CHAPTER ONE

                 The Name on the Nose

Captain Jack Whitaker stood beneath the wing of the battered C-47, eyeing the storm clouds coiling above the Burmese jungle. His leather jacket was soaked through at the shoulders. The crew was gathering—Murphy and LaClair, once gunners and now loadmasters; Sayers, the ever-steady mechanic; and young Tommy Dillard, the radio operator who still carried a baseball mitt in his duffel, like it might bring stateside a little closer.

Murphy, broad-shouldered and quiet as rain, never showed up without an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear and a scowl that could out-stare a sergeant. LaClair wore his grin like armor, Louisiana drawl thick as molasses as he greeted the ground crew like old poker buddies. He had a habit of tapping the plane’s nose three times before boarding, like it owed him a favor. Sayers kept to himself, grease under his fingernails and a photo of his twin daughters folded neat in his shirt pocket. He talked to the engines like they understood him. Tommy always showed up five minutes early and hovered like someone waiting for permission to belong. The mitt was his anchor. His voice cracked sometimes when he spoke, but behind the radio, he was all steel.

“Load her up tight and tie her down twice. We are wheels up at oh-five hundred,” Jack barked, looking up at the large white block letters painted across the nose of his plane: PETO’S KEY.

“Damn painter can’t spell,” he muttered. It was supposed to say PETOSKEY. That was what Jack had written carefully on the request sheet in his best captain’s script—after all, it was not just a name. It was home. It was beautiful summer sunsets, Lake Michigan frozen in winter. It was where the sky met the trees in postcard perfection. It was his wife Sarah waving from the porch on Howard Street. Not some damn Florida beach town where tourists went to get sunburned.

Tommy offered to repaint it, but LaClair said it was bad luck to change a name once it was painted. Murphy said it was like having a typo on a tombstone. Jack just concluded that maybe Peto knew something they didn’t. From that day on, Peto’s Key wasn’t just a plane—it was a joke, a charm, and a promise. The crew took to saying that Peto was the guardian spirit watching over them through every trip across the Hump. Every time the engines rattled or the wings iced over, LaClair would slap the wall and yell out, “Still counting on you, Peto.”

Jack had been a foreman at the Michigan Maple Block Company before trading lumber and late shifts for khakis and cockpit gauges. At twenty-four, he had grown used to the smell of sawdust and sweat and ruled the floor with quiet authority. He knew every machine by the sound it made and every man by the stories they didn’t tell.

When the war started, he could have stayed. Essential industry, the papers called it. But Jack had watched his youngest brother hug their mother goodbye at the train depot—uniform pressed stiff and jaw clenched against fear—all in the same week. That was all the push he needed. He enlisted in the Air Corps a month later.

The sun had not dared to rise yet, but the airfield already steamed with heat, engine grease, and nerves. Flying “The Hump,” the aerial supply route over the eastern Himalayas, was anything but simple. It was the part of the world God made while He was in a lousy mood.

Pilots faced sudden storms, hurricane-force winds, and violent turbulence that could drop a plane thousands of feet in seconds. Icing was a constant threat—engines would freeze, wings would glaze over, and visibility could vanish in an instant. Japanese aircraft patrolled the skies, and while the terrain offered some cover, it also made evasive maneuvers nearly impossible. Planes were often overloaded, under-maintained, and had a nasty habit of engine failure at altitude. If you went down, rescue was unlikely. The mountains were remote, the jungle unforgiving, and the weather could turn a search mission into a suicide run.