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took out the women by submarine." Whip blinked rapidly. "But she wouldn't go.
    She refused to leave the wounded."
    He didn't say any more, and Lou Goodman didn't press it, because what the hell was there to say? They both knew what must have happened.
    Lou Goodman was surprised, then, when Whip found his voice again. And what he told the colonel also told Goodman, more than anything else, just how extraordinary a change had taken place in this man.
    "I try not to think about it too much. It could kill me, and some other people too. This hate thing. If I hate that much I don't think, I just see red and all I want to do is to kill.
    But that's a mistake because then I'm going up against the Japanese with hate as my overriding compulsion. I had a hell of a time fighting that down. I mean, you can't go into this war without thinking ahead every step of the way. Every step you can, anyway.
    Otherwise you make mistakes, the kind the Japs love you to make. They've got us outnumbered and the Zero is a killer, it's a hell of a lot more fighter than our people have to fly, and there's nothing more those guys would love to find than a bunch of B-25s without some real discipline to the way they handle those bombers. So I try, I try as hard as I can, not to hate, because it will eat me alive." He gestured to push away what might have been an obvious but wrong conclusion on the part of his audience. "Oh, I think about her, Lou, but I try to remember what she was like, that she'll be the same way, older and more experienced, when I see her again, but she'll still be my kid sister and…
    and, oh, shit, Lou, you know all the words."
    Lou Goodman gave him a few moments. "Sure, kid, I know." He forced life back into his own voice. "I hear you cut your teeth at Midway."
    He could almost feel the relief in Whip at the change in subject. Whip nodded slowly. "It was Midway, all right. We were flying the Marauders then. The same 22nd Group you got here at Garbutt." He laughed harshly, but without bitterness, because Whip, Lou Goodman was learning quickly, was never bitter about the business of killing with airplanes.
    "Midway. What a hell of an introduction to a war…"

5
    At that same moment of reminiscence between Whip Russel and Lou Goodman, shared over the precious cold beer dragged to its last regretful swallow, Midway was also the topic of discussion elsewhere on Garbutt Field. The men of the Death's Head Brigade had assembled within what was laughingly called the Officers' Club, a tarpaper-covered wooden shack embroidered with grass and reed walls. However, despite the warm beer and the stale cigarettes and the scratchy phonograph and the brutal heat and the insects that crawled, buzzed, burrowed and stung, it was infinitely to be preferred to the drab nothingness of the tents assigned to the newly arrived men as temporary quarters. The tents shared with the club the same heat, dust and insects, but lacked the beer and heat-warped records scratching away their memory-jogging tunes of distant dance halls and Saturday night dates.
    Captain Benjamin Czaikowicz, fondly christened "Psycho" by his fellow pilots, looked sadly about the dusty abortion of a club. Psycho was a Polish boulder of brawn and muscle and a gifted pilot, almost blind in his devotion in following Whip Russel in combat. Psycho flew the number two slot in the 335th Bomb Squadron, to the left and just behind the black airplane that led the pack.
    Psycho shook his head. "There's a breeze in here," he murmured. "I think." He gestured to the other men. "There must be a breeze. See those flies over there?
    They're doing slow rolls where the breeze comes around that corner. But maybe it's not a breeze at all, hey? Maybe it's the flies. Maybe they make the breeze."
    First Lieutenant Alex Bartimo leaned against the bar with elbows at perfect angles of ninety degrees, fingering the dust on his beer can. Of all the men suffering the dusty heat and the insects, only Alex jarred the eyes.