Flanagan looked around the compartment. The crews of the deck guns were babbling excitedly, ignoring the Pharmacist’s Mate and his patient. The high they had been riding in the deck gun action was still with them.
“All right, you people,” Flanagan growled. “Let’s knock off this bullshit. You people sound like a zoo.”
John Wilkes Booth, the ship’s yeoman who had manned the 20-millimeter machine guns, grinned at Flanagan.
“Hell, Chief, it was just like a turkey shoot back home in Alabama. We just purely shot those bastards right outa water, didn’t we?”
Flanagan stared at the black-haired yeoman. “Next time we get into one of those flails I wish you’d keep your big mouth shut. It’s bad enough when those twin twenties of yours are hammering right over our heads on that forward deck gun, we don’t need you screaming like someone had shoved a big corn cob up your ass and sat you down hard!”
“I wasn’t screaming, that was my Rebel yell. You got to yell if you’re fighting, Chief. All us good of Suth’n boys give out with the Rebel yell when we get in a fight. Scares the damn Yankees outa their skulls!”
“You’d better Rebel yell your ass up to that cubbyhole you call an office,” Flanagan growled. “The Exec is writing up the contact report, and he’ll be looking for you to do a little fightin’ on that typewriter.”
Booth slid out from behind the mess table and looked at the second loader, whose head was resting on his arm on the table.
“Old Doc does pretty good with that needle for a Reservist who used to sing in front of some damned band, doesn’t he?”
“I didn’t sing in front of any band,” Wharton snapped. He ran his hand over his carefully combed wavy blond hair. “I was a featured ballroom dancer with a full orchestra. Not a band, an orchestra. There’s a hell of a difference. Shit, singers are a dime a dozen in show business. Dancers, good dancers, are hard to find.” He rolled his eyes upward. “Man, I had me a partner, a tall redhead, she was built like a brick shithouse! If you ever saw her, Booth, your gonads would shoot right up to your stomach. That is, if yeomen have gonads.”
Booth grinned at the Chief Pharmacist’s Mate. “All that good civilian background sure helps to make a submarine sailor, doesn’t it? Damned submarine navy is just like the Army. The Army takes a civilian who’s a first-rate restaurant cook and makes him into a truck driver.” He rinsed his coffee cup in the sink and put it back in the cup rack. “I guess that being a professional ballroom dancer is the right background for a bedpan cleaner.” He went forward and through the hatch as a gust of laughter swept the Crew’s Mess. Chief Wharton grinned and took the sleeping loader’s wrist in his hand and began to take his pulse.
“LaMark,” Flanagan said to the ship’s Gunner’s Mate. “The Exec wants a reading on how much ammunition we shot off and how much we got left. Like right now.”
“Got it right here, Chief,” LaMark said. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket.
“That isn’t going to do the Exec any good in your pocket,” Flanagan said.
“I’ll take it to the Wardroom right away. Man, that quad pom-pom is sure a fire hose, ain’t it? I could have cut that damned escort vessel right off at the water line if you people on the deck gun hadn’t got lucky and blew it up. I pure blew that ship’s bridge into firewood.”
Flanagan faced the people still sitting at the mess tables, his powerful sloping shoulders hunched belligerently.
“I want you people on the gun crews to know that for a bunch of sorry peckerheads you did a pretty damned good job.” He looked at Steve Petreshock, who was sitting with Fred Nelson, the torpedoman in charge of the After Torpedo Room.
“The torpedoes ran good. Like they are supposed to run. Old Man told me he was happy about that so you two people can feel happy. Just make sure the rest of the fish we still got run good. As soon as the Exec gives me the word I’ll be able to tell you when to start the reload.” Petreshock and Nelson grinned their appreciation.
“All the rest of you people” — Flanagan’s voice was a low rumble — “get your asses outa here. The baker’s got to have some room to mix his bread dough.” He drew a cup of steaming coffee from the urn as the men left the mess room. Scotty Rudolph came out of the galley with a smoking hot, freshly baked cheese Danish.
“Just out of the oven, Chief. They taste pretty good when the cheese is still hot, but don’t burn your damned tongue.” Flanagan nodded his thanks and sat down at a mess table. The ship’s cook sat down across from him.
“You people did an awful lot of yellin’ and a hell of a lot of shootin’ up there tonight. I like to broke my damn back shoving those shells up through the ammo chute. Those things are heavy.”
“Ninety-two pounds each,” Flanagan said.
“What in the hell was goin’ on?” the cook said.
“Well, I don’t rightly know what went on before the Old Man hollered for Battle Surface. But when I went over the bridge rail there were ships all around us and the Old Man is yellin’ at the Exec, he was aft on the cigaret deck, to shoot some damned target.”
“I wear the battle phones back here,” Rudolph said. “I know the Old Man hit two ships with fish from the Forward Room and the Exec knocked off one ship with a couple of fish from the After Room. But you don’t get any dope over the phones when there’s a Battle Surface going on.”
“Well,” Flanagan said. He sipped at his coffee and chewed a bite of the pastry. “We were manning both deck guns and doin’ nothing and all of a sudden the Old Man yells for the forward gun to take out an escort that was chargin’ at us from up forward on the port bow. We couldn’t get any radar ranges, radar was busy with gettin’ ship ranges for torpedo targets. Old Man yells for us to adjust range by shell splashes. That ain’t the easy way to do it, you know, because the gun keeps shooting longer for the first five, six rounds as the barrel heats up.
“But that number two baker of yours, that Willie Stevens we made pointer on the forward gun? He did a hell of a job. Got a hit with the third round and held the point of aim right in there and the escort is tryin’ to get away and we’re movin’ all the time.
“Once we tore that bastard all up the Old Man comes about and reverses course and both guns went to work on a freighter he’d hit with a torpedo. I guess we hit him with maybe fifteen, twenty rounds. We musta hit his engine room, the boilers, because he blew into two pieces. I tell you, Scotty, this Old Man is a heller. Not like the skipper I had on my first three patrols out of Brisbane. That bastard wouldn’t surface if there was an escort vessel within ten miles.” He pushed himself to his feet.
“I got to see the Exec and get the word on reloading the tubes. Like you said, they taste better when they’re hot. I like the way you put raisins in the cheese part.”
Captain Mike Brannon sat in his accustomed place at the head of the Wardroom table. He finished a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon that Mahaffey had put in front of him.
“I don’t see how you can eat those powdered eggs and that canned bacon and look as if you were enjoying it,” Olsen said. “I can’t get that stuff down.”
“I thought it tasted pretty good,” Brannon said. “I must have been hungry. Let’s get down to business. I want to get some sleep after they finish reloading the tubes.”
Olsen looked down at his notes and put a clean piece of paper in front of him. “Let’s get the tonnages of the ships we sank down on paper. I didn’t get too good a look at that first ship you hit. Not until it was aft of us, and when I saw it then it was bottom up. How big was it?”
“Not too big,” Brannon said. “She looked to me like one of those inter-island freighters. Pretty decrepit, from what I could see. I saw a lot of lines and other gear hanging loose from her booms. I’d guess about a thousand tons. No more than that.”
“I’ll put her down for one thousand tons,” Olsen said. “The other two targets we hit with torpedoes; I got a real good look at the one I fired at. Pretty good size, I’d say. Maybe three thousa
nd, thirty-five hundred tons. That one and the one you hit looked like they could have come off the same shipyard ways. Thirty-five hundred tons, that seem right?”
“Let’s not be greedy,” Brannon said slowly. “You feel awfully silly when you get back to port and they read your patrol report to you, and when they come to the part where you say you sank a five-thousand-ton ship they read you an intelligence report that says the Japanese reported losing a two-thousand-ton ship. They ask you nasty questions about your judgment and infer that if you can’t judge the size of a ship you can’t work out a torpedo problem. No. Make both those ships three thousand tons.”
“Yes, sir,” Olsen said. “The two escort vessels. I think they were pretty small. About five hundred tons each. Do you agree?” Brannon nodded his assent and Olsen made some notes.
“That one escort, the one that got rammed out to our starboard,” Olsen continued. “Can we take credit for that one? The bigger ship rammed it when it started to make a run on us. Damned near cut it in two. It went down when I hit the bigger ship with a fish.”
“I don’t see why not,” Brannon said. “If we hadn’t gone in on the surface and started shooting, that freighter would never have rammed the escort. Hell yes, we’ll claim it. What does that give us as a total?”
“Let’s see,” Olsen said. “The Tail End Charlie is one thousand tons. Three thousand each for the two freighters and two escorts at five hundred each. That makes seven thousand tons of merchant shipping and a thousand tons of escort vessels. Add the two big Fubuki destroyers we sank when the Mako went down and we’ve got one hell of a bag!”
“Wait until they start the nitpicking in Fremantle and Brisbane,” Brannon said dryly. He fished a cigaret out of Olsen’s pack on the table and lit it. Mahaffey, in the tiny Wardroom galley, saw him light the cigaret and came out with fresh cups of coffee.
“Those people on the Staff in Fremantle and Brisbane,” Brannon said, “all they do is go over our contact and patrol reports with a fine-toothed comb to try and find anything they can to gig you on. They always do that. I think they believe this is how you fight a war.” He leaned back in his chair and yawned. “What’s the status of our torpedoes and ammunition?”
“We fired six fish from the Forward Room last week at the two Fubukis,” Olsen said. “You fired four more out of that room tonight, so we’ve got six fish left up there. Six in the tubes, no reloads. I fired two fish out of the After Room tonight, so we’ve got four in the tubes and reloads for Nine and Ten tubes back aft. The deck gun forward fired twenty-two rounds and the gun aft fired twelve rounds. No problem there. We’ve got plenty of ammo for the deck guns. That one point one pom-pom is another matter. That thing goes through ammo like my ex-wife used to go through my paycheck. We’re down to just under fifty percent of that gun’s ammo supply. We’re better off in the twenty millimeter stuff. We have about seventy percent of our supply left for that gun, and we didn’t use any fifty-caliber stuff at all.”
“The twin twenties?” Brannon said. “I don’t remember telling the twenties to fire. I can’t even remember them firing, and God knows I should be able to remember that. They built that pregnant lump out in front of the bridge for a gun platform for the twenties when they decided to give us the pom-pom and put it on the cigaret deck.”
Olsen grinned at Brannon. “Well, sir, you know our demon yeoman John Wilkes Booth. You can’t get that good old Southern boy near a fight and not expect him to join in.
“That escort vessel that was rammed to our starboard? The escort had a gunner on it who was all guts. His ship was cut nearly in two. He was sinking, and he opened fire on us with a machine gun. Booth took care of him. He poured that twin twenty into him until he silenced him. I didn’t see what he did on that escort you took under fire on the port bow, but Flanagan told me that Booth was really going to it with the twin twenties and screaming his head off. Flanagan told me that he bounced Booth about the screaming, and Booth said he was just giving his Rebel yell. Flanagan said it scared half the gun crew to hear him yelling.”
“I don’t remember hearing him yell, either,” Brannon said.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Olsen said with a grin. “You were a fairly busy fellow during that action tonight. Bob Lee said he was nearly a wreck when you finally secured the Plot. He did pretty well, didn’t he?”
“Not nearly as well as he should have,” Brannon said slowly. “Lee is bright enough, God knows. Sometimes he scares me, he’s so damned bright. But he hasn’t as yet gotten the knack of anticipation in a battle situation. Arbuckle has to depend on him for information, and even when I was yelling and hollering on the bridge I could hear Arbuckle shouting at Lee for more information. I can’t have that, John.
“I want you to take the complete plot of tonight’s action and sit down with Lee and Arbuckle and go over it step by step. Show them what you would have done and when you would have done it and why. Show Lee and Arbuckle where they have to be thinking with me, thinking as I think. I shouldn’t have to ask for information that they should be giving me automatically, and I won’t have any more of it in the future. Another thing,” Brannon paused. “I think that Lee is losing weight. He wasn’t any fat man when he came aboard, but it seems to me that he’s getting a lot thinner. Maybe he’s worrying about his job, about things like that. I’d like you to find out.”
“Captain,” Olsen said. “I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re the Executive Officer, John,” Brannon said. “A good Executive Officer should be able to do anything, any damned thing his Captain asks him to do.” He grinned at Olsen. “Art Hinman used to lecture me on that when I was his Exec. I got to the point where I could almost read his mind.”
“I’ll try, sir,” Olsen said. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Tell Jerry Gold that he did one hell of a job of compensating this ship. We were in almost perfect trim when we dove, and that was after we’d fired six fish and used up one hell of a lot of heavy ammunition. He’s a damned good diving officer, and I want him to know that you appreciate that and that I appreciate it.” He looked at Olsen.
“The radar,” he said softly.
“What about the radar?” Olsen said. “It worked just perfectly. I thought Jim Michaels was full of crap when he came aboard in Fremantle and told me what that SJ radar could do. He wasn’t full of it at all. The way he can read that thing, the way he’s taught Rafferty, they told us exactly what we had out there and they even gave us damned accurate readings on the relative size of the targets.”
“That’s it,” Brannon said slowly. “Mako didn’t have this new SJ radar. If we hadn’t left Mako when we did — we were running out ahead of Mako you remember — we’d have picked up that convoy and Michaels would have been able to tell us there were two big destroyers hiding back of those ships. We could have ambushed those damned destroyers that killed the Mako. But we left her and the Mako never knew what she was walking into.”
“My God, Skipper,” Olsen’s voice was low, intense. “You just can’t think about what happened in that way. We left because we had to leave. Our patrol orders told us where we had to go and when. For God’s sake don’t live with the idea that we did anything wrong, because we didn’t!”
“I don’t think we did anything wrong,” Brannon said slowly, his voice soft. “I just keep wondering about how it would have been if we had decided to stay with Mako just an hour or two longer. I know it’s sort of foolish, but I do.” He stopped and looked down at the table top.
“I thought about Art Hinman when we were coming up on that convoy tonight.” Brannon looked up, and Olsen saw that his eyes were fixed on something far distant.
“The first night surface attack we made in the Mako Art Hinman told me to take the TBT on the cigaret deck, to protect his stern and to keep him informed. Just as I told you to do tonight. Like you did tonight I fired two fish out of the After Room. Like you I got one hit. Like you those were the first torpedoes I ever fired at an enem
y.” He turned his head and focused his eyes on Olsen.
“I had a funny feeling tonight, John. A very odd feeling. I felt as if Art Hinman was on the bridge with me and that he was joking with me and telling me to go right up the convoy’s rear end. I thought I heard him say that when we started shooting torpedoes the convoy would scatter and then I could use the deck guns. I don’t know, John, it seemed natural to me that Art Hinman seemed to be there.”
“I don’t think it was unnatural, sir,” Olsen said. His lean face was somber. “My mother believed that when a person died his or her soul went back to God. But if that soul knew that someone the soul had loved on Earth was in trouble or needed help, the soul could go back and give that help.” In the small Wardroom galley Pete Mahaffey cocked his head as he listened, and then he began to shake his head in disapproval.
“I thought it was only the Irish who are fey,” Brannon said
“No,” Olsen replied, “the Swedes have a long history of that sort of thing.” He slid his long, lean frame from behind the Wardroom table.
“I think I’ll take a walk through the boat,” he said. “I’ll have the contact report all typed up for you when you get up.”
“Tell everyone who’s awake that they did a hell of a good job,” Brannon said. “Especially the people in the torpedo rooms. The fish ran good and the exploders on the ones we got hits with worked.” He rose and followed Olsen out of the Wardroom and went to his stateroom.
He turned on the small light over the mirror and washbowl and blinked in surprise. His face was grimy with the smoke and soot of the gunfire. He ran hot water into the bowl, washed, kicked off his sandals, put his socks and shirt in a small laundry bag, and stretched out on his bunk. He heard Pete Mahaffey’s loud whisper through the watertight door opening to the Control Room that the Captain was in his bunk and the low order from the Chief of the Watch to get-a-one-degree-up-bubble-and-hold-it-there-damn-it.
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