Sentinels of Fire

THREE

The captain called a meeting in the wardroom later that morning after the ship had secured from dawn GQ, with me and the four department heads, the navigation officer, gun boss, chief engineer, and supply officer. I waited until everyone was there and then called the captain to report that we were assembled. I was a bit concerned when the skipper stepped out of his inport cabin and into the wardroom, waving a hand at the officers to resume their seats. Captain Tallmadge normally presented himself as a pillar of resilience — calm, energetic, and exuding that quiet authority of the born leader. This morning he seemed different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was definitely something …

“Okay, gents,” the Captain began. “What happened this morning was pretty awful. No warning, no radar contact, and a ship and her entire crew gone in the blink of an eye. CTF 58 is asking what the hell happened, and frankly, I don’t know what to say. Jimmy — any ideas?”

Jimmy Enright shook his head. The Combat Information Center was under his purview. The CIC contained the radar display consoles, where whatever images the searching radar beams could pick up were displayed as blurry green blobs on a large, circular cathode ray tube. “The ETs tuned the magnetron at twenty-three hundred,” he said. “The scope operators reported a lot less clutter. We held the LCS sharp and clear on the surface search. The midnight-to-eight watch standers thought the radars were better than usual. The Freddies”—fighter direction officers—“thought so, too. Still, nobody saw that thing come in on us.”

“Captain,” Marty Randolph, the gunnery officer, said, “I had the mid-to-eight as the CIC supervisor. We rotated the scope operators every thirty minutes. There was nothing going on. Nothing. The CIC officer and I went over some reporting paperwork, but after zero five hundred everybody tightened up because sunrise was coming. The Freddies were talking to the duty carrier and setting up CAP patrol sectors. The LCS said their search radar was okay, but just okay. They don’t have any electronics techs, and we talked about maybe cross-decking one of our guys to sharpen their gear. But it was routine — no indications that a big raid was coming, no reports of a big launch from Kyushu or Formosa. Nothing.”

“Yet,” the captain said. There were sober nods all around. It hadn’t been Malloy’s mission to protect the LCS; in fact, the opposite had been true. Still.

“Yes, sir,” Marty said. “The bastards got one through on us. Maybe they’re changing their tactics. They know they can’t surprise the big-decks down at the AOA as long as the pickets blow the whistle.” The AOA was the amphibious objective area.

“Jimmy, how tired are your people?” the captain asked.

Jimmy puffed out a long breath. “They’re six on, six off, like everyone else in the crew,” he said finally. “We’ve been up here for just over three weeks, so yes, they’re starting to drag their asses. That’s why we rotate the scope operators every half hour. You can only stare at that green haze for so long before you start to fall asleep. The men know that, and they’re conscientious about it. Somebody sees a guy nod off, we move him.”

“Besides,” I said, “the watch standers know the kamikazes don’t fly at night, so for most of the late night, especially on the midnight-to-eight, everyone’s just trying to stay awake and alert, right? That’s wearying in itself, and fatigue is cumulative.”

The captain raised a hand. “Gents, believe me, I know. I don’t think this was a case of our people being asleep at the switch. The Japs are becoming desperate. They fly to Okinawa and see over a thousand ships and amphibious craft. Fifteen hundred, if we can believe our own newsreels. That’s more ships than they ever had in their navy. Today they probably have maybe a half-dozen ships of any consequence left and no fuel to run them, which is why they now have pilots willing to crash their planes into anything that’s American, haze gray, and under way.”

He stopped for a moment and rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired,” he said. “Everyone’s tired. When we ran with the big-deck carriers and the Japs came, we were one of twenty escorts shooting their asses down. We’ve been in on landings before. We do call-for-fire missions, the Marines or the Army take care of the bloodwork ashore, and then we’re off to the next shitty little island. This distant picket duty is different. We’ve never been the targets before. It’s always been the big boys, the carriers, the battlewagons, but now the Japs have figured out that they have to get by us to even reach the juicy targets.”

“People are scared, too,” Mario Campofino, the chief engineer, said. “It was one thing to be part of a whole fleet, but this…”

“If it’s any comfort,” the captain said, “I’m scared, too. Man’d be a fool not to be scared. But we’re the khaki — we have to set the example. It’s only human to be scared of what might happen, like the LCS disappearing like that. On the other hand, we’re not exactly helpless. We’ve got six five-inch, eight forty-millimeter, and ten twenty-millimeter barrels going for us. Our job as the wardroom is to remind the crew of that and then to do everything possible to keep our people sharp and all those guns loaded and ready to fight back. Okay?”

There were nods all around. We recognized the pep talk for what it was, but I thought it was worth doing. I continuously tried to prop people up as I made my daily rounds, inspecting the messdecks and berthing spaces, and sometimes just talking to the men. They needed reassuring, as I did from time to time. I closeted alone with the captain at least twice daily to talk problems and solutions. I would vent my frustrations with our precarious position up here all alone, and he would tell me that we could handle it. Only lately I’d been wondering: Who reassured him? The answer was pretty simple: No one.

The sound-powered phone under the captain’s end of the table squealed. The captain picked it up and listened, then told it okay. “The morning CAP is up,” he announced. “So now we have some top cover. Go get ’em.”

I followed the captain back into his inport cabin just forward of the wardroom mess. The space measured nine feet wide by fifteen long, growing narrower as one faced the bow. It had its own tiny bathroom, or head, at the forward end, a desk and bureau set at the after end, and two portholes, which were currently bolted shut. There was a fake-leather couch along the inboard wall that converted into a pullout single bed. I sat on the couch; the captain took the armchair in front of his desk and let out a long sigh.

“You feeling okay, sir?” I asked.

The captain shook his head. “Actually, no,” he said. “I’m sick about what happened to that LCS. I keep thinking we could have done something, even though I know we couldn’t. All those people, gone in a flash. And for what? Some Jap pilot dies a ‘glorious’ death, but it makes no goddamned difference at all as to how this mess is going to come out. They know it, too. They have to know it. What is the matter with those people?”

I felt the same way. Sick was a good word for it. I wanted to recite the litany of reasons that there was nothing Malloy could have done, but the captain already knew all that. As to the Japanese, they were simply barbarians.

“What do you want to say to CTF 58?” I prompted, remembering we were on the hook to answer the admiral’s message.

“What I want to say and what I will say are two very different things,” the captain said. “I want to say, send more destroyers. Leave those helpless little gator-freighters at the beach where they belong. Hell, send a battleship or six. What else do those overblown tubs have to do, except carry admirals around in grand style? It’s not like the Japs have anything left worthy of a sixteen-inch salvo.”

Open sarcasm was something new from the captain. In the two months I’d been aboard he’d been Mr. Steady Eddy, the wardroom’s stable element when the rest of the officers started bitching and moaning about how the tin cans were being thrown away up on the picket line while entire squadrons of battleships and aircraft carriers steamed back and forth in grand fleet dispositions, ready to refight the Battle of Midway at a moment’s notice, even though the great bulk of the Jap fleet already littered the bottom of the Pacific.

“I recommend we tell it like it happened, then,” I said. “His message didn’t ask for advice, just the facts as we know them. I can gen up a draft pretty quick.”

The captain waved his acquiescence. He was obviously in a black mood and just wanted me to go do my job. The sound-powered phone set squeaked.

“Captain.” He listened for a moment and then said, “Very well. I’ll come up.”

He hung up and spoke to me again. “Belay the message — there’s a big raid coming in. Radar shows two formations, a big one for Okinawa and a smaller one splitting off and breaking up into pairs.”

Those pairs were headed for the picket line, I thought. Here we go again.

I put away my notebook as the GQ alarm went off. I looked at my watch; it was only nine fifteen. It felt like we’d been through a whole day already. I glanced at the captain as I opened the door to go up to the bridge and CIC. He was still sitting there, staring at absolutely nothing. I closed the door gently, so as not to disturb him, which was a bit silly since the passageway was full of men scrambling to their GQ stations outside the wardroom.

I joined the stream of men thumping up the ladder toward the bridge and my GQ station, the Combat Information Center, which was right behind the bridge. I could hear the engine-order telegraph ringing as the ship increased her speed and the OOD initiated evasive maneuvers. Below I heard the sounds of steel hatches being slammed down and repair parties laying out their firefighting gear. Malloy’s crew was fully trained, so there were no orders being shouted. Everyone knew what to do and where to go, and the ship would be buttoned up in under three minutes, ready for whatever might be headed our way.

The exec’s traditional GQ station was aft, at a place called secondary conn, the theory being that if the bridge command team got wiped out, the exec, second in command, would be able to take over from a station a hundred fifty feet aft. Since the advent of the Combat Information Center, however, most execs took station in Combat, where all the tactical information was concentrated and displayed. Some captains were even starting to fight their ships from Combat, although most clung to the tradition of being on the bridge. Our skipper was one of those, trusting his own eyes over what might or might not be true on a radarscope.

“Combat manned and ready, XO,” LTJG Lanny King, the CIC officer, reported as I stepped into the dark and crowded space. “We have many bogeys, but none headed directly our way.”

“Yet,” I said, speaking out loud what everybody else was thinking. Combat spanned almost the entire width of the upper superstructure. There were two vertical, six-foot-high Plexiglas status boards along the back bulkhead, showing what was called the air picture. The boards had a five-foot-diameter compass rose etched into them, with concentric ten-mile range rings expanding from the center, which marked where we were. Contact information on bogeys detected by radar were passed via sound-powered phones to men standing behind the lighted boards, who then marked the range, bearing, course, speed, and altitude of all air contacts within fifty miles of the ship using yellow grease pencils. Because they stood behind the boards, they’d all had to learn to write backward, so that the officers positioned in front of the boards could interpret what they were seeing.

Down each side of Combat were the radar operators, both air search and surface search, sitting at bulky consoles where the green video displays flickered. The entire space was kept in constant semidarkness to make it easier for the radar operators to see their displays. Standing behind the console operators were the two fighter direction officers. The Freddies were fighter pilots who were being given a break from flight duties and who’d been trained to control other fighters by radio and radar. Each morning, all the destroyers would be assigned a section or even two of CAP: carrier fighter planes sent up from the carriers steaming off Okinawa to destroy as many of the incoming Jap planes as possible before they could reach their bomb-release or suicide-dive points over the American fleet.

I stood in the middle of the space, right next to a lighted table where the surface picture was plotted. The table, called a dead-reckoning tracer or DRT, contained a small light projector underneath its glass top. The projector was slaved to the ship’s gyro, and thus whenever the ship moved, the projector moved with it under the glass, projecting a yellow circle of light with a compass rose etched onto it. That way we saw a true picture of what the ship was doing. Plotters, men standing around the table wearing sound-powered phones, would then plot the positions of surface contacts, both friendly and enemy, onto a very thin sheet of tracing paper taped to the glass top. The result was the so-called surface picture: what we were doing, where our escorting ships were and what they were doing, and where any bad guys were within range of our guns.

The air and surface plots meant that there were lots of men speaking quietly into sound-powered phones, both making and getting reports, but to my ears it was all just a routine hum. After three years of war, my brain had learned to tune out the routine and repetitive reporting and listen instead for the sounds of immediate danger, indicated by words such as “closing fast” or “inbound” or “multiple bogeys,” or that great catchall “oh shit.” Combat was the nerve center of the ship in terms of war-fighting. In addition to the surface and air pictures, the sonar operators had a console in one corner, meaning that all three dimensions of what we might encounter, air, surface, and underwater, were displayed in this one space.

If Combat was the brain, then the gun directors and their associated weapons represented the fist. Malloy had three twin-barreled five-inch gun mounts, all of them controlled by a large analog computer down below the waterline in a space called Main Battery Plot. There were two gun directors, one that looked like a five-inch gun mount without any guns, mounted one level above the bridge, and a second, much smaller one, at the after end of the ship’s superstructure right behind the after stack. The forward director had its own radar, which would feed range and bearing information down to the computer, which in turn would drive the five-inch gun mounts to train and point at the computed future position of incoming targets. The after director was a one-man machine, without a radar, but it could be optically locked on to incoming targets as long as they were very close. It could control the lesser guns, the multibarreled forty- and twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft batteries.

In practice, however, these smaller guns were usually controlled by human pointers and trainers, who concentrated on keeping the stream of projectiles being fired by their guns streaming just ahead of and slightly above an incoming plane. The five-inch could reach out nine miles under director control, but by the time the forties and twenties got into it, the Mark One eyeball was the director of choice. The forties and twenties were for the close-in work, the last ditches of defense. Earlier in the war, Jap bombers would only have to get within a few vertical miles to release their bombs and then turn away. Nowadays, however, the Jap planes were the bombs, so there wasn’t much of a fire-control problem when a kamikaze came, because he came straight at you. It was simply a matter of how much steel-clad high explosive you could put in his way that determined whether or not he arrived in one piece and killed the ship or did a flaming cartwheel into the sea.

“Station Six-Fox reports she’s taking bogeys under fire,” Lanny announced.

“Distance?” I asked. I scanned the plotting boards. Six-Fox was the Waltham, another radar picket ship. She was an older, Fletcher-class destroyer, with five single-barrel five-inch guns.

“Fifteen miles southwest, XO,” Lanny said. He pointed down at the plotting table. “Right here.”

“Our radars are not picking up Six-Fox’s bogeys,” one of the Freddies said. “Our CAP says the Japs’re coming in on the deck this time. Zeros, it looks like.”

Just like this morning, I thought. I picked up my own sound-powered phone handset, switched to the combat action circuit, and called the captain at his station on the bridge. The captain’s talker, Chief Petty Officer Julio Martinez Smith, answered.

“I need the skipper,” I said.

“Um, we thought he was in there with you,” Smith said. Chief Smith was another CPO who worked for me; as chief yeoman, he was the ship’s secretary, or chief administrative petty officer.

Shit, I thought. “Thank you,” I replied, as if it were perfectly normal for the CO not to be at his station during GQ. I hung up and left Combat, going back down the ladder to the wardroom and through it to his inport cabin. The wardroom was set up as the main battle dressing station, with the chief corpsman and his assistant waiting there with all their medical gear spread out on the table. They were surprised to see me in the wardroom at GQ, but I didn’t have time to explain why I was there. I knocked twice on the skipper’s door, opened it, and found the captain the way I’d left him, sitting in front of his desk and staring at nothing. He looked up, obviously startled when I poked my head in.

“Waltham under attack from low-fliers,” I reported.

“They are?” the captain asked. “Go to GQ. They’ll be here next.”

“We are at GQ, sir,” I said. “I’ve been in Combat. I thought you were already out on the bridge.”

The captain appeared to be confused. He shook his head. “Must have fallen asleep,” he said. “Damn! I’ll be right up. How far away is Waltham?”

“Fifteen miles southwest. Our radar doesn’t hold her bogeys.”

The captain shook his head again. “Fifteen miles — there’s no way we can offer mutual support. They’re doing this all wrong, XO. We should be in a loose gaggle, but close enough so that all the pickets can support each other.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir, and we maybe should put that in our message to CTF 58. Right now, though, I’m headed back to Combat.”

“Right, right,” the captain said, getting up. “I’ll be up in two shakes.”

I felt the ship leaning into another turn as the OOD made random course changes, forcing me to grab the handrail as I climbed the ladder. If the Divine Wind was blowing, you did not steer a straight course and make it easy for them. But what was going on with the CO? He had never, ever flaked out like that. As I opened the door into Combat I heard raised voices out on the bridge and then the engine-order telegraph ringing up more speed.

“Bogeys, bogeys, composition two, low and fast, three-five-zero, sixteen thousand yards and closing!” one of the radar operators announced.

“Designate to director fifty-one,” Lanny ordered. I heard the director rumbling around on its roller path overhead while the gunfire-control system radar operators down in Main Battery Plot attempted to find and then lock on to the incoming planes. I wondered if I should go out to the bridge until the captain showed up, but then I heard the captain’s voice on the intercom. “We’re coming to zero eight zero, speed twenty-five to unmask, XO,” he said. “Open fire at five miles.”

“XO, aye,” I responded. That was better, I thought. Much more like it. The guns could shoot a projectile out to eighteen thousand yards, or nine miles, but they were much more effective if we waited until the planes got into five miles, or ten thousand yards.

“XO, Sky One. Director fifty-one is locked on and tracking.”

“All mounts, air action port. Commence firing when they get to ten thousand yards.”

Almost immediately the five-inchers opened up with their familiar double-blam sound as they began hurling fifty-four-pound, five-inch-diameter shells down the bearing. Two of the mounts, fifty-one and fifty-two, were firing shells with mechanical time fuzes, set to explode in front of the approaching aircraft. Mount fifty-three, all the way aft, was shooting some of the new variable-time fragmenting shells. The VT frags were equipped with a miniature radar in the nose that detonated the shell if it detected anything solid coming at it or near it.

“Bearing steady, range eight-oh-double-oh, and still closing.”

Eight thousand yards. Four miles. The guns were blasting away in irregular cadence now, their thumping recoil shaking the superstructure and stirring a light haze of dust out of the overhead cableways. The forties would join in next, but not until the range came down to about two miles, or four thousand yards. The twenties were good for about a mile. The individual gun captains were all experienced hands and would open up as soon as they thought they could do some good.

“Director fifty-one reports splash one bogey,” the JC circuit talker announced.

One down, one to go, I thought. It was hell having to just stand here and wait to see if the guns were going to take care of business. Then the first of the forty-millimeter mounts opened up. They were noisy guns, firing as fast as the loaders could jam four-round clips of shells into their feed slots. One man, the trainer, controlled the direction of fire. A second man, the pointer, on the other side of the mount, controlled the angle of elevation. Both had to lead their targets, making split-second calculations in their heads as to how best to make that stream of white-hot steel heading out over the water intersect with the silvery blob that was coming in right at them.

Suddenly, everyone in Combat felt a shock wave hit the ship, followed by a loud boom.

“Splash, second bogey,” the talker announced. “Director fifty-one says his bomb went off.”

No kidding, I thought. Not that far away, either. Still, we were safe, for the moment.

I felt the ship turning as the captain ordered her brought about so that we would not get too far off our radar picket station. Right now our job was to stay alive, but our mission, ultimately, was to detect any more air raids headed for the fifteen-hundred-ship armada assaulting Okinawa. That meant we had to get back on station. The radar picket stations were designed to have interlocking radar coverage. If one picket wandered too far off station, it would create a hole in the radar screen plan. The Japs could detect where there was radar coverage and, more importantly, where there wasn’t any.

We’re bait, I thought. We’re totally expendable. Jap planes that divert to the picket line don’t attack the invasion forces, so the heavies are glad to see them diverting. I felt more than a little helpless stuck here in Combat. On the other hand, maybe it was better to not see the Jap bomber that was about to burn us all to death.

“Combat, Captain. What’s the raid status?”

I jumped to respond. “Main raid is in a furball with the inner-ring CAP,” I said. “No more bogeys coming for us at the moment. Waltham hasn’t reported in.”

“There’s a helluva big column of black smoke southwest of us,” the captain said. “Bearing two three five. Keep trying to raise her.”

That was where the plotting table last held the Waltham. I turned to ask Lanny if Waltham had an escorting support ship. “Negative, XO,” he reported. “She was by herself.”

I tried to quash the sinking feeling in my stomach. I was more determined than ever to put something in our report to CTF 58 about needing mutual support on the picket line. They were launching a new destroyer every thirty days back in the States. Surely they could find a few more for the most dangerous station in the Navy.

I decided to go out to the bridge. Once the main attack group had done what they could over Okinawa, any stragglers that escaped the hordes of CAP would come back out and try their luck with the pickets. We were looking at a lull of maybe twenty minutes.

The sunlight hurt my eyes when I stepped out onto the bridge. The GQ team made for quite a crowd, what with all the extra phone-talkers and the fact that everyone was wearing bulky gray kapok jackets and steel helmets. The captain was in his chair, sipping on a mug of coffee and sucking down a cigarette. There was a rule about no eating, drinking, or smoking at general quarters, but if the captain wanted coffee and a ciggybutt, he got them. Because the wind was abaft the beam, the air smelled of stack gas, overlaid with the stink of gunpowder from the earlier exertions. The five-inch gun crews were out on deck policing the brass powder cans littering the forecastle. The forty-millimeter loaders were jamming rounds into the clips they used to load the forties. There were contrails at high altitude as the outer CAP fighters searched out whatever bogeys were still out there after the main raid. The lookouts were scanning high and low for the telltale black dots that meant another kamikaze was inbound. I walked over to the captain’s chair.

“How close did they get?” I asked.

“Not very,” the captain said. “I think fifty-three got both of ’em with that new VT frag stuff. You could see the Able-Able common bursts behind the planes as they came in — they’re black, as you know — but then there were grayish bursts ahead of them, and they did the job.”

“Still in short supply,” I said. “I couldn’t get much of it, even on the Big Ben. Maybe next time we go downtown we’ll get enough for all three mounts.” “Downtown” was the term for going off-line and back to the main fleet formation off Okinawa to refuel, reprovision, and rearm from fleet replenishment ships.

The captain raised his binoculars to study that black column of smoke on the southwestern horizon. “Any contact with Waltham?”

“No, sir. Once this raid is over I think we should go over there, see what’s happening.”

“Send our CAP over to take a look,” the captain said. “We can’t leave station.”

“I think it’s time to speak up, sir,” I said. “In our report to CTF 58, I mean. A second destroyer on each station would mean each kamikaze would face twelve five-inch instead of six. Surely they have enough to go around.”

The captain gave a bitter grunt. “They need the extra tin cans to escort the high-value ships, XO. The carriers, the battleships. Go ahead and say that in the message, I don’t care, but them’s the facts of life. Plus, in all fairness, the bulk of the raids go there, not here.”

The bitch-box spoke. “Captain, Combat.”

The captain depressed the talk-switch on the bitch-box. “Go ahead.”

“Stragglers outbound from Okinawa. Inner-ring CAP in pursuit, reporting low-fliers outbound in our general direction.”

The captain gave me a weary look. I understood, nodded, and went back into Combat. A moment later the captain’s voice came over the ship’s general announcing system, the 1MC. Its loudspeakers were placed all over the ship so everyone got the word at the same time. “Heads up, people. This time they’re coming from Okinawa. Five to ten minutes. Search sectors zero niner zero south and west to two seven zero. Low-fliers.”

Back in Combat, I asked the Freddies where our own assigned fighters were.

“Loitering at fifteen thousand feet, but they’ll be bingo-state in about ten minutes.”

Bingo state meant the planes would be down to just enough fuel to get back to their carrier. They’d barely be able to make one intercept on any stragglers from the Okinawa raid, and maybe not even that.

“Reliefs coming out?”

“Not yet, XO. After a big raid like that, they might be late. Especially if the bastards managed to get to a carrier.”

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, I thought. “Okay, send ’em home, but have them go via the Waltham’s last position. I need to know if she’s still with us.”

“Bogeys still inbound,” the radar operator called, “but it looks like they’re headed for Six-Fox and Niner-George.”

“Alert our CAP that they may get some action over Waltham,” I said. Then I called the captain on the bitch-box to tell him what I’d been ordering up. He said he concurred. I felt the ship turning again. The captain was taking no chances with bogeys inbound, even if they were after other picket stations this time. No straight-line steaming on the picket stations. One of the Freddies was trying to get my attention.

“XO, the CAP has a tally on the Waltham. She’s DIW and burning aft. We’re vectoring our guys against that single bogey inbound on her, but it’s gonna be tight — they’re outa fighting gas, and our radar is intermittent on that bastard.”

“How bad is Waltham?”

“Guys said she looks like a surfaced submarine,” the Freddy answered.

My heart sank. I reported on the Waltham’s status to the captain and recommended again that we head southwest to see what we could do.

“We’ll have to get permission to leave station,” the captain said. “Any signs of a second big raid yet?”

“Negative, and our CAP has only enough gas to make one pass at the bogey headed for Waltham. If they get into a chase, we’ll have no CAP until the next launch cycle. No replacement CAP for either station as of yet. The only active bogeys are outbound.”

“All right,” he said. “Do this. Send CTF 58 a voice message. Make it a UNODIR. Tell them Waltham needs help, we’re headed over there, our CAP are bingo, and we hold no bogeys in our sector.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said. I knew the captain really wanted to head southwest and save Waltham if he could, but the rules about leaving station were pretty stringent. Hence the UNODIR, Navy radio shorthand for “unless otherwise directed, I am going to do such and such.” That put the burden of abandoning Waltham on the admiral commanding the picket line and his staffies down in the amphibious objective area. They might well come right back and say no, but usually they’d let a CO sending a UNODIR message take his chances. If he left station and a big raid got through undetected, woe betide him.

I felt the ship turning again and heard the bells for more speed as I drafted a short UNODIR voice message to Commander Task Force 58, our big boss down off Okinawa. I asked one of the Freddies to relay it via the fighter planes that were about to go back to their carrier. If we waited to send it through the regular naval communications channels, it might be two days before the message would even get to CTF 58.

This was another reason there ought to be two tin cans on each radar picket station, I thought. One could go help another ship without leaving a hole in the radar screen.

I scanned the vertical status boards. Waltham was indicated on the surface summary plot now as being thirteen miles west-southwest. The air summary plot showed a dotted line originating near Okinawa and headed for Waltham, but the line had stopped, meaning Malloy’s radar could no longer see what was probably a kamikaze headed for Waltham’s station.

He’s on the deck, I thought, and nobody can raise Waltham. I was about to go out to the bridge to talk to the captain when the ship made a violent turn to port and the forties and twenties opened up. Before I could gather my wits I heard an airplane engine roar close over the ship, followed by a tremendous crash of steel against steel overhead. I ducked reflexively, closing my eyes and trying to make myself small, then realized how ridiculous I must look. I wasn’t even hurt. I opened my eyes. Every other man in Combat was down on the deck.

There was a distant boom off to starboard, and then the guns quit firing. All of Combat was filled with a white haze of dust, and the watch standers were looking at each other as if checking to see if they were still alive. Several men were getting up off the deck with embarrassed expressions that probably matched mine.

“My radar is down,” the air-search console operator announced in a high-pitched voice.

“Surface search is down, too,” a second operator reported.

We were tactically blind, which meant that Combat was temporarily out of business. I went through the forward door, past the charthouse, and out onto the bridge. To starboard I saw a cloud of dirty smoke and steam hanging over the water, drifting aft, maybe five hundred yards away. The officer of the deck eased the ship into a wider turn; everyone else on the bridge with binoculars was anxiously staring out at the horizon. The captain, whose face was a little white, was standing in the bridge wing door.

“Never saw him,” he said. “He was so close the five-inch couldn’t even fire. Thank God the AA gun crews did see him.”

“Bridge, Sigs!” came over the bitch-box. The signalman sounded scared out of his wits.

“Bridge, aye,” the captain replied.

“Captain, we got a bomb up here. A big fucking bomb. It’s wedged between the forward stack and the starboard flag bag.”

“Clear the signal bridge,” the captain ordered, “and yell up to Sky One to get out of there. XO, go flush everyone out of Combat.”

If the signalman had accurately described the bomb’s location, it was resting on top of the CIC compartment’s back bulkhead. The Japs had been slinging five-hundred-pounders on their Divine Wind planes. If it went off now, it would flatten CIC and probably the pilothouse, too. I stepped through the front door of CIC, where everyone was staring at me with wide, frightened eyes. Apparently they had all heard the signalman’s call on the bitch-box.

“Everyone out,” I said, trying to pretend I was in total control of myself, as if it was no big deal that there was a five-hundred-pound bomb coiled up perhaps twenty feet from us. “Freddies, set up your tactical circuit down in Radio Central; everyone else muster on the messdecks. CIC Watch Officer, go to secondary conn. Come up on the 1JV circuit until the OOD relieves you.”

The watch standers, officers and enlisted, all tried not to crowd up at the front door, but I could feel their fear as they hurried past me and headed down below. I really, really, had wanted to lead that charge but knew I couldn’t do that. Once the space had been evacuated, I went back out the bridge to report to the captain. He had sent the entire bridge watch team except for one terrified-looking phone-talker back to the secondary conning station, remaining alone on the bridge. He’d ordered Main Battery Plot to evacuate the AA gun stations nestled on either side of the forward stack, then told Damage Control Central to send an investigative team to the signal bridge. Then he got on the 1MC.

“Attention all hands,” he said. “This is the captain speaking. We have an unexploded bomb wedged into the superstructure on the signal bridge. We are going to have to figure out how to defuse it and get it over the side. I want all hands to keep away from the base of the forward stack until we figure out how to do that. In the meantime, all hands on topside stations keep your eyes peeled. We never saw that last bogey until he was right on us. Heads-up ball for the forties on that one. Well done. That is all.”

Marty Randolph, the gun boss, arrived down in the pilothouse from his station up above in the forward five-inch gun director.

“Did you see it?” I asked him.

Marty licked his lips. “Most certainly did,” he said, his voice strained. “Stared at that damned thing for ten seconds, waiting for my first personal meeting with Jesus. It’s big, XO. Really big. Wedged sideways. I didn’t linger to see if it’s ticking or whatever they do.”

The captain grinned. “Linger,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Okay. What do we know about how aircraft bombs are fuzed?”

Marty said he’d had a class on bomb fuzing back in gunnery school. “Usually there’s a wire, hooked to the plane’s fuselage or wing, with the other end hooked to the arming switch on the bomb. They drop it, that wire pulls the arming switch. Then they have little propellers on the nose and on the tail. The propellers are driven by the slipstream as the bomb falls. It has to turn a certain number of revolutions before the arming circuit is completed, which keeps the bomber safe from a preemie.”

“So when he saw he was gonna miss with the plane, he dropped the bomb, but it didn’t have time to arm,” the captain said.

“I sure as hell hope so,” the gun boss said. “’Cause if that bastard’s armed, there’s nothing we can do about getting it over the side.”

Four chief petty officers in full battle gear and oxygen breathing rigs came out onto the pilothouse. “Repair Two investigators,” their leader, Chief Dougherty, announced. “Request permission to go up on the signal bridge.”

“What if I say no, Boats?” the captain asked.

“Well then, God bless you, Cap’n,” he replied. The other chiefs grinned. Everyone was trying to be really cool, calm, and collected. I wondered if the chiefs were as scared as I was. Even the captain’s little joke had seemed a bit forced.

“Let me go up first,” Marty said. “I know what to look for. Those little props are the key to this. I’m assuming they’re jammed stopped right now. We can’t have them move for any reason.” He turned to one of the engineering chiefs from Repair Two. “Brainard, you guys bring any monkey shit with you?”

Two chiefs dug into their battle dress and produced what looked like oversized toothpaste tubes. The tubes contained a sealant goo, popularly known throughout the navy as monkey shit, which was used to seal everything from small steam leaks to water seals on boats or leaking bridge windows. When exposed to air it hardened into a plasterlike compound.

“I’ll locate the fuzing props and cover each one up with a handful of monkey shit, which should mean they can’t ever move again.”

“Then what?” the captain asked.

“We’ll wing it from there, Captain,” Marty said. “See if we can find out what kind of bomb it is and get some advice from the bomb-disposal guys on one of the flattops on how to safe it out.”

The ship began to turn again. “We still going to see about Waltham?” I asked.

The captain shook his head. He looked over at the gyro repeater next to his chair. “Talker, tell secondary conn to steer back east. Tell ’em to execute a broad weave, base speed fifteen knots.” He turned to me. “No, we have to deal with this problem first, I think. No point in going alongside Waltham and then blowing up.”

The talker pretended he hadn’t heard that comment about blowing up. He bobbed his head and relayed the message to the officer of the deck, who was standing out in the breeze at the secondary conning station behind the after stack, along with the helmsman and lee helmsman. The ship began another turn.

“Okay, Marty, go on up,” the captain said. “Take Dougherty with you. Talk to me on the bitch-box when you figure it out. XO, go below and see if you can set up some kind of CIC on the messdecks, and remind me later that we need to design a secondary CIC, just like we have a secondary conning station.”

I went down to the crew’s messing space, where the CIC team had assembled. They’d found plug-in points for their sound-powered phone circuits and were relying on Radio Central to cover the air-control and raid-reporting radio links. We were, however, blind without access to our radar screens and, of course, useless to the main formation as a sentinel. When I sat down at one of the tables, Lanny King handed me a message form.

“This is the answer to the UNODIR,” he said. “Short, but not so sweet.”

The message, which had come from our own squadron commander, Commodore Van Arnhem, based down in the fleet anchorage, was indeed short. Remain on station. Your mission is radar picket. Waltham is our problem.

“Well, screw ’em if they can’t take a joke,” I said quietly. “By the time anybody gets to Waltham she’ll be sleeping with Davy Jones. Maybe if we told them our radars are down they’d let us go over there. Any word from topside on the bomb?”

“Negative. How are we gonna get rid of that thing? Ten guys go pick it up and throw it over the side?”

“You volunteering to lead that working party?”

“Um, no, sir, I am not.”

“We’ll have to figure out a way that doesn’t involve a bunch of people hugging it,” I said. “We’ll wait for word from Bosun Dougherty. I’ll be right back.”

I went back up the bridge and handed the message form to the captain, who grunted when he read it. “Blast to follow, no doubt,” he muttered. The tone of the message was clear enough. I also knew that the admiral down off Okinawa would sit down when he had a moment and direct our squadron commander to write a personal-for message directly to the captain regarding his UNODIR. Such hate mail was called a blast. The opposite was called an atta-boy. The rule in the Navy was that one blast undid the working value of ten thousand atta-boys at fitness report time. Oh, well.

The gun boss dropped down the ladder from the signal bridge, his hands covered in grayish goo. “The fuzing props were intact but jammed,” he announced. “Now they’re really jammed. Bomb case is completely intact. It’s definitely a 250 kg general-purpose bomb. Not smoking, not ticking, or humming, but a nasty piece of work, and it’s embedded just aft of the flag bags and the base of the foremast.”

“Got any good news?” the captain asked.

“Yes, sir, it didn’t go off while I was tickling its fuze.”

“And how are we going to get it out of there and over the side?”

“Sea anchor,” a gruff voice responded as Chief Dougherty came onto the bridge. He was a large, loud man and a force to be reckoned with both in the chief’s mess and about the decks.

“Tell me more, Boats,” the captain said.

“We take a mooring line and wrap that bastard six ways from Sunday. Then we pass the mooring line outboard of all superstructure down the port side, and make the bitter end to a big-ass sea anchor. Pitch that over the side, put the helm down to port, and kick her in the ass. The sea anchor will fill and grab and pull that pogue right off the ship.”

The captain looked at me. I shrugged. Sounded like it would work.

“How will you rig the sea anchor?” the captain asked.

“Take a twenty-man life raft, weigh down one long side with five-inch rounds, sew some canvas across the net bottom, and set a yoke which we can shackle to the bitter end of the mooring line.”

The captain nodded his approval. “I concur,” he said. “Make it so. Marty, go see which side will be better, and whether or not we can remove any interference before we try this. I’d prefer not to pull the mast over if we can help it.”

“Should we clear this with the boss?” I asked. “Maybe get some explosive ordnance disposal advice before we go yanking that thing around?”

“If we were sitting down there in the AOA next to a flattop, I’d say yes, call the EOD. But right now we’re up here all by ourselves in Injun Country, deaf, dumb, and blind, with too many hours of daylight left for the Japs to pay us another visit. Besides, the last time I conversed with CTF 58, he hurt my feelings. Get on with it. I mean, what could go wrong, hunh?”

There were wary grins all around. Everybody standing there, right down to the captain’s phone-talker, knew exactly what could go wrong. Dougherty, however, waved away the danger. “Piece’a cake. We’ll be set in forty-five minutes.”

“Thirty would be wonderful, Boats. I have one suggestion. That bomb should have two hangar fittings on it somewhere, where they hang it on the plane’s belly? Instead of cocooning it in six-inch manila, find those points, rig a wire bridle, and make your line to the bridle, not the bomb.”

“Aye, sir. I’ll get on it, then.”

“Where are we in the great scheme of the Okinawa invasion?” the captain asked after the gun boss and the chief bosun’s mate left the bridge. We could both hear director fifty-one training slowly in a circle above us under the control of operators down in Main Battery Plot. The gunfire-control radar was the only radar left operational on the ship right now, and I wasn’t quite sure why. It wasn’t much of a search radar, but it was better than nothing. I hoped. I told the skipper what we had cobbled together.

“We’re up on the HF raid-reporting circuit, and we’re guarding the air-control VHF circuits via some creative patching from Radio Central to the messdecks, but basically, we’re out of the game until we get radars back up and Combat remanned. Marty’s got the director going in radar search on the horizon, but that’s…” I shrugged again. It wasn’t much, as we both knew, but at least they might detect a low-flier.

“Still nothing from Waltham?”

“No, sir.” Once the midday haze set in, we couldn’t even see that smoke column anymore. “She may be talking to aircraft on VHF, but she’s not up on the main raid-reporting circuit.”

The captain yawned, covered his mouth, and then yawned again. “Right,” he said. “Put a request in for some EOD assistance over the normal comms channel. That way we can say we did ask, but we really can’t wait. Let me know when they have the sea anchor ready. I’m going to my cabin.”

“But, sir, the sea cabin’s awfully close to where that bomb is…?”

“My inport cabin,” the captain said. “Call me when you’re ready to pull that thing off us.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I replied. I was surprised by the captain’s decision to lay below. We were about as vulnerable to another surprise attack as we could be, what with no search radars manned and no close-by support, and our situation wouldn’t get any better until darkness fell. We had a live bomb parked on the 03 level, which, if it went off, would probably flatten most of the forward superstructure, including the captain’s inport cabin. I asked him if he wanted me to stay on the bridge.

He shook his head, got up from his chair, and went forward to look out the bridge windows. The chief bosun was up on the forecastle, where he had the entire first division rousting out one of the 350-foot-long mooring lines, while a second crew was modifying one of the floatation rafts with a wire bridle.

Hell, I thought. It might work. We’d have to get all the topside people to muster at one end of the ship or the other before we let that sea anchor take a strain. I saw the lone phone-talker standing in one corner of the pilothouse, as far from where the bomb was as he could get. I told him to unplug his sound-powered phones and go set up outside the captain’s inport cabin. If anyone called him on the 1JV circuit with information for the skipper, he was to knock on the captain’s door and give him the report.

Then I went below to get some coffee and maybe a sandwich in the wardroom. It was beyond strange to leave the bridge totally unattended in the middle of the hottest war zone in the Pacific, but there was nothing anyone could do from there until that bomb went over the side.

Thirty minutes later, the phone squeaked in the wardroom and I picked it up.

“XO, this is Marty. We’re rigged and ready to go. Request permission to attach the bridle to the bomb’s hangar hooks.”

“Where’s the sea anchor?”

“Port quarter, with the mooring line faked outboard of everything down the port side. Chief Dougherty says to begin a slow turn to port once we drop it over the side, and then there’s maybe six fathoms of slack before it’ll tighten up.”

“You’re steering from secondary conn?”

“Yes, sir. Engine orders to Main Control via the 1JV. Everything’s working.”

“Lemme get the okay from the captain and I’ll let you know.”

“XO — he okay?”

My eyebrows went up. “What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t seem himself. Seems withdrawn, distracted, maybe. I don’t know, but the other department heads have noticed it, too.”

“I think he’s just very tired, Marty. Remember he’s the oldest guy on board, and command out here takes it out of a man, you know? Get your people ready, and get everybody away from the midships area, including inside the superstructure. That includes Radio Central.”

“Yes, sir.”

I found the phone-talker parked in the passageway outside the captain’s cabin and told him to disconnect his phones and go aft. He was gone in twenty seconds. I knocked on the captain’s door and then stepped in. I was surprised to find the lights off and the captain stretched out on his sofa-bunk, shoes off, lying on his back. He opened his eyes when I stepped into the cabin.

“Whatcha got?” he asked.

“They’re ready to try the sea anchor. I came to get your permission and to recommend you go to secondary conn, away from anything going wrong.”

The captain smiled. “Like I said before, what could possibly go wrong with this Rube Goldberg operation?” he asked. “You think Marty has a handle on this situation?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” I said. “I still wanted to get your permission to proceed and give you time to get topside.”

“You have my permission, and I’m going to stay right here.”

“You are?”

“Yup. You’ve been XO here now, what, two months?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you don’t need me out there on deck. I’d be just another spectator, now that we’ve had to clear the bridge. I want you to run this show. Don’t call me for every step along the way: use your best judgment and get the thing done. Have your damage control parties ready to go if that thing cooks off. Otherwise, get shut of it, reman all battle stations, and let’s get back up into the radar screen. Call me when it’s over.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir,” I said, “but I’d feel a whole lot better if you were on deck watching over my shoulder.”

“You’re in training for command, Connie,” he replied. “I’d feel better if the commodore were here, watching over my shoulder, but he isn’t. That’s a part of command you need to get used to. Now, turn to.”

Surprised, I nodded, tried to think of something to say, and then backed out of the cabin. I already felt different, even though I knew full well I still had the captain to fall back on. The officer with the most experience. The owner of the whole shebang when things went off the track. Like that UNODIR message: I had wholeheartedly supported doing that, but when the shit-o-gram came back from our squad dog, as commodores were called when they weren’t listening, it wouldn’t be addressed to me. I wondered if I was being a little bit disloyal. I started aft.

Even after two months, I was still getting used to the scale of a destroyer command. I’d come to Malloy from an Essex-class, thirty-eight-thousand-ton, big-deck carrier known throughout the fleet as the Big Ben. Malloy was my first destroyer, and the transition from thirty-eight thousand to twenty-two hundred tons had been initially unsettling. Between the ship’s company and the air group, there had been nearly three thousand men on board the Franklin. Malloy’s full wartime complement was one-tenth of that. In a carrier, you might know most everybody in your department. In a destroyer, you knew everybody, and everybody knew you. I’d never felt conspicuous in Franklin; here I felt like I was onstage almost all the time. It had been a big change.

Back on the fantail I found the bosun’s crew ready to deploy the homemade sea anchor. There were plenty of hands to help, as all the forward topside gun stations had been cleared out in case that bomb went off. Jimmy Enright, the navigation officer, walked over.

I asked him if we’d heard back from the fleet EOD people. He pulled me aside, away from eavesdropping ears.

“Negative, sir. And based on what I’m seeing on the Fox broadcast, they’ve got bigger problems than one unexploded bomb down there on Okinawa. That last big raid? That was over a hundred aircraft, and they put three big-decks out of action, hit a battleship, sank an escort carrier and three transports. Plus, the Army’s apparently getting its ass handed to it on the south end of the island.”

“So we are really on our own up here, I guess,” I said.

Jimmy shrugged. “Always have been, XO. Here’s Marty.”

The gun boss walked back to where we were standing. “I’ve cleared all the topside people out forward, and we’re ready to take tension on the bomb.”

“How much damage is this going to do when it pulls out?” I asked. I realized then that I was about to make a decision without ever having seen how the bomb was wedged into the ship’s superstructure.

“Front half is buried into the deck behind the signal bridge, so the only way to pull it is to twist it out of its hole, warp it between the mast and the forward stack, under the port flag bag, and hopefully over the side without hitting the main deck.”

“Hopefully.”

“Best we can do, XO. Can’t risk getting a damage control party close enough to dislodge it outta there. This way, if it goes, it eats metal, not people.”

“Right,” I said. Should I go up there, I wondered, and take a look for myself? Marty was an experienced department head. The captain was giving me the chance to make the big decisions here, so if I went up there it would indicate that I didn’t quite trust Marty’s judgment. I decided to proceed.

“Warn the engineers, too. If that thing goes off, it might happen at the waterline, and that could open Number One Fire Room to the sea.”

“Already done, XO,” Marty said. “We’re as ready as we’re gonna be. I’m not thrilled with this lashup, but we can’t have another kami come in strafing and set that thing off where it is.”

“Very well,” I said. “Proceed, then.”

Marty hesitated, as if he were looking around for the captain. I just stood there, which was when Marty realized that the captain was not going to come out and watch. He nodded.

I had the word passed over the 1MC that we were about to pull that bomb off the forward superstructure and all hands should stay well clear of the forward stack. I saw Marty giving the go-ahead to Bosun Dougherty. The chief looked over at me, and I nodded back at him. Then he started giving orders, and the working party picked up the unwieldy canvas-covered, wood-framed life raft, carried it to the port side, stabilized it for a few seconds on the lifelines, and then heaved it over the side. I felt the ship’s rudder bite in and the fantail of the ship begin to swing out and away from the bobbing raft. The gun crews behind the after stack were crouched behind their splinter shields to get some metal between them and where the bomb was wedged, invisible from the back half of the ship.

I watched from the very after part of the port quarter, so I could see when that manila mooring line began to tighten up. Right now it was still lying slack on the water, but the raft was turning over as its bridle pulled half of it below the surface, and then the whole thing submerged suddenly, perpendicular to the mooring line, and filled like a kite coming into the wind. The mooring line submerged with it, and then all the slack came out of it with a whipping noise as the raft resisted being pulled against the sea. A moment later there was a tearing sound as steel gave way forward, causing everyone who heard it to wince. There were two loud bangs, a moment of silence, and then more metal being deformed violently, followed by a splash on the port side.

Marty, who’d been watching from the portside forty-millimeter guntub, gave a thumbs-up. The bomb was gone. Suddenly the life raft, no longer under tension, popped up about a hundred yards from the stern of the ship. I was wondering if that bomb was still attached to it when there came a heavy thump, like a depth charge, followed by a foaming mass of smoke and bubbles. Marty came down to the fantail as the crew cheered. I was wiping the sweat off my face as he arrived.

“Good job, Guns,” I said.

“The monkey shit came off the tail propeller just as the bomb went over the side,” he announced. “Thought we were gonna get a show after all.”

We both looked back at the discolored patch of water behind us, where dead fish were glinting in the afternoon sun. I wondered if the captain had felt that thump.

“Okay,” I said. “Have the OOD pass the word to reman all GQ stations, and let’s get back to business before more Japs show up.”

Then I went forward to inspect the area where the bomb had been. When I got there I saw a problem. A big problem. The departing bomb had torn away the entire bottom section of the air-search radar waveguide as it lurched over the side. In fact, that was probably why the radars had gone down after it hit. We were blind until we could get a new waveguide, and that would require getting to a destroyer tender. Not only that, it appeared that the buckler plates supporting the mast had been ripped off as well. I went over to one of the wire stays supporting the mast and grabbed it with my bare hand. As the ship rolled gently in the sea, I could feel the stay tighten and then loosen slightly. Was that normal play, or were the stays the only thing holding up the mast now?

I could hear the CIC team remanning their stations below me. Time to get a report off to CTF 58, but first I needed to report in to the captain. I did my normal entry routine, two knocks, then stepped through. The inport cabin was fully dark, and the captain was nothing more than a long lump under the bedcovers, snoring softly. Because of all the electronics equipment, the CIC was air-conditioned, and the ship’s architects had kindly attached a small, four-inch vent pipe to bleed some of that precious cold air from Combat’s air-conditioning system down into the inport cabin, which was now almost cold. Ordinarily, I would have awakened the CO and told him what was going on and that we needed to get down to one of the repair ships at Kerama Retto, an island adjacent to the main island of Okinawa Shima.

On the other hand, the captain had told me to take care of business. The fact that he was sound asleep at two thirty in the afternoon while the ship was still very much vulnerable to kamikaze attack said it all. The man was simply exhausted.

I withdrew from the cabin and closed the door softly behind me. Then I went up to Combat. There I dictated a message to the navigation officer, describing the bomb strike and reporting that the mast had been compromised and that our air-search radar, our reason for even being here, was out of business. I then requested permission — no more UNODIRS! — to proceed to Kerama Retto for urgent repairs. I sent it to Admiral Chase, who was Commander Task Force 58, with a copy-to our squad dog, Commodore Van Arnhem, as well as to the Service Squadron Ten commodore at Kerama Retto so he would have a heads-up on what we needed. It was entirely possible we’d be sent on to Leyte in the Philippines if none of the repair ships anchored at Kerama Retto had a waveguide. That wasn’t an altogether unpleasant prospect. Anything but this. I told Jimmy to get the ship back to our assigned station in anticipation of a relief ship showing up sometime in the next twenty-four hours.

“Still nothing from Waltham?” I asked.

“Negative, sir, and we still don’t have any CAP overhead. That big strike this morning made a shambles of the flight schedules, apparently. Pray that the Japs shot their wad for today.”

“Pray away,” I said, “but keep your people on their toes. Brief the gun crews that we have no radar. All those guys — that’s a lot of eyes. It’ll be better when the sun goes down, but the skipper says it’s only a matter of time before those bastards start flying at night.”

Jimmy seemed surprised. “But how could they land back at — oh.”

I smiled. It was not like they expected to fly home and land.

Jimmy shook his head. “I’ve lost track, XO. Are we still at GQ?”

“No, go back to port and starboard. If we stay at GQ all day everybody will be a zombie. Get some people into their racks, and tell the galley — no, I’ll take care of that.”

Jimmy nodded, then surprised me. “Where’s the skipper?” he asked.

“In his cabin, writing up the reports.”

He gave me a look that said Sure he is, but he didn’t say it. I fake-punched him on the shoulder and left Combat. Jimmie Enright was good people and no dummy.

I went out onto the bridge, which was now fully remanned. The ship was already headed back east. Our assigned radar picket station was about eight miles distant. The OOD, Lanny King, had taken the initiative to start us back toward our station, but he was headed straight for that point in the sea. I cautioned him about straight courses. “There’s no big hurry, so go fifteen knots, but zigzag while you do it. The last two kamis got in on us undetected, and that’s with the radars working, okay?”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir, I forgot.”

“Everybody’s tired, Lanny. Keep asking yourself: What else should I be doing? And get word to Lieutenant Fontana to come find me.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”