Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "I doubt it," McKay said. "We're going to play it safe."

  For a moment he saw himself storming into flag plot to berate Spruance, to goad him into becoming Bull Halsey for a day and a night. Ships would sink, men would die —but thousands more would die the other way. The war would stretch over time's horizon, where grinning death waited for Sammy, the crew of the Jefferson City.

  But he was only a captain. A man who gave orders — and obeyed them.

  Again the intimation of death seized him like a spasm of malaria. It simultaneously burned and chilled his flesh. He struggled for calm, for hope. Maybe it was only his own death that he foresaw.

  For the first time, Captain McKay hoped so.

  "What the fuck's goin' on?" Jack Peterson wanted to know.

  He and the team of his gun director — Camutti, Daley, the Radical — stood on the wing outside main forward in the dusk watching the fleet swinging east, away from the enemy. From horizon to horizon, the carriers and battleships and cruisers made graceful simultaneous turns like dancers in a gigantic ballet. Their wakes formed huge white loops in the inky water.

  Lieutenant Commander Mullenoe emerged from main forward to join them. From his post at the forty-millimeter gun director just below them, Flanagan asked the gunnery boss for an explanation.

  "I don't know any more than you do," he said. But his disgust was evident. The Japs were somewhere in the darkening sea to the west. They were running away from them.

  "We can't be afraid of those guys, can we, Commander? With this fleet?" Jack said.

  "I hope not," Mullenoe said.

  “All hands man your battle stations!"

  The blue sky was full of Japanese and American planes, rolling, diving, climbing, burning, exploding above them.

  On the bridge, Captain McKay watched the struggle unfold with bitter satisfaction. Instead of hurling a first strike at an enemy already battered by American radar-controlled gunnery during the night, the Fifth Fleet was fighting on the defensive, allowing the Japanese commander to throw every plane in his air force at them, plus whatever he could scrape from nearby Guam. He was demonstrating to Admiral Spruance and Admiral Lee that war at sea had changed drastically since the battle of Tsushima Strait in 1905.

  The Jefferson City was part of the inner battle line, close to the carriers. Beyond them stretched a dozen battleships and six times that many destroyers, their guns pointing skyward.

  In the first stages of the battle, the flagship did not have to fire a gun. "Our Combat Air Patrol is doing an incredible job," Montgomery West reported from CIC. "They shot down ninety percent of that first attack, and the picket destroyers got the rest."

  But the first attack was only the beginning. Within the hour, the radar screens swarmed with pips of over a hundred more planes. Some of the torpedo bombers, Nakajima B6N's known as Jills, got past the CAP and roared over the battleships toward their primary target, the carriers. Frank Flanagan hunched against his forty-millimeter gun director and poured shells at one of these two-engined craft as it zoomed past them at wave-top height. Ships all around them were firing at it too. Flames burst from its belly and it exploded.

  A cry of anguish from the men on the forty-millimeter mount below him jerked Flanagan's eyes away from this satisfying sight. The pointer on the mount, the man who aimed the guns if Flanagan or his director was disabled, was sprawled over the breeches. The other men were screaming and falling off the mount, frantically brushing at some substance that was all over their blue shirts. It took Flanagan a moment to realize it was blood. It took him another moment to realize that the pointer, an easygoing kid from Boston, had no head. His body had spewed blood all over the rest of the gun crew.

  "What happened?" Flanagan shouted.

  They pointed hysterically across the water at a cruiser that was firing at another Jill up ahead of them. As the plane passed between them and the Jefferson City, at least a half dozen forty-millimeter shells whined over Flanagan's head.

  "Bridge, this is forty-millimeter mount one," Flanagan cried. "Tell those guys to starboard that they're firing into us. They just killed my pointer."

  "Get him off the mount and resume firing," said the new air defense officer, Lieutenant Salvatore Calabrese.

  Flanagan passed on the order. The gun crew refused to obey it. They were totally demoralized, crying, brushing at the blood, staring at the cruiser, ready to duck another round. Flanagan scrambled down the ladder to the mount and dragged the dead pointer off his seat, trying not to look at the ugly mass of ravaged flesh between his shoulders.

  "Now get back on those goddamn guns," he shouted.

  They obeyed him and Flanagan scrambled back to his gun director. He had barely put on his earphones again when Calabrese said, "Mount one, take that plane bearing zero one five."

  It was another Jill that must have been hit by the Combat Air Patrol. It was smoking and burning, and the pilot, visible at the controls, looked dead. His hands were on his wheel but his head lolled to one side. The five-inch guns erupted with their usual ear-splitting concussions, but the Jap was too close for the proximity fuses to work. It happened so fast, Flanagan could not get him in his gun director. His hands, slippery with the pointer's blood, could not seem to grasp the handles firmly. His guns pounded, but the shots went low and his next rounds were high.

  The careening green plane tipped to one side. He had no torpedo. He had launched that long ago. His nose dipped and it looked as if he was going to crash either in the water or against the cruiser's hull. But at the last moment the pilot tried to pull up and get over her to the carrier a thousand yards beyond her. The Jap had just enough strength to attempt this last defiant maneuver.

  He did not manage it. Instead, he smashed into the main battery gun director. The plane cartwheeled to the right and exploded in the water on the port side. The impact tore the gun director off its hydraulic moorings as cleanly and as murderously as the forty-millimeter shell had decapitated the pointer. Over the gunnery circuit Flanagan heard Jack Peterson cry, "Jesus Christ!"

  Before Flanagan's horrified eyes, the director toppled from the superstructure, hit the railing of the flag bridge and bounded out beyond the main deck into the sea. For a second it poised there on the surface beside the burning fragments of the plane and Flanagan thought, It will float. They'll get out. A second later the director vanished. There was only a swirl of blue-green water and the sea resumed its blank expressionless face.

  "Jack, Jack," Flanagan sobbed. "No. Jesus. No."

  The air battle raged for the rest of the day, with amazingly light damage to the American Fleet. Listening to the exultant American pilots as they blasted the enemy from the sky, Captain McKay soon realized that the Japanese were not the skilled airmen who had swirled out of the sun to smash the Enterprise and the Hornet in the Solomons. They were poorly trained replacements for those lost veterans.

  From CIC, the number of reported kills reached astronomical heights. "We've shot down at least three hundred and fifty of them," West reported.

  By the time the defensive battle ended, it was, late in the afternoon. The American carriers turned into the east wind to launch their dive bombers and torpedo planes. When these pilots reached the enemy, three hundred miles to the west, there were only twenty minutes of daylight left. They scored hits on a few carriers but darkness swiftly shrouded their targets. Ninety percent of the Combined Fleet steamed on untouched.

  As the American pilots groped back to their carriers, the radio became a chaos of desperate voices reporting imminent disaster.

  "Candy? Candy? This is Batman. Come in, please." "Can anyone tell me where I am?"

  "Give me a vector. Can anyone give me a vector?"

  Spruance was finally forced to order the carriers to turn on their landing lights to prevent a catastrophe. The Americans spent the night frantically fishing pilots from the sea — while the beaten Japanese Fleet, shorn of its air defenses, fled to safety. The frustration in the wardroom of the Jeffer
son City was intense.

  "We should have had them by the balls by now," Bob Mullenoe yelled, kicking a chair halfway across the room. "We should be flipping coins to see who was going to sink the cripples."

  Everyone felt the same way. Even Edwin Moss could not think of anything good to say about Admiral Spruance.

  "Clean out their lockers. Put all their stuff in their seabags and take them down to the chaplain."

  Boats Homewood's voice was thick with grief. He was in a daze. Flanagan was almost as bad. He went to work on Daley's locker first. In the back was a glossy purple rosary, a packet of holy pictures his mother had sent him, a picture of a dark-haired Italian-looking girl he had never mentioned to anyone.

  Camutti's stuff was mostly photos of females in various alluring poses. Some were movie starlets, others were straight porn from girlie magazines. Not one had a personal inscription. There was a packet of letters from his father but none from his supposed squadron of Philadelphia girlfriends.

  Jack Peterson's locker was the hardest. Almost everything in it made Flanagan weep. The spitshined black shoes, the carefully folded tailor-made blue uniform. In the back, a lot of pictures of women with undying testaments of love written on them and a packet of Martha Johnson's letters, which triggered a spasm of guilt as well as grief.

  What else? His hand touched metal — a lot of it. Almost as much leather. He peered into the dark coffinlike rectangle and saw at least a dozen silver bracelets and as many wallets.

  Jack was the thief. For a moment Flanagan was too stunned to think. Then he acted instinctively. He stuffed the loot into the pockets of his dungarees. No one was watching him. Everyone in the division was in a funk over the way Jack and his team had died. They stayed as far away as possible from this ritual removal of the effects of the dead.

  Flanagan took the seabags down to the chaplain's office and left them with his yeoman. Then he began a frantic search for Boats Homewood. He did not know what to do with the loot. If he returned it to the rightful owners, Jack's reputation would be ruined forever. If he threw it over the side, was he Jack's accomplice?

  He could not find Boats anywhere. Flanagan's bulging, clinking pockets made him more and more frantic. Someone said he had seen Homewood go up on deck. Flanagan started at the bow and worked his way down the starboard side. The ship was steaming west with the rest of the fleet, in pursuit of the Japs. The grand strategy of the battle of the Philippine. Sea was beyond Flanagan. He still thought the shootout that would end the war was imminent.

  They might all be drifting down into a thousand fathoms by tomorrow night. Maybe Jack's reputation was irrelevant. But he could not bear the thought of betraying him.

  A huge figure loomed up in the darkness at the fantail, outlined against the phosphorescence of their wake. It was unquestionably Homewood. He was talking to someone. Flanagan hesitated, confused. There was no one else in sight.

  "What did y'have to go and do that to me for?" Homewood said. "Why? He was all I had. This other kid Flanagan is ten times smarter but he hates the Navy. Jack didn't, no matter how much shit he threw at it. He was a sailor all the way. Why did y'have to take'm away from me? I know I don't deserve nothin' from you. I'm seven kinds of a bum. But I been tryin' to keep my nose clean for a long time now, tryin' to do my job with these kids."

  Was he talking to God? No. Gradually, Flanagan realized Homewood was talking to the sea. To the Pacific's immense blankness. The only god he knew or understood in his sailor's soul.

  "Boats?" he said. "It's Flanagan. I ... I've got to talk to you."

  "About what?"

  "About Jack."

  "You feel it too? How goddamned unfair it is? How fuckin' awful?" The huge hand grabbed Flanagan's shoulder and shook it until he thought his brain would tear lose.

  "I wish you remembered him the way I did. He was the skinniest smart-aleck kid you ever seen. Trouble was his middle name. The drinkin' we done together, the dames we had, Jesus, you'd never believe it. But then I saw how fucked up he was, how really fucked up. I mean he was on his way to serious brig time, Portsmouth you know. So I got to work on him. That meant I had to get to work on myself first. I finally had to look myself in the fuckin' mirror and say, 'Homewood, you bum, are you goin' through this fuckin' Navy without accomplishin' nothin' but getting busted and goin' up the ladder and gettin' busted again?'”

  "So I shaped up and I got to work on him the way I tried to get to work on you 'cept you're too fuckin' smart for me. I worked on him and I got somewhere. He was almost straightened out, I swear to God he was. I guess that dame Martha Johnson had a lot to do with it, but I got him started, don't you see? I could remember where he come from, that skinny fuckin' wise guy who wouldn't salute nobody unless they was pointin' a gun at him!"

  The mighty hand was turning Flanagan's shoulder into mush. The sea hissed past them with the stars in its blank face.

  "Now he's gone. He's down there, maybe where we're all headin'. I'm glad you feel the same way about it. Ain't that what you wanted to tell me?"

  "Yes. That's it. I just ... wanted to let you know. And listen. I don't hate the Navy the way you think I do. I just like to give you a hard time. I like to give everybody a hard time. I've got a big mouth."

  "Aw, shit, I know that. You think I'd waste ten seconds on you if you was a fink? Go get yourself some sleep. You got a graveyard watch, don't you?"

  Amidships, Flanagan looked carefully around him. There was no one in sight. Over the side went a dozen silver and gold chains and a dozen wallets. It was a rotten thing to do to his shipmates. He would have it on his conscience for the rest of his life — if he had a life. But it was a small price to pay for Boats Homewood's peace of soul.

  On the bridge, Captain McKay listened in silence while Officer of the Deck Mullenoe exchanged bitter comments with Navigator Marse Lee about the futility of pursuing the Japanese fleet.

  "Don't you agree, Captain?" Mullenoe asked.

  "Have you ever heard about the fog of war, Bob?" McKay said.

  "No," he said.

  "It was a very popular phrase at the War College when I was there."

  I'm afraid it includes the prejudices and quarrels of the admirals. He wanted to sneer something like that about the cold-eyed impassive man on the flag bridge below them. But Captain McKay could not do it. He was still part of this Navy. He had been married to its ships, its rituals, its code longer than he had been married to Rita. He was asking Rita to forgive him for his blunders. Could he do less for the Navy?

  "It was over, Captain. As good as over if we went after them," Mullenoe said.

  "Maybe."

  Mullenoe thought he was rebuking him. He retreated before his own sense of the weight, the power of command. "I guess that's all we'll ever be able to say. Maybe. But right now, it stinks."

  Mail Call

  Dear Frank:

  I wish you'd write more often. Your father is so down in the dumps. He just sits in the parlor all day staring at the window. The only thing he's interested in is the war news from the Pacific.

  I think it's terrible the way he's taking the blame for a system that was rotten long before he got into it. God how I hate Tammany Hall! I've had to put up with those drunken boozers all my life. Above all, your Uncle Barney. Now I can tell them what I think of them — and I have. At the last New Year's party I got tiddly and told them all off. Barney's wife hasn't spoken to me since. But I don't care.

  Father Callow was asking for you. He says he hasn't had a letter from you in a good year. Shame on you, Frank! I'm sure you're still alive only because he's remembered you in his daily Mass ever since you enlisted. I told him the other day I thought the war and the suffering and death you've seen might make you realize how badly the world needs spiritual guidance. It might confirm your vocation. Do you think so?

  Your loving, Mother

  Dear Frank:

  I can barely see this sheet of paper, and it's been a week since I got the news about Jack. Of all the ro
tten deals life has shuffled my way, this is the worst. I finally met a guy I really loved, who really loved me, and what happens? He said that damn ship had Jonah written all over it since Savo Island, but he wouldn't get off it. That would have been cowardly. God, the way you men think. It isn't with your brains. It's with your gonads. You're all afraid someone's going to impugn your courage. You're ready to get killed to prove how brave you are! When no woman in' her right mind really gives a damn about it.

  Oh, hell, that isn't true. I'm not making any sense. I'm just driveling as well as sobbing all over this letter. It was swell of you to write me, Frank, and if you get to Seattle again I'd love to see you. We'll have a drink in memory of Jack.

  Fondly, Martha

  Dear Joey:

  Miracles do happen! Your friend Preston Sturges made some calls per your desperate request and I've gotten a part in a film Universal is making, an imitation of A Yank in the RAF. Except that this time the Yank (Ronald Reagan) is in the U.S. Army Air Force. I'm the snooty English girl who doesn't like Americans, and when he splashes a gallon of muddy water all over me as he whizzes by in his jeep, my opinion of you beastly barbarians sinks even lower. That soon changes, for no particular reason the script writer has been able to come up with so far, and we go on to the usual mush.

  War pictures are definitely on the wane in Hollywood. Escape is in, the war is out. The Crosby picture Going My Way, the most sentimental treacle I've ever seen, is the smash of the year. After that comes The Song of Bernadette, about the miracles at Lourdes. Not being a believer in that sort of magic, it left me cold. Ditto National Velvet, starring a precocious brat named Elizabeth Taylor and a horse, who stole the show. You get the feeling the Home Front doesn't want to think very much about you brave boys bobbing around in the western Pacific. Which leaves me outraged and frustrated. My only consolation is the way the Allies are wiping up the Bache in Europe.

  Speaking of frustration, is there any hope of you coming back to California soon? I keep reading about these wonderful task forces, complete with oilers and ammunition ships and supply ships which means you can stay at sea indefinitely. Are they also sending you some floating brothels? That seems to me the only thing the Navy hasn't added into the equation for fighting this war for the rest of the century without letting you off that damn ship.