The Jet Plane’s Last Battle

JET PLANE MYSTERY

CHAPTER I WHISTLING MYSTERY

CHAPTER I

WHISTLING MYSTERY

Ensign Jack Steel sat on the edge of a life raft whittling a stick. A strange place to whittle, one might say, on the deck of a great U. S. aircraft carrier in mid-Pacific. But Jack loved to whittle.

“What do you make when you whittle?” someone once asked him. “Shavings—just shavings—that’s all,” had been his prompt reply. Then, feeling that this was not a real answer, he went on to say, “I whittle and think. Thinking is what really counts.”

Jack was thinking now, not thinking hard—just letting thoughts drift in and out of his mind. There was enough to think about, too; they were in Jap waters right now. Something was bound to happen soon, perhaps at dawn. Jack would be away before dawn, for his was a scout plane. Back at the faraway training base at Kingsville he had put in his bid for a dive bomber.

“Ah! A dive bomber!” he had said to Stew, his buddy. “There’s the plane for me! You climb to twelve thousand feet, you get near the target, you come zooming down at four hundred an hour, you let go your bomb, and—”

“Wham!” Stew had exclaimed.

“Yes,” Jack had agreed. “Then you get out of there fast, as if Old Nick himself was after you.”

In the Navy you don’t talk back; so when the powers that be read off Jack, or “Jackknife Johnny,” as some of the boys called him, for a scout ship, a scout ship it had been—and still was.

And now, Jack thought, I wouldn’t trade my little old scout plane for any ship that flies. To go skimming away before dawn, to watch the “dawn come up like thunder” in those tropical waters, then to skip from cloud to cloud, eyes ever on the sea, looking for the enemy—ah, that was the life!

“Nothing like it!” he whispered as he carved off a long shaving and allowed it to drop silently on the deck.

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