“Let them come!” Stew looked to the loading of his gun. “We’ll be waiting for them. We can’t run, but we still can fight.”

Two destroyers lay between the torpedo planes and the cargo ships. Their pom-pom guns began throwing up shells. The boys could see them explode in mid-air. Disregarding these, the torpedo pilots came sailing straight in, dropping rapidly as they approached their target.

Jack held his breath as one by one they passed through shellfire. That’s Dick, I imagine, he was thinking. Dick, Bert and Phil. All swell boys!

One shell, exploding beneath the second plane, lifted it into the air, but the plane came straight on.

At just the right moment, not five hundred feet from the sea, the first plane released its “tin fish.” Jack saw it hit the sea and speed away.

“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted. But the torpedo acted strangely. It leaped into the air, then dove like a playing porpoise. At last it reached the side of a cargo ship.

“Now!” Stew breathed.

But there came no sound. “Oh!” Jack exclaimed, as he saw the torpedo speed away beyond the ship. “It went right under her! What a—”

He did not finish, for suddenly a mighty explosion fairly tore the sky.

“Did you see that!” Stew exclaimed. “The second torpedo took that ship right on the beam! And did she explode! Must have been loaded with TNT.”

Jack had not seen. What he did see was a tower of black smoke and pieces of debris falling over the sea. And he saw the second ship, attacked by the last torpedo plane, meet the same fate.

All this had happened in the space of seconds, and all the time their disabled plane was chugging its way toward three small islands that stood out like green stones set in a field of blue.

“I hope they raise chickens on those islands,” said Stew.

“Chickens and no Japs,” Jack agreed. At that moment his eyes swept the sky for the Zeros. “Gone,” he murmured at last. “I guess they’ve seen enough for one day.”

After that Jack was silent for a time. He was thinking: Those ships were loaded with ammunition intended for Japs on some island. If they had gone through safely, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of our Marines 

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