Reporting for duty at the Queensland repair base, Barry ran into surprises still more bewildering. The first was the news that he was promoted to first lieutenant; the second, that he would be given command immediately of a Flying Fortress. The ship and crew, he was told, were now waiting for him on the runway.

Wondering if it were all some crazy delusion, Barry hurried to the airport. For a moment it seemed that he must be back in Seattle, looking at Sweet Rosy O’Grady for the first time. For there she sat, with her inboard props turning slowly in the sun, and her name painted clear on the fuselage.

There was even a tall, wide-shouldered figure in flying togs, leaning against the plane’s tail. He looked like Captain O’Grady from a distance. But he couldn’t be!

Barry wiped his hand across his eyes, and walked toward the ship. The tall fellow looked up. He wasn’t the Old Man—he was Hap Newton!

Hap let out a whoop like a locomotive and charged down upon Barry Blake. The two friends proceeded to do a war-dance, bombarding each other with questions. The surprise was entirely mutual. Hap had been based in another part of the South Pacific until recently. His B-26 Marauder had run out of gas near the northern tip of Queensland one night, and its crew had bailed out. Only Hap and the bombardier-gunner had made shore. Just this morning Hap had been assigned to the Rosy O’Grady as co-pilot.

“And now you are my skipper!” he exclaimed. “It’s such a wild coincidence that I can’t believe it yet.... But just wait, Barry—the shocks aren’t over. Step inside and meet the rest of us.”

Barry turned to the open hatch, but he had no chance to enter. Men were boiling out of it as if the ship were too hot for them. In five seconds they were all around him. Fred Marmon, Cracker Jackson, Tony Romani, Curly Levitt, and Soapy Babbitt, with his broken shoulder still a little stiff, but useable.

“Where’s Danny Hale?” Barry asked, the moment they gave him a chance to speak.

Silence, as stunning as a blow, answered him. Barry’s face went white.

“Tell me, boys,” he muttered through stiff lips. “You—you mean that Danny—that he....”

“He got transferred, Barry,” Curly Levitt said quietly. “It was just after the medical-corps men carried you back to the dressing station on Grassy Ridge. A bunch of us were trying to capture a Jap field gun. We ducked into a slit trench and started tossing hand grenades, but the Japs chucked them right back at us before they could explode. One landed in our trench. Danny covered it to protect the rest of us—and just then it went off.”

“Thanks, Curly,” Barry said in a choked voice. “Sorry my question brought it all back to you. It—it is easier, somehow, to think of Danny as simply transferred.... Have they sent us a bombardier yet?”

“They sent him—such as he is!” replied a strangely familiar voice.

Barry jumped as if he had been shot. Through the hatchway dropped a small, bandy-legged man whose short blonde hair bristled like the fuzz of a newly hatched duckling.

“Chick Enders!” Barry cried, making a grab for his old friend. “How did you get here?”

“The same way Hap Newton did,” answered Chick, grinning from ear to ear. “I was the bombardier who bailed out with him from the B-26.”

“Boys,” said Barry Blake, turning to face his crew, “I know that in a few seconds I’m going to wake up and find myself back in my little hospital bed. The sawbones will be looking solemn and saying: ‘That chunk of shrapnel went deeper than we thought. It’s affected his brain!’”

He cuffed back his hat and laughed.

“It’s too good to be true, finding you all here—and Sweet Rosy O’Grady too! I’m going to say hello to her before she vanishes in a pink fog, or something!”

Understanding chuckles followed him as he dived into Rosy’s open hatchway.

“We’ll leave him alone with her for a few minutes,” Curly Levitt suggested. “Mess call is about due. Lieutenant Enders can wait here to show the Old Man to his quarters.”

It was past midnight before Rosy’s crew talked themselves out and fell asleep. In the morning, Barry reported for orders. He learned that his new battlefront base was to be another jungle airport, farther west along the New Guinea coast. They would fly the shortest route across the island’s central mountain range, and carry a full load of bombs.

“Not much excitement on the way,” Fred Marmon commented; as the crew headed toward their waiting ship. “There’s nothing in the interior but mountains and jungles and wild men. Even the Japs steer clear of it, they tell me!”

“You’ll have plenty of excitement once we reach the northern coast, Fred,” Barry told him. “The Japs have been punching back hard at our new airports. They realize that, given enough bases for a big air offensive, we can push them right out of the East Indies. They can’t keep backing up forever, and keep any ‘face’ with their people at home.”

Sweet Rosy O’Grady took off as smoothly as she had on her maiden flight. Except for the patched places in her aluminum skin, there was little to show that she was not a new ship.

“As a matter of fact, she’s better than new, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon declared. “She’s been battle-tested. Every part of her, except these new engines, has stood up under the worst strains. She won’t fail us, no matter what we ask of her.”

“They patched her up in New Guinea—enough to fly her back to this Queensland repair base,” Curly Levitt explained. “Here they gave her a complete overhauling. Most of her replaced parts came from other wrecked ships—”

“Like Hap and me!” spoke up Chick Enders.

“Yes, you’re battle-tested, too,” Barry laughed. “By the way, did either of you hear or see anything of our old messmate, Glenn Crayle? After all the surprises of the past twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him waiting for us at the new airport. Would you, Hap?”

“Aw, don’t talk about it, Barry,” his big co-pilot replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised, either, but I’d be pretty doggoned sore. The sight of that mister would sour my stomach for the duration.”

“Mine, too—unless he’s toned down a lot,” agreed Chick. “This war does queer things to people. It may have let the wind out of Crayle and showed him that he wasn’t such a hot pilot as he thought. I hope so, anyway.”

“I believe you’ve got hopes for Hirohito, too,” Hap Newton scoffed. “Let’s forget Crayle until he does show up—and I hope that event will be a long, long time away!”

The blue expanse of Torres Strait now showed beyond the green of Cape York. For an hour the Fortress hung above it at six thousand feet. Then, almost before her crew realized the change, the high grasslands of New Guinea were sweeping beneath her belly. Far to the east lay the Gulf of Papua, with a mass of cumulus clouds tumbling above it. Ahead rose the island’s mountainous backbone.

“Let’s fly a little lower, Barry,” Chick Enders said. “You won’t have to start climbing over the central range for half an hour. I’d like to get a look at one of these native villages, and give the local hillbillies a thrill at the same time.”

“All right, Chick,” Barry replied. “But we won’t do any hedgehopping with a quarter of a million dollars worth of Fortress. If the air isn’t bumpy I might take Rosy down to five hundred feet—when and if you spot a thatch-roofed metropolis.”

“Don’t try to thrill ’em by dropping an egg on the town pump,” said Hap Newton. “General MacArthur has caused the word to be spread among the tribesmen that United Nations airmen are their friends. We wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression.”

“I wonder how many New Guinea wild men could tell the Jap ‘rising sun’ from our insignia,” Chick remarked, “even if they were near enough to—oh-oh! Look, Barry! Straight ahead on that little grassy plateau ... don’t those patches look like native gardens to you?”

By way of answer, Barry eased the wheel forward. In a long, flat dive Rosy O’Grady roared down toward the plateau. Moment by moment the tiny squares and oblongs of different colors took the shape of cultivated gardens. Near by appeared a few loaf-shaped native houses.

“There’s your village!” Barry exclaimed. “Looks like a busy place, too. They’re clearing more grassland for garden space, if I’m not mistaken.”

Looking down through the plastiglass of the big bomber’s nose, her crew could distinguish twenty or thirty human figures at one end of the cultivated section. Suddenly the natives stopped gaping at the diving plane. They ran for cover.

“We’re wowing ’em, all right,” whooped Hap Newton. “Just see those grass skirts scatter! You ought to be ashamed of scaring the ladies this way, Barry!”

“They’ll have something to talk about for a month at least,” laughed the Rosy’s skipper, as he pulled back on the wheel. “Are you satisfied with this glimpse you’ve had of native culture, Chick?”

“Not by a long shot!” the homely bombardier replied. “I wish you’d turn back for another look, Barry. There’s something blamed queer about that village. Several things, to be truthful.”

There was a grim note in Chick’s voice that Barry recognized. His bombardier was in deadly earnest.

“Okay,” he said shortly. “Slap on the coal, Hap. We’re going back for another look-see. What was it that struck you as queer, Chick?”

“Since when do men wear grass skirts, or New Guinea women wear their hair clipped short?” Chick responded. “I had a better view here in the nose than the rest of you did. I’ll swear to what I saw. And, while we’re asking questions, will somebody tell me when the natives of this country became market gardeners? There’s enough cultivated land around those dozen thatched huts to supply food for ten villages.... Look down now and tell me what you think of it!”

For wordless moments every man in the cockpit gazed at the orderly patchwork of little fields below. Suddenly Barry grasped the truth.

“Look at the pattern down there, Hap!” he exclaimed. “They’ve broken it up pretty cleverly with camouflage, but the cleared place is L-shaped. If that isn’t an airport I’m cockeyed.”

“Then those birds in grass skirts—” Curly Levitt’s voice gasped through the interphone.

“—were Japs!” Chick Enders finished the sentence. “Go as low as you dare, Barry, and see what else we can spot.”

“Man all the guns!” Barry’s order crackled in the headsets. “Cracker, be ready to strafe any antiaircraft before they can pot us....”

He broke off as the white lines of tracer bullets streaked upward from a patch of bushes at one side of the field. Other guns opened fire.

Small bullet holes appeared suddenly in the bomber’s fuselage and wings. But four of Rosy’s .50-caliber machine guns were talking back—the twin weapons of her bottom and tail turrets. Seconds later she had swept out of range.

“Well, whaddyuh know about that?” Hap Newton blurted. “New Guinea Gardens Grow Grass-skirted Gunners. Who’d ever believe that headline?”

“Why didn’t they throw any flak at us?” Curly Levitt asked. “A field as big as that ought to be protected by more than machine gun fire.”

“The airport isn’t completed yet,” Barry pointed out. “The Japs probably haven’t had a chance to bring in heavier installations. There wasn’t even a camouflaged plane in sight—nothing but those steel-mat runways dressed up to look like vegetable gardens. Of course it’s possible that there were some bigger guns but no time to man them, before we were past.”

“It’s worth risking them to give the field a thorough pasting,” Chick Enders said. “Let’s go back at about five thousand and give it every bomb in our racks.”

No shellfire greeted them as they made their run over the Jap airfield. Even the machine guns were silent. The grass-skirted gun-crews were fleeing through the surrounding grass and scrub like scared rabbits when the first stick of bombs whistled down.

They left the runways looking like a raw, black wound in the earth, with a thick cloud of dust hanging over it. All their bombs had struck with the accuracy of rifle bullets, five-hundred-pounders that flung the twisted steel matting high in the air.

“Get the exact position of this spot, Curly,” Barry Blake said, as he climbed into the hot blue sky. “The sons of Nippon won’t be using their little mountain playground as long as our fliers can keep an eye on it.”

“That’s right,” agreed the Rosy’s navigator. “We’ve wiped out an air base from which the Nips could have raided Queensland, Port Moresby, and any of our northeast airports with equal ease. And we’ve discovered some of their latest tricks of camouflage, thanks to Chick Enders. Headquarters will be glad to know about it.”

For the rest of the trip Rosy O’Grady’s pilots and bombardier kept their eyes peeled for suspicious looking “market gardens,” but none appeared. An hour after they crossed the height of land the ocean was again in sight. Soapy Babbitt contacted their new airport on the Mau River and received the answer to come in.

As the field came in sight, Barry noted that it was scooped out of the tropical forest, not far from the sea. A United Nations transport vessel lay just beyond the beach. It was unloading by means of lighters. In this manner the new airdromes all up and down the coast would be quickly furnished with equipment and defenses. The danger, of course, was that the Japs might send warships to shell the fields at night. They might even land troops a short march from the field itself.

All this passed through Barry’s mind as he circled for a landing. He had experienced one shelling from warships, and a worse one from air-borne artillery. No base, he decided, was safe from a sneak attack. In any war the main strategy must be to “dish it out” to the enemy in heavier quantities than he could return.