Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  Where this loathsome fantasy had begun, McKay did not know. He found it infuriating. He did not believe in ghosts. He did not believe Win was haunting his ship. Even if he were, he was not afraid of him. The Jefferson City belonged to Arthur McKay now. No one could take it away from him. Not even Admiral King. But the idea still enraged him.

  Maybe they were all going as crazy as the Japanese.

  Judging from appearances, madness did seem rampant on board. Everyone on the bridge and on any other exposed post, such as the forty-millimeter mounts, had his face and hands covered with blue grease, issued by the Navy to protect them against flash burns from exploding kamikazes. They were also wearing one-piece jump suits which were supposed to protect the wearers against shrapnel wounds. Unfortunately, the inventor had not figured out how to ventilate them. After two hours, the wearer felt as if he were standing inside a boiler.

  On most ships, captains had refused to issue these to their men, they were so unpopular. Captain McKay had decided even acute discomfort was a small price to pay for survival. So he zipped himself into his "shoot suit," as the men called the baggy garments, each day. The crew, bound to him now by sympathy and an almost mystical faith in his judgment, reluctantly followed his example.

  "Here they come," George Tombs said, studying the horizon with his glasses. "Looks like a hell of a lot of them have gotten through the CAP.”

  "Bogey bearing zero nine zero," said the bridge talker. "CIC reports another bogey at one eight zero."

  "Another bogey at two zero five."

  "Flank speed, steady as you go," George Tombs said.

  The five-inch guns blasted, the forties hammered. Would it ever end? Arthur McKay wondered. He was so tired. At night, Horace Aquino had to practically undress him. He was barely able to sit at the table and eat his supper.

  The first three kamikazes went after the carriers. One hit the Franklin and hurt her badly. The big ship was racked by tremendous explosions. A column of smoke rose a thousand feet in the air, George Tombs was distraught. His Annapolis roommate was the gunnery officer.

  The sky filled with black bursts from the five-inch proximity fuses. Kamikazes flamed and fell like quaint paper birds. The talker droned bearings, his voice full of suppressed terror. Only if a suicide pilot made a run at the ship did everyone's fear become visible.

  "Here comes one," George Tombs said.

  The Zero was dead ahead. A tough target for the five-inch guns. He was already smoking. Flames gushed around his engine. A fat five hundred-pound bomb clung to his undercarriage. He knew he had very little time left and was picking the first available target.

  "Get him, Guns!" McKay said.

  The Jap's machine guns flared. Marines manning the twenty-millimeter mount above turret one toppled to the deck. Others leaped to the guns and kept firing. The plane kept coming. The forty-millimeter mount on the bow was firing wild, missing him by twenty feet. Panic was ungluing their fire controlman. The Jap was going to crash into the bridge. "Do something, Captain," the talker screamed.

  The two forward five-inch mounts fired simultaneously. The Zero turned into an immense fireball. The left wing fell off and he plunged into the sea a few points off the port bow, hurling a wave of burning gasoline across the men on the forty-millimeter mount. "Fire, fire on the main deck forward," roared the boatswain's mate of the watch.

  A fire-fighting team burst onto the deck dragging hoses. Water and foam smothered the blaze. They staggered across the slippery deck to drag the scorched bodies off the forty-millimeter mount.

  "Nice shooting, Guns," McKay said to Bob Mullenoe.

  "We should have gotten him at three thousand yards," George Tombs growled.

  "They're doing their best," McKay said.

  "Turn on all lights. Search all compartments. There may be a Jap aboard!"

  It was Ensign Brownmiller on the PA system. Had he gone crazy? They were anchored a mile off the Okinawa coast. In the Marine compartment, their commander ordered everyone to load his rifle. He rushed six Marines to the captain's cabin; they practically broke down McKay's door, pounding on it. His regular guard was already inside, his .45 pistol drawn. The corporal in charge stationed three men on the wing deck outside his sea hatch. Similiar reinforcements surrounded Admiral Spruance.

  While the Marines began a frenzied search of the ship, Captain McKay pulled on a pair of pants and climbed to the bridge to find out the source of this uproar. He discovered Ensign Brownmiller with gun in hand interrogating a machinist's mate with a large bruise on his cheek. Brownmiller ordered him to repeat his story for Captain McKay.

  "I woke up and for some reason I decided to go down in the after engine room to check on a couple of things. I got there and found this guy foolin' around with the locks on the main reduction gears. 'What the hell are you doin'?' I said.

  "He didn't pay no attention to me. I started comin' down the ladder to grab him when whoa I slip on a wet step and land on my head. When I woke up he was gone."

  "What did he look like?" McKay asked.

  "He was tall. Dark hair. He had an officer's uniform on. That's all I can tell you. He didn't look like a Jap. I mean, most of them are runts, ain't they?"

  "Most of them."

  Was it possible some survivor of the defeats of the Combined Fleet, inspired by the kamikazes, had swum out to the ship, hauled himself up on the lines dangling from the boat boom and come aboard with a plan to blow up or cripple an American warship?"

  "Tell the Marines to pay especially close attention to the magazines and the fuel tanks. Anyplace where someone could cause an explosion," McKay said.

  A frantic hour later, the sweat-soaked Marine captain reported to the bridge. "Sir, we've searched every inch of the ship. We haven't found a thing. We've got guards on every magazine and in the engine and fire rooms, just in case."

  No one slept for the rest of the night. In the crew's compartments, men sat on bottom racks embellishing the story. "I heard a Marine caught him on the quarterdeck and tried to bayonet him. It went right through him," one of the mesquiteers told Flanagan.

  "It would go right through you too," Flanagan said.

  "He means it was a spook. Somethin' you couldn't kill," a second mesquiteer explained.

  "Who could it be?" Flanagan said, knowing the answer.

  "Captain Kemble," said the third mesquiteer.

  "I'm betting it was some chicken-livered guy in the black gang. My friend Marty Roth tells me if you throw sand in those reduction gears, the ship's out of action for six months. I wish he told me that when we were in Long Beach."

  "That's enough outa you, wise guy," Homewood roared.

  The mysterious intruder remained unfound, and the spooky explanation swiftly became the prevailing wisdom. Not content with simply haunting them, Captain Kemble was now trying to destroy the Jefferson City.

  "Raid number thirty-seven. Bogeys closing from the northwest. This is Delegate. Out."

  Only two hours had passed since the first raid of the day and Delegate was hoarse already. In the Jefferson City's CIC, where Montgomery West was responsible for coordinating what he heard from Delegate, from the ship's lookouts and from his radar operators, the problem was more complicated. His radarscopes were a wild confusion of enemy and friendly planes as the Combat Air Patrol tangled with the kamikazes. It was impossible to separate them. That meant they had to wait until a kamikaze got so close, the CAP broke off pursuit. With the plane hurtling toward them at 350 miles per hour, the J.C.'s gunners then had about 120 seconds to shoot him down.

  On top of fighting for her life, the ship had regular bombardment assignments, to assist the troops ashore trying to pry the Japanese out of their holes and caves. These requests for artillery support were often as urgent as the kamikaze warnings that flooded the airwaves from Delegate.

  After a week of dealing with this murderous chaos, West was glassy-eyed with fatigue. He began to wonder if he had ever been anything but this harried creature in earphones. The
memories of his previous life were as hazy as the scenes of the movies in which he had acted. Gwen's letters telling him how Hollywood and everyone else in the country seemed to have forgotten the war infuriated him. He almost wished she would stop writing him.

  "Lookouts report two bogeys, bearing one five zero, two four zero," Harold Semple said. His ears were raw from wearing his talker's headphones for twelve and eighteen hours at a stretch.

  "Yeah, yeah. What do you get on radar, Wylie?" West said.

  "Confirmed. I've got three others," Wylie said, and mumbled the ranges and bearings.

  "What the fuck did you say, Wylie? We haven't got time to repeat anything. Speak slowly, clearly."

  "Lieutenant, I don't feel good. I need another pill."

  "We all need pills, Wylie. Give me those fucking bearings again."

  Wylie started to blubber. His nerves were shot.

  They were going to get hit, Harold Semple thought. There were so many omens — the death of the captain's son, the appearance of Captain Kemble's ghost, the way people were collapsing with fatigue and fear. Yesterday Edna had crumpled into a whimpering, wailing blob.

  There was only one man who could protect him. The Great Ape, the slouching beast in Deck Division One's sleeping compartment. If anyone could survive in a sea of evil, it was Boatswain's Mate First Class Jerome Wilkinson.

  In the director for the five-inch guns, Frank Flanagan rubbed sweat from his raw streaming eyes and waited for the next kamikaze. The fire controlman who usually operated the director had collapsed. The setup was the same as the main battery director, with a high-powered range finder that spotted targets and estimated distances. But the speed at which things happened in the air was so different, it was like going from running the mile to the hundred-yard dash overnight.

  "Bogey bearing two seven zero," said the air defense

  officer, Lieutenant Calabrese. He was tough and cool. The deck apes had nicknamed him the Enforcer.

  Flanagan spun the director to port. It was a Val, with fixed landing gear — an ancient crate. But he had a big black bomb under his belly that could blow them all to pieces. "Director, this is sky forward. Have you got him?" Calabrese asked.

  "Roger. Range six thousand yards, altitude one thousand."

  "Okay. We've got a good setup in plot. We'll stay on automatic."

  The five-inch guns boomed. The Val linked right and left. The proximity fuses exploded all around him. Pieces of the plane flew off. An easy one, Flanagan thought. The next salvo would finish him. But the Val abruptly climbed to two thousand feet and the next salvo whizzed over the horizon. Suddenly Flanagan knew they were not going to stop this one.

  "Range three thousand yards." It was incredible how fast the range dropped. "Two thousand yards."

  "All mounts, go to local control," Calabrese said, giving each five-inch mount the freedom to do its own aiming and shooting.

  "Range one thousand yards," Flanagan said.

  In his powerful lens, Flanagan could see the pilot's face. He was smiling. The forty-millimeters were firing now. The ship was throwing up a wall of exploding metal. He could not possibly get through it. A forty-millimeter shell smashed the cockpit. The pilot's head vanished. But the plane kept flying, a headless corpse at the controls. It was the stuff of myths, of nightmares.

  Down the Val came in a relentless dive at the midships superstructure. The forty-millimeter guns were literally hammering it to pieces. But they could not stop it. Flanagan braced himself for the fire and explosion. It would probably blow the director into the sea. He would die like Jack Peterson.

  A final blast from a five-inch gun drove the Val toward the stern. He'll miss by inches, Flanagan thought. Please make him miss. At such moments even skeptics prayed.

  He did not miss. There was a snarling, screaming crash as the motor collided with metal. The whole ship shuddered under the impact of a terrific explosion.

  "Ah, Jesus, ah, shit," Flanagan gasped. He was weeping, banging his head against the range finder. They had done everything right. They had hit him with almost every gun on the ship. How did he keep coming? Why? Had their luck finally run out?

  "I think that fucker is coming in," said Mess Steward Cash Johnson in Repair Five, the damage control station for the after part of the ship. It was the last thing he or anyone else in Repair Five said or thought. The plane tore through the main deck and the bomb went through two more decks before exploding only a few feet away from Repair Five, killing all of them instantly. Fires erupted around the magazines and powder rooms for the after turret.

  In Damage Control Central Lieutenant Commander Edwin Moss made a swift, vital decision. "Flood all after magazines," he said.

  His men spun the dials that sent seawater rushing into these spaces. He called Repair Five and got no answer. He tried to call the engine rooms. "I think the power's gone aft, sir," his talker said.

  Strapping on his inhalator, Moss rushed aft to assess the situation. He found men from Repair Three and Four under the leadership of Boats Homewood fighting the fire with water and foam in the semi-darkness. All power was out in the after part of the ship. Homewood told him there were at least six holes in the hull and nine compartments flooded. A stumpy shipfitter pointed to a hatch that led to the central electricity room. "Some of my best buddies are down there," he said. "What the fuck's wrong with our gunnery department?"

  As the fires were extinguished, they were able to approach the slaughterhouse that Repair Five had become. Bodies and parts of bodies lay among the twisted steel and charred hoses and breathing masks, mercifully covered by the foam. Moss picked up the hat that had belonged to the ensign in charge, an easygoing kid from Connecticut. Numbly he wiped the foam off the visor. How long would this go on?

  A messenger rushed up to him. "Sir. Flag wants to know if you've seen Admiral Spruance!"

  "I've got other things on my mind."

  "He was walking on deck when the plane hit. No one's seen him since."

  Moss went up on deck, where more fire fighters were dealing with the roaring blaze around turret three. All of them wore dungarees and had their faces painted blue. At the head of one of the hoses was a figure in khaki with no paint on his face.

  "Admiral," Moss said, "Flag wants to know if you're all right."

  “Tell them I'm fine. If you can scrape together anything that's left of that Jap pilot, see if he was carrying a code book. If we could break the code they're using, we might be able to shoot these maniacs down over Japan."

  The admiral went back to fighting the fire.

  "Captain," the helmsman said, "we've lost steering control."

  "Shift to steering aft," McKay said.

  "Captain," said the signal officer, "Eldorado wants to know if we can handle our bombarding assignment."

  "Signal affirmative," McKay said.

  Damage Control had reported all fires extinguished. Turret three was out of action, but the other two were unharmed. Seventeen men were dead, seventy-seven wounded, another twenty missing — trapped and presumed drowned in the flooded compartments. The flooding had caused the cruiser to settle five feet. But Captain McKay wanted to prove to the world — and his crew – that she was still a fighting ship.

  The bombardment orders flowed in from the Eldorado. McKay could see Admiral Kelly Turner in his flag plot, predicting that the Jefferson City would quit. She was still a disgraced ship, as far as he and Ernie King were concerned. In their son-of-a-bitch code, mistakes were never erased, sins never forgiven.

  "George," McKay said to Executive Officer Tombs, "take us in to three thousand yards before we bombard. Marse Lee will have a conniption, but tell him it's an order. I'm going below to see the wounded."

  In sick bay, he talked to men waiting for the doctors to operate, to others who lay naked, smeared with jelly for their burns. A seaman second class who had been on the forty-millimeter mount on the bow when the kamikaze drenched it with flaming gasoline had burns over sixty percent of his body. He said
he was not in any pain and Dr. Cadwallader had told him he would be fine. Dr. Levy, standing a few feet away, caught the captain's eye and mournfully shook his head.

  "We've been trying to get him to write a letter to his mother," the chaplain said.

  "Why don't you?" McKay said. "Dictate it to the chaplain. I'll write a postscript, telling her what a great job you've done."

  As the boy began his letter, the Jefferson City's main battery boomed. "Dear Mom," he said. "We've just been hit by a kamikaze and I've been hurt pretty bad. But I think I'm going to be okay. We're still fighting. In sick bay, where the chaplain is helping me write this, I can hear the guns banging away. Believe it or not, they're beautiful music when you're hurt or scared. Lots of love, Andy."

  "We'll get it by the censor, won't we, Captain?" the chaplain said.

  "Guaranteed," McKay said.

  "Give them hell for us, Captain," an older sailor said, as two mess stewards picked up his stretcher and carried him to the operating room. McKay saw his right leg was missing below the knee.

  Movie stuff. But the burned sailor had it right. Men said things like that when they were in agony. "That's what we're doing," McKay said.

  Back on the bridge, Tombs reported the Marine spotters ashore were ecstatic over the hits they were scoring on an array of Japanese bunkers slotted into one of Okinawa's murderous ridges.

  "Captain, CIC reports bogeys in large numbers closing from due north."

  "Flank speed. Let's get out of this shoal water," McKay said. Would they get hit again? It did not seem fair. But who ever said fairness had anything to do with this business?

  Once more the first wave of kamikazes concentrated on the picket destroyers on the fringes of the fleet, pathetically naked to attack. They listened to the desperate calls for help from destroyer captains, the terse announcement that the Leutze, the Rodman, the Bush were abandoning ship. Then the kamikazes were streaking through the sky around the Jefferson City. The guns hammered and boomed once more.

  "Bogey bearing two one five, range eight thousand," the talker said.

  "Art," George Tombs said, "what do you say we try to maneuver this time. Give them a tougher target.”