The Commodore (2 page)

Harmon Wolf posed something of a problem in this regard, and he didn't acquire his academy handle until he first went out for varsity football as a walk-on in the beginning of his second year.

Two seniors from the varsity team dressed out in workout gear took one look at the short stack walking into the locker room and burst out laughing. One asked the young Harmon Wolf what his name was.

“Sluff Wolf,” he said.

“Sluff?” the biggest guy said. He was probably six-three in height and just as wide. “What kinda name is that?”

“It's easier than saying short little ugly fat fucker,” Harmon replied as he began to change out of his class uniform and into sweats.

That produced more laughter, but one of them still wanted to know what a guy his size was doing here trying out for Navy varsity football. “So,” he continued, a lineman trying for wit, “Sluff. You here to play football or
be
the football?”

More laughter. Sluff finished changing and went to the footlocker to find some cleats. “I'm here to kick the football,” he said. “Don't have to be cow-sized to kick a football.”

“Who you calling a cow, there, half-pint,” the monster said, getting a little angry now. Sluff turned around.

“Can you catch a football?” he asked quietly.

The lineman said of course he could.

“Okay, then,” Sluff said. “See you at the tryout.”

“We're already varsity, dumb-ass,” another guy said, looking around at his buddies. “We're not here to try out. We're here to show you what the front line looks like when
you
try to get past
us
.”

“I'm a kicker,” Sluff said. “I don't mess with front lines. Front lines are there to keep
me
safe until I get that kick away. Anyway, how's about I boot one to you and see if you can hold on to it?”

“Is that some kinda challenge, there, shrimp?”

“It's Sluff, not shrimp. But if you're afraid, well…”

The big guy hooted and said he'd see him out there. “You kick one to me,” he said. “Then I'll throw a tackle to you, how 'bout it?”

Sluff smiled and strolled out to the field. He joined about two dozen other sophomores who were there to try out. An assistant coach put them all into a calisthenics drill, followed by some sideline sprints, which were the quickest way to weed out the absolutely hopeless ones. Then they divided up into their purported specialties. Sluff was the only candidate for kicker. The main reason that he was trying out was that he'd found out the varsity kicker had failed two of his end-of-term exams in May and had been sent home. The Naval Academy took good care of its football team, but every one of them still had to take eighteen credit hours of an engineering curriculum and pass every course, every semester. The vacancy was a matter of some concern to the coaching staff.

Another of the assistant coaches came over, introduced himself, and asked if Sluff had ever played ball before. He said yes, high school, but he hadn't had time during his plebe year for any sports other than the required extracurricular stuff. The coach took him out to the thirty-yard line, handed him a football, and asked him to punt one through the goalposts. Harmon rolled the ball around in his hands for a moment, nodded, and then began to walk away in the opposite direction, toward midfield.

“Hey, sport,” the coach called after him. “Where you goin'?”

“Need more room,” Harmon said over his shoulder.

He stopped when he got to the fifty-yard line, and then did some stretching exercises for a couple of minutes. The guys who'd been harassing him were over on the sideline now, and his new best friend was making sarcastic comments about ratey youngsters, “youngster” being the academy term for a sophomore. The assistant coach was still down on the thirty, looking pointedly at his watch. Sluff did a couple of jumping jacks; then, cradling the ball between his two hands, he kicked it high over the goalposts and all the way into the end-zone stands, where it bounced back down to the field. He kicked it so hard that the sound caught the attention of the other coaches and most of the varsity team members, all of whom turned to look as that ball sailed over the goalposts. When the ball finally landed, there was a momentary hush on the practice field. The assistant coach looked at the ball and then back up field at Sluff Wolf.

“Can you do that again?” he called.

“All day, coach,” Sluff called back. “But I need a football.”

To his surprise the big lineman came trotting out onto the field with a couple of footballs. He handed one to Sluff and then said, “Welcome to varsity ball, there, Sluff Wolf.” Then he grinned and offered a paw.

Sluff played for three years and made the difference in enough games to become something of a sports celebrity in the Brigade of Midshipmen. When the team was in a tight spot and this short fella with the birth-control face ambled out onto the field, the Brigade would start chanting, “Sluff, Sluff, Sluff,” getting a little louder with each chant. The Navy side would go silent when the ball was finally snapped, and then, when it sailed through the goalposts and up into the stands, they'd roar one last “
Sluff!
” In unison. For the rest of his Navy career, Sluff it was.

Sluff Wolf did well academically at the academy, finishing up eleventh in his class of the 424 midshipmen who were actually commissioned. During the winter athletic season he liked to box, and he helped take the Navy intercollegiate boxing team to a divisional championship in his senior year. After graduation he served in the typical career pattern of shipboard assignments in battleships and cruisers. At one point in the early thirties he'd tried out for the nascent naval aviation program, but failed out for what the instructors called “inappropriate temperament.” One of his instructors had sneeringly called him a jumped-up woods nigger. Sluff had picked him up and thrown him through a window—from the second story of the hangar building, where the classrooms were. The instructor fell on a biplane wing and thus survived the fall, but Sluff's aviation career was over.

That incident also ended his traditional career path in the spit-and-polish battleship navy. He was subsequently detailed to the wild and woolly destroyer force. There he found his niche. Destroyers were small, fast, heavily armed for their size, and hard-riding fighting ships, manned by men who
liked
to fight. Everyone knew everyone in the destroyer force, and Wolf's personality and even his fierce appearance became a perfect fit. Now, after sixteen years of commissioned service, Sluff Wolf had made it to his own destroyer command. He was not entirely sure how that had happened, because he'd always had the feeling that he'd never quite achieved full acceptance into the all white, all-academy, and still very formal Navy officer corps.

At the beginning of the Pacific war, the Navy could accurately be described as a thoroughly hidebound, white-gloved, tradition-jacketed bureaucratic institution ruled by aging officers who stayed in at their current rank until someone senior to them retired—or died. Then and only then could they move up in the Navy's glacially slow promotion system, especially during the Great Depression. Change, especially any technological advance, was viewed with deep suspicion, sometimes to the point of absurdity: on the Day of Infamy, as Franklin Roosevelt labeled the Pearl Harbor attack, the call to battle stations on every one of the doomed battleships moored at Ford Island had been sounded by a bugler stationed in the “top hampers” of those cage masts. Horatio Lord Nelson would have recognized that bugle call.

And now, Sluff thought, we're finally here, the ship patrolling two miles off bloody Guadalcanal, where the sounds of desultory artillery fire were audible over the noise of the ship's vent fans. They'd pulled in at 0130, having safely escorted four transports from the port of Nouméa in New Caledonia up to Guadalcanal to bring desperately needed supplies to the Marines, who were apparently clinging to their dusty airfield by their tobacco-stained fingernails. The transports had gone to their anchorages and begun unloading in the dark, trying to get as much stuff as possible off-loaded before Jap torpedo bombers showed up at midmorning. A second tin can prowled the coastline, shooting back at the occasional Jap shore battery trying its luck in the transport anchorage area.
J. B. King
had set up a patrol box to the south of the transports, guarding against Jap subs sneaking in from the Sealark Channel.

During the early hours of the morning he'd received voice radio reports that the American cruiser force was returning to Lunga Point, right off Henderson Field. Between the rainsqualls and the overcast, it had been so dark that none of
King
's people could make out what kind of shape the cruisers were in, but the radar had shown at least four big ships entering the area. That meant they were still afloat, which was an improvement over the first engagement with the Tokyo Express.

Emerging from the head after his badly needed shower, he found his steward, a gray-headed black man whom the entire crew called Old Mose, laying out a clean uniform. There was a tiny silver tray on his desk with a mug of fresh coffee and a sweet roll nestled in a white linen napkin. Mose knew his captain's fondness for fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.

“Mornin' Cap'n,” Mose intoned with a bright smile. Nothing fazed Old Mose. Not yet, anyway. Not for the first time Sluff reflected that the ship and her eager but green crew had not yet “faced the elephant,” as they used to say during the Civil War. And neither have I, he had to admit.

“Mose, how are you?” he said, as if nothing was bothering him, either. “What's the weather topside?”

“Hit gonna rain, sure as anythin',” Mose said, nodding wisely. “Already done did. Like a damn cow pissin' on a flat rock, too. Man alive, it was pone down.”

Sluff told Mose that he expected to be summoned to the flagship sometime that morning, assuming there was no air raid.

“Lemme give them dress shoes a lick and a polish, then,” Mose said, handing over a clean and pressed khaki shirt and trousers, the shirt sporting two bright silver oak leaves on the collars. Still getting used to being a three-striper, Sluff gave them a proud glance. Then the sound-powered phone squeaked again.

“Captain.”

“We're getting a flashing light from the
Helena,
Captain,” Ensign Belay reported.

“What are they saying, Mister Belay?” Sluff asked. Mose, eavesdropping as always, grinned. Everyone knew that there wasn't an ensign in the entire fleet who could read flashing light.

“I'll find out, sir,” Belay answered promptly. “Oh, and we've also IDed
Atlanta
and
Juneau
in the area.”

“How do
they
look?”

“
Juneau,
well, XO says she's sagging amidships. He thinks her keel's broken. And
Atlanta
has a big port list on her and she's black from stem to stern. She looks pretty bad, Cap'n. XO thinks he can see Mike boats alongside, like maybe they're taking people off.”

Oh, shit, not again, Sluff thought as a chill gripped his bowels. “Very well,” he sighed. “What's the air picture look like?”

“Combat reports nothing on our air search, but Cactus says
they'll
be launching strikes at first light. They're going after a Jap convoy northwest of Savo Island. Also, there's radio scuttlebutt that there's a Jap battlewagon still out there, just north of Savo.”

Savo Island wasn't that far away, Sluff thought. If there was a wounded Jap battleship out there, nobody here was safe. “Lemme talk to XO,” he said.

Lieutenant Commander Bob Frey, his executive officer and second-in-command, picked up. A Steady Eddy if there ever was one, he'd been three years behind Sluff at Annapolis.

“Another bloodletting, XO?”

“Sure looks like it, Cap'n. One of the signalmen's been shooting the breeze with
Frisco,
and they're saying there were two Jap battlewagons out there, and that both of our admirals were killed. Skipper of
Helena
has assumed command.”

Sluff felt another cold shock. Admirals didn't get killed. Did they? Please God, not again, he thought. We don't have any more heavy cruisers.

“And what's this about a Jap BB still out there?”

“That's what Combat's hearing over the Cactus control nets. Some of their strikes are going after a troop convoy up the Slot; others are going to finish off a Jap battlewagon who's out there going in circles.”

“All right,” Sluff said. “I think we better get to GQ, then. All those Japs on Guadalcanal will see and report the cripples, and then Rabaul's gonna send a bunch of Bettys down here to finish it.”

“If I may suggest, I recommend sounding reveille first,” Frey said. “Then tell everyone what's going on. Give 'em fifteen minutes to hit the head and get some coffee,
then
go to GQ. We should be safe as long as there's no bogeys actually inbound.”

“Make it so,” Sluff said. “I'll be right up.”

He reflected that this was one of his exec's strengths: consideration for the crew. It wasn't as if they weren't trained. Sound GQ, they'd all be on station with the ship buttoned up in under three minutes. If an attack was actually inbound, that's what they'd be doing. But this way the crew would be able to wake up, learn what was going on, have time to do their morning necessaries, and then hustle to their GQ stations.

The radio messenger knocked and came in, bearing a sheaf of naval messages bound onto a steel medical clipboard. Outside, the announcing-system speaker in the wardroom passageway cut loose with the shrill whistle of the bosun's call, sounding reveille. This was followed by the exec, explaining what was going on and urging all hands to be ready to answer the GQ alarm in fifteen minutes.