Fred sounded very polite, but Jack knew he was dreadfully uncomfortable sitting in the hot Sunday morning sunshine on Ford Island. “That’s what they called the first team. I see no reason to call ours anything different,” Buster Jennings said. The three men were attired in crackly-stiff tropical whites. They sat in white-painted iron chairs around an iron filigree table of a style most often found in Victorian gardens. Beside Fred, in the fourth and last chair, was a full captain from the task group operations staff. A hundred yards from the little group was a cluster of gray buildings. which included the base chapel. “The key to their whole operation,” Jennings continued, “is that first snooper. As far as we can tell, it’s always a Betty. They have the fuel capacity for five or six hours on station. They find the task group in the dark or just before sundown—they might even be using a radar model—and the snooper stays out of range and shadows until the complete strike shows up.
