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

Pacific. Yeah, they were good guys,
guys just like me
, and they were dead now. Or floating around in the ocean waiting to die. Or marooned on an island somewhere. The folks at home saw the pictures in
Life
and thought tropical paradise, but these islands were hellholes of jungle, bugs, and snakes, with green shit growing right down to the water’s edge. Everything was alive, and everything would eat you.
    And the South Pacific was crawling with Japs. The sons of Nippon didn’t take prisoners, the guys said, just tortured you for information, then whacked off your head with one of those old swords. Gave me the shivers just thinking about it.
    If they captured me … well,
Jesus!
    No wonder I was puking like a soldier on a two-week drunk.
    I just prayed that Modahl would get us home. One more time.
    POTTINGER:
    This evening the wind was only a few knots out of the west-southwest. Our ground speed was, I estimated, 102 knots. We were precisely here onthe chart, at this spot I marked with a tiny x. If I had doped the wind right. Beside the x I noted the time.
    Later, as we approach Bougainville, Modahl would climb above the clouds and let me shoot the stars for an accurate fix. Of course, once we found the island, I would use it to plot running fixes.
    I liked the precision of navigation. The answers were real, clear, and unequivocal, and could be determined with finest mathematical exactness. On the other hand, flying was more like playing a musical instrument. I could determine Modahl’s mood by the way he handled the plane. Most of the time he treated it with the utmost respect, working the plane in the wind and sea like a maestro directing a symphony. When he was preoccupied, like tonight, Modahl just pounded the keys, horsed it around, never got in sync with it.
    He was thinking about Joe Snyder’s crew, I figured, wondering, pondering life and death.
    Death was out there tonight, on that wide sea or in those enemy harbors.
    It was always there, always a possibility when we set out on one of those long flights into the unknown.
    The torture was not combat, a few intense minutes of bullets and bombs; torture was the waiting. The hours of waiting. The days. The nights. Waiting, wondering …
    Sometimes the bullets and bombs came as almost a relief after all that waiting.
    The
Sea Witch
was Modahl’s weapon. The rest of us were tiny cogs in his machine, living parts. We would live or die as the fates willed it, and whichever way it came out didn’t matter as long as Modahl struck the blow.
    But the men had faith he’ll take them home. Afterward.
    I
wanted
to believe that. The others also. But I knew it wasn’t true. Death was out there—I could feel it.
    Modahl was only a man.
    A man who wondered about Joe Snyder and probably had little faith in himself.
    Was Modahl crazy, or was it us, who believed?
    Nothing in this life was as black as a night at sea. You can tell people that, and they would nod, but no one could know how mercilessly dark a night could be until he saw the night sea for himself.
    After the twilight was completely gone that night there was only the occasional flicker of the moonpath through gaps in the clouds, and now and then a glimpse of the stars. And the red lights on the instrument panel. Nothing else. The universe was as dark as the grave.
    Modahl eased his butt in his seat, readjusted his feet on the instrument panel, tried to find a comfortable position, and reached for his cigarettes. The pack was empty; he crumpled it in disgust.
    “You married?” he asked me.
    “No.”
    “I am,” he said, and rooted around in his flight bag for another pack of Luckies. He got one out, fired it off, then rearranged himself, settling back in.
    He checked the compass, tapped the altimeter, glanced at his watch, and said nothing.
    “Can I walk around a little?” I asked.
    “Sure.”
    I got unstrapped and left him there, smoking, his feet on the panel.
    The beat of the engines made the ship a living