“WEST OF MIDWAY ATOLL THE LAST AVENGER 0835″
“Amazingly, Bert’s Avenger continued to fly. Just about everything inside the plane had been smashed, but so far the engine hadn’t faltered. It had been the first one off the Grumman assembly line. Maybe it was charmed. He tried calling Ferrier and Manning again over the intercom, but there was no response. After the pasting they had received from the Zeroes, he had to assume they were either dead or wounded. There would be no way to find out until he landed. Since leaving Midway Atoll, they had been in the air for better than two hours. Checking his watch, he figured that he had gone sixty or seventy miles south since the Zeroes had left him alone. Dodging in and out of the scattered clouds, he hadn’t seen another aircraft. Below him, there was only the trackless sea. Back in the tail section, Harry Ferrier slowly came alive to the harsh scream of the wind through the shredded fuselage. He was still draped over the tunnel gun. It was red with his blood. There was an awful raw coppery smell in the air, and he had a terrible headache. When he reached up to touch his wound, it felt like there was a hole in his forehead. There was. A bullet had torn through the bill of his baseball cap and creased the front of his skull. Sitting up, he tried to regain his bearings. The engine appeared to be running strong, and the plane remained steady on a level course. Turning the switch on the intercom, he called up to the cockpit. “Are you okay, Skipper?” he asked weakly. Bert was overjoyed to discover that Ferrier was still alive. “I’m fine… How about you?” “I’m wounded in the head, but I think I’ll be all right,” he said. “What about Manning?” asked Bert. Harry tried to blot out the mental image of what he had seen after looking up into the turret. “I think he’s dead,” he said. The reality of it slowly sunk in. “I want you to see if the torpedo dropped,” Bert said a few minutes later. “I don’t want us to land with it hanging out of the bomb bay.” There was a small glass port in the floor of the radio compartment that allowed Harry to look into the bomb bay. It was almost directly under the gun turret. When he crawled over to check, Harry saw that it was covered by Jay’s blood. He reported to Bert that there was no way to see into the bomb bay. He then asked if it would be all right for him to crawl up to the middle seat behind the cockpit. Since their tail gun was useless, Bert told Harry to come up. Staring into the distance, Bert suddenly saw another plane emerge from the cloudy haze. It was heading in the general direction of the Japanese fleet. He was in no shape for another showdown with a Zero, or any other enemy plane for that matter. Without waiting to confirm whether it was friend or foe, Bert slid inside the nearby cloud.”
Excerpted from “A DAWN LIKE THUNDER”, author, Robert J. Mrazek. Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group. 237 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.
To be continued: Islander.