“Look at the pattern down there, Hap!” he exclaimed. “They’ve broken it up pretty cleverly with camouflage, but the cleared place is L-shaped. If that isn’t an airport I’m cockeyed.”
“Then those birds in grass skirts—” Curly Levitt’s voice gasped through the interphone.
“—were Japs!” Chick Enders finished the sentence. “Go as low as you dare, Barry, and see what else we can spot.”
“Man all the guns!” Barry’s order crackled in the headsets. “Cracker, be ready to strafe any antiaircraft before they can pot us....”
He broke off as the white lines of tracer bullets streaked upward from a patch of bushes at one side of the field. Other guns opened fire.
Small bullet holes appeared suddenly in the bomber’s fuselage and wings. But four of Rosy’s .50-caliber machine guns were talking back—the twin weapons of her bottom and tail turrets. Seconds later she had swept out of range.
“Well, whaddyuh know about that?” Hap Newton blurted. “New Guinea Gardens Grow Grass-skirted Gunners. Who’d ever believe that headline?”
“Why didn’t they throw any flak at us?” Curly Levitt asked. “A field as big as that ought to be protected by more than machine gun fire.”
“The airport isn’t completed yet,” Barry pointed out. “The Japs probably haven’t had a chance to bring in heavier installations. There wasn’t even a camouflaged plane in sight—nothing but those steel-mat runways dressed up to look like vegetable gardens. Of course it’s possible that there were some bigger guns but no time to man them, before we were past.”
“It’s worth risking them to give the field a thorough pasting,” Chick Enders said. “Let’s go back at about five thousand and give it every bomb in our racks.”