The Commodore (33 page)

Hollis stared at him for a second and then told the yeoman to strike that last comment. Then he said he needed to speak to the captain in private. The yeoman finished typing, gathered up his equipment, and stepped out.

“I heard a story you left that formation just before the other three destroyers got hit,” Hollis said. “Is that true?”

“I did. I knew Long Lances were coming, based on the Japs' maneuvers.”

“Weren't you engaging with guns at that point?”

“We were, but when you think about it, we weren't contributing very much, not compared to eighteen battleship guns. We were tethered, really. Never allowed to use our biggest weapons, our own torpedoes. When Lee opened fire, the targets were still way out of our torpedo range.”

“Have you thought that maybe that's why he kept you tethered, as you put it? If he let you guys haul out and make a torpedo attack, he would have had to wait for you to clear, and thus give away his range advantage?”

“He could have let us go make a torpedo attack as soon as we gained radar contact. Run out, let the torpedoes fly and then get out of the way so that the big dogs could eat. I did that with cruiser formations a couple of times with pretty good success.”

“Until they figured it out.”

“Until they figured it out, yes, but you know what? On that night with Admiral Lee, my slipping off the leash did not interfere one bit with Lee's line of fire, and I was able to recover hundreds of our people after Lee sailed away. Even Halsey thought that was a good thing.”

“You met with Admiral Halsey?”

“I did. We even had a drink. Captain Browning was outraged, I think.”

Hollis grunted. “So would you consider yourself a protégé of Admiral Halsey?”

“
Me?
Hell, no. I doubt he even remembers my name.”

“Halsey remembers everything and everyone,” Hollis said. “That's why he's the guy in charge now. But that's not why I asked.”

Sluff raised his eyebrows in anticipation.

“I asked because I think, given this background, you are going to need some protection, Captain. You have some enemies on the SOPAC staff. I think they want to take the results of your last night fight and hang you out to dry. They'll call it
your
night fight because your boss got killed, or at least that's how they'll try to frame it.”

“Frame,” Sluff said, realizing he was getting really tired now. “Interesting choice of words.”

“Calling it like I see it,” Hollis said. “Didn't say it was fair.”

“Well, I'll tell you, they, whoever ‘they' are, can't do anything to me that comes close to the stuff I saw happen that night or on Kalai Island,” Sluff said. “I came within five feet of being eaten alive by a Jap patrol dog. No staff pukes up at SOPAC ever went through something like that.”

Hollis nodded, sniffed, and stood up. “As a fairly successful ‘staff puke,'” he said, “I need to remind you that they can make life truly miserable for you—but only if you let them.”

Sluff suddenly realized his mistake: Hollis was a staff officer up at SOPAC. He felt his face getting red.

Hollis grinned at him. “Relax. You've come awfully far, awfully fast. That breeds resentment in the Old Guard. You have to remember, before the Japs hit Pearl, promotion was a matter of living long enough and not blotting your copybook, as the Brits like to say. Upstarts like you—”

He put up his hand as he saw Sluff's reaction to the word “upstart.”

“Upstarts like you are going to win this war,” he continued. “Halsey wants brawlers. Officers who, when cornered, come out like a mad dog and go right for the face of their tormentors. Here's my advice: I'll turn in my ‘informal' report. Browning and his cronies will indulge in some professional grinding of teeth. They may even ‘lose' it. You, on the other hand, need to get in front of Halsey and tell your side. He's in Pearl now, meeting with Nimitz, but he'll be back in a couple of days.”

“How in the world can I do that?” Sluff asked.

“Halsey comes up here to the hospital once a week. He walks the wards in full regalia, talks to the wounded. Tells them he appreciates their sacrifices. That he's going to make sure they're well taken care of. All that bluff and bluster, and yet here he is, like their grandfather, giving a shit. It's magic—a little touch of Harry in the night, so to speak. Find out when he's coming, and get in front of him.”

Sluff took a deep breath. “The fact is, Captain Hollis, that it really was
my
plan,
my
tactic, that got everyone killed. Maybe I should just give this up and go home.”

Hollis gave him a strange look. “Your call, Commodore.” Then he left.

Sluff sat back and wondered if indeed any of this political plotting and scheming was worth it. How many sailors were drowned because he'd been just a bit too sure of himself, a little cocky, maybe, telling the new admiral how to do this thing, how to beat the Japs. Then he realized something: Hollis had called him Commodore.

 

THIRTY-ONE

Nouméa Field Hospital

The next day his two doctors came by again on their morning rounds. They told him that the large bandage on his head would be coming off, to be replaced with something that looked less like a half turban. They confirmed that he could get around as long as he was having no serious pain from the surgery. As they were leaving, the older doctor told Sluff that yet another captain over at SOPAC headquarters had called, inquiring if he could have visitors.

“Remember his name?” Sluff asked. “Hollis, maybe?”

“No. Brown, I think. Browning. Captain Browning. Said he was the chief of staff.”

“Can't wait,” Sluff said. The doc caught the sarcasm.

“You want, I can turn that off with a phone call,” he said.

Sluff waved him off. “No, I've been expecting this. Time to get it over with.”

The bandage people showed up at 0900 to take Sluff to a room adjacent to the operating suite, where they undid the mess on his head, cleaned things up with something that felt like gasoline, and then remounted a new bandage that had to be three pounds lighter. When he looked in a mirror, he could see the glint of the steel plate on the side of his head through some of the gauze. It was much bigger than he'd anticipated—“plate” was an appropriate word. He noticed that the fuzz of hair growing back was definitely white now. If that kept up he was going to look as old as he felt.

“Can I touch it?” he asked. “The plate?”

“Yes, sir,” the corpsman replied. “It's harder than your own skull. It's the sutures you gotta be careful with.”

“People always said I had a hard head,” Sluff said. “Knucklehead, that was the word.”

The corpsmen grinned, and then one asked if he was really an Indian. Sluff said he was.

“Knew it,” the corpsman said. “There were a buncha guys off the destroyers that got sunk when the battleships went at it. They were talking about one skipper who dodged all those torpedoes and came back for 'em once the heavies bailed. Said he was an Indian, with the biggest—uh.”

Sluff laughed out loud. “The biggest damn nose they'd ever seen since Mount Rushmore, right?”

“Uh, yes, sir, sorry, sir, I didn't—”

“It's okay, corpsman,” Sluff said, with a grin. “And thanks for lightening up the bandage.”

He and his cane thumped back to his room, where he showered, now that the turban was gone, and then tried to decide what to wear for the meeting with Browning. Uniform? Or hospital gear? Then he realized his uniforms were at the bottom of Ironbottom Sound. The one he'd been wearing when
Barrett
capsized was surely long gone into the trash. He got out some clean cotton pajamas, a cotton robe, and then got into his hospital bed.

He touched that steel plate again. It didn't hurt, of course, but the perimeter where they'd sewn it into his skull was really sore. He tried to examine the area of his brain underneath the plate, but felt nothing. He closed his eyes. That felt really good.

Sometime later, he woke up to a knock on his door, and then Tina came in. Her expression said: Look out for this one. Behind her, standing in the doorway like a statue, was his nemesis, the eternally choleric Captain Browning.

“Captain, you have a visitor,” Tina announced, acting as if she didn't know him. “Is that going to be all right?”

Browning's severe expression must have worried her, he thought. “Of course,” he said. “Why would it not be?”

Tina nodded and then backed out as Browning came in, took off his cap, and then sat down stiffly in the room's only chair. Sluff waited for him to speak.

“Your doctors tell me that you're making good progress,” Browning said, his tone of voice neutral. “You are fortunate to have survived, from the looks of that.”

“That was just the beginning,” Sluff said. “Have you seen Captain Hollis's report yet?”

“Rear Admiral (select) Hollis gave me a verbal debrief, with a written report to follow,” Browning replied, correcting him. “I have some staff people trying to conform what you told him to what else we know about the engagement, which, admittedly, isn't much. He said you think the Japs set an ambush of their own this time.”

“Entirely possible,” Sluff said. “Heavy cruisers rounding that point at thirty-six knots were certainly not in my plan.”

“Interesting choice of words, Captain,” Browning said. “
My
plan.”

Sluff thought he heard someone in the adjoining bathroom, making cleaning-up noises. “I went through that with Hollis,” Sluff said. “The admiral and I had talked it over and he told me to run the tactic again. The first half seemed to work—we fired torpedoes on a radar solution and things went boom in the night at the appropriate time.”

“Then the cruisers showed up.”

“Yes, they did.”

“Your original targets were a light cruiser and some destroyers, correct?”

“We never saw them, but that's what we guessed from the radar returns.”

“But instead of executing what one of your people called your Comanche circle, you turned away from them and headed west. Put another way, you broke off the action and tried to escape.”

“Not exactly,” Sluff said, realizing now where Browning was going with this. “As I explained to Captain Hollis, we were between a rock and a hard place once the additional cruisers arrived and their scout plane started dropping flares. We couldn't go north or south without becoming a Long Lance sandwich, so I elected to run the squadron right at the more dangerous enemy, the heavy cruisers. They could of course fire torpedoes, but their destroyers couldn't without hitting their own ships.”

“And yet, in the end, they sank four of the tin cans in this fight and
Providence.
”

“
Providence
gave herself away before she was supposed to. She wasn't supposed to start shooting when she did, but because she did, the Jap heavies saw her.”

“We only have your word for that, seeing that Admiral Tyree did not survive the engagement.”

“What's your point, Captain?” Sluff asked with a sigh.

“My point is that there are people at headquarters who are saying you ran, just like you ran when the shooting started the night of the battleship action.”

“Then how did that Jap admiral get killed?”

Browning's face reddened. “How do you know about that?”

“Captain Hollis told me.”

“Rear Admiral (select) Hollis was speaking out of school, then,” Browning said. “That is very sensitive intelligence information.”

“We weren't running
from
the enemy, Captain Browning. We were running
at
him. And not just my flagship, but
all
of my destroyers. If we were running away, we'd have turned southwest and gone dark. As it was, we drove right at them, shooting the whole time. We were just no match for twenty-odd eight-inch guns. Our five-inch couldn't penetrate their armor, but it could wreck their topside superstructure. Our torpedoes bounced off; theirs didn't. By the way, I would like to meet some of these ‘people at headquarters.' People who weren't there.”

“That is out of the question. You are the senior surviving officer. Your actions are the focus of our inquiries.”

“Inquiries, Captain? Getting a court of inquiry together?”

“What do you think?” Browning snapped. “A light cruiser, four destroyers sunk in return for one Jap cruiser damaged and a destroyer sunk, a second one damaged? While you conveniently went over the side in the middle of it?”

Sluff could barely contain his anger now. “Went over the side? Like I slid out a diving board and executed a perfect swan dive? You are a piece of work, are you not, Browning. You and your ‘people' over at headquarters. Well, bring on your court. I can't wait.”

“You
will
wait, and right here, too. Hollis hasn't turned in his report yet and Admiral Halsey's not back from Pearl. You need to understand something, Captain: You're not in charge of anything right now, if you ever were.”

“Oh, go away,” Sluff said. “I'm not afraid of you. I've seen and done things which would make a guy like you piss his pants. How much combat have you seen from the O-club here in Nouméa? I see now why Hollis made flag and you didn't.”

Browning's face settled into a cold mask. He stood up and put on his brass hat. “You have no idea of who you're fooling with,” he hissed. “We will destroy you.”

Sluff smiled. “You can destroy my career, maybe,” he said. “But not me. By the way, here's something to think about: When
Barrett
got blown in half,
Providence
was still shooting. That means Admiral Tyree was still the boss. Seems to me you're going after the wrong guy. Now get the hell out of my room.”