Sentinels of Fire

TEN

It was one in the morning, and still no Japs. No nothing. The radars were displaying only light green scope snow and our own CAP, prowling their stations at eighteen thousand feet. I got tired of looking at them. USS Daniels was east of us about twelve miles; USS Westfall was east of Daniels, some twenty-five miles away. I told Jimmy I was going up to Sky One to get some fresh air. As I walked out I saw Jimmy reaching for a sound-powered phone handset, probably to alert Marty that the skipper was headed his way. I smiled in the darkness. As a junior officer I’d done the same thing, many times. The sound-powered phone network was like a set of jungle drums, never entirely silent until the shooting started, then all business. Otherwise, the captain of a ship couldn’t go ten feet without some talker muttering a heads-up into his mouthpiece. In a way, it was rather comforting.

I found Marty up on the director level sitting on his favorite sound-powered phone storage box and smoking a cigarette. I realized I was probably one of a very few nonsmokers on the ship, and there were times when tobacco had its appeal. Marty started to stand up as I came on deck, but I waved him back down. His JC talker was awake this time and sitting on his own box. We nodded at each other. The crew of director fifty-one was perched on top of the director, their feet dangling over its steel sides, escaping the hot confines of all the machinery inside. It was almost totally dark outside because of an overcast layer, and I’d had to wait a few minutes to fully night-adapt my eyes.

“Where are they, Marty?” I asked.

He shook his head. “This is scarier than when we see them coming,” he said.

“You got some star shell ready?”

“Yes, sir, mount fifty-three is loaded with star. Fifty-two with VT frag. Fifty-one…”

“Is gone.”

“Yes, sir. Any more news from Oki?”

“The American commanding general was killed this afternoon by an artillery barrage,” I said. “A Marine general is in charge now until the Green Machine can get another general in.”

“Maybe the Marines can get this thing done, then,” he said.

“The Army is nobody’s second team on this one, Marty,” I said. “Every grunt out there in the weeds has a Jap by the throat. I swear, reading the sitreps, this whole fight is getting personal.”

“Certainly seems that way when the kamis come here,” he observed. “What’s the big picture, Captain?”

I blew out a long breath and stared out over the water. For some reason I remembered a fragment out of Virgil, something about a wine dark sea. Nope. This one was just dark, and fresh out of witchy Phoenician queens unraveling a silken thread to delineate the extent of the kingdom’s principal city. The little flotilla of Landing Craft Support ships that were supposed to be out there hadn’t shown up yet.

“This campaign,” I said, “for this island and its airfields, is all about what’s coming next: the final assault on the Japanese home islands.” I was aware of the enlisted men in range of my voice: the director crew up on their steel box, the JC talker, the signalmen who’d gathered in the darkness behind us just because the captain was there.

“Our commodore thinks that the entire nation of Japan, all of its people, and there are millions, will turn into kamikazes once the Allies actually attack the sacred homeland. We’re going to need a miracle to pull that one off.”

Marty nodded in the darkness. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so it went quiet up there on the 03 level. Then Marty surprised me.

“Sir,” he said, “where you from?”

“The Big Ben,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

“No, sir, before that. Way before that. Where are you from, if it’s okay to ask?”

I walked over to the port side of the director platform and called down to the bridge watch for some coffee. The bridge messenger popped up the ladder a moment later with a ceramic messdecks mug. Two sugars, too. Every watch station in the ship with a coffeepot apparently had the word: two sugars, and a clean mug, if possible.

I went back to where Marty was perched on his box and leaned against the forward bulkhead. There was a light breeze at my back as Malloy cut through a calm sea at 15 knots, still weaving like a drunk every few minutes.

“I was a State Department kid,” I said. “My parents were both Foreign Service officers, and I don’t believe we ever did have a hometown. I was born in Washington, D.C., and we lived all over the world as I was growing up. I went to a variety of schools as a kid — local Catholic academies in South America, British comprehensives in London, a French lycée, a German Gymnasium for my junior year of what we call high school, you name it. Finished up back in D.C. My father had some connections, which is how I managed to get an appointment to the Naval Academy in 1931. So, where am I from? Nowhere and everywhere, I guess.”

“That’s very interesting, sir,” Marty said.

I then told my little audience about my naval career up to the point where I’d been gun boss in Big Ben. Marty asked if I had a family, and I told him no, that my fiancée had handed me a Dear John letter early in the war once she realized it was going to be a long haul. The white-hats listening in the dark knew all about those. Now, having been in the Navy for only ten years, I was already a three-striper and in command instead of having a wife and family. Before the war that achievement often took twice as long, meaning that promotion beyond lieutenant commander required someone ahead of you to retire or die. That, in turn, meant there weren’t many officers in the professional career pipe leading to command when war broke out in the Pacific. Wartime attrition over the past three years thinned it out even more; I was a prime example. That said, I still halfway expected that we’d get a message one day informing us that a Commander So-and-So was inbound to take command. On the other hand, we were on the Okinawa picket line, and as the department heads had parodied the week before, maybe not. The commodore had told me that Navy casualties, both on the picket line and out in the main fleet formations, were keeping just about even with Army casualties ashore on Okinawa. That was a very new and disturbing statistic, and the kamikaze tactic deployed on a large scale accounted for damned near all of it.

“Sky One, Combat. Captain up there?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“We have an intermittent surface contact, bearing three three zero, range twelve miles. Quality poor, comes and goes.”

Twelve miles was just over the visible horizon, so this was probably one of those radar “ghosts” the operators talked about, small splotches of video on the screen that sometimes painted bright and then disappeared, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. The last intermittent radar contact had been a Jap sub periscope.

“Tell the bridge to increase speed to twenty knots and widen the weave, in case that’s a sub.”

“The range is twelve miles, sir,” Combat said, meaning way out of torpedo range.

“And that could be the radar mast on an I-boat,” I replied. “He might not stay at twelve miles, and he’s free to maneuver. We’re stuck here on station.”

“Aye, aye, sir. We’ll watch it.”

I felt the breeze increase as we came up to 20 knots from 15. The twists and turns of the broad weave became more pronounced. I really wished that we’d had the ability to search passively for electronic signals, like the Japs apparently did. I’d love to have known for sure if there was a Jap radar shining out there. It had taken them three years to appreciate the importance of electronics in this war, but now they seemed to be catching up fast.

“Sky One, Combat. Contact has disappeared.”

“Right, I’ll be down.”

I went back down the ladder to the level of the pilothouse and then went into Combat. Jimmy Enright was there, along with the CIC officer, Lanny King. Both of them were staring at the surface-search radar display. There were no contacts, other than Daniels out to the east of us. Then there was one, but not in the same place as the first, apparently. We all saw it at the same time.

“What’s that? I asked.

“New skunk,” the scope operator announced. “Much better video, too. He’s out there, though, thirteen miles. Last one was twelve miles, but over here.” He pointed at a different mark on the scope, where he’d marked the original contact using yellow grease pencil. This contact was almost due north of us.

“Put director fifty-one on that bearing,” I ordered. “See if they can pick it up, too, and report to the air-raid net that we’re getting unknown surface contacts.”

Lanny jumped to carry out my orders. I knew that twelve miles — twenty-one thousand yards — was way out of our gun range, but the fire-control radar had a beam the size of a pencil lead. If it could gain contact, that would prove that his little blip of video was real and not some radar anomaly being generated by the much larger surface-search radar beam.

I could hear the various phone-talkers muttering quietly into their mouthpieces. Something’s going on. Heads up. The Word, getting around the whole ship, and more efficiently than if we’d held quarters and read them the news.

I went out to the bridge and slipped into my chair. The bosun’s mate of the watch made the ritual announcement. “Captain’s on the bridge.”

We waited while we tried to figure out what was out there. The five-inch director couldn’t find anything. Then Jimmy Enright had an idea. “Bridge, Combat. Request permission to vector our section of night-fighters over that contact.”

“Can their radar see something on the surface?”

“No, sir, but we can fly them right on top. They might be able to see what’s out there.”

“Give it a shot,” I said, but I wasn’t too hopeful. There should have been a big moon up, but there was enough cloud cover to blot out the usual ambient light over the sea. On the other hand, if there was one of those monster Jap battleships out there, the planes might see that. After the terrifying surprise they achieved at Leyte Gulf, we’d learned to expect anything and also to respect them.

I thought about more coffee, but my stomach said no. Five minutes later Combat reported that the two radar-equipped Corsairs were descending for a low pass. Combat still held that piece of low-grade video out there, still at twelve miles, moving very slowly to the east. I considered firing some five-inch star shells at maximum range, but with two fighters out there on the line of fire, that could cause an accident.

Then the junior officer of the deck, Ensign Lang, jumped sideways to get his hands on the centerline alidade, a small telescopic eyepiece mounted over the dimly lighted gyro repeater. I was about to ask him what he was doing when I saw it, too: a flare of red light way out on the horizon, right on the bearing of our mystery contact. I lifted my binoculars to see it, but it had already gone out.

“Bearing, zero zero five,” Ensign Lang called out.

“Bridge, Combat. The fighters are reporting a rocket, headed our way.”

I’d been looking right over the bow at that red flare. We hadn’t encountered rockets before, but if it was headed our way, we needed to turn hard to present the gun battery.

“Officer of the Deck, come right with full rudder to zero niner zero,” I ordered. “Flank speed twenty-seven knots.”

The officer of the deck gave the orders as we all stared out to port, looking for anything. Director fifty-one’s radar array was nutating, making tiny little movements of the beam, up, right, down, left, up … searching frantically for something, anything, headed our way.

“Bridge, Combat. We have a—”

Before Jimmy could finish his sentence, something roared overhead from port to starboard, making a sound like steam escaping from a lifted safety valve, and thundered off into the night to the south, away from us. No one on the bridge saw anything, but everybody heard it and ducked just the same. Then the bitch-box erupted again.

“Bridge, Combat. Crowder Two-Niner reports a second rocket. One of the pilots says it’s a submarine, a big submarine, launching these things. They’re gonna try to strafe it.”

“Captain has the conn,” I shouted. “All back full, emergency!”

The lee helmsman jumped to it, pulling the two arms of the engine-order telegraph straight to back full from ahead flank, then all the way forward, and then all the way to back full. The snipes got the message and opened the astern throttles at the same time as they closed the ahead throttles. The ship began to tremble as the turbines and their massive reduction gears were dragged down to stop in one direction and then began to spin in the opposite direction. I now knew what we were facing, incredible as it seemed: A Jap submarine was firing baka rocket planes at us.

There was nothing the guns could do. From twelve miles out, a baka could be on us in just over sixty seconds. It was a piloted rocket, though. Surely they had been taught to lead their targets, which would usually be moving ahead at 27 knots during an engagement. I was counting on that, and I hoped that by backing down hard, we’d make the pilot of this 600 mph flying bomb miss ahead, especially if he was having trouble seeing us. We also weren’t helping him see us by firing every gun we could at him, because it would have been pointless.

Seconds later, another roar of escaping steam flashed over us, in front of us, actually, and then came a tremendous explosion in the water off to starboard as the baka went in and its warhead torched off. By now Malloy was gathering speed in the astern direction, kicking big sheets of white spray over the fantail. The gun crews must be thinking the bridge had gone nuts. So what? It had worked — but how were these things seeing us? Then I realized what the answer was: They’d been fired by the submarine down the bearing of our own radars. The baka pilot didn’t have to see us: He simply had to fly his rocket-propelled bomb in whatever direction his mother ship had fired him.

“All stop,” I ordered. “All ahead standard. Make turns for fifteen knots.”

The forced-draft blowers wound down and then immediately back up as the snipes reversed the throttles once again.

“Bridge, Combat. Crowder Two-Niner reports another launch flare. They’re going in for a strafing run, but they can’t see the sea surface.”

“Break ’em off, then,” I ordered. “They’re kidding themselves.”

A third baka. A piloted rocket plane, going so fast our gun system couldn’t even compute a solution even if it did manage to lock on. Some young pilot, vintage three weeks of training, had his hands on two primitive controls: direction and elevation. He was coming at us at 10 miles per minute from only twelve miles away. There wasn’t any way we could fire at him, but maybe we could blind him.

“Sky One, commence firing star on bearing zero one zero. Rapid continuous. Burst at five thousand yards.”

Marty must have been thinking the same thing, because mount fifty-three way back on the stern opened immediately, blasting out successive two-gun salvos as fast as its crew could load them. Five thousand yards was short range for star shells, which meant their parachutes would probably be ripped right off when the bursting charge let go. Star shells were meant to be fired high and long, with the projectile arcing over and then slanting down as it blew off its end-cap, deployed the chute, and then ignited its white-phosphorous load. With luck the star would burn for almost thirty seconds as it descended, by which time the next shell was bursting above it. My hope was that the pilot, with night-adapted vision, would be blinded by all the pyrotechnics exploding above him as he came screaming toward us. The downside was that we would be perfectly illuminated by our own star shells.

The first four stars burst just as I thought they would, streaming out into the darkness trailing white-phosphorous sparks and a burning chute in the direction of the incoming baka. Half the crew was trying to see this thing when we heard that frightful sound of the rocket engine blasting right in front of the bridge windows, so close that its right wing struck the port corner of our pilothouse and tore out every porthole from left to right in a whirlwind of flying glass and ruptured steel. Moments later, a big boom from way off on the starboard side indicated that the baka had gone into the sea.

“Bridge, Combat. One of the Crowders hit the water. His wingman is reporting that they were trying to strafe that sub. He doesn’t know if they hit him or not. We’ve lost the surface contact.”

“Captain, aye,” I said mechanically. “Do we need to initiate search and rescue?”

“Sir, the other pilot said his wingman flew it right into the water at three hundred knots. Not survivable.”

Great, I thought. Now we’d lost a CAP as well as the front of Malloy’s bridge. If the sub had submerged, it was probably over, until the next sub, of course. The Japs had figured out a way to stuff three bakas into some kind of watertight hangar on a submarine’s deck, surface, launch them, and then dive the hell out of there. This would make for an interesting intel report.

I got down out of my chair, brushing shards of glass and a lapful of metal filings off my trou. There was a fresh breeze blowing in through all the missing portholes. The front bulkhead looked like an open zipper. Air-conditioning on the bridge, at last.

Would this never end, I wondered. I looked at my watch. It was only 0145, not that the arrival of daylight would mean safety, but at least we could see the sonsabitches. Invisible rocket-bombs coming out of the dark at near the speed of sound was getting on my nerves.

“Broad weave, OOD,” I said and then went into Combat to help with the reporting. I wasn’t sleepy anymore.

Two hours later, it happened again. This one was scarier than the first three, happening almost in slow motion as I was sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge. The red flare on the distant dark horizon as some kind of booster lifted a baka into the night, headed straight for us. Everyone on the bridge was trying frantically to spot the incoming suicider. I wanted to get up out of my chair, to grab binoculars and stare into the night sky, to detect anything our gunners could lock onto, but I couldn’t move. Then came the escaping steam sound, rising in intensity as the baka began its dive, actually seeming to slow down as it came in front of the pilothouse windows, from left to right, its right wing slashing a long cut across the front of the bridge, its pilot looking right at me as he went past, bucktoothed, ferociously slanting eyes, just like in all the war bond posters, grinning like a death’s head …

I sat up in the sea-cabin bunk with a strangled noise in my throat, covered with sweat. My insides churned, and I barely made it to the steel commode in time. As I flushed the pot I wondered if anyone outside in the pilothouse had heard me in there. I’d never had nightmares before, not even bad dreams. This one had been a doozy, and I felt sick for the next fifteen minutes, staying on the commode just in case. I looked at my hands in the dim red light from the pelorus mounted above my fold-down bunk. “Now who has shaking hands,” I muttered. A vision of Pudge Tallmadge holding up his trembling hands flashed through my mind. He had a sympathetic smile on his face.

What are you scared of, I asked myself: the Japs trying to kill you or making a mistake in front of the crew and everybody?

Captain Tallmadge had warned me, hadn’t he: I am afraid, he’d said. I didn’t use to do this, shake like this. Forget your career and your promotions and all that stuff: up here it’s life or death, and more often than not, death. Whole destroyers folding in half and going down like a diving sea bird, both ends flashing high and then sliding out of sight with half their crew still inside, wondering what was happening until they heard main bulkheads collapsing and the sea roaring in like Niagara. A destroyer moored safely to a tender suddenly giving out what sounded a lot like a ship-sized death rattle and then sinking right out of sight, with mooring lines popping like gunshots everywhere and crewmen frantically spilling out of her like so many drowning bugs, unaware of the depth charges at the back end counting the pounds per inch of sea pressure before …

“Stop it, for Chrissakes,” I said out loud. You can’t do this. Think about your crew, the nearly three hundred high school graduates of last year’s class. You don’t think their guts aren’t churning when they’re out there, on deck, face-to-face with these vampire aircraft coming straight at them, on purpose? Just stop it.

I got up off the commode and washed up. I checked the time: 0410. I’d gotten two hours, which was more than a lot of people in the ship. I picked up the phone and called the OOD, who was only about ten feet away.

“I’m up, and I’m going below for a shower and clean clothes. Tell the Japs to stand down for the next half hour.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Will do.”

“And get ahold of Mooky; see if he can make fat-pills for breakfast.”

“Absolutely, sir.”