“I’ll go over at eight hundred, Chick,” he said quickly. “They’re shooting too close.”
Before he had finished speaking, Chick’s fingers were busy at the bombsight’s knobs, compensating for the intended drop. The Fortress dipped abruptly. The freighter’s deck flashed beneath. Two hundred feet above, the cruiser’s shells burst—where Rosy would have been, had not Barry changed his altitude at the right instant.
The shock of them was almost simultaneous with the wallop of the bomb blast. Chick had laid his half-ton “egg” on the freighter’s stern, blowing it clean off. As the vessel settled in the water a column of smoke and flame poured upward from the torn deck.
“Good boy, Chick!” said Barry quietly. “And now we’ll take that somewhat despised but highly appropriate action known as scramming. The whole task force will be gunning for us now—not to mention whatever planes the Jap cruiser may try to launch.”
Hap Newton turned and waved mockingly astern.
“Don’t worry, Tojo—we’ll be back, with plenty of company,” he said. “You’re going to be honorable shark-meat about twenty-four hours from now!”
Sweet Rosy O’Grady plunged into the clouds and leveled off for Mau River, three hundred miles away. The wet mist whipped through her gaping wounds. The torn edges of her metal skin hummed and shrieked in the wind, but her four mighty engines thundered in unbroken harmony. She was still fit to fight.
“Speaking of shark-meat,” Fred Marmon’s voice came over the interphone, “would somebody be kind enough to slap a bandage on my back? It feels like a cubed steak.”
“I’ll do it, Fred, if you’ll tie up my right shoulder,” Curly Levitt responded. “I’ve got the first-aid kit here.... Anybody else need patching up?”
“My ear feels like something the cat brought in,” came Tony Romani’s voice from the tail turret. “I think there’s some shrapnel sticking in my ribs, too, but that can wait. You fellows fix yourselves up first.”