Sentinels of Fire (24 page)

So there we were: one partially maimed destroyer, promises of a small gaggle of amphib gun platforms, and the knowledge that the next few nights were probably going to bring the battle for Okinawa to a climax. As I'd said before, all we had to do was stay alive until the Japs wrote Okinawa off their books, the way they had so many island bastions before. The question was: how long would that take?

The department heads were looking at me expectantly. I wanted to finish up with something profound, something hopeful and perhaps even memorable. I drew a blank.

“All we can do is our best,” I said. “So let's go do that.”

 

TEN

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

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

“Where are they, Marty?” I asked.

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

“You got some star shell ready?”

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

“Is gone.”

“Yes, sir. Any more news from Oki?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sir,” he said, “where you from?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sky One, Combat. Captain up there?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Aye, aye, sir. We'll watch it.”

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

“Sky One, Combat. Contact has disappeared.”

“Right, I'll be down.”

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

“What's that? I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can their radar see something on the surface?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bridge, Combat. We have a—”

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

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

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

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

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