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Shepard, stepped down the bay. The bomb looked like a big long trash can, with fins at one end and little antennae at the other. Just a bomb, he thought, damn it, it’s just another bomb.
    Shepard stood and patted the bomb gently. “We’ve got a live one now.” Never a thought about what it would do. January hurried by the man, afraid that hatred would crack his shell and give him away. The pistol strapped to his belt caught on the hatchway and he imagined shooting Shepard—shooting Fitch and McDonald and plunging the controls forward so that Lucky Strike tilted and spun down into the sea like a spent tracer bullet, like a plane broken by flak, following the arc of all human ambition. Nobody would ever know what had happened to them, and their trash can would be dumped at the bottom of the Pacific where it belonged. He could even shoot everyone and parachute out, and perhaps be rescued by one of the Superdumbos following them....
    The thought passed and remembering it January squinted with disgust. But another part of him agreed that it was a possibility. It could be done. It would solve his problem. His fingers explored his holster snap.
    “Want some coffee?” Matthews asked.
    “Sure,” January said, and took his hand from the gun to reach for the cup. He sipped: hot. He watched Matthews and Benton tune the loran equipment. As the beeps came in Matthews took a straightedge and drew lines from Okinawa and Iwo Jima on his map table. He tapped a finger on the intersection. “They’ve taken the art out of navigation,” he said to January. “They might as well stop making the navigator’s dome,” thumbing up at the little Plexiglas bubble over them.
    “Good old American know-how,” January said.
    Matthews nodded. With two fingers he measured the distance between their position and Iwo Jima. Benton measured with a ruler.
    “Rendezvous at five thirty-five, eh?” Matthews said. They were to rendezvous with the two trailing planes over Iwo.
    Benton disagreed: “I’d say five-fifty.”
    “What? Check again, guy, we’re not in no tugboat here.”
    “The wind—”
    “Yah, the wind. Frank, you want to add a bet to the pool?”
    “Five thirty-six,” January said promptly.
    They laughed. “See, he’s got more confidence in me,” Matthews said with a dopey grin.
    January recalled his plan to shoot the crew and tip the plane into the sea, and he pursed his lips, repelled. Not for anything would he be able to shoot these men, who, if not friends, were at least companions. They passed for friends. They meant no harm.
    Shepard and Stone climbed into the cabin. Matthews offered them coffee. “The gimmick’s ready to kick their ass, eh?” Shepard nodded and drank.
    January moved forward, past Haddock’s console. Another plan that wouldn’t work. What to do? All the flight engineer’s dials and gauges showed conditions were normal. Maybe he could sabotage something? Cut a line somewhere?
    Fitch looked back at him and said, “When are we due over Iwo?”
    “Five-forty, Matthews says.”
    “He better be right.”
    A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well—most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock, January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January’s dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen’s suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing