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outrageously so. I’d call it lots of stability.
    The seconds crept by. All the tiredness that I had felt just minutes before was gone. I was ready.
    “I’ve got it,” he said flatly, staring through the binoculars. “Turn up the moonpath.”
    I did so.
    “Okay, everybody. Range about eight miles. Three minutes, then we dive to attack.”
    I tried to look over the nose, which was difficult in a Catalina.
    “Still heading southeast,” Modahl murmured. “You’ll have to turn slightly right to keep it in the moonpath.”
    The turn also moved the nose so it wouldn’t obstruct Modahl’s vision.
    Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I wondered about those guys on that sub. If we pulled this off, these were their last few minutes of life. I guess few of us ever know when the end is near. Which is good, I suppose, since we all have to die.
    The final seconds ticked away, then Modahl laid down the binoculars and reached for the controls. He secured the autopilot, and told me, “I’m going to run the trim full nose down. As we come off target, your job is to start cranking the trim back or I’ll never be able to hold the nose up as our speed drops.”
    “Okay.”
    He retarded the throttles a little, then advanced the props to the stops so they wouldn’t act as dive brakes. Still, nose down as we were, we began to accelerate. Modahl ran the trim wheel forward. I called altitudes.
    “Two thousand … nineteen hundred … eighteen …”
    Glancing up, I saw the conning tower of the sub and the wake it made. I must have expected it to look larger, because the fact that it was so tiny surprised me.
    “Twelve … eleven …”
    The airspeed needle crept past 200 mph. We were diving for a spot just short of the sub so Modahl could raise the nose slightly and hammer them, then pull up to avoid crashing.
    I could see the tower plainly now in the reflection of the moonlight, which made a long white ribbon of the wake.
    “Six hundred … five … four-twenty-five …”
    We were up to almost 250 mph, and Modahl was flattening his dive, from about twenty degrees nose down to fifteen or sixteen. He had the tower of that sub bore-sighted now.
    “Three-fifty …”
    “Three hundred …”
    “Ready,” Modahl said for Varitek’s benefit. He shoved the throttles full forward.
    “Two-fifty …”
    Modahl jabbed the red button on the yoke with his right thumb. Even with the shielding the blast tubes provided, the muzzle flashes were so bright that I almostvisually lost the sub. The engines at full power were stupendously loud, but the jackhammer pounding just inches from my feet made the cockpit floor tremble like a leaf in a gale.
    HOFFMAN:
    I could see the sub’s tower, see how we were hurtling through the darkness toward that little metal thing amid the swells. When the guns beneath me suddenly began hammering, the noise almost deafened me. I was expecting it, and yet, I wasn’t.
    I had been pointing the thirty at the Jap, now I held the trigger down.
    The noise and heat and gas from the cycling breechblocks made it almost impossible to breathe. This was the fourth time I had done this, and it wasn’t getting any better. I could scarcely breathe, the noise was off the scale, my flesh and bones vibrated. The burlap under me insulated me from the worst of the heat, yet if Modahl kept the triggers down, he was going to fry me. I was sitting on hellfire.
    And I was screaming with joy … Despite everything, the experience was sublime.
    “One hundred.” I shouted the altitude over the bedlam. Some fool was screaming on the intercom, the engines were roaring at full power, the guns in the nosewere hammering in one long, continuous burst … I had assumed that Modahl would pull out at a hundred. He didn’t.
    “Readeee …”
    “Fifty feet,” I shouted over the din, trying to make myself heard. I reached for the yoke.
    “Now!”
Modahl roared, pushing the bomb release with his left thumb, releasing the gun trigger, and pulling the