Sentinels of Fire (32 page)

Earlier that evening, after chow, I'd walked the decks and talked to the various gun crews, making sure they understood we'd fight if we could, but if they heard the ship's whistle blow, that meant we were about to be overwhelmed. As tired as they all were, I sensed that they were fully focused. They, too, had seen what had happened to our sister ship.

The bridge was quieter than usual, partly because we'd secured some of the less important watch stations. I was ensconced in my chair. We had an officer of the deck, a junior officer of the deck, one man instead of two to operate both the helm and lee helm, and a single messenger of the watch. My JA circuit battle talker, Chief Smith, was down in the chief's mess but would come up when we set GQ. The doc had established three additional first-aid teams throughout the ship, men who were capable of tending to immediate bleeding or burns in the spaces around them without having to wait for Doc and his assisting corpsman to get there. The chief engineer had set out firefighting hoses inside at strategic locations near hatchways to the weather decks so we wouldn't have to wait for a repair party to make its way from the designated repair locker to the scene of a big fire. We'd pulled all the fuzes out of the topside depth charges and struck down a major part of the ready-service ammo for the forties and twenties. They'd only have enough to shoot for about ninety seconds, but there wouldn't be ammo lockers exploding and decimating the weather decks once they were drenched in flaming avgas.

As I sat in my high-backed captain's chair, it occurred to me that these were some of the measures we should have been taking all along. Instead, we'd followed doctrine: everything loaded to the gills; repair parties mustered at their lockers in three separate locations below decks; most of the canvas firefighting hoses mounted and neatly folded, regulation-style, out on the weather decks, where a topside fire would consume them in seconds.

I called into Combat and asked if we had CAP yet. Negative. There were no night-fighters available. The Japs had come out again just after dark to treat Halsey to Bettys carrying baka bombs, so all the night-fighters were up protecting the carriers. I almost told Combat to inform the fleet air-raid reporting net that we were down to one ship on the picket line, but that net was a plain-language circuit and we knew the Japs monitored it constantly. On the other hand, I thought the Japs already knew.

The night was about as clear as it had been last night, with a light breeze from the northeast. The moon, unfortunately, was out and providing altogether too much light for my comfort. Our two radars were having a good night, though, and the Freddies could even see some of the fleet formation's high-altitude CAP about a hundred miles away to the northwest. The carriers would be some fifty miles behind those CAP stations, headed toward Okinawa. I hoped they'd be able to see and jump on any kamis headed down our way. I'd heard Jimmy telling his CIC crew that with the fleet between Okinawa and Japan itself, there'd be no reason for them to come down and attack the picket line tonight. It sounded like whistling past the graveyard to me, but what the hell—if it provided a smidgen of comfort, it was worth the try.

“Bridge, Combat. We just detected a snooper, bearing zero eight five, range sixty miles, heading west-northwest.”

“Captain, aye,” I said. East of us and heading northwest?

“And, Captain, it looks like he's laying down one of those chaff clouds, like last night.”

That made more sense. Northwest of us was the bulk of Halsey's carrier formation, headed southeast with a ring of night-fighters stationed in air-defense sectors all around the carriers. Any snoopers or kamis headed for us on a direct line from Japan would have given that formation a wide berth—to the east, apparently. Now their controller was setting up an arc of radar-jamming chaff counterclockwise from east to northwest. That would make it impossible for any of the carrier radars to see what was happening along the Okinawa picket line, and blind our radars as well. Pretty damned shrewd. I felt the figurative jaws of a vise closing on us.

“What's the true wind?” I asked.

“From the north, ten knots, variable,” Combat said. We were approaching the end of the northeast monsoon season. Soon there'd be no wind for about three weeks, and then the southwest monsoon would kick in.

“How about up at CAP altitude?”

“It'll be stronger than that, Captain. As much as forty or even fifty knots. If we had CAP we could tell you precisely…”

“Right,” I said. “So that arc of chaff is going to drift in toward us, then.”

There was a pause. “Yes, sir. We can't tell what altitude he's dropping at, but we're assuming twenty thousand feet.”

Drift in toward us, masking whatever aircraft that patrol bomber out there had under his radar control. They could loiter out there at the far end of our air-search radar range until that all-obscuring chaff cloud was in to, say, thirty miles, then launch at us at 300 knots, or more, if they were diving from altitude.

“Alert our gators,” I said. “We have probably a half hour before the Japs make their move. Conventional attack, everybody stays put. Line attack, you know what to do.”

“Yes, sir, we do.”

“Combat, compute a predicted track on that snooper. I'm going to assume the kamis are with him and will come from his predicted position in the cloud. Give me that bearing, and then we'll start steering in the opposite direction and set the gators up along that axis.”

It took them five minutes, and then they recommended we come to course 170, almost due south, to point our stern at the expected threat axis of 350. I could be all wrong, of course, and they might offset to come at us from due east, but the snooper was still spewing his chaff cloud, and I was willing to bet his suicide group was tucked in close to him. I couldn't see the gator gunships, but I knew CIC was directing them to form a two-column formation parallel to our movements. I was taking a chance: If the kamis came from some other direction, we could change course immediately, but that gaggle of gators would probably dissolve into chaos.

I asked for some coffee, and the messenger jumped to get it. I knew everybody was scared of what might be shaping up. I almost wanted a cigarette, and that image of the commodore taking a deep drag on his cigarette leaped into my mind. We'd lost one of the good ones last night, and I'd been unable to suppress a tear or two when we'd slipped his body over the side. It had been comforting, actually, to have a senior four-stripe captain onboard. I'd been all too ready to revert to the role of XO. Now that I'd been the captain for a short while, though, I was beginning to get used to it.

I looked at my watch. We had maybe twenty minutes before we'd know what they were going to do. I remembered that the commodore had had a bottle of Scotch down in his unit commander's cabin. I was tempted, sorely tempted.

Strangely, however, the fear that had coiled up in my guts before wasn't there tonight. Was that because I had resigned myself to the knowledge that there really wasn't anything we could do about another line attack? Or was it a modicum of confidence that we'd made the best preps we could and now we simply had to wait to see if any of it worked? I noticed then that Chief Lamont had come up to the bridge. He was standing near my chair, strapping on Chief Smith's sound-powered phone handset. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he said simply that he and Smith had traded off.

“Bridge, Combat. Fleet staff has just come up on the HF net,” Jimmy said. “I'm guessing they finally got our message, because they want us to retire to KR immediately at best speed.”

Best speed meant turn toward KR, come up to 27 knots, and get
Malloy
the hell out of there. The problem, of course, was the gator gunships. The best speed they could do was 10 to 12 knots, and that was downhill with a following sea. Besides, a fifteen-minute head start south wouldn't make any difference to a column of Zekes doing 300 knots.

“It's a little late for that, Jimmy. These bastards are gonna jump us in fifteen minutes.”

“What should I tell them, Captain?”

“Tell them attack in progress, we can't abandon our gators, so we're gonna stay and fight.”

There was a one-second pause before Jimmy's reply. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I'll tell 'em just that.”

Jimmy had sounded more enthused about my reply than he'd been about our preparations for imminent immolation. Well, I thought, just you wait, Jimmy, boy. Just you wait.

I heard a chuckle behind me. Lamont was laughing to himself.

“What?” I asked.

“Fiery words for posterity,” he said in a pronounced Scottish burr. “I have not yet begun to fight, et cetera? John Paul Jones was a Scot, you know.”

“And a great pain in the ass,” I said.

“Comes with the territory, I believe,” he said.

“I love the accent, Lamont, but, c'mon, where were you born, really?”

“Would you believe Hoboken?” he admitted. We both started laughing.

I looked out the bridgewing door at the gray shapes of the gunships as they scrambled to get into their V-formation. I decided to go back into CIC. I wanted to see that radar picture.

*   *   *

Once in Combat I stood behind the two big scopes the Freddies used to control their CAP, when we had them, that is. The chaff cloud occluded almost the entire top right quadrant of the screen, and it had drifted in to about thirty-five miles. I asked where the bomber was, and the radar operator pointed at a slightly brighter pinpoint of green light at the northwest edge of the arc. If there were fighters or suiciders with him, they reflected too little energy to be visible. For that matter, they could be anywhere in that broad band of green fuzz on the screen, awaiting their radio vectors to come find us. As I watched that tiny pip at the leading edge of the green arc, it disappeared.

“If that thing's turned around and flown back into the chaff cloud, how long before he gets to the middle, or about due north?” I asked.

One of the radar operators worked a handheld circular slide rule. “Eight minutes if he stays at two hundred knots.”

I nodded. If that was the case, we had eight minutes before we'd know what was coming. “How close will the chaff cloud be in eight minutes?”

“Right at thirty miles,” Jimmy said from the other side of the main plotting table. “But the cloud will also be thinning out. That stuff doesn't stay up forever.”

Thirty miles. If the kamis popped out at thirty miles, going 300 knots, they'd be on us in six minutes, tops. That should be more than enough time to vacate the upper decks, because the entire crew could get to their GQ stations in less than two minutes. Line formation. That's what we were waiting to see.

I waited, mentally searching our plans for any big holes. Then I told Jimmy to compute a radar search sector centered on what we assumed would be their line of attack, and pass that to Sky One to begin a director radar search. The sooner we picked up the first suicider, the sooner the five-inch could go to work to thin them out. Our main gunnery computer usually lagged the target if it was going really fast. That meant that the computed gun orders would put shells behind the target. By now, however, our fire-control radar operators knew how to deal with a straight-in, slant-diving approach: add in an up-spot of a hundred feet in elevation and a drop-spot of three hundred yards in range. That would put the bulk of the ack-ack in
front
of the approaching plane. If it was VT fuzed, that gave the tiny radars the best chance to detect something coming at them. If it was a mechanically timed fuze, it should explode in front and just above the approaching plane, filling the air with shrapnel for him to fly though.

At four minutes, I had Combat send out a message to all the gunboats saying that we were expecting an attack very soon and confirming the bearing we expected it to come from. Admittedly, that was a big assumption on my part, but you had to start somewhere.

Of course, as it turned out, I was wrong.

One minute later, a blob appeared on the inside edge of the chaff cloud at 330, thirty degrees to the
left
of where I had thought they'd come from. Well, no, twenty degrees. Was it worth it to try to reform our two-column formation? I made a quick decision: Stick with what we had. If there'd been a division of destroyers out there, then I might have tried it, but the slow, clumsy-handling amphib support ships would have turned the maneuver into a cluster-fuck at the worst possible moment.

“Composition?” I asked, staring down at the radarscope.

“One,” the operator said. “One large, from the size of the video, but one.”

All right then, I decided. So tonight the bomber was coming. Perfect target for the five-inch. The two remaining LCSs each had a five-inch, but they were not radar-controlled. I'd instructed them to open fire upon my command at a predesignated range, elevation, and bearing, if only to add volume to the ack-ack barrage. I didn't care who shot this guy down, so long as he went down.

“Sky One reports lock-on, single target, opening fire in thirty seconds at max range.”

Opening fire with
one
twin five-inch mount, I realized. If I turned the ship, I could get two mounts to bear and double the firepower. If I did that, though, we'd be running over gators within ninety seconds. Holes in the plan? Here was one, a big one. Had I outsmarted myself? And just one suicider? All that chaff, for
one
suicider?

Mount fifty-three opened up in rapid-continuous fire, and I could dimly hear some other five-inch guns firing on either side of us.

“Main Battery Plot says this thing's coming in at three hundred fifty knots,” Jimmy reported. “Big target.”

I tried to remember which of the Jap bombers could make that kind of speed. Our time margin to decide was dwindling rapidly, but it was clearly one plane. Surely they could—