The Wild Banshees / Book 2

The Wailing

by C. Scott Lannon

Every pilot in his squadron trusted him to keep the count. Someone else had been keeping it too. Central Solomons, summer 1943. Major Mick Corrigan is grinding VMF-333 north toward Munda one mission at a time, trading replacement pilots for a strip of coral that refuses to fall on schedule. He keeps the arithmetic in his own hand: every man out, every man back, by name, in a private notebook the official casualty forms never see. Then a classified file surfaces in the flight surgeon's tent. Twelve entries. Six weeks of clinical notes on things no medical textbook explains, built from testimony an enemy pilot gave that no American was ever meant to read. A security officer wants it seized, and its author called to account: a Japanese-American captain whose family sits behind a fence at Manzanar. Corrigan has to decide what he is willing to defend, and what he is willing to know.