Only Sergeant Hale, the bombardier, refused to join his crewmates in killing time. Stretched at full length in the plane’s transparent nose, he stared fixedly at the sea.
“Danny is a born hunter,” the Old Man observed. “Reckon he learned his patience from the Texas Apaches. They’ll lie ten hours in one spot without moving, waiting for a deer to pass a runway.”
They were just six hours out from Trinidad when Hale gave a bellow of discovery. Gazing down and ahead, Barry saw a convoy of twenty merchant ships, escorted by two destroyers and three corvettes. The intensified Nazi submarine attacks had made heavy protection necessary, he reasoned.
“We’ll go down and say hello to them,” said the captain, fastening his safety belt. “Maybe it will cheer them up to see Sweet Rosy O’Grady dropping them a curtsy, even if she can’t stick around.”
With engines throttled down, the bomber dropped toward the crawling convoy. Fascinated, Barry Blake watched the toy-like ships grow larger. Now he could make out the British flags and the tiny figures of the antiaircraft gun crews in their tin nests on the superstructures.
“I hope no cockeyed gunner takes us for an enemy and cuts loose,” he thought. “That wouldn’t be any fun at all—”
“Submarines to the right!” yelled Sergeant Danny Hale. “I can see their shadows just under the surface, Captain. And look—they’ve just fired two torpedoes! Let’s smash ’em!”
“You bet your sweet neck we will!” answered the Old Man. “Take over the throttles, Blake. Watch your r.p.m. We’ll give Hale a target he can’t miss.... Sergeant Babbitt, signal the convoy that we’re not bombing them!”
The Fortress leveled out at 500 feet. Glancing down, Barry saw the deck of a freighter immediately beneath him. He could almost catch the expressions on the upturned faces of her crew. His eyes came back to his instruments and clung to them.
“Bombs away!” yelled Hale’s voice in the interphone. “Give me a run at the other one, Captain.”