They called her cursed.

She sat at the edge of the boneyard at Port Moresby like some big, tired animal that had forgotten how to fly, her skin patched with mismatched aluminum, her nose scabbed where Plexiglas used to be. The ground crews walked past her without looking too long, the way you don’t stare at a bad omen. Superstition traveled faster than orders out there, and the word on this particular B-17E was simple: she got men killed.

Then a 24-year-old captain named Jay Zeamer asked for her.

He didn’t want a good airplane. The good ones were all assigned. He wanted one nobody else did — something he and a crew of misfits could tear apart and build back up their way. So they rolled the “cursed” Fortress out of the graveyard and into the harsh New Guinea sun, and over the next three months, nine Americans turned a worn-out B-17 into a flying gun rack.

They painted her number on the tail: 41-2666.

Old 666.

The name stuck fast.

The first time Jay walked up to her, she looked every bit as bad as the rumors. Panels hung loose along the fuselage. Rivet lines showed daylight. The nose looked like it had gone three rounds with a prizefighter and lost. Something inside her left wing rattled in the morning breeze.

He put a hand on the oil-streaked skin anyway.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “We’ll get along.”

Behind him, his newly assembled crew sized up the project. They were not the shiny, rulebook flyers of training posters. They were the guys who’d rubbed somebody the wrong way, or gotten bored flying straight-and-level milk runs, or volunteered one time too many until regular crews started to look at them sideways.

They’d given themselves a nickname already, half-joke, half-challenge: The Eager Beavers.

Technical Sergeant Johnny Able, the radio operator and top-turret gunner, wiped sweat from his brow and leaned on an ammo crate.

“This thing’s supposed to fly?” he muttered.

“Not yet,” Staff Sergeant Forest Dillman answered, small and wiry beside him. At five-foot-four, the ball turret gunner looked like a kid someone had left on the wrong playground. “But she will. Look at all the space for guns.”

Forests of machine guns — that was the idea.

Most B-17s in the theater carried a standard loadout. Nose armament, waist guns, tail guns, top and ball turrets — enough to defend themselves while a formation of Fortresses put bombs on target together. But in the Pacific in 1943, they weren’t flying tidy European-style box formations. Out here it was long, lonely missions over blue water and green jungle, small groups and too many solos, where Japanese Zeros could come howling in from any direction they pleased.

And in the last six months, the Pacific had eaten bombers alive.

Forty-three unescorted Allied bombers lost over Japanese-held islands. Survival odds on those runs were under thirty percent. Command showed the numbers and called certain missions “volunteer only.”

That was where the Eager Beavers usually raised their hands.

They stripped two thousand pounds out of Old 666.

Armor plate that didn’t make sense, old equipment that never worked right, pointless weight that took up space where they wanted something else. They installed new engines, wrangled fresh parts out of supply like street hustlers, and turned favors into hardware.

Then they started hanging .50-caliber machine guns wherever they could think to mount one.

Three fifties in the nose — twin flexible guns plus a fixed gun that Jay could fire from the cockpit. Twin fifties in each waist position, not singles like most B-17s in theater. Twin fifties in the top turret, twin in the ball, twin in the tail. They scrounged, welded, drilled, improvised until the bomber bristled.

Someone said she now carried more firepower than any single aircraft in the Pacific.

Kendrick, the right-waist gunner, ran a hand along one of the new nose guns and grinned.

“Cursed, huh?” he said. “Looks more like a bad dream for whoever’s on the wrong end of this.”

Sergeant Herbert Pew, his partner at the left waist, just shrugged. “Bombers don’t win dogfights,” he said. “That’s what they tell us.”

“Yeah?” Kendrick’s grin widened. “Maybe this one didn’t get the memo.”

They laughed like men who understood odds and ignored them anyway.

June 16th, 1943 came up hot and gray, the kind of New Guinea dawn where the horizon is just a brighter shade of darkness and the air smells like rain, oil, and nervous sweat.

At 4:00 a.m., Old 666 lifted off from Port Moresby, heavier in guns and ammunition than she’d ever been, lighter in everything else.

The mission was simple on paper and suicidal in practice: a solo, unescorted photo reconnaissance and mapping run over Bougainville and Buka — deep into Japanese territory.

The Marines needed photographs. In November, they’d be going ashore at Empress Augusta Bay, and they needed to know every reef and sandbar and log-jammed beach beforehand. The plan called for long, steady, straight-and-level passes so a bank of cameras in the bomb bay could stitch together large-scale images of the coastline.

No weaving, no dodging, no formation of other bombers to hide inside.

Just one B-17 flying a ruler-straight line over enemy airfields.

P-38 fighters didn’t have the range to escort them the whole way. Command knew it. Jay knew it. His crew knew it.

Volunteer only.

The Eager Beavers showed up as usual.

In the nose, Second Lieutenant Joseph Sarnoski settled into the bombardier’s position beside the cameras. The 28-year-old had flown combat for a year and a half out here, seen enough missions where the flak and fighters turned the sky into a killing field. Three weeks earlier he’d earned a Silver Star for another rough run.

It should have been his ticket home.

His orders back to the States were already cut. His bag sat packed at Port Moresby, three days from a ship and then the long journey back to Pennsylvania, to his wife Marie, to a family with so many kids they practically needed their own zip code.

But the mission needed an experienced bombardier to run the cameras — someone who could keep his head while they flew through whatever the Japanese threw at them.

He’d volunteered anyway.

He checked his twin nose guns, felt the rubber grips under his hands, glanced at the fixed .50 that Jay could fire from the cockpit. Most Fortress crews in the Pacific prayed the enemy never came head-on; they had thin protection forward.

Old 666 was different.

He looked back through the corridor toward the cockpit, saw Jay’s profile in the dim light, square jaw set, hands calm on the yoke. Co-pilot John Britton sat beside him, not quite as relaxed. It would’ve been strange if he was.

Sarnoski gave a thumbs-up, and Jay answered with one of his own.

Then there was just the steady roar of engines and the long, empty miles.

The sun came up low over the Pacific, a dirty orange disc behind haze, as Old 666 crossed the last stretch of water toward Bougainville. The cameras would be useless until the light was right. They arrived early — too early for mapping.

They could wait offshore, turning lazy circles over the water, or they could do what Intelligence had asked at the last minute:

Fly in over Buka Island and photograph a small airfield there that had seen a spike in Japanese activity.

One bomber.

Solo.

No escort.

Everyone understood what it meant to loiter near an enemy airstrip with no friendly fighters within hundreds of miles.

In the back, the crew voted the way the Eager Beavers usually voted.

They went for the airfield.

At 8:03 a.m., Old 666 was steady at 25,000 feet over Buka.

The bomb bay doors were closed. The cameras in their racks were running, film spooling steadily, shutters clicking in mechanical rhythm as the bomber held her straight path over the airstrip below.

Jay’s altimeter sat rock steady.

“Hold it right there,” Navigator First Lieutenant Ruby Johnston said, hunched over his charts and watches. “Two more minutes on this leg.”

“Two minutes,” Jay repeated.

He could feel it in those two minutes — the exposure, the vulnerability. No turns, no jinks, no speed changes. A six-mile-long target board in the sky.

Below, on the Buka runway, sixteen small shapes began to move.

Zeros.

They lifted from the strip in two’s and four’s, bellies glinting and then vanishing in the climb. In the thin air, cold light off the Pacific, they were just specks at first, but everyone in the crew knew what they meant.

Sixteen fighters. One Fortress.

It didn’t take a slide rule to do that math.

In the nose, Sarnoski watched them through the Plexiglas, tracking their climb, reading the angles.

“Sixteen, Skipper,” he said quietly over the interphone. “They’re all coming.”

“Copy,” Jay said.

He didn’t turn. Didn’t break off. The cameras still clicked away, the film capturing runways and taxiways, revetments, anything the photo interpreters back at Moresby could use later.

The Japanese fighters climbed hard, three thousand feet a minute. They reached 22,000 feet — three thousand below the B-17 and still coming.

“Thirty seconds,” Johnston called.

Thirty seconds. It might as well have been an hour.

The first five fighters broke formation and spread out in front of Old 666, line abreast, nose pointed right down the bomber’s throat. Classic frontal attack — the kind that shredded B-17s with concentrated 20mm cannon fire before a single American gunner could get their sights steady.

But most B-17s didn’t have what Old 666 had in her nose.

Sarnoski tightened his grip on the twin fifties, breathed once, slow and steady. He could feel the bomber’s engines through the deck plates, a constant vibration under his boots.

“Here they come,” he said.

The Zeros closed at a combined closing speed around seven hundred miles an hour, climbing into the bomber’s line of flight, their own guns beginning to wink.

At six hundred yards, they opened fire — thin lines of tracer and shells reaching for the Fortress.

“Now,” Jay said.

Sarnoski squeezed the triggers. The nose became a thunderstorm. Twin .50s roared at his shoulders, the fixed gun in front barking as Jay thumbed his own trigger in the cockpit. Three machine guns poured a stream of metal into the air, tracers reaching out like angry orange fingers.

The lead Zero’s nose disappeared in a flash of torn metal. The engine cowling ripped open. The fighter shuddered, rolled inverted, and fell out of sight.

The other four kept coming.

They bored into their own fire, steady, fearless or maybe just trained beyond hesitation.

At three hundred yards, they were close enough that Sarnoski could see the pilots hunched over their instruments.

The first shell hit the nose.

The Plexiglas erupted inward, turned into a storm of jagged, invisible knives. A 20mm shell detonated just in front of Sarnoski’s position; the blast threw him backward like a rag doll. Something tore across his neck and side; everything went sideways and red.

For a second, he saw only the floor and the smear of blood already pooling there.

In the cockpit, metal shrieked and shuddered. A shell came up through the floor, blowing out Jay’s left rudder pedal in a spray of fragments. Pain slammed into him, white-hot, from his left leg. Shrapnel bit into both legs and his wrist. He tasted blood and cordite at the same time.

The Zeros screamed past the bomber, over and under, the whole exchange lasted twelve seconds.

One Zero destroyed.

One bombardier down.

One pilot wounded.

Fifteen Japanese fighters still alive and climbing.

Six hundred miles from friendly airspace.

Navigator Ruby Johnston saw it all in pieces as he crawled forward.

The corridor to the nose was full of smoke and cold air and floating bits of insulation. The wind had teeth now, knifing through the shattered Plexiglas. He saw Sarnoski lying under the catwalk, blood pouring from his neck in rhythmic spurts.

That scared him more than the holes in the airplane — that pulsing, each beat a little less than the one before.

He pressed a hand to the wound, trying to stop the leak, but Sarnoski pushed his hand away with surprising strength, eyes blazing.

The bombardier jabbed a finger toward the nose guns.

Another wave was coming.

Johnston looked up through the ragged hole where the nose used to be. He saw them: eight Zeros, higher now at 26,000 feet, hanging like sharks above a wounded whale.

They’d watched the first attack, learned from it.

This time they came in smarter — four from above, four from below, a bracket attack meant to split a bomber’s defenses and overwhelm them.

Sarnoski dragged himself back to his guns, every inch of movement painting the metal floor a deeper red. His flight suit clung wet to his side and thigh. His hands trembled on the grips.

He blinked until the double images merged into one Zero in his sight.

Six hundred yards.

Five hundred.

Four hundred.

He fired.

The twin fifties hammered. Tracers stitched up the lead fighter’s nose. The canopy exploded, shards and smoke spinning away. The Zero rolled over and slid out of view, trailing debris.

Sarnoski swung to the second fighter as if his body wasn’t failing, fired again. Rounds punched into the engine; the propeller stuttered and stopped. The Zero fell off that attack, dead stick, dropping somewhere into the sky behind them.

In the cockpit, Jay fought the bomber itself now. With the left rudder pedal blown away, he had to muscle the yoke, forcing Old 666 to stay straight and level while his leg screamed.

He should have turned.

He should have dived.

But the cameras were still running, and the Marines back on Guadalcanal and Honolulu would need every frame.

He held course.

Below the fuselage, in the cramped glass-and-steel bubble of the ball turret, Staff Sergeant Forest Dillman watched his own set of attackers. Four Zeros were coming up from beneath the bomber at 19,000 feet, where most bombers were naked and helpless.

Old 666 wasn’t most bombers.

He’d been in that ball for six months and thirty-two missions, curled around twin fifties in a space that felt smaller every time he clambered into it. You didn’t stretch in a ball turret. You curled, you breathed, you checked your ammo feeds and your sights.

You waited.

This time, there was no long waiting.

“At six o’clock low, four of ‘em,” he called.

He squeezed the triggers at four hundred yards. The sound filled his little world, a deep, percussive rhythm that lived in his bones. Tracers arced toward the lead fighter, walked up its belly. For a heartbeat nothing happened, then the Zero simply turned into fire.

The fuel tank went up in an orange puff, and then the shards went spinning away.

The three remaining fighters scattered, banking away from that sudden flame.

Above, the film continued to run, each frame capturing the contours of coastline and jungle even as metal and men tried to tear each other apart around it.

The first part of the mission — the Buka photos — was complete.

Jay banked the wounded Fortress left, turning southwest toward the western coastline of Bougainville, the real objective they’d come out here for.

Thirteen Japanese fighters were still up there, regrouping.

Sarnoski slumped forward over the nose guns.

Johnston felt for a pulse and felt nothing.

The bombardier had kept going for four minutes after a wound most men wouldn’t have lived past four seconds. He’d stayed at his position until his heart simply stopped.

There was no time for grief. Not with Zeros still out there.

Johnston pulled the body back, gently as he could in the cramped space, and slid into the nose gunner’s stance. Old 666 needed every gun and pair of eyes it had left.

Back in the fuselage, something else happened — something slow, dangerous, and invisible at first.

In the cockpit, the oxygen gauges dropped to zero.

The shells that had wrecked Jay’s leg had also blown the main oxygen tanks behind the cockpit. At 25,000 feet, you didn’t live long on hope alone. The crew had small personal bottles, but those would last ten minutes at best.

After that: confusion, clumsy hands, tunnel vision, unconsciousness, and then nothing at all.

Jay faced a choice.

He could dump altitude immediately, dive below ten thousand feet where men could breathe unaided — and in doing so, cut the photo run short.

Or he could stay high long enough to finish the job, and gamble his crew wouldn’t black out before he got them down.

He hesitated just long enough to know he was making a decision, then chose.

“Three more minutes at altitude,” he said. “Finish the strip.”

In the right seat, Co-pilot John Britton came to with a pounding ache in his skull and the taste of iron in his mouth. He’d been knocked cold when the first shell hit the cockpit. Now he blinked, focused, and saw the state of the man beside him.

Jay’s left leg was a wreck; the knee was simply gone. The flight suit around it was shredded, dark with blood. White shapes showed where bone had no business being seen. His right wrist dripped steadily onto the floor, already slick with more blood and hydraulic fluid.

“Jesus, Jay—” Britton reached for the yoke.

Jay shook his head sharply.

“Not yet,” he said through clenched teeth. “Hold her steady. Cameras need two more minutes.”

Britton looked from the compass to the angry, torn sky around them and then back at his pilot.

“All right,” he said.

Sometimes there weren’t many choices. Just different ways to be afraid.

The remaining thirteen Zeros regrouped at 27,000 feet, two thousand feet above the big American bomber that refused to die.

They’d lost three aircraft outright and seen two more limp away, streams of smoke marking their paths. The Fortress below was clearly more heavily armed than anyone had told them. Somewhere on the ground, some Japanese intelligence officer had underestimated the Americans, and the cost was now falling out of the sky in burning hunks.

The flight leader changed the play.

No more frontal assaults into that meat grinder of nose guns.

They’d come in from the sides now, where many B-17s were relatively thin-skinned: the waist positions.

He had no way of knowing Old 666 carried twin fifties at both windows, not singles.

On the right, Staff Sergeant George Kendrick locked his hands around his grips, watched six Zeros swing into line. On the left, Sergeant Herbert Pew watched seven more line up, their wings glinting as they drifted into their attack runs.

Too many targets.

Too many angles.

Kendrick and Pew had flown together eight months. They didn’t have to talk about who would take what. They knew the drill. Right gunner handled the threats on his side; left handled his; anything that crossed the bomber’s tail swapped hands.

The Zeros rolled into their dives.

At five hundred yards, Kendrick started firing.

His tracer stream reached for the lead Zero. He walked the fire in, adjusting for the way the fighter jinked and snaked. The fighter flew straight into it. The wing root burst, spraying fuel that caught, a bright streak against the blue-green jungle below. The Zero rolled away, trailing fire.

He shifted to the second fighter. This pilot was better, juking out of the line of fire, making the .50s work. Kendrick led him, fired again, and watched rounds stitch across the fuselage. The canopy blew out; the fighter snapped into a roll, out of control, and dropped away.

Two down on the right.

Four still coming.

On the left side, Pew watched his first target come in too fast. He held his fire. One of the tricks they’d learned out here was to wait — to fight the urge to pull the triggers the second the enemy was in sight. Ammunition was heavy; they’d brought a lot, but not enough for waste.

The Zero spat fire at three hundred yards, its own guns flashing.

Pew waited a fraction more.

Then he squeezed.

The fighter flew straight into the stream of .50-caliber rounds, engine suddenly smoking. It pulled up, too late, and disappeared above the wing.

The cameras in the bomb bay clicked out the last frames of coastline.

“Mapping run complete,” Johnston called, still in the nose.

Jay shoved the yoke forward.

Old 666 dropped her nose and dived.

The Fortress fell like it wanted to leave parts of itself behind.

From 24,000 feet to 15,000, the altimeter unwound fast. The dive was steep enough to make stomachs lurch, ears pop. But at that altitude, the crew could breathe again on what thin, warm air filtered through the shot-up fuselage.

White-edged black crept back from their vision. The fuzz in their brains cleared.

The Zeros, though, came with them.

At 15,000 feet, Jay eased back, leveling off. The bomber had to get home, and you didn’t get home if you tore your wings off chasing speed. The remaining fighters dove too, pressing the advantage. Lower and slower, the bomber was easier meat; they could now play vertical games, diving out of the sun, using speed to hit and climb away.

Eight Zeros were still fully operational.

The rest burned or limped home.

The Japanese flight leader split his remaining planes into two elements of four. One group would attack from the rear quarter, one from the front.

A pincer.

Tail gunner Staff Sergeant William Vaughn saw the rear element first. Four fighters in trail, coming down from six o’clock high, guns beginning to flicker at the edges of their range.

He’d seen that setup thirty times in other missions — the way fighters swept in, chewed at the tail, then popped up and away before the top turret or nose guns could reach them.

He waited.

Six hundred yards, their first tracers fell short.

He held his fire.

Five hundred.

Four hundred.

At that distance, their tracks were committed. They couldn’t simply pull off and try later. That was when he squeezed.

The twin fifties in the tail hammered. The lead Zero took hits across its engine, black smoke belching out behind it. The fighter tried to pull up, stalled, and fell into a spin, vanishing below the tail.

The other three scattered.

Up front, Johnston saw four Zeros diving from ten o’clock high.

He swung the nose guns.

The barrels were still warm from the earlier fight, still reeking of oil and burnt powder. His own heart hammered just as hard.

He opened up at five hundred yards, stitched tracers across the sky, missed. The fighters were closing fast, their sleek shapes wobbling only slightly as they rode their attack paths down through the air.

He led them more the second burst. The tracers walked up the nose of the lead Zero. The cowling shattered. Metal flew back, peppering the canopy. The fighter pulled up, wounded, streaming smoke.

But nothing came free.

Old 666 shuddered as 20mm shells pounded into her left wing, blowing out sections of skin and structure. Hydraulic fluid sprayed. The number two engine coughed, sputtered, and fell out of rhythm.

Jay scanned the engine instruments. Oil pressure dropping. Head temperature climbing.

No saving it.

He feathered the propeller, shutting the engine down before it ripped itself apart.

Three engines remained.

Six hundred miles to go.

At 8:45 a.m., forty-two minutes after the first fighters came up from Buka, the remaining Zeros called it quits.

They’d burned through their ammunition and fuel. The sea was a long way down. Home was thirty miles behind them. They’d already lost four planes for sure and damaged three more beyond easy repair.

The flight leader waggled his wings — the agreed signal.

The seven surviving Zeros turned northeast, climbing away, leaving a crippled American bomber limping southwest over open ocean.

In the cockpit, the adrenaline began to ebb, leaving only pain.

Jay sagged back in his seat. The left leg was beyond agony now, a distant, pulsing throb that washed through his body in waves every time his heart beat. His right wrist burned; he could see pale tendon where the skin had been opened. The floor under his boots was a lake of blood and fluid and spent brass.

The air smelled thick — copper from blood, sharp cordite from burned powder, gasoline and oil from leaking lines.

“Take it,” he rasped, voice low.

Britton wrapped his own hands around the yoke and throttles. Old 666 responded sluggishly but still responded. Three engines pulled, a little uneven, but they pulled.

Behind the cockpit, Johnny Able climbed down from the top turret. His own left leg was bleeding from shrapnel where a shell fragment had gone hunting for his femur and missed. He limped past the cockpit, looked once at Jay’s leg and then away.

You couldn’t look at something like that too long and still keep working.

He and Kendrick did what they could: bandages, sulfa powder, pressure to slow the bleeding. There was no way to fix bone that had been shattered in three places in an airplane moving two hundred miles an hour.

They made sure the tourniquet was right.

The doctors would have to do the rest — if they got there in time.

The radio, hit in the first volley, was dead. No SOS, no status reports, no fighter cover or crash boats could be summoned. They were now just a scarred shape moving over an empty ocean, one more line on a navigator’s chart, heading back toward the jagged backbone of New Guinea.

Port Moresby was five hundred miles away.

Two hours of flying at reduced power and speed.

Behind the nose, under the catwalk, Sarnoski’s body lay covered with a jacket, his hands still stained with cordite and blood.

Johnston didn’t have time to look long. He checked their position, checked the drift, and then crawled back to the guns.

Old 666 still had to get home.

The sky stayed empty.

Every minute they expected to see more dots appear on the horizon, another Japanese squadron vectored out from Rabaul to finish what the first had started. Rabaul had planes and pilots to spare. A lone, crippled B-17 with no radio and no escort would be the easiest kill of the week.

But sometimes bad luck only chases you for so long.

The minutes turned into an hour, then more.

At 9:30 a.m., the New Guinea coastline finally appeared ahead, smeared green and black beneath the wing. Old 666 had crossed the Solomon Sea with three engines and a bellyful of holes.

Port Moresby wasn’t on the beach, though. It lay two hundred miles inland, behind the Owen Stanley Range, a spine of mountains that rose seven thousand feet into weather that could turn murderous in minutes.

The bomber was losing altitude.

The three remaining engines were no longer enough to hold 15,000 feet with all the damage they’d taken. The altimeter unwound slowly but steadily — 12,000, 11,500, 11,000.

Britton kept a close eye on number one engine. The gauges told a bad story. Head temperature in the red. Oil pressure wandering. If that engine failed, they’d be down to two.

Two engines weren’t enough to claw over mountains that big.

You didn’t ditch a heavy bomber in the New Guinea jungle. You simply disappeared into green and fire.

Clouds closed in at ten thousand feet. One moment they could see distant ridgelines and sky; the next they were inside a gray world of rain and turbulence, lightning flashing somewhere close enough to feel.

Britton flew on the instruments now. Compass. Airspeed. Altitude. Rate of climb — or in their case, an unwelcome descent. The bomber shuddered in the weather, rattling in ways that made the damaged structure creak ominously.

There was no clear sense of how close the rock was beyond the cloud.

When they finally broke out, it was like waking up inside a dream you hoped you weren’t really having.

Old 666 hung in the middle of a steep-sided valley. Jungle-clad mountains rose on both sides, closer than anyone liked, higher than the bomber.

Britton banked gently, following the valley southwest. Somewhere ahead there had to be a pass, a low saddle through the range that would let them cross.

The altimeter read nine thousand feet.

Still dropping.

Kendrick came forward once more.

“Skipper’s out,” he reported. “Barely breathing. Pulse is weak.”

Jay had slipped past groaning and cursing to a quieter place, somewhere beyond words. His skin was the color of paper. His lips had a faint blue tinge. The bandages around his leg were soaked through and still darkening.

He needed more blood than a B-17 carried. He needed operating rooms and transfusions and doctors who weren’t also flying through storms in shot-up airplanes.

He needed them soon.

Britton pushed the throttles forward. It strained the engines, especially number one, already running too hot, but speed now was the only thing left he could give the man who’d kept them alive when turning back would have made sense.

Ahead, the valley opened a little. A notch in the ridgeline showed sky.

“Hang on,” Britton muttered to nobody in particular.

He pulled the nose up, aiming right for the lowest point in the mountain wall ahead. Eight thousand feet. Eight-five. The needle climbed painfully, only seven hundred feet per minute — a far cry from what a healthy Fortress could do.

Trees on the ridge ahead seemed close enough to touch.

Old 666 scraped over the pass with three hundred feet to spare.

Green flashed beneath them.

Then the world opened.

On the far side of the ridge, the land fell away toward Port Moresby. The airfield at Seven Mile — one of the bases clustered around the town — lay ahead like a pale strip laid across the darker green.

Britton reached for the radio switch out of habit, thumbed it, and got nothing but silence.

The radio had been dead when the first shells came through; nothing had changed.

No emergency call.

No priority clearance.

Just one beat-up bomber inbound without permission and hoping nobody was lined up on the runway already.

He dropped the landing gear.

Hydraulics wheezed. The crew felt the vibrations through the structure like a groan.

The gear came down, locked with a thump.

He reached for the flap lever. The flaps drooped, then stopped halfway. Hydraulic pressure bled away faster than the system could provide.

They’d be landing fast.

On final approach, Old 666 came barreling in at about 140 miles per hour — thirty faster than they would have liked, but they’d burned up all their options behind them.

Britton held the nose up, bleeding off as much speed as he could without stalling.

Main wheels kissed the runway once, bounced, kissed again, and finally settled.

He hauled on the brakes, reversed prop pitch, everything he could do to make four tons of aluminum and fuel and men come to a stop before the end of the runway.

The bomber rolled, slowing.

Two thousand feet left.

One thousand.

Five hundred.

Old 666 shuddered to a halt with two hundred feet to spare.

Britton shut down the engines. The props spun down, each blade slowing until it tipped lazily around and then stopped.

For the first time in eight hours, there was silence.

No engine noise. No gunfire. Just the sound of the tropical wind and the distant echo of activity from the rest of the airfield, coming back into focus like the world had been paused and someone had finally hit play again.

The ground crew came running.

They’d watched the approach, seen the feathered engine and the shredded nose and the bullet holes in the wings. The medics arrived at the same time, jumping from trucks with litters already in hand.

The crew door opened near the tail.

Johnny Able climbed out first. He moved stiff, favoring his wounded leg. Kendrick followed, then Pew, then Vaughn, then Dillman, then Johnston. Six men, upright, bloody and bone-tired, but alive.

A crew chief clambered through the hatch and into the bomber.

He saw the cockpit floor first — slick with blood, metal showing through where shells had torn up panels. He saw Jay slumped in the pilot’s seat, head tilted back, eyes closed, face an ashy gray.

He saw the jacket-covered shape beneath the catwalk forward, the way the cloth lay too still.

He came back out fast, looked at the medics waiting near the ladder.

“Get the pilot last,” he said grimly. “He’s dead.”

They took that as fact.

A man didn’t lose that much blood and live.

The medics made for the other crewmen, but Britton clambered down behind Jay’s stretcher and grabbed the lead medic’s arm, fingers tight.

“The pilot’s not dead,” he said, eyes blazing. “Check him.”

Something in his voice cut through the chaos.

The medic hesitated, then bent again over the stretcher.

He pressed fingers to Jay’s neck, feeling for something that might as well have been a rumor.

There — the faintest flutter, a thread where a rope should have been, but it was there.

“Dammit,” the medic breathed. “He’s alive.”

They sprinted the stretcher to the waiting ambulance. Dust flew from the tires as it tore off toward the field hospital.

In the operating room, the doctors looked at the man on the table and quietly took their own bets.

One in ten, they thought.

Maybe.

He’d lost more than half his blood. Both legs were shattered, the left knee a puzzle of bone fragments, arteries shredded. His right wrist tendons were cut. Shrapnel peppered his arms and torso. His body temperature was down to ninety-four degrees.

They hung bags of blood and plasma, started transfusions. Four units went in. Then six. Then eight. Each one brought a little more color back to his face.

Surgery lasted six hours.

They patched veins, stitched arteries, reassembled a knee as best they could, cleaned wounds that had been full of engine oil and grit and metal.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the odds shifted.

Against what any chart would have predicted, he lived.

Back at the airfield, Johnston led the ground crew to Sarnoski’s body. They eased it from where it had lain beneath the nose guns, carried it down the ladder and onto a waiting stretcher, covering him with a clean sheet.

He’d died where he’d volunteered to stand, at the nose of a bomber flying a mission everyone had called impossible, firing guns until his heart gave out.

He should have been going home in three days.

He was going home anyway — just not the way anyone had pictured.

The ground crew chief walked around Old 666 slowly.

He did it the way a mechanic always does, methodically, counting damage as if numbers could explain anything.

One. Two. Ten.

Twenty.

He stopped counting bullet holes out loud and just kept track in his head.

One hundred.

One-eighty.

He finally came up with a number:

187 bullet holes.

Five 20mm cannon strikes.

The nose — gone.

Oxygen system — destroyed.

Radio — destroyed.

Number two engine — destroyed.

Hydraulics — shot to hell.

Left wing spar — cracked.

Tail — riddled with holes.

He looked up at the battered fuselage, at the missing Plexiglas and the jagged patches of aluminum where the crew had once tried to armor whatever they could.

“How many fighters hit you?” he demanded of Britton.

“Sixteen,” Britton said. Then, after a moment: “Maybe seventeen. Hard to tell. They came in waves.”

The crew chief shook his head.

“That’s not possible,” he said at first. No bomber survived that alone. Not out here.

Then he climbed inside and saw the thousands of empty shell casings rolling loose on the floor, smelled the iron and oil and old fear, saw where the metal bent and tore and still held.

He believed it then.

In eighteen months in the Pacific, he’d never seen anything like it.

The film from Old 666 went straight from the camera reels to the developer’s trays.

Within hours, intelligence officers clustered around tables covered with fresh prints, grease pencils in hand. The photos of Buka airfield showed sixteen aircraft on the ground, confirmation of the Japanese buildup there and a roadmap for future strikes.

The mapping shots of Bougainville’s western coastline were even more important.

Every reef line.

Every sandbar and submerged rock.

Every stretch of beach on Empress Augusta Bay.

They traced the lines, marked the safe channels, identified landing zones, defensive positions, approaches, exit routes. They built invasion plans on the back of the film a dying bombardier had kept rolling while a bleeding pilot held his plane steady.

On November 1st, 1943, the Third Marine Division went ashore at Empress Augusta Bay.

They carried with them maps that had started as frames of film inside Old 666’s bomb bay. They landed where the reefs were passable and the beaches firm enough for men and equipment. They avoided shoals that would have grounded landing craft and turned Marines into targets.

The invasion succeeded.

The foothold on Bougainville was secure.

Whether anyone ever told the Eager Beavers just how many men they’d saved with that miserable, hero-stained morning over Buka and Bougainville, no one could say.

But the numbers were there, even if nobody wrote them down.

For Jay Zeamer, life became a long corridor of hospital rooms and recovery wards.

He spent fifteen months under white ceilings, learning the names of nurses and the smell of antiseptic instead of the feel of aircraft controls. Seven surgeries on his left leg. Three on his right wrist. Physical therapy that hurt more than some missions had.

He learned to walk again, slowly, on a leg that would never bend quite right. The knee never healed perfectly. He carried a limp the rest of his life.

But he walked.

He lived.

On December 17th, 1943, back in Pennsylvania, Marie Sarnoski stood in a neat dress at a ceremony that felt too quiet for what it represented. The Medal of Honor was placed in her hands, heavy and bright.

She looked at it a long moment, then turned and gave it to Joseph’s parents.

They placed it in a glass case beside his Silver Star, beside his Air Medal, beside a photograph of their son in uniform, young and alive and smiling like the war couldn’t touch him.

Two weeks later, on January 16th, 1944, General Henry “Hap” Arnold stood beside a hospital bed at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C.

Jay sat in a wheelchair, thinner than he’d ever been, his uniform hanging looser than it had in the Pacific heat. His parents stood nearby; his mother cried quietly, his father saluted.

Arnold pinned the Medal of Honor on his chest.

He said a few words about courage and sacrifice. There were cameras, flashbulbs, reporters scribbling notes. The official record would list the reasons in careful language: conspicuous gallantry, intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.

What it really translated to was simpler:

He’d taken a bomber everyone thought was cursed, volunteered for a mission everyone thought was suicide, and refused to quit until the job was done, even when his own blood was turning the cockpit floor slick.

The other seven men — Britton, Johnston, Able, Kendrick, Pew, Vaughn, Dillman — received the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for valor.

Two Medals of Honor.

Seven Distinguished Service Crosses.

Five Purple Hearts.

Nine men on one mission.

It remains, even now, the most highly decorated single air mission in American history.

No other bomber crew has ever been honored like that.

Not before.

Not since.

Old 666 didn’t retire right away.

They patched her up, as much as they ever patched anything in that theater. New nose Plexiglas, new skin on the wings, new lines where the old ones had bled out over the Solomon Sea.

She flew eighteen more missions.

Crews who took her up later swore they could still see bullet holes under the patches, still see stains in joints and seams that no scrubbing ever really erased.

By March 1944, she’d done more than anyone could have reasonably asked of an assembly of aluminum and steel. They sent her back to the United States, turned her into a training bird for crews who’d never see the Pacific the way the Eager Beavers had.

In August 1945, when the war finally ground itself to a close in fire and surrender, Old 666 was scrapped.

No ceremony.

No speeches.

Just another airframe taken apart piece by piece.

But legends don’t live in metal.

They live in stories.

After the war, Jay went back to his interrupted education. He returned to MIT, finished, and earned a master’s in aeronautical engineering. For three decades he worked in the aerospace industry, helping design the next generation of aircraft, the kind that would fly higher and faster than anyone had thought possible back when he was holding an abused B-17 steady over Bougainville.

He married.

He had children.

He traded the constant roar of engines for the quieter rhythms of civilian life, though a limp followed him everywhere he went, a permanent reminder of a morning when sixteen fighters had tried to erase him.

In the end, he retired to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he’d spent his childhood summers building boats and learning how to read wind and water. He lived long enough that the war he’d fought in turned into a chapter in history books and late-night documentaries, something young people learned about instead of lived through.

On March 22nd, 2007, at the age of eighty-eight, Jay Zeamer died.

They buried him at Arlington National Cemetery, with full military honors.

Section 34, grave 809.

His headstone is simple, like most of the others. It carries his name, his rank, the wars he served in, and a few words that tie him forever to that battered, impossible airplane:

Lieutenant Colonel J. Zeamer Jr., Medal of Honor, Old 666.

Some visitors to Arlington walk by without noticing. Others pause, read the name, and remember the story — the “cursed” bomber that refused to die, the crew that volunteered for a mission everyone else turned down, the bombardier who kept firing with a mortal wound, the pilot who stayed at his controls with shattered legs.

In the end, that’s where Old 666 really lives.

Not in steel.

Not in photographs.

But in the memory of nine Americans who flew into a sky full of enemy fighters, did their job anyway, and came home with proof that sometimes, just sometimes, a curse is nothing more than a dare waiting to be taken.

THE END