Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "We've got a tradition in the Navy—of talking back. Trying, at least once, to change the orders."

  "I'm not in the Navy any more."

  "You're still in it. That's why we're having this conversation."

  "I'm working for an Army general. Who's done a lot more for me than anyone in the Navy ever has."

  McKay sighed. "I can't tell you what to do, Duke. I can only tell you I don't like it."

  Choices. Was he making one by not telling this young man, his former pupil whose arrogant style concealed a grudging respect for him, to refuse to kill thirty thousand civilians? For a moment dread filled Arthur McKay's soul. Did mere knowledge involve him in this stupendous decision? Could he take legitimate refuge in the chain of command, in the comforting fact that he was not supposed to know anything about this weapon? It was obvious Duke Pearce half wished he would tell him to refuse to obey his orders. But he also wished, yes, even visibly hungered for reassurance.

  Even if he convinced him, would it change anything? Someone else would arm the bomb. Duke Pearce's career would join Arthur McKay's in the Navy's junk heap of hopes and promises.

  There was another even more demoralizing thought. Were they all, as members of the armed forces, as Americans, part of this decision, whether they chose to be or not? Whether their ignorance remained total or their knowledge as complete as Duke Pearce's? Were they a people in the sight of God, like the Israelites of the Old Testament?

  The captain did not know. He was in a moral world beyond his experience, if not beyond his fears. Suddenly the Jefferson City was voyaging into history and beyond it, along the horizon of eternity. Softly, sadly, he repeated his last words.

  "I can only tell you I don't like it."

  "I don't like it either," Duke Pearce said. "But you do a lot of things you don't like in a war."

  Across the Pacific the Jefferson City pounded at flank speed. In the engine rooms and fire rooms, Oz Bradley and his men fretted over their turbines and boilers, shifting the burden whenever a gauge warned them of fatigue. On their first day out, the captain had visited them with his mysterious passenger, Captain Pearce. He had told them how much he was depending on them to set a speed record to Tinian. Pearce had spent the rest of the day with the black gang, discussing ways to improve the engines' performance. Everyone decided he was their sort of guy. He loved machinery.

  As the Jefferson City approached the submarine net at the mouth of Pearl Harbor, Navigator Marse Lee emerged from his sanctum behind the pilothouse. "We've just set a world's record for a ship sailing between San Francisco and Hawaii," he said. "The old record was seventy-nine hours. We've done it in seventy-eight and a half"

  Captain McKay passed the information to the crew. "Balls," roared Flanagan, who had bet ten dollars on the anchor pool. Marty Roth, who had the mathematical brain to figure out the probability of an early arrival, won.

  At Pearl, they stopped only long enough to refuel. They were back at sea, pounding west again, before the end of the day. Homewood was wistful. "I was gonna visit one of them little Chinese girls on River Street," he said. "Behave myself too."

  "Sure," Flanagan said, razzing him as usual.

  "You gonna marry that girl?" Homewood said. Flanagan had introduced him to Martha when they drove down from Seattle. They had spent the night at Homewood's Long Beach apartment.

  "I hope so."

  "You can't go to Annapolis if you're married."

  "I don't want to go to Annapolis, Boats."

  "Jesus Christ, I ain't surprised. You've turned into a fuckin' yeoman in front of my eyes."

  Homewood was referring to the time Flanagan spent editing and writing the ship's paper. It appalled the boatswain to see a sailor he liked pounding a typewriter.

  "The hell I have. Give me a knot. Any knot."

  Homewood pulled a piece of line from his pocket. "Carrick bend."

  Flanagan bent the line into a figure eight.

  "Timber and a half hitch."

  He looped the line over the railing outside main forward, snaked it through two loops and flipped it over the rail in one large reinforcing loop.

  "You got a great future in the Navy. I know it."

  "Too much regimentation for me, Boats. I'm a free spirit."

  "Aw, bullshit. I got that line from Peterson. What'd he ever do with his fuckin' freedom except get into trouble? You're goin' the same way, I can see it."

  The aerographer joined them with his balloon. Homewood drew him into the argument. "You're stayin' in, ain't you, Eric?"

  "Goddamn right," Eric said as the balloon soared into the blue sky. "The minute this war ends, the fucking country is going to nosedive into another depression. You don't have to worry about that in the Navy."

  "That settles it," Flanagan said. "I'm going to become a stockbroker. When you predict disaster, I know there's nothing to worry about."

  "What about the typhoon?" the prophet indignantly demanded.

  "You've got to get lucky once in your life."

  "What do you think's in that goddamn coffin amidships, Eric?" Homewood asked.

  Eric shrugged. "Maybe it's for the body of Halsey's aerographer," Flanagan said. "While we were batik in the States, he sailed them into another typhoon."

  Homewood gazed up at Eric's dwindling balloon, then stared gloomily at the timber and a half hitch on the rail. "Wise guy," he said.

  He left Flanagan there feeling like a crumb.

  He still did not like it, Arthur McKay thought as he watched a half dozen admirals and Army Air Force generals swarming onto his quarterdeck at Tinian. They congratulated him for his swift passage, but they pumped Duke Pearce's hand with far more enthusiasm. McKay did not like the greedy anticipation in their smiles. They were too cocky, too eager to get on with the business of the bomb. The idea of advising Pearce to walk out on the project swiftly became ridiculous.

  Over the side, using their seaplane crane, went the coffin. The cylinder was lowered into another boat. Pearce held out his hand. "Thanks for the transportation, Art.”

  "Good luck."

  "I'll need all of that I can find."

  In an hour, the Jefferson City was under way for Guam, CINCPAC's new headquarters. Later in the day, they stood into Apra's oval harbor. What now? McKay wondered. Would they even bother to send them to the war zone? Those grins on the faces of the brass at Tinian made him think the war really was about to end.

  McKay went ashore in his gig and reported to CINCPAC. His classmate Byron Maher, still a captain thanks to Ernie King's unrelenting son-of-a-bitch code, invited him to lunch with Admiral Spruance. They sat on an airy veranda and ate Spruance's usual meal—salad and soup. The admiral looked as spare and fit as ever. He liked the news that the Jefferson City had broken the speed record to Pearl Harbor. "I must mention that to Chester, so he can put it in his next letter to King."

  The admirals were still feuding.

  Spruance told him there was no point in having the cruiser sit in Apra Harbor. She might as well join the Fifth Fleet, which was operating off captured Okinawa. "You'll have to go to Leyte for refresher training," he said. "The staff and I will be moving to Manila soon. We can pick you up there."

  "What are you planning these days?" McKay asked. "The invasion or the surrender of Japan?"

  "A little of both," Spruance said warily.

  "No one's told me anything," McKay said. “But I gather we're going to drop something awfully heavy on them."

  Spruance's normally impassive face convulsed. "Pearce flew over from Tinian last night to show us the pictures. I think it's monstrous! I'd rather lose four hundred ships than drop it!"

  Byron Maher looked appalled. In his old-womanish chief-of-staff way, he perpetually worried about his boss getting into trouble. "Admiral, those opinions simply can't be ... stated."

  "I know it. They won't be. Except to people I trust."

  After lunch, Captain McKay strolled down to the Naval Operating Base near the harbor and asked to see the
convoy and routing officer. He was a pleasant young lieutenant junior grade, with a desk awash in papers. They discussed what route the Jefferson City would take to Leyte and the speed at which she would travel. McKay quickly discovered he did not have much choice. The top speed was fifteen knots, to conserve oil. The route, Course Peddle, was practically a straight line.

  "What about escort?" McKay said.

  "I don't think there's one available," the lieutenant said. "Could you inquire? We don't have any sonar gear on a cruiser.”

  "I know that, sir," the lieutenant said.

  He telephoned the office of the admiral in command of the Marianas. "Is there an escort available for a cruiser going to Leyte?"

  "Not necessary," said a gravel voice on the other end of the phone.

  The lieutenant glowered at the phone. "They treat us like shit over there," he said. "Excuse my French, sir. The policy is pretty set, Captain. That's MacArthur's Navy in the Philippines, and we don't send any escorts, because the bastards don't send them back. We spend more time fighting them than we do the Japs. Anyway, there haven't been any serious submarine contacts in the waters between here and there for months."

  "Okay," McKay said. Having decided it was not his job to order the President around, he was not about to try to change the way General MacArthur and the Navy had divided up the Pacific.

  Twenty-eight hours later, the Jefferson City was steaming toward Leyte on Course Peddie. At 2300 hours McKay went up to the bridge to have a last look around before going to sleep. The sky was overcast, with only a slice of a moon showing through the clouds. The day had been uneventful. One or two contacts with submarines had been reported by nearby merchant ships. They were periscope sightings, a not unusual phenomenon. Sailors on merchant ships seemed to specialize in seeing periscopes. So did their captains. In three years of war, the Jefferson City had received at least five hundred such reports. No one ever paid any attention to them.

  During the day, the ship had been zigzagging, standard procedure in a war zone. When darkness fell, and visibility under the clouds sank to minimum levels, McKay had told the officer of the deck he could quit zigzagging, which was a useless maneuver in his opinion, anyway. If a submarine was lurking out there, a zigzag course might carry you toward rather than away from it.

  The one thing he did not like about their course was the speed. Traveling at fifteen knots, the ship could be overtaken by a submarine. If CINCPAC had let her clip along at close to flank speed, only incredible luck could give a submarine a shot at them. The sub would have to be sitting right on their course, a one in ten thousand chance in an ocean as big as the Pacific.

  Commander Moss was the officer of the deck. The weather was deteriorating, the barometer falling. The sea was choppy, almost rough. "Anything happening that I should know, Ed?" McKay asked.

  "Not a thing, Captain. I just checked with CIC. They're as bored as we are."

  "In that case, you better needle the lookouts every half hour."

  "Aye, aye,_Captain."

  "Where are the night orders?"

  The quartermaster of the watch handed him the documents, prepared, as usual, by Navigator Marse Lee. McKay signed them without reading a line. It was the kind of routine that made a captain feel good. It demonstrated the mutual trust between him and his men.

  "Captain," Moss said as McKay was leaving the bridge, "was that stuff we brought out to Tinian bacteriological warfare?"

  “No.”

  "I'm glad to hear that. Good night, Captain."

  Back in his cabin, McKay wrote a letter to Mildred Meade, thanking her for "persuading" Rita to come to California. Only the truest of friends, which you will remain forever in my heart, would have done it.

  He was turning into a sentimental slob.

  Horace Aquino came in to ask him if he would like a cup of tea or some broth. The steward talked excitedly about getting to Manila at last. Only one thing troubled him. He did not have the right to wear a chief petty officer's uniform. Chief mess stewards had gray, inferior-looking uniforms. "I have served in the American Navy for twenty-five years, Captain. Why won't they let me wear the same uniform as other men with such long service?"

  "Write to Admiral King about it. I'll give you his address tomorrow."

  Aquino departed. McKay pondered the painting of the Chinese traveler for a moment. He turned out the light and lay down in his bunk. Ten seconds later, a tremendous explosion tore through the Jefferson City. McKay knew instantly it was a torpedo in the bow. He sprang out of his bunk. His feet were barely on the deck when a second, more terrible blast ripped into her amidships. The shock of the second explosion seemed to rush like a terrific jolt of electricity up the ship's steel frame into the captain's body. His head snapped back; he felt bones break in his neck. He was flung to the deck as if a violent hand had gripped him by the throat. Around him bulkheads buckled, beams crashed down, trapping him in a maze of wreckage.

  On the bridge, Edwin Moss stared in disbelief at the sheet of red-yellow flame that rose above the bow. My fault, he thought. My responsibility. The shock wave hurled him against the bulkhead. Half the men around him were knocked to the deck.

  The second explosion was much more violent and more deadly. For eighteen months Moss had spent much of his waking hours thinking about ways to preserve the Jefferson City if a torpedo struck her. He knew exactly where she was most vulnerable—amidships, where the second torpedo had hit. In his mind's eye he saw tons of water rushing into fire rooms and other compartments that would fatally destroy the ship's metacentric balance, already too low from the extra guns on her deck.

  For a half minute after the second explosion, there was total silence. The only sounds were the rush of the sea, the throb of the turbines. The talker staggered to his feet and Moss said, "Get Damage Control." There were damage control parties standing regular watches in five parts of the ship.

  "Everything is dead on the sound phones, sir," the talker said.

  "Stop the engines," Moss said to the engine telegrapher.

  The sailor shoved the annunciator handle to stop. "I don't get a response, sir," he said.

  The Jefferson City continued to churn ahead through the moonless, starless darkness. Moss knew tons of water were gushing into the smashed bow. "Go below and pass the word, `All hands topside,'" he ordered the messenger.

  From deep in the ship emanated the most chilling sounds Moss had ever heard. A weird combination of groans and shrieks. "Where's the captain?" he asked, amazed that McKay had not yet reached the bridge.

  "I'll go get him," said Ensign Brownmiller, the junior officer of the deck.

  He was back in thirty seconds. "He's trapped in his cabin. The explosion buckled the hatches on both sides. He says he's hurt. He can't move."

  The ship was beginning to list to starboard, the bow plunging deeper and deeper into the dark sea. "Get some shipfitters up there. We've got to get the captain out of that cabin," Moss said.

  He sent the boatswain's mate of the watch to the radio room with orders to send out an SOS. He told the engine telegrapher to go below and order everyone out of the fire rooms and engine rooms.

  George Tombs appeared on the bridge. "Where's the captain?" he said. "I recommend we abandon ship."

  On the main deck, Flanagan tied the straps of his kapok life jacket with trembling fingers. It could not be happening. Torpedoes, their old enemies from the Solomon Islands. Torpedoes, not kamikazes.

  The Jefferson City shuddered and groaned again. He had never heard such unearthly sounds. "She's finished," Homewood said. "That's the good spirits givin' up on her. I can't understand it. I was sure the captain's joss'd get us through somehow. I thought maybe we'd take a couple more kamikazes, but never this."

  "What do we do?" Flanagan asked. He was a raw recruit again. So were the rest of F Division, those who had gotten out of the compartment after the second torpedo hit.

  "Start cuttin' away that life raft," Homewood said, pointing to the raft on turret tw
o. "We're gonna need anything that can float pretty soon."

  When the torpedoes hit, Harold Semple was in the Combat Information Center writing a movie script. It starred an enormously attractive over-the-hill female star of the 1920s and a young handsome idealistic matinee idol of the '30s. In his head, Semple was the faded queen and Montgomery West was the idol.

  If you knew the truth about my past, would you love me? the queen murmured.

  Love makes the truth irrelevant, the idol said.

  The blasts blew Semple across the compartment and left him lying on his back in a welter of paper and shattered typewriters and radar screens. Whizzer Wylie was a few feet away making small whimpering noises. Semple's ears rang like a church bell was clanging inside his head. He tried to pick up Wylie, but he was too entangled with the equipment. Semple stumbled into the passageway in search of help. A figure loomed up in the dull red glow of the battle lamps. It was Jerome Wilkinson.

  Semple had not spoken to him in months. Now terror swept away all his resolutions. "Jerry," he said, "are we going down?"

  "There ain't nothin' left below decks forward. The whole fuckin' compartment went underwater in ten seconds. I was the only guy that got out."

  "There's a man trapped in here. Help me get him topside."

  "Fuck him. There ain't time to help anybody. You better get yourself a life preserver."

  It was horrible. But Wylie was probably dying anyway. Fate, blind ruinous fate was thrusting Semple into the Great Ape's arms again. Frantically, he flung himself against Wilkinson's chest. "Don't leave me, Jerry. I've always loved you—"

  Wilkinson laughed. "You lyin' little shitheel."

  "Help me, Jerry. Help me and you'll have me forever, I swear it."

  "Come on. We got about sixty seconds to get off this fuckin' scow.

  Montgomery West had been sitting in the wardroom watching and listening to Lieutenant MacComber, Chaplain Bushnell, and Dr. Cadwallader playing bridge with a new ensign just out of Annapolis. MacComber was giving him his usual line about the Academy being a waste of time. Bob Mullenoe sat nearby making acrid remarks about Southern disloyalty.