The ocean was a jumble of bomber remains. The plane’s lifeblood—oil, hydraulic fluid, and some one thousand gallons of fuel—slopped on the surface.
Louie heard a voice. He turned and saw Phil and Mac, far away, clinging to debris. Blood spouted in arcs from Phil’s head and streamed down his face. No one else had surfaced.
Louie saw two rafts. The engineer, in the heroic last act of his life, had apparently yanked the release handle just before he was killed. The rafts had inflated themselves and were drifting away rapidly.
A typical World War II bomber life raft.
Louie knew he had to stop Phil’s bleeding, but if he lost the rafts, they’d all perish. He swam for one of the rafts. His clothes weighed him down, and the current and wind carried the raft faster than he could swim. As the raft slid hopelessly out of reach, Louie looked back at Phil and Mac, sharing the recognition that their chance was lost. Then he saw a cord trailing behind the raft. He snatched it, reeled the raft to him, and climbed aboard. He grabbed the oars, rowed to the second raft, and tied the two together.
He rowed to Phil and Mac and pulled Phil aboard. Mac, uninjured, climbed up on his own. Both men, like Louie, were filmy with fuel and oil. With all three in one raft, it was cramped; the raft interior was only about six feet long and a little more than two feet wide.
There were two gashes on
Phil’s forehead, spurting blood. Louie ran his fingers down Phil’s throat until he felt a pulse, the carotid artery, then put Mac’s hand on it and told him to press down. He pulled off his top shirt and T-shirt and pulled Phil’s shirts off as well. He asked Mac to do the same. He folded Phil’s shirt, pressed it to the wounds, then tied the other T-shirts around his head. He slid Phil into the second raft.
Phil felt woozy. As the pilot, he was in charge, but knew he was in no condition to make decisions. He asked Louie to take command.
“I’m glad it was you, Zamp,” he said softly.
From the water came a small sound: a moan, trailing off into a gargle, then silence. Louie grabbed an oar and circled, searching for the drowning man, but whoever had made the sound had slipped under. He didn’t come up again.
Eleven men had gone up on Green Hornet. All but three were dead.
With Phil stable, Louie turned his attention to the rafts. They were made of rubber-coated canvas divided into two air pockets. The critical issue was provisions. The provisions box, which Mac had been holding as the plane went down, was gone, ripped from his hands in the
crash or lost in his escape from the wreckage. In their pockets, the men had only wallets and coins. Their watches were still on their wrists, but the hands had stopped when the plane hit. Cecy’s bracelet wasn’t on Phil’s wrist, and his lucky silver dollar wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe he’d forgotten them, or maybe they’d been lost in the crash.
Whatever was in the raft pockets was all they’d have. In them, Louie found several chocolate bars, several half-pint tins of water, a brass mirror, a flare gun, sea dye, fishhooks, fishing line, a leak patching kit, and two air pumps in canvas cases. There was also a set of pliers with a screwdriver in the handle. Louie pondered it, wondering why anyone would need a screwdriver or pliers on a raft. That was all there was. No knife, nothing for shelter, no fishnet, no radio.
Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half pints wouldn’t last long. Because sea water is so salty it’s poisonous, they couldn’t drink it.
Adrift near the equator with little water, Phil, Louie, and Mac would soon be in dire trouble.
Since the crash, Mac hadn’t said a single word. He’d done everything Louie asked of him, but his face had never lost its glazed, startled expression.
Louie was assessing the rafts when Mac suddenly began wailing, “We’re going to die!” Louie tried to reassure him, but Mac kept shouting. Exasperated, Louie threatened to report Mac when they returned. It had no effect. At wits’ end, Louie whacked Mac’s face with the back of his hand. Mac thumped back and fell silent.
Louie established rules. Each man would eat one square of chocolate in the morning, one in the evening. Louie allotted one water tin per man, with
each man allowed two or three sips a day. Eating and drinking at this rate, they could stretch the supplies for a few days.
There was nothing to do but wait. Louie’s back hurt. The skin down the length of it had been scraped off as he escaped the wreckage, and he assumed that this was the source of his pain. He had no idea that he was hurt much worse than that. When he’d been thrown into the gun mount as the plane struck the ocean, every one of his ribs had broken.
Pushing away thoughts about the men who’d died, Louie pondered his escape from the wreckage. If he’d passed out from the water pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?
The men watched the sky. Louie kept his hand on Phil’s head, stanching the bleeding. The last trace of
Green Hornet, a shimmer of gas, hydraulic fluid, and oil, faded away. In its place, rising from below, came massive blue shapes, gliding in lithe arcs around the rafts.
Sharks had found them.
The sharks, which Louie thought were of the mako and reef species, were so close that the men could touch them. The smallest were about six feet long; some were twelve feet. They bent around the rafts, testing the fabric, but not trying to get at the men. They seemed to be waiting for the men to come to them.
The sun sank, and it became sharply cold. The men used their hands to bail a few inches of water into each raft. Once their bodies warmed the water, they felt less chilled. They fought the urge to sleep, afraid a ship or submarine would pass and they’d miss it. Phil was so cold he shook.
It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the rafts.
Louie’s arm was still draped over the side of his raft, his hand resting on Phil’s forehead. Phil drifted to sleep, feeling the sharks scraping down his back. In the next raft, Louie, too, fell asleep.
Mac lay awake, his mind spinning with fear. Grasping at a panicked resolution, he began to stir.
