“Bombs away!” cried Chick Enders. “Let’s get out of here in a hurry!” Barry put his Fortress into a steep, climbing turn that strained her to the limit. Zigzagging, banking, spiralling, he made the big bomber climb like a cat in a fit. Far beneath, a sheet of flame was rising from the enemy cruiser. Chick Enders’ bomb had opened her oil tanks. Some of her antiaircraft were still firing, but _Rosy’s_ unorthodox actions fooled them completely. “Great stuff, Barry!” yelled the little bombardier. “We’ll pull the same stunt on that destroyer to the east of us. Let’s go!” “We will not!” Barry Blake retorted. “I felt _Rosy_ groan too many times in that last crazy climb. If I did it again she might really come apart. From now on we’ll confine our bombing attacks to a reasonable altitude. It’s better to waste a bomb than a bomber, even if you don’t believe it.” As they headed for their new target at ten thousand feet, more bomb bursts tossed up white fountains of sea water around the farther warships. Seven or eight Fortresses were now on the scene. The flotilla’s fleeing remnants were doomed. It had been a ghastly slaughter, Barry reflected. Nearly twenty thousand enemy troops, not to mention the crews of the Jap vessels, were either dead or floating among the wreckage. An army and a task force blotted out in two days! Mechanically he guided _Rosy O’Grady_ on her run. He was sick of killing. Even Chick’s jubilant, “Bombs away!” failed to thrill him as it had before. Another hit! The thousand-pound bomb burst the thin-hulled destroyer apart like a paper bag. Swiftly she settled, stood up on her nose, and slipped out of sight. There was no time to launch a boat. Five miles beyond, a number of tiny waterbugs were leaving zigzag wakes in the water. They were probably Jap landing barges, Barry thought, crammed with armed soldiers from one of the troop transports that had gone down. Now he saw the cause of their erratic dodging—a flight of Mitchell B-25’s diving at them, with tracer bullets streaking from their guns. “Those Nips haven’t a chance, even if they’re lucky enough to shoot down a plane or two,” Hap Newton observed. “Their barges must look like sieves already. More meat for the sharks!” “More butchery!” muttered Barry Blake. “It’s necessary, of course. If those armed Japs ever made land, they’d soon be killing our own men. That’s what they were sent here for. But I’ve seen enough slaughter today to make me feel rather sick.” Chick Enders didn’t say so, but he may have felt the same way, after thinking it over. At any rate, he seemed to have lost his uncanny marksmanship for the rest of that day. His remaining bombs scored nothing better than near misses on a desperately zig-zagging destroyer. Another Fortress sank that vessel as Barry turned his plane homeward. “Looks like some sort of a weather front, over toward the coast,” Hap Newton remarked. “I hope our base isn’t shut in by it. We’d have to find another field or bail out....”