Torpedo Run (18 page)

As Goldberg and the Preacher broke out the flag and spread it across the foredeck, Goldberg said, "I hope that's a Navy plane. Those Army guys don't know a PT boat from a petunia bed."

"I don't care who he works for. I just want him to see us," the Preacher said.

"Twin-engine bomber," Peter said, studying the plane. "Don't see any rising sun, but it might be there."

"What's his course and altitude?" Archer asked.

"About two eighty and he's
way
up there—ten or fifteen thousand."

Every man aboard except Britches was watching the plane as they stood at the guns, their heads bent back. It looked so unreal up there in the sky. So tiny as it moved along.

"He'll never see us," Stucky told Mitch. "He's too high."

Peter lowered the glasses and was surprised to find Archer sitting in the underway seat abaft the bridge with his eyes closed. Now he opened them and looked up at the plane for a moment. Then Mitch came running up on the bridge. "Why don't we make smoke?" he asked. "Maybe he'd see the smoke."

"With the wind the way it is the smoke would just blow all over us, Mitch. Then he'd never see us," Peter told him.

"I guess you're right," Mitch said and started aft again.

Archer stopped him. "Stand by to make smoke, Mitchell."

Mitch looked from Archer to Peter. "The smoke'll just cover the boat, Adrian," Peter said as quietly as he could.

"I didn't say make smoke. I said to stand by to make smoke," Archer said coldly and closed his eyes again.

The plane came steadily toward them, the faraway droning changing slowly to a soft hammering sound. There were no red meatballs on it and at last Peter could recognize it as an Army patrol bomber.

As it came closer the men left the guns and began to jump around on deck, waving their arms and uselessly shouting.

But the high hammering plane went over them swiftly with no change of altitude and continued toward the northwest.

The noise and movement of the men died and slowed and left them standing there, slowly turning their heads as the plane went away with no sign of having seen them.

And then lazily the plane turned and as it turned it nosed down, peeling down out of the sky and coming back toward them.

"I take back everything I ever said about the Army," Mitch told Stucky. "Wonderful outfit! I'm going to give 'em all a medal."

The plane continued to dive as it straightened out of the turn and was now coming directly at them. Peter estimated from the angle of the dive that the plane would pass over them at about a hundred feet. "Hold the flag up so he can see it!" he yelled down to Goldberg.

The men were yelling again and jumping around in pure joy as the plane came on toward them.

Peter was the first to see the little winking lights along the leading edges of the wings. "Get down! Get down!" he yelled as, across the bright blue water, the little vicious white footsteps raced toward
Slewfoot.

It took the men a few seconds to realize what was happening and, even after they did, they stood a moment longer staring in utter disbelief at the machine-gun bullets striking the water and now seeing the faint lines of the tracers through the sunlight. And then they dived for cover.

Except Goldberg. He stood out on the foredeck, a big, unmissable target and waved the flag, holding out as much of it as he could with his long arms.

The streams of bullets missed
Slewfoot,
slamming past on each side of her. And then the little spinning black barrel dropped out of the bottom of the plane.

Peter watched it coming with a feeling of absolute helplessness. It looked to him as though the bomb was flying horizontally through the air and spinning slowly, but as it came closer and closer it seemed to drop down as though pulled by some magnet in
Slewfoot.

It was all so slow and lazy, the black thing floating down toward the boat, the tin vanes on the end of it making it turn around and around.

The hard hammering roar of the plane smacked down on them for an instant and was gone.

The bomb struck the water with a bright, white splash and then exploded. The sea rose first in a curious, smooth, rounded hump and then that burst open and dirty-colored water gushed upward, hesitated, then curled and fell back on
Slewfoot.

"He's coming back!" Stucky yelled. "Get him! Get him!"

Archer dragged himself out of the seat and screamed at Stucky, "Hold your fire!" Then he swung forward and screamed again, "Hold your fire. Get away from those guns! Wave that flag!"

But the plane was shooting again, the muzzle flashes twinkling like little yellow lights along the leading edges, the bullets again walking toward them in bright splashes across the water.

Goldberg and the Preacher held the flag up as high as they could and waved it as the plane roared toward them, the sound of its engines drowning out everything.

And then Peter heard the Bofors cannon crumping away behind him, heard the clang of the empties hitting the deck. He spun around to see Stucky jammed against the gun as it fired and recoiled, fired and recoiled.

The plane swept close over them, Stucky swinging the gun up, and then it turned suddenly straight down and struck the water.

The impact tore the wings off and broke the fuselage in half. For a moment the empennage stood upright in the water and then slowly sank.

No one came out of the plane.

Archer said, "Have Stucky report to the bridge, Mr. Brent."

"It's too late now," Peter said.

"It's never too late to enforce discipline, Mr. Brent."

Peter climbed slowly down off the bridge and walked slowly aft. Perhaps in the last moments that pilot had seen the flag. Thinking back, it seemed to Peter that in the last few yards of his flight his guns had stopped firing. If only Stucky had held his fire they might have been recognized. Recognized and saved.

But then, he thought, perhaps not. The pilot might have kept on, never seeing the flag, until he hit them and killed them all.

Nobody would ever know.

Stucky was sitting down among the empty shell cases, his back against the gun mount. Mitch was standing back by the smoke generator looking down at Stucky with a curious expression.

As Peter approached he knew that all hands were now thinking the same thing, wondering the same thing. If Stucky had not fired the Bofors, what would have happened?

"Stucky," Peter said, and hated having to do it, "the Captain wants to see you. On the bridge.'
1

Stucky must now be realizing what he had done, Peter thought, as he just sat there against the gun mount. Peter looked over at Mitch, who was still staring down at Stucky. "Well, it was good shooting anyway," Peter said. Then he walked around in front of Stucky and said, "Okay, Stucky. On the bridge."

Stucky's face was gone.

The hot, blazing sun poured down from an empty sky upon an empty sea. Archer, who knew the ritual for burial at sea, said the words as he stood beside the depth charge racks, his face white and strained.

And then Stucky, wrapped in one of the canvas gun covers, slid away from
Slewfoot
and struck the water and was gone.

"All right, men," Archer said, "return to your duties."

For once, Peter thought, the man had had some compassion in his voice. He watched Archer walk slowly forward and go below.

Mitch picked up one of the Bofors empty shell cases and stood for a moment just holding it and looking at it and then, with sudden violence, he flung it away. Peter watched the bright brass case turning end over end through the air until it struck the water with a bright splash and sank, wobbling down through the blue water.

"If Stucky hadn't shot him down, we'd be on our way home now," Mitch said savagely. "Even an Army pilot would have recognized that flag after a while."

"After he'd blown us out of the water," Peter said. "Come on, Sko, let's see what we can do. Mitch, you keep the deck. Try to find us another plane. A Navy one, if you can."

Below, in the engine room, Skeeter and the Professor were already at work clearing away the last of the wreckage made by the exploding shell. Now, with sunlight pouring down through the hatch, things didn't look so hopeless.

But by nightfall Peter realized how hopeless it actually was. While Sko worked on the engines Peter had gone over the side to look at the propeller shafts and jammed rudders. With Mitch and Jason standing shark guard with carbines, he had dived under the boat to find the rudders hopelessly jammed hard over, one propeller gone, the other two frozen in the outboard strut bearings, the shafts badly twisted.

As the sun went down with an almost startling suddenness, Sko climbed wearily up into his tractor seat. Through the open hatch the now dark sky began to twinkle with far-away stars. Peter started to turn on the lights but thought what's the use and sat down on a toolbox and leaned wearily back against the bulkhead.

"The only chance we've got," Sko said in the darkness, "is to pull one of the engines and
get
some new bearings in it. For that we need an A-frame built up on deck. We haven't got an A-frame or anything to make one out of."

"Even if we got an engine running," Skeeter said from his darkness, "what could we turn with it?" "Pull the best shaft," Sko said, "straighten it and put it back. For that we need shallow water so a man can stand up and work on it. What have we got here, Peter?"

"About a thousand fathoms," Peter said, not caring much, for anything over one fathom was too deep.

The Professor went over and turned on the lights. "This is what is known as an academic and footless conversation," he told them as he got out a notebook and studied it. "You said we were drifting north about a hundred miles a day, didn't you, Peter? Okay,
if
we could build an A-frame and
if
we could pull an engine and
if
we could fix the props and rudders in this deep water: it would take
at least
four or five days to do all those things. I figure longer. So what good would it do? We've got enough gas to run"—he looked at his notebook—"three hundred and ten miles on one engine at dead slow. Say we had drifted five hundred miles by the time we could get her under way. We run back three hundred and where are we? Right where we are now—nowhere."

Peter looked past the dim light and up at the stars in the now black sky.

"Any chance of getting some chow out of the Captain?" Skeeter asked him. "That little snack we had at noon isn't holding me."

"I'll see," Peter said, "but I doubt it."

As he went forward, he stopped in his cabin and got the sextant and chronometer, wondering as he did so why he was doing it. What difference did it make where
Slewfoot
was on this limitless ocean.

He went on into the dayroom to find Goldberg feeding Britches some water.

"It's pretty salty," Britches said.

"It's the best we've got," Goldberg told him. "Next time it rains we'll get some good water."

"How you feeling, Britches?" Peter asked.

"Fine," the boy said, "Just fine."

"Don't hurt?"

"Not much, but I sure could use some fresh water."

"There isn't any," Peter said. "But it'll rain pretty soon. It always does."

"I never thought I'd be praying for rain," Britches said.

"Keep it up," Peter said and climbed up on deck. No one was forward, or amidships, or aft. Peter climbed on up to the bridge to find Mitch sound asleep in the canvas chair, his feet up on the tank compartment. Peter woke him up by sliding his feet off so that they flapped down on the deck. "You supposed to be on watch?" Peter asked. "Not me," Mitch said. "Nobody told me I was on watch."

"Who is then?" "Jason or somebody, I guess." Peter handed Mitch the chronometer. "Are you awake enough to read this thing?"

Mitch looked at the chronometer. "Ten-twenty."

"I want it down to split seconds, Mitch."

"What's up, Skipper?"

"I'm not the skipper. Go in the chart house and when I holler 'Mark' write down the time. It's got to be exact, Mitch."

"Exact it will be," Mitch said, getting out of the chair.

Peter hadn't taken a star sight since his days in the school in Rhode Island, and now he found that taking a sight from the moving bridge of a small boat adrift in a restless sea was a lot different from standing on dry land with a professor at your elbow.

He braced himself in the bridge with his knees and elbows and held the sextant up with both hands. For a long time he could not hold a star in the little mirror long enough to bring it down to the horizon, but after a while he caught on. "Mark!" he called out to Mitch in the chart house. Mitch called the time back and Peter read him the angle.

He shot three of the brightest stars he could find and then went into the chart house to work out the sight. It took him more than an hour, but at last he had a tiny triangle penciled in on the chart of the Bismarck Sea. He pointed to it with pride and told Mitch, "That's exactly where we are, Mitch, me boy. Right there." Then he got the dividers and measured off the distance between the star fix and the last dead-reckoning position. "We've moved a hundred and fifty-seven miles since we got hit," he said. "I guess the storm really shoved us for a while."

He got the parallel rulers and laid them across the two positions and then walked the rulers up the chart on the same course, lightly penciling in the line.

The islands of the Bismarck Archipelago form a long, rather narrow horseshoe lying on its side with its open end pointing toward the west. New Guinea forms the southern curve of it, New Britain and its string of westerly islands the northern. At the extreme tip of the northern islands are the Admiraltys.

The penciled line of the course
Slewfoot
was being moved along passed by the last little group of the Admiralty Islands.

Passed them. To the west.

Peter got the dividers and measured over from the penciled line to the dots of the islands.

Twenty-two miles.