Harms way, p.50
Harm's Way, page 50
General Quarters sounded at 0615.
The Rock, who had been standing with his elbows against the rail, half-asleep on his feet, was shaken into consciousness by the klaxon’s bray. For a moment he was assailed by the same sleep-drugged, sweat-drenched sensation which used to grip him after too many hours on Old Swayback’s bridge. He blinked hard. Five hundred yards to starboard Moultrie appeared to be pulsating in an odd fashion, like a large panting dog, and he stared at her for several seconds before he realized that it was an optical illusion caused by his own fatigue.
This was, Torrey told himself angrily, one hell of a way to approach a battle. Seeing mirages. Unnerved. Dead beat.
He called, “Mac!”
Lieutenant McConnel trotted out of the Flag plot where he’d been killing time until the admiral finished his solitary Sabbath communion and evinced a desire for human company.
“Sir?”
The Rock rubbed his eyes. “I’m going below for a quick nap,” he said. “Wake me at 0900.”
“But that’s only three hours,” Mac protested.
“I know. You may have to use dynamite. But wake me.”
“Yes, admiral.”
“Meanwhile, pass The Word to Diadem and Moultrie and the lead destroyer—I want their skippers here for a conference when I get up.”
Torrey reached for the perpendicular ladder that led to the upper deck where his cabin was located. The cold steel bars felt rubbery against his hands. He hoped he’d make his bunk before he blacked out. And when he did, somewhat to his astonishment, he flung himself across the bed and shut his eyes, without bothering to undress. Perversely, then, he couldn’t sleep.
Outside his stateroom, audible through the open port, the operators of the twin-mount five-inch/38 were cursing each other amiably, as gunners are inclined to do when they’re not shooting or cleaning or tinkering; and this small distraction caused him to reflect upon the magnificent companionability of a cruiser’s gun crew. Working together in their cramped steel box, manning the levers and hoists and gears that aim, load, and project the shells, they have little choice but to be comradely, for theirs is the special kinship which comes from knowing that what happens to one happens to all.
It was curious, he mused, that men could ride into battle so calmly and even elegantly in a machine that weighs thousands of tons: some of them writing letters in their private rooms and quietly pausing now and again to study the photographed faces of their wives, or reading philosophy, playing acey-deucy and pinochle, drinking Cokes, eating gedunks, rolling dice, wrestling, yarning, or—as in the case of this five-inch/38 crew—experimenting with fancy new cusswords.
In a few hours the chaplain would wrest them away from these worldly pursuits, pray a bit, and leave them all with a sober awareness that now-we’re-getting-on-with-it-at-last.
Torrey tried to remember who said, “There are no foxholes in the ocean,” but the name wouldn’t come. It was damned true, though. You just kept shooting, and eventually either you or the enemy vanished beneath the waves, because there wasn’t any surrender at sea, either.
He dozed.
What awakened him finally was Old Swayback’s bugler blowing Church Call. He listened a moment to the sad, soft sound, in which was some of the haunting quality of Taps, some of the sweep of Tattoo. Then he arose, went to the washbasin, and doused his face in lukewarm water. Now it was time to tell his captains how they’d fight the Battle of Levu-Vana.
Moultrie crept smoothly alongside Old Swayback, converging on a course that wasn’t quite parallel until only thirty yards of frothy sea separated the two vessels. A chief bosun fired a heaving line whose weighted end was quickly seized by a couple of seamen on the approaching cruiser. They used the thin length of hemp to drag a breeches-buoy across the watery chasm, and then, hand over hand, they hauled Larry Moorian from his sleek and fashionable command to Admiral Torrey’s deplorably outmoded flagship. This maneuver was repeated for Terence Mann, the barbarous master of HMAS Diadem, and finally for youthful Kyle Bannion, commodore of the four destroyers that accompanied Task Unit zebra and of the other workhorse tincans that were presently safeguarding transports, jeep-carriers, and LSTs all over—as he rather bitterly phrased it—mare nauseam.
As each of the three captains was fetched aboard Old Swayback, sputtering from unscheduled duckings, his ship resumed normal steaming formation, briskly and accurately, and quite undisturbed by the temporary loss of her skipper.
Torrey and his staff were waiting for them in the commodious Flag quarters. Discreetly aide-like, Mac occupied a chair placed well behind the circular table in the center of the room. Tuthill and Egan Powell flanked Torrey. Only Clayton Canfil was missing. He’d remained on Gavabutu to prod his coastwatcher network into one last monumental effort to discover what the trifurcated Japanese fleet was up to.
When he perceived his guests’ bedraggled uniforms, Torrey smiled sympathetically. “Mac will pour you gentlemen a spot of coffee.”
“Coffee!” Terence Mann rattled the cups with his cockney roar. “We should’ve met in Diadem, admiral! Then it wouldn’t have been coffee, by God, but dark Barbados rum—the only bloody way to splice the main brace before a man faces shot-and-shell!”
Egan Powell stepped into the breach. “We Yank teetotalers fight all the harder, captain, because we’ve got to win the battle before we can get back to our officers’ clubs for a wee dram.”
“Damned debatable theory,” Mann muttered, aiming a distasteful grimace toward the coffee urn.
The Rock figured they’d adequately observed the niceties. “You all know about Captain Eddington,” he said in a changed voice. “It’s because of his reconnaissance that we’re at sea somewhat sooner than I had planned. We’ll have to complete our strategy in the saddle, so to speak.”
He could, Torrey supposed, have phrased it a lot stronger: lauded Paul Eddington’s heroism, stressed the urgent nature of their impromptu discussions this morning, and solemnly warn them about the perils that lay ahead. But these were intelligent men. Their cognizance of the desperate situation would neither be lessened by understatement, nor improved by hyperbole.
After they’d accorded Eddington a brief silent tribute, Torrey added, “Tuthill, here, is my new chief of staff. He’ll brief you.”
Moorian said, “Congratulations, Tut.”
Tuthill acknowledged him with a succinct nod. “Now, gentlemen, I’ll run through our strategy for Levu-Vana—and your tactical part in the set-up.” As he unfurled his ubiquitous charts, the freshly breveted chief of staff said, “If these seem hastily drawn—and rather ragged—forgive me. They are. Admiral Torrey doesn’t believe in sleep. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find them an adequate rendering of what we propose for the phase immediately following the Skyhook landings.”
Mann cast a startled look at the intricate markings on the map, and then turned to study Torrey, as if he were trying to equate this inscrutable man with the fantastic plan which Tuthill was explaining.
“Bloody well incredible,” he said, showing snaggled teeth in what might have been an admiring grin. “But also a fair dinkum one-way ticket to immortality.”
“I thought,” said Tuthill, “that you Aussies thrive on longshots.” “Ah, captain, we do. We do! But I doubt there’s a bookmaker in Sydney who’d take this one—even at a hundred-to-one odds.”
“Got the wind up, captain?”
The red-faced Australian sat bolt upright in his chair, with a prodigious display of hurt pride. “My dear fellow! You misjudge me. My quarrel’s with those gutless bookies in Sydney.” He fetched out a capacious kangaroo-skin wallet, flung it jauntily onto the table-top, and surveyed his fellow captains. “Matter o’ fact, any of you coves care to cover a bet, I’m offering even money we’ll pull it off!”
“Hell, Terry, I’ll go you one better” Moorian drawled. “I’ll lay you Moultrie against Diadem—and those are pretty goddamn generous terms.”
“Done!”
“What would you do with a Yank cruiser, if you win?” Egan Powell asked dubiously.
Mann chortled. “That cute little toy of Moorian’s? Why, I’ve got thirty thousand acres of bush in the Queensland outback—I’d put wheels on Moultrie and use her to hunt kangaroos.”
Reluctantly Torrey called a halt to the jest. He admired their easy light-heartedness, and he didn’t care if it was real or feigned. It bore out Nelson’s dictum that all men are brothers in the face of the enemy. But Skyhook lay before them, ominous even when contained on a vellum chart, and there was no time left for pleasantries.
“Tomorrow midnight we rendezvous with the amphibious team at Point Able,” he said. “At that same hour the escort carriers will start their run into Lakola Bay, and the battleships should arrive off Beach Red to start their bombardment simultaneously with the air-strike—if their boilers hold up.” He tapped the chart lightly. “The transports, cargo ships, and LSTs all have strict orders to unload and get the hell out...muy pronto...leaving behind only MoTorpRon Charlie and her mothership.”
“I gather we divide forces about then,” Moorian remarked conversationally, the way he might have commented on a peculiar new spice in somebody else’s sauce Béarnaise.
“Yes,” Torrey said, “assuming our coastwatchers on Marate and our final recon flights give us The Word we’re expecting—that the Nips are figuring to bracket the big island.”
They gazed somberly at the map. The crimson line which represented the Japanese separated several hundred miles above Levu-Vana, like a truncated coral snake, and its components wriggled southward toward Pala Passage, which ran between Levu-Vana and Toka-Rota, and thence toward the unimpeded high seas east of Levu-Vana itself.
“How wide is this strait where it bottlenecks into Lakola Bay?” Moorian asked.
“Twenty miles,” The Rock said, “but most of it is uncharted shoal-water. They won’t have more than a dozen miles to maneuver in.”
“And that’s where we ram the cork!”
Torrey nodded. Nobody voiced the thought uppermost in their minds: it was an appallingly delicate cork. It might hold. But on the other hand, it was a damned sight more apt to blow sky-high under pressure from the volatile Jap force, splintering bottle and all. This uncertain stopgap was composed of the two old battlewagons, Moultrie and Diadem, eight destroyers—and sixteen plywood motor torpedo boats. The cork was called Task Group HORATIO, and although it wasn’t clear whether Torrey meant to memorialize Lord HORATIO Nelson in this manner, the name fitted, so they let it go at that.
Off to the right, tentatively, Tuthill had drawn another series of blue lines to indicate the projected whereabouts of a second American force—Task Group JOHNPAUL—during HORATIO’S vigil at Pala Passage. (Obviously The Rock was thinking of the revolutionary captain when he christened this flank of his inadequate armada. Or, they wondered, was he? Perhaps “Paul” subconsciously stood for someone else.) Again, however, the captains preserved respectful silence, waiting for Torrey to speak. Their quietude was enhanced by their sobering discovery of the even scantier composition of Task Group JOHNPAUL: the three paper-skinned CVEs, a half-dozen destroyers, and only Old Swayback to provide fire support against an enemy line that would surely include battleships.
“I’d hazard a guess,” Torrey said calmly, “that the Japs will arrive sometime Wednesday night.”
As a conservative New Englander, not given to wild surmise, The Rock would have based his calculations upon the best available Intelligence reports, they knew, so his guess was probably correct.
“Fortunately,” Moorian observed, “I’ve got one damned fine chaplain on Moultrie.”
Everyone understood his seemingly irrelevant remark. It was already Sunday noon. Approximately sixty hours remained for them to plan, prepare—and pray.
“We Aussies travel light,” Captain Mann said. “Aboard Diadem I am the padre.” His broad pink countenance gleamed with sober pride as he added, “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that your fine hymn ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ was composed by a staunch Church of England man. When the going gets sticky I find it most useful indeed.”
“Do you know the last stanza?” Torrey inquired seriously.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I’d be most obliged if you’d recite it to close this conference—Chaplain Mann.”
The Australian didn’t seem astonished at the request. After the briefest hesitation, he asked them to bow their heads, and then he intoned the verse in his curiously nasal, yet not unpleasing voice:
“O Trinity of love and power!
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour;
From rock tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe’er they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.”
That night the sky cleared, and when the sea turned unexpectedly calm, Max Gottlieb grew emboldened enough to predict decent conditions for D-Day. Task Group zebra drove north-northwestward, now, seeking the invisible mark on the fallow ocean which was labeled Point Able, where the transports and the LSTs would soon be gathering like replete cattle awaiting the herdsman.
From his tall swivel chair on the signal bridge, Torrey peered out at the dark-rushing waters, noting the lucent ivory V that foamed endlessly at the flagship’s prow. They were making damned satisfactory progress, he thought approvingly, and looked upward to confirm Gottlieb’s fair weather promise. But what he saw was the moon half-veiled in a wisp of cloud fabric which seemed to accentuate its soft glow, rendering it almost sensual, like warm flesh glimpsed through black lace.
He turned away, strangely irritated, as he speculated upon what random emotion might have impelled his foolish conceit, and whether others on the quiet bridge viewed this fleshly moon as he did. Then he smiled. It would be amusing to tell Egan Powell about it, and watch his satyr face when this depraved phenomenon was described by the staid and juiceless admiral. But, of course, he couldn’t.
Glancing seaward again, he made out the dim shapes of Moultrie and Diadem, flanking the flagship to port and starboard, and it struck him that this black and soundless ocean had somehow been created for him alone to brood upon, here on the lonely bridge. He felt disembodied: a wraith, an island; a strange and unapproachable man in sweaty khaki, tasting the warm night breeze and listening to the muted sound of voices from the blacked-out Flag plot.
The Rock wore a railroad engineer’s cap which Powell had given him on some frivolous occasion, and now he drew it low across his brow. If he wished to seize forty winks, nobody would be the wiser, for the great-billed headpiece would protect his secret...
Lieutenant McConnel slipped out of the plotting room and walked carefully past the somnolent admiral on his way to the starboard bridgewing. The Old Man wasn’t being very communicative tonight, Mac thought. Even less so than usual. Probably worried about Tuesday. Or their rendezvous with those goddamn slow-moving oat-burners tomorrow. Or the Japs. Only one thing was certain about his taciturnity, Mac knew: The Rock never paid an instant’s tribute to anything personal. His life was Navy. Chop him open and you’d find Diesel oil in his veins and gunpowder in his gizzard.
A silvery glint on the sea caused Mac to glance upward at the moon.
It formed a perfect crescent, with an eyebrow-shaped cloud tipped quizzically above its peak. Suddenly a vagrant memory nagged him, and he frowned in concentration. Funny. He’d seen just such a moon once before, a very long time ago, at Pearl Harbor when Bev was with him. Wasn’t it that last weird night before the blitz? It was. Mac removed his garrison cap to wipe his moist forehead. It was almost midnight. He hated to go below, but he figured he’d better get off a letter to Bev before he caught a little sleep under the steamy airblower. Maybe he’d tell her about this oddball lunar coincidence. She’d get a boot out of the fact that the same moon was shining here, in the godforsaken middle of nowhere, halfway between Gavabutu and Levu-Vana, which had illuminated Pearl Harbor exactly one year ago—on December 6!
There wasn’t much cooking in the wardroom. Bobby Burke, the exec, was lackadaisically rolling dice for dime cigars with the little Irish padre, who deemed this innocent game of chance good practice for the incomparably larger gamble his flock was heading into. Two j.g.’s were shooting a game of cribbage, but they seemed to be gabbing a lot more than they were playing, as if all they really wanted was an excuse for an amiable argument.
Off in one corner of the gloomy compartment the shortwave radio yammered away all by itself, with the dial tuned to Tokyo Rose. As usual, she was bragging about the incipient annihilation of the Yankee fleet; and she was being specific about it, too, for she kept talking about Admiral Rockwell Torrey and how he was finally going to get what he deserved. You had to admit, Mac mused, that Tokyo Rose had a goddamn sexy voice, and when she said “finally” she didn’t mangle her l’s. Most Nips would have said “finarry” like regular comedy Orientals. But not Rosie.
One of the cribbage players called across the wardroom to the chaplain. He wanted to know if the padre aimed to get in a few extra licks on their behalf tonight.
The chaplain’s simian face clouded.
“You’d better restate your own case, son, because if you haven’t done your homework by now, it’s a trifle late.” Then he relented. “However, I am going to have a few words with Him before I hit the sack. I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Mac finished his letter. He’d toyed with a juvenile impulse to toss in a few foreboding hints about their anticipated engagement with the Japs, but he resisted the urge, and after he’d sealed the envelope he felt pretty noble about the whole thing. Bev would simply stew around and worry, and it was always possible the battle would never happen anyhow. These alarums and excursions had a way of evaporating, he’d learned. Belatedly, too, he remembered that his letter would still be sitting right in the ADTAC pouch if they got into a fight, for there weren’t any spare tincans to send back to Mesquite with the mail.
