Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 (5 page)

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.”

“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 turned the plane, banking steeply to put the contact ahead of us.

As we were in the turn, he said, “It’s a submarine, I think.”

As he leveled the wings the radioman shouted, “Contact.”

Modahl looked with binoculars. “It’s a sub conning tower. About six miles. Running southeast, I think. We’re in his stern quarter.”

He banked the plane steeply right, then disengaged the autopilot and lifted the nose and added power. “We’ll climb,” he said. “Make a diving attack down the moonpath.”

“Going to drop a bomb?”

“One, I think. There may be nothing at Buka or Rabaul.”

He explained what he wanted to the crew over the intercom. “We’ll use the guns on the conning tower,” he said, “then drop the bomb as we go over. You guys in the blisters and tunnel, hit ‘em with all you got as we go by. They’ll go under before we can make another run, so let’s make this one count.”

Everyone put on life vests, just in case.

“Your job,” Modahl said to me, “is to watch the altimeter and keep me from flying into the water. I want an altitude callout every ten seconds or so. Not every hundred feet, but every ten seconds.”

“Yessir.”

He called Hoffman to the cockpit and talked to him. “One bomb, the call will be ‘ready, ready, now.’ I’ll pickle it off, but to make sure it goes, I want you to push your pickle when I do.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Modahl climbed to the west, with the moon at his back. He got to twenty-four hundred feet before he tickled the bottom of a cloud, so he stayed there and got us back to cruising speed before he started his turn to the left. He turned about 160 degrees, let me fly the
Witch
while he used the binoculars.

“We’ve got it again,” the radioman said. “Thirty degrees left, right at the limits of the gimbals.”

“Range?”

“Twelve miles.”

“Come left ten,” Modahl told me.

I concentrated fiercely on the instruments, holding altitude and turning to the heading he wanted. The Catalina was heavy on the controls, but not outrageously so. I’d call it lots of stability.

The seconds crept by. All the tiredness that I had felt just minutes before was gone. I was ready.

“I’ve got it,” he said flatly, staring through the binoculars. “Turn up the moonpath.”

I did so.

“Okay, everybody. Range about eight miles. Three minutes, then we dive to attack.”

I tried to look over the nose, which was difficult in a Catalina.

“Still heading southeast,” Modahl murmured. “You’ll have to turn slightly right to keep it in the moonpath.”

The turn also moved the nose so it wouldn’t obstruct Modahl’s vision.

Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I wondered about those guys on that sub. If we pulled this off, these were their last few minutes of life. I guess few of us ever know when the end is near. Which is good, I suppose, since we all have to die.

The final seconds ticked away, then Modahl laid down the binoculars and reached for the controls. He secured the autopilot, and told me, “I’m going to run the trim full nose down. As we come off target, your job is to start cranking the trim back or I’ll never be able to hold the nose up as our speed drops.”

“Okay.”

He retarded the throttles a little, then advanced the props to the stops so they wouldn’t act as dive brakes. Still, nose down as we were, we began to accelerate. Modahl ran the trim wheel forward. I called altitudes.

“Two thousand … nineteen hundred … eighteen …”

Glancing up, I saw the conning tower of the sub and the wake it made. I must have expected it to look larger, because the fact that it was so tiny surprised me.

“Twelve … eleven …”

The airspeed needle crept past 200 mph. We were diving for a spot just short of the sub so Modahl could raise the nose slightly and hammer them, then pull up to avoid crashing.

I could see the tower plainly now in the reflection of the moonlight, which made a long white ribbon of the wake.

“Six hundred … five … four-twenty-five …”

We were up to almost 250 mph, and Modahl was flattening his dive, from about twenty degrees nose down to fifteen or sixteen. He had the tower of that sub bore-sighted now.

“Three-fifty …”

“Three hundred …”

“Ready,” Modahl said for Varitek’s benefit. He shoved the throttles full forward.

“Two-fifty …”

Modahl jabbed the red button on the yoke with his right thumb. Even with the shielding the blast tubes provided, the muzzle flashes were so bright that I almost
visually lost the sub. The engines at full power were stupendously loud, but the jackhammer pounding just inches from my feet made the cockpit floor tremble like a leaf in a gale.

“One hundred.” I shouted the altitude over the bedlam. Some fool was screaming on the intercom, the engines were roaring at full power, the guns in the nose
were hammering in one long, continuous burst … I had assumed that Modahl would pull out at a hundred. He didn’t.

“Readeee …”

“Fifty feet,” I shouted over the din, trying to make myself heard. I reached for the yoke.

“Now!”
Modahl roared, pushing the bomb release with his left thumb, releasing the gun trigger, and pulling the yoke back into his stomach all at the same time.

I began cranking madly on the trim.

We must have taken the lenses off the periscopes with our keel. I distinctly felt us hit something … and the nose was rising through the horizontal, up, up, five degrees, ten, as the guns in the blisters and tunnel got off long rolling bursts. When they fell silent our airspeed was bleeding off rapidly, so Modahl pushed forward on the yoke.

“Hoffman, you asshole, did the bomb go?”

“No, sir. It didn’t release.”

“You shit. You silly, silly shit.”

“Mr. Modahl—”

“Get your miserable ass up here and talk to me, Hoffman.”

He cranked the plane around as tightly as he could, but too late. When we got level, inbound, with the moon in front of us, the sub was no longer there. She had dived.

“You fly it,” Modahl said disgustedly, and turned the plane over to me.

Hoffman climbed up to stand behind the pilots’ seats while Modahl inspected the hung bomb with an Aldis
lamp. I tried not to look at the bright light so as to maintain some night vision—the light got me anyway. When Modahl had inspected the offending bomb to his satisfaction and finally killed the light, I was half-blinded.

Hoffman said, “Maybe we got the sub with the guns.”

Modahl’s lip curled in a vicious sneer, and he turned in his seat, looked at Hoffman as if he were a piece of shit.

“Which side are you on, Hoffman? Your shipmates risked their lives to get that bomb on target, to no avail. If that bomb comes off the rack armed while we’re landing, the Japs win and our happy little band of heroes will go to hell together. I don’t care if you have to grease those racks with your own blood. When we make an attack they goddamn well better work.”

Hoffman still had pimples. When Modahl killed the Aldis lamp I could see them, red and angry, in the glow of the cockpit lights.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Modahl asked without bothering to turn around.

“No, sir,” Hoffman stammered.

“Screaming on the intercom during an attack. Jesus! I oughta court-martial your silly ass.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It just slipped out. Everything was so loud and—”

Modahl made a gesture, as if he were shooing a fly. But that wasn’t the end of it. “Chief Amme,” Modahl said on the intercom. “When we get back, I expect you and Hoffman to run the racks through at least a dozen cycles on each bomb station. I want a written report
signed by you and Hoffman that the racks work perfectly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pottinger, bring your chart to the cockpit. Let’s figure out where we are and where the hell we go from here.”

I was still hand-flying the plane, so Modahl said to me, “Head northwest and climb to four thousand, just in case we are closer to Bougainville than I think we are. We’ll circle around the northern tip of the island and approach the harbor up the moonpath.”

Modahl took off his headset and leaned toward me. “Hoffman’s getting his rocks off down there.”

“Maybe he’s crazy, too,” I suggested.

“We all are,” Modahl said flatly, and nodded once, sharply. His lips turned down in a frown.

I dropped the subject.

“When you get tired, we’ll let Otto fly the
Witch.”
Otto was the autopilot. After a few minutes I nodded, and he engaged it.

It was two o’clock in the morning when we approached Buka harbor from the sea. Jungle-covered hills surrounded the harbor on two sides. A low spit formed the third side. On the end of the spit stood a small lighthouse. In the moonlight we could see that the harbor was empty. Not a single ship.

Pottinger was standing behind us. “How long up to Rabaul?” Modahl asked.

“An hour and forty-five minutes or so. Depends on how cute you want to be on the approach.”

“You know me. I try to be cute enough to stay alive.”

“Yeah.”

“Before we go, let’s wake up the Japs in Buka. Why should they get a good night’s sleep if we can’t?”

“Think the Japs are still here?”

“You can bet your soul on it.”

Modahl pointed out where the town lay, on the inland side of the harbor. It was completely blacked out, of course.

We made a large, lazy circle while the guys in back readied the parafrags. We would drop them out the tunnel while we flew over the town … they fell for a bit, then the parachutes opened, and they drifted unpredictably.
This was a nonprecision attack if there ever was one. It was better than throwing bricks, though not by much.

We flew toward the town at three thousand feet. We were still a mile or so away when antiaircraft tracers began rising out of the darkness around the harbor. The streams of shells went up through our altitude, all right, so they had plenty of gun. They just didn’t know where in the darkness we were. The streams waved randomly as the Japs fired burst after burst.