The Sea Witch Read online

  A dozen or so of the tender sailors pushed us away from the float. As soon as the bow began to swing, Amme began cranking the engine closest to the tender. It caught and blew a cloud of white smoke, and kept the nose swinging. Modahl pushed the rudder full over and pulled the yoke back into his lap as Amme cranked the second engine.

  In less time than it takes to tell, we were taxiing away from the tender.

  “You guys did that well,” I remarked.

  “Practice,” Modahl said.

  Everyone checked in on the intercom, and there was a lot of chatter as they checked systems, all while we were taxiing toward the river’s mouth.

  Finally, Modahl used the rudder and starboard engine to initiate a turn to kill time while the engines came up to temperature. The mechanic talked about the engines — temps and so on; Modahl listened and said little.

  After two complete turns, the pilot closed the window on his side and told me to do the same. He flipped the signal light to tell Amme to set the mixtures to Auto Rich. While I was trying to get my window to latch, he straightened the rudder and matched the throttles. Props full forward, he pulled the yoke back into his lap and began adding power.

  The engines began to sing.

  The Witch accelerated slowly as Modahl steadily advanced the throttles while the flight engineer called out the manifold pressures and RPMs. He had the throttles full forward when the nose of the big Cat rose, and she began planing the smooth water in the lee of the point. Modahl centered the yoke with both hands to keep us on the step.

  I glanced at the airspeed from time to time. We were so heavy I began to wonder if we could ever get off. We passed fifty miles per hour still planing, worked slowly to fifty-five, then sixty, the engines howling at full power.

  It took almost a minute to get to sixty-five with that heavy load, but when we did Modahl pulled the yoke back into his lap and the Cat broke free of the water. He eased the yoke forward, held her just a few feet over the water in ground effect as our airspeed increased. When we had eighty on the dial Modahl inched the yoke back slightly, and the Witch swam upward in the warm air.

  “When the water is a little rougher or there is a breeze, she’ll come off easier,” he told me. He flipped the switch to tell Amme to raise the wingtip floats.

  He climbed all the way to a thousand feet before he lowered the nose and pulled the throttles back to cruise manifold pressure, then the props back to cruise RPM. Of course, he had to readjust the throttles and sync the props. Finally he got the props perfectly in snyc, and the engine noise became a smooth, loud hum.

  After Modahl trimmed he hand-flew the Witch awhile. We went out past the point, where he turned and set a course for the tip of the island that lay to the northeast.

  “Landing this thing is a piece of cake. It’s a power-on landing into smooth water: Just set up the attitude and a bit of a sink rate and ease her down and on. In the open sea we full-stall her in. After you watch me do a few I’ll let you try it. Maybe tomorrow evening if we aren’t going out again.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The fact that Modahl was making plans for tomorrow was comforting somehow, as I’m sure it was to the rest of the crew, who were listening on the intercom. As if we were a road repair gang on the way to fill a pothole.

  When we got to the island northeast of Samarai, we flew along the water’s edge for twenty minutes, looking for people or a crashed airplane or a signal — anything — hoping our lost Catalina crew had made it this far.

  We had been in the air over an hour when Modahl turned northeast for Bougainville. He engaged the autopilot and sat for a while watching it fly the plane. We were indicating 115 miles per hour, about a hundred knots. The wind was out of the west. Pottinger, the navigator, was watching the surface of the sea to establish our drift before sunset.

  “Keep your eyes peeled, gang, for Joe Snyder and his guys. Sing out if you see anything.”

  The land was out of sight behind and the sun was sinking into the sea haze when Modahl finally put his feet up on the instrument panel and lit a cigarette. The sun on our left stern quarter illuminated the clouds, which covered about half the sky. The cloud bases were at least a thousand feet above us, the tops several thousand feet above that. The visibility was about twenty miles, I thought, as I studied the sun-dappled surface of the sea with binoculars.

  Standing in the space behind us, between the seats, the radioman also studied the sea’s surface. His name was something Varitek … I hadn’t caught his first name. Everyone called him Varitek, even the other sailors.

  The noise level in the plane was high; the headsets made it tolerable. Barely. Still, the drone of the engines and the clouds flamed by the setting sun and the changing patterns on the sea were very pleasant. We had cracked our side windows so there was a decent breeze flowing into the plane.

  One of the sailors brought us coffee, hot and black. As Modahl smoked cigarettes, one after another, we sat there watching the colors of the clouds change and the sea grow dark. A sliver of the sun was still above the horizon when I got my first glimpse of the moon, round and golden, climbing the sky.

  The other members of the crew were disappointed that they didn’t see any trace of Snyder’s plane. I hadn’t thought they would, nor, apparently, did Modahl. He said little, merely smoked in silence as the clouds above us lost their evening glow.

  “Watch the moonpath,” Modahl told me after a while. “Anything we see up this way is Japanese, and fair game.” He adjusted the cockpit lighting for night flying and asked the radioman for more coffee.

  MODAHL:

  I couldn’t get Joe Snyder and his crew out of my mind. A fellow shouldn’t go forth to slay dragons preoccupied with other things, but I liked Joe, liked him a lot. And whatever happened to him could happen to me and mine.

  The Japs were staging ships and supplies through Buka and Rabaul as they tried to kick us off Guadalcanal. They were working up to taking Port Moresby, then invading Australia, when our invasion of Guadal threw a monkey wrench in their plans. Now they were trying to reinforce their forces on Guadalcanal. A steady stream of troop transports and cargo ships had been in and out of those harbors, not to mention destroyers and cruisers, enough to put the fear in everybody. Then there are Jap planes — they had a nice airfield on Rabaul and a little strip near Buka. The legs on the Zeros were so long you just never knew where or when you would encounter them, though they stayed on the ground at night.

  If they could have flown at night, the Cats couldn’t. The guns in the side blisters were poor defense against enemy fighters. When attacked, the best defense was to get as close to the sea as possible so the Zeros couldn’t make shooting passes without the danger of flying into the water. If a Japanese pilot ever slowed down and lined up behind a Cat a few feet over the water, he’d be meat on the table for the blister gunners — the Japs had yet to make that mistake and probably never would.

  I sat there listening to the engines, wondering what happened to Joe, if he were still alive, if he would ever be found.

  VARITEK:

  If you didn’t believe you had a good chance of living through the flight, you would never get aboard the plane. Somebody said that to me once, and it was absolutely true. It took guts to sit through the brief and man up and ride through a takeoff, knowing how big this ocean was, knowing that your life was dependent on the continued function of this cunning contraption of steel and duraluminum. Knowing your continued existence depended on the skill of your pilot.

  On Modahl.

  Modahl. If he made one bad decision, we were all dead.

  These other guys, I saw them fingering rosaries or moving their lips in prayer. I didn’t buy any of that sweet-hereafter Living on a Cloud Playing a Harp bullshit.

  This is it, baby. This life is all you get. When it’s over, it’s over. And you ain’t coming back as a cow or a dog or a flea on an elephant’s ass.

  I tried not to think about it, but the truth was, I was scared. Yeah, I believed in Modahl
. He was a good officer and a good pilot. Sort of a holier-than-thou human being, not a regular kind of guy you’d like to drink beer with, but I didn’t care about that. None of these officers were going to be your buddy, and who would want them to? Modahl could fly that winged boat. He was good at that, and that was all that mattered. That and the fact that he could get us home.

  He could do that. Modahl could. He could get this plane and his ass and the asses of all of us home again, back to the tender.

  Yeah.

  HOFFMAN:

  These other guys were so calm that afternoon, but I wasn’t. Tell you the truth, I was scared. Waiting, waiting, waiting … it was enough to make a guy puke. I tried to eat and managed to get something down, but I upchucked it before we manned up.

  I knew the guys on the Snyder crew — went to boot camp with a couple of them and shipped out with them to the South Pacific. Yeah, they were good guys, guys just like me, and they were dead now. Or floating around in the ocean waiting to die. Or marooned on an island somewhere. The folks at home saw the pictures in Life and thought tropical paradise, but these islands were hellholes of jungle, bugs, and snakes, with green shit growing right down to the water’s edge. Everything was alive, and everything would eat you.

  And the South Pacific was crawling with Japs. The sons of Nippon didn’t take prisoners, the guys said, just tortured you for information, then whacked off your head with one of those old swords. Gave me the shivers just thinking about it.

  If they captured me … well, Jesus!

  No wonder I was puking like a soldier on a two-week drunk.

  I just prayed that Modahl would get us home. One more time.

  POTTINGER:

  This evening the wind was only a few knots out of the west-southwest. Our ground speed was, I estimated, 102 knots. We were precisely here on the chart, at this spot I marked with a tiny x. If I had doped the wind right. Beside the x I noted the time.

  Later, as we approach Bougainville, Modahl would climb above the clouds and let me shoot the stars for an accurate fix. Of course, once we found the island, I would use it to plot running fixes.

  I liked the precision of navigation. The answers were real, clear, and unequivocal, and could be determined with finest mathematical exactness. On the other hand, flying was more like playing a musical instrument. I could determine Modahl’s mood by the way he handled the plane. Most of the time he treated it with the utmost respect, working the plane in the wind and sea like a maestro directing a symphony. When he was preoccupied, like tonight, Modahl just pounded the keys, horsed it around, never got in sync with it.

  He was thinking about Joe Snyder’s crew, I figured, wondering, pondering life and death.

  Death was out there tonight, on that wide sea or in those enemy harbors.

  It was always there, always a possibility when we set out on one of those long flights into the unknown.

  The torture was not combat, a few intense minutes of bullets and bombs; torture was the waiting. The hours of waiting. The days. The nights. Waiting, wondering …

  Sometimes the bullets and bombs came as almost a relief after all that waiting.

  The Sea Witch was Modahl’s weapon. The rest of us were tiny cogs in his machine, living parts. We would live or die as the fates willed it, and whichever way it came out didn’t matter as long as Modahl struck the blow.

  But the men had faith he’ll take them home. Afterward.

  I wanted to believe that. The others also. But I knew it wasn’t true. Death was out there — I could feel it.

  Modahl was only a man.

  A man who wondered about Joe Snyder and probably had little faith in himself.

  Was Modahl crazy, or was it us, who believed?

  Nothing in this life was as black as a night at sea. You can tell people that, and they would nod, but no one could know how mercilessly dark a night could be until he saw the night sea for himself.

  After the twilight was completely gone that night there was only the occasional flicker of the moonpath through gaps in the clouds, and now and then a glimpse of the stars. And the red lights on the instrument panel. Nothing else. The universe was as dark as the grave.

  Modahl eased his butt in his seat, readjusted his feet on the instrument panel, tried to find a comfortable position, and reached for his cigarettes. The pack was empty; he crumpled it in disgust.

  “You married?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “I am,” he said, and rooted around in his flight bag for another pack of Luckies. He got one out, fired it off, then rearranged himself, settling back in.

  He checked the compass, tapped the altimeter, glanced at his watch, and said nothing.

  “Can I walk around a little?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I got unstrapped and left him there, smoking, his feet on the panel.

  The beat of the engines made the ship a living thing. Everything you touched vibrated; even the air seemed to pulsate. The waist and tunnel gunners were watching out the blisters, scratching, smoking, whatever. Pottinger was working on his chart, the radioman and bombardier were playing with the radar, Amme the mechanic was in his tower making entries in his logbooks.

  I took a leak, drank a half a cup of coffee while I watched the two guys working with the radar, and asked some questions. The presentation was merely a line on a cathode-ray tube — a ship, they said, would show up as a spike on the line. Maybe. Range was perhaps twenty miles, when the sea conditions were right.

  “Have you ever seen a ship on that thing?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” the radioman said, then realized I was an officer and added a “sir.”

  I finished the coffee, then climbed back into the copilot’s seat.

  When my headset was plugged in again, I asked Modahl, “Do you ever have trouble staying awake?”

  He shook his head no.

  A half hour later he got out of his seat, took off his headset, and shouted in my ear: “I’m going to get some coffee, walk around. If the autopilot craps out, I’ll feel it. Just hold course and heading.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He left, and there I was, all alone in the cockpit of a PBY Catalina over the South Pacific at night, hunting Jap ships.

  Right.

  I put my feet up on the panel like Modahl had and sat watching the instruments, just in case the autopilot did decide that it had done enough work tonight. The clouds were breaking up as we went north, so every few seconds I stole a glance down the moonpath, just in case. It was about seventy degrees to the right of our nose. I knew the guys were watching it from the starboard blister, but I looked anyway.

  We had been airborne for a bit over four hours. We had lost time searching the coast of that island, so I figured we had another hour to fly before we reached Buka. Maybe Modahl was talking to Pottinger about that now.

  If my old man could only see me in this cockpit. When he lost the farm about eight years ago, five years after Mom died, he took my sister and me to town and turned us over to the sheriff. Said he couldn’t feed us.

  He kissed us both, then walked out the door. That was the last time I ever saw him.

  Life defeated him. Beat him down.

  Maybe someday, when the war was over, I’d try to find him. My sister and I weren’t really adopted, just farmed out as foster kids, so legally he was still my dad.

  My sister was killed last year in a car wreck, so he was the only one I had left. I didn’t even know if he or Mom had brothers or sisters.

  I was sitting there thinking about those days when I heard one sharp, hard word in my ears.

  “Contact.”

  That was the radioman on the intercom. “We have a contact, fifteen miles, ten degrees left.”

  In about ten seconds Modahl charged into the cockpit and threw himself into the left seat.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, and twisted the autopilot steering. We turned about fifty degrees left before he leveled the wings.

  “We�
�ll go west, look for them on the moonpath, figure out what we’ve got.”

  He reached behind him and twisted the volume knob on the intercom panel so everyone could clearly hear his voice. “Wake up, people. We have a contact. We’re maneuvering to put it on the moonpath for a visual.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “May just be stray electrons — that radar isn’t anything to bet money on. If it’s a ship, though, it’s Japanese.”

  THREE

  “We’ve lost the contact,” Varitek, the radioman, told Modahl. “It’s too far starboard for the radar.”

  “Okay. We’ll turn toward it after a bit, so let me know when you get it again.”

  He leaned over and shouted at me. “It’s no stray electron. Ghost images tend to stay on the screen regardless of how we turn.”

  He was fidgety. He got out the binoculars, looked down the moonpath.

  He was doing that when he said, “I’ve got it. Something, anyway.” He turned the plane, banking steeply to put the contact ahead of us.

  As we were in the turn, he said, “It’s a submarine, I think.”

  As he leveled the wings the radioman shouted, “Contact.”

  Modahl looked with binoculars. “It’s a sub conning tower. About six miles. Running southeast, I think. We’re in his stern quarter.”

  He banked the plane steeply right, then disengaged the autopilot and lifted the nose and added power. “We’ll climb,” he said. “Make a diving attack down the moonpath.”

  “Going to drop a bomb?”

  “One, I think. There may be nothing at Buka or Rabaul.”

  He explained what he wanted to the crew over the intercom. “We’ll use the guns on the conning tower,” he said, “then drop the bomb as we go over. You guys in the blisters and tunnel, hit ‘em with all you got as we go by. They’ll go under before we can make another run, so let’s make this one count.”

  Everyone put on life vests, just in case.

  “Your job,” Modahl said to me, “is to watch the altimeter and keep me from flying into the water. I want an altitude callout every ten seconds or so. Not every hundred feet, but every ten seconds.”