The Commodore

 

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About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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This book is dedicated to the thousands of American
sailors still on duty in the depths of Ironbottom Sound,
off Guadalcanal, in the South Pacific.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to acknowledge and highly recommend James D. Hornfischer's book
Neptune's Inferno,
which inspired me to create a novel about a destroyer commander from that period of the Navy's Pacific war.

 

PART ONE

THE MAKEE-LEARN

 

ONE

USS
John B. King,
Guadalcanal

The sound-powered phone mounted above his rack squeaked.

No-o-o, he moaned. Too early. His eyelids felt like they were glued together.

A second squeak, slightly more emphatic. With his eyes still closed, he groped for the handset, pressed the button, and said, “Captain.” Croaked was more like it.

“Good morning, Captain, Ensign Belay, junior officer of the deck, here,” said an annoyingly bright voice. “The
Frisco
's coming in.”

Frisco,
he thought, ordering his right eye to open. It refused. The heavy cruiser
San Francisco
. She'd been the flagship during the big dustup last night. Everyone was wondering how the cruisers had fared this time. Hopefully better than the first time they had gone up against Jap cruisers out in the waters around Savo Island.

“How's she look?”

“Beat up, sir,” the JOOD said. “Especially up in the pilothouse, flag bridge area. Somebody worked 'em over pretty good.”

“Somebody,” he thought, would be the Japanese cruiser formation known as the Tokyo Express.

He sighed. The damned Japs were still the masters of the night fight, them and their horrendous Long Lance torpedoes.

“She under her own power?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, but there's no waterline showing, and her forwardmost turret doesn't look right. Pointed over the side instead of centerlined. It also looks like they're doing a water washdown topside, for some strange reason.”

“They're probably washing debris, blood, and human body parts over the side, Mister Belay.”

He could actually hear the JOOD gulp at that. Ensign Brian Belay, God love him. The jokes had been endless. He reminded himself once again to stop picking on the ensigns. “I'll be up,” he said. “But I need some coffee, please.”

“Right away, Cap'n.”

He hung up the Bakelite handset and finally convinced his right eye to open. His cabin didn't look any different. Sixteen feet long, seven feet wide, a gray steel bureau with drawers, a tiny closet for hanger gear, and a built-in desk. The bed folded back into the bulkhead and became a couch. One desk chair. One porthole, dogged shut. A tiny head forward with a shower, steel sink, and steel commode. The cabin had been carpeted when the ship was first commissioned, but the carpeting had been ripped out back in Pearl when they took off all the nonessential combustibles.

He'd hit the sack well after midnight still in his uniform, which hadn't done its military bearing any good. He had managed to get his sea boots off. Well, mostly off. They were both still on the end of the bed. With two eyes open now he looked at his watch. Zero five thirty. Reveille in a half hour. He tried to shake the cobwebs out of his brain. He'd once entertained the quaint notion that once he became the captain, he might get to sleep in from time to time. Fat chance, especially these days.

The ship, USS
John B. King
—
his
ship, he reminded himself—was supposed to chop to the Guadalcanal cruiser group at noon today, which meant he'd probably be taking a boat ride once the flagship anchored. If he was going to see the admiral, he needed a shower and a clean, pressed set of khakis. He wondered if there was fresh water available. Even his brand-new destroyer barely distilled enough fresh water for a day's consumption by a crew of 330, and that was only
after
the boiler feed-water tanks had been topped off.

He swung out of the bed, pushed it back up into the bulkhead, and headed for the shower, recalling the sweet-mannered Marine captain back during plebe summer yelling “Aw-
right,
maggots, off your dead asses and on your dying feet!” at every reveille. And then blowing a trumpet over the amplified announcing system. Sixteen years ago. No—that's when he'd graduated.
Twenty
years ago, when he'd been a brand-new plebe.

Great God, he thought, he was truly getting old. But: in command, and in command of USS
John B. King,
DD-711, a brand-new, 2,100-ton, Fletcher-class destroyer, no less. He was one of only six commanders from his class in command in this year of our Lord 1942. He smiled at the thought of what his superior brethren back at the Boat School would have thought of that. Sluff Wolf? In
command
? No way in hell, that's what they would have thought. Showed them.

His real name was Harmon Wolf. He was a Naval Academy graduate from the class of 1926. His parents were both from the Iron Range territory of Minnesota. His father had been a full-blooded Red Lake Chippewa who drove the giant ore trucks from the taconite open-pit mines to the railhead. His mother was the daughter of an Irish family who'd emigrated to the United States from Canada. Since the little town he'd grown up in was adjacent to the Red Lake reservation, his father had insisted that he spend time on the reservation learning about his Indian heritage. His mother tried equally hard to enmesh young Harmon in the clutches of the Roman Catholic Church. When he'd finally submitted to the coming-of-age ceremony on the reservation, he'd been given the Indian name of Wolf Who Walks in Smoke. Neither of his parents could quite figure that one out, and young Harmon had later come to believe that it had been his paternal uncle's idea of a joke, the smoke an oblique reference to the Catholic High Mass tradition of the priest walking down the main aisle swinging a censer. His uncle was the tribe's Mide, which loosely translated to Medicine Man, although he was also a fourth-degree member of the tribe's Midewiwin and thus one of the most powerful mystical councillors.

The young Wolf did well in school, excelling in mathematics and becoming something of a star on the school's football team as a kicker. His success at school was the result of his mother's Irish heritage and her conviction that education was the best and probably the only way to keep her son out of the taconite pits of the Mesabi Range. That notion was strongly reinforced when Harmon's father overturned an ore truck crossing a river bridge during a rainstorm. They eventually found the truck, but not the driver. Without his father's income, Harmon and his mother moved onto the reservation as wards of the tribe, and in particular his uncle, the Mide. Having been to the white man's school for several years, Harmon was more than a little skeptical of all the mysterious ceremonies and secret signs surrounding his uncle. His mother, ever practical, told him to be politely respectful and to keep his mouth shut.

The contrast between Harmon's academic achievements and those of the rest of the reservation children led to a scholarship to Saint John's University, northwest of the Twin Cities. During his first year there the country went into a sharp depression and he began to wonder what he would do after college. When two military recruiters showed up on campus extolling the good deal offered by the two service academies—four years of college for free—he jumped at it and went after an appointment to both the Naval Academy and West Point. He made the cut for both, but gained only a third alternate appointment. Since all he knew about West Point was that there was a mountain nearby called Storm King, and since he'd had enough of cold dark mountains, he concentrated on the Navy appointment. When the principal appointee and the first two alternates to Annapolis failed their physical exams, Harmon got the nod.

He had no problem passing the physical. He wasn't very tall, only five-eight, but he was built like a steel fire hydrant, all chest and shoulders, and somewhat bandy-legged, like his father. He was undoubtedly the homeliest candidate the entrance examining board had ever seen, with deeply tanned skin, spiky black hair, a huge nose, piercing black eyes, pronounced cheekbones, and a downturned, almost scowling mouth.
He
didn't know he was scowling—that was just his face. He was very strong, having worked as a choker setter for a logging firm in the north woods every summer during high school. Thanks to his mother he'd been an avid reader since childhood and thus had an exceptional vocabulary, but his physical appearance made him stand out from the almost homogeneous stream of young, white, middle-class men flowing through the physical exam center.

His prospective classmates didn't know quite what to make of him, and there were certainly racial underpinnings to how they looked at him. Harmon knew all about that, having taken quite a bit of racial crap from white kids in the town. His uncle had taught him how to fold into himself when the taunts came. He would hunker down, settle his face into a cold mask, condense his body into a posture that hinted at explosive rage, and then lock those obsidian eyes on the biggest and noisiest of his tormentors. Just as his uncle had predicted, that pose made anyone picking on him suddenly uneasy. The admission docs passed him, but without much enthusiasm. The full admissions board noted his math score on the academy entrance exam plus his record of athletic ability, and he was in.

His name at the academy was simply Harmon Wolf, the mystical Indian name having been set aside by the academy's entrance examination board with much rolling of eyes. Some of his classmates joked that Wolf must have been the inspiration for the so-called buffalo nickel, and even he had to admit the resemblance. In those days, as now, it was important that every midshipman eventually acquire his academy nickname. There were, of course, complicated and deeply traditional rules about that. If a midshipman named William dated or eventually became engaged to a woman named Mary, for instance, then her nickname became Billy and
his
nickname became Mary. All Gibsons became Hoot. Anyone with an obviously German name was called Dutch.