Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 (7 page)

“Shoot ‘em out,” Modahl roared to the gunners in the blisters and the tail, who opened fire within a heartbeat.

I was rotating the stiff trim wheel when I felt Modahl push the yoke forward. His hand dropped to mine, stopping the rotation of the trim wheel. Then the fifties in the nose lit off. He had opened fire!

Up ahead … a destroyer, shooting in all directions—no, the gunners saw us pinned in the searchlights and swung their guns in our direction!

Modahl held the trigger down—the fifties vibrated like a living thing as we raced toward the destroyer, the engines roaring at full power. With the glare of the searchlight and tracers and all the noise, it looked like we had arrived in hell.

And I could feel shells tearing into us, little thumps that reached me through the seat.

We were rocketing toward the destroyer, which was shooting, shooting, shooting …

Another searchlight hit us from the port side, nearly blinding me. Something smashed into the cockpit, the instrument panel seemed to explode. Simultaneously, the bow fifties stopped, and the plane slewed.

Modahl slumped in his seat.

I fought for the yoke, leveled the wings, screamed at that idiot Hoffman to stop firing, because he had opened up with the thirty-caliber as soon as the fifties lit off and was still blazing away, shooting BBs at the elephant: Even though we were pinned like a butterfly in the lights, in some weird way I thought that the muzzle flashes of the little machine gun would give away our position.

My mind wasn’t functioning very well. I could hear the fifties in the blisters going, but I shouted,
“Hit the
lights, hit the lights”
anyway, praying that the gunners would knock them out before the Japs shot us out of the sky.

We were only a few feet over the black water: The destroyer was right there in front of us, filling the windscreen, strobing streams of lava-hot tracer. I cranked the trim wheel like a madman, trying to get the nose up.

The superstructure of the destroyer blotted out everything else. I turned the trim wheel savagely to raise the nose and felt something impact the plane as we shot over the enemy ship.

More shells tore at us, then the tracer was arcing over our wings. One by one the lights disappeared—I think our gunners got two of them—and, mercifully, we exited the flak.

The port engine was missing, I was standing on the rudder trying to keep the nose straight, and Modahl was bleeding to death.

He coughed black blood up his throat.

Thank God he was off the controls!

Blood ran down his chest. He reached for me, then went limp.

Three hundred feet, slowing … at least we were out of the flak.

The gyro was smashed, the compass frozen: The glass was broken. Both airspeed indicators were shot out, only one of the altimeters worked …

Everyone was babbling on the intercom. The cruiser was on fire, someone said, bomb blasts and flak had damaged the tail, one of the gunners was down, shot, and—

Modahl was really dead, covered with blood, his eyes staring at his right knee.

The port engine quit.

Fumbling, I feathered the prop on the port engine. If it didn’t feather, we were going in the water. Now.

It must have, because the good engine held us in the sky.

We were flying straight at the black peninsula on the western side of the bay. We were only three hundred feet above the ocean. Ahead were hills, trees, rocks, more flak guns—I twisted the yoke and used the rudder to turn the plane to the east.

We’ll go down the channel
, I thought, then it will be a straight shot south to Namoia Bay. Some islands north of there—if we can’t make it home, maybe we can put down near one.

The gunners
lifted and pulled Modahl out of the pilot’s seat while I fought to get the
Sea Witch
to a thousand feet.

Varitek had caught a piece of flak, which tore a huge gash in his leg and ripped out an artery. The other guys sprinkled it with sulfa powder and tried to stanch the bleeding … I could hear the back-and-forth on the intercom, but they didn’t seem to think he had much of a chance.

Dutch Amme climbed into the empty pilot’s seat. He surveyed the damage with an electric torch, put his fingers in the hole the shell had made that killed Modahl.
There were other holes, five of them, behind the pilot’s seat, on the port side. Amazingly, the destroyer hadn’t gotten him—someone we had passed had raked us with something about twenty-millimeter size.

“Searchlights … That’s why Joe Snyder didn’t come back.”

“Yeah,” I said, refusing to break my fierce concentration on the business at hand. I had the Cat out into the channel now, with the dark shape of New Ireland on my left and the hulk of New Britain on the right. From the chart I had seen, that meant we had to be heading south. Only 450 nautical miles to go to safety.

“The hull’s tore all to hell,” Amme said wearily. “When we land we’ll go to the bottom within a minute, I’d say. You’ll have to set her down gentle, or we might even break in half on touchdown.”

Right! Like I knew how to set her down gently.

Amme talked for a bit about fuel, but I didn’t pay much attention. It took all my concentration to hold the plane in a slight bank into the dead engine and keep a steady fifty pounds or so of pressure on the rudder, a task made none the easier by the fact that my hands and feet were still shaking. I wiped my eyes on the rolled-up sleeve of my khaki shirt.

The clouds were gone, and I could use the stars as a heading reference, so at least we were making some kind of progress in the direction we wanted to go.

“Tell radio to send out a report,” I told Amme. “ ‘Searchlights at Rabaul.’ Have him put in everything else he can think of.”

“Varitek is in no shape to send anything.”

“Have Pottinger do it. Anybody who knows some Morse code can send it in plain English.”

“You want to claim the cruiser?”

“Have him put in just what we saw. People saw fire. Leave it at that.”

“With Mr. Modahl dead … it would look good if we claimed the cruiser for him.”

“Do like I told you,” I snapped. “A hundred cruisers won’t help him now. Then come back and help me fly this pig.”

Ten minutes later Amme was back. “Some flak hit the radio power supply. We can’t transmit.”

When the
sun rose Varitek was dead. The mountains of New Britain were sinking into the sea in our right rear quarter, and ahead were endless sun-speckled sea and open, empty sky. Right then I would have appreciated some clouds. When I next looked back, the mountains were lost in the haze.

Dutch Amme sat in the left seat and I in the right. Both of us exerted pressure on the rudder and worked to keep the
Witch
flying straight. We did that by reference to the sun, which had come up over the sea’s rim more or less where we thought it should if we were flying south. As it climbed the sky, we tried to make allowances.

I also kept an eye on the set of the swells, which
seemed to show a steady wind from the southeast, a head wind. I flew across the swells at an angle and hoped this course would take us home.

Our airspeed, Amme estimated, was about 80 mph. At this speed, with a little head wind, it would take nearly seven hours to reach Namoia Bay.

Fuel was a problem. I had Amme repeat everything he had told me as we flew down the strait, only this time I listened and asked questions. The left wing had some holes in it, and we had lost gasoline. We were pouring the stuff into the right engine to stay airborne. The upshot of all this was that he thought we could stay up for maybe six hours, maybe a bit less.

“So you’re saying we can’t make Namoia Bay?”

Amme thrust his jaw out, eyed me belligerently. This, I had learned, was the way he dealt with authority, the world, officers. “That’s right, sir. We’ll be swimming before we get there.”

Of course, the distance and flying time to Namoia Bay were also estimates. Still, running the
Witch
out of gas and making a forced landing in the open sea was a surefire way to die young. I knew just enough about Catalinas to know that even if we survived an open-ocean landing in this swell and were spotted from the air, no sane person would risk a plane and his life attempting to rescue us. Cats weren’t designed to operate in typical Pacific rollers in the open sea.

If we couldn’t make Namoia Bay, we needed a sheltered stretch of water to land on, the lee of an island or a lagoon or bay.

There were islands ahead, some big, some small, all covered with inhospitable jungle.

Then there was Buna, on the northern shore of the New Guinea peninsula.

“What about Buna?” I asked Amme and Pottinger, who was standing behind the seats. “Can we make it?”

“The Japs are still in Buna,” Amme said.

“I heard they left,” Pottinger replied.

“I’d hate to get there and find out you heard wrong,” Amme shot back.

So much for Buna.

I had Pottinger sit in the right seat while I took a break to use the head. The interior of the plane was drafty, and when I saw the hull, I knew why. Damage was extensive, apparently from flak and the bomb blasts. Gaping holes, bent plates and stringers … I could look through the holes and see the sun reflecting on the ocean. The air whistling up through the wounds made the hair on the back of my head stand up. When we landed, we’d be lucky if this thing stayed above water long enough for us to get out of it. Hell, we’d be lucky if it stayed in one piece when it hit the water.

As I stood there looking at the damage, feeling the slipstream coming through the holes, I couldn’t help thinking that this adventure was going to cement my reputation as a Jonah with the dive-bomber guys. They were going to put me in the park for the pigeons. Which pissed me off a little, though there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Varitek’s and Modahl’s corpses lay in the walkway in
the center compartment. I had to walk gingerly to get around. Just seeing them hit me hard. The way it looked, this plane was going to be their coffin. Somehow that seemed appropriate. I had hopes the rest of us could do better, though I was pretty worried.

When I got back to the cockpit I stood behind Amme and Pottinger, who were doing as good a job of wrestling this flying pig southward as I had. Still, they wanted me to take over, so I climbed back in the right seat. Amme suggested the left, but I was used to using the prop and throttle controls with my left hand and the stick with my right, so figured I would be most comfortable with that arrangement.

Someone opened a box or two of C rations, and we ate ravenously. With two guys dead, you think we’d have lost our appetites, but no.

“We’re going to have to ditch somewhere,” I told everyone on the intercom. “Everyone put on a life vest now. Break out the emergency supplies and the raft, get
everything ready so when we go in the water we can get it out of the plane ASAP.”

They knew what to do, they just needed someone to tell them to do it. I could handle that. After Amme got his vest on, I put on mine and hooked up the straps.

I had Pottinger bring the chart. I wanted a sheltered stretch of water to put the plane in beside an island we could survive on. And the farther from the Japs the better.

One of the Trobriand Islands. Which one would depend upon our fuel.

We were flying at about a thousand feet. Without the altimeter all I could do was look at the swells and guess. The higher we climbed, the more we could see, but if a Japanese fighter found us, our best defense was to fly just above the water to prevent him from completing firing passes.

I looked at the sun. Another two hours, I decided, then we would climb so we could see the Trobriand Islands from as far away as possible.

As we flew along I found myself thinking about Oklahoma when I was a kid, when my dad and sister and I were still living together. I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like; she died when I was very young. I remembered my sister’s face, though. Maybe she resembled Mama.

The island
first appeared as a shadow on the horizon, just a darkening of that junction of sea and sky. I turned the plane ten degrees right to hit it dead on.

The minutes ticked away as I stared at it, wondering.
Finally I checked my watch. Five hours. We had attacked the harbor five hours earlier.

Ten minutes later I could definitely see that it was an island, a low green thing, little rise on the spine, which meant it wasn’t coral.