1942

Hawkins grinned. “I take it you don’t trust him.”

“Hawk, the old army was a small club, and the garrison on Oahu was an even smaller chapter of that club. Everyone knew everybody else, and, yeah, I knew about good ol’ Sergeant Charley Finch. Hell, everybody did. You’re right, he was a minor crook and a total shit. Keep this under your rusty helmet, Hawk, but he was under investigation by the FBI.”

Hawkins whistled. “Why?”

“Stealing army stores and selling them. I got involved in my intelligence capacity because the FBI thought he was selling weapons to gangsters and other people who didn’t like the United States.”

“Jesus, now what?”

“Well, we gotta remember that he was never arrested, never indicted, never tried, and never found guilty. Who knows, he may be innocent of anything major.”

Jake thought of the supplies he’d “liberated” before the surrender. Did they make him different from Finch? “At any rate, he’s the type of person who actually could show up fat and healthy when everyone else is starving, and that doesn’t necessarily make him a crook. In fact, it might make him the kind of cunning son of a bitch who could help us.”

“Okay, Colonel Jake, then what does it really make him?”

“Someone we watch very carefully, Hawk. Either he’s telling the truth, or he’s doing things I don’t even want to think about.”

Hawkins took a deep breath as he realized what Jake was implying. “The killing on Lanai? Those seven guys who got caught by the Japs? You think he had something to do with that?”

“It’s almost too awful to contemplate, isn’t it? I can’t believe a fellow American would have anything to do with it, but I can’t get the possibility out of my mind. Nobody has any proof, and you can’t send somebody to jail on my hunches. On the other hand, if Sergeant Finch is such a damned great hustler, he may be an invaluable asset to us. We’re gonna use him, Hawk, but”-Jake grinned tightly-”we’re going to watch him like a hawk.”

The giant flying boat wasn’t particularly difficult to get or keep airborne, although keeping it on the straight and narrow in a stiff desert wind was a challenge, even for a skilled pilot like Colonel Jimmy Doolittle.

Below him were a series of rectangles painted in white on the flat and barren ground east of San Diego. They were approximately one thousand feet by one hundred feet and were intended to simulate a very large ship, and a ship that was anchored. Doolittle and Nimitz had concluded that anyone could hit a tank farm full of large and combustible oil storage tanks. It would take real skill to hit a carrier if, by chance, one was in Pearl Harbor at the time of the strike.

The priorities were ironically like those given the Japanese on December 7. First were the carriers. In their absence, the oil storage tanks. Nowhere on the list were battleships. Even if there were battlewagons in Pearl, they were to be ignored in favor of the carriers and the oil storage facilities. My, Doolittle thought, how the mighty have fallen. His personal opinion was that battleships were particularly dramatic dinosaurs that could do damage only if they were permitted to get within range. The purpose of a plane was to keep them out of range and to sink them.

After numerous attempts, Doolittle and the other pilots had come to the conclusion that the Boeing Model 314 flying boat was a lousy bomber, and that hitting any target was extremely difficult.

Of course, if they’d been able to use one of the new, secret Norden bombsights, it might have been different. High command, however, had nixed that idea. Too much chance of the bombsights falling into enemy hands, they’d said, which pretty much told him what they thought of his chances for survival.

This conclusion was further reinforced when Doolittle was informed that he would be promoted to brigadier general on his return, and not before. He understood fully. Enough generals had been killed or captured in this war. They did not need another one for the Japanese press to trumpet as a triumph. Colonels, even bird colonels, were a dime a dozen.

The massive plane came in over the target at five hundred feet. Five other planes flew at the same height over other, similar rectangles.

The original eight planes had been reduced to six because of maintenance problems and had been cannibalized for parts.

The bombardier signaled and released the bags of flour that served as dummy bombs. The plane shuddered slightly as the bombs were dropped, and Doolittle pulled hard to lift her out of harm’s way. In his mind he could visualize scores of antiaircraft guns shooting at him, while a dozen Zeros streaked downward to blow him out of the sky. He decided that he must have been nuts to have volunteered for this.

“Got some hits,” exulted Bart Howell from the tail of the plane. The skinny little engineer was usually airsick, but this time he actually looked happy. Then Doolittle saw the caked puke on the front of his coveralls. Doolittle laughed. Howell was giving his all for his country, even his lunch.