Sentinels of Fire

TWO

“XO.”

“Yes.”

“Morning stars, sir.”

“What about ’em?”

The quartermaster of the watch chuckled. “Nautical twilight in fifteen, sir,” he said. “You want Mister Enright to take it?”

“I’d love that, McCarthy,” I said. “But…”

“Yes, sir. Anyway, morning stars.”

“Got it,” I said. “On my way. Two sugars, please.”

“Ready and waiting, XO.”

“Captain up?”

“No, sir. Log says he went to his sea cabin at oh one thirty.”

I grunted. The captain was a heavy smoker who used all that nicotine to stay up as late as possible. Once he went down, however, he went down. It was one of my jobs to wake him up, which always took some doing. “On my way,” I said.

I got up, splashed some water on my face, and put on my uniform khakis. I stared at my reflection in the sink mirror and groaned at what I saw. The fifty-year-old face looking back at me was really only thirty-five. I’d aged fifteen years since we’d gone on the radar picket line. We all had. Even the ensigns were looking old. I went looking for my sea boots in all the clutter in my tiny “stateroom.”

The ship was quiet. Reveille was forty-five minutes away. The forced-draft blowers in Number Two Fire Room whined contentedly. The executive officer’s stateroom was in after-officers country just forward of and almost on top of number 2B boiler, as the hot steel deck readily attested. Dressed, I stepped across the passageway to the officers’ head to pump bilges. There was no time for a shower, and besides, one of our evaporators was on the fritz, so the ship was on water-hours. Rubbing my eyes, I collected my kapok life jacket and helmet and then headed topside to the bridge to take morning stars.

It was still dark when I stepped out onto the bridge, but I could make out the silhouettes of the bridge-watch team. I stopped for a moment to adjust my eyes and listen for any sign of problems. In happier times, the half hour before sunrise was always one of the best things about being at sea. Even in lousy weather, the first sight of the sea in the morning twilight is always a delight. Couple that with the smells of breakfast wafting up from the galley and that first cup of Navy coffee, and all the small terrors of steaming a blacked-out warship at night diminish with each passing moment of rising sunlight out on the eastern horizon.

Not now, though, and not here, some fifty miles north of the Okinawa amphibious objective area. We were aware of an altogether different rising sun up here on the radar picket line, one that came out of the sky in the form of a bomb-laden Jap fighter or bomber, intent on killing us all. I could literally feel the tension, because everyone up on the bridge knew that twilight on the Okinawa radar picket line was no longer anyone’s friend. People were scared, and with good reason.

The lee helmsman saw me and announced “XO’s on the bridge” to the rest of the watch standers. The officer of the deck, Lieutenant (junior grade) Tom Smithy, greeted me, as Quartermaster Second Class McCarthy handed me a ceramic mug of coffee.

“Morning, XO,” Smithy said. “Steaming as before on Okinawa picket station four-Able. LCS 1022 abeam to port, three thousand yards. Comms good. No contacts, air or surface. Gun crews sleeping on station. Visibility unlimited, seas flat, wind out of the northwest at five to seven knots. Barometer is steady at thirty-point-oh-two inches. GQ at zero six forty-five, sunrise at seven fifteen.”

“Very well,” I said. “Sounds like another great Navy day. I’ll be shooting stars on the port bridge wing. Remind me to get the captain up just before GQ.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Smithy said and turned back to resume his scan of the horizon. It was nautical twilight, which meant that the horizon would begin to assume some definition as the ambient light slowly grew to the point where it was no longer dark but not quite daylight. It was the kind of light that was good for using a sextant — and also for a kamikaze pilot who had chosen to come in on the deck right before dawn, and that was why the ship would go to general quarters thirty minutes before the actual sunrise took place.

I went out to the portside bridge wing, where McCarthy had set up the sextant, my notebook and chronometer, and a list of celestial azimuths. Normally there would have been a makee-learn ensign on deck, but with the exhausting watch-and-watch routine of the picket stations, six hours on, six off, the captain had decided to suspend navigation training. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know where we were — forty-nine miles north-northwest of Okinawa — but it was a cardinal rule of the wartime destroyer force that the navigation officer shot stars whenever visibility allowed. Since Jimmy Enright was also the ship’s de facto operations officer, I’d begun doing the celestial navigation a couple times a week to spell him. At least once a day, at either morning or evening nautical twilight, I shot stars and fixed the ship’s position with an accuracy that not even radar could match. It was an ancient art, and I took pleasure in practicing it.

“Who’s up?” I asked.

“Aldebaran, Sirius, Jupiter, Polaris, Vega, and Venus.”

“That’ll do it. I’ll start with the stars, then the fat boy; I’ll end with Venus, lower quadrant.”

“Aye, sir,” McCarthy said as he consulted his Rude starfinder. “Vega should be three three seven, fifty-six point four degrees.”

We worked through the list, with me capturing each celestial body in my sextant telescope and then bringing the image down to the increasingly visible horizon, rocking my sextant from side to side to make the twinkling image just touch the horizon, then calling out a mark. The quartermaster recorded the elevation angle and precise time of each observation. Once we had the observations, McCarthy relieved me of the sextant and headed back into the charthouse behind the bridge to set up the plotting sheets.

I stayed out on the port bridge wing to finish my coffee and watch the dawn spread its soft light over a metallic gray sea. I could just make out the silhouette of the LCS off to port. She was out there as an additional surface-search radar asset and AA gun platform. One tried to forget the unofficial nickname for the Landing Craft Support ships stationed with the picket destroyers: “pallbearer,” since they often got to pick up the pieces after a kamikaze got through and struck one of the tin cans.

I glanced at my watch: twenty minutes to morning general quarters stations. Gotta go get the skipper up, I thought.

Something twitched down in my subconscious mind. Something I’d forgotten to do? A sound? I’d turned to step inside the pilothouse when I felt and then heard something that hooked my full attention: the rising scream of an airplane engine winding out to redline RPM. Before I could quite grasp what was happening, and awake now like never before in my life, I felt a compression wave as something flashed directly over the ship’s mast. Time stood still for an agonizing second as a silvery blur appeared between the Malloy and that LCS. Then the OOD slammed the red GQ alarm handle sideways, initiating the bong-bong-bong battle stations alarm throughout the sleeping ship. Feeling suddenly naked, I grabbed for my steel helmet even as the LCS exploded in a bright orange fireball with a gut-thumping roar.

“God dammit!” I swore, fumbling with my helmet.

One hundred fifty sailors and three officers on the LCS disappeared in a sickening tattoo of booming explosions as all her topside ammo cooked off. A moment later, a boiling cloud of fiery black smoke, dust, and steam produced a dreadful rain of metal and human debris all around where the LCS had been a few moments before. It was clear that she was gone, what was left of her shattered hull already tumbling down into the depths of the Pacific.

The OOD kicked the ship’s speed up to 25 knots and executed a sharp turn to starboard. He knew the rules: Move. Move quickly and boldly when the kamikazes came. If you never saw the first one, you weren’t going to see the second one, either, who already might be in his 400 mph dive, setting up on a slow-moving American destroyer waking up to yet another homicidal day on the Okinawa radar picket line.

The bridge was filling with the GQ crew. Extra phone-talkers hurried in. The first lieutenant took the deck, while Tom Smithy assumed junior officer of the deck and the conn. Bleary-eyed sailors were squirming into kapok life jackets and fastening their steel helmet straps, while gawking at the deathly pall two miles away. The forward guns trained out to starboard as the director officer atop the bridge searched for the next kamikaze.

“Captain’s on the bridge,” a sailor announced, and I finally stepped off the bridge wing and into the controlled chaos in the pilothouse.

“I take it one got through,” the captain said, tying his own life jacket straps across his chest. He was already wearing his helmet, with the letters CO stenciled in black across the front.

“Felt it before I saw or heard it,” I said. “A blur, then a blast. No radar warning; nothing. I’ll go amidships and see about getting some life rafts ready.”

“All right,” the captain said, climbing into his chair and reaching for his binoculars. “We’ll take evasive maneuvers for a few minutes, then pass through the datum.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“XO?” he said. “We’re not going to stop.”

“All her ammo seemed to go off at one time,” I said, still staring at that collapsing plume two miles away. An entire ship — a small one, granted, but still. A dirty cloud of greasy gray smoke was all that was left. “Not likely anybody’s still alive over there.”

“We’ll go see,” the captain said. “People survive the damnedest things, but right now we have to get ready for the rest of the bastards.”

Jimmy called out another course change and slowed the ship’s speed to 20 knots. I headed aft to the boat deck, where the lifeboat crew would be making ready to lower the ship’s whaleboat, Malloy’s primary motorized lifeboat, to the rail. I knew we wouldn’t be putting a manned boat into the water until we knew there were no more kamikazes around. Instead we’d drive through the area where the LCS had exploded and kick two inflatable life rafts over the side. If there were any survivors swimming out there, they’d see the rafts. Stopping the Malloy, however, was out of the question, as I’d learned that day with the Corsair pilot. This Jap had managed to evade our air-search radar and two surface-search radars, most likely by coming in right on the deck. The surface radars should have detected something, which told me that there might be an inversion layer hanging over the ocean, masking incoming contacts. I looked again at the cloud of dirty smoke flattening out over the sea. It was going to be another very long day if this disaster was any indication.

When I reached the boat deck, the lifeboat crew already had the motor whaleboat swung out and ready to launch. I still marveled at the crew’s level of training: I’d been aboard for not quite two months now, and everyone in Malloy seemed to know his job and when to do it. The chief bosun’s mate had come up from Repair Two and was supervising the rigging of two of the ship’s canvas-and-wood rafts. Once the captain brought the ship through the area where the LCS had gone down, the deck apes would dump the rafts over the side, but only if the lookouts reported heads in the water. The LCS had been larger than an amphibious landing craft but smaller than a full-sized LST, with a crew of three officers and 150 men. She’d had four rocket launchers, a single five-inch gun, two quad forty-millimeter AA guns, two twenty-millimeter AA guns, and all the ammunition to service that ordnance stowed in deck lockers for quick access. Their original mission had been to provide quick-response naval gunfire support for landings once the big gunships, the heavy cruisers and battleships, had detached from the actual landing operation. They could stay close inshore and deal with all the pop-up targets as the Marines dug the enemy out of their bunkers and caves. When the Japs began to pick off the radar picket destroyers, however, the task force commander had ordered LCSs out to the picket line to augment the line’s already slim antiaircraft defenses.

Now that it was full daylight, every man on a topside battle station was scanning the skies for more Japs. There was a layer of thin clouds masking the morning sunlight. I could hear the five-inch gun director training around on its barbette above the bridge, as the director officer examined the indistinct horizon with his optics while down below, in Main Battery Plot, radar operators stared anxiously at their A-scopes, watching for the telltale spike in the shimmering green video display that would indicate a target. Above the gun director, twenty feet higher on the foremast, the bedspring air-search radar antenna made a groaning noise as it, too, scanned the airspace around our assigned station. When the Japs came in a big raid, headed for Okinawa itself or the fleet formations, the radar picket line would usually get plenty of warning. It was the one- and two-plane raids, the ones who were after the radar picket ships themselves, that were much harder to see. I had often wondered why they didn’t station the individual picket ships closer together for mutual support.

“What the hell, XO,” the chief bosun said, a pained expression on his face as we stared out at the smoky mess that once been an LCS. The bosun was a profane, cigar-chomping, bulky, black-haired Irishman named Dougherty, ruddy faced from years on the forecastles of more ships than anyone else in the crew. Per tradition, he was called Boats.

“They’ve learned,” I said, grabbing a stanchion to support myself as the ship made a tight turn. The bosun seemed to be planted into the steel deck as if he had a gyro somewhere in that big paunch. “Big raids mean lots of metal in the sky. We can see ’em and sic the CAP on ’em. Now they’re coming out in onesies and twosies, down on the deck for the last twenty miles. They disappear in the radar sea-return.”

“And he went for the LCS?”

“I don’t know that, Chief,” I said. The boat crews were back on their gun stations, everyone staring skyward, looking for anything. “He damn near clipped our mast. Maybe overshot, went for the LCS as a consolation prize.”

“Christ on a crutch,” the bosun said. “They never knew what hit them.”

“Nor would we,” I said. “Part of the charm of the picket line these days.”

“We oughta have fifty goddamned destroyers up here,” the chief said. “Ain’t like there’s a shortage.”

“Apparently, there is. The landings at Okinawa are bogged down. They’ve got one destroyer for every half-mile sector of beach on that miserable island. You know the Japs: they’re gonna fight to the death, every last one of ’em.”

We caught a whiff of sulfurous gun smoke as Malloy closed in on the last known position of the LCS. The bulk of the smoke cloud had been blown downwind, but the stink of sudden death and diesel oil remained. The sea was littered with sodden lumps of insulation, shattered wooden crates, some clothes, bobbing steel drums, empty and not-so-empty kapok life jackets, and one lonely life raft that was sadly devoid of survivors.

“Look sharp there,” the bosun bellowed to all the men within earshot. “Heads — we’re looking for heads. Faces. Anybody swimming, any poor sumbitch raising a hand.”

After a minute of steaming through the area, it was plain to see that there were no survivors. The Japs often slung a large, contact-fuzed bomb under a kamikaze’s belly in order to amplify the catastrophe of a five-thousand-pound fighter plane striking a ship at 300 miles per hour. Space demons from Mars, I thought. They’re not human.

“Chief!” a man shouted, pointing down into the water on the port side. Fifty feet away there was what looked like a head lolling above a kapok jacket collar. The ship’s wake had disturbed the water, and a shoulder appeared briefly. As we looked, a dark gray fin cut through the water and bumped the kapok, which is when we saw that that was all there was — a head and a shoulder. A moment later another shark snagged the remains and pulled them down. A wave of frustrated cursing swept through the guntubs. Sharks were every sailor’s nightmare.

I felt the ship accelerating and decided to go back up to the bridge. I signaled the bosun to restow the motor whaleboat. There was nothing more to be done here. A mournful silence settled over the ship. There but for the grace of God …