navy code?” asked Barclay as the rickety car descended into the hull.
“Zoot-suit slang,” Pembroke replied. “Golly, I miss the forties.”
“You weren’t even alive in the forties,” said Barclay.
“Yeah. Golly, I miss ’em.”
The forward hangar bay was astonishingly hot, a phenomenon that evidently traced to the seven kerosene stoves roaring and snorting along the amidships bulkhead. Sweat popped onto Oliver’s brow, rolling downward and stinging his eyes. Instinctively he stripped, taking off his Karakorum parka, cashmere scarf, cowhide gloves, and Navy watch cap.
“Tactics.” Removing his Memphis Belle bomber jacket, Pembroke swept his bare arm across the cavernous bay.
“Exactly.” Flume pulled off his blue crewneck sweater. “Strategy’s the soul of war, but never underestimate the power of tactics.”
The bay was jammed to the walls, plane stacked against plane, their wings folded like the arms of defeated infantrymen bent in surrender. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts, maintenance crews bustled about, chocking wheels, popping out instrument panels, poking around inside engines. A few yards away, two nervous-looking sailors rolled back the steel door to the powder magazine, gently picked up a 500-pound demolition bomb, and set it on a hand-operated trolley.
“American carrier planes are traditionally stored on the flight deck,” said Pembroke.
“As opposed to the Jap convention of keeping ’em on the hangar deck,” said Flume.
“By bringing both squadrons below, Admiral Spruance has thawed every rudder, flap, and gas line.”
“Come dawn, he’s gonna start all the engines down here. Imagine: starting your engines in your hangar bays — what a brilliant tactic!”
The bomb handlers dollied their charge across the bay and, as if returning a baby to the womb, stuffed it into the fuselage of an SBD-2 Dauntless.
“Say, you folks are planning to come, aren’t you?” asked Flume.
“Come?” said Oliver.
“To the battle. Ensign Reid’s agreed to fly us out in Strawberry Eleven.”
“This isn’t my sort of thing,” said Barclay.
“Oh, you must come,” said Pembroke.
“Marx never cared for battles,” said Winston. “I don’t either, especially.”
“What about you, Oliver?”
The Enlightenment League’s president took out his monogrammed linen handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. If he worked at it, he could easily have discouraged himself, conjuring up fantasies of Strawberry Eleven crashing into an iceberg or being blown apart by a stray demolition bomb. But the final truth was this: he wanted to be able to tell Cassandra he was there, right there, when the Corpse of Corpses went into the Mohns Trench.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
The next morning at 0600, Spruance’s pilots and gunners crowded into the carrier’s stuffy, smoke-filled briefing room. Oliver immediately thought of the Episcopalian services to which his parents had periodically dragged him back home in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; there was the same weighty silence, the same restless reverence, the same mood of people getting ready to receive the lowdown on matters of life and death. The hundred and thirty-two war reenactors sat at rigid attention, parachute packs balanced on their laps like hymnals.
Ramrod straight, chest puffed out, Spruance’s portrayer slipped his briar pipe between his teeth, ascended the podium, and, grabbing the sash cord, unfurled a hand-drawn overhead view of the body in question, cryptic grin included. “Our objective, gentlemen: the insidious Oriental golem. Code name, ‘Akagi.’ ” The corpse was sketched with its limbs spread-eagled, evoking da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man. “Nimitz’s strategy calls for a series of coordinated strikes against two separate targets.” Lifting the pointer from the chalk tray, the admiral jabbed it into the Adam’s apple. “Our torpedo squadron will concentrate on this area here, Target A, hitting the region between the second and third cervical vertebrae and creating a rupture descending from the epidermis to the center of the throat. If we’ve calculated correctly, Akagi will then begin shipping water, much of it flowing down the windpipe and into the lungs. Meanwhile, Scout Bombing Six will drop its payloads on the midriff, systematically enlarging this depression here — Target B, the navel — until the abdominal cavity is breached.” Clamping his pointer under his arm like a riding crop, Spruance faced the air group’s leader. “We’ll attack in alternating waves. Toward this end, Commander McClusky, you will divide each squadron into two sections. While one section’s over its designated target, the other will be getting refueled and rearmed back here on Mother Goose. Questions?”
Lieutenant Lance Sharp, a paunchy, balding man with a tiny smear of brown mustache on his upper lip, raised his hand. “What sort of resistance might we expect?”
“The PBYs report a total absence of fighter planes and AA artillery on both Valparaíso and the golem. However, let’s not forget who constructed this sucker. I calculate the enemy will launch a fighter umbrella of between twenty and thirty Zeroes.”
Lieutenant Commander E. E. Lindsey, a tense Virginian who bore a startling resemblance to Richard Widmark, spoke up next. “Will they really launch a fighter umbrella?”
“That’s basic carrier tactics, mister.”
“But will they really?”
“They launched a hell of a fighter umbrella on June 4, 1942, didn’t they?” Spruance chomped on his pipe. “Well, no, they won’t really launch a fighter umbrella,” he added, more than a little annoyed.
“Question about technique, Admiral,” said Wade McClusky. “Shall we dive-bomb, or would glide-bombing be best?”
“If I were you, given the inexperience of my pilots, I’d opt for glide-bombing.”
“My pilots aren’t inexperienced. They’re perfectly capable of dive-bombing.”
“They weren’t experienced in ’42.” Spruance slid his pointer along the left breast. “And be sure to come in from the east. That way the AA gunners’ll be blinded by the sun.”
“What AA gunners?” asked Lindsey.
“The Jap AA gunners,” said Spruance.
“This is the Arctic, sir,” said McClusky. “The sun rises in the south, not the east.”
For a moment Spruance looked confused, then a smile to match Akagi’s spread across his face. “Say, let’s take advantage of that! Attack from the south, and dive-bomb the hell out of em!
“Don’t you mean, glide-bomb the hell out of ’em?” said McClusky.
“Your boys can’t dive-bomb?”
“They couldn’t in ’42, sir. They can today.”
“I think you should dive-bomb, don’t you, Commander?”
“I do, sir,” said McClusky.
Spruance lanced his pointer into Akagi’s right side. “Okay, boys, let’s show those slant-eyed bastards how to fight a war!”
At 0720, Ensign Jack Reid’s handsome, toothy portrayer guided Oliver, Pembroke, Flume, and the burly actor playing Ensign Charles Eaton into the barge and ferried them out to Strawberry Eleven. Reid eased himself into the pilot’s seat. Eaton assumed the copilot’s position. After hunkering down in their machine-gun blisters, Pembroke and Flume swapped their parkas for matching mauve flak jackets, then slipped on their headsets, opened an aluminum cooler, and began removing the raw materials of a picnic: checkered tablecloth, paper napkins, plastic forks, bottles of vintage Rheingold, Tupperware containers filled with treats from the Enterprise’s galley. Within minutes the PBY flying boat was moving, climbing toward the gauzy midnight sun. Field glasses in hand, Oliver crawled through the unoccupied compartments, eventually settling on the mechanic’s station; it was a cramped space, mottled with rust and flaking paint (poor Sidney and Albert, he thought, they could never really recover the forties, only its disintegrating remains), but the large window afforded a sweeping vista of sea and sky. For better or worse, this coign of vantage also lay within hearing distance of the impresarios.