Sentinels of Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  Then it was over. Just like that: over. I blinked my eyes as I realized Combat was calling me on the bitch-box. I tried to reply, but nothing came out but a squeak. I cleared my throat, hoping no one had heard that, but how could they—we were all deaf. I tried again.

  “Captain, aye.”

  “Radar is showing no contacts,” Jimmy said. “I think we got ’em all. Westfall had one hit his fo’c’sle, but they said there was no real damage.”

  “Very well,” I said. “Now: look out for chapter two—make sure they didn’t have friends at high altitude waiting for us to focus on the low-fliers.”

  “Combat, aye.” I was still trying to gather my wits. I’d never seen a fireworks show like that in my entire Navy career. The concentration of twenty- and forty-millimeter fire from our dozen gunships had made our five-inch fire seem insignificant. I looked at the gyro repeater. We were still headed east, and I assumed we were still at 12 knots.

  We should turn around, I thought, head back toward station, figure out what we were going to do with Westfall. The commodore had some decisions to make. I looked across the pilothouse as the GQ watch standers tried to clear their ears and regain some sense of what was going on. The commodore was still in his chair, but the back half of his head was missing.

  THIRTEEN

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then started swearing.

  “Captain?” someone was saying. “The commodore…”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. Get me damage reports, now.”

  Chief Smith, my JA talker, spoke up. “They didn’t hit us, Captain,” he said. “That last one came in strafing, but…”

  “But what?”

  “It was high, sir. He went over the ship.”

  “I heard what sounded like a riveting gun,” I said. “Maybe not high enough?”

  “Combat, Bridge. Westfall is requesting instructions.”

  The skipper of Westfall was senior to me. Hell, every commander, USN, out here was senior to me. He was really asking the commodore for instructions, not me. Unfortunately, the commodore was no longer with us.

  “Tell him to take the next picket station to the east of us,” I said. “Is that chaff cloud still up?”

  “Yes, sir, but it’s dissipating. I think. We hold no air contacts.”

  “Very well,” I said. “Get Lieutenant Commander Canning out here, please. And the doc.”

  “Sir?”

  “The commodore has been killed, Jimmy. The pilothouse got strafed. We need to get a report out.”

  Al Canning came out of Combat like a missile. He went immediately to the commodore’s chair, took one look, and then sank down to his knees. He was mumbling something that sounded a lot like “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  My sentiments exactly.

  My last image of him alive was with that cigarette, glowing from a serious inhale, and the mug of coffee, held casually off to one side, in case the ship heeled unexpectedly and spilled it. Doc came out of the charthouse passageway, saw Lieutenant Commander Canning, and hurried over. His medical bag was already open, so we’d taken other casualties, it seemed.

  “Bridge, Combat. New bogeys, inbound, bearing two seven five, range forty miles, composition two to four, coming straight in, on top in six to eight minutes.”

  “Alert Westfall and the gunships,” I said. “Send out orders to turn ninety degrees to due north, to course zero zero zero, speed twelve. Both air-search radars up this time. We’ll do the same deal we did before: star shells ahead of them at nine miles. Tell Sky One.”

  “Combat, aye.”

  By the book, I should have called Westfall, told her skipper that he was now the senior officer present, and requested orders. The truth was, however, that we weren’t a real, formally constituted task unit, and by the time we got that news over to Westfall we’d have our hands full with these new suiciders. We’d deal with this new attack, and then I’d happily hand over to Westfall.

  I took another look across the dark pilothouse. The doc had thrown a surgical drape over the commodore’s head and shoulders and sent his assistant for a body bag. I called Doc over to my chair.

  “Other casualties?” I asked.

  “Signalman First Emory was killed by cannon fire, and Radioman Third Benitez took what looks like a twenty-millimeter round through the knee. Took his lower leg right off. He’s on a tourniquet now until I can do some cleanup work. And, of course—” He bobbed his head in the direction of the commodore’s chair. We both hung on as Combat executed the formation (such as it was) turn to the north so that everyone’s guns would bear. The OOD and the JOOD were out on the bridge wings making sure all the gators had gotten the word that we were turning. Director fifty-one was already bumping and grinding on its tracks, searching west for the incoming raid.

  “Bridge, Combat. Bearing two seven five, range thirty miles, and they appear to be lining up in a column of some kind.”

  “Any signs of a controller aircraft out there, beyond the bogeys?”

  “Negative, but that chaff cloud is still out there. He could be hiding in that.”

  “Where’s Westfall?”

  “Three miles east of us, matching our movements.”

  “Captain, aye.” I wondered if the Jap radar could see through that chaff cloud. I got out of my chair and went out onto the port bridge wing. Director fifty-one’s big antenna was in the nutating mode, jerking that pencil-lead-thin beam out into the darkness, looking for anything. Our little fleet of gator gunships was roughly in formation around us, emitting huge clouds of diesel exhaust as they plowed through the calm seas. There was enough light to see them, but not enough to make out their hull numbers or other small details. I knew that CIC would be talking to them, giving them range and bearing to the incoming suiciders minute by minute. They wouldn’t be able to do anything at all until they actually saw the first kami. We, on the other hand, would have that entire column under radar-directed fire from the moment it crossed the eight-mile range ring. I hoped Westfall would simply join in when her guns could bear. My brain wanted some coffee, but my eyes kept seeing the commodore’s coffee mug, still clutched in his lifeless hand, empty now, just like him.

  Director fifty-one stopped nutating, indicating they had a lock-on. I looked aft and saw mount fifty-three swing out to port, elevate, and then open fire with the first star shells. I missed being in CIC, where I could see the entire picture—where all the ships were, where the enemy aircraft were—and manage the stream of tactical radio orders going out to our minifleet. As exec, I’d become spoiled, having the whole picture displayed in front of me. As captain, though, I was duty-bound to stay out here in the dark, if only to order maneuvers to avoid collision or clear the firing arcs for the gun batteries.

  This time I didn’t look out to the west to see the star shells because I wanted to keep my night vision for as long as possible. Mount fifty-two trained out to port now, followed by the quad forty sitting on mount fifty-one’s roller-path circle. I stepped back into the pilothouse just as fifty-two let go, rapid continuous, shooting VT frag now, as was mount fifty-three. Fifty-two’s muzzles were only about twenty feet in front of the bridge wing, so I stepped back away from the doorway to avoid all the smoke and blast. There was a twenty-millimeter guntub down below the port bridge wing, and I knew its crew would be flattened on the deck with their hands over their ears because of fifty-two’s muzzle blasts. I was waiting for fireballs in the distance. I thought I heard Westfall shooting, too, but it was hard to tell over the booming racket of my own guns.

  Once again, I got that helpless feeling. The five-inch gun battery was blasting away, the guns being laid in train and elevation by electro-servo motors responding to orders from an analog computer down in the bowels of Main Battery Plot, which in turn was taking inputs from the ship’s gyro and the all important fire-control radar mounted up on top of director fifty-one. Tracking circuits were tracking; magazine crews five decks below me were humping projectiles and powder cans into the ammo
hoists; the hoists were elevatoring the rounds to the mounts; sweating gun crews were extracting smoking powder cans from the breach and ramming new shells back in, slamming shut the breechblock, and closing the ready key. Blam-blam. Drop the block and do it all again, quickly.

  First fireball! It looked to be way out there, an early casualty of another deadly object doing its job: accelerating from zero to twenty-six hundred feet per second in one tenth of a second, the safe and arming interlocks opening up electrical pathways as the shell spun and arced high up over the water, its tiny transmitter buzzing out a cone of energy fifty feet in front of its nose, its receivers waiting for the first millivolts to rise in its sensors, indicating that there was a thing within fifty feet of it, a capacitor then firing a jolt of electricity into the fuze, the fuze firing a bolt of lightning into the warhead, the warhead exploding into a million red-hot steel fragments that burst outward, following that same cone that the shell’s radar had been peering into, and tearing a suicider out of the sky.

  As the last star shell blinked out, I put my binocs on that fireball and caught a glimpse of dark gray objects flitting past and just above the dying kami, illuminated by the avgas fire streaming from his riddled wing tanks, but only for the briefest of seconds. They looked tiny, and for a moment, they looked like they weren’t headed for us. They were going to go past us? I’d counted four, maybe five shapes out there, but as I was trying to make sense of what I’d seen, the forties opened up and thinking was no longer possible. Mount fifty-two was training away to the right, toward the bow. Then all the gators got into it with their forties, and the night lit up with tracer fire and muzzle flashes all around us.

  They were going past us.

  Westfall. They were going for Westfall, all alone out there, six thousand yards to the east. Oh, Christ, should I have ordered him to close us?

  Another fireball lit up the sky, this one fairly close, and I had to close my eyes for a second at the intensity of the flames. The burning kami flew into the water and exploded with a blast that had to have been caused by an underslung bomb. I thought I saw one of the gunships heel over on her beam ends from that explosion, but then my attention was drawn to Westfall as, to my absolute horror, four kamis, one right after another, in perfect column formation, flew right into her amidships. One hit the deckhouse just below the base of the forward stack, but those other three, still in perfect line formation, flew through the storm of twenty- and forty-millimeter tracer fire coming right at their faces, tearing off wings and tails and igniting banners of flaming gasoline along their flanks, and crashed into her port side. The first one exploded upon impact, blowing an immense hole in Westfall’s side right at the waterline. The second flew into that hole and exploded, causing the ship to bulge amidships as fire came out of every crack and crevice in her hull, and then the third followed the second into what was left of the ship’s middle, exploding out the starboard side of the mortally ruptured destroyer in a sheet of fire, followed by yet another bomb blast that went off right on the surface. For one horrifying moment, two of Westfall’s main engineering spaces, the forward fire room and the forward engine room right behind it, were fully exposed. They looked like two flaming steel ovens, and I realized I could see right through her.

  I was dimly aware that our guns had stopped firing, and so had those of the gators. We were all transfixed by the spectacle of Westfall collapsing in the middle, her bow and stern going up into the air in a flaming V only moments later, and then sinking out of sight in a boil of steam until there was nothing left to be seen of her. I felt sick to my stomach as the darkness drew down around us again. I was conscious of seeing some of the gunships breaking out of our circular formation and heading for the spot where Westfall had plunged, but, with my ears still ringing from all the gunfire and my heart pounding with the realization that there had been nothing—nothing—Westfall or any of the rest of us could have done about that kind of an attack, I just stood there.

  The Japs had figured it out. No more onesies and twosies: bring a crowd, line ’em up at 300 knots, and then dive the whole column into any given ship. The guns might get one, maybe even two, but then the next two, or three, or four, would all hit the ship in the same place, cut in her in two, and put her and every soul aboard down in less than a minute.

  My legs started shaking. I needed to sit down.

  As my hearing returned I heard voices around me, talkers chattering about what had just happened, and the OOD calling into CIC for contact status. The bitch-box was totally silent, as if it, too, were too shocked to speak. I leaned over the microphone screen.

  “Combat, Captain. Any more bogeys?”

  “That’s a negative, sir,” Jimmy said. “That chaff cloud is still up, but it’s beginning to disintegrate, we think.”

  “Very well. Detach all but three gunships to pick up survivors from Westfall, then give the OOD a recommendation to resume our assigned picket station. Get an op-immediate off to Fleet. Make sure they know there’s only one picket destroyer left on the line.”

  “Combat, aye.”

  The docs had removed the commodore’s body and that of the signalman topside. We would have to conduct a burial at sea first thing in the morning, after dawn GQ, assuming we weren’t dealing with kamikazes. I glanced over at the unit commander’s chair and saw the messenger of the watch swabbing the deck with a disinfectant solution. That’s what we’ve come to, I realized. One moment a senior officer; the next, a bloody stain on the deck that needs disinfecting. Marty appeared at my elbow.

  “We need to figure something out,” he said. “We need to figure out how to stop an attack like that.”

  “I’m all ears, Marty,” I said, “but I’m fresh out of ideas.”

  “How about a V-formation,” he said. “Take all these gunboats and station them in a V-formation opening to the axis of attack. That way, every gunboat gets a shot at the line of planes.”

  “And if they change the axis of attack at the last moment? Come in from a different direction? At least an AA circle gives everybody a chance to shoot.”

  He looked crestfallen. “Marty,” I said, “keep thinking. You’re absolutely right—we have to come up with something, or we’ll…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t have to.

  He nodded. He was as tired as I was, which reminded me to think about my people instead of sitting there, quivering in my own fear. I called Combat and asked Jimmy to come out to the bridge. I told him to put his XO hat on and see to the crew. I needed a damage assessment, a casualty report, and then a plan to let people get some sleep while still keeping the ship reasonably ready to repel any more attacks. It was going on 0300, and I was desperately hoping the Japs had gone to bed for the night.

  We couldn’t assume that, however. We were just one ship, the only ship on the picket line. That fact wouldn’t be lost on any long-range Jap bomber out there at eighty miles, looking in on what was left of the American picket line. Hey, home base, send out another ten kamis, you can’t fail. Then when the fleet returns, there will be no more early warning.

  I tried to collect my thoughts as the bridge team secured from GQ. I knew that something was wrong with my logic. It’s called fatigue, stupid. Something about the fleet returning from their northern strike run. Of course they’d send replacement destroyers, establish a new picket line, maybe send up some AA light cruisers, dedicate a big-deck to the picket line CAP support mission. All of those things. Or would it be none of those things?

  “Captain, you need coffee, sir?”

  I glanced at the frightened-looking seaman apprentice standing at the arm of my chair with a mug of what looked like asphalt. He was the same one who’d been swabbing the deck a few minutes ago. His hands, which smelled faintly of disinfectant, were just barely trembling.

  “Looks like your hands are shaking.”

  “Just a little bit, sir.”

  “Mine are, too,” I said. “But we can’t let anyone see, can we.”

  “No, sir
. Can’t do that.”

  “Two sugars, son?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Good. Everything’s gonna be okay, then.”

  FOURTEEN

  With coffee in hand and all my bulky battle gear still wrapped around me, I took a turn about deck. There seemed to be more ambient light now, which meant whatever cloud cover we’d had was beginning to lift. I had no trouble finding my way down ladders and through all the guns massed amidships. A lot of the gun crews were asleep at their stations, with one man keeping awake and manning the sound-powered phones. I could hear the talkers whispering as I left one gun mount and walked aft toward the next one. Heads up.

  I was amazed to see that most of the brass had already been policed and stowed in the shell case lockers. The forties had fresh clips poised above their loading slides, and the twenties were similarly loaded up and ready to go. The after quad-forty platform gun crews were still working at picking up all the shell casings. I could smell the burned grease fumes coming off the gun barrels, which remained too hot to touch. The gun captains acknowledged my presence, but there was no impetus for small talk. Everyone had seen what happened to Westfall, and at least the senior people knew that there was no defense against a line attack like that. I was walking around mostly to show my face, and also to distract myself from my own feelings of nauseous fear at watching Westfall break in two and sink like a hot rock.

  I went down the port quarter ladder to the main deck and threaded my way through the depth-charge K-guns and out onto the fantail. Both doors on mount fifty-three were open, and their crew was also picking up brass powder cans. My chief master at arms, Chief Lamont, was back there, pretending to supervise but mostly staring out over the black sea at where we’d last seen Westfall. I joined him by the after depth-charge racks. We nodded at each other but did not speak. There wasn’t anything to say, really. Mount fifty-three’s twin barrels were burned black halfway to the mount’s face. I could feel the tremble of Malloy’s twin screws beneath my feet and hear the whine of the steering engine responding to small helm commands from the bridge.