Free The Twilight Warriors by Robert Gandt

the deck and through the open cockpits.
    Erickson’s engine settled down to a low, steady throb. Following the lighted wands of the plane director, he taxied to the number one catapult on the port side of the forward deck. On signal, he unfolded the Corsair’s wings, then checked to make sure they were locked in place.
    Nearly an hour remained before sunrise, but the eastern sky was turning pale, offering a tiny pencil line of horizon. Except for his night carrier qualifications aboard USS
Core
nearly four months before, Erickson had no experience at launching in darkness.
    One after another, the Corsairs hurtled down the catapult track. Erickson’s flight leader, CAG Hyland, was already airborne. Windy Hill had just launched from the starboard catapult. Erickson waited while the crewmen hooked the catapult shuttle to the belly of his airplane. On signal he pushed the throttle up to full power, checked his gauges, then shoved his head back against the headrest. He gave the ready-to-launch salute.
    The catapult fired. Erickson felt like a stone in a slingshot. He sensed the dark shape of the carrier sweeping away behind him. The hard thrust of the hydraulic catapult abruptly ceased, and the Corsair hurtled into the night sky.
    Minutes later, Erickson was joined up with Hyland’s flight, tucked in behind Windy Hill’s right wing, on his way to Japan.

    F rom his CAP station at 20,000 feet, Landreth squinted into the pinkening sky. It was still too dark to pick out the shapes of warships against the blackened ocean. All the carriers in
Intrepid
’s Task Group 58.4 had launched their strikes. Now the aircraft were en route to the targets.
    Most of the time, combat air patrol was an exercise in boredom. You droned in an orbit over the task force, conserving fuel, waiting for a sudden urgent call from the FIDO—fighter director—whose radar showed incoming unidentified aircraft, called bogeys. When the bogeys were identified as hostile, they became bandits. In the space of seconds, boredom was replaced with a surge of adrenaline-charged excitement.
    For Landreth, no such call had come. In the warm solitude of his cockpit, he had time to reflect. Like most pilots in the wartime Navy, he was a reserve officer. When the war ended and the military shrank back to peacetime size, they would return to civilian life. Now that Landreth was in his second tour of combat duty, he had reached a decision. He wanted to stay in.
    The night before, he’d brought up the subject with the skipper over a toddy in Rawie’s stateroom. Technically, it was a breach of regulations. Drinking aboard Navy ships had been banned since 1914 when Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels issued General Order 99: “The use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station, is strictly prohibited, and commanding officers will be held directly responsible for the enforcement of this order.”
    It was one of those rules that begged to be broken. Most squadron pilots had stashes of booze for the purpose of late-night debriefings, celebrations of promotions and victories, and toasts to fallen comrades. Few commanding officers made an issue of it, and Will Rawie was no exception. Rawie, in fact, was a firm believer in the salutary benefits of a libation with his pilots and kept his own supply for that purpose.
    Rawie told Landreth he had his blessing to become a regularofficer in the Navy. It was exactly what Landreth had hoped to hear. He left the skipper’s stateroom with a warm contentment from the drinks and the knowledge that he had a career ahead of him in the Navy.
    Landreth was still feeling the contentment as he and his flight continued their orbit on their CAP station. It was quiet in their sector, although the Hellcat night fighter pilots on the opposite side of the task force had been sent after a pair of intruders, a twin-engine Kawasaki Ki-45 “Nick” fighter and a Mitsubishi