J. E. MacDonnell - 139

by Death Of A Destroyer(lit)

  "The picture being that you want me to make the decision as to whether we turn back and put him into hospital in Moresby."

  It was harsh, but Sainsbury wasn't feeling amiable. He knew the reason - this wasn't a seamanship or gunnery or tactical problem, things he was familiar with - but knowing didn't help.

  Doherty's face had tightened. "It's not that at all. It's just that I wanted... well, your advice."

  "I'm sorry, Doc, but this is an occasion when I want your advice."

  "Of course, I understand that."

  "Then let me have it."

  "My God, you're not being exactly helpful!"

  Sainsbury didn't want to be helpful; except insofar as helping this officer to make up his own mind about a problem which was peculiarly his own. He looked at Doherty, a level steady gaze, and suddenly the surgeon seemed to get the message.

  He nodded, slowly as to himself. "All right," he said. "There is a possibility of gangrene setting in - there's always that in such a case

  - but I think the patient will recover normally." Sainsbury kept his eyes on Doherty. "You appreciate the significance of what you have just said." It was a statement.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I could turn back - now. Tommorrow, no. Whatever I do, I am acting on your advice, on your professional competence and judgement. And I am not, Surgeon-Lieutenant Doherty, thinking of any possible consequences to myself. In short, I am not suggesting that you will take the can. I know you will."

  Doherty breathed in. "You're a hard man... sir."

  "Destroyers are not usually commanded by marshmallow types. Well?"

  Doherty smiled. A real normal smile. It broke suddenly upon a face that had been hard and acerbic, like sunshine breaking suddenly from a grey sky. It made his face oddly attractive. Only one or two women, and a few men, had seen that transforming smile.

  "Good man," he said, and as he went past Doherty he slapped the surgeon's arm with the back of his hand.

  Doherty looked after him, then heard the rattle of the ladder chains. He thought, slowly and with emphasis: Well, I'm buggered. Only well afterwards, down in the sickbay and listening to Graham's cheerful chit-chat with the S.B.A., did he think about how that skinny old maiden aunt of a captain had made a man of him.

  Chapter Five

  They reached the rendezvous point halfway through a hot, still afternoon. The U.S. destroyer Mack was nowhere in sight.

  "This is the time, Pilot?" Sainsbury asked.

  "Right on, sir. But the Yanks don't worry about an hour or two either way."

  This was not wholly true, but as Sainsbury had spent most of his war so far in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, his knowledge of American navigation was meagre. Yet there was nothing deficient about his knowledge of discipline and proper procedure.

  "I should prefer our Allies to be called American, Pilot, at least in public. The word Yank seems to me a somewhat derogatory term."

  They were used to him now. "Yes, sir," Pilot answered unsmilingly. "Sorry."

  "And any one of a dozen reasons could have caused Mack's lateness. We are here to report on aircraft. Mack may have found some. Similarly, they may have found her, and for all we know, done for her."

  "I hadn't thought of that," said Pilot, truthfully, and just as he finished a phone sounded. Sainsbury, leaning against the fore windbreak, took it out himself.

  "Bridge, captain speaking."

  "We have a surface radar contact, sir, right ahead, range fifteen miles."

  "Very well."

  Sainsbury looked at the far northern horizon. Where yesterday the meeting of sea and sky had been sharply defined, now up there was hazy with low cloud. Above them also clouds hung, but his attention remained ahead. Presently radar amplified its first report:

  "Contact coming directly at thirty knots."

  "Well, Pilot?"

  "Looks like I owe `em an apology, sir," Binder grinned.

  "Yes. Has anyone got her visual yet?"

  "I..." The signal yeoman hesitated, then went on surely. "Just the bow-waves through the haze, sir, but I'd say she's a destroyer."

  "Jap cruisers can make big bow-waves," said Caswell helpfully.

  "Number One," Sainsbury said, "you are not, I fervently trust, one of those funny first lieutenants?"

  "No, sir, just practical. A Jap cruiser squadron could be over this far, on its way down to bombard Guadalcanal."

  "Hmmm. I prefer you to be funny, Number One. Ready with the challenge, Yeoman?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Make it."

  The yeoman used the big ten-inch signalling light at that range. The challenge was answered quickly, and correctly.

  "Ah well," grinned Caswell, "a man can't be right all the time."

  "Number One, in my recently stated preference for your alleged humour, I was being funny."

  They all grinned at that, but there was relief in their gestures. This was very unfriendly country.

  In half an hour the racing newcomer had curved round and eased up close alongside. They saw that she looked much the same as Spindrift - two funnels, four single-gun mountings, similar in her weight and length. But 5-inch guns instead of 4-inch, and those twelve torpedo tubes.

  "Welcome stranger," Sainsbury said through the radio-telephone, surprising them with his unwonted levity. "My ship is Spindrift, my name is Sainsbury, lieutenant-commander. Over."

  "Hi, there," came back a cheerful voice, which may have come from Pennsylvania or California, though certainly not Prussia."Mack, Lieutenant-Commander Bledsoe, with an `e'. I kinda hate to ask this in public, but seeing as we'll be working together... What is the date of your command?"

  "Two days ago."

  "Well I'll... Hmmm. Looks like I'm senior. Please take station..." There was a pause, while Caswell and Co. looked unhappy, and almost accusingly at their captain. Then: "Say, this is your first command?"

  "Actually, no. My third, in fact."

  "Jesus... Sorry, Commander. Looks like I'm the junior boy - way down. Where do you want me?"

  "Astern, please," said Sainsbury, poker-faced, "distant four cables." That was eight hundred yards. "We shall patrol at twenty knots 150 miles to the north, then back on a reciprocal course. Object of the exercise is to sight and report on any aircraft heading for Port Moresby. Those are my orders. I presume yours are somewhat similar?"

  "Exactly similar. But then - I presume - they originated from the one source."

  "He's feeling a bit touchy about his seniority foul-up," Caswell smiled. Sainsbury gestured him to silence.

  "From your Admiral, yes," Sainsbury gave him his out. "Now, Commander, if you will kindly take station we can commence our patrol."

  "I'm on my way!" And so he was, ringing on flank speed and reining Mack round like a race horse. Then another swiping turn, then straightening her up and settling in position dead astern, distance 800 yards.

  "Seems to know his stuff," Caswell conceded grudgingly. "And wants us to know it."

  "Now, now, Splinter," Sainsbury admonished, "hands across the Pacific and all that, remember?"

  "Yes, sir, I'll remember," Caswell said darkly. "Just so long as he fights his guns as well as he drives his ship."

  "At the risk of sounding defeatist," Sainsbury said, "it is my hope that we don't have to find out."

  "Well now," Caswell grinned. "I'll drink to that."

  * * *

  It took until the next day for them to find out. Though under the horribly unlucky circumstances, what happened could be no true indication of Mack's gunnery efficiency.

  Towards noon a bank of thick white clouds came sailing over from the invisible coast of New Guinea to the westward. The two destroyers were on a southward leg, steaming now at fifteen knots to conserve fuel. Well over to port, the eastward, the sky was clear, a vast blue empty dome; but directly above them the clouds hung. Mr Meeking, the torpedo-gunner, glanced idly up at their mass. They looked hot, almost, and electric. Probably foul up our radar, he thought


  -temperature inversion. The thought made him take his binoculars from where they hung by the binnacle. He had them almost to his eyes when he thought he heard a sound. He paused, his head on one side; all ears. Then he dropped the glasses and in two strides was at the captain's buzzer. Before Sainsbury answered the imperative ring the sound came again - from almost directly above, through the clouds, a distinct, though filtered, drone.

  By the time Sainsbury made the bridge the ship was stirring under the harsh summons of the action alarm.

  "Fighter-bomber," Meeking enlightened him tersely. "High on the port bow. Alone, I think."

  "That's unlikely," Sainsbury muttered, and took the glasses the other handed him. He spoke as he searched the clouds. "Radar in contact?"

  "They have been, yes. But that's a hell of a pile of muck up there. Inversion's playing up with the sets."

  "Then they should be on him now," Sainsbury said, "for there he is. Yeoman, warn Mack."

  The gunner craned his head up. The aircraft was small, a black speck against the high clouds. It was moving very fast, crossing in front of their bow and then wheeling back again.

  "He's waiting for a friend," Sainsbury decided, and swung his head up to stare at the director. That master-sight of all the guns was already on the target, moving as it moved. Caswell was on the bridge now and the captain turned to him impatiently. "Closed-Up yet?"

  "Not quite, sir. The three-inch still to come." He paused, listened to a report from a seaman on a telephone, then swung back to Sainsbury. "Ship closed-up for action, sir."

  "Right. Let that fellow see what we're made of." And let me, too, was his unspoken thought.

  Caswell picked up the director phone.

  This moment - in maybe weeks of monotonous patrol, or of convoying, or days of fruitless and equally boring searching for a submarine - this, now, was what they really had been trained for, since first they had seen a naval gun far down in Flinders Naval Depot. Already, even before Caswell's order to the director, the system swung into action - ranges from the radar sets had been fed into the fire-control table, protectively deep inside her; the table had received them, digested them, and fed them out again to the four 4.7 inch guns in elements of training and elevation; and with fuse-settings to explode the time-fused shells at the correct height and future position of the plane - where it would be after the time of flight of the shells. The guns were following director, their long grey barrels sniffing to the sky, almost vertical; behind them the loading numbers waited, the yellow-nosed shells in their arms, waiting to feed those noses into the fuse-setting machine and then drop them into the loading trays.

  Sainsbury snapped a look astern, to where Mack, fully alerted, was swinging to take up her ordered station out on the starb'd beam

  - two ships one behind the other offered too good a target for a misdirected bomb at the leading one. His head came back and he ordered quietly:

  "All right, Number One, open fire."

  The Director Control Officer said into his phones, not quietly:

  "Commence, commence, commence!"

  The executive order ran through every gunnery compartment in the now shuddering ship. The aircraft, joined by its mate, had reached the end of its circling. It had begun to bank, to return on the other leg, when Spindrift exploded into flame and smoke. Four shells streaked skyward and burst all about the aircraft in black blossoms of turbulence and flung steel.

  Not bad at all, Sainsbury was thinking, when the aircraft put its nose down and fell headlong out of the sky upon them.

  He was closing range at something like 400 miles per hour: too fast for the 4.7s to get their fuses changed in time. Down aft, behind the second funnel, Carella was waiting with his four-barrelled pompom. The ship was swinging so that, he knew, he could bring his gun to bear on the plummeting target ahead of her. Further aft from him the 3-inch was already barrage firing,wham wham wham, much faster than the main armament.

  But the speed of that initial high dive was too much. Both the pom-pom and the 3-inch missed him. There came suddenly a wild banshee scream. The plane pulled out twenty feet above the sea, a streak of menace, the leading edges of her wings broke into slabs of yellow and brown and a crash of cannon shells slashed a powdery path across the sea. Close, but not inboard. The Jap whipped over in a tight turn and came driving in again, from the beam, almost at rightangles to her length, firing again.

  But this time he had only his engine, lacking the speed of that power dive. He gave them only a few extra seconds, but that was all they needed. Carella's lines of red tracer reached out and nailed him; the fighter's smooth streamline erupted in many vicious little explosions. It wasn't enough, he still came on. The 3-inch shifted from long to short barrage. Now its shells were fused to burst at 1500 feet. She could get off only three, but one got him, and one was enough. The Jap's nose jerked up, then down. Shredding pieces of his body he hit the water in a slewing rush, sprayed a wall of water fanwise before his nose, and dug under. No fire or explosion; just no more plane.

  His eyes squinted and his mouth puckered, Sainsbury swivelled his head from the ulcer of froth on the blue sea at Caswell's shout: "The other bloke's diving on Mack, sir!"

  They watched. Their show was over. They could do nothing to help. He was dropping too fast for the big guns to follow him, and if the pom-pom or other close-range weapons opened fire, tracking him down, they could punch their shells and bullets into Mack herself. The American ship was on her own.

  Engine note a rising snarl of supercharged sound, the fighter-bomber bore in. Clearly they saw the black blob of his bomb under his belly; clearly they saw it detach, falling with apparent slowness at first, and then in a streak too fast to follow as it neared the water.

  Mack was firing desperately with every close-range gun she had; her engaged side looked like one unbroken line of flame. She was hitting her target, but the Jap had unloaded. Bledsoe swung her. His first command, insufficient time in it, overall inexperience? Whatever the reason, she swung too late.

  Superheated steam is a marvellously efficient servant but a frightful master; its hot blast can peel human skin like a cooked beetroot. Mack took that bomb in her forward boiler-room. The disciplined force of steam at a pressure of 350 pounds per square inch, at a temperature of 600 degrees superheat, was unleashed abruptly in a blast that lifted the little ship's midship deck in huge leaves of steel twisting in the air, and burst her sides and bilges open to the sea. Sliding with the enemy, her own strength had ruptured her as though she had stopped a battleship's broadside.

  A few of her crew had time to abandon her before, still making way and vomiting plumes of white into the blue sky, she staggered under. The snarl of the wounded but triumphant aircraft beat away to silence.

  It was a swift and stunning blow. Sainsbury's voice broke the shocked quiet on Spindrift's bridge; the order bringing to their horrified minds a realisation; at first dimly appreciated, that their own world was still ordered - as it had been, regulated, normal, safe.

  "Get the whaler lowered, Number One, and be quick about it. Now that we're sighted I don't want to hang about here."

  "Aye aye, sir," Caswell muttered. He fumbled at the PA mike. Seeing him, Sainsbury was aware of his own sense of horror and shock, and forced himself to keep it from showing on his face. He set his face rigidly and walked over to the voice pipe.

  "Starb'd twenty," he ordered, and swung her round to come up alongside the frothing ulcer of black and scummy water that marked the destroyer's grave.

  Sainsbury saw him first, as the blobbing, oil-plastered head slipped down the ship's side. He must have been blown right out of the boiler-room to have got that far from where the ship sank. Instinctively Sainsbury opened his mouth, as he had with the other stoker, Graham, to order the engine stopped - the floating body was heading straight for the whirling screws. Then he shut his mouth. The man, of course, would be dead. Nevertheless, with a horrible and compulsive fascination - as you stare at a racing car h
urtling end over end - they craned over the side, and watched the stern draw swiftly towards him. He was almost level with the screws when they saw his head come up. For one frightful instant every man on the bridge felt the look on that torn face bore into his brain. Then he feebly lifted one arm.

  "Christ!" burst from Sainsbury. "Stop both engines!"

  It was too late; no chance at all. The man, from being a static weight, was transformed suddenly into violent movement, as though a giant's hand from below had grasped his leg and was twirling him round in a fantastic catherine-wheel dance. Then he was sucked under.

  Then the engines stopped. The ship coasted on. Sickness in their guts, they waited. The wake stretched behind her, clean and white. A hundred yards astern it was suddenly fouled by a black object; then another. Small objects, only as big as part of a man.