Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 Read Online Free PDF Page A

sun was still above the horizon when I got my first glimpse of the moon, round and golden, climbing the sky.
    The other members of the crew were disappointed that they didn’t see any trace of Snyder’s plane. I hadn’t thought they would, nor, apparently, did Modahl. He said little, merely smoked in silence as the clouds above us lost their evening glow.
    “Watch the moonpath,” Modahl told me after a while. “Anything we see up this way is Japanese, and fair game.” He adjusted the cockpit lighting for night flying and asked the radioman for more coffee.
    MODAHL:
    I couldn’t get Joe Snyder and his crew out of my mind. A fellow shouldn’t go forth to slay dragons preoccupied with other things, but I liked Joe, liked him a lot. And whatever happened to him could happen to me and mine.
    The Japs were staging ships and supplies through Buka and Rabaul as they tried to kick us off Guadalcanal. They were working up to taking Port Moresby, then invading Australia, when our invasion of Guadal threw a monkey wrench in their plans. Now they were trying to reinforce their forces on Guadalcanal. A steady stream of troop transports and cargo ships had been in and out ofthose harbors, not to mention destroyers and cruisers, enough to put the fear in everybody. Then there are Jap planes—they had a nice airfield on Rabaul and a little strip near Buka. The legs on the Zeros were so long you just never knew where or when you would encounter them, though they stayed on the ground at night.
    If they could have flown at night, the Cats couldn’t. The guns in the side blisters were poor defense against enemy fighters. When attacked, the best defense was to get as close to the sea as possible so the Zeros couldn’t make shooting passes without the danger of flying into the water. If a Japanese pilot ever slowed down and lined up behind a Cat a few feet over the water, he’d be meat on the table for the blister gunners—the Japs had yet to make that mistake and probably never would.
    I sat there listening to the engines, wondering what happened to Joe, if he were still alive, if he would ever be found.
    VARITEK:
    If you didn’t believe you had a good chance of living through the flight, you would never get aboard the plane. Somebody said that to me once, and it was absolutely true. It took guts to sit through the brief and man up and ride through a takeoff, knowing how big this ocean was, knowing that your life was dependent on the continued function of this cunning contraption of steel andduraluminum. Knowing your continued existence depended on the skill of your pilot.
    On Modahl.
    Modahl. If he made one bad decision, we were all dead.
    These other guys, I saw them fingering rosaries or moving their lips in prayer. I didn’t buy any of that sweet-hereafter Living on a Cloud Playing a Harp bullshit.
    This is it, baby. This life is all you get. When it’s over, it’s over. And you ain’t coming back as a cow or a dog or a flea on an elephant’s ass.
    I tried not to think about it, but the truth was, I was scared. Yeah, I believed in Modahl. He was a good officer and a good pilot. Sort of a holier-than-thou human being, not a regular kind of guy you’d like to drink beer with, but I didn’t care about that. None of these officers were going to be your buddy, and who would want them to? Modahl could fly that winged boat. He was good at that, and that was all that mattered. That and the fact that he could get us home.
    He could do that. Modahl could. He could get this plane and his ass and the asses of all of us home again, back to the tender.
    Yeah.
    HOFFMAN:
    These other guys were so calm that afternoon, but I wasn’t. Tell you the truth, I was scared. Waiting,waiting, waiting … it was enough to make a guy puke. I tried to eat and managed to get something down, but I upchucked it before we manned up.
    I knew the guys on the Snyder crew—went to boot camp with a couple of them and shipped out with them to the South