“Finger-tip control!” chuckled Hap as he took over. “I may be rough, but I can be oh, so gentle, too, Skipper! Just watch me take her upstairs.”
The bomber formation was climbing steadily, to top the 16,000-foot range ahead. A bitter chill seeped into the plane. The crew found themselves breathing faster to get enough air. Automatically they reached for their oxygen masks. Those things were lifesavers when you got up above 20,000. Even at somewhat lower altitudes they helped keep your head clear and your stomach in place.
At 18,000 the air was bumpy. The flight leader, Captain Bartlett, took his bombers up to 20,000, where it was colder but smoother. Beneath them the great range was spread out like a relief map, with patches of white cloud here and there showing local rains.
An hour later the immense blue bowl of the Arafura Sea rose up to enclose them with its rim of endless horizon.
“We’re like four tiny flies buzzing across a giant’s washbowl,” Barry thought. “And yet this Arafura Sea is just a little spot on God’s Footstool. Most high school students never knew where it was before the war. A flier certainly comes to feel his smallness in time and space!”
The four planes loafed along at about 200 m.p.h., to conserve gas. They dodged a thunder storm just north of the Gulf of Carpenteria and swung back to the southwest. At noon they were over Port Darwin, Australia, with a heavy overcast obscuring sea and land. Barry took over the controls in preparation for landing.
“Ceiling one thousand feet and dropping fast,” came the airfield’s radioed report. “You arrived just in time. In another hour we’ll be closed in.”
“This weather may postpone our mission, whatever it is,” Chick Enders remarked as they went down through the wet cloud rug. “Looks like a general storm coming over the coast.”
“That’s something for the brass hats to worry about, Chick,” Barry Blake replied. “We haven’t the haziest notion yet what we’ve come here to do—There’s the field, Hap! It looks a lot better than the one we left this morning.”
Though his B-26 was still a bit unfamiliar to the young Fortress pilot, he set her down without a bounce. The field was hard and smooth, with only a few patches showing where Jap bombs had recently dropped. The lowering clouds, Barry remarked, would probably keep enemy raiders at a distance for the next few days.