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

thing. Everything you touched vibrated; even the air seemed to pulsate. The waist and tunnel gunners were watching out the blisters, scratching, smoking, whatever. Pottinger was working on his chart, the radioman and bombardier were playing with the radar, Amme the mechanic was in his tower making entries in his logbooks.
    I took a leak, drank a half a cup of coffee while I watched the two guys working with the radar, and asked some questions. The presentation was merely a line on a cathode-ray tube—a ship, they said, would show up as a spike on the line. Maybe. Range was perhaps twenty miles, when the sea conditions were right.
    “Have you ever seen a ship on that thing?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah,” the radioman said, then realized I was an officer and added a “sir.”
    I finished the coffee, then climbed back into the copilot’s seat.
    When my headset was plugged in again, I asked Modahl, “Do you ever have trouble staying awake?”
    He shook his head no.
    A half hour later he got out of his seat, took off his headset, and shouted in my ear: “I’m going to get some coffee, walk around. If the autopilot craps out, I’ll feel it. Just hold course and heading.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    He left, and there I was, all alone in the cockpit of a PBY Catalina over the South Pacific at night, hunting Jap ships.
    Right.
    I put my feet up on the panel like Modahl had and sat watching the instruments, just in case the autopilot did decide that it had done enough work tonight. The clouds were breaking up as we went north, so every few seconds I stole a glance down the moonpath, just in case. It was about seventy degrees to the right of our nose. I knew the guys were watching it from the starboard blister, but I looked anyway.
    We had been airborne for a bit over four hours. We had lost time searching the coast of that island, so I figured we had another hour to fly before we reached Buka. Maybe Modahl was talking to Pottinger about that now.
    If my old man could only see me in this cockpit. When he lost the farm about eight years ago, five years after Mom died, he took my sister and me to town and turned us over to the sheriff. Said he couldn’t feed us.
    He kissed us both, then walked out the door. That was the last time I ever saw him.
    Life defeated him. Beat him down.
    Maybe someday, when the war was over, I’d try to find him. My sister and I weren’t really adopted, just farmed out as foster kids, so legally he was still my dad.
    My sister was killed last year in a car wreck, so he was the only one I had left. I didn’t even know if he or Mom had brothers or sisters.
    I was sitting there thinking about those days when I heard one sharp, hard word in my ears.
    “Contact.”
    That was the radioman on the intercom. “We have a contact, fifteen miles, ten degrees left.”
    In about ten seconds Modahl charged into the cockpit and threw himself into the left seat.
    “I’ve got it,” he said, and twisted the autopilot steering. We turned about fifty degrees left before he leveled the wings.
    “We’ll go west, look for them on the moonpath, figure out what we’ve got.”
    He reached behind him and twisted the volume knob on the intercom panel so everyone could clearly hear his voice. “Wake up, people. We have a contact. We’re maneuvering to put it on the moonpath for a visual.”
    “What do you think it is?”
    “May just be stray electrons—that radar isn’t anything to bet money on. If it’s a ship, though, it’s Japanese.”

THREE
    “We’ve lost the contact,” Varitek, the radioman, told Modahl. “It’s too far starboard for the radar.”
    “Okay. We’ll turn toward it after a bit, so let me know when you get it again.”
    He leaned over and shouted at me. “It’s no stray electron. Ghost images tend to stay on the screen regardless of how we turn.”
    He was fidgety. He got out the binoculars, looked down the moonpath.
    He was doing that when he said, “I’ve got it. Something, anyway.” He