smoky mid-harbor island that was the Navy’s airfield. He waved and she wildly waved back. She was horror-stricken by what she had seen at the fleet landing, yet never had she felt so aroused, so full of life, so plain damn good, and so much in love.
An Army spokesman came on the automobile radio as she drove home, urging calm, warning against sabotage, and assuring the people that the second attack had been turned back with little further damage to the fleet, and at fearful cost to the Japanese. All-clear sirens were wailing over the island. She found the maid in an armchair listening to the radio, which was playing Hawaiian music again.
“Victor’s been very quiet, Missus Henry,” she said. “Not a sound. Isn’t it terrible about the war? But we’ll beat them.”
“
In his bedroom Victor coughed, a deep harsh cough like a man. “Why, there he goes now,” Janice said.
“The very first time, ma’am, since he got his medicine. I’ve been listening.”
Janice’s watch read eight minutes to ten. “Well, it’s been about two hours. I guess that’s all the medicine’s good for, I’ll give him more.” The baby still felt cool. He took the spoonful of brown syrup without opening his eyes, sighed, and turned over. Janice sank in a chair, perspiring and spent, thinking that a war had begun and the Pacific fleet had been smashed between her baby’s two doses of cough medicine.
Chapter 60
The sun poked up over the horizon, painting a red flush on the Clipper’s wing. Wide awake, Victor Henry watched the brightening disk rise free of the ocean. The flying boat’s engines changed pitch, rasping at his nerves. Since he had said good-bye to Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square in the snow, he had been shaken up in trains, planes, boats, trucks, jeeps, sleighs, and even oxcarts. He thought his bones would vibrate aboard the
The sun moved sidewise. The turn was so shallow that he felt no tilt in his seat. A pink ray shot across his lap from the opposite side of the plane. Pug left his seat and walked forward into the galley, where the steward was scrambling eggs. “I’d like to talk to Ed Connelly if he’s free.”
The steward smiled, gesturing at the door marked FLIGHT DECK. The naval officer and the Clipper captain had been eating meals together and sharing rooms at the island hotels. In the dial-filled cockpit the engines sounded much louder, and beyond the plexiglass the void purple sea and clear blue sky stretched all around. The captain, a beefy freckled man in shirt-sleeves and headphones, looked oddly at Pug Henry.
“Morning, Ed. Why are we heading back?”
Connelly passed him a radio message, hand-printed in red ink on a yellow form.
CINCPAC HARBOR CIRCUIT GENERAL PLAIN LANGUAGE MESSAGE QUOTE AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NO DRILL UNQUOTE X HEAVY GUNFIRE IN ANCHORAGE X RECOMMEND YOU RETURN WAKE TILL SITUATION CLARIFIES
“How about that?’ The captain removed the sponge-rubber headphones and rubbed his curly red hair. “Do you suppose it’s for real?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Victor Henry.
“I’m damned. I honestly never thought they’d go. Attacking Pearl! They’ll get creamed.”
“Let’s hope so. But what’s the point of turning back, Ed?”
“I guess they might be hitting Midway, too.”
“Well, they might be hitting Wake, for that matter.”
“I’ve talked to Wake. All quiet.”
Victor Henry returned to his seat, agitated though far from astonished. Here it was at last, he thought: an attempted sneak attack on Pearl, in the midst of a war scare. The uninventive Asiatics had elected to try the Port Arthur trick again, after all. But surely this time they were running their heads into a noose! The United States in 1941 wasn’t Czarist Russia in 1904. One phrase in Cincpac’s message nagged at him:
A calm sunburned marine in a jeep, naked except for shorts, socks, and boots, waited for him at the landing. The marine commander had put his forces on combat alert and wanted to see Captain Henry. They drove along the beach road in blazing sunlight and choking coral dust, then turned off into the brush. Combat alert had not changed the look of Wake in the past hours: three flat sandy peaceful islands in a horseshoe shape around emerald shallows, ringed by the wide sea, alive with myriads of birds — for it had been a sanctuary — and bustling with the bulldozers and trucks of civilian construction gangs. The queer hump-backed island rats hopped like tiny kangaroos out of the jeep’s path, and brilliantly colored birds rose from the brush in chirping clouds.
Perfectly camouflaged by scrub, the command post was sunk far down in coral sand. When Victor Henry faced the marine colonel in this deep timbered hole, saw the radio gear and crude furniture and smelled perking coffee and freshly dug soil, the war with Japan became a fact for him. The dugout did not have the graveyard-muck odor of the Russian trenches; it was roasting hot and dry, not freezing cold and wet: the men frantically working on the telephone lines and the overhead beams were not frostbitten, pale, bundled-up Slavs, but sunburned, heavily sweating Americans in shorts. Yet here, where the roar of the Pacific dimly sounded, these Americans — like the Russians outside Moscow — were going into the ground to await attack. The United States was in.
The colonel, a mild-faced scrawny man with whom Pug had dined the night before gave him an envelope to take to Cincpac. “Put it in the admiral’s hand yourself, Captain. Please! It’s a list of my worst shortages. We can make a fight of it here. Maybe we can hold out till we’re relieved, if he’ll send us that stuff. Radar gear for Wake is sitting right now on the dock in Hawaii. It’s been there for a month. For God’s sake, ask him to put it on a destroyer or better yet a bomber, and rush it here. I’m blind without radar. I can’t send fighters on patrols, I have too few. I’m twenty feet above the ocean at my highest point, and I only gain a few more feet with my water tower. We’ll probably end up eating fish and rice behind barbed wire anyway, but at least we can make the bastards work to take the place.”
Pug got back to the hotel just ahead of a rain squall. The Clipper passengers were sitting down to lunch when blasts shook the floor, rattled the dishes, and sent broken windowpanes slinking to the tiles. Amid shouts and cries the passengers jumped for the windows. Fat cigar-shaped airplanes, with orange circles painted on their flamboyant jungle camouflage, were flashing past in the rain; Pug noted their twin engines and twin tails. Smoke and fire were already rising from the airfield across the lagoon, and more explosions, bigger flames, heavier smoke came fast. Pug had often seen bombing, but this attack, destroying an American installation with impunity, still outraged and numbed him.
The marauding bombers, blurry in the rain, kept crisscrossing the islands and the lagoon with thunderous engine roars, meeting only meager bursts of fire. Soon a line of bombers came winging straight for the Pan American compound, and this was what Victor Henry was fearing. An attack on the Clipper might strand him and paralyze his war career before it started. There was no way off Wake Island, except aboard that huge inviting silvery target. Savage explosions and crashes burst around them as the planes bombed and machine-gunned the hotel, the Pan Am repair shops, the dock, and the radio tower. A gasoline dump close by went up in a colossal sheet of white flame, climbing to the sky with a terrific howl. The passengers dove under tables or huddled in corners, but Victor Henry still crouched at the window beside the pilot, watching. They saw spurts of water approach the flying boat. They saw pieces of the Clipper go flying.
When the bomber sounds faded, Pug followed the pilot out onto the pier at a run. Like a clothed ape, Ed Connelly clambered over the slippery flying boat in the rain, making it rock and slosh. “Pug, so help me God, I think we can still fly! They didn’t hole the tanks or the engines. At least I don’t think they did. I’m hauling my passengers the hell out of here now, and I’ll argue with Hawaii later.”
The passengers eagerly scrambled aboard. The Clipper took off, and it flew. Below, smashed airplanes
