Torpedo Run (11 page)

But the jeep driver drove on past all of the fighters, past the bombers, past
everything.

Peter never felt really comfortable around the Army, and this driver made him particularly uncomfortable, acting as though Peter were asking him to sacrifice his life or something. As they passed the last of the parked airplanes and roared on down the empty and deserted runway, Peter got up enough courage to say, "I'm supposed to get in one of those planes."

"That's right," the driver said, gunning the jeep even faster.

"I think the pilot's waiting," Peter said.

"Pilots," the driver said with disgust.

"I mean," Peter said, "do you know where you're going?"

The driver turned and looked at him for a long, cold moment but didn't say anything. Then suddenly and so fast it almost flung Peter out of the jeep, he wheeled the thing off the runway, crashed across a strip of rough ground, and braked to a sliding stop near a clump of trees.

"End of the line," the driver said.

Peter looked around but could see nothing but the end of the runway with the jungle all around it. "Where's my plane?" he asked.

"In there somewhere," the driver said, pointing toward the jungle. Then he nervously gunned the motor as a signal for Peter to get out and leave him alone. Peter got out. The jeep took off with all four wheels spinning, slammed back to the runway, and disappeared.

Peter walked cautiously into the sparse jungle and found the airplane.

It was
tiny.
A little high-wing monoplane with a little coffee-grinder engine up front and a propeller not much longer than Peter's arms. It was streaked with mud, a sad vine was dripping off one wing, and one of the cockpit doors was flapping sadly back and forth in the morning wind.

Peter, feeling the same cold sickness he often felt just before a fight in
Slewfoot,
walked slowly over to the plane. There was no one in the little cockpit—or anywhere else.

There were two beat-up metal seats, side-by-side. In each there was a brown, thin, ragged canvas cushion, the stuffing pooching out of a slit in one of them. On the mud-covered floor about two million ants were eating what was left of a Spam sandwich. Hanging from the radio tuning knob was a little hula girl made out of pink rubber. She was swinging back and forth in the wind. Sticking out of the map compartment under the dash were two or three well-read comic books, but no maps.

"You Ensign Brent?" a voice asked from behind him.

The man was an apparition. He hadn't had a haircut in nine months, and long stalks of it hung down over his face so he looked like he was peering through some sort of a fence. Then, when that hair stopped just below his nose, an enormous moustache took up. Every hair in the moustache was going in a different direction and to Peter it looked like a tangle of barbed wire. The only clothing he had on was a pair of ragged, paint-stained shorts. No shoes, no shirt, no hat. He was lean, muscular, and tan.

"Yeah," Peter said.

"I'm Lieutenant Carruthers, your pilot, sir. Where you want to go?"

"Up the coast through the Vitiaz," Peter said, shaking hands.

"Hop in," Carruthers said.

"In
this?"
Peter asked, backing away from it,

"What else?"

Carruthers stooped under the wing and went to the sad, napping door. He took it off and laid it on the ground. Then he went around to the other side and took that door off too.

"They just get in the way in case you have to jump out," he said.

Peter wasn't
about
to get into this wreck. "Er … your Operations people said something about an L-85. You know, something with a little more … well … er … "

Carruthers climbed into the cockpit, saying, "Meet the L-85. Her name's Deborah." Then he sat there, looking expectantly at Peter.

There was nothing to do but get in. If this had been the Navy, Peter wouldn't have minded saying that he wasn't going to get into any such contraption as this, but with the Army …

As he sat down on the slit cushion, he noticed the vine hanging off the wing. "Want me to pull that vine off?" he asked hopefully.

"It'll either blow off or we'll take it along and drop it on the Japs."

Peter squirmed around in the seat, looking behind and under it for the parachute harness. He could find nothing that even faintly resembled a parachute. "How do you hook up the chute?" he asked.

"Chute?" the pilot asked, sounding surprised. "Listen, you ever sit on a parachute pack for a couple of hours? Like sitting on a pile of rocks."

"I won't mind," Peter assured him.

"Maybe not," he said, "but it doesn't make any difference because there aren't any."

"What happens if you get hit?" Peter asked, his voice sounding weak and faraway.

"Ride her down," Carruthers said. "She floats like a chute anyhow."

It made Peter sick and all he could do, as the engine began to make dreadful coughing noises, was sit there and stare straight ahead.

The engine suddenly stopped coughing and panting and began to run, and when it did it seemed to Peter that the plane was going to fall apart. The wings waggled around drunkenly, and the whole plane shook and rattled. The engine, with no cowling around it, bounced around just in front of him until Peter wondered if it was attached to the plane. Clouds of blue smoke poured out of it and were swept into the cockpit by the whirling propeller. And then, when the smoke died down a little, Peter looked with horror at long, hot flames shooting out of both sides of the engine.

He glanced over at the lieutenant, expecting him to cut the engine immediately and—Peter prayed—report this thing as absolutely unflyable; but the lieutenant just shoved the throttle all the way forward, took his feet off the brakes and away they went, staggering and wobbling out from under the trees, bouncing savagely across the strip, and finally hitting the end of the runway. There it rolled along, the wings wobbling up and down, the vine still streaming from one of them.

By some miracle the plane rose into the air. Peter looked out with horror and saw the ground dropping away below him. Surely, he thought, as the engine streamed blue flame, this pilot would put it down on the ground again and run away.

The pilot was paying no attention to the plane. He wasn't even looking out of it, but was bent over, searching around for something on the floor.

He found the ant-covered piece of sandwich and picked it up. As he flung it out of the plane he said, "I never saw as many ants as they've got out here."

"Lots of ants," Peter said, his mouth dry as sandpaper. "Don't you even have seat belts?"

"There's one around someplace."

Peter, after a long search, found the belt tangled up under the seat. He untangled it and strapped it on. "You don't use a seat belt?" he asked.

"Not until they shoot at me. I got sort of a nervous stomach," the pilot said, taking his left foot off the pedal and sticking it and half his leg out the door so it waved around in the prop wash. Then he took his other foot off the other pedal and rested it comfortably on the instrument panel.

"The vine's gone," Peter said.

"Too bad. Hey, what are we looking for?"

"A yellow rubber boat."

"Where'd you lose it?"

"Up near Vadang, but on the mainland side of the strait."

"What's the matter? You a supply officer and lost it and they're going to make you pay for it?"

"No. We lost it off a PT boat."

The pilot jerked around in the seat and stared at him through the dripping of lanky hair. His voice sounded awed and frightened as he asked, "Are you a PT-boat man?"

Peter nodded.

The pilot shook his head back and forth. "You know what I'd do if somebody told me I had to ride in one of those PT boats? I'd shoot myself."

Peter was suddenly completely absorbed by a gauge which he could just see past the pilot's dirty bare foot on the instrument panel. The needle of the gauge was up against the pin on the empty side.

"Is that the gas gauge?" he asked.

The pilot nodded and said, "I wouldn't put foot on one of those PT boats if it was in a museum in Milwaukee."

Peter pointed a shaking finger at the gas gauge. "It's reading
empty,"
he said.

"It always does," the pilot said, not looking at it. "Man, it's just suicide riding those boats. What chance have you
got?
They can hit you with a slingshot, and all that aviation gas goes up like a bomb."

But Peter's attention was fixed on the instruments. The compass was reading due south but, when he looked out of the plane, they were heading northwest. "Is the compass working?" he asked, his voice falling almost to a whisper.

"If it is, it's the first time," the pilot said. "You must be out of your mind to ride in those boats."

Peter had never felt so lost and helpless in his life, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. "Oh, they're not so bad," he said. "At least when they get in trouble they don't fall ten thousand feet and splatter you all over the landscape like this contraption."

"Who's falling?" the pilot asked, a little indignant. "You've only got one place to go in those boats—
down.
I can go anywhere I like and this ain't no 'contraption.'"

"Sorry," Peter said, "but I'll take the boats anytime to one of these whatever you call 'em. A boat's pretty hard to see and pretty hard to hit."

"I lie in my sack at night and listen to you guys going out in those floating plywood bombs and I say 'thank the Lord I'm in the Air Corps,' and then I go to sleep." The pilot began fishing around in the cockpit until he found the ends of the seat belt. Without pulling his leg back into the plane or taking his foot off the instrument panel he buckled the ends around his "nervous stomach" and began to sing.

"Oh, there'll be mushrooms in the sky," he sang in a croaking voice.
"Cah-chung cah-chung cah-chung."

It was bad enough just being in the plane, Peter thought, without this madman for a pilot.

"You ever see mushrooms in the sky?" the pilot asked.

"No."

"You will."

They had crossed the Huon Gulf, and Peter expected him to swing to the right and follow the peninsula; but, instead, he kept on a straight course which carried them back over the dark green jungle.

"Mushrooms in the sky," the pilot said. "With rocks in 'em.
Cah-chung."
Then he looked over at Peter. "We're going to get shot down," he said calmly.

Before Peter could answer, the sun suddenly disappeared, the sky turned black and, in the plane, there was a strong acrid smell of burning gunpowder.

And almost instantly there was a tremendous, earsplitting, stomach-jarring, bone-rattling explosion which sounded exactly like
"cah-chung."

Following that were more and more
cah-chungs,
and the plane began to rock violently, thrown this way and that by the bursts of antiaircraft shells all around it.

Peter grabbed for the instrument panel but couldn't reach it as the plane was flung down, ramming him back into the seat.

As it came out of the black roaring smoke Peter saw that it was falling, totally out of control, and spinning as it fell. Above them he could still hear the antiaircraft shells exploding—
cha-chung cha-chung
blam blam blam. He tried to look up but couldn't, so looked down.

Below him—far below him—the sea and the jungle were whirling slowly and jerkily around; and as they whirled he whirled too, his body being slammed around in the seat, only the belt keeping him from being thrown out.

He was doomed, Peter decided. Nothing could save him now. The jungle, spinning like a green top, was rushing up toward him. And even the engine had been knocked out, he noticed, as the propeller suddenly appeared, the little blades spinning lazily around and around, driven, he decided, by the wind of their fall.

In the movies, he remembered, in a situation like this our hero always came up with some funny remark that showed how nonchalant and brave he was; and Peter felt that it was his duty to say something, but all he could say was, "That's what I mean about the PT boats. What do we do now?"

"Do?" the pilot asked. "Nothing."

Peter decided that he should have been able to figure that one out for himself. With no parachute he couldn't jump out; and with the plane out of control and powerless there was no way to level off and land—even if there had been some place other than the terrible jungle to land
on.

The
cah-chungs
were faint and faraway now, and it seemed to Peter that the little noises he heard only made everything sound more silent. The wind was whistling eerily around the plane, the engine was making little, pitiful, coughing and panting noises, some gears somewhere were chattering oily, and from the radio a flat, unexcited voice was talking about the weather.

A man in a PT boat never would feel as helpless and awful as this, Peter decided. In the boats there would always be something you could
do
to try to save your life. You wouldn't have to sit like this, strapped into a seat, with no way in the world to keep this airplane from killing you as it spun on down into the jungle where the tall, hard trees would tear it apart and tear you apart too.

The jungle was so close Peter could see the individual trees sticking up at him like so many deadly and enormous spears. He could even see the fronds of the coconut palms and the vines. And they were
rushing
upward at him, reaching out for him.

In the last seconds of his life, Peter closed his eyes.
Why look at it coming?
he asked himself.

It felt like a giant had slammed a hand against his chest and rammed him backward. He waited for the sound of the plane being torn apart, the sound of the trees tearing into him, the feel of pain and blood, and the last seconds of life.

Nothing else happened. In fact, the engine began to run again.

But when he opened his eyes he saw that they were down in the jungle all right. A giant of a tree was rushing straight toward them—like a wall of green leaves, and gray, huge limbs and trunk, and those slimy vines.