Torpedo Run Page 4

  "All you will hear will be a faint scream of indignation," the Professor said.

  The Professor, whose real name was John B. White, was nineteen, but he had a year of college and was very smart. He stood now smiling sweetly at Sko until Sko turned back to the control panel and clutches. Then the Professor turned on Skeeter, the other motormac, and said, "You heard His Majesty?"

  "I heard," Skeeter said, "and tomorrow I put in for a transfer off this rusty bucket of bolts. Nobody can call me swab handle. I'm Mr. Swab Handle."

  When Peter got back to the bridge and took off his goggles he found that Murph, intentionally or not, had closed the course so that Slewfoot was now less than six thousand yards from the dark, speeding transports. For a moment Peter felt a hot flash of anger—if they spotted Slewfoot now … blooey—but he controlled it and said, "Nothing to the right, Murph. From now on."

  "Nothing to the right," Murph said, and then added, "Why don't we let 'em have just one fish? Just for the fun of it."

  "We're leaving them alone," Peter told him firmly. Then he went over to the gunners. "You guys on the guns, listen. When I say 'Fire' I want ten rounds from the machine guns and two rounds apiece from the twenties and the forty. Then stop. Not another shot—no matter what happens."

  "Even searchlights?" Jason asked.

  "Not another shot—lights or no lights."

  Stucky, on the 40, asked, "What are we going to shoot at?"

  "Nothing," Peter said.

  Shaking his head, Stucky went aft to where Mitch was sitting gloomily on the smoke generator. "I think he's lost his mind," Stucky said.

  "If he ever had one. Oh, what Jonesy would have done with a setup like this! If Jonesy was here we'd've sunk 'em all by now."

  "Shooting at nothing," Stucky said vaguely. "Wait till the taxpayers hear about this."

  On the bridge Peter turned and looked over at the dark mass of New Britain. The island was running out fast, sloping from the mountains down to the point at the entrance of Dampier Strait. A tiny flicker of light over there marked the little town with the cute name, Sag-Sag. Peter had always thought that was a fine name for a town.

  In a moment now there would be no more island to absorb Slewfoot's image on the enemy's radar. In a moment he was going to get the answer.

  To keep the engines from choking up on an abrupt change of speed, Peter throttled back slowly to idle and, at the same time, called aft to Mitch, "Make smoke."

  As Mitch turned the generator on he laughed a little sourly. "We're going to fight dem skeeters all de way home. Ain't we brave?" he said to Stucky.

  The thick, acrid smoke gushed out of the tubes, flowed down heavily over the stern, and then striking the water, flowed out over it, slowly rising. To Peter, watching it, it looked as though Slewfoot were leaving behind a solid gray wall, thick and high.

  Peter let it flow out for a hundred yards and then buzzed Sko to reverse all engines. When he felt the props bite he told Murph to back her straight into the smoke.

  The stuff was thick and crummy, burning their skins a little and making them cough as Murph backed the boat slowly into it. Peter watched until the smoke curved around the bow and Slewfoot was entirely in it. Then he said, quietly, "Commence firing."

  It was weird. At one moment Slewfoot was an invisible thing inside the pall of thick smoke. In the next she was a fiercely glowing, flickering, flaming mass of brilliance as all her guns began to fire, the tracers going out through the smoke like thin chains of light. The thick smoke around her glowed with a wavering, eerie light as though the light itself were holding her.

  And from a silent boat she was now a roaring, chattering, hammering, thudding explosion of sound.

  In the engine room Sko waited, listened to the uproar above him. To him the oddest sound in all the noise of a fight was the sharp clatter of the brass empties falling on the deck. It sounded to him like some sort of hellish rain.

  Sko looked back at the Professor and Skeeter but didn't have to say anything. Somehow, down here in the engine room where you couldn't see and nobody ever told you, you knew, somehow, when the moment of danger was at hand. Sko and Skeeter and the Professor knew it now—and waited.

  It only took a few seconds to get off the ten rounds from the machine guns and those were the only seconds Peter was going to give his enemy to make his decision. That he would shoot, you could count on. Shells from the big guns were on the way now, Peter knew, streaking toward him through the dark sky, whirling as they came.

  "Jettison smoke generator!" he yelled aft to Mitch.

  Mitch was really scared now. Not of the enemy—he'd seen him before—but of Peter and what Peter was doing. To stop a PT boat dead in the water so that she was a perfect target and then open fire was insane.

  The uproar of the guns stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the ten rounds spent. Mitch rolled the smoke drum over the stern, and in the sudden silence the splash sounded as though it could be heard all the way to New Guinea.

  Jason, the gunner, lifted his head from the warm sighting rest and turned to look anxiously at Peter. Welborn, the Preacher, turned from his torpedo racks to look at Peter.

  Sko sat silent above his engines, the cigar finally motionless; the Professor and Skeeter stood on the hot plates and watched the accelerator rods as the big engines ticked over slowly.

  Peter saw the smoke generator roll upright in the water and saw the smoke rolling out of it.

  And then he heard them coming. In the silent night, with only the purr of the idling engines he could actually hear the high, approaching scream of the enemy's shells.

  In almost a single smooth movement Peter rang for ahead, emergency, and began to move the three throttles forward. At the same time, instinctively, for he had always handled the wheel in a fight when Jones was skipper, he stepped to the wheel.

  And then he stood there with nothing to do but wait.

  The engines would either take it or they would not. They would roll or falter.

  Sko listened to those three engines as though he were a part of them. In his body he could feel the crankshafts beginning to move as the pistons began the furious sliding in the oiled cylinders. He turned his head aft and looked for a second at the series of belts on the V-drives of the outboard engines, and then he looked down at Skeeter and the Professor and they too were now a part of the engines.

  Peter waited, the screaming on top of him now, waited for the power to pour through the reduction gears and on into the bronze shafts and out through the shaft logs to the bronze propellers and, finally, to strike the water.

  The whole boat was rammed sideways through the water as the enemy salvo struck close abeam and exploded. Men who were not holding on were thrown down; those who were, almost had their grips broken by the force of it.

  And then, almost invisible in the smoke, the mountain of water fell out of nowhere on Slewfoot. It washed the fallen men helplessly across the deck, drenched all hands, and struck Peter full in the face, nearly knocking him away from the wheel.

  Sko looked at the bulkheads and the ceiling close above him. He was looking for the black sea to come in there with him.

  Sam, the cook, got up off the deck of the day-room and ran forward to see if the boat had been holed around the bow.

  The men got up, one by one, and went back to the guns and racks.

  But, now, Slewfoot was under way. As Peter wiped the salt water out of his eyes, he looked ahead through the smoke and saw the long, slim bow coming up; and he felt the stern squatting, felt the shove of the engines rocking him back.

  Sko watched his tachometers, the thin needles moving steadily across the faces of the dials, 1900, 2000, 2500. For this one time, Sko decided, let 'em go to the pegs.

  "I'm sorry, little girls," he said to the engines, "but we need it all."

  On the bridge Peter said to Murph, "When we break out of this smoke we're going to be headed straight for New Britain. Let's don't go aground."

  A salvo of shells came w
hining down through the smoke and struck somewhere behind Slewfoot, throwing up another geyser of water.

  And then the smoke thinned and Slewfoot came tearing out of it, trailing little tendrils of the thick stuff for a moment until the wind of her movements blew it clear.

  In the abrupt change from the dense smoke to the clear air it seemed for a few seconds as though the dark island was on top of them. Peter threw the wheel hard over, Slewfoot spinning hard in the turn and throwing up a long, curling slice of white water.

  He straightened her out, moving close beside the island, and now she ran, the mufflers off the big Packards, the tach needles up against the pegs, the superchargers screaming.

  He was on a parallel course with the enemy again and had no trouble making him out. Every searchlight on each of the transports was blazing, the deck cannon were shooting with frightening speed, the muzzle blasts like blinking lights in a sign. And all along the decks of the ships the troop machine guns and rifles were blazing away, tiny winking lights.

  They were giving that smoke a beating. The searchlights were playing back and forth along the length of it. The tracers were pouring into it like streams of light.

  Peter turned then and looked at the island on his left. Now he could see the tiny, dim spots of light in the town of Sag-Sag—firefly glows made by the oil lamps of the natives.

  Speed was all he had now as the land ran out and Slewfoot tore across the wide entrance of Dampier Strait—speed and the smoke that was still being made by the floating generator. Let them probe that with their radars, he thought.

  The situation was now this: the three transports had not changed course or speed as they searched the smoke cloud with their lights and shells. Slewfoot, with the Packards all out, was ahead of the transports now, six thousand yards to the left of them and on the same course.

  Peter kept waiting for the radarman to say something; and as time passed and no word came, he began to wonder if he had made a mistake. Had his estimate of the situation been completely wrong?

  If it was wrong then what he had done was about as wrong as you could make it. He had given away to the enemy the priceless thing a PT boat had—surprise. They knew now that they were under attack, and now, because of what he had done, they were ready for him.

  "Take it," he said to Murph. "Nothing to the right."

  Peter dropped down into the radar shack and looked over Willie's shoulder.

  "I was just going to call you," Willie said. "There's something fishy. See how those blips are changing? They look like they're getting bigger."

  Peter looked at them, and the relief he felt was almost solid.

  In a moment there were not three blips, there were four … five … six.

  He had to give the enemy credit for a smart maneuver. The destroyers must have been sailing almost within shouting distance of the transports and right alongside and to seaward so that a PT boat, hugging the land, could not see them either by radar or binoculars.

  A beautiful trap, Peter decided.

  Murph's head appeared in the hatch, and his voice was up three notches. "Cans, skipper! Three destroyers!"

  "I know," Peter said, coming out of the shack.

  Jason saw them then and said, "Holy mack-e-rel, Amos!"

  Mitch, the big bosun, coming forward saw them and stopped in his tracks. "My God! Look at that!"

  The Preacher saw them and backed away a few steps as though the three destroyers were menacing him with a fist.

  Peter said to Murph, "Send a contact report—all boats. Three cans, three transports. Base course two seven zero, speed fifteen, now abeam Umboi Island at fifteen thousand yards." Then he spun Slewfoot around in a wide flat disk of spray until she was heading straight back toward the destroyers.

  The destroyers were moving too. Peter could see the white wakes streaming as, in a column, they drove toward the low cloud of smoke still lit by the searchlights. Then either a destroyer or a transport started firing flares that burst high above the smoke and hung up there, brilliant swaying lights that seemed to light the sea and the smoke and the destroyers as though on a stage. Against these lights the details of Slewfoot seemed cut out of pure blackness—every man and object silhouetted and without dimension.

  Down in the engine room Sko and Skeeter and the Professor waited in the solid sound and heat and terrible vibration of the big engines.

  Sam, the cook, with nothing to do for the moment, ducked below and ran aft to the engine room. "Three destroyers," he yelled at Sko.

  "Shooting at us?" Sko yelled back.

  "Not yet, but soon, man, soon."

  On the bridge Murph was trying to read the bearing, hanging on with all his might against the hard, slamming, pitching, bucking, slithering of Slewfoot as she gathered speed after the turn and worked up past 45 knots. She was throwing white spray all over the ocean, and a huge, rolling foothill of churned water rose as though carved solid just abaft the stern.

  "What's the range?" Peter yelled down to the radarman.

  "Six thousand."

  Peter looked at the scene ahead of him—the three enormous transports, the superstructure and decks sharply lit by the muzzle flashes and searchlights. And at the three destroyers, all lights blazing, guns now firing into the cloud of smoke. Above and ahead of the destroyers the flares hung like hard white suns in the black sky.

  Slewfoot could turn now, turn away in her dark world and, engines muffled again, sneak away through the Strait and those six ships of the enemy would never find her.

  Or she could go on as she was going—the exhaust a solid thunder, the crack of water against the sharp bow-like stones striking together—go on to the enemy.

  5

  The youngest man aboard Slewfoot was a seventeen-year-old who had lied about his age to get in the Navy. That morning he had sneaked into the jungle with a helmet full of water and the razor. He had had to pay five dollars for a 69¢ secondhand razor and to put up with a lot of noise about wiping his face with a wet towel but, in the jungle where no one could see him, he had decided he needed a razor. Putting the metal signaling mirror he had liberated from a life raft up in the fork of a bush, he had studied himself carefully and decided that what looked like fuzz to the other men was, actually, a beard. He had shaved it slowly and carefully, washed the razor, and hidden it.

  His name was Bridgers, but the crew of Slewfoot called him Britches—or Kid, or Baby, or Mother's Boy, or worse—and now he was so scared his eyes were swimming as he stood beside his torpedo rack and looked ahead at the speeding destroyers. What he wanted now—more than anything he had ever wanted in his life—was just to talk to somebody, just to feel that he wasn't all alone out here. But Goldberg, the torpedoman, was standing beside him staring at the enemy and didn't look as though he wanted to talk.

  Goldberg was a big, hulking, forbidding man whose voice sounded as though it were coming through a bucket of gravel. There were times when you could talk to Goldberg and times when you'd better not. But Britches was lonely and he decided to risk it. "Big, aren't they?" he asked, trying not to let his voice squeak, but it did anyway.

  "Medium size," Goldberg graveled at him.

  Talking didn't seem to help Britches' fear much—it had grown absolutely solid and alive and a lot bigger than he was. "Do you think Mr. Brent's going to attack 'em?" he asked.

  "If he isn't we'd sure better get off this course."

  "Do you think he should?" Britches asked. "Aren't they … I mean … well, look at 'em."

  "I'm looking at 'em."

  Britches asked, "Are you scared, Goldberg?"

  "Scared? Who, me?" Goldberg growled, and then he looked down at Britches. "I'm too scared to be scared. You never fought a destroyer, did you? You never had one shooting right down your throat, did you? You've just been fooling around knocking off those helpless barges. Well, if he keeps on going in this way you just wait, sonny boy, just wait. It's going to be the biggest Fourth of July you ever saw. Man, I remember one time in The Slot �
�� "

  Britches had just wanted to talk to somebody, but as Goldberg went on and on he decided that this was the next best thing—to have somebody talk to him.

  On the other torpedo rack the Preacher stood and looked ahead and wondered how men did it. How had Jonesy had the courage to do the things he had done? And now, how did Mr. Brent have the courage? Was there something in being an officer that gave you courage? The Preacher didn't think so. It was just something some men had. Some didn't. The Preacher knew that if he were skipper now he would turn Slewfoot on her screws and run. There were too many destroyers, too many guns, too many everything for one PT boat to take on alone.

  Jason, the gunner, looked at the ships ahead of him all bathed in the brilliant light, and it seemed to him that he was alone in a dark world and those ships were sliding sideways toward him.

  Jason could feel his mouth beginning to get dry, felt the shakes crawling toward him across the deck. But he knew what to do about that. He leaned in against his guns, jamming his shoulders into the curved braces, and then he swung them toward the destroyers and looked at the ships now through the ring sight of his guns. This way the ships were no longer the enemy, no longer a threat to him. They were just a target.

  Stucky on the big Bofors cannon looked at the destroyers. They were shooting now with everything that would bear—sheets of tracers pouring into the rolling cloud of smoke the floating generator was still sending up. The AA guns were banging away, the long barrels pumping back and forth like pistons. The muzzles of the machine guns seemed to be on fire. The turret guns were shooting more slowly, and it interested Stucky to watch how the gout of flame would suddenly appear—flame and smoke—but the destroyers were going so fast, the wind was whipping the smoke straight back down the outside of the barrels. Stucky decided he wouldn't like to work in a turret gun, wouldn't like being cooped up inside that steel room with nothing to see except the big breech of the gun lunging back at you.

  Mitch watched the destroyers and decided that there were good gunners behind all those guns—gunners who could get on target fast and clamp you in a straddle of shells you couldn't get through alive.