SNAFU: Everyone Has Their Demons



  SNAFU

  Nick Carcano

  ~~~

  Copyright © 2014 Nick Carcano

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  ***

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living, dead, or demonic, actual events, or locales is purely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Other Books by Nick Carcano

  1

  The few fighters from Candy Squadron that made it back from the mission found their carrier listing at a 20 degree angle, belching smoke. Lieutenant Commander Turner banked his Wildcat into a slow orbit around the stricken vessel, taking it in. The other five fighters dutifully followed behind him.

  "Think those kung foo fighters got the Paddy, too?" Lieutenant Gustaffson radioed from his fighter right behind Turner.

  "Stow that shit, Candy six," Turner said. His hand shook as he switched to the USS Shamrock Bay's frequency. He'd seen things as a pilot: a glowing green ball of light the size of a B-29, dead pilots sitting in the wardroom. Nothing like the Zeroes that had bounced his squadron. Coming back to this didn't make it any easier.

  "Candy Lead calling Shamrock CAG. Candy Lead calling Shamrock CAG."

  They circled for five minutes before someone responded.

  "CAG's dead. They hit us like a hammer, Candy. You're going to have to ditch. We're abandoning ship." In the background Turner heard the groaning klaxon that signaled a dying ship.

  Their Commander Air Group, Captain Fitzpatrick was a legend. The nose art on his plane had a fighting leprechaun with the words "Luck of the Irish." His wife had just had a baby girl. Turner couldn't picture him dead.

  "Candy Squadron, this is Candy Lead. We're going to have to ditch. Follow me, we'll line up abreast alongside the Paddy. I'll go first then everyone else follows. Remember, gear up, unbuckle your parachute."

  They acknowledged as he continued their slow circle around the dying carrier. It listed further, unsecured equipment and crew sliding across the open deck and into the sea. One of the destroyers in the group was pulling alongside to effect a rescue, while a second steamed protectively nearby, probably trying to scare away any subs tempted by an easy shot.

  The surface was almost like glass, but Turner grit his teeth as he let his plane drift down into the water. He landed as smoothly as one could land a plane that weighed 3 tons. He even managed to get all the way out of his seat and inflate his Mae West before the plane sank underneath him. Gustaffson came in next, almost as smoothly and Turner swam for him. The next three came in more or less smoothly. The sixth, Second Lieutenant Wright, hit hard and his Wildcat flipped over on its nose, crashing upside down into the water. It sank and Wright never came up.

  2

  "What the hell happened, Matt?" Commodore Harken asked when they were all fished out of the drink and what remained of the carrier group was steaming for New Caledonia. Sailors and aviators packed the decks of the destroyers, but Harken had carved out the officers' wardroom as his new office.

  Turner could bullshit it, but there was no way you left with a squadron and came back with a flight and kept your command. Maybe if he told the truth they'd send him home on a psych discharge. Better than getting shuffled from dead-end posting to dead-end posting and branded incompetent.

  "Two flights of Zeroes approached from the northwest around 13:00. They had blue demons painted on their noses. When we opened fire, the nose art became animated and shifted to wherever we aimed. Both machinegun and cannon rounds were ineffective."

  "Matt, I expect better from you than a joke right now."

  "Not a joke, sir. Saw it with my own eyes."

  Harken frowned.

  "Here's what I think happened. You made a bad call, got bounced, and you either don't have the guts to own up to it, or you've had a mental breakdown. Which is it?"

  "Neither, sir."

  Harken's eyes held a small amount of pity. "I'm disappointed, Matt. Dismissed."

  Two days later, a PBY Catalina overflew them and the ship's engines stopped. He was summoned to the wardroom again. A woman in a Navy uniform with no rank insignia was with him. Maybe she was a psychiatrist, here to confirm he should be in the loony bin.

  She held up the after-action report he'd typed and signed like his own death warrant.

  "Is this a joke, Commander?" She had a voice like a Newark truck driver.

  "No, Ma'am."

  "Anyone else in your unit get a close look?" she asked.

  He hadn't expected that.

  "One of my Lieutenants, Gustaffson."

  "Pack your kit and tell your Lieutenant to do the same. Keep it quiet. Did you write about it? Diary? Letter home?"

  "Just my after action report."

  "Good," she turned to Harken, "Commodore, I need you to cut the Commander and his Lieutenant loose to me. Write up a transfer to Pavuvu for both of them for medical treatment and file it when you get back, but don't forward the transfer to Pavuvu."

  "It's bad enough a broad caused me to heave to, now you're giving me orders to falsify a transfer?"

  "Commodore, do you want me to get General MacArthur on the horn to repeat my orders to you?" she asked.

  Harken looked defiant but the woman held his gaze and he faltered.

  "Fine."

  3

  Turner had been expecting a psych discharge at best, but now he was on a PBY Catalina bound for somewhere unknown. And the company wasn't bad either. The woman was no Lauren Bacall, but he hadn't seen an actual, bona fide woman in two months.

  "Who are you, Ma'am?" he finally managed.

  "You can call me The Professor. I'm from the OSS. Don't repeat that to anyone unless you want to end up re-assigned as a forward observer in a jungle somewhere."

  "Spooks," he said, letting the word digest.

  She chuckled. "More right than you know."

  "Am I in trouble?"

  "No more than the rest of us."

  She wasn't a great conversationalist. He was grateful to be saved from the fate of getting Section Eight'd, but now he was lost. Lieutenant Gustaffson was doing his best impression of being asleep, clearly letting his commanding officer tangle with the scary lady.

  She was blunt, no reason not to respond in kind. "Professor, what the fuck is going on?"

  She counted something off on her fingers before she responded.

  "We've been getting reports of unkillable Zeroes. Most pilots aren't as forthcoming as you were. But a few rumors got around and we put the screws to a few pilots who'd been shot down. There is a lege
nd in Japan, of trickster demons known as the oni. Though they were considered a menace in ancient Japan, they have taken on somewhat of a protective role in modern Japanese society. They use statues of them, onigawara, as gargoyles on their buildings and men in oni masks frequently lead parades. Command tells me that the Japanese got desperate after Midway. They somehow attached real oni spirits to their planes, like gargoyles. So far as I can tell, no one who's gone up against them has managed to fly back. How did you manage that?"

  "It was a dumb hunch, but the dancing nose art seemed limited in size. I ordered everyone's wingmen to close up and engage together. The...art...couldn't be in two places at one time and one pilot's bullets could get through."

  "You know what they call a hunch that works, Commander? A solution."

  "That solution meant there was no one to watch each other's backs. We were able to knock down a few, but at the expense of half of my squadron. A lot of good men died," he said. He'd put the men lost out of his mind, but now it came rushing forward. He wiped at his eyes, turning away from the Professor and pretending to fiddle with something in his bag.

  "I didn't even get to write letters home yet," he said. "I was too stunned."

  She pulled some stationary out of her satchel and handed him a fountain pen. "Write them now, we'll need one more refueling stop so we've got several hours. We'll have to route them through several posts to avoid them being traced back, so they'll be delayed a few weeks, but they'll get there."

  "Thanks," he said, taking the pen and starting to write. The words disappeared seconds after writing them. "Is this one of those invisible ink pens?"

  "Oh!" She snatched it and the first paper out of his hand and handed him a different pen. "Sorry."

  She took the page she'd confiscated and burned it with a lighter, stamping into ash after a crewman yelled at her.

  "Where are we going anyway?" he asked.

  "A place with no name," she replied.

  4

  The atoll had barely enough space for a packed-earth runway, a hangar, a few quonset huts, and a lonely AA gun.

  "Welcome to No Name Atoll," the Professor said to Turner before jumping out of the PBY into the knee-deep water and slogging to the beach.

  A young man in thick glasses, wearing a rumpled Marine uniform with corporal's chevrons met her on he beach.

  "How's the SNAFU Mears?" she asked.

  "I think they might have overdone it with the tranquilizers on Terminal Island. But I think it's coming around."

  "This is Commander Turner and Lieutenant Gustaffson, they saw the onigawara up close and even managed to kill a few of the Zeroes that had them," the Professor said, gesturing back to the two pilots.

  The young man turned to them and began peppering them with questions.

  "What were their dimensions? Did you see any of the 700 nanometer wavelength or only cobalt? Did they seem to obey the laws of parallax or maintain their spectral dimension regardless of angle of approach?"

  "Well, I-" Turner stammered.

  "Mears," the Professor called, "Leave them alone for now, we need to attend to the SNAFU."

  "What snafu?" Turner asked.

  A woman's scream ripped through the air, rising in volume until it drowned out the sound of the waves and the Catalina's supercharged engines. Turner clapped his hands over his ears as the sound went higher in pitch and his vision blurred. Then mercifully it ended.

  "That's the SNAFU," the Professor responded.

  5

  The Professor handed him two foam ear plugs. They were slightly damp to the touch.

  "Dipped in holy water," the Professor said. She pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his mustache. The handkerchief came away bloody.

  "Nothing to worry about, happens to everyone the first time they hear it."

  "What the fuck was that?"

  "Come on, I'll show you."

  He looked back at Gustaffson and the PBY. He had his pistol, they could force the pilots to fly them to a nice Navy brig in sunny San Diego. But no sooner had he thought about it than the Catalina reversed its props and backed into the lagoon.

  Reluctantly, he put in the ear plugs, hefted his sea bag and followed the Professor.

  She led him to a small hangar where two MPs with subguns came to attention as she passed. Inside the hangar was a new SBD Dauntless dive bomber with yellow primer showing in spots underneath the blue-gray overcoat, and a torpedo mounted on a dolly. The torpedo itself wasn't like any he'd seen before. It was perforated at regular intervals with half-inch holes. Coarse, wiry brown hair poked out of some of them.

  "SuperNatural Anti-paranormal Fiend Unit," the Professor said, her voice dulled by the ear plugs. "The Japanese have their oni and we have demons of our own. Well, a devil, to be precise. President Roosevelt insisted on hunting it down personally in 1913 and until recently it's been held in a secret facility I never told you about."

  Normally, Turner would have scoffed at the idea of being in the presence of a devil, but things had been anything but normal lately. The torpedo wiggled and Turner took a step back when he realized a pair of orange eyes was peering out at him from two holes. He turned to the Professor, the side of his face tingling from the unseen stare.

  "So, will our uh-devil, protect us like the Jap ones?" Turner asked.

  "Not quite," the Professor responded. She gestured to the young Marine and said, "Mears, let's close it up. I hate talking with these ear plugs in."

  Mears nodded, pushed the dolly outside, down a ramp, and into a concrete air raid shelter. After he closed the heavy steel door, the Marine grabbed a hose attached to a water tank with a cross painted on it sprayed down the shelter.

  The Professor pulled out her ear plugs and worked her jaw.

  "Oh, that feels so much better," she said. "Now, let's get a drink."

  6

  The officer's mess was empty except for a chaplain with a bottle of wine reading a book in one corner.

  "Help yourself boys," the Professor said, pouring herself a club soda with a lime. "It's no Atlantic City, but it's the only booze in five hundred miles."

  Turner found a dusty bottle of whiskey and poured himself four fingers of it, while Gustaffson helped himself to lukewarm Schlitz. They both joined the Professor at a table.

  "To the devil you know," she said, holding her drink aloft.

  They returned the salute. The whiskey was a step above torpedo juice, but anything to take his mind off the thing in the hangar was welcome.

  "I'm a folklorist," the Professor said. "My particular area of study is American religious folklore, specializing in demons, devils, imps, ghouls, ghosts, poltergeists, etc. When the OSS first got reports of these oni on Zeroes, they drafted me from Syracuse University to figure them out. I've studied all the Japanese mythological texts I could get my hands on and the only weakness I've really found is monkeys. Finding that many monkeys and assigning a monkey to every American plane would present a logistical nightmare, so that's out, though I have no doubt some other poor OSS bastard is in Africa right now buying every monkey he can get his hands on.

  "Anyway, I remembered a strange thing from my studies. There aren't a lot of demon myths in America."

  Turner's glass ran dry and he poured himself another, bringing the bottle with him to the table.

  "Which is strange because America was founded by Puritans, folks with such extreme religious views, that they would rather settle an unknown, alien continent, rather than live in England. Such folks should have seen demons in every shadow, every strange new animal. But they didn't. There are only a handful of such myths in America and only one confirmed, the SNAFU."

  She let that hang there and Turner focused on the burn of the whiskey.

  "I had a theory: the SNAFU scared off the rest. You heard that call. Predatory animals call for two reasons, for a mate, or to warn others that they're the strongest. That isn't a mating call.

  "Here's the plan: you fly our devil to Rabaul in the Dauntless, Mear
s will go with you. The Japanese will send a formation of Zeroes and Mears will use the liquid stimulation rod we're installing in the gunner's seat to get the SNAFU to sing, scaring off the oni protecting the Zeroes."

  "He's going to poke it with a wet stick?" Gustaffson asked, chuckling in disbelief.

  "Liquid stimulation rod, yes," the Professor said. "It dislikes water, holy water in particular. We're fitting a reservoir into the bomber."

  "That's a hell of a theory, prof. What makes you think it will work?" Turner asked, setting his glass down half-full. "Rabaul's Jap central. Flying there's going to be like punching a hornet's nest."

  The Professor looked down at her drink, running her finger around the rim of the glass.

  "We had a shinto priest come and bless an onigawara, an oni gargoyle on Terminal Island. When the SNAFU screamed, the onigawara cracked in half."

  At that moment an unearthly howl sounded from outside the quonset hut. But it wasn't the SNAFU. It was an air raid siren.

  7

  Outside the tent, Turner spotted a dozen Japanese fighters and bombers headed their way. "Please tell me there's another air raid shelter," Turner said as the anti-aircraft gun began its rhythmic thumping. A few pitiful black pinpricks of flak appeared amid the Japanese formation.

  "No, just the one," the Professor said. Turner glanced at the gray pillbox, then back at the approaching planes.

  The scream of air brakes broke his indecision as the first dive bombers nosed down toward them. Hot steel screamed through the air, chewing up the sand around them. A blast knocked him off his feet and his hearing disappeared. A hand grabbed him and pulled him up, through a cloud of dust and smoke. The Professor.

  She got them to the shelter and he heaved open the door.

  "Where's Gustaffson?" he shouted, his voice a small, dull sound.

  She shook her head and stuck the foam plugs back in her ears.

  He felt inside his pocket, but came up empty. He patted himself all over, but they were gone.

  The Professor yanked him down into the shelter and a bomb blast a second later slammed the heavy steel door shut. A high-pitched whine at the edge of his hearing grew louder and deeper until he realized it was the SNAFU, screaming from its torpedo-cage not a foot away. Turner jammed his fingers in his ears and kicked the dolly up against the far wall, buying himself a few inches of extra space from the devil.