The four passengers were all captains. Three were Navy four-stripers from BUSHIPS1 in Washington, sent to Pearl to see what could be done to speed up the repairs to U.S. Pacific Fleet battleships damaged and sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four months before. Their party had originally been made up of three BUSHIPS captains and one BUSHIPS commander; but, over howls of outrage from the BUSHIPS captains, the BUSHIPS commander had been bumped from the flight by the fourth captain now aboard the PBY-5.
The PBY pilot found this one very interesting. The fourth captain was an Army captain, which meant that he was two grades junior to the BUSHIPS commander he had bumped. But he was also an aviator, and seeing a fellow airman bump the Engineering Corps commander had not displeased the pilot.
And, although the Army captain was wearing wings on his ill-fitting, dirty, and mussed tropical worsted uniform, he was also wearing the crossed sabers of cavalry. The pilot had wondered about that. The crossed cavalry sabers had the numerals 26 affixed to them, identifying an officer of the 26th Cavalry. The 26th had not long before been caught in the Philippines and apparently wiped out on the Bataan Peninsula. But this captain clearly hadn’t come out of the Philippines, because no one had come out of the Philippines. The poor bastards had been deserted there.
No one, of course, except General Douglas MacArthur, his wife and child, the child’s nurse, and some brass hats, who had escaped from Corregidor on Navy PT boats. The pilot decided it was possible, though unlikely, that the Army captain was somehow connected with MacArthur. That seemed even more possible to the pilot when he considered the captain’s travel priority. The end of the shouting session in Pearl Harbor over whether or not he was to go on the Catalina came after the admiral summoned to resolve the dispute read his orders and announced to the BUSHIPS senior brass hat, “Captain, it’s not a question whether this officer is going with you or not, but whom you wish to send in the available space on the plane with him.”
The pilot had planned to have a chat with the Army officer once they were airborne. But the first time he’d gone back into the fuselage, the captain was sound asleep.
He had made himself a bed of mailbags in the tail of the aircraft, wrapped himself in three blankets, and was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted—and more, the sleep of the ill. His eyes were shrunken, and he was as skinny as a rail. He clearly needed rest, and the pilot didn’t have the heart to wake him.
Though there was evidence he had eaten the box lunches provided, every time the pilot had gone back the Army officer had been asleep. There was also proof that the captain was traveling armed. An enormous old-fashioned World War I Colt revolver lay on one of the mailbags beside him. No holster, which meant that the captain had been carrying the pistol under his blouse, stuck in his waistband.
Steadying himself by holding his hand flat against the fuselage skin above him, the pilot now made his way down the fuselage to the senior of the BUSHIPS captains and made his airline pilot’s speech.
The other two Navy captains leaned forward in their seats to hear what he had to say. The Army captain did not wake up.
“Sir,” he said, “we have just picked up Alameda. I thought you’d like to know.”
“We’re running late, aren’t we?” the captain said.
“We’ve had a head wind all the way across,” the pilot said.
“Is that so?” the captain said. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Inasmuch as the captain’s tone of voice clearly implied that the head wind was obviously the pilot’s fault, a dereliction of duty that was inconveniencing him and seriously interfering with the war effort, the pilot did not, as he had intended to do, inform him that they would land in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Instead, he walked aft and leaned over the Army pilot, frowning sympathetically at his sick pallor and sunken eyes. He touched and then shook his shoulder. The man did not stir.
Then he caught the Army pilot’s breath. He chuckled, and felt around the mailbags until he found what he was looking for. It was a quart bottle of Scotch. And it was empty.
The pilot reburied the bottle and then, smiling, made his way forward to the cockpit.