At the Midway (57 page)

"Who is that?"

"Uh... me."

"You
digging
over there?"

"Yeah... well, I'm trying to get out.  Mind giving me a hand?"

"You mean you're not pinned down?"

"No.  What happened?  I got whacked on the head."

"Enderfall, get your ass over here and dig me out.  No, belay that.  What good am I with this leg?  Help Fritz.  You still with us, Fritz?"

"Yes."

"I have some matches--"

"No!" Hart shouted.  "I smell gasoline.  I don't think all of it ignited."

"That's right, Enderfall.  You'll have to reach around and grab ass to find us.  That'll do your heart good."

"Ooooo...."

"Ace!" Lieber called.

"Ooooo...."

"Come on, Enderfall," Ziolkowski commanded.  "This is what you've dreamed of.  Ain't none of us can move but you."

"Aw, Top...."

If homoerotic grasping and groping was Enderfall's penultimate fantasy, he had his fill that night.  With serpentine twists he maneuvered through the fallen beams, over moaning men and silent bodies.  But he only succeeded in spreading the chaos.  If he tried to lift a timber off one man, it placed unbearable strain on another.  And the space was so cramped he could not help banging against the injured.  Enderfall's major accomplishment was keeping men awake who would have been better off asleep.

Hart's legs went numb.  He'd added to the stink of evacuated bladders after too many pinched hours.  Like Lieber, he managed to wiggle his toes enough to convince himself no vital nerves had been severed.

When light began filtering in, he noted something odd gleaming on the timber next to him.  To pass the cumbersome minutes he concentrated on it, trying to guess what it was.

Recognition did not come gradually, but in a horrifying burst.  When sunlight abruptly shot through one of the larger gaps above him--and fell directly on the scattered brain of one of the marines.  Hart caught his breath and averted his eyes.

With the sun came a budding of conversation among the Orientals trapped in the bunker.  The Chinese warbled lowly, their sentences worming aptly as they described the horrors around them.  The Japanese spoke in brief, harsh torrents that seemed to push at the beams as they discussed ways to extricate themselves.

The whites offered very little beyond low curses.  They seemed to have no language for catastrophe beyond a catastrophic breakdown of language itself.  They waited to see what Enderfall would do, now that he could see what he was doing.

"Hell, I'm the one in deep shit," he whined as he labored at the beams.  "If those bastards come back I'll be stuck out here.  You're all buried and safe."

"Of all the fucking luck, you had to be the one loose," Ziolkowski groused.

Those who could see the sergeant noted his pallor.  Those who could see his broken leg knew it would have to go.

"I'm doing my best, Top," Enderfall griped.  And he was.  But the morning light made him wary.  The dreadful blows that had killed or wounded the marines and civilians lay open to view.  At one point Enderfall stumbled over a man who'd been scissored in half by two beams.  He ran out.  The men below could hear him crying.  He did not come back for a long time, and the trapped men were in an agony of suspense after the sobbing faded away.  After an hour had gone by, Ziolkowski let out a bellow that lifted Lieber's hair.  Still no response.

"They got him," someone cried softly.

Two more hours passed.  Suddenly they heard shuffling, and Enderfall's face appeared.

"I couldn't come back," he said breathlessly.  "They were on the beach.  If I'd moved they would've seen me.  They only took off a little while ago."  He returned to his labors.  The morning wore into noon.  The heat was stifling.  A stench rose from the dead.

Lieber's hand came across a loose nail.  Wanting a date on his tomb, he etched "
Im
Feld
, 24 Junis, 1908" on the timber that held him down.

"Hey!" came Enderfall's excited voice.

When they heard the boat motors, three men who had already half freed themselves lost their pants and a good deal of skin in their haste to finish the job and look.  Enderfall abandoned the bunker and ran into the quad.  When they heard his cheers, the men below cheered also.  Enderfall returned flush with joy.  "They came!  Hart was right!"

The civilian could not look in his direction.  To do so would have meant glancing across the grisly cerebral patch of what had been a man.  He noted the tilt of disbelief and awe in Enderfall's tone.  Hart had foretold the future with supernatural accuracy.  The battleship
Florida
had indeed been en route and was now seeding the island with a new contingent of marines.  That the telegraphic process was as plain as Marconi, well
-
publicized, comprehended by physicists the world round, seemed to sink men without the knowledge into dumb savagery.  Enderfall
-
-
and some of the others
-
-
looked at Hart as though suddenly recognizing a sorcerer in their midst.

1338 Hours

The telephone rang tinnily.  Oates swept it up.

"The landing party has formed on the beach, sir.  The file-closers are moving up."

"You can see them?"

"The smoke is breaking over the lagoon.  I don't see anything else.  No one's come out to greet them."

Oates hung up.  It was beginning to seem they were too late for either salvation or vengeance.

"Sir... I hope that's not hull damage I'm seeing," said Grissom.

"On the lighter?"  Oates swung his powerful Zeiss glass around, but the funnel smoke danced in the downwind and blocked the
Iroquois
from view.

"I could be wrong, sir.  The way she's stepped up on the beach, it could be something lying against her."

"What are we doing here?" Oates sighed suddenly.

"Sir, hell if I know."

All guns were trained out.  Oates was about to order a stand down from General Quarters when the lookout phone rang again.  Wearily, he reached into the pilothouse and picked it up.

"Captain!  Torpedoes!  Bearing Green Oh-Three-Oh direct!"

1350 Hours

As the marines from the battleship freed their trapped compatriots, they listened in disbelief to the story the survivors told them.  Yet there was no denying the great gashes in the earth, nor the fact that some of the compound buildings had not been knocked over, but
flattened
.

Ziolkowski was gently lifted out of his near-grave.  He gave a whoop when he saw the landing party's three-inch fieldpieces being hauled up the beach.

"We'll show the bastards now!  One round in the gut... just one...."  And then he fainted.

The
Florida
marines stared at the unconscious, grizzled veteran.  Whatever their private opinion of lifers, they respected their judgment in things military.  The second lieutenant in charge of the contingent ordered a defense perimeter established around the compound, putting the three-inchers at its core.

"Is this everyone?" the lieutenant asked Enderfall, pointing down at the men still trapped in the bunker.

"I don't know.  I... I don't know...."

"Sergeant Hoskins!  Detail some men to search--"

He was cut off mid-sentence.

The guns of the
Florida
had erupted.

1406 Hours

On seeing the wakes for himself, Oates had immediately ordered the messengers on the bridge to run like hell down the starboard side and tell everyone in hearing to fire at the three approaching objects, now almost abeam.  The torpedoes had been spotted far earlier than he would have thought possible.  With luck, they could blow them out of the water before they got close.

Midshipman Davis was tying a cord around his shorts, which had started to drag the more he sweated, when the electric indicator on the casemate wall clicked and he looked up to see: COMMENCE FIRING.

"Fire at what!" he cried, seeing nothing out the gunport.

On the decks and turrets above them machine guns began to chatter.  Spent cartridges drummed on the metal plates like a storm of railway spikes on a tin roof.  An instant later the top-deck six-inchers plugged the air, sending deep thuds up and down starboard.  About seven hundred yards out he could see the water explode.  But nothing else.  He slapped the breech of the six-incher in frustration.

"Mr. Davis!" one of the gunstrikers shouted.  "It can only be one thing!  Tor--"

"Fire at the strikes!" Davis yelled.  They were too low to see the wakes, but if they could not shoot at an unseen target, they could shoot at a target seen by others.  They ranged in on the white wall of water that was coming closer and closer to the ship.

"
Fire
!"

The swift jerk of his arm spoke to those who could not hear through the din and their earplugs.  They leapt back.  Davis squeezed the trigger.  Underneath, the deck jumped.  There was a screech from the mount spring as the gun recoiled.  Then they were at the breech.  The casing shot out in an acrid plume of smoke and cordite and clattered on the deckplates.  The next shell was already rammed home.

Pump
!

That was how the six-incher concussion felt.  Not a sound, but a deadening of sound.  Like the deafness induced by hard coughing.

Pump
!

One had to move fast to avoid the ejected casing.  Davis dodged, then peered through the gunport.  The view to starboard was blocked by a thick cloud of smoke.  It did not affect their rate of fire.  They had not been able to see anything in the first place.

1410 Hours

Damn!  Oates' gunners had been trained to fight enemy fleets--to concentrate on the enemy's "knuckle," the apex of his deployment--not submerged torpedoes.  Confused, the gunners churned the ocean into a foam of wild shots.  They might as well have been shooting in the dark.

After ordering the machine guns and six-inchers to fire, Oates ordered flank speed.  He hoped to "comb" the torpedoes, which entailed aiming the ship at them to present the least target possible.  The helmsman whipped the wheel over, but they were making too little headway.  The torpedoes would reach them before the
Florida
was halfway into her turn.  Though the engine room bell clanged wildly, it would be several minutes before they could raise full steam.  Oates had considered the possibility that the area was sown with Japanese mines, but the new kind of self-propelled torpedo--fired from an invisible submarine--had been the threat furthest from his mind.  Underwater craft were primitive, pop-bolt affairs incapable of long ocean voyages.

Or so Oates had believed.

Running out to the bridge, he was just in time to witness the first ragged salvo.  The noise was terrific, like having cymbals clapped against one's ears.

"Sweet Jesus, Grissom!" the captain bellowed at the top of his voice.  "
Submarines
!"

"I'm not so sure, Captain.  Those wakes must have been over a mile out when the lookout spotted them."

Oates ran inside and took up the phone to the crow's nest.  Out the side of his eye he caught the glint of cascading cartridges.  There were two .30-caliber machine guns halfway up the fighting mast, about twenty feet below the forward lookout.  Next to the lookout, they had the best view of what they were firing at.  They showed no sign of easing off.  Obviously, they saw something.

The crow's nest lookout did not answer for a long time.  Oates assumed the gunfire was making it nearly impossible for him to hear the telephone ringing.  Then, abruptly, came a voice--hard to hear--but frantic beyond reason.

"Slow down, son!  I can't understand a word!"

Across the pilothouse the ordnance officer was making overwrought gestures as he spoke into his own telephone.  Oates read from his expression that his gunners could no longer bracket the wakes in their range finders.  The captain pressed his lips against the mouthpiece in his hand. "What's happening up there?  We've lost track--"

A flurry of incomprehensible fear shot out.

"Calm down!  Listen, son, we're depending on you.  Tell me clearly--"

"
Serpents
!"

Nothing else he said was understandable.  In the midst of guns and gunfire, Oates felt a terrible chill.

The ordnance officer was calling to him.  The next thing Oates knew, the cacophony of guns shifted to port.

"They've changed course!"

Grissom raced in, eyes wide.  "Sir!  I saw them!  It's
them
!"

"Why are we firing to leeward?"

"They swerved abaft.  They're headed for the lagoon."