Up ahead lay the island. At better than three hundred miles an hour the huge flight of fighters went over the shore, heading straight for the airfield. They paid no attention to the twenty or thirty Jap fighters high above them, did not even notice the bursts, of ack-ack shells that puffed around and ahead of them. They were too low and traveling too fast for ack-ack to be very effective or accurate—and as for those Zeros, the American planes would take care of them in just a few minutes. Scoot saw the airfield up ahead, saw Jap planes on the runways ready to take off. And the next minute he was roaring over the field, not thirty feet above the runway, watching the Jap ground crews running for cover, seeing a few firing rifles futilely into the air at the speeding planes. He pressed the machine-gun button and felt the slight backward push to the plane as the battery of fifty caliber machine guns poured out its converging fire of destruction. Jap after Jap, fleeing toward the hangars, was cut down in his tracks. Scoot concentrated a terrific burst of fire on the plane directly ahead of him, saw a flash as it caught fire, then pulled up and away with a shout that could have been heard half a mile away had not the air been filled with the roar of powerful engines. He circled and came back over the field the other way, this time dipping to pour a hail of lead into the open doors of a hangar. “How did the other boys happen to leave that one standing?” Scoot wondered. “The others are all down in ruins.” It was not easy to demolish a big hangar with a fighting plane, so Scoot left that for the bombers, knowing that he had taken care of a few Japs huddling inside the building and had put forty or fifty holes in the plane standing near the front. After one more sweep over the field, he pointed his Hellcat’s nose at the sun and climbed. But there was something up there on the sun, he thought, looking intently. Sunspots? What a funny thing to think of at a moment like this. He’d hardly be noticing sunspots—but he _would_ almost instinctively notice Jap Zeros when they were diving at him out of the sun. “That’s what they are!” Scoot exclaimed. “But they made one big mistake. They thought we were going to strafe the field a couple more times and they’d come down on us out of the sun while we were busy doing it. I’ll bet they’re confused now, seeing us coming right up at them head-on.” The first groups of the fighter squadrons were all aiming for the clouds after their attack on the field, while the next groups were carrying on the strafing job. And Scoot knew, too, that two groups were high in the air, serving as cover for just such a Jap attack. “Those Nips may not know it,” he muttered to himself, “but I’ll bet there’s a flock of Hellcats coming out of the sun right behind ’em.”