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next one is on me, friend."
    "Sure."
    Czaikowicz pushed a beer slowly at the B-17 pilot. The barriers came down even more.
    "You want to know about this fellow who leads us?" He jerked a thumb at the man in shorts and white sneakers. "You ask him," he said of Alex Bartimo. "He's been with the captain longer than any of us." Psycho grinned hugely. "They flew and fought together before the rest of us ever met Whip Russel."
    Chippola looked up at the suddenly open door, and Psycho carried it just a bit further. If Bartimo didn't want to pick it up, that was up to Alex. "They were together at Midway,"
    Psycho added.
    Tod Chippola showed his surprise. "So was I. Flew a B-17 there." He studied Alex Bartimo. "I thought I knew most of the people who flew Forts at Midway. I don't remember you."
    Alex sighed. Ordinarily he would never have responded to this man. But Psycho, and the others from the 335th, had picked up the deep strain running through these poor bastards at Garbutt, and the empathy had worked its way into the open. If Psycho had given him this much lead, well, what the hell.
    Alex Bartimo turned his eyes to Chippola. "You were too high to see us," he said at last.
    The B-17 driver nodded slowly and they saw he'd put it all together very quickly. "B-26s.
    I remember now. There were four Marauders there. Two from the 22nd and two from the 38th Bomb Groups. You were all under navy control from Midway." He snapped his fingers. "Sure. That's right. You carried torpedoes." He stared at Alex Bartimo in a new light and with open respect. "Jesus, you poor bastards went in on the deck ." He shook his head. "We could hardly see the goddamned Japanese fleet, we were so high."
    A deep moan swept overhead and then there was the rush of thunder and wings passing by. "P-39s," someone called out. "They keep away most of the flies."
    "They sure as shit don't bother the Zeros," came another catcall, and the laughter followed the fading moan of Allison engines.
    It was a pause for searching back through the months. They all remembered the Battle of Midway in June. The first week of the month. Hell, yes; we won that session with the Japanese. The biggest air-sea battle since the war started, for Christ's sake. Everyone knew what the Japanese had in that engagement: an armada of six aircraft carriers, seven battleships, sixteen cruisers, forty-five destroyers, twelve transports and hundreds of fighters and dive and torpedo bombers. They outnumbered us by three or four to one and before the whole thing was over we had broken the back of the whole Japanese fleet and —
    They drew up short in their introspection. Let's keep it straight, they might have said to themselves. The navy won that battle. Because sure as hell the Army Air Forces did not.
    Not because they didn't try. Everybody tried, and for most of the way through that savage melee the Japanese beat the absolute living shit out of the army, the marines and the navy. Not until the very end of things, when we were on our way to one of the most disastrous defeats in our history, with consequences far more critical than resulted from the battering at Pearl Harbor, did the navy dive bombers cut loose and run.
    The Japanese were busy tearing the hell out of torpedo bombers trying to get through to the Japanese warships. And while they were enjoying their massacre of the hapless souls flying just over the waves, the SBD dive bombers rolled into the screaming plunges that ended with the enemy carriers gutted and exploding.
    Tod Chippola openly studied Alex Bartimo. You could almost hear the thoughts rustling through his mind. Bartimo didn't look like the kind of man you expected to find in a flying wreck in the midst of a brutal air war. Especially in a hell-bent-for-leather outfit that was scoring hard against the Japanese. No matter those carefully patched rags and sneakers. You couldn't miss the signs. Alex was a fancy, a smooth dude, and he hadn't spoken more than a few words for Chippola