第 16 页

On the control panel, there were four feathering buttons, one for each engine, covered by a plastic shield. Leaning between Cuppernell and Phil, the engineer flipped the shield and banged down on a button. The moment he did it, Green Hornet heaved and lurched left. The engineer had hit the No. 2 button, not the No. 1 button. Both leftward engines were now dead, and No. 1 still wasn’t feathered.

Phil pushed the two working engines full on, trying to keep the plane aloft long enough to restart the good left engine. The racing right engines, pulling against the dragging, liftless side, rolled the plane halfway onto its left side, sending it into a spiral. The engine wouldn’t start. The plane kept dropping.

Green Hornet was doomed. The best Phil could do was to try to level it out to ditch. He grunted three words into the interphone:

“Prepare to crash.”

Louie ran from the flight deck, yelling for everyone to get to crash stations. As the plane whirled, he dug out the extra life raft, then clambered toward his crash position by the right waist window. He saw Mac, the new tail gunner, clutching the survival provisions box. Other men were frantically pulling on Mae Wests. Louie was distantly aware that Mitchell hadn’t emerged from the nose. It was Mitchell’s duty to calculate the plane’s position, relay this to the radioman so he could send a distress signal, and strap the sextant and celestial navigation kit to his body. But with the plane gyrating down nose first and the escape passage narrow, perhaps the navigator couldn’t pull himself out.

As the men behind the cockpit fled toward the comparative safety of the waist and rear of the plane, one man, almost certainly the engineer who had hit the wrong feathering button, apparently stayed in front. Because life rafts didn’t deploy automatically in a crash, it was the engineer’s duty to stand behind the cockpit to pull the overhead raft-release handle. To ensure that the rafts would be near enough to the plane for survivors to swim to them, he would have to wait until just before the crash to pull the handle. This meant that he would have little or no chance to get to a crash position, and thus, little chance of survival.

Phil and Cuppernell fought the plane. Green Hornet rolled onto its left side, moving faster and faster as the right engines thundered at full power. There was no time to radio a distress call. Phil looked for a swell over which to orient the plane for ditching, but it was no use. He couldn’t haul the plane level, and even if he’d been able to, he was going much too fast. They were going to crash, very hard. Phil felt strangely devoid of fear. He watched the water rotating up at him and thought: There’s nothing more I can do.

Louie sat down on the floor by the bulkhead, facing forward. There were five men near him. Everyone looked stunned; no one said anything. Louie looked out the right waist window. All he saw was the cloudy sky, turning around and around. He felt intensely alive. He recalled the bulkhead in front of him and thought of how his skull would strike it. Sensing the ocean coming up at the plane, he took a last glance at the twisting sky, then pulled the life raft in front of him and pushed his head into his chest.

One terrible, tumbling second passed, then another. An instant before the plane struck the water, Louie’s mind throbbed with a single, final thought: Nobody’s going to live through this.

——

For Louie, there were only jagged, soundless sensations: his body catapulted forward, the plane breaking open, something wrapping itself around him, the cold slap of water, and then its weight over him. Green Hornet, its nose and left wing hitting first at high speed, stabbed into the ocean and blew apart.

As the plane disintegrated around him, Louie felt himself being pulled deep underwater. Then, abruptly, the downward motion stopped and Louie was flung upward. The force of the plane’s plunge had spent itself, and the fuselage, momentarily buoyed by the air trapped inside, leapt to the surface. Louie opened his mouth and gasped. The air hissed from the plane, and the water rushed up over Louie again. The plane slipped under and sank toward the ocean floor as if yanked downward.

Louie tried to orient himself. The tail was no longer behind him, the wings no longer ahead. The men who’d been around him were gone. The impact had rammed him into the waist gun mount and wedged him under it, facedown, with the raft below him. The gun mount pressed against his neck, and countless strands of something were coiled around his body, binding him to the gun mount and the raft. He felt them and thought: Spaghetti. It was a snarl of wires, Green Hornet’s nervous system. When the tail had broken off, the wires had snapped and whipped around him. He thrashed against them but couldn’t get free. He felt frantic to breathe, but couldn’t.

In the remains of the cockpit, Phil was fighting to get out. When the plane hit, he was thrown forward, his head striking something. A wave of water punched through the cockpit, and the plane carried him under. From the darkness, he knew that he was far below the surface, sinking deeper by the second. He apparently saw Cuppernell push his big body out of the plane. Phil found what he thought was the cockpit window frame, its glass missing. He put his foot on something hard and pushed himself through the opening and out of the cockpit. He swam toward the surface, the light coming up around him.

He emerged in a puzzle of debris. His head was gushing blood and his ankle and one finger were broken. He found a floating hunk of wreckage, perhaps four feet square, and clung to it. It began to sink. There were two life rafts far away. No one was in them. Cuppernell was nowhere to be seen.

Far below, Louie was still ensnared in the plane, writhing in the wires. He looked up and saw a body, drifting passively. The plane coursed down, and the world fled away above. Louie felt his ears pop, and vaguely recollected that at the swimming pool at Redondo Beach, his ears would pop at twenty feet. Darkness enfolded him, and the water pressure bore in with greater and greater intensity. He struggled uselessly. He thought: Hopeless.

He felt a sudden, excruciating bolt of pain in his forehead. There was an oncoming stupor, a fading, as he tore at the wires and clenched his throat against the need to breathe. He had the soft realization that this was the last of everything. He passed out.

He woke in total darkness. He thought: This is death. Then he felt the water still on him, the heavy dropping weight of the plane around him. Inexplicably, the wires were gone, as was the raft. He was floating inside the fuselage, which was bearing him toward the ocean floor, some seventeen hundred feet down. He could see nothing. His Mae West was uninflated, but its buoyancy was pulling him into the ceiling of the plane. The air was gone from his lungs, and he was now gulping reflexively, swallowing salt water. He tasted blood, gasoline, and oil. He was drowning.

Louie flung out his arms, trying to find a way out. His right hand struck something, and his USC ring snagged on it. His hand was caught. He reached toward it with his left hand and felt a long, smooth length of metal. The sensation oriented him: He was at the open right waist window. He swam into the window, put his feet on the frame, and pushed off, wrenching his right hand free and cutting his finger. His back struck the top of the window, and the skin under his shirt scraped off. He kicked clear. The plane sank away.

Louie fumbled for the cords on his Mae West, hoping that no one had poached the carbon dioxide canisters. Luck was with him: The chambers ballooned. He was suddenly light, the vest pulling him urgently upward in a stream of debris.

He burst into dazzling daylight. He gasped in a breath and immediately vomited up the salt water and fuel he had swallowed. He had survived.

Twelve

Downed

THE OCEAN WAS A JUMBLE OF BOMBER REMAINS. THE LIFE-BLOOD of the plane—oil, hydraulic fluid, and some one thousand gallons of fuel—slopped about on the surface. Curling among the bits of plane were threads of blood.

Louie heard a voice. He turned toward it and saw Phil, a few dozen feet away, clinging to what looked like a fuel tank. With him was the tail gunner, Mac. Neither man had a Mae West on. Blood spouted in rhythmic arcs from Phil’s head and washed in sheets down his face. His eyes lolled about in dazed bewilderment. Phil looked at the head bobbing across the debris field and registered that it was Louie. None of the other men had surfaced.

Louie saw one of the life rafts bobbing on the water. It was possible that the raft had been thrown loose by the disintegrating plane, but it was much more likely that the engineer, in the last act of his life, had yanked the raft-release handle just before the crash. The raft had inflated itself and was drifting away rapidly.

Louie knew that he had to get Phil’s bleeding stopped, but if he went to him, the raft would be lost and all of them would perish. He swam for the raft. His clothing and shoes weighed him down, and the current and wind carried the raft away faster than he could swim. As it slipped farther and farther from reach, Louie gave up. He looked back at Phil and Mac, sharing the recognition that their chance was lost. Then he saw a long cord trailing off the raft, snaking not two feet from his face. He snatched the cord, reeled the raft to him, and climbed aboard. A second raft was sliding away. Louie pulled out his raft’s oars, rowed as hard as he could, and just managed to catch the cord and pull the raft to him. He fed the cords through grommets in the rafts and tied them together.

He rowed to Phil and Mac. Realizing that the jagged hunk that he was clinging to might perforate the rafts, Phil pushed it away. Louie pulled Phil aboard, and Mac climbed up under his own power. Both men, like Louie, were filmy with fuel and oil. With all three of them in one raft, it was cramped; the raft was only about six feet long and a little more than two feet wide.

There were two gashes on the left side of Phil’s forehead, by the hairline. Blood was spurting from the wounds and, mixed with seawater, sloshing in the bottom of the raft. Remembering what he had learned in Boy Scouts and his Honolulu first aid course, Louie ran his fingers down Phil’s throat until he felt a pulse, the carotid artery. He showed Mac the spot and told him to press down. He pulled off his muslin top shirt and T-shirt and pulled Phil’s shirts off as well. He asked Mac to do the same. Setting aside the top shirts, Louie dipped Phil’s T-shirt in the water, folded it into a compress, and pressed it to the wounds. He took the other T-shirts and tied them tightly around Phil’s head, then slid Phil into the second raft.

Phil’s mind was woozy. He knew that he’d crashed, that someone had pulled him from the water, that he was in a raft, and that Louie was with him. He felt frightened, though not panicked. As the pilot, he was officially in command, but he grasped his situation well enough to know that he was in no condition to make decisions. He could see that Louie had a nasty cut on his finger, near his USC ring, but was otherwise unhurt and lucid. He asked Louie to take command, and Louie agreed.

“I’m glad it was you, Zamp,” Phil said softly. Then he fell quiet.

From somewhere nearby, there was a small sound, a moan trailing off into a gargle, a mouth trying to form a word, a throat filling with water—then silence. Louie grabbed an oar and circled around as rapidly as he could, searching for the drowning man. Maybe it was Cuppernell, who hadn’t been seen since he was deep underwater. They would never know. Whoever had made the sound had slipped under. He didn’t come up again.

——

With Phil relatively stable, Louie turned his attention to the rafts. Made of two layers of canvas coated in rubber and divided into two air pockets bisected by a bulkhead, each was in good condition. The critical question regarded provisions. The provisions box, which Mac had been holding as the plane went down, was gone, either ripped from his hands during the crash or lost in his escape from the wreckage. In their pockets, the men had only wallets and a few coins. Their watches were still on their wrists, but the hands had stopped when the plane had hit the water. Probably for the first time since Phil had arrived in Oahu, Cecy’s lucky bracelet wasn’t on his wrist, and the silver dollar he’d been keeping for his reunion with her wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe in the hurry to dress for the flight, he had forgotten them, or maybe they’d been lost in the crash.

Pockets in the rafts contained some survival provisions. Whatever was in them was all that they’d have. Louie untied the pocket flaps and looked inside. He found several thick chocolate bars—probably the Hershey Company’s military-issue Ration D bars—divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant. The package instructions said that each man was to be given two segments a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, to be held on the tongue and allowed to dissolve over thirty minutes.

With the chocolate, Louie found several half-pint tins of water, a brass mirror, a flare gun, sea dye, a set of fishhooks, a spool of fishing line, and two air pumps in canvas cases. There was also a set of pliers with a screwdriver built into the handle. Louie pondered it for a long while, trying to come up with a reason why someone would need a screwdriver or pliers on a raft. Each raft also had a patch kit, to be used if the raft leaked. That was all there was.

The provisions were grossly inadequate. One year later, each B-24 raft would be equipped with a sun tarpaulin for shade, blue on one side, yellow on the other. For camouflage in enemy waters, the tarpaulin could be spread blue side up; for signaling, the yellow side could be waved. Each standard 1944 raft would also be equipped with a bailing bucket, a mast and sail, a sea anchor, sun ointment, a first aid kit, puncture plugs, a flashlight, fishing tackle, a jackknife, scissors, a whistle, a compass, and religious pamphlets. None of these items, not even a knife, was in Green Hornet’s rafts. The rafts also had no “Gibson Girl,” a radio transmitter that could send signals over some two hundred miles. Newer planes had been carrying them for nearly a year, and in two months, all planes would be equipped, but Green Hornet hadn’t been furnished with one. And they had no navigation instruments. It had been Mitchell’s job to strap them to his body, but if he had done so, the instruments had gone to the bottom with him.

Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half-pints wouldn’t last them long. The men were surrounded by water, but they couldn’t drink it. The salt content in seawater is so high that it is considered a poison. When a person drinks seawater, the kidneys must generate urine to flush the salt away, but to do so, they need more water than is contained in the seawater itself, so the body pulls water from its cells. Bereft of water, the cells begin to fail. Paradoxically, a drink of seawater causes potentially fatal dehydration.