Sentinels of Fire Read online

  There was a distant boom off to starboard, and then the guns quit firing. All of Combat was filled with a white haze of dust, and the watch standers were looking at each other as if checking to see if they were still alive. Several men were getting up off the deck with embarrassed expressions that probably matched mine.

  “My radar is down,” the air-search console operator announced in a high-pitched voice.

  “Surface search is down, too,” a second operator reported.

  We were tactically blind, which meant that Combat was temporarily out of business. I went through the forward door, past the charthouse, and out onto the bridge. To starboard I saw a cloud of dirty smoke and steam hanging over the water, drifting aft, maybe five hundred yards away. The officer of the deck eased the ship into a wider turn; everyone else on the bridge with binoculars was anxiously staring out at the horizon. The captain, whose face was a little white, was standing in the bridge wing door.

  “Never saw him,” he said. “He was so close the five-inch couldn’t even fire. Thank God the AA gun crews did see him.”

  “Bridge, Sigs!” came over the bitch-box. The signalman sounded scared out of his wits.

  “Bridge, aye,” the captain replied.

  “Captain, we got a bomb up here. A big fucking bomb. It’s wedged between the forward stack and the starboard flag bag.”

  “Clear the signal bridge,” the captain ordered, “and yell up to Sky One to get out of there. XO, go flush everyone out of Combat.”

  If the signalman had accurately described the bomb’s location, it was resting on top of the CIC compartment’s back bulkhead. The Japs had been slinging five-hundred-pounders on their Divine Wind planes. If it went off now, it would flatten CIC and probably the pilothouse, too. I stepped through the front door of CIC, where everyone was staring at me with wide, frightened eyes. Apparently they had all heard the signalman’s call on the bitch-box.

  “Everyone out,” I said, trying to pretend I was in total control of myself, as if it was no big deal that there was a five-hundred-pound bomb coiled up perhaps twenty feet from us. “Freddies, set up your tactical circuit down in Radio Central; everyone else muster on the messdecks. CIC Watch Officer, go to secondary conn. Come up on the 1JV circuit until the OOD relieves you.”

  The watch standers, officers and enlisted, all tried not to crowd up at the front door, but I could feel their fear as they hurried past me and headed down below. I really, really, had wanted to lead that charge but knew I couldn’t do that. Once the space had been evacuated, I went back out the bridge to report to the captain. He had sent the entire bridge watch team except for one terrified-looking phone-talker back to the secondary conning station, remaining alone on the bridge. He’d ordered Main Battery Plot to evacuate the AA gun stations nestled on either side of the forward stack, then told Damage Control Central to send an investigative team to the signal bridge. Then he got on the 1MC.

  “Attention all hands,” he said. “This is the captain speaking. We have an unexploded bomb wedged into the superstructure on the signal bridge. We are going to have to figure out how to defuse it and get it over the side. I want all hands to keep away from the base of the forward stack until we figure out how to do that. In the meantime, all hands on topside stations keep your eyes peeled. We never saw that last bogey until he was right on us. Heads-up ball for the forties on that one. Well done. That is all.”

  Marty Randolph, the gun boss, arrived down in the pilothouse from his station up above in the forward five-inch gun director.

  “Did you see it?” I asked him.

  Marty licked his lips. “Most certainly did,” he said, his voice strained. “Stared at that damned thing for ten seconds, waiting for my first personal meeting with Jesus. It’s big, XO. Really big. Wedged sideways. I didn’t linger to see if it’s ticking or whatever they do.”

  The captain grinned. “Linger,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Okay. What do we know about how aircraft bombs are fuzed?”

  Marty said he’d had a class on bomb fuzing back in gunnery school. “Usually there’s a wire, hooked to the plane’s fuselage or wing, with the other end hooked to the arming switch on the bomb. They drop it, that wire pulls the arming switch. Then they have little propellers on the nose and on the tail. The propellers are driven by the slipstream as the bomb falls. It has to turn a certain number of revolutions before the arming circuit is completed, which keeps the bomber safe from a preemie.”

  “So when he saw he was gonna miss with the plane, he dropped the bomb, but it didn’t have time to arm,” the captain said.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” the gun boss said. “’Cause if that bastard’s armed, there’s nothing we can do about getting it over the side.”

  Four chief petty officers in full battle gear and oxygen breathing rigs came out onto the pilothouse. “Repair Two investigators,” their leader, Chief Dougherty, announced. “Request permission to go up on the signal bridge.”

  “What if I say no, Boats?” the captain asked.

  “Well then, God bless you, Cap’n,” he replied. The other chiefs grinned. Everyone was trying to be really cool, calm, and collected. I wondered if the chiefs were as scared as I was. Even the captain’s little joke had seemed a bit forced.

  “Let me go up first,” Marty said. “I know what to look for. Those little props are the key to this. I’m assuming they’re jammed stopped right now. We can’t have them move for any reason.” He turned to one of the engineering chiefs from Repair Two. “Brainard, you guys bring any monkey shit with you?”

  Two chiefs dug into their battle dress and produced what looked like oversized toothpaste tubes. The tubes contained a sealant goo, popularly known throughout the navy as monkey shit, which was used to seal everything from small steam leaks to water seals on boats or leaking bridge windows. When exposed to air it hardened into a plasterlike compound.

  “I’ll locate the fuzing props and cover each one up with a handful of monkey shit, which should mean they can’t ever move again.”

  “Then what?” the captain asked.

  “We’ll wing it from there, Captain,” Marty said. “See if we can find out what kind of bomb it is and get some advice from the bomb-disposal guys on one of the flattops on how to safe it out.”

  The ship began to turn again. “We still going to see about Waltham?” I asked.

  The captain shook his head. He looked over at the gyro repeater next to his chair. “Talker, tell secondary conn to steer back east. Tell ’em to execute a broad weave, base speed fifteen knots.” He turned to me. “No, we have to deal with this problem first, I think. No point in going alongside Waltham and then blowing up.”

  The talker pretended he hadn’t heard that comment about blowing up. He bobbed his head and relayed the message to the officer of the deck, who was standing out in the breeze at the secondary conning station behind the after stack, along with the helmsman and lee helmsman. The ship began another turn.

  “Okay, Marty, go on up,” the captain said. “Take Dougherty with you. Talk to me on the bitch-box when you figure it out. XO, go below and see if you can set up some kind of CIC on the messdecks, and remind me later that we need to design a secondary CIC, just like we have a secondary conning station.”

  I went down to the crew’s messing space, where the CIC team had assembled. They’d found plug-in points for their sound-powered phone circuits and were relying on Radio Central to cover the air-control and raid-reporting radio links. We were, however, blind without access to our radar screens and, of course, useless to the main formation as a sentinel. When I sat down at one of the tables, Lanny King handed me a message form.

  “This is the answer to the UNODIR,” he said. “Short, but not so sweet.”

  The message, which had come from our own squadron commander, Commodore Van Arnhem, based down in the fleet anchorage, was indeed short. Remain on station. Your mission is radar picket. Waltham is our problem.

  “Well, screw ’em if they can’t take a jok
e,” I said quietly. “By the time anybody gets to Waltham she’ll be sleeping with Davy Jones. Maybe if we told them our radars are down they’d let us go over there. Any word from topside on the bomb?”

  “Negative. How are we gonna get rid of that thing? Ten guys go pick it up and throw it over the side?”

  “You volunteering to lead that working party?”

  “Um, no, sir, I am not.”

  “We’ll have to figure out a way that doesn’t involve a bunch of people hugging it,” I said. “We’ll wait for word from Bosun Dougherty. I’ll be right back.”

  I went back up the bridge and handed the message form to the captain, who grunted when he read it. “Blast to follow, no doubt,” he muttered. The tone of the message was clear enough. I also knew that the admiral down off Okinawa would sit down when he had a moment and direct our squadron commander to write a personal-for message directly to the captain regarding his UNODIR. Such hate mail was called a blast. The opposite was called an atta-boy. The rule in the Navy was that one blast undid the working value of ten thousand atta-boys at fitness report time. Oh, well.

  The gun boss dropped down the ladder from the signal bridge, his hands covered in grayish goo. “The fuzing props were intact but jammed,” he announced. “Now they’re really jammed. Bomb case is completely intact. It’s definitely a 250 kg general-purpose bomb. Not smoking, not ticking, or humming, but a nasty piece of work, and it’s embedded just aft of the flag bags and the base of the foremast.”

  “Got any good news?” the captain asked.

  “Yes, sir, it didn’t go off while I was tickling its fuze.”

  “And how are we going to get it out of there and over the side?”

  “Sea anchor,” a gruff voice responded as Chief Dougherty came onto the bridge. He was a large, loud man and a force to be reckoned with both in the chief’s mess and about the decks.

  “Tell me more, Boats,” the captain said.

  “We take a mooring line and wrap that bastard six ways from Sunday. Then we pass the mooring line outboard of all superstructure down the port side, and make the bitter end to a big-ass sea anchor. Pitch that over the side, put the helm down to port, and kick her in the ass. The sea anchor will fill and grab and pull that pogue right off the ship.”

  The captain looked at me. I shrugged. Sounded like it would work.

  “How will you rig the sea anchor?” the captain asked.

  “Take a twenty-man life raft, weigh down one long side with five-inch rounds, sew some canvas across the net bottom, and set a yoke which we can shackle to the bitter end of the mooring line.”

  The captain nodded his approval. “I concur,” he said. “Make it so. Marty, go see which side will be better, and whether or not we can remove any interference before we try this. I’d prefer not to pull the mast over if we can help it.”

  “Should we clear this with the boss?” I asked. “Maybe get some explosive ordnance disposal advice before we go yanking that thing around?”

  “If we were sitting down there in the AOA next to a flattop, I’d say yes, call the EOD. But right now we’re up here all by ourselves in Injun Country, deaf, dumb, and blind, with too many hours of daylight left for the Japs to pay us another visit. Besides, the last time I conversed with CTF 58, he hurt my feelings. Get on with it. I mean, what could go wrong, hunh?”

  There were wary grins all around. Everybody standing there, right down to the captain’s phone-talker, knew exactly what could go wrong. Dougherty, however, waved away the danger. “Piece’a cake. We’ll be set in forty-five minutes.”

  “Thirty would be wonderful, Boats. I have one suggestion. That bomb should have two hangar fittings on it somewhere, where they hang it on the plane’s belly? Instead of cocooning it in six-inch manila, find those points, rig a wire bridle, and make your line to the bridle, not the bomb.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll get on it, then.”

  “Where are we in the great scheme of the Okinawa invasion?” the captain asked after the gun boss and the chief bosun’s mate left the bridge. We could both hear director fifty-one training slowly in a circle above us under the control of operators down in Main Battery Plot. The gunfire-control radar was the only radar left operational on the ship right now, and I wasn’t quite sure why. It wasn’t much of a search radar, but it was better than nothing. I hoped. I told the skipper what we had cobbled together.

  “We’re up on the HF raid-reporting circuit, and we’re guarding the air-control VHF circuits via some creative patching from Radio Central to the messdecks, but basically, we’re out of the game until we get radars back up and Combat remanned. Marty’s got the director going in radar search on the horizon, but that’s…” I shrugged again. It wasn’t much, as we both knew, but at least they might detect a low-flier.

  “Still nothing from Waltham?”

  “No, sir.” Once the midday haze set in, we couldn’t even see that smoke column anymore. “She may be talking to aircraft on VHF, but she’s not up on the main raid-reporting circuit.”

  The captain yawned, covered his mouth, and then yawned again. “Right,” he said. “Put a request in for some EOD assistance over the normal comms channel. That way we can say we did ask, but we really can’t wait. Let me know when they have the sea anchor ready. I’m going to my cabin.”

  “But, sir, the sea cabin’s awfully close to where that bomb is…?”

  “My inport cabin,” the captain said. “Call me when you’re ready to pull that thing off us.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I replied. I was surprised by the captain’s decision to lay below. We were about as vulnerable to another surprise attack as we could be, what with no search radars manned and no close-by support, and our situation wouldn’t get any better until darkness fell. We had a live bomb parked on the 03 level, which, if it went off, would probably flatten most of the forward superstructure, including the captain’s inport cabin. I asked him if he wanted me to stay on the bridge.

  He shook his head, got up from his chair, and went forward to look out the bridge windows. The chief bosun was up on the forecastle, where he had the entire first division rousting out one of the 350-foot-long mooring lines, while a second crew was modifying one of the floatation rafts with a wire bridle.

  Hell, I thought. It might work. We’d have to get all the topside people to muster at one end of the ship or the other before we let that sea anchor take a strain. I saw the lone phone-talker standing in one corner of the pilothouse, as far from where the bomb was as he could get. I told him to unplug his sound-powered phones and go set up outside the captain’s inport cabin. If anyone called him on the 1JV circuit with information for the skipper, he was to knock on the captain’s door and give him the report.

  Then I went below to get some coffee and maybe a sandwich in the wardroom. It was beyond strange to leave the bridge totally unattended in the middle of the hottest war zone in the Pacific, but there was nothing anyone could do from there until that bomb went over the side.

  Thirty minutes later, the phone squeaked in the wardroom and I picked it up.

  “XO, this is Marty. We’re rigged and ready to go. Request permission to attach the bridle to the bomb’s hangar hooks.”

  “Where’s the sea anchor?”

  “Port quarter, with the mooring line faked outboard of everything down the port side. Chief Dougherty says to begin a slow turn to port once we drop it over the side, and then there’s maybe six fathoms of slack before it’ll tighten up.”

  “You’re steering from secondary conn?”

  “Yes, sir. Engine orders to Main Control via the 1JV. Everything’s working.”

  “Lemme get the okay from the captain and I’ll let you know.”

  “XO—he okay?”

  My eyebrows went up. “What do you mean?”

  “He doesn’t seem himself. Seems withdrawn, distracted, maybe. I don’t know, but the other department heads have noticed it, too.”

  “I think he’s just very tired, Marty. Remember he�
�s the oldest guy on board, and command out here takes it out of a man, you know? Get your people ready, and get everybody away from the midships area, including inside the superstructure. That includes Radio Central.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I found the phone-talker parked in the passageway outside the captain’s cabin and told him to disconnect his phones and go aft. He was gone in twenty seconds. I knocked on the captain’s door and then stepped in. I was surprised to find the lights off and the captain stretched out on his sofa-bunk, shoes off, lying on his back. He opened his eyes when I stepped into the cabin.

  “Whatcha got?” he asked.

  “They’re ready to try the sea anchor. I came to get your permission and to recommend you go to secondary conn, away from anything going wrong.”

  The captain smiled. “Like I said before, what could possibly go wrong with this Rube Goldberg operation?” he asked. “You think Marty has a handle on this situation?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” I said. “I still wanted to get your permission to proceed and give you time to get topside.”

  “You have my permission, and I’m going to stay right here.”

  “You are?”

  “Yup. You’ve been XO here now, what, two months?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you don’t need me out there on deck. I’d be just another spectator, now that we’ve had to clear the bridge. I want you to run this show. Don’t call me for every step along the way: use your best judgment and get the thing done. Have your damage control parties ready to go if that thing cooks off. Otherwise, get shut of it, reman all battle stations, and let’s get back up into the radar screen. Call me when it’s over.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir,” I said, “but I’d feel a whole lot better if you were on deck watching over my shoulder.”

  “You’re in training for command, Connie,” he replied. “I’d feel better if the commodore were here, watching over my shoulder, but he isn’t. That’s a part of command you need to get used to. Now, turn to.”