Nobody else spoke. Chick Enders had expressed the feeling of every man in the plane who had a view of the colors below. Soon, however, the cloud painting changed, the gold growing whiter and more brilliant, the blue and pink fading out.
Fifty miles farther on a gap appeared, and through it the white-capped ocean. For nearly an hour the water remained in sight. A hundred miles from Rabaul the ceiling closed again, and Barry turned his Fortress back on the second leg of a big triangle.
No more breaks appeared until they were halfway to the Admiralty Islands. Here the clouds were higher, with small gaps in them that opened and closed as the winds whipped the masses of vapor along. Below them the ceiling seemed to be several hundred feet above the sea.
“I’m going down, Hap,” Barry Blake announced. “We won’t be able to see as far as we’d like to, but we’re doing no good up here above the ceiling. Besides, I have a hunch....”
“Play it, then,” Hap Newton advised. “In this game a bit of a hunch is sometimes worth a barrel of reasoning. Chick, be ready with that bombsight! We might come out right over a Jap battlewagon!”
The bomber sank through the fluffy cloud mass like a swooping eagle. For a moment her pilots could see nothing outside. Barry kept his eyes glued to the altimeter: a thousand feet, nine hundred, eight hundred—Suddenly they were through, with the rolling ocean so near that its white-topped waves seemed to reach up for them.
Hastily Barry pulled out of his shallow dive, and climbed for the clouds. His hunch had been right, as the shouts of Hap Newton and Chick attested. Spread out over a twenty mile area were a dozen large vessels.
“The Jap convoy!” Hap cried. “No doubt about it—they’re heading southwest toward New Guinea. Let’s give ’em all we’ve got—”
CRANG!
The blast of a small-caliber shell inside Rosy’s fuselage shocked her crew into grim alertness. Two seconds later her top turret guns chattered. Empty shell cases tumbled smoking to the floor behind Barry, as he zoomed the Fortress into the nearest mass of clouds.