Pacific Glory

FIFTEEN

A really dark rainsquall was blowing across the sea to their west, and Marsh turned Evans toward it to try to hide for a few minutes. They slipped into the welcome obscurity of tropical rain, although the ship was making so much black smoke he wondered if the Japs couldn’t still see them. Apparently they could. Another salvo of eight-inch came howling through the rainsquall and thankfully went long. The steam leak from the forward fireroom was diminishing as the boiler emptied itself. Marsh prayed that all that steam was coming up through the stack; otherwise, his whole forward fireroom crew had been roasted at six hundred degrees. A shell would have been kinder.

Reports came in from the gunnery department. They’d lost mounts fifty-one and fifty-three. All the topside AA gun stations on the starboard side were reporting heavy casualties. Marsh knew that the forward fireroom had to be permanently out of commission. Damage control central reported that a DC team was still trying to get down into the space to determine how bad the situation was. Main control had cross-connected the forward engine room with the after fireroom, so they still had two engines, but no longer twenty-seven knots’ worth until they could get a second boiler going in the after fireroom. From the feel of the ship, any fires still burning in the forward boiler room were being smothered by inrushing seawater. Marsh called main control and reminded them to shore up their forward bulkhead. They said they were already doing it.

The rabbi came into the pilothouse with a preliminary casualty report. His uniform was blood-spattered, not from injuries but from assisting in the wardroom, which was now the ship’s principal casualty station. Twenty-seven known dead, that many again wounded seriously enough to be out of action. For once he was not smiling, and neither was Marsh. He said he was going back down the starboard side to tend to the wounded still in their gun tubs. Marsh told him to keep undercover as best he could, because Evans wasn’t done with this fight yet. He nodded somberly, handed Marsh the blood-spattered casualty list, and then tried to get off the bridge without slipping on all the blood on deck.

Evans had expended six of her ten torpedoes and still had three five-inch guns out of five operational, although with an as yet unknown number of personnel casualties. Marsh was sorely tempted to just hide in the rainsquall for a while until they could get themselves back together.

Then he remembered the battleships.

He brought the ship about, slowing down to fifteen knots to ease the pressure on the snipes, who were trying desperately to get the remains of the steam plant stable again. They emerged from the rainsquall to a depressing tableau. Another of their tin cans was in the process of capsizing about five miles away. The Jap cruiser line was still pressing in on the fleeing jeep carrier formation, although they were now being swarmed by aircraft who were doing everything from dropping tiny foxhole busters to making strafing runs. The jeeps, like the old battleships, had been loaded out for close air support work at Leyte, not a fleet action, so the planes were reduced to doing whatever they could. Marsh didn’t see any sign of the other destroyers, but much of the sea area was obscured by the remains of chemical smoke clouds and rainsqualls.

One of the jeeps, probably Gambier Bay, was burning from midships to stern and dead in the water some ten miles distant. Another ship, whose identity he couldn’t make out, was also stopped and completely afire. Then he swung the binoculars around to the northwest to see where the battleships had gone.

Unfortunately, nowhere.

He lowered his binoculars to see two behemoths, followed distantly by their own pack of destroyers, lumbering in his direction while still lofting booming salvos at the jeeps. The only good news was that they, too, were being swarmed by naval aircraft. Marsh thought he’d seen three, maybe four battleships originally, but now he wasn’t sure how many there were. Two were bad enough.

“Time to get the hell out of here, XO,” a voice at his elbow said quietly. Marsh turned around. It was John Hennessy, staring at the oncoming battleships through his binoculars.

Just then, as if to make his point, three enormous explosions shook the ship as one of the battleships dropped a salvo two hundred yards short and directly abeam. The water columns from the shell splashes were higher than Evans’s masthead. The Japs were ranging on the ship with one turret. Once they got a hit, they’d let fly with all six guns and obliterate Evans and all her works. Marsh immediately ordered a left standard rudder to put the ship in a turn away from the enemy and back into the rainsquall.

“Think we can outrun that with only one boiler and a fireroom full of water?” he asked.

“We can try,” Hennessy said. He wasn’t kidding. He was pleading.

Marsh was certainly tempted. They’d done what the admiral had told them to do. They’d run straight in against outrageous odds, conducted a torpedo attack that had momentarily disrupted the Jap attack, and actually hit one cruiser. Evans was down to half propulsion power and two-thirds of her gun capability. The starboard-side main deck was awash in body parts among the forty- and twenty-millimeter ranks. The cruisers had beaten the hell out of them and sunk at least two brother destroyers, and now there were two battleships coming, one of which was taking an unholy interest in Evans.

Marsh looked around the pilothouse. The door to the chartroom was wedged open, and the deck inside the tiny passageway was covered in gore. The bridge 1JV talker’s body had been wedged between the helm and lee helm, and the looks on his remaining bridge crew’s faces clearly indicated their votes.

Unfortunately, at that precise moment, he could visualize Beast McCarty, sitting there on the O-club steps. You’re scared, aren’t you? You’ve always been scared. This war is man’s work. Warrior’s work. One day you’ll meet the elephant, and personally I think you’ll fuck it up.

He now fully understood what the Civil War soldiers had been talking about when they talked about facing battle, the elephant of the expression: certain death in the form of two black castles of steel, whose hulls were beginning to fill the view from what was left of their bridge windows. Mick hadn’t mentioned that they might come in herds.

Hennessy saw that Marsh was thinking about it. The torpedo officer stuck his head into the pilothouse, waiting for orders.

“XO, we gotta get out of here,” Hennessy said.

Marsh bit his lip. God knows, he thought — I want to escape, too.

You’re scared, aren’t you? Scared every day you’re out there with the Big Blue Fleet. Been scared since you first went to sea.

Yes, I am, he thought. Scared shitless. He took a deep breath.

“We have four fish left?” he asked, after giving the helmsman another course change. Never fly straight in a dogfight. Keep her weaving.

Hennessy’s eyes widened, and he swallowed hard. “Um, yes, sir.”

“Go into Combat, get us in position for a torpedo attack.”

“Attack?” he said, his voice rising to a squeak.

“This is why we’re out here, John,” Marsh said as gently as he could, trying to keep the fear out of his own voice. “I don’t know what that real big one out there is, but it’s our duty to at least give him a bloody nose.”

Hennessy gave him an agonized look. “Captain, that’s fucking suicide,” he whispered.

Now it was Captain, no longer XO, Marsh noticed. “No, John,” he said. “It’s our duty. Coming down here in the first place — that was suicide.”

He turned to the men in the pilothouse, who’d been listening to all this and were white-faced with fear. Marsh suspected he was white-faced, too, but this wasn’t the time to acknowledge it, not to all these terrified kids in front of him. “This is the captain,” he announced, “and I have the deck and the conn. Helmsman, left standard rudder.”

He looked back at Hennessy. “Get back down there. We’ll shoot to port.”

Hennessy backed away from him as if Marsh were truly insane, but then discipline asserted itself and he went back down to Combat, tiptoeing across the mess in the charthouse passageway. Marsh told the helmsman to steady up while he studied the relative motion of the two battlewagons, which were getting bigger by the moment. The leader was a type he’d never seen in their enemy warship recognition charts. The second in line was one of their older battle cruisers, modified to become a battleship, a Kongo class, with fourteen-inch guns. She was the one interested in Evans, and he saw her forward turret flash again in their direction. He put the rudder over, in the opposite direction this time, and hoped their maneuvers, lame as they were, were confounding the Jap’s firing solution. Evans felt even heavier in her guts now. He had to assume the forward fireroom was almost fully flooded. The DC teams still hadn’t managed to get into the wrecked compartment, and the black smoke rolling out of the bent-over number one stack was getting thicker. He visualized burning fuel oil floating on the rising waters in the fireroom.

Three more shell splashes, this time long. As a gunnery officer, he knew what they were doing. Shoot deliberately long in range, then short, cut the difference between the two range settings in half, and fire again. Do that often enough, you’ll walk your shell pattern right onto the target.

He turned Evans again, and this time steadied up on his best guess for an intercept course on the lead battleship. He went out onto the port bridge wing and swept the sea with his binoculars. He couldn’t see any of the other destroyers or the jeeps.

Evans was all alone. He felt his guts clench. Alone and taking on a battleship. He did see two of the distant heavy cruisers coming about in their direction. The admiral on the lead Jap battleship must have called for reinforcements when he saw Evans make that turn toward them, because, for some strange reason, he’d left all his own screening destroyers way behind him.

Marsh called down to Combat, telling them again they’d be firing torpedoes to port and asking them to compute an intercept course on the lead battleship, which was still lobbing main battery salvos at the jeeps.

“Intercept, Captain?” Hennessy called back. Marsh wondered if he was losing it.

“Yes — I want to lay her right alongside the big guy. It’s the only safe place out here.”

That provoked a stunned silence in Combat and also out on the bridge. One of the bosuns was calmly swabbing the deck where the phone talker had exsanguinated. They’d moved his body now to the back wall of the pilothouse. It was one more surreal sight that morning, a nineteen-year-old sailor in his battle helmet and kapok with swab in hand, mopping up the slippery blood, while outside another salvo of fourteen-inch shells walked even closer to the ship, this time shaking Evans from stem to stern. The shell splashes were so enormous that a fine rain seemed to be falling. Marsh made another course change, doing it randomly now, hoping the probabilities would work in their favor for a little while longer, long enough for them to get the last of their torpedoes away.

Marsh called the chief engineer, Kit Carson, down in main control. “Tell DC central to forget number one fireroom,” he ordered. “I need all the turns you can give me, and I want a full team stationed in after steering, right now.”

“Aye, Cap’n,” Carson called back. “We’re shoring both bulkheads, fore and aft of one-fireroom. I think she’s flooded to the waterline — we’re starting to get water through some of the overhead cableways.”

“All right. I can feel it up here, too. We’re going in on a torpedo attack against a Jap heavy, so it’s gonna get noisy again.”

“Give ’em hell, Cap’n,” he called back. No more XO, Marsh noticed again. When you’re putting everyone’s life on the line, they don’t call you XO. Even the snipes knew what was coming. He could just imagine the chatter going on through the ship’s many sound-powered phone circuits.

At that moment an entire line of relatively smaller shell splashes erupted around them. Marsh looked over the bow to see that the two heavy cruisers, closing in echelon formation to clear their firing arcs, were inbound with visible white bones in their teeth as they increased speed. Apparently the Jap battleship admiral had figured out what Evans intended by turning toward his column.

Marsh brought the ship farther to the right to keep a steady bearing, decreasing range on the lead battleship, which appeared to be doing close to thirty knots. With their limited speed he had to take a broad angle of approach to intercept, and this exposed more and more of Evans to more and more heavy guns. He saw the massive after turret of the monster swinging to face the Evans as she closed in. He called out to the torpedo officer that he wanted to fire torpedoes at four thousand yards, assuming they made it in that close. The remaining five-inch guns opened up at about that time and began firing at the lead battleship. The second battlewagon, the Kongo class who’d been ranging on at Evans, was still just beyond their effective five-inch range. His guns did not have a range problem, and at that moment the ship managed to drive right into the Kongo’s range notch.

One fourteen-inch shell took care of the leaning forward smokestack by smacking it right over the side with a loud clang. A second punched into the hull just above the waterline, going right through the already wrecked forward fireroom and out the other side without exploding. Battleship projectiles were designed with fuzes that delayed the explosion until the shell had penetrated the target battleship’s armor. Evans didn’t have any armor.

A third round came through the portside wall of the pilothouse, obliterated the torpedo officer and both his enlisted men, wrecked the steering and engine-order telegraph, and amputated Marsh’s right foot before smashing out the starboard side, taking most of the starboard bridge wing with it. Just as Marsh had predicted to the chief engineer, it was really noisy.

He had been sitting in his chair, leaning over the bitch-box to hear above the wind noise coming across the bridge and the sudden racket from their one operational forward mount, which was only fifteen feet away. His right foot had been pointed back behind the footrest so he could reach the face of the bitch-box. He never felt a thing, other than just a sudden pressure on his foot. He was as stunned by the sight of the two torpedomen literally exploding into a bloody blur as he was by the fact that he’d been hit, too. He turned in his chair, pulled up his right leg, and saw that everything below the ankle was gone, with only the top part of his black uniform sock still hanging on to his shin over a bright white bone. It was bleeding, but not as much as he would have expected.

“Six thousand yards, Cap’n,” John Hennessy called from Combat. “Still want to wait?”

“Not anymore,” Marsh called back, his voice suddenly weaker than before. “Tell the torpedo mount captain he has control. Let ’em go as soon as he’s on solution. Fire two, wait thirty seconds, and then recompute if the target turns before shooting the other two. Set ’em deep, now — twenty feet.”

The ship’s junior pharmacist’s mate came out of the haze of smoke and dust swirling about the pilothouse and knelt down by the captain’s chair, his hands full of bandages. He ignored the human debris in which he was kneeling. Before Marsh could say anything, the corpsman jabbed a morphine syringe into his right thigh, applied a tourniquet below his knee, and then started wrapping the stump. Marsh still had experienced no pain from getting hit, but the moment the corpsman touched it he surely did.

He looked back through the bridge window openings while the GQ bridge team tried to reconstitute itself. They could no longer steer from the bridge so he shifted steering control back to the after steering compartment, relaying his conning orders through a sound-powered phone. Marsh knew he wasn’t going to send any more engine orders other than what he’d already told the snipes: Crank the throttles open and leave ’em there. He tried to gather his wits and absorb the tactical situation, but it was hard. They were, despite the massive hits, still closing on that lead battlewagon, and she was getting bigger by the moment. The cruisers were firing at them again, but in a few minutes they’d have to stop or risk hitting their own flagship, assuming Evans stayed afloat long enough to get to the launch point.

Marsh heard the reassuring sound of two torpedoes going over the side above the banging of mount fifty-two, which was now landing hits on the big guy’s towering pagoda superstructure. The after mounts were working him over, too, pelting the huge black mass of armored steel with their peashooters. Marsh thought he saw a couple of planes swooping down on him, but the battleship’s AA fire was going like gangbusters, keeping most of the planes at bay. Where oh where was Halsey with all those brand-new Iowa-class battleships?

Another salvo of fourteen-inchers came howling in all around them, with one hitting the forecastle. The shock detached their remaining anchor, which went over the side in a rattling cloud of dust and perhaps ten shots of chain before the detachable links broke. The only thing keeping them alive was that these huge shells, designed for long-range artillery duels with another battleship, were still punching through Evans’s thin skin without going off. Marsh could barely see the Kongo, though, because his line of sight was being obscured by the fact that Evans was getting very close to the lead battleship, so close that his secondary batteries, five- and six-inchers, were opening up on Evans even as the monster began to turn away from their torpedoes.

Turning.

His mind was getting a little fuzzy not to have noticed that, probably from the morphine.

The battleship was turning away, and he’d stopped firing on the jeeps out on the horizon. Okay, Marsh thought. That’s what they sent us out to do. He yelled into the bitch-box to tell CIC that the target was coming to port.

“We see it on the track, Captain,” Hennessy called back.

Two eight-inch rounds hit forward, punching yet another hole in poor old mount fifty-one. The second round hit somewhere underneath the bridge, probably in the in-port cabin, and this one did go off, with enough force to hump the bridge’s deck up a foot or so, knock everyone off his feet, and shake Marsh’s chair into a momentary spin.

He called back a new course to after steering, aiming to cut across the turning battleship’s wake and then come around to match his course and get as close to him as they could, forcing the other enemy ships to stop firing at them for fear of hitting what had to be their flagship. Though making more knots than Evans was, his speed of advance slowed markedly when he went into his turn as that huge multileveled pagoda superstructure began to lean out over the water. Marsh could actually see the battlewagon’s enormous optical range finder way up on the tower, turning to stay on whatever target his main battery guns were working.

Their first two torpedoes had gone past him by a wide margin, as Marsh halfway expected, but they got the opportunity of a lifetime when he made that turn. Marsh heard their last two fish go off the starboard side at about two thousand yards range. As Evans closed in on his mile-wide wake, Marsh waited with his heart in his throat to see if they hit him. Then he saw the first fish broach as it encountered the huge ship’s underwater pressure wave. It literally leaped out of the water and went off on the side armor belt, making a big bang but not doing any visible damage. The second one hit him farther aft on the starboard side and produced a satisfying, thumping waterspout.

Ninety seconds later Evans cut across the battlewagon’s wake. Marsh ordered hard right rudder to take station on the battleship’s port quarter, where he then maneuvered to match the giant’s wide, sweeping left turn back to the northeast. There now erupted a hot duel between every gun they had and every gun the Japs could point down, which thankfully did not include his after main battery turret, whose muzzles had appeared to be as big as the Lincoln Tunnel.

Marsh knew that once Evans steadied up on whatever course the looming battleship was coming to, he would soon draw away from them, and then they’d pop out from the big ship’s shadow and become easy meat for the waiting Kongo. For an exhilarating few minutes, though, the tattered remains of their starboard-side twenties and forties fired round after round into his top hampers and his deck-mounted AA gun mounts. The Evans gunners could shoot up, but the Japanese could not shoot down. Even his bigger, six-inch secondary guns, designed mainly for antiaircraft work, could not depress low enough to get at Evans, although they tried plenty hard. There was an infernal blizzard of white-hot steel sizzling through the air above Evans, while her AA crews blasted away at his lightly armored AA gun mounts. Mount fifty-two, firing in local control now, took it as a personal mission to shoot up the towering heights of the pagoda structure. Marsh had visions of their bridge and staff people all lying flat on the deck from the hail of steel, and then a Jap twenty-five-millimeter managed to rake Evans’s bridge, and Marsh joined what was left of his bridge team on the deck until one of Evans’s forty-millimeters silenced the offending fire.

Marsh clawed his way back up into the captain’s chair, which seemed the best place for him to be with one foot gone. The Kongo was visible about five miles behind them on Evans’s port quarter, coming to his left. Marsh told the torpedo mounts to train out in his direction. The Kongo must have been watching, because he put his rudder over at once and came back right, disappearing out of Marsh’s sight behind the blocky stern cranes of their new formation partner. Evans’s five-inch guns had started a big fire on the battleship’s fantail with a hit among his scout planes and catapults, although Marsh knew that wouldn’t pose any real danger to this giant. Their lone torpedo hit hadn’t even slowed him down. Then he felt a large thump way back near the stern, followed by another and another. It took him a minute to figure it out: The gunners on the fantail were rolling depth charges, set at fifty feet, alongside the battleship. It was the equivalent of a five-hundred-pound bomb achieving a near miss deep along his port side. The charges were, however, also banging the hell out of the emergency steering team, so Marsh ordered them to knock it off.

At that moment one of the jeep carrier planes came out of the morning sun from low ahead and strafed the pagoda structure of the battleship. Some of the ricochets hit Evans’s own superstructure, but Marsh didn’t mind too much. He could see their guy’s shells and tracers slashing into the battleship’s upper command and control levels. Definitely some Jap-burger being made up there, he thought. The plane shot overhead and banked hard, obviously intending to do it again, this time from the big guy’s port side. Marsh weakly cheered him on, and then he disappeared behind that pagoda tower. Marsh caught a brief glimpse of something white painted on his fuselage, something besides the white star emblem. He wondered if it could be Beast. Machine-gunning a battleship would be right up Mick’s alley.

As Marsh had anticipated, the battleship was steadying up now and beginning to pull ahead. This meant that those two cruisers would soon get a clear shot and be on them like a tiger. Marsh wished they had more torpedoes, more ammo, more speed, but the truth was that Evans’s time on this earth was about up. Along with his own, he realized. As the battleship’s massive stern pulled ahead up their starboard side, mount fifty-two finally ran out of ammunition with one last hit up on the battleship’s searchlight platforms. The moment Evans emerged from her protective shadow, Marsh could see the two heavy cruisers dead astern coming on like black panthers, their forward eight-inch turrets training out over their starboard bows to begin the end of Evans as he watched.

Then another Jap cruiser came sailing in from the monster’s starboard side. Marsh hadn’t even seen her coming, but her intent was pretty clear: Cross perpendicular to the battleship’s wake and then open an enfilading fire on Evans with every one of her eight-inchers. Now Marsh knew what the French admiral Villeneuve must have been thinking when he saw Lord Nelson’s massive Victory sliding past, perpendicular to his flagship’s stern, preparing to rake him from one end to the other.

Lie down, he thought. Lie down. But he was too tired now to get out of his chair.

Mick overshot the clutch of cruisers and was closing in on what he now confirmed as two battleships, followed by some destroyers with maybe a couple of cruisers in that mix, too. He fastened his attention on the biggest battlewagon, which looked to be nearly a thousand feet long. At the very least she was longer than one of the American big-deck carriers, and her forward turrets were belching out flame and smoke in the general direction of the jeep formation way off to the southeast. So far, however, Mick wasn’t seeing any flak. Maybe they hadn’t spotted his lone Dauntless approaching their formation. I’d give my right hand for a thousand-pounder about now, he thought. Or maybe my left — nobody’d want my right paw just now. Then he laughed and rolled in on the big bastard from ten thousand feet.

As he began his dive, he noticed something strange: The battleship seemed to have another ship close aboard on her port side. Dropping through the layers of light cloud, he could see his target and then he couldn’t, but he would have sworn the little ship was firing at the big ship, reminiscent of the days when sailing ships went muzzle to muzzle at a hundred yards. Was that an American tin can? He focused on the big boy. He began to see some tracers coming his way from encased AA guns mounted right under that huge pagoda structure, but they had miscalculated his dive speed. He was flying with his left hand now. He’d balled what was left of his right hand around the sodden glove, holding the mess in his lap.

Finally he began the pullout, and started shooting when his gun sight crossed that enormous gilded chrysanthemum sculpture welded across the battleship’s bullnose. He saw his own tracers ricocheting off the slabbed steel sides of the forward gun turrets, then the base of the pagoda, and then, as he pulled harder, into the lower-level bridge windows and then on up toward the director before he busted the stick hard left and slid by the towering pagoda, going so fast that he nearly rolled a three-sixty.

Two guns, shooting seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute, two dozen rounds per second, and he’d probably been on target for three, maybe four seconds. So, what did that make it: seventy rounds of fifty-caliber armor-piercing incendiary tracer blasting around the confines of the bridge levels. Had to have scared ’em at the very least, he thought.

He zoomed out behind the battleship far enough to get away from the stern twenty-five-millimeter mounts and then was surprised to see three enormous explosions blossom about two miles in front of him, low over the water, sending a forest of shell splashes rising through the smoke cloud.

My God, he thought, they’re shooting some kind of AA ammo out of their main battery. He jinked hard right and began to climb. He hadn’t seen the telltale you’re-almost-empty solid stream of tracers coming out of his own guns, which meant he still had some rounds left. As he turned to the right he was able to make out the American ship that was still alongside the battlewagon, close enough to refuel, both of them going full bore across the rain-flattened sea in a broad left turn. It was definitely an American destroyer, its topsides shot all to hell, one stack gone, the radar antenna hanging off the yardarm, but most of its guns pointed up at the superstructure of the black giant and blasting away, tearing pieces of steel out of the pagoda and shredding whole AA gun mounts along the edge of the main deck.

“Get ’em, tiger!” he yelled, watching all the Jap’s portside AA gunners clawing steel for cover what with all that five-inch going off up and down the decks from point-blank range. He turned hard, dropped back down to two hundred feet, and came in from the battlewagon’s port side, leveling off at about the height of the navigation bridge. He bore in to just over a mile and began shooting, this time putting the tracer stream through the bridge compartments. He was actually able to see the tracer rounds ricocheting around inside the pagoda as they hit the centerline armored tower and bounced off. As he blew past the face of the pagoda, he felt multiple hammers on his right wing; a twenty-five AA gun had found his range on the way out. Something bumped his right leg, hard, twice.

It wasn’t coming from the battleship, though. There was a heavy cruiser racing in as if to intercept the big ship’s wake. Mick realized that the little destroyer was about to have company in the form of ten eight-inch guns that would be able to shoot parallel to the battleship’s side and absolutely rake the tin can. As he turned again, weaving in and out of intensifying AA fire, he felt a strange heaviness in his right side and looked down for a moment. He could not quite comprehend what he was seeing.

His right leg was lying on the floor of the cockpit, severed at the knee by a twenty-five-millimeter shell. There were four large holes in the fuselage on the right side and three more exit holes on the left. The blood was coming out of his right femoral artery in small buckets. He realized he’d be unconscious in a minute and dead in two. Then the engine went unstable, coughing twice, quitting, then restarting, but with a violent vibration.

Well, God damn, he thought. Little bastards finally got my ass.

He turned hard again, fighting the wave of unconsciousness that was quietly enveloping his brain as his blood pressure fell toward zero over zero. At least it doesn’t hurt, he mumbled to himself. There was a lot more AA fire now from that cruiser, as well as from a couple of quad batteries on the stern of the big guy.

Doesn’t matter anymore, Mick kept telling himself. Nothing matters anymore.

He felt the right side of his face sagging as he gripped the stick as hard as he could with his good left hand, tugging his wrecked barge through one last turn as his vision tunneled down into a reddish haze.

Maybe I can help that tin can.

More flack hit the Dauntless as he steadied into a shallow dive on the cruiser. The canopy disintegrated in a blizzard of Plexiglas, slashing bits off his helmet. Then the engine positively seized, snapping the prop right off and jerking the nose sideways.

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Got you now, grape.

He smelled smoke and saw flames rising along the aircraft’s side as more rounds hit.

Bastards, he thought. Tore off my leg and now they want to cook it?

Well, God damn your eyes, eat this.

An instant later he flew eight tons of Dauntless dive bomber into the cruiser’s midships Long Lance torpedo magazine and took them both to glory.

Marsh couldn’t do anything but watch as Evans’s nemesis emerged from behind the battleship, every one of her guns trained their way. He yelled for everybody else to get down, get down, and was beginning to extricate himself from the captain’s chair when that lone Dauntless dive bomber that had strafed the big guy from ahead appeared out of nowhere, trailing two streams of white smoke, banked clumsily right and down, and flew straight into the approaching cruiser. He hit her just forward of amidships, causing a massive explosion out of all proportion to one eight-ton airplane hitting a thirteen-thousand-ton armored cruiser. Bright white steam immediately erupted out of the cruiser’s stack, and she staggered off to the east, her hull apparently so badly damaged amidships that her masts appeared to be sagging in toward one another. For a moment, anyway, she masked the fire of the other two wolves on Evans’s port quarter. Marsh gasped in relief.

Marsh had forgotten about the Kongo-class battleship, but he hadn’t forgotten about Evans, whose world finally ended as a full salvo of fourteen-inch landed all around and aboard. The ship was whipsawed as the air was filled with an overwhelming roar of fire, smoke, and crashing metal. Evans went way over onto her beam ends with the impacts, coming back upright most reluctantly. To Marsh she felt an awful lot like Winston when she’d decided to give up the ghost. Then something heavy hit him from above and he blacked out.

He awoke to find himself on the buckled deck of the pilothouse, where it was raining. His whole body hurt, and both his eyes were swelling up. He tried hard to figure out this raining-inside-the-pilothouse business, until he realized that the pilothouse overhead was gone, along with Sky One, the primary gun director, the mast, and all the remaining bridge personnel. He tried to get up and then felt a lance of pain flash up his right arm.

Right arm? Can’t be right — it was his foot, not his arm. He spat out a mouthful of saltwater and other things too terrible to comprehend, blinked stinging saltwater out of his eyes several times in order to focus, and realized the deck was no longer level. He looked down at his arm, or what was left of it.

His right hand was gone at the wrist, clipped as clean off as his right foot. This time there was no pharmacist’s mate coming to his aid, and there was plenty of bleeding. His brain told him to tie it off, but, still fuzzy from the shock of the final hits and the morphine, he felt like he was living through a slow-motion nightmare. He finally struggled semiupright and managed to get his web belt off and make a tourniquet. He quickly found out that a tourniquet is really hard to do with one hand. The bleeding slowed, but he could barely pull the belt tight enough. He wondered how long he’d been out. Then he wondered if it even mattered.

Sitting up now on the battered steel deck of the pilothouse, he could feel the ship getting heavier and heavier. Although she was still on a relatively even keel, she definitely was starting to settle by the stern, and she’d lost most of her forward way. There were no more shells coming in, so he could hear shouts from out on the weather decks. He hadn’t given the order to abandon ship, but apparently someone had, because those who could were going over the side. The sea was probably already lapping at the lifelines.

The interior of the pilothouse was a shambles of bodies, parts of bodies, wrecked steering equipment, fallen cables, steel helmets, and bloody insulation, which the sudden rainsquall was turning into a hideous soup on the deck. Only two men were left standing. Then he looked again. They only appeared to be standing up. They’d both been impaled on the steel ribs of the bridge structure where a big shell had left its entrance hole.

Of all things, his captain’s chair was unscathed, so he pulled himself over, grabbed the footrest with his remaining good hand, and somehow clambered into it. Staring through the gaping row of half-rounds where the bridge windows had been, he could now see the forward part of the ship. “Their” battleship was steaming majestically away, stern pointed at them as her huge guns lofted more monster shells downrange toward the now invisible jeeps. She was still afire aft, though, which gave Marsh some small measure of comfort.

Mount fifty-one, the forward-most five-inch mount, was completely gone, leaving only a round hole where the stump of her barbette protruded a few inches above the forecastle deck. Mount fifty-two was trained almost back at the bridge, with her right side peeled back like a sardine can and her blackened barrel pointing almost straight up. Marsh flinched when he saw the burned, gory wreckage inside the mount. They’d reported running out of ammo as Evans fell out of the shadow of the big battleship, which probably explained why the ship hadn’t been already obliterated by a magazine explosion. Looking at all the damage, Marsh realized that that was a distinction without a difference.

He felt himself leaning back in his chair and then realized that he wasn’t leaning back — the ship was. She was definitely settling by the stern and also beginning to list to port. He took a few deep breaths, rubbed his swollen eyes, and undid the snap on his borrowed battle helmet. He thought about getting out of the chair to see the damage back aft but then asked himself: What did it really matter? In a few minutes Evans and her crew would all be a memory.

He’d felt the hits. Fourteen-inch armor-piercing rounds, they’d gone right through, coming in from astern and some of them ripping their way completely through the ship. They’d torn the life out of Evans. He knew she was a goner. He was very, very tired. With two amputations, there was little point in his going into the water with the remnants of the crew who were going overboard. The ones who did manage to get away wouldn’t need any more bleeding shark bait.

The familiar roar of a boiler’s safety valve opened up as the snipes in two-fireroom dumped steam so that the boilers wouldn’t explode when she went down. Marsh wondered if John Hennessy was still alive. Maybe he’d given the order to abandon ship once he got a look at the pilothouse. I would have, he thought. He no longer had the strength to turn around to see if the passageway down to CIC was still even there. He looked at his remaining hand. Who’s going to take my academy ring back to Sally? he wondered.

The bellow of the dying boiler drowned out whatever noises the men were making now in getting off the ship. He closed his eyes. His right foot throbbed, even though it wasn’t there anymore. His right forearm hurt like hell. He wondered idly if he shouldn’t just relax the tourniquet and be done with this mess. Then he fished out a relatively clean handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped the stump, tying it off with his watchband. The warm rain pelting down on his face felt good, and for the moment it was probably hiding them from those two heavy cruisers. The handkerchief quickly turned bright red.

Part of his exhausted brain was chiding him to do something.

You’re the captain.

No, I’m not. I’m the XO.

You’re supposed to be giving orders and telling people what to do next.

Like what? Come back aboard and keep her afloat?

The simple truth was that there was no need for further orders. Much as in battle itself, if the officers and men had been properly trained, they would know what to do. A loss of communications between the Sky One director and a gun mount didn’t mean the gun mount stopped shooting. Can you see a Jap ship? Shoot at it.

What was it Nelson said back in 1805? No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy. Something like that. Lord Nelson would have approved of Evans this morning. Now that it was over, though, nobody needed captaining.

Suddenly he sensed a shadow to his left. He opened his eyes. The rainsquall was lifting south. One of the Jap heavy cruisers was sliding by, close aboard to port, her alien-looking pagoda superstructure momentarily blotting out the sudden sun.

She was really close, and she was rolling slowly in the underlying deep Pacific swell. One moment he could see her starboard side, the next he could see all the way across her decks. Her topside AA gun crews in their bulky battle dress were pointing at Evans and at the men in the water, now sandwiched between the two ships. Some of them were cheering and probably shouting banzais, although the steam plume was still drowning out all sound. Every one of her eight-inch guns was pointed right at Evans. Marsh winced when he visualized what was about to happen. He could see several of his people down in the water between the two ships trying to get out of the way of the salvo that had to be coming.

Then he noticed something else. Way up on the multilevel pagoda, a single officer was standing out on his starboard bridge wing. He had a battle helmet on and binoculars hanging from his neck, and, of all things, he was wearing white gloves. Marsh tried to sit up in his chair and almost rolled out of it. With Evans’s pilothouse roof ripped completely off, they could look right at each other.

To his amazement, the Japanese officer lifted one of those gloved hands in a formal salute and held it. After a few seconds, Marsh lifted the stump of his right arm and tried to return his salute. A pulse of pain made him drop his arm almost immediately, but Marsh was pretty sure the Japanese officer had seen that bloody handkerchief. The officer followed suit, dropping his hand, nodded or maybe even bowed once, turned around, and went back into his own pilothouse. Then that big black beast settled by the stern and accelerated away, a bright white foaming wake enveloping her fantail as her eight-inch turrets lifted their barrels in perfect unison southeast in search of more promising meat.

Marsh sank back in his chair and wondered if they would move off and then send one of those terrible Long Lance torpedoes into Evans, just to make sure — but as he watched, the cruiser’s side decks erupted into a barrage of antiaircraft gunfire. A flight of planes from one of the jeeps fell out of the sun and swooped down on her. The flow of steam from the after fireroom ebbed suddenly and then stopped with a wet gasp. Marsh could now hear the racket of the Jap cruiser’s secondary battery, thumping away and filling the sky overhead with black puffs, out of which more and more planes seemed to be descending. She was a few thousand yards away and starting to twist and turn as the attack strengthened. He watched in fascination as she went off toward the horizon, trailing some black smoke now and still enveloped in a swarm of attacking planes.

The other Taffy groups must have joined the fight, he thought. Twelve jeep carriers could field over a hundred aircraft of all types. Hopefully the Japs would think Halsey’s big-decks had gotten into the game, not that it was going to make any difference to Evans.

The list to port was increasing. Once again he felt he should be doing something, but he could not focus his brain through the fog of pain. He looked out over the port side again, where he could see men in the water, gray life jackets concealing their faces in many cases. Most were upright and swimming away from the ship; some were dragging buddies, and some were motionless. A lot of them were clustered around life rafts, which meant that the abandon-ship order had been given in time. A sudden stink of bunker oil invaded the wreckage of the pilothouse. Marsh remembered that smell. A warship, bleeding to death. He hoped the depth charges had been safed.

The depth charges.

Now that was something he could do.

He slid out of the chair and tried to lower himself gently onto the torn deckplates. He didn’t do very well, ending up on his belly, trying to get his breath back and blink the tears out of his eyes after whacking his right arm stump on the footrest. It took him another few minutes to clamber through all the wreckage in the pilothouse and out to what was left of the port bridge wing. He went to port because it was downhill, and that was when he finally got a good look at the rest of the ship. There wasn’t much left to see. There was a single, ominous hole in the port bulkhead down where Combat had been. The lifelines stanchions along the port quarter were already getting their feet wet, so if he was going to do any good, he had to hurry. Now he wished he’d let the gunners back aft have their fun, but Evans would have lost her rudders, too.

There was no way he could manage that steep steel ladder from the bridge wing to the next level down. He lay there for another minute, trying to gather his wits while he watched what was left of his right forearm drip into the sea below. He was exhausted. It would have been wonderful to just put his head down in that soft rain. The ship wasn’t moving forward at all. She, too, was rolling in that deep swell, but not coming back very much after each roll to port. Pretty soon she’d take one last roll and keep right on going.

Get a move on.

Why?

The depth charges.

Right.

Then he noticed that what was left of the bridge wing no longer had any sides. He was lying on a diving board. A moment later he just slid into the sea from about fifteen feet up. As he fell, he remembered the big day back at the academy swimming pool when the entire class had to do the dreaded platform jump as they trained for what it would be like to abandon ship. He managed to do a complete somersault on the way down but failed to take that big breath. Submerging to what seemed like a hundred feet, he woke back up and scrambled hard for the surface, which was maybe two feet away. Fortunately the sea was still calm, and, after the initial stinging shock, the warm saltwater actually felt good on his two stumps. He tried to eke out a clumsy sidestroke along the battered hull, very conscious of all the bloody arms and legs hanging through the lifelines. The torpedo mounts were both gone, as were mount fifty-three and most of the after superstructure, courtesy of probably just one of those fourteen-inch shells. He looked around to see if there were any more Japs inbound, but the rain obscured the surrounding sea. If there was a Jap destroyer coming to machine-gun the survivors, it was probably better not to know.

After two hundred feet of grunting and splashing, he slithered back aboard, rolling over rather than through the fantail lifelines as Evans leaned way over, as if to see where she was going. Mount fifty-five was still trained out to starboard, its blackened gun barrel still searching for another battleship to annoy. Fifty-four had been split clean in two, as if by a giant hatchet. The barrel was missing. He could see some arms and legs in the mess, where glinting brass hydraulic lines contrasted brightly with the burned wreckage inside.

The fantail was intact, but the deck was already under about six inches of water. There were a half-dozen bodies piled up around the after windlass, their faces covered in black oil like some ghastly caricature of a vaudeville crew. Marsh flopped across the deck like a seal, pulling with his one good hand and pushing with his remaining foot to get back to the depth charge racks. Captain Hughes’s policy had been to keep the fuze pistols set on one hundred feet as long as they were in enemy waters. What he had to do now was apply the settings wrench to each depth bomb and spin the dial over to the safe position. Otherwise, once the ship sank below one hundred feet, the depth bombs would all go off, crushing the guts out of any man still floating nearby.

He found it difficult to concentrate. Small waves were obscuring the settings dials and momentarily blinding him each time he tried to set the wrench. That morphine injection was working too well, damping the pain at the cost of dulling his brain. He was also running out of strength. It was difficult to do the simplest things, especially without his right hand, and each time he tried to brace his body with his right leg, he came up short. Literally.

He thought he heard someone shouting.

Sorry, bud, he thought. I’m busy here. Couldn’t help you even if I wanted to.

Put the wrench on the tabs. Turn it counterclockwise, all the way through the detent to SAFE.

More shouting, excited voices. His vision was beginning to tunnel up again, but he was determined to get this final thing done.

Ignore the noise. Move to the next one. Clear your eyes. Find the dial. Take the wrench out of your teeth, fit it on the dial. Counterclockwise. Lefty-loosey. Feel the detent. Push through it. SAFE.

Put the wrench back in your teeth. Move to the next one. Clear your eyes. Find the dial. Spit out the wrench and fit it on the dial.

The water was getting deeper as Evans gave in to her fate. It felt so strange to feel his knees on steel while the sea was enveloping the collar of his life jacket. The kapok was actually making it hard to stay next to the racks.

One rack done. Now to the other side. Have to get them all, he thought, before my brain swirls into a salty, purple haze. Fifty percent isn’t good enough.

Blink away the salt and oil. Find the dial. Spit out the wrench. Five hundred pounds of TNT. Good stuff. Kill a sub quick. Kill the swimmers even quicker.

More voices, close aboard now. Don’t bother me. Gotta do this, see? Five hundred pounds, turn your leg bones into broken glass and your pipes into applesauce. And I even like applesauce.

Then strong arms. One of the voices sounded like Chief Marty Gorman. Pulling him away from his duty.

He tried to protest, got a mouthful of seawater. Three guys yelling: It’s okay, it’s okay, you got ’em all. Come on, now. She’s going down.

Going down. That’s what the captain is supposed to do, isn’t it? Go down with his ship? But you’re the XO, not the captain. The ghost of Beast McCarty’s face swam into his vision. “Congratulations, classmate,” the ghost said with that irascible grin. “You met the elephant today. You did good.”

You, too, Beast, he thought.

Okay, then.

For the first time in the war, he was no longer afraid of anything, and on that happy note, he let them pull him off the fantail and into the welcoming sea. From behind them he thought he heard a loud, ship-sized groan.

Good night, sweetheart. Good night.

Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

He mentally recited Coleridge’s agonized words as the life raft bounced around in what looked like calm waters, under a blazing tropical sun. He dimly remembered last night, after the ship went down and they found themselves alone on the Philippine Sea. He kept trying to get his mind back to the surface to reassume command, but their sole surviving pharmacist’s mate had given him one more jab of morphine, reducing him to a relatively comfortable zombie. When dawn broke, the mate prepared to do it again, but Marsh told him not to. He was sure they were going to be rescued soon and didn’t want to be completely out of it. That was at dawn.

By midafternoon, it was becoming clear that they were not going to be rescued anytime soon. They’d seen distant aircraft, and even a PBY, flying low over the waters to their south, but no one came for them. It was as if the battle had never happened. No Japs, no jeeps, nobody at all except a hundred or so survivors from Evans, clutching to life rafts or floating nearby, while the Philippine sun slowly roasted them. He’d never heard such silence, but it was broken soon enough when the sharks moved in.

There were four rafts. The most seriously injured were in the rafts. The rest of the survivors were clinging to them as their kapoks tried to soak up the entire ocean, rendering them useless. Marsh’s right forearm throbbed, and his right foot was positively on fire. They periodically dipped each severed appendage into the sea on the theory that the saltwater would keep infection at bay. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but his bleeding stumps were not impressed. The pain became his all-consuming focus, and then the waiting pharmacist’s mate gave him another stick.

Marsh was only peripherally aware of what happened next, when the sharks came in force. The first man taken made not a sound, but the two men next to him certainly did. There was nothing any of them could do. There was nowhere to go, and no way to drive them off. If a man kicked at them, he simply confirmed he was live prey. They would circle the rafts and all the floating men, then submerge. Men would look down into the water, waiting, ready to kick or thrash or do anything that might prevent what was rising from the deep to take them, but the ones taken never had a chance to do anything but open their mouths and then disappear in a bloody swirl. It was horrible, and their helplessness made it even worse. Marsh eventually felt guilty being in the raft and thought about ordering men to take turns, in the rafts and then alongside, to give everyone an equal chance at survival. Deep down, though, he knew that was nonsense: No one already in the raft would have budged.

Where were the rescue forces? There should have been planes combing the sea, looking for survivors from the tin cans who’d gone north to die under the guns of battleships. Then a thought occurred to him: Maybe the Japs had won and wiped them all out. Maybe there was no one left out there on the horizon — three, maybe four battleships against even eighteen jeeps was no contest at all. Maybe they’d sunk them all and then gone back to wherever they’d come from. Maybe the planes they’d seen had been Japs, looking for stragglers to machine-gun. His brain whirled with the effort of the what-ifs and the maybes. Once every four hours, someone gave him a couple of sips of water. They had to wrest the cup away from him each time they did. Marsh knew better, that the water had to go a long away with all these men, but his thirst was urgent. He automatically reached for the cup with his missing right hand, which they gently pushed aside.

When night fell on the second day, he let them give him another morphine jab. He remembered telling the pharmacist’s mate, “No more water for me. I’m not gonna make it anyway.” The badly sunburned young man grinned in the darkness.

“Yeah, you will, Skipper,” he said. “They’ll figure it out. Tomorrow for sure.”

They did come. The young pharmacist’s mate had been right. A Black Cat PBY seaplane showed up one hour after sunrise, circled them twice, dropped some water supplies and four more rafts, and then flew off. A small herd of Army Higgins boats arrived four hours later to begin the rescue, while the seaplane flew overhead, making sure no one was left behind.

They were much diminished. Marsh wasn’t sure how many of them had made it into the sea as Evans went down, but there were fewer of them than that waiting to be picked up. John Hennessy was in another raft, and Swede Bolser was alive but badly burned. Marsh’s second night had been one of violent dreams as he relived taking his ship alongside that battleship, her towering steel sides rising in front of his face like a moving black mountain, looming ever closer until he was smothered by her sheer size.

As the captain, he felt he had failed the survival experience entirely. Once a day, someone jabbed him in the thigh with a syringe, and all became better. He was actually in the raft, while most of the survivors were hanging on to the sides. Even so, he was often out of his head, which was a mercy when the pharmacist’s mate dunked his severed limbs into the saltwater. Every time they relaxed one of the tourniquets he bled like a stuck pig. They gave him precious water and salt tablets, while making a paste of seawater and sulfa powder as a poultice for his open wounds. There were times when he thought the crew ought to just pitch his useless ass over the side to make room for men with better chances. He was pretty sure he’d babbled on in this vein, because one of the gunners finally put a wet cloth over his mouth and told him to “hesh up,” as he was encouraging the sharks.

There were moments of lucidity. He remembered that fateful decision to go back and expend their remaining torpedoes. What price had we all paid for that decision? he thought sadly. The look in John Hennessy’s eyes, the terrified faces of the bridge watch, the false bravado of the chief engineer—Give ’em hell, Cap’n—they’d trusted in him and he’d killed many of them in the next half hour, while doing next to nothing to the Japanese. He himself had been reduced to a one-legged, one-armed impostor. If this was what command was about, he wanted no further part of it. These were good men, brave and true, and he’d selfishly led them to slaughter, egged on by a memory of being called a coward by a man who’d taken a woman with whom he was still in love. Because he could, and Marsh couldn’t.

He was in tears when they passed him over the gunwales of the Higgins boat. The Army medic on board took one look at his injuries, thought Marsh was weeping because of unbearable pain, and gave him yet another jab of morphine. By now Marsh welcomed it, but not because of the physical pain.