The Nugget

by P. T. Deutermann

  Two heavy cruisers in the carrier’s screen about two miles back on our starboard quarter opened up first with their five-inch batteries. I couldn’t see what they were shooting at until black puffs began to decorate the northwestern skies around the formation. I felt like I should be doing something to help with the defense, but without an airplane, a pilot was just supercargo. I nearly jumped out of my skin when all four of Hornet’s twin five-inchers let fly right below me. The ship was now in a slow right turn to bring the five-inch batteries’ gun barrels to bear on what was coming, which I still couldn’t see. I did see a black speck way up there turn bright orange and fall out of the sky, followed by another. The curtain of flak grew heavier as every ship in the task force got into it, blasting hot steel into the skies from five-inchers and the light cruisers’ six-inchers. The side of the battleship accompanying us turned into a wall of flame as her five twin-barreled five-inchers opened up. I still couldn’t see the Japs. Then I realized I should have been looking up.

  And here they came, just like we had done at Midway. Two Vals, carrier bombers, the Jap version of the SBD, had pushed over into seventy-degree dives, engines howling, the planes getting bigger and bigger as they jinked from side to side, buffeted by the aerodynamic forces of a 300-knot drop and near misses from all the AA fire. I stared in horror, very much aware that this was how the Japs on Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu must have felt when we hit them. I also realized that coming up here had been a dumb idea. Neither of us had helmets, life jackets, or any other form of protection. The noise from all the guns made my ears hurt so bad I wondered if they weren’t bleeding.

  I never saw but I did feel the first bomb hit. It was back aft, right in the middle of the flight deck, and it punched a small hole in the deck and went down. A dud, I prayed, but it wasn’t. Somewhere in the ship’s belly there was a heavy thump and then a thunderous boom. Debris and fire shot up out of that small hole and out the side and stern galleries of the hangar deck. Then a second one, much closer, which went off just behind the island, blasting three planes right off the ship’s side and knocking me over in a tangle of limbs and nearly over the side. As I tried to gather my wits we were showered with fragments of shattered wood from the flight deck. I looked over at Rooster, who was curled up in a tight ball, covering his head and face with both arms. Very dumb idea, I thought again.

  I let go of the gallery railing and started to crawl over towards that notch between the life raft stacks. Then I heard a sound I couldn’t at first comprehend: the scream of an airplane engine well past its red line. I looked over my shoulder just as a Val, his right wing on fire, crashed into the island, just abaft the bridge, maybe 60 feet away, and exploded into a huge ball of flaming avgas. Then a giant clubbed me in the head and I was well and truly gone away.

  THIRTEEN

  The first thing I noticed when I came to was the quiet. Second, it was evening, with the sun no more than ten degrees from touching the distant horizon. Third: somehow, seawater had washed over my entire right side. Only seawater isn’t red. I tried to move and my body convinced me that wasn’t a great idea just now. What was bleeding? I felt my scalp, which seemed looser than it had been. There was a long cut on the right side that ran all the way down past my right ear.

  Where is everybody, I wondered. Rooster: where’s Rooster? I was lying on the deck, my right arm curled underneath me. The deck was warm. Really warm. I tried to focus, but it was hard and my ears were ringing. Then a cloud of hot smoke enveloped me and I spent the next minute trying to cough up my lungs. When I regained control of my spasms the smoke had whisked away. I looked around for Rooster and there he was. Awake, looking back at me, but something was seriously wrong. And why was it so quiet? Where the hell was everybody?

  “What happened?” I rasped at him.

  He opened his mouth to reply but only revealed a mouthful of blood. He closed his eyes and then his body sagged and seemed to lose definition.

  Rooster was dead.

  Goddammit!

  I was pressed up against the blackened steel of the gallery railing. I looked out, expecting to see the horizon. Instead I saw the sea, much closer than it should have been. Hornet had a heavy starboard list on. There was a roaring fire somewhere down below, probably in the hangar deck. The ship rolled hesitatingly a few degrees to port, then back to starboard a good twenty degrees, where she hung ominously. I remembered that feeling when Oklahoma began to give up the ghost.

  Good God, I thought: they’ve abandoned ship! At that moment a thunderous roar came from way down below on the opposite side of the ship. Hornet bucked sideways, clearly gut shot. Then a second one, even bigger. A third, and then a fourth. Torpedoes. Big torpedoes. A minute later I could feel the ship settling rapidly into the sea. I was astonished to see two Jap destroyers pulling out ahead of the ship, turning across her almost submerged bow, and then speeding away to rejoin their forces. I heard a great whistling noise building from somewhere forward on the flight deck. I knew what that was: the sound of air being forced out of the hull as she began to fill.

  Gotta move, gotta get out of here. I painfully picked myself off the deck. The rack full of life rafts had been upset, with the black rubber bundles scattered all over the gallery deck. The area forward of the life raft stack was wrecked, burned, and shredded, with the wing of a Jap plane clearly visible in the wreckage, that red circle staring back at me in triumph. He’d dropped his bomb, then probably been torn up by the close-in 20mm’s and just kept coming, determined to make his emperor proud.

  The ship lurched to starboard, as if something big had given way down below.

  Life rafts. Get one. Hell, get two, pitch ’em over the side and go in after them. They were heavier than I expected, but I managed to get one, and then a second one up over the railing and into the water, which was now only 20 feet below me instead of 70.

  Gotta go. Gotta go. The whole ship was shaking now, as if she was resisting her fate. I would, too. The waters here were four miles deep.

  “Boss!” Rooster croaked. “Wait for me.”

  I turned around. He was alive and crawling towards the railing.

  Neither of us had a life jacket, but it was no longer a matter of choice. The whistling noise from the flight deck elevator openings was much louder now.

  The vibration got so bad that Rooster and I were shaken off the gallery deck and into the water. I hit the side of one of the life rafts. I grabbed and tried to corral it, and, in so doing, I managed to pull the inflation handle. The raft rewarded me with a punch in the face as the rubber expanded. Above us the dark gray bulk of a 27,000-ton aircraft carrier leaned way over, on fire from end to end now and threatening to roll over right on top of us.

  I looked around for Rooster but couldn’t find him, so I clambered aboard the raft and then tried again. I saw him, ten feet away and making a feeble effort to swim towards the raft, trying to ignore the looming shadow of the dying carrier that was getting ever closer. I went back into the water and swam over to him, grabbing him by the sleeve of his shirt, and then pulling him back to the raft. He tried to help but he was much too weak. I don’t know how I got the both of us onto the raft but I did, and then I collapsed to get my wind. Something big hit the water right next to us. I opened my eyes in time to see things rolling off the flight deck as she started her final plunge: airplanes, push-tractors, even bombs, all accompanied by a sickening number of smaller, dungaree-clad white and red bundles sliding down the ruined deck and slapping lifeless into the sea.

  I looked for the paddles. There were supposed to be paddles. There. Strapped to the floor of the raft. I pulled one out and started paddling as hard as I could, which wasn’t very hard. When I finally ran out of steam I looked back. The back one-third of the carrier was standing up out of the sea now, her bronze propellers shining in the evening light. I watched in awe as she slid down into the depths. Then I think I passed out.

  I awoke sometime later. It was night. Full dark, no wind. Rooster was a gray s
hape on the netted bottom, out like a light. Hornet and all her works were long gone. The sea smelled of fuel oil and char. I looked around and saw the second life raft 20 feet away, bobbing patiently. Somehow that was important. Extra water. Food. I knew I should go back into the water and retrieve it. I closed my eyes for just a minute, resting for the effort. The next thing I knew it was daylight. Something had awakened me. Noise. Engine noise. I looked around and then up. An ominous black silhouette was nose on and getting bigger and bigger. Four engines. Floats out at the wingtips. Big seaplane.

  Kawanishi.

  I rolled into the sea on the opposite side of his approach, popped back up, grabbed Rooster and pulled him, squawking like a chicken, into the water with me. I yelled at him to take a deep breath and then we both went down as far as we could. A second later bright silver slashes appeared in the water as those barbarous bastards strafed the raft. We popped up thirty seconds later as the seaplane rose back into a slate gray sky. We waited for him to turn around but he didn’t. He droned away, satisfied with getting a few murders under his belt before breakfast. I longed for the day that we got out of this present fix and back into the business of carrying out Halsey’s first law.

  The raft had been hit several times, but, being a honeycomb of rubber, there wasn’t much real damage. First order of business was to get back in and then we needed to retrieve that second raft. There was no telling how long we’d be out here or if the PBYs would even be sent out. They’d abandoned the ship, so they might think they got everyone off except the dead.

  I finally inspected the raft. Food and water were in two long pipe-like canisters strapped to the inner sides. I broke out a water can and punched it open with the can opener taped to the inside of the canister. We both gulped it down despite the taste of chlorine. Rooster seemed to recover a bit and he was able to help me paddle over to the second raft. We thanked God there’d been no wind. We lashed it to our own raft and then relaxed and prayed for the PBYs. My head wound had stopped bleeding but I could feel a long, ugly scab forming. Neither one of us had serious wounds, but we both felt like we’d been steamrolled. I had vague memories of a lecture at flight school about the effect of a bomb blast on the human body.

  “Should’a stayed in the house,” I observed.

  “No guarantees that fire in the hangar bay wouldn’t have cooked us,” Rooster pointed out. “You see that wing on the signal bridge? The one with the meatball on it?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s what they’ll do one day,” he said. “When they run out of bombs and carriers. They’ll start doing that shit on purpose. Japs’re big on suicide.”

  “God I hope not,” I said. “How do you defend against that?”

  He just shook his head, winced at the effort, and then curled up to take a nap.

  I stayed awake. I felt bad about our predicament. If we’d stayed inside the ship we’d have probably been led out to one of those ropes leading over the side, slid down into the water, and been picked up by a destroyer. We would have been on our way to Nouméa by now. I’d told Rooster to go below, but I should have known he’d stick with me. Nugget mistake, I thought. Believed I was a big aviator by now. Then I remembered something: if a PBY did fly over, how would we make him see us? Smoke flares. I crawled over and past Rooster and opened up the supply canisters. Time to take everything out and see what we got.

  The new rafts were designed to hold up to twenty men, with the wounded inside and even more clinging to the nets stitched into the sides and the bottom if necessary. Most ships carried the old-style balsa-wood-and-netting rafts, which weren’t really lifeboats but more like big flotation devices for men to hang on to during an operational rescue and recovery operation after a ship went down. These things were much better, although once the wind came up they’d go wherever the wind took them, so there was no hope of navigating by the stars and paddling to some island. I hauled all the supplies out, aware that I’d probably never get all that stuff back in. I found smoke flares, wrapped in oilpaper. They worked just like a railroad flare: cut the paper off the top, remove the top, and scratch it hard against the igniter pad. There were some medical kits, a couple of flashlights, food and water packets, a ball of marline twine, two fishing kits, and, buried all the way at the back of the tube, a package of cigarettes and some matches. Hallelujah!

  I lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke at Rooster, who woke right up.

  “Where the hell did you find that?” he asked. I handed him one and the pack of matches. He lit it reverently, like an altar boy lighting the altar candles.

  “For me to know and you to beg, slave,” I stated calmly. “I will require that you keep my stateroom spic and span and bring me champagne on demand.”

  “Y’all got it, Boss,” he said with a grin. “You gonna want fish aigs, too?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, and then looked up. A sudden breeze had come up. The skies were neither clear nor cloudy, but they were a slate color that hadn’t been there earlier. “I think we need to lash down all this stuff before it gets rough out.”

  It was a good thing we did. A squall line rose up on the horizon and within a half hour we were bouncing around in crashing, confused waves, torrential rain, and a wind with a mission. Once again, the rafts proved their worth, because they were equipped with a tarp stitched into one end. We could huddle out of the rain, although unlike on the old balsa rafts, the waves came aboard and stayed, forcing us to bail. We’d brought the other raft in closer and doubled the line attached to it. We’d also re-strapped the supply tubes to the side netting. Even if the wind flipped the raft, all we had to do was hang on and wait for the fun to stop. Rooster suggested we tie ourselves to the raft in case that did happen, so we made a crude rope out of the marline, allowed six feet of slack, and secured the other end to our left wrists.

  As things turned out, the squall passed as quickly as it had erupted. We both felt better, having had a fresh-water shower. I tied the two smoke flares to the top line of the side netting. They were waterproof and I made sure Rooster knew how to light one off. It was starting to get dark. Rooster and I each had a ration of food and a can of water. Then we each lit up a precious cigarette and pretended we were on a cruise. Another squall jumped us late that night. This time the fresh-water shower was colder than the one we’d enjoyed earlier. I’d had great plans to use stars to figure which way we were drifting, but the skies were solid overcast. I did know that the northeast monsoon was coming on, which meant we’d go southwest. What I didn’t know was where Hornet had been when she went down. I gave up trying to figure it all out. We had food and water for several days between the two rafts. What we needed now was a PBY.

  We spent our time swapping stories. It turned out that Rooster was not the country boy he pretended to be. He was from Alabama, but from Mobile. His father was an engineer like mine was and he’d had a year of college before coming into the Navy, trying to outrun the looming Depression. He’d actually been offered a commission at one point until he made the mistake of bedding his squadron’s executive officer’s wife. The XO sought physical retribution, which did not go in his favor. That meant, of course, that Rooster was put on report for striking an officer, which in turn led to a hasty transfer and permanent enlisted status. I asked him if the lady had been worth all that. They are all worth it, Boss, he said. Every one.

  The following night, just after sunset, we heard aircraft engines. They sounded different from the Kawanishi engines, but they were high, so we really couldn’t tell. Whatever it was, it was multi-engine. Ours or theirs? I thought the plane was headed south. That would indicate ours since Nouméa was south of Guadalcanal. We didn’t have much time to decide, and a minute later, I scratched off the first flare. The light was dazzling in the ocean darkness. The smoke, almost invisible in the night, blew off to the southwest. We listened for any change in the aircraft’s engine noise. Nothing. The plane kept going and finally disappeared. I doused the flare in the sea and tried not to get to
o disappointed.

  “That guy was way up there,” Rooster observed.

  “If it was a PBY or an R4D, he was probably ferrying wounded from Guadalcanal to Nouméa,” I replied. “Assuming I have any idea of which way is which.”

  Rooster agreed. The question neither one of us wanted to bring up was whether or not anybody on that plane had noticed a sudden blaze of light way down there on the sea surface. Not to mention that what looked like a blowtorch to us would have been a pinprick of light if that guy had been at 15,000 feet.

  The same thing happened the next two nights. A lone aircraft, way up there as Rooster had put it, droning through the night. None of them had reacted to our flares. We’d used up all the flares from the one raft so we raided the supply cache on the other raft for more.

  “We can’t keep seeing each other like this, Rooster,” I pointed out after the next plane ignored us.

  “Thanks for reminding me, Boss,” he said.

  “And this is still all your fault, too,” I replied.

  He grinned in the darkness.

  “I thought you were a goner, back there on the gallery deck. I’m sure as hell glad you weren’t.”

  He nodded.

  “Because then I wouldn’t have anyone to blame for this mess we’re in except myself,” I said. “Happily, here you are.”

  “I gotta take a leak,” he announced, disrespectfully. Somehow that struck me as really funny, and then we were both laughing, possibly just a bit hysterically. That’s when something really big appeared out of the black sea in a great rush of foaming water and suddenly the night was alive with the sound of substantial diesel engines. We gaped like a pair of Bedlam idiots as a submarine approached out of the night and came to a stop, its rounded bullnose looming right over our raft. Gray figures threw us a lifeline. Rooster grabbed it before I could get to it, and then they pulled us close in to those sloping sides. I found myself tearing up. Some alert aviator had seen the flares. Thanks be to God.