Fred Trusteau carried the War Diary under one arm and forced his way through the crowded passageways leading to the squadron office. He’d just come from the ready room, which was full of bickering pilots speculating over the upcoming mission, philosophizing about their chances of coming through it, and trying like hell to guess where it was they were going. They had been at sea for two days and still no word. Fred didn’t find this unusual or unexpected. He knew they wouldn’t tell the pilots, or anyone else for that matter, what the target was until they were at least halfway there. This was done in case a ship or aircraft had to return to Pearl Harbor because of breakdown. If that occurred, there might be a chance of word leaking out before the strike had actually begun. He had tried to explain it to Jacobs but was not successful. And the anxiety was beginning to affect him, too.
When he reached the office, he found his way blocked by a second-class mechanic named Peters, who was sitting in a chair facing the closed door of the office and deftly wielding a palette and a long thin paintbrush. Fred came up close behind him, bent down to examine his work. He was surprised to find a nearly completed rendition of the squadron insignia. Jack of hearts and all. “Mind if I go in?” he asked.
“Just a sec. Just a sec.” Peters spoke without breaking his squinting concentration on the insignia.
“That looks real nice,” said Fred, switching the Diary impatiently from one hand to another.
“Yeah, sure it does,” said Peters. He dabbed at the palette and continued his work, still without looking at Fred. “You would say that. You don’t have to paint the damn thing.”
“Will you be very much longer?” asked Fred.
“Just a few seconds more. Just a few seconds more.”
Fred bent down again and looked closer. It was really quite attractive. Peters was adding black highlights to the wings and feathers of the silver eagle. Sometime after he had produced the original drawing, the coat-of-arms shield had been broadened, and the single word had been changed from script to an Old English style and placed in the dividing bar between the Jack of hearts and Navy insignia. It was looking nice, very nice indeed.
“They look good on the planes, too,” said Fred.
“They’d better. I was up forty-eight hours straight to get the goddamn things done. Whoever designed this nightmare ought to have one tattooed on his butt.” Peters finished with the eagle, switched to another brush, and began to touch up the Jack’s colorful uniform.
“Maybe he already does,” said Fred.
“You think so?” asked Peters. He stopped painting and looked up at Fred. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t know it was you, sir.”
“I have to get in,” said Fred distinctly. He put his hand on the doorknob to emphasize the point.
“Okay, okay,” said Peters. He scooted his chair back. “Just be careful and don’t touch it.”
Fred opened the door, went through, and closed it behind him. On the other side of the door was a large sign reading, DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR. He chuckled. Sweeney, the yeoman, was hunched over the typewriter, pecking away at the keys.
“What’s the good word, Sweeney?” Fred asked, laying the Diary down on the edge of the desk.
“Nothing,” said Sweeney. “There aren’t any good words anymore.”
“Sorry I asked,” said Fred. Now he almost hated to ask Sweeney what he had to ask him.
“That’s all right, sir,” said the yeoman, punching savagely at the typewriter. “It isn’t your fault.”
“How do you know it isn’t?” said Fred. Sweeney looked up suspiciously, and Fred said quickly, “I need a little help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I need CAP rosters for the last couple of days.”
“What for?”
“The War Diary,” said Fred. He leaned over the typewriter to look at what the yeoman was typing and saw the words, “Ammunition Expenditure Report.” Squadron leader business.
“Don’t you know where to find them yet, sir?” asked Sweeney, managing to sound mortally offended.
“If I did, would I ask you?” Fred glanced down at the papers Sweeney was copying and caught a glimpse of something red several sheets down. “Every time I need them I find you’ve moved them somewhere else.” He came around the desk where he could read better and fished with one finger for the red-marked sheet.
“Don’t mess things up,” said Sweeney. He pushed his chair back, opened the filing cabinet behind him, took out a single folder (without looking), slammed the drawer explosively, and tossed the folder to the empty side of the desk. He started typing again, but Fred stopped him.
“Where’d you get this?” Fred asked. He was holding a single page of blue-mimeographed type. Across the top of the page was rubber-stamped, in blood-red: “Top Secret.”
“Get what?” Sweeney strained to look, half-standing, half-sitting.
“You’re not supposed to have this.” Fred read through the first sentences, realizing immediately what he had. Under the “Top Secret” was a little block of words: “Operation FASTFOOT, CINCPAC INST 020844-1342Z.” In the upper right hand corner was another rubber-stamped block which read: “PAGE___OF___ COPY___OF___ CUST___” The first two blanks were inked in with the numbers “15,” the third with “9,” the fourth with “11.” Beside the “CUST” blank were the initials “JEH” and the date “24 Aug 43.” Fred now knew he held the fifteenth and last page of the ninth of eleven copies of a Top Secret instruction which the skipper had signed for only yesterday.
“What is it? What is it?” whined Sweeney.
“Where did you get this?” asked Fred again. “It was in these papers here.”
“I got it off the skipper’s desk, in his stateroom.”
“Did he give them to you himself?”
“He was there when I took them, getting ready for the briefing.”
“The briefing?”
“He’s in it now. With the other two skippers and CAG and some big shots from the Yorktown.” Sweeney was sitting back in his chair, looking somewhat frightened. “You mean it’s something important?”
Fred ignored the question and continued reading. The body of the material on the page began with paragraph 34-(c), and had the heading, “Wireless Procedures: Target Area (cont.).” The paragraph described transmission times for the submarines operating in the area. Beneath paragraph 34-(c) was paragraph 34-(d) with the title “Call Signs,” and there followed a list of call signs. He found VF-20’s, Banger, under that of the bomber squadron, Red Rocket. There were at least twenty more, but he didn’t stop to count them.
What interested him most was the final paragraph, entitled, “Cancellation.” He read it carefully.
“35-(a) Cancellation. This instruction is canceled in its entirety 2 Sep 43 2400Z. All pages of all copies in custody of Air Group Commanders and below will be visually accounted for following command level briefing 25 Aug 43 by briefing officers involved.” Fred gave a low, ominous whistle. That was the briefing the Skipper was at right now. Somehow the last page of the op plan he had signed for had come unattached and found its way to the squadron office in Sweeney’s work. When the briefing was finished, or maybe when it was begun, the Skipper’s copy would be collected and inspected. If they found a page missing, all hell would break loose. Fred thought fast. “Get me an envelope,” he said. “A big one.”
“Did I do something wrong?” Sweeney asked.
“Not yet,” said Fred. He tore a piece of paper from a pad and scribbled a hasty note. He snatched the envelope that Sweeney had produced from a drawer in the desk and stuffed the page and note in it.
“Where’d you say the briefing was?”
“In flag country, somewhere. The admiral’s quarters, I think.”
Fred was already at the door. “Don’t say a thing about this,” he said, “and someday you’ll make first class.” Fred jerked open the door, forgetting that Peters was still outside. He rushed past him, nearly bowling him over. The outstretched paintbrush left a little red smear on Fred’s cloth belt, but he didn’t notice it.
He found flag country in the island with remarkable ease, and found the briefing compartment just as easily—it was the door with the armed Marine standing rigidly outside. The Marine, colorful in his full-dress uniform, sprang to attention as Fred stopped in front of him.
“I’m looking for Lieutenant Commander Hardigan,” said Fred, almost prancing with anxiety.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you are not cleared to go in there.” The Marine stared at a spot on the far bulkhead as if Fred wasn’t even there.
“I have an important message for him,” said Fred. “Really important.”
“My instructions were to let no one pass,” said the Marine. Fred noticed that he wore a corporal’s chevrons and that he had the look of a man who followed orders, come hell or high water. He tried another tack.
“Can you give this to him?” he asked. He held out the sealed envelope.
“I…” said the Marine. This was obviously not in his instructions. “I, uh…”
“Sure you can,” said Fred. “Just step in and hand it to Lieutenant Commander Hardigan.”
“I don’t…”
“He’s the tall man with black hair? Good-looking, sideburns?”
“I know which one…”
“Good. Just hand it to him. See? It has his name on it.” Fred shoved the envelope into the marine’s hands, stepped back quickly.
“Well,” said the Marine.
“Come on,” Fred cajoled. “It’ll only take a second.”
The Marine took a deep breath, released it; then, as if his mind were made up completely and there were no longer any questions, he resolutely opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.
Fred ran the back of his hand across his brow and thought, I sure hope it was in time.
“We’ve given a lot of thought to composite strike composition,” said the lieutenant commander from CINCPAC Operations, “just as we’ve given a lot of thought to the hows and whys of operating four carriers in a single group, as we have here now. We don’t really care how you represent this info on composite strikes to your own men, but the real reason is simply this: We wish to establish patterns and procedures in this strike that can be developed into guidelines that we can follow in later strikes, and what it boils down to is that we don’t want to ever lose a lot of aircraft from any single squadron. Therefore, the bombers for each strike will be drawn from all three engaged air groups, as will the fighters. Independence, as specified earlier, will provide force CAP and ASW searches and not participate in any of the strikes.”
Jack sat and listened and was chilled by the casual manner the briefing officer used when referring to aircraft losses. It was as though the aircraft flew themselves, unaided by human hands; it was as though men were not involved at all. The briefing officer was a paper-shuffling war technician—cold, impersonal, calculating. He didn’t have to fly the planes out to the enemy-held island of Marcus.
“Approach will be made during the night of the thirtieth to the north of the island. We will then turn and launch from the northwest and be over the target by dawn. Flight time for strike aircraft should be forty-five or fifty minutes. I know the targets we’ve assigned are sort of general, but we feel as if we’ve covered all the possibilities.”
Jack moved uncomfortably in his seat. He was glad the briefing was nearing its end. He was having serious misgivings about the entire affair. Marcus Island was isolated for sure, isolated deep in enemy-controlled waters. Midway Island was fifteen hundred miles to the east, Tokyo barely a thousand to the northwest. Strong enemy bases existed less than four hundred miles away in the Bonins and Marianas. This briefing told them what they had to do, but not why. The lieutenant commander had spent the greater part of the lecture explaining cruising formations for the four carriers, rotation of ASW searches, and expected weather conditions between Pearl and the target. The only picture Jack had seen of Marcus Island was vintage 1942, February to be exact, taken when Admiral Halsey hit the atoll with the single carrier Enterprise. Jack had seen that photograph months and months before.
“You still don’t have any information as to fighter wings based there?” asked Woody Heywood. He had asked the same question before but hadn’t received a satisfactory answer. Jack could see that he felt the same way he did about the operation—that they were risking four new, inexperienced carriers with their air groups on an underplanned foray far into enemy territory for one day of strikes against an island with no strategic value whatever.
“We don’t know for sure. We do know that they’ve expended hundreds of aircraft and crews in the Solomons during the last nine months, so the isolated island garrisons may be entirely stripped.”
“Or they may have strong wings.”
“That’s why we’re sending the fighters in first.”
“You lucky dog, you,” said Boom Bloomington to Jack, then withstood a withering glare from Buster Jennings for his lapse of discipline at such a serious moment.
Jack flipped through his copy of the attack instruction. It typified the entire affair: It was a grand total of fifteen pages, saying less about the true nature of the strike than the briefing officer had. He’d seen longer instructions for off-loading ammunition in peacetime.
He reached the back pages of the plan. With a stomach-turning wrench, he realized that the last page was missing. He went back through it quickly page by page, remembering how he had signed every one in the presence of the briefing officer. Every one had been there then. Trying to appear calm, he checked through all his papers and his notes. He even looked surreptitiously under the table.
“Okay, gentlemen,” said the lieutenant commander, “Bill here will take your copies of the instruction. Please be sure to destroy any notes you’ve taken after your own briefings. I guess that’s it….”
A grimly efficient-looking lieutenant with a crew cut and black-rimmed glasses, came to the table and took up Buster Jennings’ copy. He checked its number against a list he carried on a clipboard, then flipped quickly through the pages from front to rear, checking them all. Jack felt doomed. The lieutenant finished with CAG’s copy and took Woody Heywood’s. Jack stacked all his notes together with the copy of the instruction and stood, prepared to look surprised when the lieutenant found the page missing.
There was a noise at the door and a Marine came in. “Lieutenant Commander Hardigan?” Jack looked up, surprised. “This is for you, sir,” He handed Jack a single sealed envelope with “Lt. Comdr. Hardigan—Impt.” written in ink on the outside. Jack thanked the man. Meanwhile, the lieutenant finished with Woody’s copy and moved mechanically to Boom’s. Jack opened the envelope, turning so that Buster Jennings, who was now talking with the briefing officer, wouldn’t see. His heart leaped when he saw the page of the instruction. There was a note with it. “Skipper—Sweeney had this with him in the squadron office. Do you need it? Fred T.”
What timing, thought Jack. He crumpled the note into his pants pocket and slipped the errant page to the back of the instruction. No one took any notice.
“If I may, sir?” said the crew-cut lieutenant. He took the little booklet from Jack’s hands and began his check.
“You know, Lieutenant,” said Jack, “you ought to get something better than staples to bind these things. That back page is coming off there.”
The lieutenant squinted through his glasses at Jack. “I’ll pass your suggestion along,” he said.
“Milk run,” said Boom loudly. “It’ll be a pushover. They won’t know what hit them.”
“Just be careful not to get yourself expended,” said Heywood.
“Yeah,” said Jack, “that’s worse than getting shot down.” How could he thank Trusteau? A seventy-two hour pass? A promotion to j.g.?
“What did that Marine want, Hardigan?” CAG asked. They were leaving together, passing the Marine himself.
“Nothing,” Jack said.
“Must have been something.”
“One of my men was working on a plane report. He thought it might be important for the briefing, so he had the guard deliver it.”
“You tell your man not to interrupt a closed briefing again,” said Jennings officiously.
“You bet,” said Jack. They passed a drinking fountain and Jack stopped to get a drink, letting CAG walk on ahead and disappear. “You bet,” he said again, and went in search of Fred.
“I owe you one,” said Jack to Fred as they paced the flight deck. The sun was sinking into the sea—a gaudy display of tropical splendor they’d learned to take for granted by now.
“It was nothing. Really,” said Fred.
“It was everything. It saved me from a very embarrassing moment. That goddamn Sweeney. You have to watch him every second.”
“I told him not to say anything about it. I don’t think he will.”
As they plowed through the wind toward the bow, they passed a single fighter spotted for launch on the single starboard catapult.
“I don’t suppose I can count on you not to have read that page,” Jack said.
“That was the first thing I did,” said Fred. “I couldn’t resist.”
“Then I suppose you know where we’re going.”
“No, sir. That part wasn’t in it. All I remember is the code name: Fastfoot.”
“Even that’s more than you should know. Until tomorrow, anyway.”
They walked on in silence, reaching the very end of the flight deck, which curved smoothly, suddenly, into nothingness. Under the overhang below them was a forty-millimeter mount, sailors hunching there to escape the wind. Jack and Fred turned mechanically and began to walk back again.
“Marcus Island,” said Jack. “Ever heard of it?”
“Marcus? Never.”
“Minami Tori Shima. That’s the Japanese name for it.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
“Don’t tell a soul.”
“No, sir. I won’t. I promise.”
“But there’s something I don’t understand.” Jack stopped and gazed out at the horizon. The rapidly failing light showed the boxy shapes of two more carriers, as well as battleships, cruisers, destroyers. “All this power, these carriers, these planes—and all we’re going to do is raid the place. Marcus isn’t even very big.” Jack turned and started walking. “I mean, if we wanted to take the island, you know, land the Marines and all that, it might make some sense.”
“Admiral Berkey called it a training strike.”
“Admiral Berkey? When did you talk to Admiral Berkey?”
“Back before we pulled into Pearl. He even told me when we were going to sail, more or less.”
Jack chuckled aloud. “You’re amazing,” he said.
“No,” said Fred, “really it makes sense. We’ve got four carriers in this force alone. That’s more than we’ve ever had in one place at the same time. And there’s two or three more back in Pearl that aren’t ready yet. No one seems to know how it’s going to work having all these flattops in the same force. So we try them out on something small.”
“You sound like a staff officer.”
“And who knows? Maybe the Japs’ll think we really want to take the place and send in a couple of thousand troops and a bunch of planes they could use somewhere else.”
“I’ll write a letter to Admiral Nimitz recommending you for flag aide.”
“Would you do that?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“You want me to?” asked Jack, enjoying Fred’s naiveté.
“No, sir. Really, I like it here.”
“You do, huh?”
“More than anything,” Fred said intensely.
They walked on in silence for almost a minute, coming abreast of the island. Jack had been almost embarrassed by the way Fred had said, “More than anything.” He angled off toward the island and belowdecks with Fred dutifully following.
“What’s the movie tonight?” Jack asked.
“The Public Enemy. James Cagney. Good picture.”
“Want to take it in?”
“Yes, sir. Sure.”
“I’m treating. I’ll even buy you a cup of coffee.” They reached the hatchway just as a seaman arrived to close it down for the night.
“That’s very generous, Skipper.”
In the dark confines of the island, Jack stopped suddenly. He touched Fred on the shoulder. “Seriously,” he said. “I owe you one.”
Fred looked at Jack as well as he could in the darkness and shook his head. “Sure, Skipper,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
“Well, I say,” said Jack, laughing, roughing up Fred’s neck, “they don’t call you Trusty for nothing.” And the two men headed down and aft to the wardroom, had some coffee, and watched The Public Enemy, with James Cagney.
A red-goggled Fred Trusteau sat in the cockpit of his Hellcat and tried not to be nervous. The cavernous interior of the hangar deck stretched ahead of him almost, it seemed, into infinity. A forest of folded wingtips and unmoving propellers obstructed his view of everything except the two fighters in front of him. Their engines and his, too, produced a maelstrom of wind and noise and vibration that made thinking a difficult project.
Four Hellcats were warming up in the hangar deck this morning, the day of their first combat mission as VF-20. Four others were warming up on the flight deck above Fred. It was Fred and the skipper, Fitzsimmons and Hughes who together formed the first division of the squadron and one-half of the fighter force that Ironsides was due to launch for Marcus in a few minutes.
Fred shuddered slightly as he recalled how, minutes earlier, after a thorough briefing in the ready room, the eight pilots had trooped to the flight deck expecting to find their aircraft ready and waiting, only to discover that their Hellcats were still on the hangar deck because of some confusing oversight that he still didn’t understand. While the minutes ticked away toward the time when they had to launch in order to be over the target at the break of dawn, deck officers and pilots, plane pushers and crew chiefs, staff officers and air officers, shouted, cursed, exchanged angry phone calls, got enraged, became confused, gave contradictory orders, lost their tempers—until now, when it was decided that the first four fighters could warm up on the hangar deck and could be sent aloft with their engines running in time for the launch.
When it came right down to it, thought Fred, they had no choice. Men’s lives would depend on their timely arrival over Marcus. Recriminations would flow freely when the strike was over. Perhaps careers would suffer. So the four Hellcats warmed up on the hangar deck.
The lights above him blinked once. Fred glanced over his gauges, satisfied that everything was all right. A young mechanic appeared at the side of his cockpit, tugged at the straps, checked the buckles that held Fred in place, touched Fred’s legs, shoulders, and arms like a nervous mother hurrying her son off to his first day in school. The mechanic gave a thumbs-up to someone to the side of the aircraft and hung on to the edge of the cockpit. The lights went off completely now, and Fred stripped off the goggles and handed them to the mechanic. The young man gripped Fred’s shoulder in a friendly squeeze and was gone.
The Hellcat suddenly shuddered and began to move backward. Fred knew by that that they had already moved the Skipper’s plane, directly behind him, to the elevator, and sent him aloft. There was a slight bump. The plane stopped moving. Fred looked up. There in the huge square hole of the elevator, he could see the brilliant, white tropical stars. The square grew larger and larger, the air fresher and cooler. Suddenly he was on the flight deck. Jack’s fighter, marked by a single blue light beneath its tail, hurtled off the deck.
Shadowy shapes moved around Fred, and a single red wand popped into existence in the hands of some invisible deck officer. Taxi her forward, said the wand. Fred released his brakes and increased his throttle, rolled the Hellcat forward. Hold it there, said the wand. Fred stood on the upper portion of the rudder pedals and felt the plane hunker to a stop. Run her up, said the wand.
Fred stood on the brakes with all the strength he possessed and increased the throttle smoothly all the way to the stop, feeling the cyclonic power of the engine lift the tail into the air. Then he leaned all the way to the left and found the hooded deck lights that told him where the deck was, and where it wasn’t. In that brief interval, before the wand snapped downward and he released his brakes, he had time only to think that despite the chaos of the launch, he was ready for whatever would come ready because the only man among them who had kept his temper and remained calm through it all would be flying there in front of him. Go, said the wand, and Fred flew away into the night.
Jack checked over his left shoulder and saw Fred’s Hellcat blotting out the stars, hanging off his left wing like a great amorphous shadow. He liked having Fred out there—just as if he were an old, tested friend rather than the untried rookie he was. But despite Fred’s youth, despite his inexperience, he flew with a confidence in his aircraft and his abilities that was just this side of jauntiness. It was pleasing to watch, and Jack knew he was dependable, too.
Looking over his right shoulder, Jack could see the other two elements of the first division, Fitzsimmons and Hughes. But the other division taking part in the first wave was not visible against the black sky and ocean. Those fifteen harrowing minutes prior to the launch came back to Jack and he smiled. Something like that was bound to happen on the first combat mission. It always did. But they had been flexible enough to make it work, and the first division was winging its way to Marcus. Even if the rest of the sweep was not right behind him, even if they had been delayed slightly, they would still reach the target at about the same time. Then all of them would be cutting through the skies over the target at eighteen thousand feet, protecting the six Avengers that would come in low to lay incendiaries on the airstrips as illumination for the bombers from the other two carriers. Jack wondered if they had radar, and if they would have time to get fighters to their altitude. Something tickled Jack’s side. His flight suit was soaked with sweat. Just like old times.
He swept his eyes over his instruments, saw nothing amiss, and focused briefly on the panel clock. Five minutes until the target. He had complete faith in the navigation of the task force. He knew if they said the island would be under at such and such a time, it would be. He stretched and rubbernecked and noticed the beginnings of dawn—the lightening around the edges of the great bowl of sky that always preceded the sunrise.
Something on the surface of the ocean caught his attention. He stared hard. The white brush marks of waves breaking on a coral atoll. It was an enemy atoll, an outpost of Japanese filled with deadly aircraft, accurate guns, and burrowing troops of the kind that had sniped at him and Duane Higgins as they huddled in foxholes on the miserable island of Guadalcanal.
Daylight comes so quickly out here, he thought. Already the stars were magically disappearing, and the sky was turning a deep royal blue. He looked back and saw that all eight of his Hellcats were indeed there. With that reassurance he led them into their first combat experience as Fighting Twenty.
The black mass of the island of Marcus was below them. There were no enemy fighters. On land, the first of many bombs burst like flowers blooming in the clinging darkness, throwing out brilliant streamers from fiery red centers.
They made a complete circle of the island in the growing light, looking for enemy aircraft, but found none. The small group of Avengers came around again and dropped their remaining bombs on buildings and vehicles, airstrips and towers. Several raging fires were easily visible now. A heavy cloak of black smoke began to rise and drift with the light tropical breeze.
Jack went to his throat mike. “This is Banger Leader. Looks like we caught them on the ground, fellas. Let’s take it on down.” His own voice in his ears sounded amazingly calm and composed, and he hoped it sounded that way to his pilots. He waggled his wings once, then peeled to the right, and headed down. Fred and the second section followed in smooth coordination.
Jack watched the island grow in size and detail as he dove. From this viewpoint it looked smaller than the pictures and the maps at the briefing. Jack could take in its entire length in a single glance. Acres of vegetation had been cleared away for airstrips. Clusters of buildings squatted at the ends of the runways; a few of them now were engulfed in sweeping flames and clouds of boiling black smoke.
He searched for the Avengers, but they were nowhere to be seen. And then he found their target: a row of twin-engined aircraft, still vague in the early morning light. He adjusted his course to sweep in over them, holding his altitude to two hundred feet, remembering all too clearly how he had lost the wingman at Buka by strafing too low and getting caught in the explosion of an enemy bomb. It was better if the enemy planes were armed and gassed; then they would burn easier, and fewer passes would have to be made. Jack lined up the aircraft in his sights and checked once more for Fred. The targets filled his gunsight. He squeezed the trigger.
The pass was over in seconds and the enemy planes—they were Bettys he was sure—had indeed been armed and gassed. Jack touched his rudder pedals lightly to sweep his concentration of fifty-caliber slugs and tracers back and forth through the neat row of planes. Before they could clear the area the planes began to burn and explode. One in particular went up with a violence that caused him to duck involuntarily and pull to the right. Then it was over, and they were over the black water, which was turning dark blue. And Jack glanced over to check on Fred. But Fred wasn’t there.
To Fred, the skipper seemed especially precise, confident this morning. When he went down, he did so without hesitation. And when he reached his altitude, it was as though his aircraft moved on solid, unseen rails holding it in place. Fred found himself flying the same way, as he watched morning come to the island of Marcus, which he had first heard of three days ago. It looked much the same as some of the islands in the Hawaiian chain. Those were the only real, live Pacific islands Fred had ever seen. The only difference lay in the fact that this one was inhabited by the Japanese—nefarious beings who shot at pilots in parachutes and themselves died in droves in banzai charges.
When Fred followed the Skipper down, and they began their first pass over the row of dark, twin-engined aircraft (so that’s a Betty, he’d thought), he had tried to spot some Japanese. They were totally invisible, of course. There was not even any antiaircraft fire yet—at least none that he could see. As far as you could tell, this was just another training mission, with dud bombs and color-coded tracers that would tell who had shot the best when it was all over. At least it seemed that way, until the first Betty went up like a volcano and caught Fred’s Hellcat in its blast.
Fred opened fire a split second after the skipper did, and he watched his tracers tear into the ground around the nose of that first Betty, throwing up chunks of material and firing showers of colorful sparks into the air. Then they were over the rest of the Bettys, and some were already starting to burn. Then a big orange-red blossom of fire and smoke enveloped his plane and hurled him upward. Before he could emerge from the other side of the black cloud, something hit his plane from beneath with a solid “thunk”; instinctively, Fred had pulled the stick to the left to escape the rest of the explosion. He knew almost instantly, though, that something was terribly wrong with his big blue fighter.
The first thing he noticed was the vibration. He’d had enough hours in the Hellcat to know its every bump and shudder, and this one he felt now was all wrong. He fought back a feeling of overwhelming fear and looked around for the rest of the division. How the hell could they disappear so fast? He continued turning to the left, feeling out the new vibration, until he was out over the water. Then he checked his instruments and found his oil pressure dropping slowly, his cylinder head temperature climbing perceptibly. He had no idea what was wrong, and throttled back to save the engine. As his air-speed dropped through 180 knots, the entire aircraft shook and shuddered like a frail building in a windstorm. He immediately gave the engine more throttle. The shudder passed.
“Oh, Jesus,” Fred said out loud. Here he was, in a shaking, dying plane a mile off the beach of an enemy-held island, all by himself, with the carrier an impossible two hundred miles away.
His first thought was of the radio. “Banger One Three to Banger Leader. I am—” He stopped, realizing that he could be telling the enemy, too—that he was a lone cripple. Just then, the engine gave a heart-stopping gasp and backfired and began running rough. Fred pulled out his plotting board, found the course back to point option, and vowed to put as much distance between himself and Marcus Island as his faltering engine would allow.
Oh, Skipper, he said to himself, what did I do to deserve this break?
“Banger Leader to all Banger elements. Did anyone see him go down?”
Jack didn’t need to say who it was he was talking about. The other six pilots could see the gaping hole in the formation where Fred should have been, as they formed up to head back to the Constitution. Jack, Fitzsimmons, and Hughes had circled the island once, while the second division strafed again, burning all the visible aircraft on the field below. But Fred hadn’t shown up. He had simply vanished, so quickly that no one had seen him go.
Jack had fought back the sickening feeling rising in his throat, and they had continued their attack; they were diving on the antiaircraft guns that were now spotting the air with dirty brown explosions and showing their positions with little spits of flame in the green jungle below. When the next wave of Essex and Yorktown bombers glided in with heavy bombs, the fighters broke off the attack and formed up on the course back to the task force.
“Don’t worry, Skipper,” said Fitzsimmons. “He’ll probably be waiting for us back at the ranch.”
“Cross your fingers,” said Jack.
They flew the rest of the long trip without speaking. Once, they spotted a flight of Avengers on their way to Marcus, high above them, but neither group of planes took any formal notice of the other. Several minutes before they spotted the outer destroyers of the task force, Jack thought he saw something on the surface of the water, and he went down to look. It was nothing—an illusion, a trick caused by light refraction, or a broaching fish, or Jack’s imagination. When they reached the ship, they landed without fanfare and turned their aircraft over to the hustling plane pushers.
On his way down to the ready room, Jack went through the hangar deck and looked at all the Hellcats there. Fred’s wasn’t among them. When he reached the ready room, he went straight to the debriefing officer to ask if he had any word on Fred, even though he knew what the answer would be. “No word yet,” said the officer. “But he’s still got half an hour of fuel, so he could show up at any time.”
“Sure,” said Jack. He dropped into his reclining seat and closed his eyes. And thought: The rest of the squadron mustn’t see me like this. Men die in war. It’s happened before; it’ll happen again. Only why did it have to be Fred? “Okay,” he said aloud. He stood up, dropping his plotting board, headgear and lifejacket into the chair. “Let’s get this debriefing over with. We’ve got another strike in two hours.”
The pilots chattered away as if they were impervious to what had happened. The returning men were pressed for information on the progress and difficulty of the strike. But Jack knew they were watching him, knew they looked to him for how they should feel about losing a member of the squadron in battle. They must see that life goes on, he thought. But why did it have to be Fred?
His part of the debriefing was short. It was, after all, a simple strike without airborne opposition. Jack showed the intelligence officer where they’d strafed the Bettys, corrected the map as to the position of a radio tower, and tried to point out where the antiaircraft batteries were that they had attacked.
When he was through he felt no better. He went topside to watch the launch of Constitution’s second strike of eight Hellcats under Duane Higgins and twelve SBDs under Boom Bloomington. The frenetic activity on the flight deck did nothing to cheer him up, so he headed up into the island to the flag plot compartment where the progress of the strike was being monitored by the air officer and his staff. No one there had received any word from other ships as to the whereabouts of missing pilots, so he went back down to the ready room and the rest of his charged-up pilots.
Jack reached the ready room at the same time as two stewards carrying a huge platter of sandwiches and several jugs of coffee. But he didn’t feel like eating. In three minutes all the food was gone, but he didn’t notice.
He tried to force his mind away from the increasingly apparent fact that Fred was not coming back. He talked with the other pilots about their parts in the mission. He tried to tell himself that it was amusing how their stories got exaggerated; soon the whole Japanese air force and most of the Imperial Army began appearing on the little island of Marcus and was single-handedly destroyed. But he kept coming back to the fact that nothing this day and many days afterward would be amusing—the only man he had ever really cared about, he knew now, was missing, and probably dead.
Around noon, the teletype in the forward part of the ready room came to life and began clattering out information on the second strike. The bombers had just destroyed what looked like an ammo dump. One of them was down on the reef. Then the teletype said that a four-plane section of the Independence CAP had destroyed a four-engine Japanese search plane north of the force, which started the pilots talking about retaliation from Japanese subs and fleet units, which of course was only speculation and would never materialize. Finally the teletype printed one last story and fell silent. It said that Ensign Trusteau was alive and well on the Essex. His shot-up plane was being patched together again. And Jack almost started crying, which his pilots interpreted as meaning that the old man really cared about his pilots.
The Constitution’s final wave against Marcus went off as scheduled, at 1330 hours, with Jack Hardigan leading the same two divisions (with Ensign Jacobs flying wing on him) and escorting six SBDs and six Avengers. By this time, the little island was so battered that the airstrips were the only visible sign of human habitation. The aircraft didn’t spend more than five minutes over the target. When they got back to the carrier, the task force was already headed back to Pearl, and the strike on Marcus passed into history.
Step on a crack and break your mother’s back. For no particular reason, the childhood ditty popped into Fred’s mind as he and the skipper trudged up and down the vast expanse of wood planks known as the flight deck. The cracks were rows of tie down cleats, recessed into strips of steel slightly lower than deck level. There were no aircraft topside this evening, perhaps in expectation of heavy weather. There were lots of other people, though, enjoying the aircraft carrier’s peculiar advantage over other warships when it came to recreational room. Some ran. But Fred felt that it was the continuous hissing of the wind and the privacy it afforded that brought everyone up here as the sun sank and night lowered around them.
“I don’t mind telling you,” said the skipper, “that we thought for a while yesterday we had really lost you.” He kept his hands in his pockets and his head down, but his voice carried clearly.
“I thought you had, too, Skipper, for a while there,” said Fred. He was thinking how great it was to be back among friends, especially the skipper. The Essex had been the first carrier he had come to. He hadn’t even looked for Ironsides. The two carriers were identical in their major points of construction, but the ready room, the wardroom, the people, were uncomfortably different. It was like being a kid transferred to a new school.
“I guess it just goes to show you how fast things can happen when you’re over a target. One second things are all right, and the next….” The skipper didn’t complete the sentence.
“On the way back I kept thinking how big this ocean is,” Fred said, “and how they’d never find me. But old number thirteen just kept on running.” He remembered the sweat, and the pounding heart that wouldn’t quiet, as the minutes stretched into an hour, and still the hot, rough engine ran and back-fired, coughed and shook, losing oil steadily. And the great waiting Pacific passed unhurriedly below him as he checked his parachute pack, first-aid kit, raft, pistol. He knew that he was making himself ready to put down in the middle of an enemy ocean but also knew that no one is ever ready for a slow death.
“Makes you feel better when you know how well they build these birds.”
“Maybe I’ll write them a letter when I get the chance,” Fred replied.
“Do that. I’m sure they’d be glad to get it.”
“I wouldn’t think they get many complaints.”
Jack smiled to himself as he realized the similarity of Fred’s remark to the old, well-known joke about what to do when your parachute doesn’t work.
“Admiral Berkey was over there,” said Fred.
“Where?”
“On the Essex. They didn’t have any spare staterooms so he got me set up with one of his staff officers.”
Jack felt a stab of jealousy. Ensigns don’t hobnob with admirals and they sure as hell don’t—sleep with them either. Jack realized with a jolt what he’d been thinking. “That was generous of him,” he said.
“He’s a good person,” said Fred.
An officer in shorts and T-shirt jogged past them. Fred remembered the previous night—a sleepless affair since the lieutenant commander in the rack below talked to his wife in his sleep. In the morning, he’d move around the stateroom with a very noticeable erection.
They walked with the wind at their backs, in a spot of silence that stretched into a minute, then two. Fred was inwardly reveling at this private moment with the Skipper; he was still intoxicated with the thrill of being alive to enjoy it. They were abreast of the island and virtually alone when the Skipper suddenly stopped. Fred stopped and turned to look at him. He couldn’t see his face, but he felt that something was wrong.
“Are you all right, Skipper?” Fred asked involuntarily.
The words almost didn’t penetrate Jack’s consciousness. He was deep in a mental turmoil triggered by the ridiculous picture of Fred Trusteau sleeping with Admiral Berkey. It had been replaced in Jack’s mind with the next logical step: Fred Trusteau should have been here, sleeping with Jack Hardigan. The thought that it would be a nice, pleasant thing to do was disturbing. Immediately, he tried to reject the idea. When Fred spoke, Jack found that he was standing still in the middle of the flight deck looking at the man he wanted to—sleep with. He started walking again, struggling to control his thoughts.
“I just thought of something,” he said, after a moment. Fred had fallen into step beside him. They walked on in silence again.
“Must have been pretty important,” said Fred, wondering what it had been.
“No,” said Jack. “No, it was very unimportant.” He turned abruptly and headed for the hatch in the island that Fred had entered on his first day aboard, now so many weeks ago.
Fred went after him like a perplexed little dog following his master.
They reached the rounded entrance; Jack entered first, without ceremony and without waiting for Fred to close the heavy steel door and catch up with him.
Fred caught up with him on the hangar deck. “I guess I’ll be turning in, sir,” said Fred.
“That’s fine,” said Jack. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” said Fred. “Good night.”
The skipper’s back vanished into the darkness. Fred waited for several minutes to make sure Jack had gone ahead before he started for his stateroom. He was vaguely upset; he wondered if he had said or done something to disturb the skipper. It bothered him for several hours that night before he was able to fall asleep.
TO: LT COMDR J HARDIGAN USN USS CONSTITUTION FPO SF
FROM: M HARDIGAN PORTLAND MAINE
DAD NEAR DEATH STOP MOM BAD OFF STOP
PLEASE COME IF ABLE STOP
MONTY
6 September 1943: Air Group Twenty debarked this date U.S.S. Constitution for Naval Air Station, Ford Island, Oahu, arriving 1300 hours without incident. Upon arrival, Lt. Comdr. Jack Hardigan, USN, Commanding Officer VF-20, was detached for emergency leave to commence immediately. Lieutenant Duane Higgins, Executive Officer, has assumed command responsibilities until further notice.