Sentinels of Fire (20 page)

“Radar contact, three zero zero, range seven-oh miles, composition one or few,
not
closing.”

Jimmy gave me a here-we-go look. “Snooper?” I asked.

“Seventy miles,” he said. “Means he's high. Not closing means he's waiting for something or he's building his picture.”

Or both, I thought. Then the raid-reporting-net talker spoke up. “Station One-Fox reporting a single contact, bearing zero zero five from him, range six-five miles, not closing.”

It was the same pattern we'd seen before, lone aircraft loitering high at some distance. Probably analyzing our air-search radar beams to see where the pickets were. I wished we had the means to detect and analyze
their
radar transmissions, because, with four large, 350 kw turbogenerators down in our two engine rooms, we could have jammed them.

Over the next thirty minutes three other picket stations reported similar lone contacts. The senior picket destroyer skipper, two sectors away from us, sent out a warning message to the fleet anchorage that we had a possible raid shaping up; I could just about visualize the commodore hearing that and heading up to the CIC on board the tender. He could watch, but he couldn't do anything for us. Hell,
we
couldn't do anything for us. The ship heeled gently into another turn as we wandered in aimless patterns around our station.

“Should we go to GQ?” Jimmy asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “Let people get some sleep if they can. Is Marty awake?”

“He's up top, at Sky One.”

“Find out what the gun status is,” I said. “I'm guessing he's got the gun crews standing easy on station, but confirm that, please.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said and picked up a sound-powered phone handset.

I couldn't see rousing the entire ship just because we had snoopers taking up position out on the edge of the warning area. GQ meant shutting down the below-deck ventilation fans, dogging down all the watertight hatches, breaking out all the damage control equipment from the three repair lockers, and packing every man from every division into cramped spaces meant for much smaller watch teams.

On the other hand, why
were
those bastards lurking out there?

“Jimmy, what are the Freddies doing?”

“Not much, XO. No CAP, nothing to control.”

“Do we have a radio receiver that can listen in to Jap freqs?”

“I'll ask 'em,” Jimmy said. He came back a minute later. “That's affirm, XO. All you get is jabber, but the Freddies know which frequencies are usually the main Jap air control circuits.”

“All right, have them start dialing through those freqs and listening in. I think those distant snoopers are controllers. Right now they're waiting for something, but if they get kamis assigned to them, the jabber ought to build up on their control freqs. Worth a try, anyway.”

“Absolutely,” he said. I think he was glad to have something to do.

“I'm going up to Sky One.”

He nodded and went back to get the two Freddies going on their eavesdropping mission.

I then went up to Sky One, the gunnery officer's GQ station. Marty was sitting on a sound-powered telephone stowage box, cupping a cigarette in one hand and holding a cup of coffee in the other. He was twenty-eight years old and, like the rest of us, looked twice his age. His talker was asleep behind him, propped up against the barbette supporting the main battery director. From Sky One I could look forward over the tops of the forward five-inch gun mounts all the way to the bow. Astern was the number one stack, or what was left of it, then the midships guntubs that had replaced the quintuple torpedo tube mounts, the number two stack, the small, visually operated director platform, then our second AA gun clusters, twenties and forties, and finally mount fifty-three, the after five-inch mount.

The ship turned again, with the heel being more pronounced at this height above the waterline. With some of the forward stack gone, a change in the wind pushed a wave of acrid, eye-watering stack gas across the director platform. The moonlight was uncomfortably bright, but the horizon was lost in the darkness. The seas were like glass, as if they, too, were waiting for something to happen.

“Hunter's moon,” Marty said, echoing my own thoughts.

“Unfortunately,” I said. “The snoopers are back, but they're staying way out there. I'm trying to decide when to go to GQ.”

Marty chuckled. “I think you'll find, XO, if you take a turn about deck, that just about everyone in the crew is already on station. Only thing left to do is to lock down the hatches and watertight doors. Nobody wants to be caught below decks by a surprise suicider.”

“Yeah, I figured that,” I said. “I just hate to secure all the ventilation until we have to. The main holes get pretty unbearable.”

“Sky One, Combat?”

Marty leaned over to his bitch-box. “Sky One, aye.”

“Freddies say they're hearing a lot of jabber on a freq that was dead quiet five minutes ago.”

“Okay,” I said. “Get that word out on the air-raid reporting net to the other pickets. Then have the OOD sound GQ.”

The GQ alarm let go a few seconds later, and the familiar sounds of hatches and doors banging shut echoed throughout the ship. I went below to the bridge to get my battle gear on. Then I climbed into the captain's chair and waited for all the manned-and-ready reports to come in. It was almost 2300. Good a time as any, I thought.

I tried to review in my mind what else we could do to get ready for what I thought was coming. The ship was at general quarters. All the stations were manned and ready. Ammo to the trays, the five-inch loaded up with AA common and VT frag, with some star shells handy in the mount. The snoopers were talking to somebody, and that somebody had to be kamis, so why couldn't we see them on the radar?

Because they were coming in on the deck, flat-hatting fifty feet over the water in the darkness and following course orders from the snoopers. God, I'd love some night-fighter CAP about now. I picked up the
1
MC microphone and nodded for the bosun's mate to pipe an all-hands.

“This is the exec speaking,” I said. “We think the snoopers out there on the sixty-mile fence have received some kamis, and that they're directing them in toward us and the other pickets. The radars can't see 'em, which means they're on the deck, low and fast. They can't see much, either, but they're getting vectors to close with the picket stations. We're going to start circling now, to make it hard for them to line up. Forties and twenties: You see something coming, open fire immediately. We won't have much warning, and the five-inch may not get to play, so—you guys know what to do. Remember what Father Halsey said: Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. That's all.”

I put the microphone back in its holder and told the OOD to increase speed to 15 knots, put the rudder over five degrees left, and leave it there until otherwise directed. UNODIR, I thought, with a mental grin.

Something caught my eye, way out on the horizon. It was a white light, intense and growing, which then turned yellow and finally red. It was
way
out there, to the east of us, lighting up the underside of a thin cloud deck we hadn't been able to see before. A minute later, as the red light began to fade, we heard a distant rumbling sound.

“Combat, Bridge. Who's east of us?”

“Station Niner-George,” Jimmy replied. “The
Murray.
She's zero niner five, twenty, um…”

“We just saw a pretty big explosion out there,” I said.

“Lost video on Niner-George,” he reported in a tight voice.

Twenty miles was at the very end of our surface-search radar's range, even on a good radar night like tonight. Still.

“Officer of the Deck, twenty knots, please. Ease your rudder to left three degrees.”

“All engines ahead
full,
make turns for twenty knots. Ease your rudder to left
three
degrees.”

The helm and lee helmsman answered up and executed the orders. I was thinking furiously. I'm the Captain. What should I be doing, right
now
? I hit the bitch-box.

“Combat, Bridge. What's the bearing to the snooper in our sector?”

“Three three five, range fifty-five miles.”

I punched the button for Sky One. “Sky One, Bridge. Open barrage fire on bearing three three five. Use Able-Able common into a range notch at ten thousand yards until you get a lock-on, then shift to VT frag.”

“Sky One, aye,” Marty replied. To his credit, all three five-inch opened within thirty seconds, firing deliberately, punching out a stream of projectiles timed to burst not quite five miles from the ship in the direction of what
might
be approaching at 300 knots. Fifteen seconds later, a yellow fireball erupted out on that bearing, momentarily illuminating a terrifying sight: Three surviving Vals, single-engine carrier dive bombers, wingtip to wingtip, on the deck, so low that their props were kicking up roostertails, were clearly visible, coming straight for us. The forties and the twenties got into it one second later, pumping out such a stream of tracers that we almost couldn't see the Vals anymore. The ship's constant left turn was going to mask our own guns' fire, so I yelled for the helmsman to shift his rudder to right-ten. The five-inch continued to fire, probably in local control now, and then I saw VT frag bursts erupting among the incoming kamis, followed by a second fireball, then a third.

The fourth kami, however, was devoted to a stronger god, because he hit mount fifty-one broadside. Going almost 300 miles an hour, he knocked the entire mount right off its roller path and over the side in a flaming ball of erupting aviation gasoline, shattered steel, and body parts. An instant later, the ship shook as the Val's belly bomb went off underwater, creating a bright green bolus of fire in the sea and smacking the hull hard enough to set off the gyro alarms on the bridge.

The guns fell silent. We were still turning. There were two patches of burning gasoline drifting astern. I closed my mouth and took a deep breath. Great
God
!

We were alive. Four Vals had come in low, really low, right down on the deck, but under precise radar control from the snooper. We'd killed three, thanks be to God, but number four had hurt us, and hurt us bad. There was nothing left of mount fifty-one and its ten-man crew except a stark, circular black hole in the forecastle deck, framed by its glistening roller path. The hiss of a ruptured gas-ejection air line made a bright sound in the darkness. There was no wreckage on the forecastle. One moment, a gun mount blasting away at an approaching suicider; the next moment, a clean deck.

The crew of mount fifty-two, just behind fifty-one and slightly above, were leaning out of their hatches, dumbstruck.

We all were. A two-gun, five-inch, thirty-eight caliber gun mount had been knocked clean over the side in the blink of an eye.

We were still turning, but to no purpose. I told the OOD to resume the random weave while I tried to gather my wits. The bitch-box spoke.

“Bridge, Combat. What happened?”

Good question, I thought. Then Sky One joined the conversation.

“What happened was that the XO told us to start firing blind down the bearing to the snooper, and that killed three out of four kamis,” Marty said. “But mount fifty-one is … gone.”

It was time for someone to take charge. That would be me, I realized.

I ordered the OOD to slow to 12 knots and maintain the random weave. I told Marty to evaluate any damage to the forward ammunition handling systems. Then I asked Combat for a range and bearing to the snooper patrolling our sector.

“He's still out there, forty-eight miles now, bearing three three five,” Combat replied.

I considered our options. There was nothing to be done for the crew of mount fifty-one. They, and their shattered gun mount, were already spiraling down to the bottom of the sea, some nine thousand feet below us. If that snooper loitering out there was a long-range bomber, he could stay there for several hours, just waiting for new kamikazes to report in. Forty-eight miles at 27 knots, we could be underneath him in an hour and a half.

“Combat, Bridge. Bring all the radars down to standby. I intend to go kill that snooper. Give me a course at twenty-seven knots to intercept the center of his orbit, and when we get to within four miles of that EP, light everything back off, lock him up, and shoot his ass down. Sky One, you copy?”

“Sky One, aye.”

“Combat, aye, recommend three three zero.”

I told the OOD to follow Combat's recommendations, and off we went. We were leaving station, and I hadn't asked permission—but as long as that snooper was out there, he could feed the next wave of kamis and the one after that into our station until we were all dead. The fleet anchorage had been alerted that the Japs were out tonight, but I didn't think they were really interested in Okinawa. Tonight they wanted the pickets; hence the four-plane formation vectored against us, and probably each of the other stations, as evidenced by that flare of fiery death to the east of us. With a director orbiting outside our range at twenty thousand feet, the kamis could all come in right down on the deck, under our radar envelope, and we'd never see them until they hit us.

Our mission was to provide radar early warning of an incoming kamikaze attack. For that, we were required to remain on station. However, nothing in our orders said we had to stay here until we died, and with the Japs' new tactic, slavishly staying here on our lone station was tantamount to a suicide mission of our own.

The hell with that.

The gun boss appeared on the bridge. He looked a bit shell-shocked. “Gone,” he said. “Just goddamned gone. The handling rooms, the magazine crews, everybody below decks is okay. All we need now is a new gun mount. Where we going?”