Without stopping to make sure of the last man, he turned to help Fred
Marmon. That was a mistake. A half-dead Jap is more dangerous than a
coiled cobra.
As Barry turned his back the dizzy son of Nippon clawed out a pistol
and fired. Fortunately for Barry the Jap’s aim was bad. The bullet
drilled through the calf of his right leg.
Tony Romani’s quick eyes caught the play. His pistol blazed twice. The
Jap stiffened out, his weapon sliding from his hand.
The nearest enemies were all accounted for, but a movement to the right
caught Barry’s eye.
“Down, boys!” he said sharply. “There’s another bunch coming out of the
communication trench. I’ll keep ’em busy while you reload your
tommy-guns.”
Throwing himself down behind a small rock, Barry opened fire in
two-second bursts. He must halt the Jap retreat, and still conserve his
ammunition until the others had replaced their empty cartridge drums.
His strategy worked almost too well. The Jap officer leading the
retreat took Barry for a lone gunner, and decided to wipe him out at
once. Firing in short spurts, he led his thirty-odd men straight at the
outcropping of rocks.
Bullets pounded the stone behind which Barry lay. They glanced off with
wicked little screams. Once rock-dust got in Barry’s eye, half-blinding
him.
“Make it snappy, fellows!” he warned through clenched teeth. “Our game
will be up in half a minute.”
“I beg to differ with you, Lieutenant,” Curly Levitt’s voice sounded at
his shoulder. “Just watch this!”
His tommy-gun spoke, just as the thirty Japs started their rush.
Barry’s weapon chimed in briefly, slamming its last bullet into the
officer’s midriff. The charging Japs flung themselves flat.
Barry rolled aside to make room behind his rock for Fred Marmon.
Sergeants Jackson and Romani had now finished reloading. They were
firing from the highest point of the rocks, raking the enemy
mercilessly. Quickly the Japs realized that to stay where they were
meant sure death. Behind them the Americans were mopping up the last
trenches.
Barry had just joined Danny Hale in the shelter of a half-sunken
boulder. The big sergeant was trying to puzzle out the workings of a
captured Jap rifle. Suddenly he glanced up.
“Here they come, Lieutenant!” Danny Hale whooped. “No time to reload
now.”
Dropping his tommy-gun, Barry whipped out his bayonet. At Danny’s heels
he vaulted the boulder. The Japs who dived through the hail of
sub-machine gun bullets must be met with cold steel.
The shooting fizzled out. Now all the fighting was hand-to-hand. Barry
bayoneted a monkey-like figure who had leaped upon Fred Marmon’s back.
Turning, he glimpsed Danny Hale wielding his Jap rifle like a
pitchfork. Just in time, he leaped aside to dodge an enemy bayonet
thrust and grapple with the man.
He blocked a vicious kick with his knee, but his wounded leg gave way.
The next instant he was rolling on the ground, with the Jap’s buck
teeth snapping at his throat, and the Jap’s knife slashing his ribs.
Desperately he twisted aside and jabbed with his bayonet. His enemy
screeched and went limp.
Another mob of helmeted figures came bounding through the tall grass.
Barry heaved the dead Jap aside, and came up on one knee. Sweat stung
his eyes, blurring them. He gripped his bayonet for a last thrust.
“Hold it, man!” yelped a Yankee voice. “Don’t you know your friends?”
The newcomers were infantrymen, arriving just too late for the finish.
They had popped out of the communication trench and were looking for
more Japs. With them was a medical-corps man—the same one who had
attended Barry in the field dressing station. Seeing Barry’s new
wounds, he whipped out a hypodermic needle, and drove it home before
the young flier knew what was happening.
“You bonehead!” Barry cried. “I’m only scratched. Now you’ve fixed me
so I can’t carry on. There’s a lot of mopping up to do. Those Jap field
guns—”
“We’ve plenty of men to take care of them, sir,” the corporal
interrupted. “If the Lieutenant will permit me to contradict him,
wounds two and three inches deep are hardly scratches. They need to be
stuffed with sulfa powder—not dirt. And besides that, sir, you’ve lost
a lot of blood.”
“Oh, have it your own way,” sighed Barry, as the swift-acting drug
began to take effect. “Got a drink of water handy? I’m thirsty as a
fried fish.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LIEUTENANT IN WHITE
Barry’s next impression was as startling as a vision of something
unearthly. A girl with big, blue eyes and a crisp white uniform, was
pushing something into his mouth. The thing was a thermometer.
“Who—where—whap happumed...?” Barry mumbled in bewilderment.
The blue-eyed vision touched her lips. A red-gold curl that had escaped
from her cap dangled as she shook her head. She took Barry’s wrist in a
light, expert grasp and compared his pulse-beats with her watch. The
seconds, it seemed to him, passed with agonizing slowness.
A glance about him showed a regular hospital ward. The beds were
occupied by young fellows dozing, reading, listening to the tuned-down
radio. This couldn’t be New Guinea! But where was it? And _how long_
was it since the Battle of Grassy Ridge, when that Jap had tried to
bite his throat, and....
“You’re in a base hospital in Queensland, Australia,” the nurse
murmured, just as if she had been reading his thoughts. “You have been
here for a week. As long as your fever continued you were kept under
the new sleeping drugs. I don’t think you’re very bright,
Lieutenant—getting into a second fight before your head wound had
started to heal. But your blood seems to fight germs as hard as you
fought the Japs. You’re disgustingly healthy.”
“And you’re distractingly beautiful, Lieutenant!” Barry retorted.
“Nevertheless, feasting my eyes on you doesn’t fill my empty stomach.
How about bringing me a T-bone steak—rare?”
The blue-eyed nurse made a face at him.
“All you deserve is a can of bully-beef,” she declared. “But I’ll see
what I can do.”
Barry’s steak turned out to be bacon and toast. At his groan of
disappointment, Nurse Stevens threatened to take it away. In fact,
Barry had to apologize and promise to make no more complaints before
she would let him eat anything.
Not many days passed, however, before Barry Blake was actually eating
steaks and calling Lieutenant Moira Stevens by her first name. He
started that on the first evening that she helped him to walk from the
ward to the canopied ramp that surrounded the hospital.
“Why won’t you tell me anything about Captain O’Grady?” he asked as she
took the deck chair beside him. “You admitted he was sent here from the
New Guinea airfield. If he’s dead, I’m well enough to stand the news
without bursting a blood vessel.”
Lieutenant Stevens turned her clear, steady gaze on Barry’s face.
“You think the world of Captain O’Grady, don’t you?” she murmured. “How
long did you know him before he was wounded?”
“Less than two weeks,” Barry Blake responded. “Somehow time doesn’t
count much with wartime friendships. It seems as if I’d known you for
months—Moira.”
A low laugh bubbled in the girl’s throat. It wasn’t a giggle—just a
good-humored, friendly chuckle. Lieutenant Moira Stevens rose several
points in Barry’s estimation because of it.
“I guess I can safely tell you the latest news about Captain O’Grady
now,” she said, changing the subject. “I heard the doctor say this
morning that he is out of danger. When you first came to your senses
the captain was just hanging between life and death. If I’d told you
the truth then, you might have worried yourself back into a fever.”
Barry did not speak. He gazed across the clearing at a row of tall
cocoanut palms. All at once the tropical night seemed very beautiful.
“So the Old Man is here—in this hospital,” he said at last. “When do
you think I might see him? I—I’d like to talk with him about _Sweet
Rosy O’Grady_ ... tell him she’s not beyond repair.”
“I’ll ask the medical officer in charge, Barry,” the girl promised, as
she rose to her feet. “Come, now! It’s time you were getting to bed.
Take my arm—that’s it—and we’ll go back to the ward.”
The following day Moira took Barry to see his Old Man for a
three-minute period. Captain O’Grady looked shockingly thin. His wide,
humorous mouth was drawn with lines of pain, but his blue eyes had the
same smile that Barry remembered.
“What brought you here, Barry?” he asked as he released his co-pilot’s
hand. “Another raid on Rabaul?”
“Nothing so pleasant,” Barry grinned. “The Japs raided our airport the
next night after you came to this hospital. The raid was a cover-up for
a landing of paratroops and field guns on a ridge above the field. I
got cut up a few days later helping to clean them out with tommy-guns
and grenades. All of _Rosy’s_ crew went along and had a great time.”
Captain O’Grady’s face sobered.
“I see,” he murmured. “The Jap guns had shot up the field so you
couldn’t get any planes off to bomb them. You boys were wrong, though.
You had no right to risk half a dozen highly trained Fortress men in a
land skirmish. Why did you do it?”
“That’s hardly a fair question, Captain!” Moira Stevens broke in.
“You’d have wanted to go yourself if you’d been there. Would you be
happy, sir, sitting in the shade of your plane while your friends were
fighting to save it for you?”
“Nurse Stevens,” the Old Man replied with a wry smile, “you’ve knocked
out all my guns. I’m completely at your mercy, and you know it.”
“In that case, sir,” Moira said, “Lieutenant Blake and I will leave you
to make the best landing you can.... Come along, Barry! Time is up.”
As she pulled the young co-pilot toward the door he turned for a last
word.
“I’ll be back to see you again as soon as the nurse will let me,
Captain,” he said. “And, by the way sir, _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ is only
grounded until she can get repairs. I—er—thought you’d like to know.”
In his later conversations with the Old Man, nothing was ever said
about the Captain’s missing arm. They talked as though one of these
days would see him again at the wheel of a flying fort. But both men
knew that it was all talk. Before long Tex O’Grady would be back at
home in the States with the only person in the world that he loved
better than his warplane—sweet Mrs. O’Grady herself.
Six weeks from the day he came to the Queensland hospital, Barry Blake
received his new orders. He was to report at the new airplane repair
base immediately upon being discharged.
Barry was exultant. He demanded that Moira bring the medical officer in
charge to examine him at once. For the past week, he told her, he had
been feeling more like a prisoner than a patient—without even a
prisoner’s excuse for sticking around. Furthermore, he declared, a
certain blonde, blue-eyed lieutenant had been neglecting him shamefully.
[Illustration: “_I’ll Be Back as Soon as the Nurse Will Let Me._”]
Moira Stevens wrinkled her pretty nose at him.
“As a nurse I have no interest in perfect physical specimens,” she
replied. “Sick men are my job. But if you haven’t forgotten me when
this war is over, it might be fun to get together and compare notes.”
She flashed him a smile that took the chill out of her words.
“Hmmm!” murmured Barry as she swept out of the ward with a rustle of
starched uniform. “They don’t make ’em any finer than Lieutenant Moira
Stevens. And I mean, _definitely_!”
The colonel in charge gave Barry an examination that overlooked nothing.
“You’re fit for service, Lieutenant,” he said. “If you were my age,
you’d be in bed for another six weeks. Be thankful that nineteen years
heals just twice as fast as forty-five! Er—by the way—at eleven
thirty you will report to Captain O’Grady on the west ramp outside the
hospital. That is all.”
Barry had intended to see the Old Man before leaving, but being
_ordered_ to do so puzzled him. He glanced at his watch and saw that it
was already ten-thirty. He would have just comfortable time to shave,
dress, and check over his few personal effects that had been sent from
the New Guinea airport.
As he stepped out onto the west ramp, the sight of several “brass hats”
halted him in his tracks. A mere second lieutenant had no place in such
company! Then he glimpsed Captain O’Grady in a wheelchair, chatting
with the highest-ranking officer.
Barry glanced at the time—eleven-thirty. Recalling that he was there
by order of the colonel gave him courage. He waited until O’Grady
recognized him, then stepped forward and saluted.
“General Morse,” the captain said with grave formality, “this is
Lieutenant Barry Blake, who brought our crippled Fortress home after
the raid on Rabaul. Although wounded, he landed the plane under almost
impossible conditions, risking his own life to save mine!”
As in a dream, Barry found himself taking the general’s outstretched
hand. He tried to make some appropriate answer, but no words would
come. All at once he found himself the center of everyone’s attention.
General Morse was pinning something on his breast. In the background
the colonel and the brass hats were standing at attention—to honor
_him_.
Barry caught his Old Man’s eye, and it steadied him. He saluted, met
the general’s handclasp, and stepped back. The tableau of high-ranking
officers broke up and passed on into the hospital.
“Sit down with me, son,” O’Grady invited him. “Moira Stevens will join
us in a few minutes for lunch. There’ll be just the three of us. You
don’t know how pleased I am, Barry, that I could be present to see you
decorated with the Purple Heart.”
Barry touched the bright medal wonderingly.
“I feel, somehow, as if it ought to belong to you, sir,” he answered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER TWELVE
NEW GUINEA GARDENS
Reporting for duty at the Queensland repair base, Barry ran into
surprises still more bewildering. The first was the news that he was
promoted to first lieutenant; the second, that he would be given
command immediately of a Flying Fortress. The ship and crew, he was
told, were now waiting for him on the runway.
Wondering if it were all some crazy delusion, Barry hurried to the
airport. For a moment it seemed that he must be back in Seattle,
looking at _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ for the first time. For there she sat,
with her inboard props turning slowly in the sun, and her name painted
clear on the fuselage.
There was even a tall, wide-shouldered figure in flying togs, leaning
against the plane’s tail. He looked like Captain O’Grady from a
distance. But he couldn’t be!
Barry wiped his hand across his eyes, and walked toward the ship. The
tall fellow looked up. He wasn’t the Old Man—he was _Hap Newton_!
Hap let out a whoop like a locomotive and charged down upon Barry
Blake. The two friends proceeded to do a war-dance, bombarding each
other with questions. The surprise was entirely mutual. Hap had been
based in another part of the South Pacific until recently. His B-26
Marauder had run out of gas near the northern tip of Queensland one
night, and its crew had bailed out. Only Hap and the bombardier-gunner
had made shore. Just this morning Hap had been assigned to the _Rosy
O’Grady_ as co-pilot.
“And now _you_ are my skipper!” he exclaimed. “It’s such a wild
coincidence that I can’t believe it yet.... But just wait, Barry—the
shocks aren’t over. Step inside and meet the rest of us.”
Barry turned to the open hatch, but he had no chance to enter. Men were
boiling out of it as if the ship were too hot for them. In five seconds
they were all around him. Fred Marmon, Cracker Jackson, Tony Romani,
Curly Levitt, and Soapy Babbitt, with his broken shoulder still a
little stiff, but useable.
“Where’s Danny Hale?” Barry asked, the moment they gave him a chance to
speak.
Silence, as stunning as a blow, answered him. Barry’s face went white.
“Tell me, boys,” he muttered through stiff lips. “You—you mean that
Danny—that he....”
“He got transferred, Barry,” Curly Levitt said quietly. “It was just
after the medical-corps men carried you back to the dressing station on
Grassy Ridge. A bunch of us were trying to capture a Jap field gun. We
ducked into a slit trench and started tossing hand grenades, but the
Japs chucked them right back at us before they could explode. One
landed in our trench. Danny covered it to protect the rest of us—and
just then it went off.”
“Thanks, Curly,” Barry said in a choked voice. “Sorry my question
brought it all back to you. It—it _is_ easier, somehow, to think of
Danny as simply transferred.... Have they sent us a bombardier yet?”
“They sent him—such as he is!” replied a strangely familiar voice.
Barry jumped as if he had been shot. Through the hatchway dropped a
small, bandy-legged man whose short blonde hair bristled like the fuzz
of a newly hatched duckling.
“Chick Enders!” Barry cried, making a grab for his old friend. “How did
you get _here_?”
“The same way Hap Newton did,” answered Chick, grinning from ear to
ear. “I was the bombardier who bailed out with him from the B-26.”
“Boys,” said Barry Blake, turning to face his crew, “I know that in a
few seconds I’m going to wake up and find myself back in my little
hospital bed. The sawbones will be looking solemn and saying: ‘That
chunk of shrapnel went deeper than we thought. It’s affected his
brain!’”
He cuffed back his hat and laughed.
“It’s too good to be true, finding you all here—and _Sweet Rosy
O’Grady_ too! I’m going to say hello to her before she vanishes in a
pink fog, or something!”
Understanding chuckles followed him as he dived into _Rosy’s_ open
hatchway.
“We’ll leave him alone with her for a few minutes,” Curly Levitt
suggested. “Mess call is about due. Lieutenant Enders can wait here to
show the Old Man to his quarters.”
It was past midnight before _Rosy’s_ crew talked themselves out and
fell asleep. In the morning, Barry reported for orders. He learned that
his new battlefront base was to be another jungle airport, farther west
along the New Guinea coast. They would fly the shortest route across
the island’s central mountain range, and carry a full load of bombs.
“Not much excitement on the way,” Fred Marmon commented; as the crew
headed toward their waiting ship. “There’s nothing in the interior but
mountains and jungles and wild men. Even the Japs steer clear of it,
they tell me!”
“You’ll have plenty of excitement once we reach the northern coast,
Fred,” Barry told him. “The Japs have been punching back hard at our
new airports. They realize that, given enough bases for a big air
offensive, we can push them right out of the East Indies. They can’t
keep backing up forever, and keep any ‘face’ with their people at home.”
_Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ took off as smoothly as she had on her maiden
flight. Except for the patched places in her aluminum skin, there was
little to show that she was not a new ship.
“As a matter of fact, she’s better than new, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon
declared. “She’s been battle-tested. Every part of her, except these
new engines, has stood up under the worst strains. She won’t fail us,
no matter what we ask of her.”
“They patched her up in New Guinea—enough to fly her back to this
Queensland repair base,” Curly Levitt explained. “Here they gave her a
complete overhauling. Most of her replaced parts came from other
wrecked ships—”
“Like Hap and me!” spoke up Chick Enders.
“Yes, you’re battle-tested, too,” Barry laughed. “By the way, did
either of you hear or see anything of our old messmate, Glenn Crayle?
After all the surprises of the past twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t be
surprised to see him waiting for us at the new airport. Would you, Hap?”
“Aw, don’t talk about it, Barry,” his big co-pilot replied. “I wouldn’t
be surprised, either, but I’d be pretty doggoned sore. The sight of
that mister would sour my stomach for the duration.”
“Mine, too—unless he’s toned down a lot,” agreed Chick. “This war does
queer things to people. It may have let the wind out of Crayle and
showed him that he wasn’t such a hot pilot as he thought. I hope so,
anyway.”
“I believe you’ve got hopes for Hirohito, too,” Hap Newton scoffed.
“Let’s forget Crayle until he does show up—and I hope that event will
be a long, long time away!”
The blue expanse of Torres Strait now showed beyond the green of Cape
York. For an hour the Fortress hung above it at six thousand feet.
Then, almost before her crew realized the change, the high grasslands
of New Guinea were sweeping beneath her belly. Far to the east lay the
Gulf of Papua, with a mass of cumulus clouds tumbling above it. Ahead
rose the island’s mountainous backbone.
“Let’s fly a little lower, Barry,” Chick Enders said. “You won’t have
to start climbing over the central range for half an hour. I’d like to
get a look at one of these native villages, and give the local
hillbillies a thrill at the same time.”
“All right, Chick,” Barry replied. “But we won’t do any hedgehopping
with a quarter of a million dollars worth of Fortress. If the air isn’t
bumpy I might take _Rosy_ down to five hundred feet—when and if you
spot a thatch-roofed metropolis.”
“Don’t try to thrill ’em by dropping an egg on the town pump,” said Hap
Newton. “General MacArthur has caused the word to be spread among the
tribesmen that United Nations airmen are their friends. We wouldn’t
want to give them the wrong impression.”
“I wonder how many New Guinea wild men could tell the Jap ‘rising sun’
from our insignia,” Chick remarked, “even if they were near enough
to—oh-oh! Look, Barry! Straight ahead on that little grassy plateau
... don’t those patches look like native gardens to you?”
By way of answer, Barry eased the wheel forward. In a long, flat dive
_Rosy O’Grady_ roared down toward the plateau. Moment by moment the
tiny squares and oblongs of different colors took the shape of
cultivated gardens. Near by appeared a few loaf-shaped native houses.
“There’s your village!” Barry exclaimed. “Looks like a busy place, too.
They’re clearing more grassland for garden space, if I’m not mistaken.”
Looking down through the plastiglass of the big bomber’s nose, her crew
could distinguish twenty or thirty human figures at one end of the
cultivated section. Suddenly the natives stopped gaping at the diving
plane. They ran for cover.
“We’re wowing ’em, all right,” whooped Hap Newton. “Just see those
grass skirts scatter! You ought to be ashamed of scaring the ladies
this way, Barry!”
“They’ll have something to talk about for a month at least,” laughed
the _Rosy’s_ skipper, as he pulled back on the wheel. “Are you
satisfied with this glimpse you’ve had of native culture, Chick?”
“Not by a long shot!” the homely bombardier replied. “I wish you’d turn
back for another look, Barry. There’s something blamed queer about that
village. Several things, to be truthful.”
There was a grim note in Chick’s voice that Barry recognized. His
bombardier was in deadly earnest.
“Okay,” he said shortly. “Slap on the coal, Hap. We’re going back for
another look-see. What was it that struck you as queer, Chick?”
“Since when do _men_ wear grass skirts, or New Guinea women wear their
hair clipped short?” Chick responded. “I had a better view here in the
nose than the rest of you did. I’ll swear to what I saw. And, while
we’re asking questions, will somebody tell me when the natives of this
country became _market gardeners_? There’s enough cultivated land
around those dozen thatched huts to supply food for ten villages....
Look down now and tell me what you think of it!”
For wordless moments every man in the cockpit gazed at the orderly
patchwork of little fields below. Suddenly Barry grasped the truth.
“Look at the pattern down there, Hap!” he exclaimed. “They’ve broken it
up pretty cleverly with camouflage, but the cleared place is L-shaped.
If that isn’t an airport I’m cockeyed.”
“Then those birds in grass skirts—” Curly Levitt’s voice gasped
through the interphone.
“—were _Japs_!” Chick Enders finished the sentence. “Go as low as you
dare, Barry, and see what else we can spot.”
“Man all the guns!” Barry’s order crackled in the headsets. “Cracker,
be ready to strafe any antiaircraft before they can pot us....”
He broke off as the white lines of tracer bullets streaked upward from
a patch of bushes at one side of the field. Other guns opened fire.