Three days passed without news of any Jap naval maneuvers. That was not surprising, for the weather was frightful. The regular bombing runs from Henderson Field to Rabaul and Gasmata had been called off because of it. Two reconnaissance planes were missing—probably wrecked by those unspeakably fierce South Pacific squalls. It seemed unlikely that enemy warships would be out.

Nevertheless, Colonel Bullock was nervous.

“The Japs have used bad weather as a screen for their movements before now,” he pointed out to Barry Blake. “If they wanted to risk getting off course and piling up on a reef, they could sneak up within striking distance of this coast, and land their troops when the fog lifts.”

“Sweet Rosy O’Grady is ready to take off the minute you give permission, sir,” Barry responded. “We’ll gladly take the chance of running into a squall. All of us would rather be upstairs fighting the weather than stewing in our own juice down here.”

The colonel met Barry’s eyes, and grinned.

“You mean you’d risk anything for a chance to bomb the Japs,” he chuckled. “All right, Blake! You can take off at dawn tomorrow, wind or no wind. Head eastward toward Rabaul, then swing around by the Admiralty Islands. The Japs might even send a convoy from Truk, their big base to the north.”

Rosy O’Grady’s crew was jubilant when they heard the order. The fog, the bugs, the everlasting sticky heat of Mau River made idleness a torture. That night they crawled under their mosquito bars and fell sound asleep without the usual “bull session” of complaints.

The fog had lifted a little when they finished their pre-dawn breakfast and headed for the runway. Rosy’s four engines were whooping it up as the greaseballs warmed them.

“That’s real music!” Fred Marmon shouted to Barry. “If they run as sweetly as that today, no storm’s going to worry us.”

“She’s bombed up. I saw to that last night,” said Chick Enders at Barry’s elbow. “They’re all half-ton babies. If we should spot a Jap convoy, we’ll be set to slam it.”

“If!” repeated Curly Levitt, the navigator. “It’s a pretty big ‘if,’ even granting that there is a convoy at sea. There won’t be many holes in this cloud ceiling, I’m afraid....”

His voice faded out beneath the thunder of five thousand horses, as Rosy O’Grady strained at her braked wheels. The engine roar died down suddenly, a moment later, and the mechanics slid out of the hatch. The sergeant in charge made a circle with his thumb and finger, indicating “Okay!” Barry Blake nodded, and plunged into Rosy’s dim interior.

The runway was a vaguely lighter strip down the center of the field as they took off. It dropped away, as lightly as a streak of fog. Hap Newton touched the lever that raised the wheels. Suddenly the blanketing mist closed them in completely.

For the first hour Barry flew by instruments. Then, just off the western tip of New Britain, the air about them cleared. No loom of Arabia ever wove such gorgeous colors as the rising sun now spread over the cloud rug below Rosy’s broad wings. Among deep blue shadows the rolling vapors gleamed with gold and pink.

In the bomber’s transparent nose, Chick Enders gazed at the scene, open-mouthed.

“Fellows,” he said in a voice of wonder. “That’s a sight worth any flier’s life. It’s Heaven’s art work, fresh from the hand of God!”

Nobody else spoke. Chick Enders had expressed the feeling of every man in the plane who had a view of the colors below. Soon, however, the cloud painting changed, the gold growing whiter and more brilliant, the blue and pink fading out.

Fifty miles farther on a gap appeared, and through it the white-capped ocean. For nearly an hour the water remained in sight. A hundred miles from Rabaul the ceiling closed again, and Barry turned his Fortress back on the second leg of a big triangle.

No more breaks appeared until they were halfway to the Admiralty Islands. Here the clouds were higher, with small gaps in them that opened and closed as the winds whipped the masses of vapor along. Below them the ceiling seemed to be several hundred feet above the sea.

“I’m going down, Hap,” Barry Blake announced. “We won’t be able to see as far as we’d like to, but we’re doing no good up here above the ceiling. Besides, I have a hunch....”

“Play it, then,” Hap Newton advised. “In this game a bit of a hunch is sometimes worth a barrel of reasoning. Chick, be ready with that bombsight! We might come out right over a Jap battlewagon!”

The bomber sank through the fluffy cloud mass like a swooping eagle. For a moment her pilots could see nothing outside. Barry kept his eyes glued to the altimeter: a thousand feet, nine hundred, eight hundred—Suddenly they were through, with the rolling ocean so near that its white-topped waves seemed to reach up for them.

Hastily Barry pulled out of his shallow dive, and climbed for the clouds. His hunch had been right, as the shouts of Hap Newton and Chick attested. Spread out over a twenty mile area were a dozen large vessels.

“The Jap convoy!” Hap cried. “No doubt about it—they’re heading southwest toward New Guinea. Let’s give ’em all we’ve got—”

CRANG!

The blast of a small-caliber shell inside Rosy’s fuselage shocked her crew into grim alertness. Two seconds later her top turret guns chattered. Empty shell cases tumbled smoking to the floor behind Barry, as he zoomed the Fortress into the nearest mass of clouds.

“Where is he, Soapy?” the young pilot asked through clenched teeth.

“Right on the other side of this cloud, last I saw of him,” replied the radioman-gunner. “He’s a big Jap twin-float bomber ... looks like an Aichi T98.”

“Two 20-mm. cannon and four fixed wing guns,” stated Barry, recalling what he had learned of the T98’s armament. “Unless he gets in some lucky shots our .50-calibers ought to be a match for him. We’re going after that baby, and blast him out of the air!”

The broken clouds opened out suddenly, revealing the two planes flying almost abreast, and barely a stone’s throw apart. They opened fire together. Now it was Rosy O’Grady’s full broadside that came into play—nose, tail and side guns, spitting bullets that could chew chunks out of railroad tracks.

Rows of holes like stitching appeared here and there in the Aichi’s fuselage, but the “greenhouse” of the Jap plane appeared bulletproof. Rosy’s slugs struck it and bounced away at right angles. Inside could be seen the Jap gunners, hunched over their weapons, their faces drawn and tense. Smoke drifted from the hot muzzles of their cannon.

Rosy O’Grady was taking punishment. Her fin and rudder looked like a slice of Swiss cheese. Shell holes gaped in her fuselage. Shell fragments were whizzing about her interior—thin, jagged bits of steel with cutting edges. Every gunner was nicked and bleeding, yet all stuck by their guns.

The Jap was catching plenty of trouble, too. His left hand engine was smoking, and his forward cannon appeared to be damaged or jammed. He made a swift, left hand turn, trying to escape Rosy’s broadside.

Barry saw the Aichi’s play, and countered it. The huge Fortress seemed to pivot inside the Jap’s half circle. The strain of that sudden turn would have broken anything but a fighter or a Fortress in two, but Rosy took it. Her deadly broadside kept hammering the now-frightened Jap.

The Aichi nosed up, disappearing behind a long streak of cloud. The shuddering racket of Rosy’s .50-calibers stopped. Barry Blake wiped the blood off his forehead, where a ricocheting shell fragment had cut him. He winked at Hap Newton, who smiled back despite a sliced cheek.

“Ball turret from pilot,” he said into the interphone. “Watch out for a trick. That Jap might try to dive below us and rip at our belly.... There he goes now!.”

“I see him, sir!” said Cracker Jackson, as his bottom guns opened up.

Barry shoved the wheel forward sharply, diving after the Jap. Smoke from the Aichi’s left engine was drifting back to blend with the powder smoke of her rear cannon. A shell slammed into Chick Enders’ left gun with a crack that resounded through the plane.

Chick lost balance as Barry pulled out of the dive, barely two hundred feet above the water. The little bombardier shook his numbed fingers, grabbed the right-hand machine gun and swung it broadside. Again the two planes were flying side by side, but the Jap was licked.

Flame burst from his crippled engine. A front panel of his “greenhouse” collapsed. He swerved wildly, nosed downward, and struck the water with a terrific splash.

Barry zoomed his ship as steeply as he dared. In that last minute of dogfighting he had flown within two thousand yards of a Jap cruiser. Tracer shells from the warship were streaking the air about him.

In a tight climbing turn the big Fortress dodged, heading for the protecting overcast of clouds. If one of those five-inch naval shells hit her, she would be a dead duck, and every man aboard her knew it.

Chick Enders was not satisfied with mere escape. He turned to his pilot with a pleading expression.

“Give me one crack at that warship, Barry,” he begged. “What’s the use of coming out with a full bomb load if we’ve got to take it all back?”

Barry banked his plane, and climbed again. The clouds enfolded the battle-torn Fortress like soft fleece.

“All right, Chick,” he consented. “I’ll give you a crack at something, but not when they’ve got us pinned to the wall. It’s more important to get the report of this convoy back to headquarters than to sink a ship. Soapy, get on the air and let me talk to the base.”

Circling at reduced speed within the sheltering cloud blanket, Barry radioed a brief report of the convoy’s location, direction, and probable size.

“Shot down twin-float Aichi T98 that attacked us,” he concluded. “We’re going back to leave a few calling cards on the Jap’s decks.”

Roaring down through the ceiling, Barry spotted the circle of flame that still marked the grave of the Aichi. Two vessels of the convoy were steaming past it on either side. The nearer was a big, troop-carrying destroyer. The farther was a cargo vessel of six thousand tons.

“We’ll take the destroyer first,” yelped Chick Enders, cuddling his bombsight.

They were so near that the Jap gunners had no time to swing their heavier guns. The shots that they aimed flew wild. Already the destroyer’s deck was almost beneath. From stern to bow Rosy O’Grady’s shadow swept over the doomed warship.

The thousand-pound bomb went through her deck as through paper, and exploded in her bowels. The destroyer broke in two, spewing into the waves shapeless things that had been men and machinery.

“Now for that cargo tub!” cried Chick, his voice high pitched with excitement.

Barry banked around and came at the Jap freighter head-on. It was a dangerous maneuver, for a cruiser scarcely a mile away had opened fire. Flak was coming near enough to make the air bumpy, and there was no chance to dodge while making a bombing run. Barry hugged tight to the ceiling at a scant thousand feet.

“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.”

All of the crew had some wounds, but none of them were dangerous. Rosy’s pilots had escaped with scratches. Chick Enders had a bruised hand and a cut on his leg. Their hurts were just enough to get them “warmed up for a real fight,” as Hap Newton put it.

“When we land, we’ll stick with Rosy until she’s bombed and serviced for another run,” Chick suggested. “Only the pilots need to report to Colonel Bullock, and he won’t ground them for a couple of scratched faces. That way, we can take off with the other planes for the all-out attack.”

The plan was unanimously approved, but it was doomed to failure. Rosy O’Grady made a three-point landing, like the perfect lady she was, but as she rolled to a stop, Chick Enders groaned.

“There’s Colonel Bullock coming out to us in the jeep!” he exclaimed. “He’ll never let us take off without a real inspection. And that means we’ll miss the big fight!”