Pacific Glory Page 4

  There was frantic shouting over the topside speakers, and then a crowd of flight deck crewmen swarmed the plane, manually disengaged the tail hook, and physically pushed the SBD over to one side of the centerline. Fifteen seconds later, another fuel-starved SBD swooped aboard.

  Mick took off his flight helmet, wiped his sweat-soaked face, and released the canopy. He looked up. The first face in view was one of the landing signal officers, his paddles stuck under his armpit. He did not look pleased.

  “Boss wants to see you in PriFly, Lieutenant,” he announced. “Now would be nice.”

  Ten minutes later Mick was standing tall in the primary flight control tower, which was a glassed-in box on the island, overhanging the flight deck. His squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander “Dagger” Watson, was with him. They were both still in their flight suits from the carrier raids, their faces red with sweat and their hair matted down like wet moss by their leather helmets. Watson had told Mick to keep his mouth shut and let him do all the talking, assuming they got a chance to say anything.

  Commander Oxerhaus was sitting in his thronelike chair, from which he could oversee the entire flight deck. He launched immediately into one of his by now familiar tirades, getting louder and redder in the face each moment: Lieutenant McCarty, known to the entire world as the dumbest aviator and biggest asshole who ever existed, had put the whole air group at risk with a reckless dead-stick landing on the flight deck in the middle of a desperately difficult recovery situation, with fuel-starved aircraft still behind him. He had disobeyed standing orders, obviously lied about his fuel state, and all because he was a little girl who didn’t want to muss her hairdo by ditching on a perfectly calm sea within sight of a rescue destroyer, and on and on. When he finally paused for breath, Mick’s CO got in a word.

  “For what it’s worth, Boss,” he said, “Mick here planted a thousand-pounder right in a Jap fleet carrier’s forward elevator today. That should count for something, I think.”

  “That’s just great,” Commander Oxerhaus snarled. “As I understand it, that’s his fucking job. It’s good to hear that once in his short naval career he managed to do his fucking job. Truth is, I don’t care what happens to a Jap carrier. I care about my flight deck, my flight deck crews, and maintaining some semblance of military discipline in the deck operations of this carrier. I’m taking this up with the skipper as soon as this cycle completes, and I’ll be demanding this asshole’s wings, got it? Now get out of here before I lose my temper.”

  Watson nudged Mick, and they left the control tower. They went down several ladders until they reached the flight deck, where Watson stopped in the hatchway leading to the deck, took off his leather helmet, and scratched his itchy, wet scalp as the warm Pacific air mixed with engine exhaust streamed past them into the bowels of the ship.

  “Sorry, Skipper,” Mick said. “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Well, the way I see it, I brought my barge home. Last I heard, we needed every plane we can keep these days. I did at least help to destroy a Jap bird farm. Out of thirty-eight guys, only three managed to hit that bastard. Way I see it, no harm, no foul.”

  “Mick, what if you had crashed on deck? Oxerhaus is right: Everybody behind you would be in the drink, which means we’d have lost four planes instead of just one. You took a really big chance. Okay, it worked out, this time, but the potential consequences just don’t balance out.”

  Mick shook his head. “Skipper! We got three Jap carriers today. The barge drivers. The SBD squadrons. Three fucking carriers. C’mon!”

  “We had help, Mick.”

  “Who, the torpedo guys? I never saw any torpedo guys.”

  “That’s because they’d all been shot down by the time we got there. Because they arrived first, all the Zeros were down on the deck, shooting fish in a barrel. The torpeckers gave us a free shot. Get the picture?”

  Mick hadn’t heard that. “All of ’em?”

  “All of them. They died so we could get a free ride. So don’t think you single-handedly did anything today, except that landing.”

  “Well, shit, Skipper, I did hit the bastard. And from what I saw, I killed him.”

  “The word ‘we’ even in your lexicon, Mick? I was there, too, remember?”

  “Yes, sir, of course you were. But I’m sorry. This is bullshit. The plane’s back, I’m back, three Jap fleet carriers are toast, and everybody’s mad at me?”

  The skipper studied his flight boots for a moment. “This isn’t the first crazy shit you’ve done, Mick. Some of these senior guys, they keep score, you know?”

  Mick had no answer for that. The truth was hard to rebut.

  “I hafta say, Skipper,” he said finally, “this is gonna be a day to remember. It’s wartime. Everybody takes chances when the chips are down. Hell, guys crack it up on deck on a good day for no obvious reason. I got us a carrier, for Chrissakes!”

  “That’s not necessarily how the bosses will see it, Mick.”

  “That’s because the bosses’re all too damned old, and got where they are after thirty years of peacetime.”

  “We didn’t start this one, Mick, remember? The bosses are the best we have on deck. Admiral Spruance? He’s not even an aviator, but he got three Jap carriers today.”

  “He didn’t get any carriers,” Mick said. “Guys like you and me, we got three carriers.”

  “Like the air boss said, Mick—that’s your job. Spruance put you out there, and you did good.”

  Mick gave up. “Screw it. I need a toddy.”

  “Go easy on that stuff, Mick,” Watson said. “This isn’t over. You’ll have to see the captain sometime later today.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper,” Mick said, throwing up his hands in frustration. He headed for the ready room. When he got there, the rest of the bombing squadron pilots were whooping it up after the big strikes. Hands were waving, the tally of Jap planes shot down was growing by the minute, and the lies were expanding to fit their enthusiasm. Someone saw Mick come in, and they all started razzing him for the dead-stick landing, but he knew they were doing it with unfettered admiration. One of his squadron-mates jumped up on the briefing table, stood on one leg like a crane, and hopped across the table with his arms spread out, weaving from side to side, coughing like a sputtering engine and then squatting down on the table and letting out one truly noisy fart.

  Everyone roared. Mick grinned, but he still wanted that toddy.

  Drinking officially was not permitted on Navy ships, but an unofficial exception had long been in place for carrier pilots, as long as they kept it discreet. Mick retrieved his coffee mug from the board, unearthed the stash, and poured himself a round shot. The rest of the guys were picking on someone else by now, led by the squadron XO. Skipper Watson hadn’t come down from topside yet, so Mick decided he should do a team sneak-away before the skipper got back.

  The bourbon washed his tailbone in its familiar warmth. He wanted another but thought better of it. Save it for after the carrier’s captain chewed his ass for the landing. The Yorktown’s skipper was a known war-fighter, though, and Mick figured he would humor the choleric Oxerhaus and then send Mick below with a stern warning and a wink. They needed pilots far too badly to take anyone’s wings, especially when the pilot involved in this little stunt had managed to pull it off and hit a carrier. He rinsed out the mug and put it back on the board, trying not to notice the mugs that were hanging upside down, denoting the guys who hadn’t made it back yet.

  As he walked back to his stateroom forward of the ready room, he felt the carrier lean into a wide turn. There was the usual clanging and banging going on topside as the flight deck crews respotted the air group, elevatored any bent birds down to the hangar deck, and got ready to launch the CAP—the combat air patrol. As best he knew, no one had yet located the fourth Jap carrier, which could mean trouble later.

  His flight suit stank of sweat, ozone, and hydraulic oil in equal proportions. He really wanted a shower but cho
se instead to switch to red light in the stateroom and just flop into his rack. His roommate hadn’t come back yet, but he was listed as ditched and recovered on the status board. They’d get him back aboard as soon as the rescuing destroyer could get alongside Yorktown for a highline transfer.

  As he lay back he could hear the first of the CAP fighters taking off, its engine howling at full military power as it roared down the wooden deck. Then another. Go get ’em, tigers. Then he fell asleep.

  The general alarm woke him a minute later, or at least it seemed like a just minute. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d been down for almost an hour. He could hear boots running outside in the passageway as the ship’s company ran for their GQ stations, urged on by the bong-bong-bong of the GQ alarm. He lay back in his rack. Pilots were supercargo when the ship went to GQ; they either mustered in their squadron ready room or stayed in their own rooms, preferably out of the way, while the fighter-biters launched to engage incoming bandits and the ship’s gun crews fought off any bogeys that got through the CAP screen. Then the captain came on the 1MC, the ship’s announcing system.

  “All hands, this is the captain. Condition Red. Radar has many bogeys inbound. Our CAP is up and will engage, but stay alert. Air department strike down all topside planes and ordnance, and purge all avgas fuel lines. Engineering, double-check condition Zebra; Enterprise CAP reports torpedo planes in this strike. That is all.”

  Torpedo planes, Mick thought. That’s all? That’s enough. He’d seen what Jap torpedoes could do to battleships in Pearl Harbor. He felt Yorktown begin to tremble as they brought the speed up to flank and began a sinuous weave. A weave won’t do it, guys, he thought. The Japs had it right: Start a circle and stay in it; a bomber might get through, but torpedo planes had a hell of time with those circles.

  The ventilation went off, and immediately the tiny stateroom began to heat up. Mick’s room was on the starboard side. Two of the ship’s five-inch antiaircraft mounts were about a hundred feet from his room. He considered going to the ready room, which was air-conditioned, but remembered the rule: Once GQ sounds, stay put. Plus, if some pilots stayed in their rooms, they wouldn’t lose an entire squadron if the ready room took a direct hit.

  The sound-powered admin phone squeaked.

  “Lieutenant McCarty,” he said. “Solo.”

  “Okay,” said the squadron admin officer. “Stay put.”

  There’s an echo in here, he thought. “Roger dodger.”

  He lay back on his rack and waited. It wasn’t long before he heard the familiar double thump of the escorting destroyers’ guns going off, joined a minute later by the louder booms of the light cruisers. When the bogeys penetrated the combat air patrol, the carrier’s screening ships closed in a circle around the bird farm to make the Japs work for it. Now that the escorts were lighting up the sky, Mick knew that some of the enemy planes must have made it through. At a certain point, pursuing fighters had to break off any pursuits to avoid flying into the curtain of ack-ack coming up from the screening ships.

  He sighed, got up out of his rack, and strapped on his breathing apparatus, steel helmet, and life jacket. The sweat began to pour out of him with all that gear on. He opened the door and looked out into the passageway, which was empty. There were no watertight doors in either direction: If you saw water in this passageway, the carrier had already sunk. He stepped back into his room, latching the door open to get some more air.

  Then Yorktown’s own five-inchers joined the shooting, rattling the furniture and light fixtures all around him each time they went off. The noise from the guns topside got louder as the massed batteries of forty-millimeter guns joined in. He thought he heard the whine of an aircraft engine coming in and then over the flight deck above, but there was no bomb. Then he heard another one, same deal, lots of close-in gunfire from the antiaircraft guns massed along the starboard catwalks, and that rising-pitch scream of an engine overspeeding, followed by a thumping boom somewhere back aft that shook the whole ship.

  Bastard got us, he thought, but Yorktown seemed to shake it off, and the guns kept firing. The concussions were shaking the overhead light fixtures, and there was a fine mist of dust raining down from the cable bundles running through the stateroom’s overhead. He heard a siren down in the hangar deck but didn’t know what that meant. He realized he didn’t know much about the carrier herself, other than how to get a plane on and off the flight deck. He sat back down on his rack, still sweating profusely and now unable to lie down with all his survival gear on. It felt weird to be sitting in his stateroom while an intensifying air-defense battle raged one deck above him.

  He suddenly found himself upside down on the deck, his ears ringing from a really big explosion. When he cleared his head, he sensed the room filling with smoke. He couldn’t see, then realized his helmet had slipped down over his face. He struggled to get up, but there was something wrong with the deck—it was curved up like the hump in a rug, and the aft bulkhead of the stateroom was flattened down over his shoulder. He tried to think, but his brain was still fuzzy from the shock. All he could do was lie there, trying to gather his wits.

  “Trapped,” he said out loud, and between the rising heat and the smoke, he knew he was going to cook in there unless he did something productive soon.

  He tried to move, but the bulky life jacket was caught on something. Then he heard a roar of steam out in the passageway.

  That’s not right, he thought. The boilers are a couple hundred feet away. The temperature in the room began to soar. What air there was, was beginning to suffocate him.

  Gotta move, gotta move.

  First, gotta breathe.

  He slipped the breathing apparatus face mask up over his face and pulled the lanyard. There was a brief puff of odorless smoke, and then clear oxygen streamed into the mask.

  Okay, he thought. Get out of this kapok, and then get the hell out of this area.

  Squirming like an insect shedding its cocoon, he pulled himself forward toward the door, untying the strings on his life jacket. The door itself was now out in the passageway somewhere, and the door frame was a crazy trapezoid of deformed metal. Deafened by the roar of a steam leak back down the passageway, he felt another bomb hit, starboard side and deep. These must be Vals, he thought. That’s armor-piercing stuff.

  He finally got himself free of the life jacket and made it out the doorway. The passageway was getting dark, with only a few battle lanterns throwing yellowish light here and there. He looked up. There was smoke boiling along the overhead like a giant snake seeking a bolt-hole. The roar of escaping steam was louder out in the passageway, but now it sounded like it was coming from way back aft, behind the island. The smoke was filling the passageway in earnest, expanding down from the overhead toward the asphalt-tile deck, and the heat was getting worse, much worse. The battle lanterns looked like evil yellow eyes, opening and closing as the heavy black smoke searched for a way out.

  Right or left? That was the question.

  There was hell to pay back aft, steam, smoke, probably a big fire and structural damage. Forward? There was one hatch leading topside at the forward end of this passageway, but there seemed to be an awful lot of stuff heaped between him and it.

  Another booming blast sounded off back aft, and this time a bolus of fire came whipping up the passageway. He got as flat as he could and covered his head and face mask with his arms as the flame front shot over him, singeing the hair off the back of his arms and head. Then it was gone. He looked over his shoulder. The smoke back aft had a deadly red glow to it.

  Forward it is, he decided.

  It was hard. He couldn’t stand up because of that maelstrom of hot smoke, coiling and writhing only inches above his head. Each time he got to a knee-knocker he literally had to throw himself over the frame, because by now there was only about twelve inches of air left down low. Just like football practice, he thought, as he wormed his way forward on his elbows and knees.

  He finally reached the l
adder vestibule leading up to the flight deck. Where the hell was everybody? he wondered. Were the rest of the guys trapped in the ready rooms back aft?

  He reached up through the murk for the hatch handle, half expecting it to be jammed, but it wasn’t. He rolled over on his back to give himself some leverage and pushed up on the handle, then got to his knees to push it all the way open.

  Big mistake.

  The moment the hatch cracked off its coaming, the overpressure in the passageway slammed it back against the bulkhead, taking Mick with it before he could let go of the operating handle. His battle helmet came off, and his right arm jammed in the treads of the ladder leading topside. The smoke came at the new airway like an express train, bringing with it enough heat to scorch his flight suit and deform the face mask.

  He heard a whumping at the top of the ladder and looked up through his rapidly fogging mask. The hot smoke column, filled with particles of unburned fuel, had found fresh air. Now it had ignited, creating a Roman candle up at the top of the ladder. Mick cringed at the bottom of the ladder, suddenly aware that it was getting progressively harder to get a breath of oxygen from his canister. How much time did he have left? He’d forgotten to set the timer.

  Can’t go up the ladder, not into that.

  Can’t go back to my stateroom.

  Can’t get my arm out of this ladder.

  “Oh, shit,” he mumbled.

  He felt his mind wandering. He realized he’d stopped perspiring, and that wasn’t good, not in all this heat. His breathing apparatus made him feel like he was sucking on a bent straw. He began yanking on his arm to free himself from the ladder.

  Hot. So goddamned hot.

  Then he was free. So free that he was floating in midair and then crashing down again onto the steel deck of the vestibule. The ladder’s pins held, but it had come loose anyway because the pin brackets themselves had been broken by an enormous explosion deep down below.

  Torpedo.

  This time the big ship lurched sideways, and then a second torpedo delivered a punishing belt of energy to the hull that Mick felt in his own guts and knees.