Sentinels of Fire (7 page)

“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
1
MC. 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
1
JV 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
1
MC.