“Hist there! You!” it whispered.
Startled, but standing his ground, he gripped his automatic, then in his hoarsest whisper answered:
“Hist back to you!”
CHAPTER XI
NIGHT FIGHTERS
Jack’s conclusions regarding the Black Bee’s fight with the Jap task force were correct. After he and Stew had been driven from the scene of fighting and had abandoned their plane on the sea, the U. S. dive bombers had come in for their deadly work. Diving from twelve thousand feet, they had released their bombs at a thousand feet. Some bombs missed their mark. Others made contact. One fell forward on the Jap carrier, killing a gun crew. Two fell almost directly on the propeller, rendering it useless. While the carrier ran around in wide circles, the torpedo bombers closed in. Judging the enemy’s probable position at a given moment, they released their “tin fish” with such deadly accuracy that one side of the carrier was blown away. Just as the Japs began abandoning ship, the carrier blew up.
A squadron of U. S. dive bombers that had arrived too late to work on the carrier, went after the fleeing cruisers, which did not pause to pick up their own men struggling in the water. Two cruisers were sunk, and one left in flames.
Ted had limped back to his own waters to make a crash landing in the sea close to the Black Bee, and to be picked up by a PT boat. All in all it was a glorious fight. One U.S. fighter and his gunner were permanently lost. They had been seen to fall flaming into the sea. A service was read for these men by the chaplain.
The Commander lost no time in letting his men know that this battle was in the nature of an accident and that the real goal of the task force at that time still lay ahead.
All day they steamed rapidly toward the west.
“It’s Mindanao,” Kentucky, Ted’s flying partner, said to him. “We’re going to hit them where they live, in the Philippines. And will we take revenge!” Kentucky’s eyes were half closed as he looked away to the west. Ted knew that at that moment he was thinking of “the best pal I ever knowed,” as Kentucky had expressed it to him, whose grave had been dug the day after the smoke cleared from Pearl Harbor.