“Hope you’re right,” Stew grumbled. “We’re due for some luck. Three months in the Pacific and we haven’t sighted a single snooper or sneaking Jap ship. It’s rotten luck!”
“Cheer up, there’ll come a time,” Jack sang. He was in fine spirits. The feel of violin strings under his fingers had done things to him. And besides, there was much more involved in that simple ceremony of swapping a cheap radio for a priceless violin than the onlookers realized. He and the fighter Ted Armour had a secret all their own.
The two boys in their scout plane flew straight away for some time. Fighter planes would guard the air close to their task force. At last they began crisscrossing the sky. Each time, as they went farther out to sea and their sectors widened, their crisscrosses increased in length.
“We’re heading into a mess of black clouds,” Stew grumbled. “Won’t be able to see a thing.”
“Not so thick, at that,” Jack called back cheerfully. “Wait until the sun is up and you’ll see.”
Soon dark clouds turned purple, faded into dark red, then pink, to take on at last the fluffy white of full day.
“What a day for duck hunting!” Stew exclaimed.
“I’ll say!” Jack agreed. “But give me Japs, not ducks! The things they did to our prisoners in the Philippines make my blood boil!”
“Mine too. I’m aching to get a crack at them. We—”
“Look!” Jack exclaimed. “Off there to the east!”
“Yep! And we’ve got no task force out there!”
“Duck into that long white cloud, quick!” Stew suggested.
Jack’s head was in a whirl as he gripped the controls, banked his plane, then vanished from sight into the cloud.
“Contact,” he whispered hoarsely. “Contact at last! And there’ll be a fight!”
“Boy, oh boy!” Stew exulted as they slid into the cloud. He set his radio with trembling fingers. “Here’s where we score a scoop!”
“Wait!” Jack warned. “We can’t risk a false alarm. Might pull the entire task force off its course for nothing!”
Jack was thinking. What a lovely cloud this is! There’s sure to be a carrier in that Jap convoy down there, if they’re really Jap ships—a carrier and Zeros. There’s sure to be a fight, and this ship of ours is good for only 260 M.P.H. at most! But this is what she was built for, and what we were trained for. This is our zero hour. He drew in three deep breaths of air and felt better. Jitters, he decided. They all get them. Old Ironsides says we’d be no good if we didn’t.