Sentinels of Fire (11 page)

I asked the captain if the big bosses were mad at us for trying to help
Waltham.

“I'm not sure they—and I'm talking about the flag officers at Spruance's level—even know we exist,” the captain said. “Okinawa has turned into a meat grinder of the worst kind. The Japs know they can't prevail, so they're bent on killing as many Americans as they can before they themselves are all dead. He was telling me about incidents where the Japs had convinced local civilians that our soldiers were going to
eat
them, and then made them jump off of cliffs to avoid capture. Absolute insanity. They're—”

At that moment one of the lookouts called in from the bridge wing that something had happened behind us. As the captain and I went out to see what he was talking about, a deep rumble overtook the ship from the direction of Kerama Retto and we saw an enormous black cloud mushrooming up over the horizon. More fiery explosions followed beneath the initial cloud, pushing whitish yellow fireballs and smoke trails in every direction. It sounded, and looked, like a volcano was erupting behind us. The entire bridge watch team and the gun crews out on deck were all staring aft.

“Something got that ammo ship,” the captain said softly.

“Which we just passed at no more than five hundred yards,” I said. There was another, even bigger explosion, and now the entire southeastern horizon was being enveloped by smoke from the blast.

“Combat reports ETA to picket station is ten fifteen,” a talker announced.

“Not quite two hours,” I said, looking at my watch. “I think it's time to button up and get ready for own brand of insanity.”

“Air search working?”

“Yes, sir, better than before, actually. We don't have any CAP assigned yet, but they should be up soon, unless of course, that”—I pointed toward the continuing fountain of fire filling the sky behind us—“upsets the flight schedules.”

“God help any ships that were close to that ammo ship,” the officer of the deck said.

The captain looked at me. We both knew that every one of the small boats, lighters, and landing craft doing the shuttle work between the ammo ship and the two carriers were already part of that enormous cloud behind us. The two carriers had been parked at least a mile away from the ammo ship, but that was still within range of falling projectiles, rockets, and even bombs that had gone up in the initial explosion. The bitch-box lit up.

“Bridge, Combat, many bogeys, two niner zero, range forty-nine miles and closing.”

“Okay, XO, lock her down and load the guns.”

I went back into the CIC as the sounds of hatches slamming down rang out throughout the ship when the alarm sounded. The officer of the deck put
Malloy
into the familiar broad weave; we weren't on station yet, but the air-search radar was doing what it was supposed to do, and we had already sent the warning down to the fleet formations off Okinawa and in the Kerama Retto anchorage. Two other picket ships had also detected the incoming raid, which appeared to have originated in Formosa.

I took a seat at the head of the dead-reckoning tracer table. I signaled one of the Freddies over on the air-search radar side to come over. “Still no CAP?” I asked.

“No, sir,” the jay-gee answered, “but the ready deck is launching. Some big deal happened down in the anchorage and that's got the command net tied up.”

“You have no idea,” I said. I wondered if those two carriers were supposed to have left the anchorage already to provide air support. Then I relaxed: There were
ten
big-deck carriers assigned to support the Okinawa invasion.

“Bogeys dispersing,” the air-search radar reported. “Range thirty-seven miles and still inbound. Looks like some are coming for the picket line.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered. Except we weren't yet on the picket line. We were still south of it. Maybe they'd go by us. I almost suggested to the captain that we slow down. The plotters around the DRT exchanged fearful looks. I leaned over to the bitch-box and called the bridge. “Captain, Combat. They're definitely splitting up. Thirty-seven miles out. Looks like a couple of them are trying to get east of us. We're going to have some business here shortly.”

For a moment, there was no reply. Then the officer of the deck acknowledged my warning, followed by something odd: “X
1
JV.”

I blinked. X
1
JV referred to the sound-powered phone circuit used usually for administrative matters—calls between offices, not tactical stations. The
Malloy,
like all destroyers, was equipped with several sound-powered phone circuits. The advantage of sound-powered phones was that they did not require electricity, only connectivity. If the ship lost all electrical power, sound-powered phones still worked. The circuits all had names, of course. The JC was the gunnery control circuit. The JA was the combat action circuit. The
1
JV was maneuvering. The JX was for communications. The JL was for lookouts. The X
1
JV connected offices and central stations like the quarterdeck, the bridge, the engineering log room, and Combat.

I reached down underneath the DRT plotting table and turned the handle on a large barrel switch to X
1
JV. That connected the handset I held in my hands to that particular circuit. Then I selected the bridge on a second switch and cranked the handle. The officer of the deck picked up immediately.

“What?” I asked.

“Captain went below,” the OOD said.

“Are you
shitting
me?” I asked before I had time to think. “Head call, or what?”

The OOD blew out a long breath. “He didn't say, XO. He just left the bridge and went down the ladder. I'm guessing he's in his inport cabin.”

“Five, maybe six bogeys inbound,” the air-search radar operator announced. “Constant bearing, decreasing range. Director fifty-one in acquisition mode.”

I was stunned. The captain had left the bridge with a raid inbound? What in the world—

“XO, recommend coming to course zero two zero to bring all guns to bear,” the CIC watch officer said. “Range is twenty-six miles, constant bearing, target video is in and out.”

That meant the Jap planes were descending. I wondered for a brief moment how the hell the Japs knew where we were, and then remembered: They were probably homing in on
Malloy
's own air-search radar beam. I hit the talk-switch on the bitch-box.

“Officer of the Deck, take Combat's course recommendations until further notice. Increase speed to twenty-seven knots.”

“Bridge, aye!”

I then reached for the barrel switch again, turning it to the JC circuit, selected the main battery gun director station, and cranked the call handle. “Sky One,” the gun boss responded.

“Marty, we've got a six-pack inbound. I think they're homing in on our air-search radar beam, so I'm gonna take the radar down and do a sidestep. The big raid's been reported, but we have no CAP, so I'm not gonna make it easy for 'em.”

“We're gonna hide, XO?”

“We're gonna try. It's visual from here out. Knock 'em dead, Marty.”

“Sky One, aye.”

I turned to the CIC watch officer. “Take down the air search. Now!”

There was a moment of hesitation, but then they jumped to it. I called the OOD on the bitch-box. “Come left, head three three zero at maximum speed. Tell main control to make no smoke.”

“Bridge, aye.”

We all felt the ship thrumming to the pulse of her twin screws. The lighting fixtures began to shake, and the deckplates in CIC were trembling as the snipes down in the engine-room holes poured it on.

Twenty-something miles, I thought. Forty thousand yards. The five-inch could begin to do effective business at eighteen thousand yards, or nine miles. The Jap planes were descending from eighteen, maybe twenty thousand feet. Now they'd lost their homer bearings. The sky outside was clear but a bit hazy. No cloud cover. We might just get away.

The wake. They'd see the wake, just like those American carrier bombers at Midway had seen that lone Jap destroyer's wake, pointing directly at the carrier formation they'd been so desperately looking for.

“Bridge, Combat. Slow to fifteen knots,” I ordered. “Broad weave around base course three three zero.”

“Bridge, aye,” the OOD responded.

I desperately wanted to go out to the bridge so I could see what was developing, but my GQ station was officially in Combat, the nerve center. This was where I belonged. In a few minutes, the lookouts would see the incoming Japs visually, and then it would turn into a gunnery exercise. Five-inch, forties, twenties, and nothing for the command to do but watch.

Well, not quite. When the kamikaze was finally visible to the naked eye, the ship had to be maneuvered. You never pointed the long axis at the kami—that gave him three hundred and fifty feet of ship to hit. You turned, presenting the side—that gave him thirty-six feet to hit and all the gun barrels to greet him. Then you'd twist and turn as the pilots tried to line up a better attack position.

I found myself biting my lip as the noise level went up in Combat. Search sector orders were going out to the lookouts: Split the search. High
and
low. That's the way the Japs would attack.

The gun teams knew their business. They also knew what would happen if they got it wrong. By this stage of the war,
Malloy
was a well-oiled machine—But the captain was a damned important part of that machine, and he was … where?

More phone-talkers were making reports, sounding like altar boys at the beginning of Mass. I could hear the big gun director overhead turning on its roller path as the pointer searched through his optics for incoming black dots in the sky.

What should I do—
right now,
what should I do? Go find the captain, roust him out of wherever he was hiding, if that's indeed what he was doing? I could hardly believe that was what was happening, but …

The JC talker was tugging on my sleeve. Something about asking for the air-search radar to come back up. “Make it so,” I responded, almost reflexively. The gun director's radar needed a cue from the larger, search radar as to where to look. My gambit to remove the beacon of their search beam hadn't worked.

Mistake. I could almost hear my mother saying,
Let's see what went wrong here, shall we?
Not now, Mom. It had left us blind at a critical moment. The captain would have vetoed that. “Yes, bring it back up.”

A voice in my head was telling me what to do: Go fight the ship. Get your ass out to the bridge wing and join the anxious eyes scouring the late-morning sky. When it finally started, there would be decisions to make: Which way to turn to unmask all the guns and minimize the kamis target? What speed? If we took a hit, then someone had to direct the damage control effort while the surviving gunners continued the air-defense fight.

I could hear the tone of the talkers' voices rising. They were getting scared.

Get out there.

Then I heard director fifty-one stop turning. They were locking onto a target. The kamikazes were here. The forward gun mounts let go with the first salvos.

Get out there, now.

“I'm going to the bridge,” I told the CIC watch officer. “Tell CTF 58 we're under attack.”

“XO,” he said, “where's the—” His voice was drowned out by another four-gun salvo from the forward five-inch mounts. I didn't wait to answer him. Besides, I didn't know the answer.

I went through the door between the charthouse and the actual bridge just as mount fifty-three joined in to deliver a six-gun salvo. All the bridge portholes had been locked in the up position to prevent glass splinters, so I caught the full force of the blasts. The breeze streaming over the bow was blowing gun smoke and bits of paper wadding through the portholes. Startled, I inhaled a lungful of sulfurous fumes and choked on it. I ordered the OOD to come back up to 27 knots in a somewhat strangled voice.

The forward mounts were firing to starboard, so I headed for the starboard bridge wing, where the officer of the deck, two lookouts, and two phone-talkers were already standing, all looking up into a metallic sky as the first black puffs of the timed fuzes began to blossom. I grabbed the captain's binoculars on the way out and started looking for the kami, but he was still too far away. Another salvo let fly, even louder now that I was out there on the fully exposed bridge wing. Mount fifty-three, back on the fantail, was also firing, but to port.

Port?
Christ Almighty—were there two of them?

Finally I spotted the black dot out there, maybe seven miles, slanting down out of the haze, embraced by a sudden succession of black puffs and then suddenly erupting into a gasoline fireball. I stared at the doomed plane as it came on, the ack-ack knocking pieces off it even as it assumed an even steeper dive angle, too steep, much too steep. He was going in, the pilot probably dead, and then he did, a sudden sheet of white water followed by the depth-charge-like underwater blast of his impact-fuzed bomb.

I ran back through the pilothouse and out to the port bridge wing as the forward five-inch mounts swung 180 degrees in unison to pick up the second kami. At that moment the forties joined the fight. I couldn't see the black dot, but I could see where all the tracer fire was going, rising into an arc of phosphorous lines and converging in a second cloud of ack-ack explosions.

Then I saw it: more than a dot now, God help us—stubby wings and that ominous black cigar shape under its belly, much closer than the first one, close enough for the twenties to get into it. Their massed fire created what looked like a veritable highway of tracer fire rising gracefully toward the target and then arcing back down again, because this bastard was coming in on the deck. Half the forty-millimeter stuff was going into the water now, and some of the five-inch shells could be seen smacking the sea and then ricocheting wildly back into the air before exploding.