Wingmen (9781310207280) (52 page)

Duane
understood the joke. The bomber pilots in the first and second
waves had been given specific targets with secondary assignments in
case they had the extra bombs. The second wave of fighters were
given targets on the ground as well. It was an amazing coup of
tactical planning: Every protected revetment, every antiaircraft
gun, every command post and troops barracks were targeted by
overlapping strikes. It was obvious that extensive photographs of
the atoll had been taken during their strikes in December. Nothing
was being left to chance.

Duane bet
heavily on a high two pair, was beat again by three of a kind. He
cursed to himself and thought of Eleanor Hawkins. He was definitely
going to spring the question on her when they got back to Pearl,
although he hadn’t told anyone else yet. When the time came, he
would have to talk to Jack Hardigan about it. Regulations required
that his commanding officers up to CAG’s level approve of the
marriage, although he couldn’t imagine either of them objecting. It
was just that Jack would probably be surprised. Or maybe relieved.
Duane wasn’t sure.

The makings of
a flush in diamonds began to build on Duane’s side so he decided to
take a chance. He bet—and wondered for the thousandth time why Jack
had so completely lost interest in women. The last time they had
even talked about women was the brunch at the Naval Station
Officer’s Club in August, and then Jack had left his date before
dark and had gone back to the ship. To the best of his knowledge,
all of Jack’s off-duty socializing had been with the men of the
squadron, Trusteau in particular. He wondered if anyone else had
noticed.

His fourth card
was his fourth diamond, and he bet it. With Carmichael and the
lieutenant commander still in the hand, he received and looked at
his last card. It was the Jack of hearts. He held it in his hand,
recognizing for the first time the squadron insignia. The goddamn
Jack of hearts, holding a sword instead of a leaf. So that was
where Trusteau had got it. By the process of elimination, he knew
that Trusteau had done the original artwork. It had irritated him
considerably to know that Jack Hardigan had accepted it without
consulting him. He replaced the Jack of hearts on the reel and
upped the bet.

Carmichael
guffawed. “Lieutenant, you don’t bluff worth a shit.” He tossed in
a handful of bills. “I call your ass.”

Duane bit the
inside of his cheek and flipped his cards face down.

As he was
raking in the pot, Carmichael turned them back up and saw the Jack
of hearts. “Well, bless my heart, if it isn’t the fighter boys’
in-sig-nee-ah. Tough luck, Mister Higgins.” He laughed loudly.
Duane bit his cheek until it bled.

After that
humiliation, however, things began to look up for Duane. When they
switched to seven stud, he began to win. Midnight found him almost
even again and looking at a full house, tens over threes, with one
card still to go. Certain of a winning hand, he went down for forty
dollars, only to lose to Carmichael again, with Jacks over fours.
Determined to get some of it back, he stayed in the game despite
the time, but only managed to lose another ten. At one o’clock he
could wait no longer. He gathered up his depleted bankroll, excused
himself, and hurried through the dark ship to his stateroom. He was
just taking off his pants when the alarm sounded.

Fred Trusteau
slept with his watch on when they were at sea. It made it easier to
wake up at inopportune times (as inevitably he had to) if he could
just raise his arm and see the time. Tonight, he was deep in a
dream that involved the hardware store and his father and a grating
voice that kept saying, “This is not a drill. This is not a drill.
All hands man your battle stations.” In his dream he had just
inexplicably landed his Hellcat in San Jose. His father had jumped
up onto the wing and said, “All hands man your battle stations.”
Fred raised his watch to his eyes and was awake. It was 1:05.

Jack Hardigan
reached the ready room before any of his pilots. Still struggling
into his flight suit and with his hair uncombed and boots untied,
the first thing he did was check the teletype in the forward part
of the compartment. There was a single message there: “Bat Team One
report to Ready Room Two.” Duane Higgins arrived next, fully
dressed and wide awake. But Jack didn’t have time to notice.

“When Fred gets
here,” he told Duane, “tell him to come on down to Ready Room Two
as fast as he can.” Without waiting for an answer, Jack grabbed the
rest of his flight gear and left.

Ready Room Two
belonged to the Torpedo Squadron. A number of the Avenger pilots
and some of the enlisted crewmen were there, milling about in
confusion. Jack found Buster Jennings talking on the telephone and
tapped him on the shoulder to let him know he was there. Then he
straightened out his Mae West, buckled on his shoulder holster and
tied his shoes. Finally put together, he had some time to wonder
what was going on.

“How many?”
asked CAG into the phone. Jack listened in and gathered that the
weather front was gone and a quarter-moon was up. A force of
Japanese torpedo bombers numbering somewhere between twenty and a
hundred was gathering for attacks on the fringes of the task force.
Then the full meaning of the information sank through. He realized
that the force was discovered. Surprise was lost. There would be a
hot reception over the target in the morning. He had no stomach for
thinking of how their mission in the dark would go.

Jennings had
finished talking on the phone and was busily strapping a
vicious-looking knife to his foreleg when Fred arrived. Without
wasting time on formalities, Jennings said, “Come on, let’s go,”
and headed for the flight deck.

The bright
quarter-moon was incongruously cheerful as Fred climbed away from
the deck of the
Constitution
, raised his landing gear, and made the
right turn that would help him find the other two members of the
team. They had practiced this link-up a number of times, relying on
precise launching intervals, speeds, altitude, and courses. As he
completed his second right turn, a pair of dark shapes moved across
the crescent of the moon. He maneuvered to join them.

“Rooster Base,
Bat One. Ready for vector.”

Fred recognized
Jennings’ voice and glided into a loose wing formation on the
bigger Avenger. Looking across his left wing, he could make out
Jack’s Hellcat, but it was too dark to see Jack sitting in the
cockpit. He wanted to come up on the circuit and tell the skipper
that everything was all right; that the hurried conference on the
flight deck, huddled in the windy darkness, had been sufficient for
their purposes, even though it wasn’t the way they had planned it.
But CAG was in charge here and needed the circuit for vector
information from the radar officer on
Ironsides
. Fred remained
silent.

“Bat One, we
have a large gaggle of bogeys bearing two zero two, altitude maybe
three thousand. Stand by for better info.”

“Roger, Rooster
Base. Number three, move it in a little closer. That’s good. Speed
one eight zero, two and three. Beginning a right turn now.” CAG
chatted away, telling Jack and Fred what he was doing, and the
Hellcats clung to his wings like two deadly hawks prowling the
night sky in search of prey.

“Bat One,
advise you check your IFF. We show one of you without it.” Fred
found the switch and checked it. It was on.

“Bat One, this
is three. Mine’s on.”

“Same here,
One,” said Jack—and Fred could imagine the skipper’s hand reaching
out, touching the same switches he had.

“We all show
IFF on and operating,” said CAG. “Suggest you check again.”

“We still show
one without IFF. What do you want to do?”

“Continue the
interception. We didn’t come up here to chicken out.” Jennings’
voice had that same intense, almost manic quality to it that it had
shown when he reached out and pounded the lawn table that Sunday
back in Pearl.

“Come to course
two six one, Bat One. Climb to angels four. You should have bogey
on your scope crossing from left to right in about…” There was a
pause and a short babel of voices in the background. “…two minutes.
Advise on contact.”

“Roger,
Rooster. Making the turn now, two and three.”

Fred gentled
his fighter into the turn and maintained his distance. He knew CAG
wanted him closer, but he was near enough to see well and that was
all that mattered. The three aircraft settled into two six one and
climbed steadily, reaching four thousand feet in one minute. Fred
could look left out of his cockpit and see the crescent moon, half
expecting a Japanese torpedo bomber to fly, witchlike, across it.
Moonlight painted a glistening highway on the surface of the ocean
below him, but it illuminated nothing and made the ocean seem
deceptively close. He searched the darkness in front of him and to
his right, seeing nothing but stars.

“Contact,
Rooster Base. Just like you said. Two and three, turning right at
this time. We have a contact. Coming to two five zero knots.”

Fred turned and
increased throttle to keep up. They made the turn smoothly, easily.
The practice sessions were paying off.

“Contact
turning to the left. Speed about one niner zero.”

The team turned
to the left, following the invisible Japanese bomber. Fred wondered
if this one were the first snooper. He was slightly confused
because their briefing sessions had said they would be going after
a single torpedo plane, not a “gaggle” of twenty or thirty. He
checked his clock. It was 1:45. They had been up for almost half an
hour. A light appeared below him, a tiny white point of
incandescence that winked uncertainly, as if on the ocean’s
swells.

“We got him,
boys,” said CAG, his voice edged with excitement. “A thousand yards
in front of us, same course—no, he’s turning again, to the right.
You take this one, number three. We’ll try to stay above you.” Fred
turned on his gun switches after dimming the gunsight all the way.
Automatically, he checked his instruments, satisfied himself that
everything was working well, and prepared for his interception.

“Five hundred
yards,” said Jennings. “He’s fading. He’s below us about five
hundred feet, same course. We should see him…”

“Got him,” said
Fred. His first indication of the enemy aircraft was an almost
invisible line of thin blue light flickering steadily against the
backdrop of black water and sky. Exhaust ports. Fred broke to the
right and headed down, backing off on his throttle to maintain his
present speed. As he closed, he first made out another set of
exhaust ports, then the bulk of two engines, wide wings, and
cigar-shaped fuselage. A Betty. A fast, land-based bomber carrying
torpedoes for attacking the ships below. Incongruously, he
remembered Jack’s statement that they were making history and
should be writing all this down for later use. He smiled, and
centered the enemy plane in his gunsight. When the target filled
the little lighted ring, he squeezed the trigger and held it
down.

The armorers
had filled the ammunition canisters in the wings with a lower
concentration of tracers, so Fred was not blinded by the blazing
slugs. The guns rattled and shook and the tracers reached out. Fred
kept the target centered, and a red flame popped into being in the
interior of the speeding Japanese bomber. Fred stopped shooting and
followed his victim around to the right, decreasing throttle to
stay above and behind. He centered it again, fired again. The fire
blazed up. As if in panic, a single gun began firing from the upper
surface of the fuselage, spewing directionless tracers around the
sky. Feeling deadly and invisible, Fred hung over the doomed
aircraft and fired again. The flames in the Betty now lighted up
the interior of the fuselage and shone through the clear gunports
like lights. A tail gunner began firing, also wide of the mark.