He nodded as he finished his soup and pushed the bowl to one side of the tray. “I haven’t a very clear idea of the location,” he admitted. “I never paid much attention to the directions. My job was to spill those bombs at the right place. I didn’t worry about the rest.”
He cleared a place on the tray and began to draw an imaginary map with his finger. “See, it was something like this. Here’s Australia, and over here’s New Caledonia where we took off, and here’re the islands we headed for.”
“Wait a minute,” said Nancy. “I’ll get a map, then you can sketch me a more detailed plan of the area you operated in.”
“Sure,” agreed Bruce. Then a shadow crossed his face. “But what’s the use? We can’t go out there and look for Tommy.”
“Who knows?” she asked, stubbornly clinging to her hopes. “I may sometime get to the islands. I want to hear every detail you can recall about the location.”
“Of course, I’ll do the map for you.” Then he added hastily, “But don’t go for paper now.”
“Sure. I’ll get that later. But right now I want you to tell me everything you can remember about that last trip with Tommy.”
“I could never forget any detail of it. Did you know it was Tommy’s last mission before he would be free to go home?”
Nancy’s heart almost stopped beating for a moment. “No, I didn’t! He had written us he was almost through, however, and would be coming home soon.”
“It’s that last flight that generally gives our pilots the jitters,” Bruce explained. “And the last five or six are no picnics.”
“Naturally we had our bird tuned up and checked down to the last bolt. She took off, singing as sweet as any lark as we flew into the northwest. We had spilled our load on some Jap oil tankers and were on our way back when those nasty Zeros knocked one of our engines out of commission.”
“O.K. then, but the next hail of fire got our co-pilot, Jack Turner. Tom kept his head until the other engine began to sputter. For a while he tried to make it closer to our own territory, but it was no go.”
Nancy was folding the hem of the sheet into tight little creases while she listened tensely. “Then you had to jump?” she asked.
Bruce nodded again. “Every man knew his job, of course. We had done it time and again in practice. I destroyed my bombsight. All our bombs had already been spilled, but I saw that the bomb-bay doors were tightly closed, ready for the plane to hit the water.”