Collection 1986 - Night Over The Solomons (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF Page A

bombers shuttled back and forth, releasing their eggs over the enemy field.
    Mike staggered back, feeling his numbed leg. It wasn’t bleeding. Evidently a stick knocked against his leg by a bullet, or a stone. He turned, dazed.
    Jerry Brandon came running toward him. “Mike! Are you all right?”
    “Sure,” he said. “Where…?”
    “I came up the trail. I thought maybe I could make it, and when the fighting started up there, I got through all right.”
    The Army officer walked back through the smoke and stopped beside Mike. “This is a good night’s work, friend,” he said. “Who are you?”
    Briefly, Mike told him. The officer looked curiously at Jerry. Mike explained, and the officer nodded. “Yes,” he said dryly, “we heard about you. Incidentally, your father’s safe. He got into Henderson Field last night.”
    They turned away. Mike looked at Jerry, smiling wearily. “Lady,” he said, “tired as I am, I can still wonder at finding a girl like you in the Solomons. If there wasn’t a war on…” He looked at her again. “After all,” he said thoughtfully, “what’s a war between friends?”
    Jerry laughed. “I think you could handle the war, too,” she said.
    AUTHOR’S NOTE
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    MISSION TO SIBERUT
    Even in those knockabout years I was trying to write, but the few stories I found time to do were returned unsold, some of them following me about for months. Some were lost, and along with them much poetry that I mailed off that never found a publisher or a return address for me.
    Yet wherever I went I tried to learn, to store memories of what lay ahead. The western shores of Sumatra were experienced but briefly, long enough to soak up some atmosphere, to observe and to study the sailing directions, and to ask questions of those who had been there before.
    The duration of one’s visit is less important than the intensity of one’s observation and study. Siberut is one of the Mentawi island group, an island about sixty miles long by twenty broad, a high, forested place. Emma Haven, the port of Padang, was the nearest of any size at all. The natives on Siberut were wary, but seemed willing to be friendly.
    Siberut was not on the tourist routes. To get there you had to have reason. The tourist boats go to the obvious places, where there are comfortable accommodations, where John and Mary can see the same things seen by Henry and Ethel. Off the beaten track the things you most wish to know are not repeated to you because the local people take them for granted.

MISSION TO SIBERUT
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    S TEVE COWAN CUT the throttle and went into a steep glide. He glanced at his instruments and swore softly. If he made it this time, he would need a rabbit’s foot in each pocket. Landing an amphibian on a patch of water he had seen but once several years before, and in complete darkness! But war was like that.
    The dark hump beneath him would be Tanjung Sigep, if his calculations were correct. Close southward was Labuan Bajau Bay. The inner bay, visible only from the air, was the place he was heading for. It was almost a mile long, about a thousand yards wide, and deep enough. But picking it out of the black, jungle-clad island of Siberut on a moonless night was largely a matter of instruments, guesswork, and a fool’s luck.
    Cowan saw the gleam of water. Guessing at four or five feet, he leveled off and drew back gently on the stick. The hull took the water smoothly, and the ship lost flying speed rapidly.
    At one place, there was about an acre of water concealed behind a tongue of land overgrown with casuarina trees. Taxiing the amphibian around the tongue of land, Cowan anchored it safely in the open water behind the casuarinas. When he finished, the first streaks of dawn were in the sky.
    Mist was rising from the jungle, and on the reef outside Labuan Bajau Bay he could hear the roar and pound of surf. There would be heavy mist along the reef, too, lifting above that pounding sea. Cowan opened a thermos bottle and