When Barry next saw Curly Levitt, the dapper navigator was firing a sub-machine gun at the searchlighted sky. Black parachutes were dropping toward the field, with Jap soldiers dangling beneath them. Every man on the field who could find a gun of any kind was shooting at the rain of enemies. And the Japs were firing back.

The party started with a terrific bomb barrage about midnight. The Japs evidently believed that neither aircraft detectors nor antiaircraft equipment were as yet set up. They were wrong about both. Another thing they didn’t know was that most of the living quarters, supplies, and even planes, had been moved into the jungle that fringed the field.

A few moments after the bombs started falling, the new antiaircraft batteries went into action. They caught three of the Jap bombers with their shells. In return, bombs wiped out two guns, three searchlights, and their crews. Then came the parachute troops.

There weren’t many of them—not more than fifty in all. Apparently the fire was too intense for the Jap transport planes to risk. Why these few suicide squads were dropped remained a mystery until morning.

Barry reached the field as the first ’chutists landed. He saw a Garand rifle in the hand of a soldier who had been killed by shrapnel. The weapon, he found, was fully loaded—and unharmed. As he turned to pick a target, the field’s floodlights went on.

A dozen of the Japs lay motionless, tangled in their parachutes. The others were squirming free, or firing from bombholes with their small caliber sub-machine guns. Barry felt a bullet tug at his trouser leg; another burned the skin of his shoulder. He threw himself prone.

A Jap had just wriggled free of his chute and was diving toward a bomb crater. Barry took a snap shot at the man, and saw him collapse. He switched his aim to a hole from which the pale flames of Jap machine guns were licking like serpents’ tongues. They were firing at the floodlights, which were rapidly going out.

The shadows deepened across the bomb-torn field. Barry was sure that some of them were Japs crawling toward the jungle. He fired at the nearest. Suddenly he realized that he was trying to shoot an empty gun.

Bullets were kicking up dirt too close for comfort. Barry glanced about and spotted a convenient bomb crater. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed it before. Clutching his empty gun, he rolled into the hole.

As he reached the bottom a steely hand seized him by the throat. Instinctively his hand shot up, grasped a muscular wrist. Moonlight glinted faintly on the long knife in the hand that he had blocked.

While he struggled with both hands to wrest the weapon away, a rocket streaked up the sky. Directly overhead the flare burst, flooding everything with white light. Barry’s enemy gasped and dropped his butcher knife. He was Fred Marmon.

“Lieutenant Blake!” the redhead yelped. “Thank Heaven for that flare—I might have carved you for a Jap.”

“You mean I might have broken your arm!” retorted Barry. “Listen, Fred—if you’ve got an extra gun or a clip of ammo, let’s have it. I think those yellow snakes are heading this way.”

“I have something better,” Marmon replied. “A sack of hand grenades. I got ’em when the Japs started landing. Help yourself—”

He broke off as Barry made a lightning lunge past him with his empty rifle. A high-pitched scream rang briefly. Barry had rammed his gun-muzzle like a bayonet into the face of a crawling Jap who had reached the edge of the hole.

Another queer-shaped helmet appeared, and beside it a machine-gun’s muzzle. Barry swung his gun-butt at the weapon, knocking it aside. A split instant later Fred struck with his knife. The second Jap kicked convulsively.

“I fixed him!” the redhead muttered. “See any more, Lieutenant?”

Other flares were lighting the field. Barry spotted a furtive movement in a crater thirty yards from the jungle’s edge.

“There’s a bunch that’s getting ready to break for the bush, I think,” he said. “Give me a few of your grenades.”

“Swell! We’ll both rush ’em,” Fred Marmon responded. “Here’s the bag of pineapples.... Help yourself, sir.”

Barry stuffed his pockets hastily. He kept one grenade in his hand, with his finger through the ring.

“I’ll go first,” he said shortly.

Crouching low, he sprinted toward the Japs’ bomb hole. Before he had quite reached throwing distance, the raiders saw him and opened fire. A slug glanced off his helmet. He took three more strides and flung himself flat. Behind a ten-inch-high ridge of earth he pulled the pin of his first grenade. Then, rising on one elbow, he flung it.

Five yards away he glimpsed Fred hurling another. As the second grenade landed six Japs boiled up out of the bomb crater. Two were still on the edge when the grenades went off—Barry’s in the hole; Fred’s just ahead of them.

A cheer went up from the American riflemen and machine gunners. A new storm of gunfire broke out, aimed at three or four other bomb craters.

“Come on, Fred!” Barry yelled. “We’ll clean out the rest of the snakeholes. The boys are shooting to keep the Japs’ heads down for us.”

“Right with you, sir!” came the sergeant’s shout.

So furious was their friends’ fire that few Jap bullets came near Barry and Fred. Crouched within easy throw of the occupied craters, they flung their deadly little missiles. Some of the enemy attempted a dash for the bush, only to be cut down. Once a grenade was tossed back. It exploded in the air dangerously close to Barry. Later he found that a flying fragment had cut his cheek.

With their “pineapples” gone, the two Fortress men trotted back to the trees.

“Why didn’t I bring another bag of ’em?” the red-headed engineer wailed. “I just know there’s a few more Japs playing possum out there on the field. Only way to get ’em is to toss a grenade into every hole you can find—”

Just in front of them an antiaircraft battery went into action. The white fingers of the searchlights began combing the sky again. Between the gun reports, Barry caught the scream of a falling bomb.

“Down!” he yelled, pulling Fred to the ground beside him.

The ground erupted near them. Half dazed by the shock, the two friends started crawling. Dirt rained down on their helmets. From farther up the field came more bomb concussions.

This time the bombardment was less intense, but it lasted for half an hour. One Jap bomber followed another at irregular intervals, flying at a very high altitude. The light of a blasted and blazing gasoline truck furnished a plain target, not to mention the antiaircraft gun flames and the searchlights. Yet the Japs were so high that more bombs fell in the jungle than struck the field.

When the raid was over, Barry Blake headed for the dressing station. His injured head was pounding like a bass drum. He longed to lie down and close his eyes.

There was no place for him in the hospital tent, however. The medical officer was operating on men wounded by bomb fragments—tying off severed arteries, sewing up torn flesh, probing for shrapnel. He was stripped to the waist, covered with sweat and blood. The medical-corps men were equally busy.

Barry had no intention of getting in their way. He found some aspirin for himself, swallowed two of the pills, swabbed iodine on his cut cheek, and left. In his crew’s shelter tent he found Curly and Fred arguing about the raid. He sank down on a cot beside them.

“There’s something queer about those parachute troops,” Curly declared. “The Japs didn’t drop them just by accident. They had some very important job which only suicide squads could do. If only we knew what it was....”

“Don’t worry, sir,” said the red-haired sergeant. “They didn’t accomplish it. We’ve just searched the field and found only four live Japs. They were all wounded. Two of ’em opened fire on us and were blotted out. Number Three played dead until one of our boys tried to turn him over. Then he set off a grenade that blew both of ’em to pieces. Number Four struck with his teeth—just like a rattlesnake—and bit a medical-corps man’s cheek. He’s the only one that’s still alive.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure that they didn’t accomplish anything important,” said Curly Levitt. “A few of them may still be loose in the jungle. I have a hunch that we’ll hear from them yet.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you, Curly,” Barry Blake put in. “I’m not so much worried about the few Jap parachutists that may have escaped to the bush. To be sure, they could do plenty of damage. But if immediate damage had been their purpose, we’d have had two or three times as many to fight. I have a hunch that this bombing and skirmishing on the field was just a trick to cover up some other maneuver.”

“You mean a Jap landing on the beach, sir?” asked Fred Marmon. “That thought hopped into my head, too—but it’s no good. Our boys have that coastline guarded so well that wild pigs couldn’t get through without raising an alarm. Their scouts would have brought us warning.”

“Let’s try to get a little shuteye, then,” Curly Levitt yawned. “We won’t help matters by worrying or arguing all night. ’Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”

At dawn the field was roused by a third bombardment. This time it was a shelling from medium-heavy field guns. It plowed the already bombed runways until the field looked like a map of the moon’s craters. Two swift fighter planes tried to take off before the last smooth strip of ground was blown up. One of them ground-looped.

The second, by clever dodging of bomb holes, managed to take the air. Fifteen minutes later it returned, riddled with bullet holes. The pilot nosed over trying to land on the field’s least plowed end. When they pulled him out of his wrecked fighter he said that he had flown over the enemy positions at less than five hundred feet and had a pretty good look at them.

The Japs were entrenched on a grassy ridge, about 1500 feet above the field and within easy range. There were two or three hundred of them, with at least twenty pieces of artillery camouflaged in clumps of trees. Evidently they had been landed by parachute from a swarm of huge transport planes, under cover of the night attack on the air field.

“You were right about the purpose of that raid, Lieutenant Blake,” Fred Marmon admitted, as the Rosy O’Grady’s crew moved their tent farther into the jungle. “The Japs will make our field useless as long as they hold that ridge. The problem is how to clean them out.”

“Better heads than ours are working on that right now,” Barry told him. “We could bomb the Jap positions with planes based at Port Moresby, for instance. Or we could bring up troops and take the ridge by assault. But neither job would be as easy as it sounds. We’ll just have to wait for the brass-hats to decide.”

The American plan did not develop for forty-eight hours. During that time a transport vessel arrived with more antiaircraft and two companies of soldiers. They were welcome additions to the field’s strength, but they did not solve the problem of the Japs’ shellfire.

On the third day after the Japs’ first raid, the field’s commandant called all his officers together. These included the air as well as the ground forces. Between the regular whoomp of bursting shells, the colonel outlined his plan of attack.

“Tomorrow,” he stated bluntly, “we shall attack the enemy position on Grassy Ridge. I should like to have had artillery here to soften up our objective, but we cannot wait for it to arrive. A surprise attack must take its place. After dark the infantry will move forward as far as possible. They will carry iron rations, and ammunition for their weapons. The attack will be at dawn.”

“How about supplies, in case the Japs aren’t routed by the first assault?” an infantry captain asked.

“In that case, our engineers will open a jeep road through the bush with bulldozers,” the commandant replied. “They’ll start in the morning, and push ahead to the steep hillside a mile and a half from Grassy Ridge. From there on we’ll have to carry all supplies by manpower, including mortars for close-in bombardment.”

“How about us fliers, Colonel?” the commanding officer of the Fortress squadron spoke up. “Do we have to loaf while even the native blacks are doing their bit? Can’t we fix up one runway while the Japs are busy ducking our shells? My boys would love a chance to smash those egg-heads with a few five-hundred-pounders.”

“You’ll probably have your chance, Captain,” the commandant smiled. “Building a road to the Ridge is the engineers’ first job; after that they’ll tackle the field. Don’t let your crews get mixed up in the ground fighting, or some ships may be short-handed when you’re ready to take off.... I think that is all for the time being, gentlemen.”