Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 (3 page)

“That hatch is open when you make an attack?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. Little drafty, but the visibility is great.”

The Cat bobbing against the float and the heat in that closed space made me about half-seasick. I figured I was good for about one more minute.

“How do they work?” I asked, patting the guns.

“They’re the Cat’s nuts, sir. They really pour out the lead. They’ll cut a hole in a ship’s side in seconds. I hose the thirty around to keep their heads down while Mr. Modahl guts ‘em.”

“He goes after the Japs, does he?”

“Yes, sir. He says we gotta do it or somebody else will have to. Now me, I’d rather be sitting in the drugstore at Pismo Beach drinking sodas with my girl while someone else does the heavy lifting, but it isn’t working out that way.”

“I guess not.”

“In fact, when we dive for those Jap ships, and I’m sitting on those guns, I’d rather be somewhere else, anywhere at all. I haven’t peed my pants yet, but it’s been close.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Guess everybody feels that way.”

“Hard to get used to.”

“Are you going to be flying with us?”

“I’m flying copilot for a while. They told me Deets has malaria.”

“You know Cats, huh?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about flying boats. I figure I can learn, though.”

Hoffman wasn’t thrilled, I could see that. If I were him, I would have wanted experienced people in the cockpit, too.

Oh well, how tough could it be? It wasn’t like we were going to have to land this thing on a carrier deck.

I patted those fifties, then crawled aft, out of the bow compartment, before I embarrassed myself by losing my
breakfast. There seemed to be a tiny breeze through the cockpit, and that helped. That and the sunlight and the feeling I wasn’t closed up in a tight place.

There were lots of discolored places on the left side of the fuselage. I asked Hoffman about that. He looked vaguely surprised. “Patches, sir. Japs shot up the
Witch
pretty bad. Killed the radioman and left waist gunner. Mr. Modahl got us home, but it was a close thing.”

Hoffman went aft to get out of the airplane, leaving me in the cockpit. I climbed into the right seat and looked things over, fingered all the switches and levers, studied everything. The more I could learn now, the easier the first flight would be.

Everything looked straightforward … no surprises, really. But it was a big, complicated plane. The lighting and intercom panels were on the bulkhead behind the pilots’ seats. There were no landing gear or flap handles, of course. Constant speed props, throttles, RPM and manifold pressure gauges … I thought I could handle it. All I needed would be a little coaching on the takeoff and landing.

The button on the pilot’s yoke that fired the fifties was an add-on, merely clamped to the yoke. A wire from the button disappeared into the bow compartment.

I gingerly moved the controls, just a tad, while I kept my right hand on the throttles. Yeah, I could handle it. She would be slow and ponderous, nothing like a Dauntless, but hell, flying is flying.

I climbed out and stood on the float watching the guys finish loading and fusing the bombs. Three men
were also sitting on the wing completing the fueling. I climbed up the net to the tender’s deck and leaned on the rail, looking her over.

Modahl came walking down the deck, saw me, and came over. He had sort of a funny look on his face. “Okay,” he said, and didn’t say anything else.

He leaned on the rail, too, stood surveying the airplane.

“Nice plane,” I remarked, trying to be funny.

“Yeah. Commander Jones says we can leave as soon as we’re ready. When the guys are finished fueling and arming the plane, I think I’ll have them fed, then we’ll go.”

“Yes, sir. Where to?”

“Jones and I thought we might as well run up to Buka and Rabaul and see what’s in the harbor. Moon’s almost full tonight—be a shame to waste it. Intelligence thinks there are about a dozen Jap ships at Rabaul, which is fairly well defended. We ought to send at least two Cats. Would if we had them, but we don’t.”

“Buka?”

“No one knows. The harbor might contain a fleet, or it might be empty.”

“Okay.”

“Tomorrow morning we’ll see if we can find Joe Snyder.”

“Where was Snyder going the night he disappeared?”

“Buka and Rabaul,” Modahl replied, and climbed down the net to check the fuses on the weapons.

While the
other guys were doing all the work, I went to my stateroom and threw my stuff in the top bunk. Another officer was there, stripped to his skivvies in the jungle heat. He was seated at the only desk writing a long letter—he already had four or five pages of dense handwriting lying in front of him.

“I’m the new guy,” I told him, “going to be Modahl’s copilot.”

He looked me over like I was a steer he was going to bid upon. “I’m Modahl’s navigator, Rufus Pottinger.”

“We’re flying together, I guess.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I wondered if that letter was to a girl or his mother. I guessed his mother—Pottinger didn’t strike me as the romantic type, but
you can never tell. There is someone for everyone, they say.

That thought got me thinking about my family. I didn’t have a solitary soul to write to. I guess I was jealous of Pottinger. I stripped to my skivvies and asked him where the head was.

He looked at his watch. “You’re in luck. The water will be on in fifteen minutes. For fifteen minutes. The skipper of this scow is miserly with the water.”

I took a cake of soap, a towel, and a toothbrush and went to to visit the facilities.

I sat through the brief and kept my ensign’s mouth firmly shut. The others asked questions, especially Modahl, while I sort of half listened and thought about that great big ocean out there.

The distances involved were enormous. Buka on the northern tip of Bougainville was about 400 nautical miles away, Rabaul on the eastern tip of New Britain, about 450. This was the first time I would be flying the ocean without my plotting board, which felt strange. No way around it though—Catalinas carried a navigator, who was supposed to get you there and back. Modahl apparently thought Pottinger could handle it—and I guess he had so far.

Standing on the tender’s deck, I surveyed the sky. The usual noon shower had dissipated, and now there was only the late-afternoon cumulus building over the ocean.

Behind me I could hear the crew whispering—of course they weren’t thrilled at having a copilot without experience, but I wasn’t either. I would have given anything right then to be manning a Dauntless on the deck of
Enterprise
rather than climbing into this heaving, stinking, ugly flying boat moored in the mouth of this jungle river.

The
Sea Witch!
Gimme a break!

The evening was hot, humid, with only an occasional puff of wind. The tender had so little freshwater it came out of the tap in a trickle, hardly enough to wet a wash-rag. I had taken a sponge bath, which was a wasted effort. I was already sodden. At least in the plane we would be free of the bugs that swarmed over us in the muggy air.

I was wearing khakis; Modahl was togged out in a pair of Aussie shorts and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up—the only reason he wore that shirt instead of a tee shirt was to have a pocket for pens and cigarettes. Both of us wore pistols on web belts around our waists.

As I went down the net I overheard the word “crazy.” That steamed me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

If they wanted to think I was nuts, let ‘em. As long as they did their jobs it really didn’t matter what they thought. Even if it did piss me off.

I got strapped into the right seat without help, but I was of little use to Modahl. I shouldn’t have worried. The copilot was merely there to flip switches the pilot couldn’t reach, provide extra muscle on the unboosted controls, and talk to the pilot to keep him awake in the middle of the night. I didn’t figure Modahl would leave the plane to me and the autopilot on this first flight. Tonight, the bunks where members of the crew normally took turns napping were covered with a dozen flares and a dozen hundred-pound bombs, to be dumped out the tunnel hole aft.

The mechanic helped start the engines, Pratt & Whitney 1830s of twelve hundred horsepower each. That
sounded like a lot, but the Cat was a huge plane, carrying four five-hundred-pound bombs on the racks, the hundred-pounders on the bunks, several hundred pounds of flares, God knows how much machine gun ammo, and fifteen hundred gallons of gasoline, which weighed nine thousand pounds. The plane could have carried more gas, but this load was plenty, enough to keep us airborne for over twenty hours.

I had no idea what the Cat weighed with all this stuff, and I suspect Modahl didn’t either. I said something to the mechanic, Dutch Amme, as we stood on the float waiting our turn to board, and he said the weight didn’t matter. “As long as the thing’ll float, it’ll fly.”

With Amme ready to start the engines, Modahl yelled to Hoffman to release the bowlines. Hoffman was standing on the chine on the left side of the bow. He flipped the line off the cleat, crawled across the nose to the other chine, got rid of that line, then climbed into the nose turret through the open hatch.

A dozen or so of the tender sailors pushed us away from the float. As soon as the bow began to swing, Amme began cranking the engine closest to the tender. It caught and blew a cloud of white smoke, and kept the nose swinging. Modahl pushed the rudder full over and pulled the yoke back into his lap as Amme cranked the second engine.

In less time than it takes to tell, we were taxiing away from the tender.

“You guys did that well,” I remarked.

“Practice,” Modahl said.

Everyone checked in on the intercom, and there was a lot of chatter as they checked systems, all while we were taxiing toward the river’s mouth.

Finally, Modahl used the rudder and starboard engine to initiate a turn to kill time while the engines came up to temperature. The mechanic talked about the engines—temps and so on; Modahl listened and said little.

After two complete turns, the pilot closed the window on his side and told me to do the same. He flipped the signal light to tell Amme to set the mixtures to Auto Rich. While I was trying to get my window to latch, he straightened the rudder and matched the throttles. Props full forward, he pulled the yoke back into his lap and began adding power.

The engines began to sing.

The
Witch
accelerated slowly as Modahl steadily advanced the throttles while the flight engineer called out the manifold pressures and RPMs. He had the throttles full forward when the nose of the big Cat rose, and she began planing the smooth water in the lee of the point. Modahl centered the yoke with both hands to keep us on the step.

I glanced at the airspeed from time to time. We were so heavy I began to wonder if we could ever get off. We passed fifty miles per hour still planing, worked slowly to fifty-five, then sixty, the engines howling at full power.

It took almost a minute to get to sixty-five with that heavy load, but when we did Modahl pulled the yoke
back into his lap and the Cat broke free of the water. He eased the yoke forward, held her just a few feet over the water in ground effect as our airspeed increased. When we had eighty on the dial Modahl inched the yoke back slightly, and the
Witch
swam upward in the warm air.