Pacific Glory

SEVEN

The Evans left Pearl a day earlier than scheduled. That kind of surprise creates a painfully hectic day for the XO as he tries to compress all the things that were going to be finished up into one day instead of two. The first four destroyers cleared the minefields set up around the entrance to Pearl Harbor and assumed their screening stations. They were followed by the carrier and the rest of the screening ships. Evans came out tail-end Charlie and had to bend on some knots to catch up with the formation. Once the carriers got out of port, they tended to run fast, as that was one of the better ways to frustrate lurking submarines. Evans strained into her assigned station two hours later and was then able to slow down to a brisk twenty knots. As usual, Marsh had no idea where the formation was headed, other than west, always west. What they were going to do when they got there was still a secret; the top brass did not share grand strategy with lowly destroyers.

Evans’s tactical world centered on protecting the aircraft carrier from air and sub attack while the carrier flung out planes who did their work miles away, hundreds of miles away sometimes. Periodically the captain would get a special message laying out the objective for upcoming air strikes, and he would share these with the officers. Otherwise, though, the rest of the crew were operationally in the dark when it came to the big picture. Marsh didn’t mind: The secrecy reduced his worry horizon to the actual horizon; there were usually problems enough in that confined space to occupy his entire day.

The ship secured from special sea detail and set the regular underway three-section watch, which meant that the deck watch officers would stand bridge watches of four hours on, eight off for as long as Evans was motoring from point A to B. Once in the objective combat zone, they would tighten that up to port and starboard watches, six on, six off, which gave the ship half the crew on station throughout the ship, on the bridge, in engineering, and all the gun stations, ready to fight. The downside was that people were usually exhausted after a few weeks of port and starboard, as Marsh well remembered from his Winston days.

The ship had been in its screening station for an hour when the sonar control room called up to the bridge to report a sonar contact. Marsh was going through some admin messages with the captain on the bridge when the report came up over the captain’s intercom, affectionately known as the bitch-box. The captain looked at Marsh, sighed, and shook his head. Apparently every time a formation came out of Pearl, one of the screening destroyers inevitably got a sonar contact. It almost always turned out to be a false contact, but the entire destroyer screen had to react anyway when the ship in contact sent out the initial report. All destroyers had to set general quarters for the hour or so it took to decide that the contact was a whale or other marine life. It was especially annoying when the ship reporting the contact happened to be a “new guy” to the Pacific Fleet, as the Evans was, fresh off the East Coast and new construction to boot.

“We’re going to get razzed about this,” the captain said, as he reached for the talk-between-ships radio handset and nodded to the officer of the deck to sound general quarters.

“Probably,” Marsh said, “but we have to go take a look.”

Evans left her assigned station and turned toward the bearing of the sonar contact, which was north of the formation track. The carrier, hearing Evans’s report, automatically increased speed to thirty knots and got the hell out of the area, beginning a broad zigzag pattern to foil any long-range torpedo shots. The destroyer squadron commodore, well aware of the false-contact reputation of the waters around Pearl, detached one other ship, USS Hodson, from the screen while the rest of the formation went galloping over the horizon with the bird farm. Marsh went down to the Combat Information Center — the CIC, known as Combat on the intercom circuits. One of the first things he had to do was to ensure that there were no American submarine submerged transit lanes nearby. He checked the chart and found that there were none.

“All stations reporting manned and ready for GQ,” the OOD reported. “Material condition Zebra is set throughout the ship.”

“Very well,” the captain said. “Arm the depth charges for one hundred fifty feet.”

In the CIC, two officers began the tedious process of establishing the plotted track of the contact. Any contact was presumed to be a Japanese submarine until it was proved otherwise. Sound-powered phone talkers connected to the sonar control room muttered constantly to the plotters as the operators down below fed bearing and range data to Combat. Back on the fantail, the depth charge gunners were taking the safety locks off the five-hundred-pound depth charges. The five-inch gun crews were ramming shells into the breeches of the gun mounts. Anyone topside with binoculars was looking for signs of a periscope.

The captain, who was senior to the skipper of the Hodson, assumed local tactical command and put the other ship on the fence, as it was called. This meant that she steamed in a big circle around the ship in contact. The tactic called for the ship in contact to cue the ship on the fence with ranges and bearings until that ship, too, established sonar contact. Once both ships held contact, one would drive down the bearing and right over the top of the sonar contact, releasing her depth charges. The ship dropping the charges would, of course, go “deaf” as soon as she passed overhead, because the sonar could not hear anything through the ship’s own propellers. The attacking ship would then go out onto the fence and reestablish contact, after which the second ship would then drive in and make an attack. The maneuver would be repeated until something happened.

First, however, there was one last thing to do: Uncle Joe. These were the code words, transmitted over the underwater telephone, which were meant to give an American submarine one last chance to identify herself as an American by surfacing immediately. The sonar operators would transmit the words “Uncle Joe” repeatedly into the water, using the underwater telephone. If they received a reply, or an American sub popped up between the ships, they all went on about their business. If nothing happened, the presumption was made that the contact was a bad guy. The destroyers were then free to make an attack, which would begin at once.

The captain called sonar control, located down on the third deck. “Sonar, conn, what’s the quality of your contact?”

“Medium definition, steady return, echoes clear and metallic. He’s running just in and out of the layer, estimate two hundred feet.”

“Pretty sure it’s not marine life?”

The leading sonarman, Chief Ripley, replied. “Yes, sir, it looks pretty good. I know there ain’t supposed to be any Japs this close to Pearl, but…”

“Never mind that, Chief. They weren’t supposed to be around here back on seven December, either. If the contact goes mushy, let me know.”

“Aye, Cap’n,” Ripley said. He’d been assigned to Evans from the antisubmarine warfare school in Key West and was a sonar expert. If Ripley thought it was real, there was a chance it was. The captain ordered the fantail crew to reset the exploder depth on the charges to two hundred feet.

The Hodson now reported that they, too, had intermittent contact, and the plots on the two ships were generally in agreement. Their evaluation of the contact, however, was possible large marine life. As in, let’s play with it but not waste too many ashcans, okay? We know you guys are new to this game.

The captain surprised Marsh by ordering Hodson to make the first attack while Evans maintained the fence. They rogered for that order and bore in at eighteen knots to run over the top while Evans steered out to maintain a good sonar contact on what was coming. Moments later the sea erupted into six huge waterspouts as Hodson’s charges went off at two hundred feet. Hodson put her rudder over and turned out to join Evans on the fence, reporting, as expected, that they had lost contact.

“Still got him, XO?” the captain called in.

“Affirmative, ready to go in.”

“Cue the Hodson back onto the contact. Then commence our attack.”

It took the Combat team five minutes to steer Hodson’s sonar team via radio back into contact. Then control of the ship was passed into CIC, where Marsh ordered the OOD out on the bridge to turn the ship onto an intercept course with the contact and increase speed to eighteen knots. The release of the depth charges was controlled from CIC because they were the only ones who could see the whole tactical picture. The idea was to give the order far enough in advance that the men actually rolling the charges did it right in front of the contact as the ship passed overhead.

“Roll one,” Marsh ordered. “Roll two.” A brief pause. “Mark center.”

The K-guns thumped charges out to the port and starboard sides while the rest of the depth bombs rolled silently off steel tracks mounted over the stern. Moments later they felt the undersea hammerblows start up.

“Sonar has lost contact.”

The Evans made a wide turn away from the detonating charges and back out to the fence. Hodson had maintained contact and was cueing Evans to get back on target, but they were now reporting a truly mushy contact. Marsh knew that this was typical following the explosion of depth charges that deep. The turmoil in the water could persist for over an hour, making good contact very difficult. Hodson still thought Evans was dealing with marine biologics. Their radio operator sounded bored.

The Evans sonar team got back on the contact a minute later and reported the same evaluation: The contact was losing definition, the course track was becoming random, and the depth estimates were all over the place. Okay, Marsh thought, we’ve done our duty and probably killed yet another innocent whale. Time to call it off.

Then they heard a thundering boom from outside, and a moment later everyone felt an underwater shock wave envelop the hull.

Evans heeled sharply to port and increased speed. The bitch-box lit up. “All stations, this is the captain. Hodson’s been torpedoed. Blew her bow right off. We’ve got a live one. Bridge has control.”

“Combat, aye,” Marsh replied. “I’ll get out on the HF and notify the commodore.”

While Marsh made his report on the long-range radio net, the ship began turning again, and now there was a high sense of urgency among the Combat team plotters and phone talkers. All the routine had gone right out of the situation, especially when the next report came over the bitch-box.

“All stations, sonar! Torpedo noise spoke, multiple fish, bearing three three zero!” The sonar operator’s voice was high-pitched.

Marsh froze for a moment as his guts coiled in a cold wave. Then he looked up at the course indicator, which showed which way the ship was headed at that instant: 320.

Marsh didn’t have to say anything. The captain himself would have the conn now, and he would try to comb the tracks of the oncoming torpedoes. After Winston, Marsh knew all about Japanese torpedoes. He was suddenly very afraid but knew he couldn’t show it. If Evans, no, if the captain did this just right, the torpedoes would come screaming past her on either side at nearly fifty miles an hour.

He felt helpless. The plotting crew was standing around the plotting table like statues, transfixed as he was by the stream of reports coming in from sonar: strong up-Doppler on the noise spokes, two, possibly three torpedoes, range now under one thousand yards, coming right for Evans as the ship heeled slightly in another tight turn. Then Marsh got hold of himself.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Reciprocal of the bearing! We’ve got a pigboat to kill. Get that track going again.”

They all bent back down to the plot. By now the bridge team should have been able to see the approaching wakes, although Jap torpedoes sometimes left no wake at all. Marsh called for a visual bearing, but, understandably, no one on the bridge was answering. Then he could hear the shouts of the signalmen topside as they spotted the incoming wakes.

Marsh told the CIC gang to brace for impact and lifted his own body up on his toes, mindful of what had happened to his knees aboard Winston.

A very long minute passed. None of the men dared to look at one another.

“Noise spokes in the baffles!” called sonar. There was an audible group exhalation in CIC. The fish had passed down either side and were now acoustically invisible in the turbulence of Evans’s own wake. They would howl out behind the ship until their fuel ran out and they plunged to the bottom. The plotting team got back to the business at hand.

Marsh sent out the best estimate of the submarine’s range and bearing to the bridge while sonar tried to refine the target through the residual wakes of the torpedoes. Finally, with the captain running down the bearing from which the fish had come and Combat calculating the best dead reckoning position for the sub, they let fly with everything. The sea around Evans erupted in thunder, and sonar once again went deaf as the ship maneuvered back out to the fence to regain contact.

“No echoes,” sonar control reported.

With their plotting team blind, Marsh went up through the charthouse passageway and out to the bridge. Everyone out there looked pretty shaken. About three miles distant, Hodson was smoking heavily forward and already down by the head. Everything forward of her forward gun mount was gone. More ominously, there was an enormous column of dense black smoke coming straight up from her number one stack, which meant they probably had a big oil fire in the forward fireroom, probably caused by the torpedo hit rupturing a fuel line on a boiler front. Marsh could see men in life jackets and helmets swarming topside, humping fire hoses in both directions. He went back down to Combat in time to hear that sonar still had no echoes.

Marsh stared and stared. Torpedoes, his nemesis. The bright morning sun became those battle searchlights, and he heard the screams of the men in Winston’s passageway as the eight-inch shells punched through and cut everyone to pieces. He felt Winston’s blackened bridge leaning over his head and heard the bodies hitting the water from four decks up.

“XO!” the captain said. “Snap out of it!”

Marsh hadn’t realized how long he had been standing there, but the captain had. “Yessir,” he said automatically, then went back inside.

With her bow gone, Hodson was no longer in the sonar game. Marsh conferred with the plotting team, and then they passed a search sector to the sonar team. “Search sector is two four zero to one six zero true, range twenty-five hundred yards.”

The only sounds now were the reports coming over the bitch-box from sonar and the coaching orders from the CIC plotting team. The captain had kept the conn and was maneuvering the ship in a broad weave to foil another torpedo attack while keeping the bow, and thus the sonar, pointed at the best estimated position of the sub. His voice was calm and precise, and Marsh, feeling anything but, tried to emulate that.

“Conn, signal bridge. Big-eyes has oil and stuff coming up.”

“Conn, aye,” the captain said. “Bearing?”

The signalmen came back with a relative bearing. Marsh looked over at the gyro compass repeater, converted it to true, and gave the bearing to the plotting crew, who would add the sighting to the plot and try to figure out which way the sub was headed. They had to assume that the oil and debris slick was a decoy, released by the sub to make them think they’d got him.

“What do you think, XO?” the captain called in.

“We fired on a dead-reckoning estimate,” Marsh said. “Blind luck if we got him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think. Let’s let him know that. Right standard rudder!”

The captain asked for an attack bearing. Marsh had to tell him that the plot was still cold.

“Your best guess, then, dammit,” he snapped.

Marsh gave him their best guess, and then he went back up to the bridge. He took another look at Hodson. The black smoke column hadn’t diminished one bit, which meant they had a serious engineering space fire going. Up forward there were no flames, but the pall of grayish smoke seemed to be increasing, boiling out of ruptured hatches on the peeled-back forecastle, or what was left of it. She had settled farther by the bow, which meant that they’d probably flooded the forward magazines. Otherwise, she looked reasonably stable. If the sub shot at her again, though, she was dead meat.

Evans drove in at twenty knots and laid down another pattern, set this time for two hundred fifty feet. They were assuming that the sub had gone deep to get beneath an oceanic acoustic layer. The sonar still had no echoes. Radio reported that they’d sent out the incident report to the carrier group. Because they were using high-frequency radio, they’d first had to encrypt the message; HF radio signals at sea could be heard in Japan, even all the way from the Hawaiian Islands. Marsh picked up his binoculars and did a sweep of the near horizon.

He listened as the captain talked to the skipper of the Hodson and asked him if they could handle their damage while Evans continued the hunt. The reply was brief: Affirmative, we’re handling it, go get the bastard. As the captain hung up the radio handset, Hodson blew up in a shattering explosion. Either the fires had reached a magazine, or the sub had finished her off. One second she was there, the next there was only a towering cloud of smoke and a half-mile-wide circle of splashes as bits of the ship and her crew of three hundred fell back into the sea. Marsh, aghast, clamped down on his fear and hustled back down to Combat.

If it had been the sub, there was no way to tell from which direction the torpedoes had come. Their plot showed where the Hodson had been, their own position, and their best guess as to where the sub was. Marsh stabbed a pencil down onto the plot and had the talker tell conn to head zero eight zero, which would take them past the spot where Hodson had blown up. He gave sonar another calculated search sector, but they reported that the explosion had made the sonar useless until Evans got past the smoking boil in the water that had been a twenty-two-hundred-ton destroyer a minute ago.

Minutes passed. Marsh, dry-mouthed as the rest of them, listened as the captain and the signal bridge appraised the scene, still weaving every thirty seconds to throw off the sub’s attack solution. He went back up onto the bridge, where he could see men in the water as Evans drove toward the still-turbulent oil slick. He then hurried back to the boat deck to supervise as the captain slowed the ship for just a minute so that the bosun’s mates could throw some life rafts over the side to the survivors. The very few survivors. Then Evans sped up again and began an expanding-square sonar search. An experienced sub skipper would have taken the opportunity of the Hodson’s sinking to go deep and slink away, satisfied with one kill. The captain handed the conn back to the officer of the deck with instructions to execute a broad weave on top of the expanding square.

“He was gutsy enough to take on two destroyers,” the captain said. “I think he’ll stick around. He missed a shot at the carrier group, but he also knows the main body’s gone over the horizon. It’s one on one now, and he’s already put one of us down.”

That was not a comforting thought, but Marsh realized the captain was probably right. For a moment he wondered they should maybe take the hint and take themselves over the horizon at high speed. There were men in the water back there, though, and killing, or at least holding down, a Jap sub lurking off Pearl was nothing if not one of Evans’s primary duties as a destroyer. What they really needed was another three or four tin cans to even things up. The problem was that their encrypted contact report might take hours to get through the communications station ashore, and by then the carrier group could be two hundred miles distant. Then one of the lookouts sounded off.

“Aircraft, two, bearing zero eight zero relative, elevation angle thirty, inbound!”

Everyone on the bridge with binoculars swung around to the starboard side to search the skies. Two aircraft out here had to be American, Marsh thought, unless of course the Japs had snuck a carrier back to the Hawaiian Islands, a feat not unheard of.

“SBDs,” the captain said. “Admiral must have got curious as to what two of his tin cans were still doing back here.”

The planes came overhead, waggled their wings, and then circled Evans. They were flying clean, except for belly tanks for extended range. Combat established comms with the flight leader and told him what was going on. The pilot rogered for the report, flew over the sparsely populated life rafts behind Evans, and then departed to the west, climbing for altitude so that their VHF radios would have a longer reach. Then the flight leader came back up, reporting a thin oil slick visible on the surface, four miles away to the west, and running an east-west axis.

“Hot damn!” the captain said. He swung around in his chair. “Captain still has the conn,” he announced. “Right standard rudder, come to two seven zero. All ahead full, turns for twenty-two knots.” Then to Marsh, “XO, go back inside, talk to the airedales, give them an estimated position. Let’s see if we can get this bastard.”

Marsh went back to the flight leader and asked if one of them could remain on station and give them an overhead view. The leader detached his wingman to stay with Evans and then positioned himself high over the moving oil trail. The ship drove west toward the new estimated position, very much aware that the sub would hear them coming before they got contact on him. The captain approached the EP at twenty-two knots while executing a random zigzag so as not to make it too easy for the sub skipper to take another shot. He told Marsh that this was no time for buck fever.

The captain then got on the ship’s announcing system and briefed the crew as to what was going on. He told everyone topside to keep a sharp eye peeled for a periscope. The sea was a little choppy but not too rough. If the Jap stuck his scope up high enough, the Evans or her airborne helper-bee might get lucky.

At twenty-two knots, it was about twelve straight-line minutes to the EP, but with the zigzag it was going to be more like twenty. Evans could go faster, but above twenty-two knots, her own hull noise drowned out the precious echoes coming back from the sonar ping. Marsh didn’t want to think about what was going through the Hodson’s survivors’ minds as they watched Evans head for the horizon. The bald fact was that they had provided rafts for far more men than were in the water. Must have been a magazine hit, he thought. She’d gone in an instant. They waited nervously, praying for no more torpedo noise spokes.

“Sonar contact, two niner zero, range fifteen hundred yards.”

“Combat, conn, conduct urgent attack — straight in now, XO.”

That’s what they did. The captain slowed slightly to give the sonar a better listen, stopped the zigzag, and bore right at the contact, depth charges primed in a depth ladder ranging from one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty feet exploding depth. Then the pilot of their one-plane air force came up on the radio shouting something about a torpedo, followed immediately by an excited call from sonar control.

“Conn, sonar, torpedo noise spoke, on the bow, high up-Doppler!”

The Jap skipper must have understood the significance of their stopping the zigzag. He’d fired one down the throat and was probably going deep again. The Doppler confirmed that it was coming straight at Evans.

“All stations, conn, torpedo wake in sight — it’s going to pass down the port side. Combat, have all the depth charges reset for two hundred fifty feet and stand by to fire.”

“Combat, aye,” Marsh answered, as one of the phone talkers passed the word back to the fantail. Now the question was: Would the sub turn as he tried to evade deep? And if he did, which way? Their one-plane air force made the call for them. The slick was beginning to drift right. Marsh checked the true wind. It was coming from the other direction. Right drift meant the sub was turning right.

“Conn, Combat, range to contact is five hundred yards. Come right in a slow five-degree rudder turn, now.”

“Conn, aye, coming right.”

“Roll one!”

Evans laid down a standard pattern and then made a sharp evasive turn. Marsh marked the plot where they made that turn because their rudders would create what was called a knuckle, a tight whirlpool in the water that the sonar could see and confuse with a real contact. The charges started going off, deep and satisfying. It felt good to be doing something about Hodson, even if they didn’t get him on this pass.

The ship swung around in a big circle and slowed to fifteen knots, trying to get back in contact. The plane still circled above them at a few thousand feet. If anything came up from the sub, he’d be the first to see it. Then they waited, constantly changing course to defeat another torpedo attack. The plotters fed constant estimated range and bearing data to the sonar operators down below, trying to focus their search, but the cluster of depth charges had so badly disturbed the water that all the sonar could see was a cloud of turbulence.

They waited some more, weaving this way and that just like the aviators did. Fly straight and level in a dogfight, someone will kill you. Marsh decided once more to go back up onto the bridge.

Everyone who had binoculars was looking hard for any signs of debris or other indications they’d hit him. The sea was picking up out here, and the relative wind blew a gust of stack gas back onto the bridge wing.

Suddenly the signal bridge called down, “Our plane’s diving astern of us, one seven zero relative!”

They looked aft from the port bridge wing in time to see the SBD strafing something back in their wake, and then the sub broached right into a hail of gunfire. Without being told, the after five-inch guns began to fire as the plane cleared out, shooting over at first and then punching five-inch shells into the black mass of the sub as she wallowed in their wake about a half mile behind them, her front half sticking out of the water as if she were stuck in ice. The captain turned the ship to open an arc of fire for the forward guns, and then all five got into it, along with one of the after forty-millimeter mounts. The noise was terrific, but no one was complaining. A cloud of gun smoke blew back over the bridge wing, filled with sulphurous confetti from the powder-can wads.

The sub’s bow began rising straight up into the air, and then she hung there. Marsh couldn’t tell if it was an I-boat, but he did see at least three direct hits from their main battery on that black, now almost perpendicular shape. Then she began to slide backward, spewing air and sheets of shiny diesel oil into the sea. The SBD kept well clear now to avoid getting shot down by the hail of gunfire that was still exploding all around where the sub was collapsing back into the sea. Marsh ran back down to CIC, knowing what they had to do next. The captain was ahead of him on the intercom.

“All stations, cease firing, cease firing. Combat, conduct an urgent attack on the sink point, bearing zero eight five, range six hundred yards.”

The captain drove them over the point where the sub had sunk, and they rolled a short pattern, again set deep. Then they drove away from that point, slowed down, and waited while the sonar went into the passive mode and listened. They had a speaker in Combat that allowed them to hear the actual sounds of the sonar and any returning echoes. Their depth charge attack had created a long acoustic waterfall of white noise, but then came the sound they’d been waiting for, a sound they’d only heard before on training tapes: the rumble and crump of a hull collapse as the sub sank below its crush depth on its way to the bottom, some twelve thousand feet down.

Marsh called the plane and asked him to verify a large oil slick and debris field that should be coming up shortly. The SBD was already skimming the scene at about two hundred feet. He reported that he could already see it and that there appeared to be bodies in the slick. That was as good a confirmation as they’d ever get. Subs sometimes released oil and trash to make pursuing destroyers think it was all over, but not crewmen.

“Combat, conn, secure from GQ. I believe we got ourselves a kill there.”

“Combat, aye, plotting a course back to the EP of Hodson’s people in the water.”

Marsh sent the plane home, telling him they’d take the survivors of Hodson back to Pearl and then, unless otherwise directed, rejoin the task force. The pilot said he’d relay the message and report that they’d sunk the sub. Marsh thanked him for equalizing the odds.

It would take the ship about a half hour to get back to the estimated position of Hodson’s survivors. Marsh went below to the officers’ head, where his bowels testified explosively to his compelling fear. Then he went to his cabin, shut the door, and lay down on his bed. He pulled a pillow over his face and began taking deep, difficult breaths, forcing himself to blank out the horrific images of the morning. Hodson without her bow. Then that fiery pall on the water, surrounded by fragments of the ship and her crew. The raucous scream of the Jap torpedoes clearly audible over the sonar speakers. The boil of bodies and oil coming up from the depths as the submarine imploded in the absolute blackness of the deep.

There was a quick knock on the door, and then the captain was standing next to his rack. He was still in full battle dress, and he had a white china mug in his hand, which he handed to Marsh. The mug contained an inch of bourbon whiskey.

Marsh, hugely embarrassed, tried to scramble out of his rack, but the captain put a firm hand on his shoulder and forced him to take the mug.

“If it’s any comfort,” the captain said, “I’ve already had one. Knock it down, XO, and then get yourself back on the line. This happens to all of us.”

Then he was gone, ducking through the door but still banging his helmet on the frame. Marsh gulped the whiskey down and promptly choked on it.

This happens to all of us.

All right, then.

He took some more deep breaths, washed his mouth out so that he didn’t smell of booze, and went back topside to take charge of picking up the survivors.

It took them an hour to round up the life rafts. When they arrived, there were only about three dozen or so men visible in the water, and some of them were not moving. That was a sobering head count. Hodson had had a crew of at least three hundred. The Jap torpedo, sub- or ship-launched, was still one of the most potent weapons in the war. Evans put down her motor whaleboat to corral the life rafts so as to minimize the time the ship spent stopped in the water. There was always the chance that the sub had had a partner on this bold mission, and everyone topside could hear the sonar going out at full power, searching all around them. Once they recovered the rafts and what was left of Hodson’s crew, they set course back to Pearl. It seemed to Marsh that the only way he got into Pearl Harbor was on a mission to get people to the naval hospital.

The entire evolution in port took six hours, and then they were steaming back out of Pearl and headed west to find the carrier group, which by now was more than three hundred miles west and opening. There’d been a line of ambulances waiting on the pier to shuttle the wounded over to Hospital Point. Evans had recovered thirty-seven alive and twelve dead. They’d hoped for more, but a magazine explosion takes the whole ship at once, as anyone who’d seen the Arizona knew firsthand.

Marsh watched the unloading of the survivors from the starboard bridge wing. The train of ambulances headed off to the hospital. For a moment he fantasized about going with them, just to see Glory. Then reality intruded. The chief engineer asked if he could take an hour to on-load some fuel oil before they left. Marsh told him to set it up and then forgot about seeing Glory. He sent for the gunnery officer to see if he could rustle up some more depth charges, too. Fuel they could get from the carrier; depth charges had to come by Higgins boat from the depot.

Just before sailing, a truck arrived and unloaded six aviators who needed a ride out to the Lexington, along with several bags of mail. Killing a Jap sub had been satisfying; getting mail was truly important. Marsh was busy filling out the after-action incident report on Hodson’s sinking and their successful fight with the Jap sub, so he didn’t get to meet the flyboys until the ship was clear of the minefields and on her way west again. One of them was none other than his academy roommate Mick McCarty, known back then as Beast.

Mick still looked like the dashing football star he’d been at Annapolis, tall, handsome, extremely fit, and full to the brim with Irish charm and bullshit. It was a little bit awkward when Marsh saw that he was still wearing lieutenant’s railroad tracks while Marsh, his classmate, was already a lieutenant commander. He shook hands with the other flyers, had an ensign show them where they’d be bunking, and then sat down in the wardroom with Mick. That’s when Marsh noticed Mick’s right hand was encased in a leather glove.

“Damn, Beauty,” Mick said. “I thought you’d be better-looking by now, but you’re uglier than ever. Congrats on those oak leaves, by the way.”

“Thanks, Beast,” Marsh said. “What’s that British Army toast? ‘Here’s to a long and bloody war’? How long you been in Pearl?”

“Two days, two nights, long enough to get a hangover and to see Glory Lewis. Did you know she’s in Pearl?”

Marsh told him about meeting her and having dinner one night. He observed that she hadn’t recovered very well from Tommy’s death in Arizona.

“Man, that was obvious,” Mick said. “I had some high hopes that I might comfort the grieving widow, but she made it pretty damn clear that wasn’t on the table. What a waste of a beautiful woman.”

Mick had been an enthusiastic and apparently successful skirt-chaser the whole time Marsh had known him. Single, engaged, married, widowed, blind, crippled, or crazy, they were all fair game for Mick. Back at the academy, he was forever bragging about his conquests. He had a theory: It took five rejections to get one yes, so all you had to do was talk to six women and you were guaranteed to get some. All except Glory Hawthorne, who’d had a lot of fun teasing Mick to distraction.

“So what are you flying these days?”

“SBD-5s,” Mick said. “Tried for fighters, didn’t have the grades at flight school. But Midway was fun.”

“You were at Midway?”

“I helped get the Kaga,” Mick said. “Best moment of my life. Better than beating Army. Put a thousand-pounder through her flight deck and watched her burn all the way back to Yorktown.”

“Now that’s something to talk about,” Marsh said. “I had to go swimming when Winston went down, although we made up for it a little bit today when we got a Jap sub.”

“There you go,” he said. “Like Halsey says, kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”

“We’re headed to join up with his Big Blue Fleet,” Marsh said. “The scuttlebutt around Pearl is that we’re starting to win this thing.”

“Lemme tell you something, sport,” Mick said, frowning. “The Japs aren’t done by a crock of crocks. Last time I came back to the bird farm my plane was so full of holes that they pushed it over the side once I crawled out. They are the fightingest bastards I’ve ever seen. This is definitely gonna take a while.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Marsh said. “Midway must have been a real kick in the buck teeth, though.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mick said. “We’re gonna win this war. We’re gonna push and push, and then we’ll drive ’em all the way back to the emperor’s bathroom, and then we’ll blast the little bastards into submission — but it won’t be any cakewalk.”

“We found that out today,” Marsh said. “We had that sub dead to rights, and yet he still managed to plant one in Hodson’s magazines. We brought in just over ten percent of the crew, and some of them aren’t going to make it.”

“I was still onboard Yorktown when the Hamman got hit,” Mick said. “She was right alongside, helping Yorktown’s ship’s company fight the fires. One minute she was there, the next she was gone and Yorktown was abandoning ship.”

“Jap torpedoes. We were lucky today.”

“What was it Napoleon said? If I have to choose between a smart general and a lucky one, I’ll take lucky every time?”

For some reason, that made Marsh shiver. He was still seeing those Jap searchlights every time he closed his eyes and thought about Winston. Mick saw his reaction.

“Oh, hell, Beauty,” he said. “Look at it like an aviator: If it’s your time, it’s your time. In the meantime, always empty your guns and don’t worry about shit you can’t change. Bull Halsey is headed for a horseback ride in downtown Tokyo, and all us snuffies’re gonna ride the whirlwind. Me? I’m looking forward to it, long as I can stay out of any more trouble.”

“Yeah,” Marsh said. “I suppose you’re right. So where’ve you been since Yorktown?”

“Would you believe Guadalcanal, and then Darwin?”

“Darwin? What the hell were you doing there?”

“Flying with the Aussies and Dugout Doug MacArthur’s Air Force. That’s what happens when you become an orphan.”

“I don’t understand ‘orphan’—you mean after Yorktown you—”

“Got fired from a big-deck squadron and became a soldier of fortune, so to speak. It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got to get topside,” Marsh told him, “but later — I want to hear it all. You need our doc to take a look at that claw there?”

Mick raised his gloved right hand and looked at it as if for the first time. “This hand?” he said. “Nope. As long as no one officially knows about it, I can keep flying.”