The Commodore Read online

  “You want, I can turn that off with a phone call,” he said.

  Sluff waved him off. “No, I’ve been expecting this. Time to get it over with.”

  The bandage people showed up at 0900 to take Sluff to a room adjacent to the operating suite, where they undid the mess on his head, cleaned things up with something that felt like gasoline, and then remounted a new bandage that had to be three pounds lighter. When he looked in a mirror, he could see the glint of the steel plate on the side of his head through some of the gauze. It was much bigger than he’d anticipated—“plate” was an appropriate word. He noticed that the fuzz of hair growing back was definitely white now. If that kept up he was going to look as old as he felt.

  “Can I touch it?” he asked. “The plate?”

  “Yes, sir,” the corpsman replied. “It’s harder than your own skull. It’s the sutures you gotta be careful with.”

  “People always said I had a hard head,” Sluff said. “Knucklehead, that was the word.”

  The corpsmen grinned, and then one asked if he was really an Indian. Sluff said he was.

  “Knew it,” the corpsman said. “There were a buncha guys off the destroyers that got sunk when the battleships went at it. They were talking about one skipper who dodged all those torpedoes and came back for ’em once the heavies bailed. Said he was an Indian, with the biggest—uh.”

  Sluff laughed out loud. “The biggest damn nose they’d ever seen since Mount Rushmore, right?”

  “Uh, yes, sir, sorry, sir, I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay, corpsman,” Sluff said, with a grin. “And thanks for lightening up the bandage.”

  He and his cane thumped back to his room, where he showered, now that the turban was gone, and then tried to decide what to wear for the meeting with Browning. Uniform? Or hospital gear? Then he realized his uniforms were at the bottom of Ironbottom Sound. The one he’d been wearing when Barrett capsized was surely long gone into the trash. He got out some clean cotton pajamas, a cotton robe, and then got into his hospital bed.

  He touched that steel plate again. It didn’t hurt, of course, but the perimeter where they’d sewn it into his skull was really sore. He tried to examine the area of his brain underneath the plate, but felt nothing. He closed his eyes. That felt really good.

  Sometime later, he woke up to a knock on his door, and then Tina came in. Her expression said: Look out for this one. Behind her, standing in the doorway like a statue, was his nemesis, the eternally choleric Captain Browning.

  “Captain, you have a visitor,” Tina announced, acting as if she didn’t know him. “Is that going to be all right?”

  Browning’s severe expression must have worried her, he thought. “Of course,” he said. “Why would it not be?”

  Tina nodded and then backed out as Browning came in, took off his cap, and then sat down stiffly in the room’s only chair. Sluff waited for him to speak.

  “Your doctors tell me that you’re making good progress,” Browning said, his tone of voice neutral. “You are fortunate to have survived, from the looks of that.”

  “That was just the beginning,” Sluff said. “Have you seen Captain Hollis’s report yet?”

  “Rear Admiral (select) Hollis gave me a verbal debrief, with a written report to follow,” Browning replied, correcting him. “I have some staff people trying to conform what you told him to what else we know about the engagement, which, admittedly, isn’t much. He said you think the Japs set an ambush of their own this time.”

  “Entirely possible,” Sluff said. “Heavy cruisers rounding that point at thirty-six knots were certainly not in my plan.”

  “Interesting choice of words, Captain,” Browning said. “My plan.”

  Sluff thought he heard someone in the adjoining bathroom, making cleaning-up noises. “I went through that with Hollis,” Sluff said. “The admiral and I had talked it over and he told me to run the tactic again. The first half seemed to work—we fired torpedoes on a radar solution and things went boom in the night at the appropriate time.”

  “Then the cruisers showed up.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Your original targets were a light cruiser and some destroyers, correct?”

  “We never saw them, but that’s what we guessed from the radar returns.”

  “But instead of executing what one of your people called your Comanche circle, you turned away from them and headed west. Put another way, you broke off the action and tried to escape.”

  “Not exactly,” Sluff said, realizing now where Browning was going with this. “As I explained to Captain Hollis, we were between a rock and a hard place once the additional cruisers arrived and their scout plane started dropping flares. We couldn’t go north or south without becoming a Long Lance sandwich, so I elected to run the squadron right at the more dangerous enemy, the heavy cruisers. They could of course fire torpedoes, but their destroyers couldn’t without hitting their own ships.”

  “And yet, in the end, they sank four of the tin cans in this fight and Providence.”

  “Providence gave herself away before she was supposed to. She wasn’t supposed to start shooting when she did, but because she did, the Jap heavies saw her.”

  “We only have your word for that, seeing that Admiral Tyree did not survive the engagement.”

  “What’s your point, Captain?” Sluff asked with a sigh.

  “My point is that there are people at headquarters who are saying you ran, just like you ran when the shooting started the night of the battleship action.”

  “Then how did that Jap admiral get killed?”

  Browning’s face reddened. “How do you know about that?”

  “Captain Hollis told me.”

  “Rear Admiral (select) Hollis was speaking out of school, then,” Browning said. “That is very sensitive intelligence information.”

  “We weren’t running from the enemy, Captain Browning. We were running at him. And not just my flagship, but all of my destroyers. If we were running away, we’d have turned southwest and gone dark. As it was, we drove right at them, shooting the whole time. We were just no match for twenty-odd eight-inch guns. Our five-inch couldn’t penetrate their armor, but it could wreck their topside superstructure. Our torpedoes bounced off; theirs didn’t. By the way, I would like to meet some of these ‘people at headquarters.’ People who weren’t there.”

  “That is out of the question. You are the senior surviving officer. Your actions are the focus of our inquiries.”

  “Inquiries, Captain? Getting a court of inquiry together?”

  “What do you think?” Browning snapped. “A light cruiser, four destroyers sunk in return for one Jap cruiser damaged and a destroyer sunk, a second one damaged? While you conveniently went over the side in the middle of it?”

  Sluff could barely contain his anger now. “Went over the side? Like I slid out a diving board and executed a perfect swan dive? You are a piece of work, are you not, Browning. You and your ‘people’ over at headquarters. Well, bring on your court. I can’t wait.”

  “You will wait, and right here, too. Hollis hasn’t turned in his report yet and Admiral Halsey’s not back from Pearl. You need to understand something, Captain: You’re not in charge of anything right now, if you ever were.”

  “Oh, go away,” Sluff said. “I’m not afraid of you. I’ve seen and done things which would make a guy like you piss his pants. How much combat have you seen from the O-club here in Nouméa? I see now why Hollis made flag and you didn’t.”

  Browning’s face settled into a cold mask. He stood up and put on his brass hat. “You have no idea of who you’re fooling with,” he hissed. “We will destroy you.”

  Sluff smiled. “You can destroy my career, maybe,” he said. “But not me. By the way, here’s something to think about: When Barrett got blown in half, Providence was still shooting. That means Admiral Tyree was still the boss. Seems to me you’re going after the wrong guy. Now get the hell out of my room.”
r />   Browning stared at him for a few seconds and then left, slamming the door after him. Sluff lay back in his bed and let out a long breath. Hollis had been right. Browning was out to get him. Not enough to have Japs trying to kill you; now he had an admiral’s staff after him as well.

  His last jab had been an interesting technicality, but with Admiral Tyree asleep in the deep, no one would be wanting to file charges of incompetence against his ghost. In fact, another admiral who’d led his cruiser force to destruction had made the same maneuvering choice Sluff had made, and he’d been awarded the Medal of Honor. The truth was that he’d convinced his boss to run the same tactic he’d used too many times before and it had backfired. Who owns that, he asked himself. Go look in the mirror.

  Listen to me, he thought, as he lay back into the pillows. Is everything really all about me? Is my so-called career that important? How about the men who died because of the orders I gave, on the fly, without a whole lot of thinking time. Didn’t they count?

  Then something occurred to him: There might be some survivors of that fight right here in the Nouméa hospital complex. Maybe he should emulate Halsey and go see them, tell them he was sorry for what happened. Quit worrying about Browning and his minions plotting to hang some dead albatross around his neck. What did Bob Frey use to say? “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke”?

  THIRTY-TWO

  Nouméa Field Hospital

  As it turned out, there were several survivors from Providence and the destroyers sunk that night. Some of them were hopelessly injured—burns patients, for the most part, who were probably not going to survive. Tina Danfield had helped Sluff find them in the hospital complex, which was a sprawling collection of small buildings spread over a ten-acre area of coconut palms. The buildings were more like tropical huts, made of wood, with no heating or air-conditioning and many of them still sporting palm-frond roofs.

  None of the people who’d survived the Providence sinking knew who he was, of course. He’d only been aboard briefly, and none of the admiral’s staff had survived the torpedoing and subsequent shelling, which had turned Providence’s flag bridge into a flaming mass of mangled metal as she settled into her watery grave. The destroyer survivors didn’t know him, either—he’d only been the New Commodore for one night, and if they remembered anything about that night, they were trying hard to forget it.

  He tried to make a brave face of it, pretending to know what their ships had done that night and telling them that they’d killed the Jap admiral and his whole staff, sunk one destroyer, and damaged a heavy cruiser and another destroyer. As he went along he started making stuff up about what they’d done to the enemy, and they seemed to appreciate it, even if they had no idea of who this ugly guy in a bathrobe with an armor-plated head was.

  The first time he tried it he ran out of steam halfway between two wards and had to be helped back to the senior officers’ ward in a wheelchair. The next afternoon he went a little slower, working his way down a list of names provided by Tina Danfield and her contacts in the hospital admin hut. On the third afternoon she came with him. She proved a lot more popular with the troops than Sluff did. She’d taken the time and effort to apply a little war paint and even Sluff thought she was a whole lot more interesting than the ugly Indian guy with the stainless-steel scalp. The only unpleasant experience was when they visited a sailor who’d lost a leg and a forearm to a shark. He’d been retrieved onto a life raft and, with tourniquets applied, made it back to Nouméa. He wanted to know why no one had come back for the survivors. Sluff had to tell him that there weren’t any ships left to come back for the survivors until the next day.

  “So it’s true,” the man had whispered. “We got our asses kicked.”

  “We did,” Sluff said. “And I’m partly responsible for that.”

  “So whaddaya want from me,” the man said. “Forgiveness?”

  “No, I’m just here to tell you I’m sorry. We tried, and it didn’t work.”

  “Well, ain’t that nice,” the sailor said. “For you, whoever you are. You can still walk.” Then he’d turned his face away.

  Tina touched Sluff’s arm and they moved on to the next sailor, who was, thankfully, a lot more friendly. When they left that ward. Sluff said he’d had enough. Once they got back to his ward, Tina said she had to go back on watch. She asked if he’d be all right.

  “You know,” he said with a sad smile, “that kid was partially right. Yes, I wanted to do the right thing, but I also wanted some forgiveness for my mistakes. He saw right through me, didn’t he.”

  “You keep talking about your mistakes,” she said. “It’s war, Captain. You went out and fought the enemy. This time the enemy won. Next time he’ll lose. It’s not like you ordered your squadron to run away—you ran right at them. What did Nelson say? No captain can do much wrong if he lays his ship alongside one of the enemy’s?”

  Sluff stared at her. “How did you know that?” he asked.

  “About Lord Nelson?”

  “No, about what happened out there.”

  She blushed. “I was the one pretending to clean the bathroom when that Browning guy came to torment you,” she said. “Walt used to talk about officers like that. He called them silver snakes.”

  He smiled. “Well,” he said. “I was happy enough to accept the promotion to captain and the title of commodore. Now I suspect I’ll have to be ready to take the consequences of losing a fight. It’s how the system works, you know. You get promoted; you get a flag, the nice boat, a steward, and the big cabin. You screw it up, you get the big court.”

  “You’re not just going to quit, are you?” she asked.

  “I’m tired, Tina. I’m also a little embarrassed about touring the wards, like I was Bull Halsey or somebody. That was about me, again. Maybe it’s just time to let the wheels of naval justice grind out the right answer.” He paused. “Thank you for your moral support and your help. It was very much appreciated. But you might want to keep your distance. From here on out, I may attract some lightning.”

  She shook her head and left quietly. He looked out the lone window, which had no glass, only screens. Sunset was coming down. How appropriate, he thought. He dozed.

  He woke up and discovered it was almost nine. He was suddenly hungry. He got up, washed his face, got back into his bathrobe and slippers, and went out into the hallway. He asked a passing corpsman if the chow hall was still open. The corpsman said, yes, it was always open because the medical staff worked around the clock. Sluff got his cane and headed out the door to the building that held the hospital’s cafeteria. Sure enough there were some bleary-eyed doctors and nurses in their surgical gowns eating at two of the tables. He grabbed a steel tray and went through the empty line, where he got some soggy chicken, watery string beans, and mashed potatoes. He took a table in a far corner of the cafeteria, near the coffee urns, figuring the docs and nurses had probably had enough of seeing patients for one day. He forced himself to eat the mushy food and then got a mug of coffee. He saw the medical people get up and head for the door. One of the junior nurses got the duty of humping all their empty trays to the steam-line scullery.

  Once they’d left he was all alone, except for the bored-looking Negro cooks back in the galley. He leaned his chair back against the wall and sipped his vintage yesterday coffee. Outside he could hear some boxy green ambulance trucks grinding their way up the hill from the port with more broken bodies. He realized it was December, heading toward Christmas.

  Christmas in the war-torn South Pacific, he thought. Now there’s a cosmic joke if there ever was one.

  That’s when Admiral Halsey and an aide came into the cafeteria and headed for the coffee station.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Nouméa Field Hospital

  As he approached the coffee urns Halsey saw Sluff. Those bushy eyebrows went straight up.

  “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” he exclaimed. “Commodore Wolf. You are alive.” Halsey sat down on one of the metal mess
hall chairs and studied Sluff’s face. “Shot at and missed, shit at and hit, I do believe, young man,” he pronounced.

  Sluff exhaled a long breath. “It’s a long story, Admiral,” he said. “And not a pretty one, I’m afraid.”

  “You think I don’t know that, Wolf? I’ve seen the butcher’s bill. Tell me in five minutes—what the hell happened out there?”

  It ended up being thirty minutes, not five, but Halsey let him tell it. The aide, a lieutenant commander, appeared to be truly horrified by what he was hearing. When Sluff finally ran out of steam, Halsey raised a hand.

  “Okay, I get the picture. There’s lot to be learned here—some of which we know, like our own goddamned torpedoes still not working, but how did those Jap heavy cruisers know when to come around the corner? They must be listening to our tactical radios.” He paused, took a sip of coffee, grimaced, and then put the mug down. “The biggest question I have doesn’t concern the night fight. How long have you been here?”

  “Got picked up by a PT boat about a week ago, and came here on a Catalina.”

  “Surely someone reported that to my headquarters,” Halsey said.

  “Don’t know, Admiral. I wasn’t the only casualty on the plane. Your chief of staff knew, though. He’s been to visit me. Told me a court of inquiry is coming. Told me that some people at SOPAC headquarters think I gathered up my squadron and turned tail when those cruisers showed up.”

  Halsey’s face turned to stone. For a moment, he seemed to be about to erupt; then he quickly calmed himself.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll look into that. Meantime, I’ve got an entire theater of war to worry about, and this incident, while important, is not as important as the Japs’ determination to reinforce their army on Guadalcanal. All the intel says they’ve got a big push coming. Are you fit for duty? Is that”—he pointed at the metal plate shining out of Sluff’s head—“disqualifying?”

  Sluff smiled. “Proof of what people have been saying for years,” he said. “That I have a very hard head.”