“Like Hap and me!” spoke up Chick Enders.
“Yes, you’re battle-tested, too,” Barry laughed. “By the way, did either of you hear or see anything of our old messmate, Glenn Crayle? After all the surprises of the past twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him waiting for us at the new airport. Would you, Hap?”
“Aw, don’t talk about it, Barry,” his big co-pilot replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised, either, but I’d be pretty doggoned sore. The sight of that mister would sour my stomach for the duration.”
“Mine, too—unless he’s toned down a lot,” agreed Chick. “This war does queer things to people. It may have let the wind out of Crayle and showed him that he wasn’t such a hot pilot as he thought. I hope so, anyway.”
“I believe you’ve got hopes for Hirohito, too,” Hap Newton scoffed. “Let’s forget Crayle until he does show up—and I hope that event will be a long, long time away!”
The blue expanse of Torres Strait now showed beyond the green of Cape York. For an hour the Fortress hung above it at six thousand feet. Then, almost before her crew realized the change, the high grasslands of New Guinea were sweeping beneath her belly. Far to the east lay the Gulf of Papua, with a mass of cumulus clouds tumbling above it. Ahead rose the island’s mountainous backbone.
“Let’s fly a little lower, Barry,” Chick Enders said. “You won’t have to start climbing over the central range for half an hour. I’d like to get a look at one of these native villages, and give the local hillbillies a thrill at the same time.”
“All right, Chick,” Barry replied. “But we won’t do any hedgehopping with a quarter of a million dollars worth of Fortress. If the air isn’t bumpy I might take Rosy down to five hundred feet—when and if you spot a thatch-roofed metropolis.”
“Don’t try to thrill ’em by dropping an egg on the town pump,” said Hap Newton. “General MacArthur has caused the word to be spread among the tribesmen that United Nations airmen are their friends. We wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression.”
“I wonder how many New Guinea wild men could tell the Jap ‘rising sun’ from our insignia,” Chick remarked, “even if they were near enough to—oh-oh! Look, Barry! Straight ahead on that little grassy plateau ... don’t those patches look like native gardens to you?”