“He’s gettin’ ’em first-hand right this minute!” the executive officer of the carrier replied. “He’s up there himself in a scout, looking over the whole business. And you can bet your bottom dollar he’s the happiest man on earth!”
“What was prettiest,” another joined in, “was seeing the planes from the other carriers coming in. From every direction! We were in the first wave, and just as we pulled up and away, there they came—wave number two from the northeast, and a little farther away wave number three from the southeast. You had to hurry and do your job so you could get out of the way of the next batch coming along.”
“Where’s Turk Bottomley?” Scoot asked. “Did any of you see him?”
“I saw him circling around for another go at one of the airfields,” a torpedo-plane pilot said. “At least I think it was Turk’s Hellcat I saw. He was joining up with the second wave and going in again.”
“He ought to be back by now,” someone said. “All the other fighters are in—except Tommy Mixler. I saw him go down in the harbor. Ack-ack.”
There was a moment’s silence at this unwanted mention of a casualty, of a friend they’d see no more, and then—as if they were forcibly clearing their minds of any such thoughts—the pilots went on chattering again. Their planes were almost ready for them to take off again when they all saw a lone fighter circling the ship. Zooming his engine and doing a beautiful wing-over turn, the pilot brought his plane around into the wind for a landing on the heaving deck of the carrier.
“That’s Turk, all right,” Scoot said. “Home from the wars.”
And it was Turk, almost out of gas and completely out of ammunition. He had stayed around as long as he could, and now he wanted to be off again within five minutes. As soon as his plane was shoved out of the way where it could be checked and get its new supplies of gas and ammunition, the fighters who had come in earlier began to take off again. They were off on schedule, going in for their second attack on Japan’s Pearl Harbor of the Pacific!
All day long it went on, with Scoot and the others staying aloft, on the alert for the Jap planes that would surely come through to attack them. No matter how great the surprise, some planes would get off the airfields at Truk and others would race in from other Jap strongholds. They would go for the carriers first, of course, for the flat-tops were the big prizes. With the base ship gone, the planes would be lost without a “home” to return to.
