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  “So,” Gorman said, “you bein’ a lieutenant and all, I guess you’re in charge. What do we do now, Cap’n?”

  “You can start by getting me a cup of that good engine room coffee,” Marsh said, trying for a little levity after the horror of the life raft.

  Gorman grinned in the darkness, his big teeth white against the black oil. “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” he said. “Right away. One lump or two?”

  Marsh managed a grim laugh. “Let’s see if we can find some more pieces of this raft. And pray for no more Jap cruisers.”

  “Fuck them,” Gorman said. “What we’re prayin’ for is no goddamn sharks.”

  Marsh looked out at the faceless heads bobbing nearby in their life jackets, undoubtedly leaking blood into the sea. “We better get away from all this bait, then,” he said.

  Gorman relieved a dead man of his kapok, and then they pushed off into the darkness, their arms hooked onto the raft fragment, kicking together like a paddle wheeler, searching for more bits of the raft. It occurred to Marsh that he finally had achieved command at sea: one piece of a bullet-riddled life raft with a crew of one feisty Irishman. Good going, Beauty, he thought. It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  Dawn brought a wonderful sight: a pair of American destroyers, combing the morning twilight for survivors. By then Gorman had lashed together three pieces of life raft. The two of them were sitting, semisubmerged, on the remains of the float when one of the tin cans came alongside and backed down, her prop wash almost pushing them away from her sides. Marsh saw literally hundreds of men on deck and experienced a pulse of joy: A lot of the crew must have made it off. Then he realized that there were very few faces he recognized. Great God, he thought—what else had happened last night?

  Gorman grabbed the cargo net strung out over the side, pulled their makeshift raft up against the steel, and clambered up in his bare feet. Marsh tried to do the same, but his hands simply didn’t work. A bosun’s mate topside saw that he couldn’t climb and tossed him a bowline, which he cinched under his arms so that they could hoist him aboard. He banged his head on the steel plates as they dragged him backward up the side, but at that point, he didn’t mind a bit. American steel felt pretty good right about then. They seemed to be in a hurry, probably because they were afraid of Jap subs that might have been left behind to pick off any rescue ships. There were dozens of waterlogged and bloodstained kapoks trailing in the destroyer’s wake, already being pursued by shark fins or disappearing in a bump and boil of pink water and slashing teeth. The destroyer was not retrieving any bodies.

  Once on deck, Marsh flopped down like a netted fish. He felt the ship push ahead handsomely. An ensign in rumpled khakis appeared, stooped down, and asked for his name and ship.

  “There’s more than one?” he asked. Marsh’s lips were caked with salt and oil, and it was hard to get his words out.

  The young officer’s face was drawn, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. “Quincy, Vincennes, Astoria, Winston,” he recited, probably not for the first time.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Marsh murmured. “All gone?”

  “All gone,” he said, flipping to a clean page on his little green wheel book. “Now—name, please?”

  “Lieutenant Marshall Vincent, assistant gun boss in Winston,” he told him. “All of them?”

  “Goddamned massacre,” the ensign said, straightening up. “We’ve been picking up survivors all night. Can you walk?”

  “Not really,” Marsh said. “I can crawl, I guess.”

  A deckhand helped him back to the fantail, where there was a line of waiting survivors. He could stand as long as the seaman supported him. Two other seamen were going along the line of survivors, wiping oil off faces and offering a dipper of water to the most recently rescued. The ship’s doctor and his two pharmacist’s mates were doing triage. There were over twenty blanket-covered forms laid out back by the depth charge racks. Every available square foot of topside space was occupied. Marsh thought the ship’s inherent stability was probably being compromised by all this topside weight. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. The water was wonderful.

  He could tell the destroyer’s ship’s company from the survivors—their guys were all wearing dry uniforms. The rest of them were in various states of soggy disrepair and injury. Marsh apparently had two sprained, possibly broken wrists, second-degree burns to his scalp and neck, and a four-inch-long gash on the back of his head, which he hadn’t felt until now. Both his kneecaps were probably cracked, a diagnosis the doc made by flexing his legs and listening to the bones grind with his stethoscope while Marsh tried not to scream. The pharmacist’s mate splinted his wrists, gave him a handful of APCs for the pain and another glass of water, and then told the seaman to take him to a spot topside to sit down and rest.

  By the lights of what had happened last night, his injuries were trivial. Four heavy cruisers had been destroyed, a thousand if not more men killed in the battle, one-sided as it had been. Another couple of thousand casualties were still being fished out of the sea. The sun hadn’t even risen yet, and he wondered if those Jap cruisers were still out there, maybe lurking just over the horizon, waiting to come in and finish the job. He felt suddenly sick again with fear, and he struggled to catch his breath. The man sitting next to him, a chief petty officer with both his legs braced in splints and wire netting, nudged his left elbow.

  “Easy there, Lieutenant,” he said. Marsh turned to stare at him, only now aware that he had begun to hyperventilate. “You made it. You’re gonna be okay.”

  His hands were bandaged, and both of his legs were splinted in clumsy wraps stiffened with copper tubing. The chief noticed Marsh’s splinted wrists.

  “Them Jap torpedoes pack a wallop, don’t they,” he said. “One minute, I’m standing on the deckplates in main control, havin’ a ciggy-butt and some java, the next, damn ship’s in two pieces and I’m tryin’ to swim with two busted wheels. One fish, broke us in half like a damn twig.”

  “Which ship?”

  “The Skinny Vinny,” he said. “Gone in ten minutes.”

  The Vincennes, Marsh thought, recognizing her fleet nickname. He lay back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. “I was in Winston,” he said. “Two torpedoes, I think. We got some rounds off, but she went dead in the water pretty quick. Then they came in close, punched holes in us with their eight-inch. One came back after the ship sank, shot up the life rafts. Bastards.”

  “I just transferred off a tin can,” he said. “Japs been usin’ their destroyers to tow barges fulla Army guys into Guadalcanal. We’d find ’em, sink the destroyer, and then shoot up the barges until they was all chum. I guess we can’t bitch about them shootin’ up a life raft.”

  “The hell we can’t,” Marsh said.

  He laughed. “Halsey’s got it right: Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. They started this shit.”

  Two sailors came by holding a soup kettle between them and asking if anybody wanted chow. Marsh wasn’t hungry; neither was the chief, but he asked if they had a smoke. They set the kettle down and fished out cigarettes. Marsh wasn’t a smoker, but when they offered him one, he took it. That first drag did more to calm him down than being rescued. He looked down the line of bedraggled men lining the decks and catwalks. Almost everyone, including some of the guys lying in stretchers, had a cigarette going. The smell of good old American tobacco was a pleasant change from the stink of fuel oil, burned flesh, and bloodied uniforms, if only for a minute or so.

  The ship was slowing down again. Another raft had been spotted. After a long night, it was going to be a very long day. His third drag on the cigarette reminded him of why he didn’t smoke, so he flicked it over the side, laid his aching head back on a soggy kapok, thought about asking for some soup after all, and then fell asleep.

  TWO

  Midway, June 1942

  Lieutenant Mick McCarty looked down at the Japanese Air Fleet with unalloyed joy. Talk about the world’s supply o
f fat targets. They’d flown out almost two hundred miles from the Yorktown and found absolutely nothing. One of the other air groups had already turned around, defeated. Their skipper, however, followed offensive doctrine: Start an expanding square search. That had led them to a lone Japanese destroyer, fifteen thousand feet below, who was etching a sharp white wake in the blue Pacific that pointed like an arrow back to the Jap carrier task force she was rejoining. They followed that unwitting Judas and found the carriers with about ten minutes of fuel to spare.

  Two ugly gray flattops below were already executing their own doctrine: When Jap capital ships came under air attack, they put the rudder over and made a continuous wide turn that made it next to impossible for torpedo bombers to line up for an attack. It was also harder for dive bombers to settle into a stable powered descent—but not impossible, Mick thought, and the Dauntless dive bomber was nothing if not a stable diver.

  The skipper divided the formation, one for each visible carrier. He went first, rolling onto his back and then pulling through to the vertical, flaps split. Mick was second man in the V and rolled in right after him. He still remembered asking his instructor at flight school why in the hell they had to go upside down to make a dive-bombing attack. Why not just push the nose over? The instructor had said okay, let’s try that. The engine quit thirty seconds later. Nose over, you pull negative g’s, which causes the fuel flow from a gravity-feed system to stop, along with the engine. Got it? Got it.

  It was a beautiful sight, he thought as his excitement rose and the slipstream began its rising wail. The skipper was just a dot below him that became a Dauntless silhouette as he pulled his SBD out of its dive and shot across the ship’s stubby, three-tiered bow. A moment later a huge whitewater column rose right alongside the squirming carrier.

  A miss, Mick thought, but probably good for some hull damage and some badly frightened engineers down in their boiler rooms.

  Mick steadied his bomb-heavy SBD, gripping the stick harder than he needed to, judging the strain on the airframe by the pitch of the airstream. Lead him, lead him, he thought, aiming his bombsight at the point of the arrow-shaped white lines on the carrier’s flight deck, bending the Dauntless ever so slightly to match the carrier’s turning circle.

  Watch your altimeter. He flicked his eyes down to the instrument panel. The altimeter was unwinding so fast he could only see the hour hand. Twelve thousand.

  Lead her.

  Ten thousand.

  More lead.

  Eight thousand. Six thousand. Steady. Keep bending into her turn.

  Four.

  Three. Details of the planes on the target’s deck were much clearer now, with little dots scattering all over like ants as the American dive bombers dropped down on them and the deck crews ran for cover.

  No cover today, sunshine, he thought. Now.

  The Dauntless bucked in satisfaction as the one-thousand-pound bomb left its hooks. He pulled back hard on the stick, having only about twenty-five hundred feet of altitude left in which to get flat. Altitude, as the instructors used to say, is your ultimate friend.

  Got that right, he thought, as his eyeballs began to sag with the g’s.

  He was dimly aware of flak thudding around him, but he had no time to do anything but will his barge to get flat and away from all this noise. He felt his chin strap bite into his chest as the g’s mounted and his head gained weight. Even his earphones were drooping off his ears.

  “Go, Beast!” someone called over the radio. “You nailed his ass. Lookit it burn. Whooo-wee!”

  “Cut the chatter,” came the skipper’s ragged voice. “Work him over. Maintain your interval. Kill him, don’t just hurt him.”

  Through increasingly bloodshot eyes Mick finally saw the lighter blue of the sky instead of the deadly dark blue of the ocean lowering into his view and eased off a tiny bit on the stick. As the g-forces relented he was able to turn his head and look back at his carrier.

  His carrier.

  A fiery bolus of burning gasoline obscured the middle of the carrier where his bomb had hit. As he was looking, there was another big explosion, deep in her guts, sending more incandescent clouds of fire belching out her sides from down on the hangar deck. The carrier’s escorts were going every which way, trying to get away from the dive bombers, unaware that not one of the diving planes was interested in anything except that mortally wounded flattop.

  We caught them pants-down, Mick thought, probably right in the middle of a launch cycle. Live bombs on the flight deck, avgas hoses everywhere, planes parked all over the flight deck, and all of it just dying to burn.

  He leveled off, unconsciously lifting his toes as he realized he was only about twenty feet above the sea. He turned upward to regain some altitude and find the rendezvous point. He’d only carried the one bomb, so now the mission was to get his crate home in one piece without attracting any itinerant Zeros in the process. He turned back east, looking for his mates.

  His backseat gunner came up on intercom and congratulated Mick for the direct hit. He looked back and saw that the carrier, his carrier, was now aflame from one end to the other and no longer making much way through the water. In the distance another huge column of black smoke was unfolding into the towering white cumulonimbus clouds, which hopefully meant that the other squadron had taken out the second flattop.

  He punched the instrument panel in pure glee. I got a carrier! Hell’s bells, he thought, this was better than the winning TD at his senior year Army-Navy game. Word at the morning briefing was that these were the flattops that had come to Pearl Harbor. Revenge was sweet, super sweet. It was the best day of his life, and supposedly there were more carriers out there. With any luck, they could get back to the Yorktown, rearm, and come back to do it all again before the other two American carriers, Enterprise and Hornet, even got into the game.

  There was lots of excited chatter on the radio, and then he recognized some call signs from the Enterprise squadrons. Apparently they’d found a third carrier about twenty miles away and reduced her to a floating volcano. The excitement really wore off when the skipper began calling for fuel-state reports from his various bombers. Mick glanced down at his own fuel gauges, blinked, and looked again. He reached out with a gloved finger and tapped both gauges, hoping at least one of them would move, if only just a little. He called the skipper and reported he was below bingo fuel. That got the tactical net quiet, because it meant Mick could not make it back to the carrier. He was going to have to ditch.

  The skipper told him to climb gently to eighteen thousand feet and then go to max conserve. Mick felt a little better when seven other planes were given similar instructions. Assuming they got back to the fleet they’d theoretically have enough altitude to glide, if they had to, to get within range of the carrier’s escort destroyers. After that, all they had to do was survive the ditching. He briefed his gunner that they might be going to a swim call.

  Damn, he thought. This’ll take all the fun right out of it.

  With the help of an unexpected tail wind, the gaggle of seven gaspers made it back to their carriers. Mick shifted to the land-launch frequency in time to hear the air boss polling each of the starving seven as to their fuel state. The first two pilots reported that it was no-go for an approach. They were directed to find a tin can and ditch alongside. Number three thought he had enough to make a straight-in approach, but when questioned, he said he wasn’t sure. He, too, was told to pick out a destroyer and ditch.

  Mick knew that the air boss, a tough, forty-five-year-old commander named Hugo Oxerhaus, wanted no part of a fatal stall right over the round-down followed by a fiery crash on deck. On the other hand, none of the carriers could afford to lose aircraft, especially with the Jap carrier fleet, or what was left of it, only a couple of hundred miles to the west. Besides, he could not abide the thought of ending such a day with a deliberate crash into the sea.

  He studied his gauges as he began to let down, then set up switches to transfer everythin
g still left in the wing tanks to the center tank. Might as well have one tank I can count on, he reasoned; the fuel tank gauges became unreliable below 5 percent. He heard his own call sign on the radio and rogered up.

  “Request state,” the PriFly talker asked.

  “Between five and ten percent,” Mick lied. He really did not want to ditch.

  “Confirm you can complete an approach.” That was Boss Oxerhaus himself talking.

  “Get me straight in,” Mick said. “If they wave me, I’ll have to ditch it.”

  “You are cleared to the pattern for one approach,” the air boss said. “You bolter, no going around, got it?”

  “Roger, out.”

  Mick began his descent. He heard the fuel transfer pump whine angrily as it lost suction and shut it down. The center tank read 5 percent, barely, which meant that he really had no idea how much fuel he had left.

  He waited until the last minute to configure the SBD for landing, then executed the Holy Trinity: Hook down. Flaps down. Wheels down.

  The broad white wake of the carrier began to narrow as he made his approach. He could see the landing signal officer on his platform, arms out, green paddles fluttering in the stiff wind. The engine sounded fine as he set her up in the groove. The winds were perfect as he came over the round-down. He cut the power when Paddles gave him the chop signal. He held his breath as he felt the hook screeching down the deck, and then came the welcome, neck-wrenching yank of an arresting wire. He heard the gunner whoop with joy. He automatically advanced the throttle to full power in case the hook skipped all the wires or disengaged the one he’d caught and he had to bolter, or fly back off the bird farm.

  The engine died in his hand.

  The plane shuddered to a stop, its propeller windmilling even as the deck crew was signaling him to taxi clear of the landing zone.

  He couldn’t do it. The hydraulics died with the engine. He couldn’t even raise the tail hook.