Sentinels of Fire (2 page)

I nodded. I'd heard much the same scuttlebutt on board the Big Ben. The carriers were the queen bees of the fleet and often carried flag officers, which meant that officers stationed aboard a carrier knew more about what was happening in the big picture than, say, officers in a destroyer. Since I was the new guy here, however, it wouldn't do for me to come across as some know-it-all, even if I was to be the second in command.

“Can you tell me about the department heads, Captain?”

“Absolutely, and we're lucky to have four good ones. The whole wardroom is actually way above average. Let's see. The senior one is Lieutenant Jimmy Enright, the navigation officer, sometimes called the ops officer. UCSD grad, headed for law school but came in after Midway. Did one tour on a light cruiser, then showed up for the precommissioning detail for
Malloy.
He's bright, a thinker, loves his electronic toys and knows more about them than some of his people. Married, two little kids. Ask him a complicated question and he'll think about it first, then come up with an answer you didn't expect.

“The gun boss is Marty Randolph. Southerner, another lieutenant, academy, 'forty-two, commissioned right after Pearl, pretends to be a good ol' boy but actually stood tenth in his class. Championship diver back at the boat school. Loves his guns and his gunners, and they worship him. Also loves to fight Japs, and his men know that and respond accordingly. He can absorb a tactical situation and split out the main battery on the fly. Not married, but I'm told there is a Southern belle somewhere back home, dutifully pining away amongst the magnolias.

“Chief engineer is Mario Campofino, not an engineer by trade or nature but a very demanding and precise young officer. OCS out of NYU, did one tour in the
Indianapolis
as a makee-learn and then, like you, fleeted up to main propulsion assistant, which, on a heavy cruiser, says a lot. Again, he was part of the precomm detail for
Malloy.
Has a great rapport with his chiefs, whom he trusts, as well he should. But when it comes to running the main engineering plant, he's by the book, all the way. Calm, cool, never loses his temper, unlike the gun boss. Confirmed bachelor, or so he says.

“Finally, Peter Fontana, lieutenant jay-gee, the supply officer. I forget his college, some Podunk U in the Midwest. Supply School, of course, then OCS. Everything tends to amaze Peter, so he's very careful. Going to be an accountant one day if we survive this fight. He's a natural born bean counter. Didn't understand what his real mission was when he first came aboard, but he does now, and he's become really good at it. He oversees the handiest collection of midnight-requisition artists I've ever seen. We go alongside a tender and they will rob that ship blind of all the stuff we're not authorized to have. When they get caught, Peter puts on such a good act of ninety-day-wonder innocence that it is truly amazing to behold. The tender's people know we're guilty, but they're so impressed with this amazingly gullible LTJG Fontana act that they forget to come get their stuff back.”

“The goat locker?”

“The chiefs' mess is strong. There are a couple of chiefs whom
I
would not have promoted, but that's just your fleet average situation.
Your
right-hand man is going to be the chief master at arms, Chief Wallace Lamont, a Scottish-descent bantam rooster with the unlikely nickname of Pinky. Red hair, ruddy face, faintly pink eyes. Even so, he's one of those guys you recognize immediately as someone you don't want to piss off. He's half the size of most of the crew, and yet no one crosses that man under any circumstances. Your predecessor depended on him absolutely. He told me more than once that nothing goes on in this ship that Lamont doesn't already know about, and if it's a problem, he's usually already taken care of it.”

“Sounds damned useful,” I said. “How do I play him?”

The captain sat back in his chair with an amused look. He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he surprised me. “What do you think your job is here, as XO?”

“Run the ship the way you want it run so that you look good.”

He chuckled. “Who told you that?”

“Commander Randy Marshal, XO in the
Franklin.
Unfortunately, I understand he died in the big fire.”

“Okay,” he said. “That's the traditional approach, but these days, out here, it bears no relation to reality, Connie, especially on a destroyer. Let me tell you what's real. In the old days, four-stripers got command by staying healthy long enough to outlive their seniors while not getting caught consorting with goats. That took some time, which meant many skippers were graybeards by the time the war started. I was on one of the cruisers sunk at Savo. Our captain was nearly fifty-five years old. We were utterly ignorant of what we should have been doing that night. The Japs had trained and trained for night engagements with torpedoes, star shells, and some of their cruisers carried up to
twelve
eight-inch guns. We, on the other hand, were past masters at shining brightwork, responding to bugle calls, holystoning teak decks, rigging a taut quarterdeck awning, and steaming in precise formation on any given sunny day. When we got sent to Guadalcanal we stayed up all night, waiting for something to happen. After three nights of that, we were all zombies, and that's when the Japs came. They tore us to pieces. They sailed by one of our picket destroyers at a range of less than two miles, but everyone on that ship apparently was sound asleep—at their GQ stations.

“We lost
Quincy, Vincennes, Astoria,
and the Aussie flagship,
Canberra,
all shot to pieces in two quick engagements. I was on
Quincy,
where I learned about swimming at night when the sea itself was on fire. Then I transferred to
Juneau,
where I learned about the Jap Long Lance torpedo. I'm alive today because I was blown over the side when she got hit the second time and the magazines went. Spent the night and the next thirty-six hours in the waters off Savo.”

His face reflected some of the horror of those engagements and the trauma he'd experienced. I didn't know what to say. My war had been on carriers. Even when we had been attacked, it had never seemed quite so personal as what the captain was describing.

“Your main job here as XO is to run the ship on a day-to-day basis to the standards I demand. You will conduct daily messing and berthing inspections so that the ship stays clean. You will supervise all the paperwork, the training of the officers, chiefs, and enlisted. You will execute the standard Navy daily routine. You will see to it that someone, including you from time to time, takes stars once a day to confirm our position, even if we can
see
the nearest island. You and Lamont will police the lower decks for minor infractions of naval discipline. You will supervise the department heads in the administration of their departments. You will draft fitness reports for all the officers in the wardroom and ensure the department heads get enlisted evals in on time. And you will spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with all the my-wife-she, my-dog-it personnel problems that three hundred twenty enlisted people can conjure up even when we're eight thousand miles away from said wives and dogs. And that's just your day job.

“In addition to all that, you will be absorbing the
art
of command. The ship, you, and I will face tactical decisions. I'll make the actual decisions and give the orders. You will also make decisions, but you will formulate mental orders. The ship will execute
my
decisions, and you'll get to see how that comes out, and whether or not
your
mental decisions might have been better—or worse. I must see to your education for eventual command, because that's the new Navy. We don't get command anymore by outliving our contemporaries. Nowadays, we get command because commanding officers who live to tell the tale evaluate us and then make recommendations. Admittedly, sometimes we get command because people die in combat and we're the only ones available, but the powers that be are determined to get the system a lot more professional than it was before Pearl Harbor.”

I still didn't know what to say, but it all sounded pretty good to me. Even better, the captain was taking the time to explain all this. I nodded.

“Now this is important,” he continued, as if what he'd been saying earlier had not been important. “I am afraid. Every day that we press closer to Japan, and they react in their ungodly, barbaric fashion, I am even more afraid. I must not show that, because the crew of this ship, most of whom are under the age of twenty-one, are already scared shitless each time one of those kamis comes out of the sky to kill us all. I have to pretend that I'm shrugging it all off, but when I come down here after an air raid and sit on the steel throne, crapping my insides out, all the pretense goes right out of it. I'm telling you this because you're going to experience it.
Malloy
isn't a forty-five-thousand-ton aircraft carrier, surrounded by two dozen or more heavily armed escorts. When and if, but probably when, they get through and hit us, actually hit us, a lot of people around you are going to die.
You
might die. The ship might die.”

He held up his two hands. The shaking was clearly visible now. “I didn't use to do this,” he said. “In times past, I was more afraid of screwing up as a brand-new skipper than of anything the Japs could throw at us. Not anymore, XO. I'm sorry if I'm scaring you, but you need to understand this: From here on out, you need to put aside any thought about your career or your professional success as an XO. Where we're going, those things mean nothing. Your job is to get up each morning pretending that you're the owner here, of
everything
that's going on in this ship, and to act accordingly. Between us, we'll try to stay alive.”

I stared down at the deck and took a deep breath.

“Well?” he asked.

“What could possibly go wrong?” I asked.

He grinned. “There you go,” he said approvingly. “Welcome aboard. Now, go meet the department heads. I apologize again that you're not getting a proper turnover, but it really doesn't matter.
Malloy
's a good ship and a happy ship. They'll call you XO from day one. That's about all it takes to assume the job. Get each department head to give you a complete tour of his spaces—
Malloy
is no cruiser or carrier, so it doesn't take that long. Get your battle gear together and know where it is at all times. These home-island Japs don't keep gentlemen's business hours.”

At that moment, the ship's announcing system broke in to announce that a raid was inbound, many bogeys, and that all hands needed to man their battle stations.
Bong, bong, bong, bong.

“Like I was saying,” the captain said, reaching for his helmet. I reached for mine, but it wasn't there. Lesson number one.

*   *   *

The next week passed quickly. The ship went to GQ twice daily as a matter of routine, just before sunrise and just before sunset, favorite times for suiciders to make an appearance. I'd moved into the previous XO's stateroom, a tiny cabin with room for a desk, a bunk, and a chair. The only thing I didn't have was a roommate, unlike all the rest of the officers except, of course, the captain. My predecessor had been a heavy smoker, so I asked to have the cabin repainted, turning it from sticky amber to white and smelling now of fresh floor wax instead of stale tobacco smoke. I spent a lot of time touring the ship with the department heads as they showed me their assigned spaces and introduced me to their people. I had lunch in the chiefs' mess, where we mostly talked about morale and the problems of housekeeping endemic to housing, feeding, and cleaning the 320 enlisted and twenty officers embarked, in a ship that was not quite four hundred feet long.

I met Chief Petty Officer Wallace Lamont early on. He was the ship's chief master at arms, which was a collateral duty. His professional CPO rating was gunner's mate. When he found out I'd had two tours in gunnery departments, he positively beamed. Strangely enough, he probably spent more time as the CMAA than as a gunner's mate chief petty officer.
Malloy
had two gunner's mate chiefs, and the junior one, Chief Mabry, took care of the day-to-day duties of being Second Division's CPO. Lamont spent his time adjudicating minor discipline problems, accompanying me on my daily inspections, and generally walking the decks throughout the day and sometimes the night, keeping an experienced thumb on the pulse of the crew.

Chief Lamont turned out to be just the right-hand man the captain had described. Short, feisty, and abrupt, he spoke with a trace of a Scottish burr, an affectation I think he'd developed after making chief eight years ago, to add to his personal mystique. He had come up through the ranks as a gunner's mate and, of course, still was one. The fact that I had been gunnery officer in two previous ships somewhat offset the fact that
Malloy
was my first destroyer. Destroyermen were a proud if a somewhat inbred bunch, and I knew there'd been some comment on the fact that I'd only served in much bigger ships, and yet here I was, sent in as XO. Everyone immediately assumed I had pull somewhere.

I didn't, but there had been some strings pulled to get me into the Naval Academy, courtesy of my parents. Navy people talked of their kids as Navy brats; I'd been a State Department brat. I didn't find out what my folks had really been doing all those years in a seemingly endless stream of embassies until their retirement party in 'thirty-eight. My father, now deceased after his lungs succumbed to years of heavy smoking, never seemed to get promoted. He was always an assistant attaché of some kind—cultural, financial, agricultural—something vague and not very important. My mother worked as a senior secretary in each of the postings, sometimes as the ambassador's personal secretary or executive assistant. I was finishing up my senior year at Western High School in Washington on the day they were given their
despedida,
as it was called, from the U.S. Foreign Service, and I got the day off from school. Instead of going to the State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom as I expected, we went to the Main Navy Building on B Street, not too far from the White House. There I found out that my parents had been working for the Office of Naval Intelligence the whole time I'd been growing up and, even more surprising, that my dear, sweet mother was the actual intelligence officer, and my father, the guy who never seemed to get promoted, her cover and controller within all those embassies. The director himself awarded each of them a medal for distinguished careers and reminded them that they must never speak about that service, and then we all partook of coffee and cake.