The plane carried six five-hundred-pound bombs, and the technique used in skip-bombing a convoy was not unlike shooting a twenty-two at a line of metal ducks in a state fair sideshow, except the ducks couldn't fire back. The bombardier would ignore the Norden bombsight, which didn't really work all that well anyway, and line up each target by eye, release a bomb, then twitch the plane and line up the next. It was fast and frightening, speed and terror all mixed together.

When done properly, the bombs would rebound off the surface of the water and careen into the target like a bowling ball bounced down an alleyway toward the pins. The bombardier was only twenty-two, fresh-faced, and from a farm in Pennsylvania, but he had grown up shooting deer in the thick woods of the countryside of his home state, and he was very good at what he did, very cool, very composed, unaware that every microsecond took them closer to their own deaths, just as it took them closer to the deaths they were trying to achieve.

"One away!" the voice from the nose of the plane crackled over the intercom, distant, as if shouted from some field far away.

"Two gone! Three!" Lovely Lydia was shuddering bow to stern, torn by the force of the bullets flying toward her, the release of the bombs and the speed of its own wind ripping at her wings.

"All away! Get us out of here, captain!"

The engines surged again, as the captain pulled back on the stick, lining the bomber into the air.

"Rear turret! What y'all see?"

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, captain! One hit! No three! No, damn it, five hits! Jesus Christ! Omigod, Omigod! They got the Duck! Oh, no.

Green Eyes, too!"

"Hang on, boys," the captain had said.