“Oh! It will!” Stew agreed. “And here’s one bombardier who’s going to try to be around when it’s over. Fight hard, but take no fool chances, that’s my motto.”
“Mine too,” Jack agreed. “I’ve got folks waiting for me back home.”
“Same here. And besides, we can’t help Uncle Sam much down there in Davy Jones’s locker.” At that they lapsed into silence.
Jack slept with his violin that night, and next morning before dawn he stowed it away in his plane. “Why not?” he asked himself. “Red’s got a dog he takes along. Blackie carries a parrot, and Bill, a monkey. A violin makes just as good a mascot, and not half the bother.”
When he and Stew worked their way to the flight deck that morning they found it crowded with planes. The Black Bee was one of the largest carriers in the Navy and carried more than a hundred planes.
Because they required only a short run to clear the deck, and also because in case of an attack they must be the first ships up, the fighters stood in front of all the others on the deck. Back of these were scout planes; next rode dive bombers; and last of all, torpedo planes.
Already the air was filled with the roar of motors warming up. Fighters would soon be taking off for a look at the skies close at hand and for practice runs. Scout planes would cut the sky into a great four-hundred-mile-wide pie and each would take its own sector of air and sea for a close search. Lucky the scout-ship pilot who could announce, “Enemy task force a hundred miles north by east.” Even the discoverer of a Jap snooper, a huge four-motored flying boat, would receive his reward, and besides, with luck, might send the air giant flaming into the sea. Little wonder then that Jack’s fingers trembled as he gripped the controls and waited for the flight officer’s signal for the take-off.
Slowly at first, then more swiftly, their wheels rolled across the deck until they glided out over the dark, gray waters into the approaching dawn.
They climbed a thousand, two, three, five thousand feet. Jack examined and tested his instruments. Stew swung his machine guns back and forth. Then pressing the button, he sent a burst of fire into the limitless blue-gray of the sky. “This is our day!” Jack exulted. “I feel it in my bones.”
“Hope you’re right,” Stew grumbled. “We’re due for some luck. Three months in the Pacific and we haven’t sighted a single snooper or sneaking Jap ship. It’s rotten luck!”