Sentinels of Fire (18 page)

“That do it?” he asked quietly.

“Sure did, and I thank you very much. Even so, I hated to see it.”

“Had to be done, XO. They get pretty good at deception, some of them. Still, I'll hate to lose him.”

Then the bitch-box lit up. “Bogeys, bogeys, inbound, two five zero, range two-oh, triple-oh.”

Well, son of a bitch! I jumped to the captain's chair and hit the bitch-box. “Combat, Bridge. Alert the
Cogswell.
”

“They got 'em, too, XO, and now those Jap bastards are gonna get a big surprise.”

And so they did. Two Vals, Jap navy dive bombers, came in, ducking and weaving, expecting a lone radar picket, and then discovering that they faced eleven five-inch, twenty-four forties, and a dozen or more twenties. They were both flamed out of the sky in less than a minute. There was such a display of fireworks it almost looked like overkill. Almost. The sudden silence was broken by some muted cheers from the guntubs.

I told the GQ team to remain on station until darkness and then went below to find the commodore. As I expected, he was in the captain's inport cabin. The captain had been sedated again, this time by the squadron doctor. The commodore gave me the high sign, and we left the cabin and went out to what had been the forward torpedo deck, now packed with forty-millimeter mounts.

“Okay,” he said, quietly. The forty-millimeter crews were still pretty jazzed up, but they were also busy picking up brass. “You made the right call. For a moment there…”

“He's done that before, too,” I said. I described the burial-at-sea ceremony. “Commodore, he's been one of the best skippers I've ever had. Caring, knowledgeable, always one step ahead of everything I've done as XO. I did not want to bring this to a head. I—”

“You did what you had to do,” he said, stopping my protests, “and you did the right thing. If it's any consolation, my doctor told me before we got here that he might present as totally normal until imminent danger arrived. Sadly he's not the first, either. So, tell me: He still do the hat trick?”

“Yes, sir, but not so very much once we got up here. Every day here is, well, scary beyond words. These bastards want to die. We don't.”

“Yep, that's the crux of it. We've never faced anything like this before, certainly not on this scale. I always imagined the days when machines would act like this, you know, pilotless aircraft, aimed at a ship with no risk to anybody but the target ship. This kamikaze business is truly awful, and we're just going to have to kill them all before it's done.”

I saw a chance to plug my pet theory about multiship picket stations. “Sir, today? Two tin cans were here when the Japs expected one. It was over pretty quick. Can't we make that the standard picket station configuration?”

He stared at me for a moment and then smiled. “We'd have at least
three
on each station, if we had them, Connie. We don't. And, just for the record, carriers trump tin cans. By the way, Halsey has taken over the fleet, and the first thing he did was double the AA screens around the carriers. Even so, we're
still
sending carriers back to the States so badly hurt they'll probably never come back out here. I hear you. There are simply not enough destroyers.”

“How about the LantFleet ships? That's a land war now.”

“This is still a
world
war,” he said patiently, “and there are still U-boats out there in the Atlantic sinking merchies. The Brits killed two U-boats near Singapore last month, for Chrissakes. Now, admittedly, the Germans are almost done. Any day now, if you believe the Army. Once they quit, then yes, we'll have more destroyers. But first they have to get here—that'll take six weeks just to make the trip. Then they'll have to be trained to PacFleet procedures. They've been hunting subs and doing convoy duty almost exclusively. What's happening now at Okinawa is way beyond
anything
the LantFleet ships have ever seen.”

“Well, then,” I said, “can we have some fuel?”

The commodore laughed. “That we can do,” he said. “I'll leave
Cogswell
here on your station, and
Malloy
can run me back to KR.”

“And the captain?”

“That would be you, now, XO,” he said. “I've countersigned the log. You own it, for the time being, anyway. By the way, who's your senior department head?”

“Jimmy Enright, the navigation officer. Solid.”

“Well, he has to take over as acting XO. You can't be both. And one more thing—it'll be your responsibility to take care of
you.
By that I mean eating and sleeping. Take naps if you have to, but insist that when you're flat exhausted, you get some sleep time. No one else will do that for you when you're in command. Now, get me a signalman.”

Once the commodore had given the good news to the
Cogswell,
we set the modified GQ condition watch and steamed southeast to Kerama Retto anchorage. Due to an anomaly in the atmosphere, our air-search radar was able to pick up the large carrier formations to the west of Okinawa at almost sixty miles distance. Sunset was approaching, so I had the ship set general quarters for the last hour of the approach to Kerama Retto. There were no air contacts other than the ever-present CAP, and that was worrisome. The kamis had been coming pretty much nonstop every day for the past month. We wondered if those Jap bombers lurking at the outer ring of the fleet's defenses presaged night attacks, with kamis being vectored under radar control from bombers who stayed out of the fight.

“What's the moon?” I asked the quartermaster.

“Waxing, three-quarters,” he said promptly.

That meant good night visibility for night pilots, of both persuasions. The picket line might be a very dangerous place tonight. I hoped
Cogswell
was up to the task; as ever, dusk and dawn were prime attack windows.

We entered the anchorage and went alongside the tender USS
Dixie,
a different ship from the one we'd tied up to before. The
Piedmont
had gone around to another anchorage on the eastern side of Okinawa. We were the outboard ship in a nest of three destroyers, two of which were in pretty bad shape. With our makeshift forward stack and a few dozen twenty-millimeter “portholes” stuffed with rags and monkey shit, we fit right in. The engineers were summoned topside to hump two long black fuel hoses from the tender across the two other ships to
Malloy
's hungry fuel risers. An ammo barge came alongside during the refueling evolution, and the gun crews spent another hour lifting pallets of five-inch and forty-millimeter projectiles up from the barge, while other teams sent cargo nets full of empty brass cartridges to the barge for return to ammo dumps stateside, where they'd be reloaded. It was almost 2000 before the logistics effort ended.

The captain had been carried off on a stretcher by hospital orderlies from the tender's sick bay, his face concealed by a carefully arranged bedsheet. The commodore had gone with him, after telling me to get
Malloy
back on station as soon as we had our supplies on board.
Cogswell
has an older and less effective radar than
Malloy,
he told me; she was to return to her patrol station outside Kerama Retto upon our arrival on station. I saluted, and he left the ship, without any bell ringing this time. Everyone was too busy moving food, oil, and ammo. All the ship's officers were out and about, acting as safety observers. The crewmen humping the heavy ammo were tired, and this was no time for someone to drop a five-inch shell.

We cast off from the destroyer nest and stood out to sea at 2200. The Chop had broken off some of the cooks from the store-handling party and told them to get some chow going, which allowed us to feed the crew before we got back on station two hours later.
Cogswell
was positively delighted to see us return and left station with all the speed the Fletcher class was capable of, disappearing over the horizon in thirty minutes flat. I envied them.

The radar picture that night remained foreboding. Once every two hours a single blip could be seen way out on the defensive perimeter. Our air-search radar could not determine height, but the Freddies figured that a contact detected out at sixty or seventy miles had to be a high-flier, and also a pretty good-sized plane. Other picket ships were reporting the same thing, a distant shadow contact. None of the pickets had CAP assigned now that it was dark, but at least one carrier down in the task force operating area had night-fighters on Alert Fifteen. We watched and we waited for something to happen.

I met with the department heads after we'd settled in on our picket station. They briefed me on the stores, ammo, and fuel loadout, and I told them I would remain in temporary command of
Malloy
until such time as a new CO was ordered in.

“That going to happen sooner or later, XO?” Jimmy asked.

“Gosh, you trying to hurt my feelings already?”

There were tired grins all around, but I understood the awkwardness of the situation. Temporary command arrangements were always unsettling. If I was “in command,” then why weren't they supposed to call me Captain? The term “chain of command” implies clarity and rigidity. A temporary CO was neither fish nor fowl, not that anyone was going to challenge my orders.

“They can always send a three-striper in from one of the staffs out in the carrier task force,” I said, “but that would mean yet another temporary assignment. I'm guessing they'll get a seasoned commander from one of the ships that was either lost or disposed of due to battle damage.”

“I can just see it,” Marty said. “Morning staff meeting on Halsey's flagship. Need a three-striper to volunteer to take command of a destroyer up on the radar picket line. Don't everyone raise your hands all at once.”

“Prime duty assignment,” the snipe said, continuing the farce. “Destroyer command, lots of gunnery action, tremendous potential to gain major experience in damage control, and maybe even a swim call in the bargain. Anybody?”

“And glory,” Jimmy chimed in. “Don't forget glory. As in, glory to God in the highest, and a really good chance to meet Him, too.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. Dark as the humor was, it was actually a good sign that they could talk that way. Part of it was that we were closer in age and experience to one another than any of us had been to the captain. That's when I realized that I might be “in command,” but I was not “the captain.” As it should be, I thought.

“Jimmy, you're now acting XO,” I said.

Jimmy stared at me. “Wow,” he said. “Didn't see that coming.”

“Chop, get a steward to change out the linens in the sea cabin.”

“Yes, sir, and how 'bout the inport cabin?”

“Collect the captain's things, do an inventory, pack everything up for shipment back to the States. Then make it ready for whoever shows up to take over. And if you can find time, paint it. The new CO might not be a smoker.”

The phone squeaked under the wardroom table.

“Yes?” I answered. It was the CIC watch officer.

“Three other pickets are reporting that they can each see a separate snooper, as if the Japs were putting one at the extreme limits of
each
of our sectors. CTF 58 has ordered the night-fighters to come up as CAP.”

“Thank you, I'll be up.”

I told the department heads what was being reported. “Get with your division officers and chiefs, sort out any rumors as to why the captain had to leave us, and tell them we can expect a new CO shortly. Remind them that that means a change of command, even up here on the picket line. That means materiel inspections of all four departments, an admin inspection, surveys of custodial gear that's missing, the whole nine yards.”

“Between raids?” Marty asked.

“Navy Regs, guys. Read chapter eight. It doesn't say ‘except during wartime.' Let's get going; hopefully the Japs aren't getting ready to initiate night attacks.”

“Why not,” Mario said on a sigh. “Nothing else to do around here.”

 

SEVEN

I needed sleep. I remembered the commodore's warning about sleep deprivation and his instruction that it was my responsibility to take care of myself, physically and mentally. Especially mentally, I thought. I still thought there'd been an exhaustion component to what had befallen our skipper, if my own mental fuzziness was any indication, and I still felt bad about all this. Sure, I'd aspired to command at sea—what line officer didn't? But not this way.

I went into Combat to take a look at the air picture. The long-range snoopers were plotted out at extreme ranges, but there were no contacts other than these mystery planes. Comms were good with the picket ships on either side of our station and with the air-raid reporting center down in the carrier formation, and both of the other pickets had some amphibious craft in their area to add extra firepower. I wondered why we didn't.

I went out to the bridge wing. Coming from the red-lighted CIC I was still a bit night-blind, but there definitely was a moon. To make matters worse, there was phosphorescence in our wake, a phenomenon I hadn't seen since the Philippines campaign. Nothing like having a green arrow pointing right at you wherever you went. I was tempted to have the OOD just put the rudder over three degrees and cut a big circle in the sea. I'd been told the Japs had done just that at Midway, putting their carriers into a circle to make it impossible for torpedo-bombers to line up a shot. Unfortunately for them, the circling tactic made it easy for a dive bomber to predict where the ship would be in the time it took for the bomb to reach the target—all they had to do was look at the wake. I told the OOD I'd be in the captain's sea cabin and he shouldn't wake me unless we caught a raid.