The Commodore (37 page)

“We all are, Dragon,” Sluff replied. “The Japs won't know what hit 'em.”

“Neither will we,” the voice on the other end of the TBS circuit said. “But, roger, out.”

Sluff turned to look at the plot. The Jap formation was on the plot, still headed south, although he knew that, by now, the hail of six- and eight-inch shells from the three cruisers must be falling all around them. His own destroyers were headed south, but still too far out to use their own torpedoes.

“The Japs slowing down?” he asked.

“I need the next radar mark to know that, sir,” the senior plotter said. Then the surface-search radar operator sounded off. “They're turning,” he shouted. “Turning left. East.
Towards
us.”

“Good,” Sluff said.

“Uh-oh,” he heard Larry mutter.

“Yeah,” Sluff said, realizing that his reputation for a frontal attack had preceded him. “Compute an approach course that will put them thirty degrees off our port bows once we turn around. We'll run right at them and then salvo the torpedoes.”

Larry gulped and then worked his maneuvering board. The plotters' hands were flying over the table, making their marks as the radar lit up each Jap ship for a brief second. Sluff was dimly aware of reports coming in from the other destroyers—they held the enemy, they didn't. One deck below he could hear the forward torpedo mount training out and the torpedomen yelling settings at each other. “Zero four zero at twenty-five knots,” Larry said finally.

“Immediate execute,” Sluff replied, and Larry issued the orders over the TBS. Once again,
King
heeled as she came about. The plotters all grabbed the edge of the table to hang on.

“Combat, Bridge, the Japs are firing star shells at the cruisers. What are
we
doing?”

“They've turned east to do two things, Bob,” Sluff said. “Fire torpedoes at our cruisers and get out of the kill zone they're in right now. I'm trying to get our division close enough to launch. Can you see them?”

“Just shell flashes,” Bob said. “A lot of them, though.”

“Well, hopefully they can't see us yet. As soon as you can fire your fish, let 'em go.”

“Better tell the rest of our division that, then, sir,” Bob said.

Sluff swore. Bob was right—he'd forgotten to do that. Larry Price was already on it as
King
steadied up on the new intercept course, belting out orders on the TBS. Then all they could do was wait. He stared at the plot. Course 040 seemed to be doing the trick, although some of the Japanese tracks were wobbling all over the place, as if they were slowing down.

“Range to nearest Jap heavy?” he asked.

“Ten thousand, five hundred,” the radar operator called out.

“Time to launch position?” Sluff asked.

“Calculating.”

He gritted his teeth. He knew his CIC team were doing their very best, but it still took time and several radar sweeps for them to be able to calculate what the targets were doing in relation to what they were doing. Their torpedoes couldn't be fired until the target's predicted position at end-of-run was a scant two miles away.

“Big explosion to the northwest of us,” Bob called down. “And another one. Somebody's getting hits.”

Sluff noticed that their western division was no longer being tracked on the table. That was the price for scaling the DRT down to a picture that concentrated on his own eastern division's torpedo problem.

“Four minutes to launch position,” Larry said. “Torpedo control has a solution.”

Sluff thought fast. The Japs were going to see his division coming if they closed in for the two-mile attack solution. There was an alternative. He hit the bitch-box switch.

“Bob, what if we fire our fish at the slow-speed setting—their range goes to nine thousand instead of forty-five hundred, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Bob replied.

“Then we could fire now, before they see us.”

There was a moment's pause. “Yes, sir, we could. We need a minute or so to reset the guidance systems.”

“Do that and then launch when you have a solution.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Sluff turned to Larry. “Tell the rest of our division to launch torpedoes on
slow
speed and fire when ready. Then issue an immediate execute to slow our formation to fifteen knots on a course that matches whatever the Japs are doing.”

Larry got the orders out and the other two ships rogered up. He then asked Sluff why they were slowing. Ordinarily a staff officer wouldn't ask a question like that in the middle of a fight, but Sluff realized Larry was simply trying to keep up with his commodore's reasoning.

“It's a really dark night,” he said. “If we go twenty-five to thirty knots, they'll see our bow waves. At fifteen there won't be any bow waves. As soon as our fish start hitting we'll open with guns and kick the speed back up.”

“Sir, the longer we creep along here, the sooner our own cruisers' firing arcs are going to include us.”

“I agree, so when the gunshoot starts, we are going to head
west,
not east. That's the fastest way for us to get across the cruisers' line of fire.”

A talker reported that
J. B. King
's fish were swimming. Teatime was in four minutes.

“Combat, Bridge,” Bob called. “We're hearing shells passing overhead. Based on the light show north of us, they're going both ways. Those have to be heavy cruisers up there.”

Sluff acknowledged and then told Larry to tell the flag where they were in relation to the Jap ships they were shooting at. His destroyers should be safe, since the distance between the two cruiser forces was nearly thirteen miles, which meant the shells were traveling high. Still, it was nerve-racking, with dozens of eight- and six-inch shells howling overhead as the cruisers conducted a long-range gunnery duel. With any luck, his eastern division would be out of the line of fire by the time their torpedoes got in among the Japs.

“Three minutes,” Larry said, as they all stared at the evolving plot on the DRT. And then Bob Frey called down from the bridge, his voice audibly excited. “Explosions north of us, lots of them. Sounds like torpedoes.”

Not ours, Sluff thought. Dragon had made his own attack. Good!

“Gun flashes north and west, sounds and looks like five-inch. I think Dragon's going in.”

Sluff was torn. He really wanted to be out on a bridge wing right now, seeing what Bob Frey was seeing. He stared down at the lighted DRT table, not seeing it. Then he focused.
This
was the tactical picture. Up on the bridge they could hear shells and see flashes, but that was
not
the tactical picture. The smudgy No. 2 pencil squiggles on the DRT trace paper—that was the picture.

“Get your guns ready, Bob,” Sluff replied. “We're almost there.”

“Commodore,” Larry said. “We should turn now—that way our guns will be settled on a steady course and speed when we open fire.”

“Good call, Larry, get the orders out,” Sluff said. Larry put out an immediate-execute to the division, turning them due west and accelerating to twenty-seven knots now that the fish were gone. A moment later, Bob Frey called down reporting more explosions as their own torpedoes slammed home.

Sluff turned to Larry. “All ships, commence firing.”

Larry had barely finished speaking into the handset when all five of
J. B. King
's went to work, firing in rapid-continuous mode under director control, blasting away as fast as the crews could load the guns and the magazine crews could push more shells up the hoists.

Sluff blew out a long breath. He'd done his job. Now it was up to the gun crews of his three destroyers and Dragon's three destroyers, a total of thirty five-inch guns punching out fifteen rounds per minute each. Four hundred fifty rounds a minute being fired at a cluster of Jap ships who'd already been attacked by sixty torpedoes and the concentrated fire of one heavy and two light cruisers. As the status reports flew around Combat, Sluff studied the unfolding track charts. The enemy force was still headed generally east but their speed was falling off rapidly. They can see us now, he thought, and even if they're being hit, they can launch their own torpedoes, not to mention start hurling eight-inch shells at our little line of destroyers. Then he realized something, looking at the track geometry: It's not “can launch”; it's “
have
launched.”

“Larry,” he said, “torpedoes are coming. We have to maneuver. Turn the formation to due north by column movement. Immediate execute. As soon as we're on course, order a cease-firing.”

This time Larry didn't ask any questions. He sent the corpen signal out by TBS and then executed it.
J. B. King
heeled to port as she swung around to the north, headed for a track behind the enemy cruiser-destroyer formation, with
Morgan
and
Whitfield
in hot pursuit. Her guns continued to blast away during the maneuver, making it hard to hear reports in Combat.

Sluff held his breath. Did we turn in time? The Type 93 Long Lance came at you at nearly sixty miles an hour. Larry ordered the radar tracker to report the positions of the two ships behind them every minute so that he would know when to order the cease-fire.

“
Morgan
's made the turn,” Larry said. “C'mon
Whitfield.
”

Then Sluff swore. The tracker marking
Whitfield,
the third ship in his formation, started making marks on top of one another. Something had happened back there. He called Bob on the bridge.

“Can you see
Whitfield
?” he asked.

“Wait one,” Bob shouted back over the banging of the two forward gun mounts. Then he was back. “She's not visible and not firing.
Morgan
is right behind us, but
Whitfield
is
not
visible.”

“Track shows
Whitfield
has stopped,” Larry said. “Recommend the cease-fire order now, sir.”

Sluff put up his hand in a wait-one gesture. In his concern about
Whitfield,
Sluff had forgotten to give the cease-fire order. Had the Japs caught their ninety-degree course change to the north? Had those canny bastards detected the fact that the bearing to all those five-inch gun flashes had stabilized for a minute and then begun to draw north? A moment later, three solid thumps penetrated the ship's hull from near misses going off close aboard.

Yes, they had. A frantic call from Bob on the bridge confirmed what they'd heard down in Combat.

“Combat, Bridge, heavy stuff, incoming. And star shells. And something else—we just saw a big explosion south of us. Magazine-size.”

One of the cruisers had eaten a Long Lance, Sluff thought. They couldn't just keep steaming in a straight line anymore, now that the Japs could see them. He had three choices: keep going north to run behind the enemy formation and start a broad weave to defeat their optical gun directors, or turn west again and try to outrun the Jap heavy cruiser's gunfire, or, finally, turn east and run right at them.

Multiple thumps erupted around them, sounding closer this time, but from the other side. He realized at least one of their heavies had trained her entire eight-inch gun battery on them and was now bracketing and halving. Cease firing? Or keep firing?

“Range and bearing to the Jap formation?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

“Zero eight one and down to eight thousand yards, Commodore,” the radar operator said in a voice that was definitely not calm. Outside,
King
's five-inch guns continued to hammer away at the Jap formation, shaking the bulkheads and causing a fine rain of dust to settle over Combat. Gun smoke had begun to infiltrate the vents.

So at least one Jap heavy cruiser was still in business, he thought, and she was focusing her guns on their little formation. An ear-thumping blast punched down through the overhead in Combat as something big exploded directly overhead, audibly raining shrapnel all over the ship. Nothing penetrated all the way into CIC, but it was obvious the Japs had found the correct range. Then the radar operator swore and announced he'd lost the picture.

Time to decide.

“Cease firing,” he ordered. Larry repeated that to their one remaining ship,
Morgan.

“Come right by column movement to one one zero, speed three-five,” he ordered. Once again, Larry sent the order out to
Morgan
by TBS. Below and behind them, they could hear
King
's forced-draft blowers spool up into a banshee scream as the ship went to full power. All the fixtures in CIC began to shake, rattle, and roll.

“Recommence firing when the turn is complete,” Sluff said. “They can see us now; no reason not to shoot at them.”

Larry's expression bordered on panic. The commodore was going to run right at them. Again. “Why?” he asked softly, as
King
straightened up from the turn and then settled into a thirty-five-knot lunge at their enemies.

“We can't outrun an eight-inch gun,” Sluff said. “They can shoot eighteen miles; we're only four miles away. They'll expect us to run west.” He looked up at the small sea of pale faces looking at him in the red light. “We're not gonna run,” he said. “We're gonna go right at them and tear those bastards up.”

He looked down at the plot one last time. The pencil lines were all merging. Time to go topside.

“I'm going to the bridge,” he announced. “Larry, tell the flag we're headed
into
the Jap formation. Tell Dragon, too; he may be able to help.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Larry said, but his face was white.

Combat, without radar, had become superfluous. The plotters, trackers, talkers, and the radar operator all stared, openmouthed, at the commodore as he left CIC.