Fletch was shouting too, in a fury at the driver: “What the hell are you doing? Keep going!”

“I can’t, sir,” the man answered. “Truck two ahead of this one just got blown to hell and gone. Road’s blocked.”

“Well, get off the road and go around him,” Armitage raged.

“I’ll try, sir,” the driver said dubiously.

Armitage wished he could see better. With the olive-drab canvas cover over the back of the truck, he might as well have been inside a Spam can for all the visibility he had. Then a fragment of bomb casing ripped through the canvas about six inches above his head. He decided he didn’t want a view all that badly.

The driver let out a frightened howl: “Fighters! Jap fighters!”

They were coming in low, plenty low enough for Fletch to hear their motors over the noise the trucks were making. He heard their machine guns and cannon going off, too. And, half a heartbeat later, he heard the driver scream.

He had other things to worry about, though. Machine-gun bullets finished the job of shredding the canvas. They did a pretty good job of shredding men, too, and metal as well. Four or five soldiers in the rear compartment started screaming and shouting and cursing, all at the same time. Something hot and wet splashed Fletch’s ear and the side of his face. The iron stink of blood filled the compartment.

More screams followed when the truck ran into the one in front of it. Next to getting strafed by a Zero, though, a collision was a small thing. The diesel engine didn’t go up in flames the way a gasoline-powered motor would have. Even so, Fletch said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Nobody argued with him. In fact, soldiers scrambled over him to escape. Some of them were wounded, others just panicked. By the time he got out, blood splashed the front of his uniform, even if he wasn’t hurt himself.