Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

That was good, sensible advice. And the ship’s growing list made going over the side easier. Genda cursed when he hit the water even so. That ankle was definitely sprained, and might be broken. He rolled over onto his back and pulled away from Akagi with his arms.

American fighters strafed sailors in the sea. Bullets kicked up splashes only a few meters from him. He swam past a dead man leaking scarlet into the Pacific. The blood would draw sharks, but sharks, at the moment, were the least of his worries.

Their antiaircraft guns still blazing, destroyers circled the doomed Akagi to pick up survivors. Some men clambered up cargo nets hung from the sides. With his bad leg, Genda couldn’t climb. He clung to a line till sailors aboard the Yukikaze could haul him up to the deck.

“Domo arigato,” he said. When he tried to stand on that bad leg, it wouldn’t bear his weight. He had to sit and watch Akagi slide beneath the waves. His face crumpled. Tears ran down his cheeks. Since he was already soaking wet, only he noticed. He looked away from the carrier that had fought so long and so well, and noticed he was far from the only man off Akagi doing the same. She deserved mourning-and so did Admiral Kaku, who’d never left the bridge.

AN EXULTANT VOICE HOWLED in Joe Crosetti’s earphones: “Scratch one flattop!” Yells and cheers and curses rang out as the enemy carrier sank.

“How do you like that, you Jap bastards?” Joe shouted. He looked around for more Zeros, and didn’t see any. Some might still be airborne, but not close to him. He’d made a few runs at sailors bobbing in the sea, but decided he could hurt the enemy worse by shooting up his ships. That felt like a real duel, because the Japs shot back for all they were worth. Watching sailors scatter was a hell of a lot of fun.

After he’d made a couple of passes, an authoritative voice sounded off: “Attention, Hellcat pilots! We’ve got a formation of bandits coming up from the south at about 15,000 feet. Time to give them a friendly American welcome, hey?”

Joe needed a few seconds to figure out where south was. He’d got all turned around in his strafing runs. When he did, he started to climb. His new wingman still clung like a burr, which was what a wingman was supposed to do. He wondered who the guy was, and from which carrier he’d taken off.

There were the bandits, buzzing along as if they didn’t have a care in the world. If they didn’t, they were about to. Joe had trouble recognizing ships, but planes he knew. He clicked through a mental card file. Bombers. Twin-engined. Streamlined-they looked like flying cigars. Bettys, he thought. They could carry bombs or torpedoes. The point of the exercise, as far as he was concerned, was to make sure they didn’t get the chance to use whatever they were carrying.

They’d seen the American fighters, and started taking evasive action. That was pretty funny. They weren’t slow and they weren’t completely ungraceful, but no bomber had a prayer of outdodging a fighter that wanted to come after it. The Bettys also started shooting. They carried several machine guns in blisters on the fuselage-almost impossible to aim well-and a 20mm cannon in a clumsy turret at the rear of the plane.

When Joe got on the tail of one, the Jap in that rear turret started banging away at him. The cannon didn’t shoot very fast. There’d be a flash and a puff of smoke as the shell burst, then a little while later another one. Joe fired a burst as he swung the Hellcat’s nose across that turret. The tail gunner stopped shooting: wounded or dead.

With that annoyance gone, Joe sawed the Hellcat’s nose across the Betty’s left wing root and squeezed off another burst. Sure as hell, the bomber caught fire. Intelligence said Bettys carried a lot of fuel to give them long range, and that they lacked armor and self-sealing tanks. It sure looked as if Intelligence knew what it was talking about.

He went after another bomber and shot it down just the same way. The poor bastard in the rear turret never had a chance-and once he was gone, none of the weapons the Betty carried could damage a tough bird like a Hellcat except by luck. Joe knew a moment’s pity for the fliers trapped in their burning planes, but only a moment’s. They would have bombed his carrier if they’d got the chance. And they would have yelled, “Banzai!” while they did it, too. Screw ’em.

Still… Three miles was a hell of a long way to fall when you were on fire.

Other U.S. pilots found different ways of attacking the Bettys. Some flew straight at the bombers and shot up their cockpits. Others climbed past them and dove like falcons stooping on doves. The unescorted Bettys were slaughtered. Watching, taking part, Joe again felt tempted to pity, but again not for long. This was the enemy. The only reason they weren’t doing the same thing to him was that they couldn’t. They surely wanted to.

Trails of smoke and flame told of Betty after Betty going into the Pacific. They never had a chance. They must have counted on getting close to the American fleet without being spotted. They might have done some damage if they had. The way things were, it was a massacre.

“Let’s head for home, children,” the squadron leader said. “We’ve got one enemy carrier sunk, one enemy carrier dead in the water and burning, no other carriers spotted. By the size of the enemy strike, it probably set out from two ships. We did what we came to do, in other words. We’ve cleared the way for things to go forward.”

That sounded good to Joe. He wanted to shoot up some more Japanese ships, but a glance at the fuel gauge told him hanging around wasn’t a good idea. He had to find north again, the same way he’d had to find south when he went after the Bettys.

He shook his head with amazement that approached awe. Two Bettys for sure. He thought he’d got a Zero and a Kate. One fight and he was within shouting distance of being an ace. He’d dreamt about doing stuff like that, but he’d had trouble believing it. Believe it or not, he’d done it.

He hoped Orson Sharp was okay. He’d looked around whenever he got the chance-which wasn’t very often-but he hadn’t spotted his longtime roomie. He kept telling himself that didn’t prove anything one way or the other. Sharp was probably looking around for him, too, and not finding him.

On he went toward the north. He wondered how much damage the Jap strike force had been able to do. Less than it would have before it tangled with the American planes, that was for damn sure. And where would the Japs land now? Both of their carriers were out of business. Would they go on to Oahu? Maybe some of the Zeros could get there, but the Vals and Kates didn’t have a chance. “Oh, too bad,” Joe said, and laughed.

He might have been speaking of the devil, because he got a radio call on the all-planes circuit from a Hellcat a few miles ahead of him: “Heads up, boys. Here come the Japs on the way home-except they don’t know home burned down. Every plane we splash now is one more we don’t have to worry about later on.”

Joe didn’t need long to spot what was left of the enemy’s air armada. He whistled softly to himself. The Japs had had a lot more planes the first time the American strike force ran into them. The U.S. fleet’s antiaircraft guns and the combat air patrol must have done a hell of a job. That looked like good news.

Zeros still escorted the surviving dive bombers and torpedo planes. Hellcats roared to the attack. Joe took another look at his fuel gauge. He’d be pushing it if he gunned his bird real hard-but why was he in this cockpit, if not to push it?

He saw a Kate flying south as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Was that the sneaky bastard who’d given him the slip last time by jinking left instead of right? He nodded to himself. He thought so. “Fool me once, shame on you,” he said. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” He goosed the Hellcat and raced toward the Jap torpedo plane.