Just thirty-two hours from the time he had boarded the carrier, Barry Blake sat at the controls of the first “flying bomb” to be launched at Amboina. Hidden in mist, the carrier had approached within forty miles of the island. The B-26 was already in the catapult; her Double Wasp radial motors were roaring at full throttle. Every man on board was braced for the launching. The shock came, jerking the pilots’ heads back as their seats pushed them suddenly. The heavily loaded Martin _Marauder_ literally shot along the carrier’s fog-swathed deck. Barry eased back on the stick, and felt the deck drop away. “We’re flying!” Hap Newton said hoarsely. “I never was so jittery taking off from a bomb-pitted jungle strip. I’d been wondering whether that catapult would boost us into the air or into the sea. How does she handle, Barry?” “Like a lady!” replied the young skipper. “I can feel the double bomb load, but it’s balanced perfectly. We’ll have no trouble with it.” Barry glanced at his climbing altimeter. When it showed a thousand feet he leveled off, heading due north. An instant later the surrounding fog fell away like torn gauze. The carrier had been keeping just within its edge until the moment her warhawks were released. Amboina Island rose like a deep purple cloud on the northern horizon. In less than fifteen minutes it would be directly beneath, Jap flak would be bursting; tracer shells and bullets would be criss-crossing the air. Already the Jap defenses must be seething like hornet nests. Their plane detectors had probably caught the first hum of Barry’s engines—now multiplied by ten or twelve as the catapult launchings proceeded. “Pilot from tail gunner,” Mickey Rourke’s voice sounded on the interphone. “I can see four of our planes jist comin’ out of the fog.” “They’ll scatter when they reach the harbor,” Barry remarked. “That will keep the Jap guns from concentrating on any group of them.” “Yeah, but how about us?” Chick Enders asked. “We’ll get to our target before the others are even in range.” “So what?” retorted Hap Newton. “The Japs will still be blinking the sleep out of their eyes when we slam ’em. And once we’re rid of this bomb load, Barry’s going to make us mighty hard to hit. That right, Skipper?” “I’m not going to wait for that,” Barry told him. “Do you see that fog layer hanging close to the water? It reaches almost to the tip of Nusanive Point. We’ll duck into it and fool any gunners that might spot us too soon in clear air.” A long, shallow dive took them into the fog layer two hundred feet above the water. And there, for the next thirty miles, they stayed. When at last the mist thinned to a few wispy streamers the swift little B-26 fairly hugged the water. Her target, the Nusanive radio tower, loomed just ahead.