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Major Dirk Pitt adjusted the headset on his thick black hair and slowly turned the channel crank on the radio, trying to fine-tune the reception. He listened intently for a few moments, his dark, sea-green eyes reflecting a trace of bewilderment A frown cut his forehead in a series of grooves and hung there in the tanned leathery skin.
It wasn’t that the words crackling over the receiver weren’t understandable. They were. He just didn’t believe them. He listened again, and listened hard over the droning roar of the PBY Catalina’s twin engines. The voice he heard was fading, when it should have been getting stronger. The volume control was turned to full on, and, Brady Field was only thirty miles away. Under those conditions, the air traffic operator’s voice should have blasted Pitt’s eardrums out. The operator is either losing power or he’s seriously injured, thought Pitt He pondered a minute and then reached over to his right and shook the sleeping figure in the co-pilot’s seat.
“Come out of it, sleeping beauty.” He spoke in a tone that was soft and effortless, yet had a way of making itself heard in a throbbing airplane or a crowded room.
Captain Al Giordino wearily raised his head and yawned loudly. The fatigue of sitting in an old vibrating PBY flying boat for thirteen hours straight was evident in his dark, bloodshot eyes. He flung his arms upward, puffed out his barrel chest and stretched. Then he came erect and leaned forward, peering out in the distance beyond the cockpit windows.
“Are we over the First Attempt yet?” Giordino mumbled through another yawn.
“Almost,” replied Pitt. “There’s Thasos dead ahead.”
“Oh hell,” Giordino grunted; then grinned. “I could have slept another ten minutes. Why’d you wake me?”
“I intercepted a message from Brady Control that said the field was under attack by an unidentified aircraft”
“You can’t be serious,” Giordino said incredulously. “It must be some kind of a joke.”
“No, I don’t think so. The control operator’s voice didn’t sound like it was faking.’ Pitt hesitated and kept an eye on the water only fifty feet away as it flashed under the PBY’s hull. Just for practice he had wave-hopped the last two hundred miles; a means of keeping his reflexes honed and sharp.
“It might be that Brady Control was telling the truth,” said Giordino, peering through the cockpit windshield. “Look over there toward the eastern part of the island.”
Both men stared at the approaching mound rising out of the sea. The beaches bordering the surf were yellow and barren, but the round sloping hills were green with trees. The colors danced in the heat waves and vividly contrasted against the encircling blue of the Aegean. On the eastern side of Thasos a large pillar of smoke rose into the windless sky and fanned a giant, spiral-shaped, black cloud. The PBY's bow soared closer to the island, and soon they could distinguish the orange movement of flames at the base of the smoke.
Pitt grabbed the mike and pressed the button on the side of the handgrip. “Brady Control, Brady Control, this is PBY-086, over.” There was no response.
Pitt repeated the call twice more.
“No answer?” queried Giordino.
“Nothing,” returned Pitt.
“You said an unidentified aircraft. I take it, that means one?”
“That’s precisely what Brady Control said before they went off the air.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Why would one plane attack a United States Air Force Base?”
“Who knows,” Pitt said, easing the control column back slightly. “Maybe it’s an irate Greek farmer who’s tired of our jets scaring his goals. Anyway. it can’t be a full-scale attack, or Washington would have notified us by now. We’ll have to wait and see” He rubbed his eyes and blinked away the drowsiness. “Get ready, I’m going to take her up, circle in over those hills and come down out of the sun for a closer look.”
“Take it nice and easy.” Giordino’s eyebrows came together and he grinned a serious grin. “This old bus is way overmatched if that’s a rocket firing jet down there.”
“Don’t worry,” Pitt laughed. “My main goal in life is to stay healthy as long as possible.” He pushed the throttles forward, and the two Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines increased their beat. His large, brown hands moved efficiently, pulling back on the control column, and the plane aimed its flat snout at the sun. The big Catalina rose steadily, gaining altitude by the second, and circled above the Thasos mountains in the direction of the growing smoke cloud.
Suddenly, a voice broke in over Pitt’s headset. The unexpected sound nearly deafened his ears before he could lower the volume—the same voice be heard before, but stronger this time.
“This is Brady Control calling. We are under attack! I repeat, we are under attack! Come in anybody, please reply!” The voice was near hysteria.
Pitt replied, “Brady Control, this is PBY-086. Over.”
“Thank God, someone answered,” the voice gasped.
“I tried to raise you before, Brady Control, but you faded and went off the air.”
“I was hit in the first attack, I.. . I must have passed out I’m all right now.” The words sounded broken, but coherent
“We’re approximately ten miles west of you at six thousand feet.” Pitt spoke slowly and did not repeat his position. “What is your situation?”
“We have no defense. All our aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The nearest interceptor squadron is seven hundred miles away. They’ll never get here in time. Can you assist?”
