smile below his little moustache. In the lightning flashes the whites
of his eyes showed clearly. Sergeant Hale’s big mouth was closed like a
steel trap. Only Fred Marmon, the red-headed engineer, seemed to be
enjoying himself. Meeting Barry’s eyes he winked, and waggled his
fingers in a mocking gesture.
At that moment lightning struck the ship. Every light went off. The
fuselage might have been the belly of a blasted submarine, pitch dark
and battered by ceaseless depth charges. A beam of light touched the
instrument panel. Barry Blake felt the cool barrel of a flashlight
pressed into his hand.
“That will help you keep a check on your instruments!” Fred Marmon’s
shout sounded in his ear.
Barry was grateful for his first chance to do something, however small,
to help Tex. He watched the altimeter register a drop of five hundred
feet, a steady climb of eight thousand, then another drop. In this
fashion an hour passed.
All at once they were out of the storm. Clear moonlight shone through
the plastic windows of the cockpit. The crew raised a hoarse cheer.
“Take over, Barry,” drawled Tex O’Grady’s voice. “I want to find out if
I am still in one piece. When _Rosy_ starts bucking like that she’s
tougher than any bronc I ever forked on my daddy’s ranch in Texas!”
Unfastening his safety belt, Captain O’Grady heaved his lanky frame out
of the seat and went back to talk with the navigator. Barry swept his
glance over the instrument board. He tried the controls, to feel out
any possible storm damage. Satisfied that there was none, he looked
below.
A sea of rolling, silvery clouds lay in every direction. It was
beautiful, but menacing. The ceiling below that overcast, Barry judged,
would be zero. It might hide either land or sea, hills or marshes, for
all that anyone knew. The storm had carried the _Rosy O’Grady_ a number
of miles off her course.
The four big engines’ steady drone of power sounded reassuring, until
Barry remembered the last reading of the gas gauge before the lightning
had knocked it out. There wasn’t enough left for fooling around, while
the _Rosy_ found out where she was.
After a few minutes, Captain Tex O’Grady loafed back to the cockpit.
“The radio’s out,” he told Barry. “That means we can’t get cross
bearings to find our position. Curly Levitt is getting a fix now on
some stars. Trouble is, he’s afraid his octant may have been knocked
out of kilter when it fell off the navigation table, back there in the
storm. Why don’t you go back and cheer him up?”
Barry thanked the lanky pilot and unfastened his safety belt. He
suspected that O’Grady was just giving him an opportunity to stretch
his legs. If a fellow needed cheering up, nobody could do a better job
of it than “Old Man” O’Grady himself.
Lieutenant Curly Levitt was up in the top turret sighting through his
instrument when Barry stepped back.
“Three stars is enough for a fix,” he shouted above the engines’
thunder. “Just wait till I shoot Venus.”
“Better not—it might really be Sirius!” punned Barry. “Anything I can
do to help?”
“Thanks,” replied the navigator, as he prepared to step down, “Just
open your mouth again and I’ll put my foot in it.”
Barry dodged, just in time to tumble over Fred Marmon who
“accidentally” happened to be crouched just behind him. As he picked
himself up, even sad-eyed Tony Romani laughed. The crew’s tense nerves
were relaxing. Whistling a few bars from _Pagliacci_, the mustachioed
navigator went back to his desk.
Curly Levitt was still a bit worried, however. On the accuracy of his
reckoning depended the life of every man on board. If he failed, the
chances were excellent that _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ would plunge to a
watery grave the moment her gas supply gave out. At best she would
crash in the Venezuelan jungle—unless, of course, the clouds broke up
farther on and showed her crew a landing field.
“Check this reckoning with me, will you, Blake?” Levitt invited. “Then
if there should be an error we can blame it on the wallop my octant
took in the storm.”
“Okay!” Barry agreed. “If your octant is off, we’ll probably find it
out too late to help ourselves. So don’t worry.”
Reckoning the fix is really a simple matter. At a given time only one
point on the earth’s surface can be directly under any star. Using his
octant, the navigator “shoots” or measures the elevation of two or more
stars, and then figures out just where each “substellar” point is on
the earth’s surface.
His next step is still easier. With his substellar points located on
the map, he draws circles around them. One of the places where these
circles intersect is the place where his plane was at the time the
stars were “shot.” There is no real difficulty in guessing which
intersection is the right one: the others are apt to be thousands of
miles from his last known position.
Everything, of course, depends upon the accuracy of the star-shooting
octant. This expensive and delicate instrument will not always stand
abuse such as Curly Levitt’s had taken. There was reason for the young
ex-lawyer to be worried. He slipped on his headset and switched on the
interphone. The click in his ears told him that it still worked.
“Pilot from navigator,” he said. “If I’m right we’re fifty miles due
north of Cayo Grande. Our present compass course would take us just
past the southern tip of Trinidad. That checks pretty well with my dead
reckoning. I haven’t had an accurate drift reading since we banged into
that front.”
“Navigator from pilot,” came the drawling reply. “_Rosy_ says she’ll
take your word for it. She likes your style, hombre, even if you _are_
a lily-fingered product of the effete East. A man who can keep _any_
sort of dead reckoning in a storm like the one we just rode through
will do to cross the river with.”
For the next hour Barry flew the big bomber, while her “Old Man” dozed
in his seat. Below them the clouds continued unbroken. The moonlight on
their gleaming crests and ridges gave the young co-pilot a queer
sensation. It was hard not to believe that he was guiding a fantastic
ship over the surface of a strange planet, thousands of light-years
from Earth. In the lightless cockpit nothing seemed real.
“You fool—snap out of it!” Barry found himself muttering. “You’re
heading into dreamland with your throttles wide. And that blur on the
window isn’t imagination—_it’s oil_!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER SIX
SUBMARINES TO THE RIGHT
“A cracked cylinder!” was Fred Marmon’s verdict, the minute he saw the
oil spray on the window. “How near are we to landing, navigator?”
“Less than an hour,” Lieutenant Levitt answered, “provided there’s
enough ceiling under those clouds.”
“I think there will be,” Captain O’Grady told them. “See! There’s a
break in the overcast, dead ahead. We’ll go downstairs for a look.”
Taking over the controls, he nosed the _Rosy_ downward through the
black hole in the clouds. A moment later Barry could see moonlight
glinting on the wave crests.
At a thousand feet the Fortress leveled out. Above her the cloud scuff
was breaking up rapidly.
“Got that radio damage located yet, Babbitt?” O’Grady asked through the
interphone. “We really ought to let Trinidad know that we’re on our way
in, so they won’t be throwing up a lot of flak at us.”
“I’ll have the trouble fixed in about five minutes, sir,” Soapy
replied. “Good thing we have plenty of spare parts. What that freak
lightning bolt did to us was a caution!”
Just ahead a dark land mass rose out of the sea.
“That’s the upper jaw of the ‘Dragon’s Mouth,’” O’Grady remarked.
“Trinidad is just beyond. I’m going upstairs again, until Soapy gets
our radio working.”
The big bomber nosed sharply upward. For a few moments she clawed her
way in almost pitch darkness through a cloud. Then the moonlight shone
clear through the windows.
Suddenly a shaft of brilliant light burst through a rent in the scuff
below them. Other searchlights stabbed upward. A sharp detonation
jarred the Fortress.
“Antiaircraft shell!” grunted _Rosy’s_ Old Man. “Evidently they don’t
like unidentified planes cruising over the airfield. We’d better spin
off.”
WHAMM! BLAMM!
Two shells, still closer than the first, made the big plane rock. Tex
O’Grady pulled the stick back between his knees and gave the engine
full throttle.
“Guess those hombres mean business, Blake,” he chuckled. “How do you
like being under fire for the first time?”
“I don’t know,” replied Barry with a forced grin. “Somehow it doesn’t
seem quite real, being shot at by your own ground forces. The trouble
is that those shells would hurt just as much as Jap flak.”
[Illustration: _“Radio’s Okay, Sir!” Came Soapy Babbitt’s Voice_]
“Radio’s okay, sir!” came Soapy Babbitt’s voice. “What’ll I send?”
“Identification signals first,” the Old Man replied. “Explain what
happened to our radio and lights. Then tell ’em to switch on the
floodlights, so we can land before the oil from that cracked engine
cylinder drowns us.”
Soapy was still talking into his radio when the searchlights behind
them switched off. O’Grady nosed down. In a moment floodlights lighted
up the field a few miles distant. The _Rosy_ landed lightly for all her
massiveness, and braked to a smooth stop.
“_Yahoo!_ Me for some hot coffee!” whooped her Old Man, reaching for
the entrance hatch. “Last man to the office buys for the whole bunch!”
Six days were spent in Trinidad, replacing the cracked cylinder and
repairing the lightning’s damage to the electrical system. On the
seventh day _Rosy_ hopped off on her long trip across the Atlantic to
Freetown, Africa.
This time she carried a few bombs. It was Sergeant Hale’s hope that
they might sight a Nazi U-boat on the crossing. The chance, of course,
was one in a million. However, watching for a target would help to
dispel the monotony of the trip.
The weather was perfect—not a single bump in the air. With “George,”
the automatic gyro, taking care of their flying, the pilots had little
to do. By turns, they napped, lunched, listened to the radio, played
games with the others of the crew. Even Fred Marmon had a soft snap,
for _Rosy’s_ hungry “quadruplets” were sucking their gas without a
whimper.
Only Sergeant Hale, the bombardier, refused to join his crewmates in
killing time. Stretched at full length in the plane’s transparent nose,
he stared fixedly at the sea.
“Danny is a born hunter,” the Old Man observed. “Reckon he learned his
patience from the Texas Apaches. They’ll lie ten hours in one spot
without moving, waiting for a deer to pass a runway.”
They were just six hours out from Trinidad when Hale gave a bellow of
discovery. Gazing down and ahead, Barry saw a convoy of twenty merchant
ships, escorted by two destroyers and three corvettes. The intensified
Nazi submarine attacks had made heavy protection necessary, he reasoned.
“We’ll go down and say hello to them,” said the captain, fastening his
safety belt. “Maybe it will cheer them up to see _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_
dropping them a curtsy, even if she can’t stick around.”
With engines throttled down, the bomber dropped toward the crawling
convoy. Fascinated, Barry Blake watched the toy-like ships grow larger.
Now he could make out the British flags and the tiny figures of the
antiaircraft gun crews in their tin nests on the superstructures.
“I hope no cockeyed gunner takes us for an enemy and cuts loose,” he
thought. “That wouldn’t be any fun at all—”
“_Submarines to the right!_” yelled Sergeant Danny Hale. “I can see
their shadows just under the surface, Captain. And look—they’ve just
fired two torpedoes! Let’s smash ’em!”
“You bet your sweet neck we will!” answered the Old Man. “Take over the
throttles, Blake. Watch your r.p.m. We’ll give Hale a target he can’t
miss.... Sergeant Babbitt, signal the convoy that we’re not bombing
_them_!”
The Fortress leveled out at 500 feet. Glancing down, Barry saw the deck
of a freighter immediately beneath him. He could almost catch the
expressions on the upturned faces of her crew. His eyes came back to
his instruments and clung to them.
“Bombs away!” yelled Hale’s voice in the interphone. “Give me a run at
the other one, Captain.”
WHOOM! BR-ROOM!
As the Fortress zoomed sharply, the two bomb explosions buffeted her.
She staggered, gained altitude, banked, and turned.
WHAMM! A torpedo had struck. Flame blossomed from the sides of the
freighter. Another ship was dodging the second “tin fish.”
Searching the water for the submarines’ shadows, Barry spotted one, but
it looked misshapen, seen through the spreading ring of the bomb burst.
Then he found the other. It was less distinct, evidently diving at top
speed. That was the next target.
Between it and the convoy, a destroyer was circling like an excited
hound. She was waiting, Barry realized, for _Rosy’s_ next run. The
corvettes were threading their way through the mass of slower
freighters, to be in at the kill.
“Steady, Blake—here we go again!” warned Captain O’Grady. “If that Hun
is too deep for our bombs to hurt him, the explosion will spot his dive
for the destroyer. Her depth charges will get him for sure.”
WHR-R-ROOM! BOOM!
The _Rosy’s_ second run was still lower. The explosions made her
aluminum skin crackle like an empty oil can. Suddenly Barry glimpsed
the mast of a freighter spearing up at the bomber’s nose. He gave her
full throttle. The mast flashed beneath—seemingly with mere inches of
clearance.
“Upstairs” again, the fortress’s crew had a grandstand view of the
submarine’s finish. The destroyer raced toward the mark left by
_Rosy’s_ last bombs. She dumped a depth charge off her stem. Her Y-guns
pitched two more “ash cans,” bracketing the spot. A fourth and last
depth charge completed the square.
Behind her, the corvettes darted to the oil slick that now spread over
Sergeant Hale’s first target, and dropped two more charges for good
measure.
“Pilot from radioman,” Soapy Babbitt’s voice crackled on the
interphone. “The destroyer’s commander sends us his congratulations and
thanks. He thinks we bagged the second sub, too. Wishes we could stay
with him for the rest of the voyage.”
“I reckon he’s telling the truth,” chuckled _Rosy’s_ Old Man. “Those
undersea wolves have been hanging right at the heels of every convoy
lately. They hunt in packs. We’ll just swing around the outskirts of
this floating freight train and see if Danny Hale can spot any more
suspicious shadows.”
The Fortress banked slightly in a slow turn, describing a twenty-mile
circle around the convoy. As she swung back again, Barry could see the
result of one torpedo hit.
The freighter had been struck on the starboard side near the bow. She
was slightly down by the head. Smoke was still rising from her
forecastle, but she still kept her place in line. Her life-boats were
in place, with nobody near them. Evidently her crew had no other
thought than to take her to port.
“There’s the second oil slick, Captain!” Hale called. “We got both
those U-boats. Yip-yip-yippee!”
As the bombardier’s coyote howl shrilled in his earphones, Barry Blake
laughed outright. Like every man on board he felt pretty cocky. Already
their ship had been under fire. Now she had drawn first blood, sinking
at least one enemy submarine without help. The world was their oyster,
waiting to be cracked wide open when they reached the battlefront.
With a final waggle of their broad wings, _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ turned
her back on the convoy and headed eastward on her course. A chorus of
grateful whistles followed her. Owing to the thunder of her own
engines, her crew could not hear the freighter’s salutes, but Tony
Romani in the tail turret reported seeing the puffs of white steam.
The sinking of the subs provided conversation to last Barry and his
companions for most of the trip. They were still comparing notes when
the sun set. That put an end to Sergeant Hale’s sea-gazing.
Supper was supplied from thermos jugs and a box of sandwiches.
Afterwards, Curly Levitt took a fix from the stars, and made a slight
correction in their compass course. The engines were behaving so
beautifully that their red-headed nurse, Fred, began to be bored. He
roamed from tail turret to cockpit playing small practical jokes on
everyone, until the Old Man told him to spin off.
By midnight everyone but Captain O’Grady was dozing. His co-pilot was
sound asleep in his seat. He was waked by the first red beams of the
sun rising over Africa. That was another thrill for Barry
Blake—watching the shoreline of a foreign continent loom up out of the
horizon. He slapped on his earphones in time to hear Curly Levitt
giving the Old Man another change of course—this time to the north.
A few minutes later the deep harbor of Freetown took shape beneath
them. Soapy Babbitt, contacting the RAF field, received permission to
come in and land. The first of their long, transoceanic hops was safely
ended.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER SEVEN
RAID ON RABAUL
The stop at Freetown was brief—chiefly for gas and a bit of rest for
_Rosy’s_ crew. Shortly after noon the big bomber took off again, headed
for Accra, six hundred miles to the eastward. There the Pan American
Lines had everything to do a complete servicing job. Captain O’Grady
landed his ship just before the sudden equatorial night shut down.
A two-day rest put _Rosy_ in first-class shape. Her engines were
thoroughly broken in. Her mighty framework had been tested in action.
Now it remained for her guns and gun turrets to be tried out under
combat conditions.
And her crew! As Captain Tex O’Grady glanced at their keen, confident
young faces, he knew he could depend on them. They’d meet danger with a
grin of defiance and their cool efficiency would whittle down any odds
they might meet.
Six thousand miles still remained between them and the Indian
battlefront to which they had been ordered. The route would lie across
Nigeria to Lake Tchad, then northwest to the Egyptian Sudan and down
the Nile to Cairo. From there they would fly eastward in easy hops over
Iran and India, till they reached their assigned base.
That was the plan; but in wartime the plans of mice and men are
especially subject to change. A few hours before his take-off from
Accra, radioed orders reached Captain O’Grady to head for Australia and
the South Pacific. Heavy bombers were more urgently needed there, it
appeared. And that meant _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_!
The new orders involved a greatly changed route. From now on Captain
O’Grady and his crew would be flying below the equator. Heading
southeast, they would have to cross the great Belgian Congo into East
Africa before stopping to refuel. As soon as Fred Marmon learned that,
he gave his “quadruplets” an extra careful inspection. A forced landing
in those all but trackless jungles was something he hated to
contemplate.
From Accra the Flying Fortress took off with all gas tanks full. Nine
hundred miles across the Gulf of Guinea she roared to Libreville, where
the Fighting French made up her depleted fuel. In the air again, she
swept in a few hours over the vast territory that took H. M. Stanley
years to explore. Twice she crossed the mighty Congo River. Then the
five-hundred-mile expanse of Lake Tanganyika lay below.
“Watch out for elephants and giraffes, boys,” came the Old Man’s
humorous drawl. “This is the country all the animal crackers come from.
I’ll take _Rosy_ down low enough so that you can see them.”
There was a general laugh, but as Captain O’Grady nosed his ship down
to a thousand feet the crew really started to look. Perhaps the Old Man
wasn’t kidding after all.
The dense masses of green forest broke up into small patches. Lush
grazing lands appeared, with here and there a clump of trees. Farther
on stretched a dry plain, spotted with the green of an occasional water
hole. As they neared one of these, Barry Blake gave a shout.
“There are your elephants, Captain!” he exclaimed. “We interrupted
their drink. I see a bunch of ostriches on the run, too—”
“Ostriches—ha, ha!” Tex O’Grady chuckled. “We’re not that near to
Australia, Bub. Those long-necked critters you see are _giraffes_. Want
me to prove it to you?”
He shoved the stick forward. As the giant plane dipped down to within
two hundred feet of them, the frightened giraffes scattered like sheep.
Barry could see their long, pathetic necks swaying like masts as they
turned this way or that. Seconds later the herd was far behind.
“When we reach Australia, Lieutenant,” Curly Levitt’s voice murmured in
the headphones, “I’ll buy you a beautiful, big picture book, and you
can learn that G stands for Giraffe, and E for Elephant and M for the
little Monkey who didn’t know which was which.”
A howl of merriment from the others who were listening in made Barry’s
ears tingle.
“Okay, okay, I asked for it!” he admitted ruefully; and for the next
hour he felt like a high school kid who has pulled the prize “boner” of
the week in class.
The sensation wasn’t comfortable. Yet it went farther than anything
that had happened yet to make him feel at one with the other members of
the crew. These men, he realized, weren’t simply a detachment of
non-coms and officers. They were a team, a family, an organism knit
together by closer bonds than their assigned duties. Every last one of
them was a brother to the rest, regardless of race or rank.
It was dark when the Flying Fortress reached Dar-es-Salam on the east
coast. The next day, after servicing, the _Rosy O’Grady_ hopped off
across the Mozambique Channel. That same afternoon she landed at
Tananarivo, Madagascar’s mountain capital, where the Fighting French
had recently improved the landing field to take care of heavy planes.
“This is the last land we’ll see for three thousand-odd miles,” O’Grady
informed his crew. “Next stop will be Broome, Australia. Marmon and
Jackson, you will make an especially close check on the engines. Take
your time about it. Better to spend an extra day here than a month on
rubber rafts somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”
By noon of the third day, Fred and Cracker had checked and re-checked
everything. Some of the care they took was really unnecessary. When
they had finished, however, the bomber’s power plant was as perfect as
human skill could make it. The fuel tanks were full. Food and water for
a thirty-hour trip were aboard, but no bombs. To allow a safe margin in
case of bad weather, the ship must fly as light as possible and save
her gas.
They took off just at dawn. Soon they were out of sight of land, and
from then on the trip became a long fight against boredom. Half of the
way they flew on two engines, to economize on gas. The big bomber
loafed along at five thousand feet, except on two occasions when she
sighted squalls and had to dodge them. Before the trip was ended most
of the _Rosy’s_ crew would have welcomed a storm to break the monotony.
They landed at Broome, on Australia’s southwest tip, with plenty of gas
to spare. The next day they headed northeastward, across the continent.
Stopping at an American base in northern Queensland, they gassed up and
hopped off on the last leg of their long flight to the battle zone.
Their base, when they found it, was still being carved out of the New
Guinea jungle with the help of native labor. On the dirt runway Old Man
O’Grady set his ship down like a cat on velvet. The moment she stopped
he let out an old-time “rebel” yell.
When Barry and Fred Marmon climbed out last, after making their final
checks, the _Rosy’s_ red-haired engineer looked scornfully around him.
In mock disgust, he stared at a group of men filling in a big, raw hole
with shovels.
“Look, Lieutenant!” he snorted. “This is what we came three quarters of
the way around the globe to find—a potato patch in the back woods!”
“Yes?” retorted Barry with a grim smile. “Those boys aren’t planting
spuds, Fred; they’re filling in a new shell hole. The Japs must have
dropped a few of Tojo’s calling cards just a little before we landed.”
The Japs called again that night. This time the “cards” that they
dropped were shells from a cruiser that had sneaked close to the shore,
in the dark hours. Five miles away, she let loose with her heaviest
guns. Her aim was surprisingly accurate. To the _Rosy O’Grady’s_ crew,
the stuff seemed to be exploding all around their tent.