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yoke back into his stomach all at the same time.
    I began cranking madly on the trim.
    We must have taken the lenses off the periscopes with our keel. I distinctly felt us hit something … and the nose was rising through the horizontal, up, up, five degrees, ten, as the guns in the blisters and tunnel got off long rolling bursts. When they fell silent our airspeed was bleeding off rapidly, so Modahl pushed forward on the yoke.
    “Hoffman, you asshole, did the bomb go?”
    “No, sir. It didn’t release.”
    “You shit. You silly, silly shit.”
    “Mr. Modahl—”
    “Get your miserable ass up here and talk to me, Hoffman.”
    He cranked the plane around as tightly as he could, but too late. When we got level, inbound, with the moon in front of us, the sub was no longer there. She had dived.
    “You fly it,” Modahl said disgustedly, and turned the plane over to me.
    Hoffman climbed up to stand behind the pilots’ seats while Modahl inspected the hung bomb with an Aldislamp. I tried not to look at the bright light so as to maintain some night vision—the light got me anyway. When Modahl had inspected the offending bomb to his satisfaction and finally killed the light, I was half-blinded.
    Hoffman said, “Maybe we got the sub with the guns.”
    Modahl’s lip curled in a vicious sneer, and he turned in his seat, looked at Hoffman as if he were a piece of shit.
    “Which side are you on, Hoffman? Your shipmates risked their lives to get that bomb on target, to no avail. If that bomb comes off the rack armed while we’re landing, the Japs win and our happy little band of heroes will go to hell together. I don’t care if you have to grease those racks with your own blood. When we make an attack they goddamn well better work.”
    Hoffman still had pimples. When Modahl killed the Aldis lamp I could see them, red and angry, in the glow of the cockpit lights.
    “Are you fucking crazy?” Modahl asked without bothering to turn around.
    “No, sir,” Hoffman stammered.
    “Screaming on the intercom during an attack. Jesus! I oughta court-martial your silly ass.”
    “I’m sorry, sir. It just slipped out. Everything was so loud and—”
    Modahl made a gesture, as if he were shooing a fly. But that wasn’t the end of it. “Chief Amme,” Modahl said on the intercom. “When we get back, I expect you and Hoffman to run the racks through at least a dozen cycles on each bomb station. I want a written reportsigned by you and Hoffman that the racks work perfectly.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Pottinger, bring your chart to the cockpit. Let’s figure out where we are and where the hell we go from here.”
    I was still hand-flying the plane, so Modahl said to me, “Head northwest and climb to four thousand, just in case we are closer to Bougainville than I think we are. We’ll circle around the northern tip of the island and approach the harbor up the moonpath.”
    Modahl took off his headset and leaned toward me. “Hoffman’s getting his rocks off down there.”
    “Maybe he’s crazy, too,” I suggested.
    “We all are,” Modahl said flatly, and nodded once, sharply. His lips turned down in a frown.
    I dropped the subject.
    “When you get tired, we’ll let Otto fly the
Witch.”
Otto was the autopilot. After a few minutes I nodded, and he engaged it.
    MODAHL:
    Of course Hoffman was crazy. We all were to be out here at night in a flying boat hunting Japs in the world’s biggest ocean. Yeah, sure, the Navy sent us here, but every one of us had the wit to have wrangled a nice cushy job somewhere in the States while someone else did the sweating.
    It’s addictive, like booze and tobacco. I just worried that I’d love it too much. And it’s probablya sin. Not that I know much about sin … but I can feel the wrongness of it, the evil. That’s the attraction, I guess. I liked the adrenaline and the risk and the feeling of … power. Liked it too much.
    It was two o’clock in the morning when we approached Buka harbor from