Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 (6 page)

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.

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.”

“They got lots of destroyers. Not so many cruisers.”

He thought like I did: If there was a cruiser in there,
the Japs knew it was the prime target and they’d be ready; still, that’s the one I’d hit. When you’re looking for a fight, hit the biggest guy in the bar.

One hundred knots is glacially slow when you’re going to a fire. I was so nervous that I had trouble sitting still. Despite my faith in Pottinger’s expertise, I kept staring into the darkness, trying to see what was out there. I didn’t want to fly into a mountain and these islands certainly had ‘em. When Pottinger said we had reached the mouth of the channel between the two, we turned north. Blindly.

As we motored up the channel at two thousand feet, I wondered why I didn’t want to put off the moment of truth, till tomorrow night, or next week, or next year. Or forever. I decided that a man needs a future if he is to stay on an even keel, and with Rabaul up ahead, the future was nothing but a coin flip. I wanted it to be over.

Pottinger and Varitek, the radioman, were on the radar; they reported lots of blips. We came up the moonpath and looked with binoculars: We counted twenty-three
ships in the harbor, about half of them warships and the rest freighters and tankers. Lots of targets.

“I think the one in the center of the harbor is a cruiser,” Modahl said, and passed the binoculars to me. As he turned the plane to the north, to seaward, I turned the focus wheel of the binoculars and studied it through his side window. With the vibration of the plane and the low light level—all we had was moonlight—it was hard to tell. She was big, all right, and long enough, easily the biggest warship in the harbor.

“Looks like a cruiser to me,” I agreed. I lost the moon as I tried to focus on other ships. Modahl turned the
Witch
180 degrees and motored back south. This time the harbor was on my side.

“See anything that looks like a carrier?” he asked.

“I’m looking.” Destroyer, destroyer, maybe a small cruiser … more destroyers. A sub. No, two subs.

“Two subs, no carrier,” I said, still scanning.

“I’d like to bomb a carrier before I die,” Modahl muttered. Everyone on the circuit heard that, of course, and I thought he should watch his lip. No use getting the crew in a sweat. But it was his crew, so I let the remark go by.

“The biggest ship I see is the cruiser in the center,” I said, and handed back the glasses.

“Surrounded by cans. When they hear us, everyone opens fire, and Vesuvius will erupt under our ass.”

“We can always do a destroyer. We can send one or two to the bottom. They are excellent targets.”

“I know.”

We turned and motored north again. He waited until the moonlight reflected on the harbor and studied it again with the binoculars. Pottinger was standing behind us. He didn’t say anything, kept bent over so he could look out at the harbor.

“The cruiser,” Modahl said with finality. He told the crew, as if they didn’t know, “We are off Rabaul harbor. The Japs have twenty-three ships there, one of which appears to be a cruiser. Radio, send off a contact report. When you’re finished we’ll attack.”

“What do you want me to say, Mr. Modahl?”

“Just what I said. Twenty-three ships, et cetera.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me when you have an acknowledgment.”

The cruiser lay at a forty-five-degree angle to the moonpath, which had to be the direction of our approach since we were bombing visually. To maximize our chances of getting a hit, we should train off the four bombs, that is, drop them one at a time with a set interval between them—we were going to try to drop the bomb that had hung on the rack at Buka. On the other hand, we could do the most damage if we salvoed all four bombs right down the smokestack. The obvious compromise was to salvo them in pairs with an appropriate interval between pairs—that was Modahl’s choice. He didn’t ask anyone’s opinion; he merely announced how we were going to do it.

Hoffman consulted the chart. If we managed to get up to 250 mph at weapons release, an interval of two-tenths of a second would give us seventy-five feet between
salvos. Modahl knew the math cold and gave his approval. Hoffman set two-tenths of a second on the interval-ometer.

“How low are you going to go?” Pottinger asked. The cockpit lights reflected in the sweat on his face.

“As low as possible.”

“We’re going to get caught in the bombs’ blast.”

“Every foot of altitude increases our chances of missing.”

“And of getting home,” Pottinger said flatly.

“Get back to your station,” Modahl snapped. “The enemy is there, and I intend to hit him.”

“I’m merely pointing out the obvious.”

“Take it up with Commander Jones the next time you see him.”

“If
I see him.”

“Goddamn it, Pottinger! That’s
enough!
Get back to your station and shut the fuck up.”

The crew heard this exchange, which was one reason Modahl was so infuriated. Right then I would have bet serious money that Modahl and Pottinger would never again fly together.

We flew inbound at three thousand feet. Modahl had climbed higher so he could dive with the engines at idle and still get plenty of airspeed. I was used to the speed of the Dauntless, so motoring inbound toward the proper dive point—waiting, waiting, waiting—was like having poison ivy and being unable to scratch.

“Now,” he said, finally, and we both pushed forward
on the yokes as he pulled back the throttles and advanced the prop levers. The engines gurgled … and the airspeed began increasing. Modahl ran the trim forward. Down we swooped, accelerating ever so slowly.

The cruiser was dead ahead, anchored, without a single light showing. The black shapes on the silver water, the darkness of the land surrounding the bay, the moon and stars above … it was like something from a dream. Or a nightmare.

I called the altitudes. “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen …”

He pushed harder on the yoke, ran the nose trim full down. Speed passing 180, 190 …

Every gun in the Jap fleet opened fire, all at once.

“Holy …!”

Fortunately, they were all firing straight up or randomly. Nothing aimed our way.

The tracers were so bright I would clearly see everything in the cockpit. The Japs had heard us—they just didn’t know where we were. Why they didn’t shoot away from the moon was a mystery to me.

“Eleven … ten … nine …”

Even the shore batteries were firing. The whole area was erupting with tracers. And searchlights. Four searchlights came on, began waving back and forth.

A stream of weaving tracers from one of the destroyers flicked our way … and I felt the blows as three or four shells hit us trip-hammer fast.

“Five … four …”

Modahl was flattening out now, pulling on the yoke with all his strength as the evil black shape of the Japanese cruiser rushed toward us. The airspeed indicator needle quivering on 255 …

“Three …”

“Help me!” he shouted, and lifted his feet to the instrument panel for more leverage.

I grabbed the yoke, braced myself, and pulled. The altimeter passed two hundred … I knew there was some lag in the instrument, so we had to be lower … The nose was coming up, passing one hundred …

We were going to crash into the cruiser!
I pulled with all my strength.

“Now!”
Modahl shouted, so loud Hoffman could have heard it without earphones.

I felt the bombs come off; two sharp jolts. Dark as it was, I glimpsed the mast of the cruiser as we shot over it, almost close enough to touch.

As that sight registered, the bombs exploded … right under us! The blast lifted us, pushed …

Modahl rammed the throttles forward to the stops.

The
Witch
wasn’t responding properly to the elevators.

“The trim,” Modahl said desperately, and I grabbed the wheel and turned it with all my strength. It was still connected, still stiff, so maybe we weren’t dead yet.

Just then a searchlight latched on to us, and another. The ghastly glare lit the cockpit.