Sentinels of Fire (21 page)

I explained what I had in mind.

“Hell, I can hit him at
twelve
thousand yards,” he said. “VT frag, once we lock him up, and he's meat.”

“We're going out dark and quiet,” I said. “No radar until we think we're pretty close. He'll run like hell once he detects our air search.”

“Won't matter,” Guns said. “Get me within four miles of that bastard, and we'll take him down.” Then he changed the subject. “We never got to try the star shells,” he said.

“No time,” I replied. “Keep them up in the mounts, though. You'll get your chance. Now, if we go back down to the tender, and they can hoist a gun mount off another, more heavily damaged ship, can we remount one?”

“Hell, yes, XO,” Marty said.

“How about battery alignment? Roller-path compensation?”

Marty had forgotten that I'd been doing five-inch guns for years. “Um, I have no idea how we'd do that, XO, but we can and we will.” Then his face sagged. “Great God, the whole gun mount crew—wiped off the ship like so many flies.”

“Look at it this way, Marty,” I said. “If we hadn't been turning, that bastard would have hit us in the forward fireroom. With his bomb. We wouldn't be having this discussion right now.”

“What was that big explosion to the east of us?”

I didn't answer him. He closed his eyes. “Okay,” he sighed. “You're right, XO. Let's go kill this guy.”

And so we did. After a ninety-minute transit, we lit off the air-search radar and found our snooper well within range. Combat passed a fire-control designation to director fifty-one, and the remaining five-inch mounts blasted into action about five seconds later. Fifteen seconds after that we were rewarded by a flaming arc of aviation gasoline streaming out of the night clouds and down into the sea.

“Back to station,” I told the OOD. “We're done here.”

 

EIGHT

The next morning our squad dog acknowledged our damage report, and we were ordered to depart station and proceed down to the tender
Dixie
at Kerama Retto. The big-deck carrier formations were almost back in the area, so we had CAP during the transit. We'd learned that
Murray
had been hit by three Vals in waterline strikes almost simultaneously. She'd rolled over and sunk a minute later with the loss of all but thirteen souls. One other picket had been badly damaged by a similar night-strike and was being towed to Kerama Retto. Two other pickets had been attacked but had managed to fight off the suiciders with little damage. There were no air contacts as we started down, so I retired to the captain's inport cabin and began to write the letters to the families of the men lost when mount fifty-one was blown over the side. We'd searched the area of our picket station at dawn, while still at sunrise GQ, in the scant hope that someone might have made it out of the sinking gun mount, but found absolutely nothing. We'd now lost enough people that the empty seats on the messdecks were becoming alarmingly noticeable.

I ground out the letters over a two-hour period as we wove our way south and east. There was a basic format, and then, with the help of the men's division chiefs, I interjected personal details wherever I could so that the families wouldn't think we'd mimeographed their letter of condolence. In each case, I was careful to use language suggesting that their loved one had been killed instantly and suffered a minimum of mortal anguish. The truth was, of course, quite different. That plane had hit the mount broadside with enough energy to lift it from its roller path and smash it sideways right over the side in the blink of an eye. The mount would have been buttoned up for GQ, which meant there was no way out for any of them. Some of the men would have been killed outright at the moment of impact. Some of them, however, would have discovered that they had no chance whatsoever only when the remains of the gun mount passed through the first few hundred feet of depth on the way to the dark oblivion of the Pacific Ocean bottom and imploded.

If this keeps up, I told myself, we all might soon join them. It would come down to how many kamikaze pilots and planes the Japs had left, and apparently that number was a lot bigger than all the king's intel officers had known. For the first time in my naval career, I experienced the helplessness that any individual feels in the face of the sheer, overwhelming power of war at sea in the face of strong odds. The radar picket destroyers needed some protection, but Halsey wasn't going to bring the picket line back into the protection of the fleet formation. We had become the equivalent of a seaborne tripwire.

I felt like one of those tethered goats the Indian Raj princes used to put out in the jungle so that their royal hunting guests could get an easier shot at a tiger. I didn't much like that analogy and wondered if other people in the ship were having similar feelings. Everyone supposedly loved Bull Halsey's bombast toward the Japs, but not for the first time I thought of inviting him to come up to the Okinawa picket line for a little overnight campout.

The phone squeaked. “KR in sight; we've been signaled to go alongside the
Dixie.
”

“I'll be right up,” I said.

We moored alongside another badly battered destroyer, the
Billingham,
which had been smashed from one end to the other during an attack on the carrier formation just before they left for that two-day strike mission up north. No part of her waterline was visible, and her main deck was only about three feet from the water. We could actually smell her as we nosed in alongside, a horrible reek that combined burned flesh, leaking fuel oil, spent high explosives, and saltwater-soaked debris. Our guys stared with horror at the sight of her. Chief Dougherty suddenly ordered five of our people to jump our mooring lines over to
Billingham
's deck, because those zombies standing there didn't seem to know what to do with the heaving lines we'd thrown over.

From my perch on the bridge wing I looked up to the bridge of the tender and saw the commodore. I saluted him, and he saluted back, shook his head, and stepped back into the tender's pilothouse. I could just imagine what he was thinking: Left the XO in charge and look what happened. Wait till he found out about our leaving station to kill the controller aircraft, I thought. Oh, well, what was the worst he could do: Send me back to the picket line?

Once we got tied up to
Billingham
I went below to change into clean khakis for my arrival call on the commodore. I had the casualty lists from last night and a summary of our battle damage, which, beyond the loss of a third of our main battery, wasn't all that bad. I'd told the snipes to scrounge some fuel, and Marty to see if there was some more VT frag to be had, one way or another.

“They gonna send us back like this?” Marty had asked.

“Absolutely,” I told him. “The radar works, and we can move. Unlike this wreck we're tied up to.”

I'd known the exec in
Billingham
and wondered if he was still alive. Her bridge and CIC area were mangled and burned beyond recognition. A small crowd of
Dixie
's repair department engineers was gathered amidships around five massive, gasoline-engine-driven water pumps. Oily black seawater was pulsing over the side from five hoses that snaked up out of the flooded main machinery spaces below.

The commodore met me at the gangway, which was unusual. We exchanged salutes again, and then he offered his hand.

“You survived a very bad night, Connie,” he said. “Well done. We've lost
Murray,
along with two ships that were with Halsey up north. That doesn't include
Billingham
here, and she's probably going to be a strike. I want to know what you did and how you did it.”

Careful what you ask for, Commodore, I thought. We walked forward along the port side of the tender toward the series of ladders that led up to the staff offices. I was just about to step up onto the first ladder rung when what sounded like a gunshot cracked the morning air. I spun around just in time to see a second manila mooring line, made up between
Billingham
and the tender, tighten up like an overstrung guitar string and then part with a punishing noise, its bitter end slashing back against the side of the tender hard enough to make a dent. Then a third, and a fourth. Men everywhere on the weather decks of the tender and down on
Billingham
's main deck were taking cover as line after line parted, the ruptured ends whipping back, tearing down stanchions and lifelines, bowling over at least two deckhands, and even thrashing the ship's motor-whaleboat. Oil- and water-soaked figures began to swarm topside from below decks, pursued by a boiling foam of fuel oil, seawater, and other debris erupting from
Billingham
's wrecked main machinery spaces.

Then I figured it out:
Billingham
was sinking, and then I remembered that
Malloy
was moored to
Billingham.

Our Chief Dougherty figured it out just about the same time as I did. I saw him grab a fire ax off the forward superstructure bulkhead and begin whaling on the nearest mooring line. Several other of
Malloy
's deckhands followed suit, chopping frantically at the brown manila lines with fire axes and even their personal bosun knives when the lines tightened up and began to pull
Malloy
over into a starboard list as
Billingham
began to settle.

The commodore swore, but there wasn't a single thing either of us could do but watch.
Malloy
's mast began to lean in at an alarming angle as
Billingham,
like some decorous and much-abused old lady who'd lost control of her plumbing, simply went down alongside the tender. Our people got the last of our mooring lines cut away just as
Billingham
's decks came awash.
Malloy
righted herself with a jerk and then, with no mooring lines, began to drift away from
Billingham
and the destroyer tender. The gangway between the tender and
Billingham
rolled off the camels and into the water, and then, with a great whooshing sound from the remains of her stacks and all those gaping holes in her main deck, great sprays of dirty seawater geysered up into the morning air as
Billingham
sank out of sight alongside the tender into two hundred fifty feet of water.

Just like that, she was gone.

I looked across to
Malloy,
which was definitely drifting astern now. Our main engines had been secured when we moored, but the boilers were still producing steam for the electrical generators, so I knew she'd be able to get back alongside. Someone on
Malloy
's bridge ordered the bosun to let go the starboard anchor, which he did with a single sledgehammer blow to its pelican hook. The six-hundred-foot chain ran out in a great cloud of rusty dust and then jerked to a stop when the anchor hit bottom.
Malloy
continued to drift astern as the anchor chain rose again and then stopped with a visible jerk. At that depth, almost the whole chain had roused out of the chain locker.

One deck below where we were standing, people from the tender were throwing life jackets and life rings down into the water for the few, too few, men paddling around where
Billingham
had been a minute earlier. Then fuel oil began to erupt like the mudpots at Yellowstone, burping gouts of black oil into the survivors' faces and eyes even as they struggled to grab onto life rings and kapok jackets bobbing nearby. Within seconds, most of the men in the water were blinded by the oil, unable to see the life jackets three feet away from them. Some men from the tender went over the side and dropped the twenty feet into the water to help the struggling survivors. It was awful.

Well done, I thought, until I remembered
Billingham
's depth charges. Great God, I thought. In all the shock and confusion following the battle damage, had anyone remembered to safe their depth charges?

No, they had not. The tender rocked as the first of the depth charges went off, practically alongside but, fortunately, at depth. Still, they produced the all too familiar mountainous eruptions right alongside, blowing seawater, fuel oil, and the ragged remains of
Billingham
's survivors and their rescuers into the air again and again until all twenty of her depth charges had gone off and there wasn't a single survivor down there in the sea. The water between the tender and
Malloy
glimmered with a thousand dead fish and, tragically, many other things too horrible to mention.

Then it got really quiet. I felt literally sick to my stomach. I looked over at the commodore, whose mouth was open and whose face was ashen. I didn't know what to say or do. Neither did he.

They were all dead. Everyone who'd survived
Billingham
's bloody thrashing up on her picket station was now either entombed in her carcass or bobbing around down there alongside the tender, pulverized by her own depth charges and so coated in fuel oil as to be indistinguishable from the other bits of buoyant wreckage still popping up onto the surface. Then the tender's GQ alarm sounded, followed by that all too familiar warning: Many bogeys,
in
bound, man all gunnery stations.

“I need to get to my ship,” I said to the commodore.

“And do what?” he asked. His expression was unfathomable.

I grunted at him. He had a good point.

“We've got more guns than the tender,” I said. “Or we did, anyway.”

“Go to it, young man,” he said. “I'm going to lay up to my cabin and cry.”

I took off down the port side of the tender's main deck, looking for a way to get over to
Malloy.
There wasn't one, and, besides, there was no time left. I heard the thump of distant five-inch guns from other ships in the anchorage, followed by the screaming of airplane engines being overdriven to certain mechanical destruction in their power dives, followed by the blasts of even more five-inch, everywhere throughout the anchorage. They were joined by massed antiaircraft guns up on the surrounding hills. Smoke generators on the beach lit off, blowing huge, billowing clouds of white smoke to obscure the ships in the anchorage.