The trail was easy to follow in the moonlight. It followed the creek for about a mile, and ended at the edge of a huge open space. This had been, a few hours before, the Jap airfield. Now, in the dim light, the place looked more like the cratered landscape of the moon than anything on earth. “There,” said Soapy Babbitt, pointing to a heap of coral blocks and rubble, “must be what’s left of the operations building. Probably the radio was there, too.” “What happened to the planes?” queried Chick Enders. “There must have been a lot of ’em caught on the ground, but I can’t see more than two or three wrecks from here.” “I guess our bombs pulverized them,” Fred Marmon said. “Boy! That blitz certainly was thorough. It’s hard to see how any Japs lived through it.” “Some of the barrack buildings around the edge of the field escaped the worst of the bombing, no doubt,” Barry Blake observed. “We’ll circle the place now and see if anything is left. Keep your pistols ready, fellows. If there should be any wounded Japs left, they’ll open fire on us.” Blasted, leafless trees that rimmed the field bore ghastly witness to the size of the bombs. Moonlight made the scene of destruction more horrible, with shadows that both concealed and exaggerated. Several times the searchers stumbled on fragments of bomb-torn corpses. One end of the field showed fewer bomb craters. It was here that a number of _Mitsubishi_ bombers had been lined up when the blitz opened. Either they had been left there for servicing, or the Japs had felt so secure that they didn’t bother to scatter their planes around the field at dispersal points. At first glance most of the bombers seemed to be intact. If that were the case, a guard might have been left with them. So as not to walk into a trap, Barry led his men into the jungle and approached the line-up from the rear. Two hundred feet back in the bush he came upon a frame building that sagged drunkenly as if a giant hand had given it a push. The tin roof had been blown off, and now lay upside down on a group of flattened tents. The building had evidently quartered Jap officers, while the tents served as shelters for the enlisted personnel. There was no sign of life in any of them—only half a dozen Japs killed by shrapnel. The planes, too, were unguarded. On closer inspection they proved to be hopeless wrecks. Fragmentation bombs had riddled the bombers with shrapnel holes, torn off wings, ripped the thin-skinned fuselages. Strangely enough, only two ships at one end of the line had burned. “No wonder the Nip survivors cleared out!” Curly Levitt remarked. “There aren’t enough usable parts in the whole line-up to build half a plane, so far as I can see. Let’s cut a mast for the catamaran, and get back to the beach, skipper.” Barry Blake did not move. Deep in thought, he stood staring at the nearest bomber, which leaned crazily on one wheel and one wing tip.