At the Midway (59 page)

While the exec was giving orders, Singleton caught the attention of Oates' orderly.  "C'mon, boy."

"But sir, you're not a
real
doctor."

"Even a fool like you must see we have to get him out of here."

With additional help from a yeoman they carried Oates to the bunk in the sea cabin aft of the pilothouse.

When the ship's surgeon arrived, he took one look and nodded.

"Digitalis?" Singleton asked.

"Not for paroxysmal tachycardia."

"Oh?  Have you given it to him before?"

Their eyes met.  The surgeon flinched a nod.

"There you have it.  Incoordination and disassociation of auricular and ventricular systole."

"I am well aware of the toxic effects, Singleton.  So long as he lets me know of any increase in urine within forty-eight hours--"

"But what if he doesn't?  He's a stubborn man.  You might try strophanthus.  That's not as potent and the toxic effects are negligible.  Besides, digitalis can't remove the dropsical effusion by itself.  You need morphine sulphate and atropine sulphate to reduce the strain.  And a strong cholagogue.  Calomel, elaterium or elaterin--in conjunction with a dry diet.  As few fluids as possible."

A strangled sound came from the bunk.

"Captain...."

"I..." Oates gasped.

"Don't try to speak.  We'll have you right as rain in no time.  You just need rest and--"

"
I
am
not
...."

Singleton and the surgeon exchanged startled glances.  Considering the pain he was undergoing, they would have deemed even a murmur as an astonishing act of will.

"...
a
hock
of
ham
!" Oates concluded.  The left side of his face seemed to cave in.  Yet he lifted one hand several inches and made a fist.  "Do... you hear me?"

"Loud and clear, Captain Oates."

1506 Hours

Through tears, through smoke, through carnage Lieber pushed himself.  At first he saw no one and was certain the entire landing party had been wiped out.  Here and there a gory limb poked out of the sand, victims of the shelling.  They put him in mind of his own injured legs.  As blood began to circulate through them, the pain became excruciating.  But he soon found himself able to push up and walk, though with all the coordination of a drunken crab.

The field guns lay on their sides at the edge of the compound.  There was no sign of the gunners.

Victims of the beasts.

Then he caught movement out the side of his eye and turned.  It was the thirty-six-foot long U.S. ensign of the
Florida
, snapping on the main gaff like a woman waving from a window. This perked him up enough to continue his search.

Finally, Lieber saw four men crawling out from under a clutch of scrawny bushes.  "
Gott
sei
dank
!  Here!  Over here!" he hailed.

"How... how can you...."

"We've been living like this for almost two weeks.  I have more stories than the four of you together.  So we talk about it later.  We have to dig some men out of the ground."

It was something to do, something necessary, so they followed.  On the way to the bunker they told Lieber of how the marines had landed with one hundred and thirteen men.  They'd brought two three-inch fieldpieces with them.  When the crucial moment came, they were manned and ready, but the officers in command were further up the lagoon, near the boats.  The field guns were a quarter mile away in the compound.  The gunners hesitated firing with men so close to the target.

The creatures split up, the largest going for the boats, the smaller two moving inland.  Shots were fired.  Men began to die.  The air reeked with brittle shouts of horror.

The gunners waited too long and only lived long enough to regret it.  The creatures were too fast, their paths too erratic.  No hits had been scored.

More men had died--until the great shells of the
Florida
ripped across Sand Island and laid blackness over all.  Eight high-explosive shells had been fired: four twelve-inch and four eight-inch.  One of them had hit the water near the beach and skipped completely over the island. Of the rest, only four had exploded.  The reason for this was the destructiveness of the maxemite explosive used in the major calibers.  It frightened the Navy as much as the enemy, so a detonator of three hundred and fifty grains of fulminate of mercury was employed to avoid premature explosions.  It took quite an impact to ignite high-explosive shells.  As a result, three of those that landed on the island plowed harmlessly into the yielding coral sand.

When they reached the dusty devastation of the bunker, they had a hard time deciding where to start.  Some of the trapped men were alive and vigorously told them so.  Some were dead and no doubt about it.  The rest may or may not have been unconscious.

"Shouldn't we be getting ready?" one of the
Florida
marines said.  "They might come back."

"Oh, they'll come back.  They've been coming back every day.  They'll keep coming back until the food is gone."

The newcomers blanched.  Only now did they comprehend.  Midway had become a commissary of human flesh.

"Our only hope is to get these men out and off the island.  If the admiral wants to do battle with these things, he can come back with the Fleet."

Wraiths that resembled men began emerging beyond the compound.  They staggered about, in shock from the beasts and the bombardment.  Considering how very few places there were to hide, it seemed a miracle to Lieber that more than three-fourths of the landing party had survived.  Some of them helped at the bunker.  Others scraped the remains of the gunners off the fieldpieces as a grisly prelude to repairing them.  A few marines wandered in temporary, silent insanity.

The men at the bunker had been at work less than half an hour when the sounds of gunfire rolled in from the sea.

Once freed, Hamilton Hart embarked on an agonizing series of attempts to stand.  When he succeeded, he looked up at a chubby cloud and thought he saw a god-like face in it.  Even as the firing outside the lagoon intensified, he gave prayerful thanks.

"Maybe the
Florida
will stop them before they can get back."

"She didn't before."

At the edge of the quad a large group of men continued the frantic task of putting the field guns in operational order.  Happy to be alive and unbroken, Hart cheered them on.  Resting on the rubble of one of the compound houses, listening to the fear-stoked men around him, a strange ripple of peace washed over him.  It was beginning to seem that some of them would live, due in no small part to his ingenuity and efforts.  Blessed expiation for what had happened on the Kiltik. When the creatures first appeared at Midway it was as if his guilt, in all its monstrous proportions, had come to earth to bedevil him.  But they also offered recompense.  What had been horrifying was now proving sweet.  For every moment his bowels threshed his fear, there was an instant when he found himself grinning for no reason
-
-
but feeling a kind of delight in existence.  Now he was absolved.  If he'd still been in the Army they would undoubtedly recommend him for a medal.   A civilian commendation was a possibility.  A handshake from the president, perhaps.  He could take the photograph of him clasping Teddy's hand, march up to the Presidio, and shove it none to gently up General Funston's ass.

The horizon flashed and sputtered.  What a fight was going on out there!  Pushing himself up, he staggered in the direction of Mt. Pisgah.  From there, he hoped to observe the long-delayed death of the dinosaurs.

1538 Hours

"That's it!" Lieutenant Grissom yelled excitedly at the ordnance officer over the metal-pounding racket.

"They seem intent on getting back to the atoll."

"Coming right into it."

"And here they come again!" the ordnance officer grinned.

The
Florida
had won the race to the lagoon.  The serpents came right at them.  At three hundred yards the rapid-fire guns opened up.  The explosions were stitched by thousands of machine gun bullets into an aquatic inferno.

Rather than trying to escape, the creatures thrashed back and forth abeam, confused by the cascade of explosives.  The gunners' fire was not very accurate.  Once again, the smoke blew back in their faces, half blinding them.  But the creatures' reaction improved their odds dramatically.  At this rate, a hit was inevitable.

Every time the six-incher under the bridge loosed a round, the broken glass on the pilothouse deck sang jaggedly.  As men passed from the pilothouse to the bridge wing, the glass was ground into slippery gravel.  Some found it difficult to maintain their footing as the ship swayed.  The
Florida
had to avoid the reef while cutting the monsters off from the atoll.  This summoned harsh turns from the helmsman.  A petty officer lost his grip on the handrail, fell, came up cut and cursing.

A lookout on the bridge nearly went by the mast as he pointed.  "There!  One of them's breaching!"

Lieutenant Grissom swung his binoculars to the starboard bow.  His breath vanished as he got a close-up look at the head of the green-striped serpent; as it flinched its head from side to side, Grissom observed its eyes.  One of them shone with perplexity and frustration.  The other was dull.  A second look confirmed one eye socket was empty.  The creature was half blind.

The ordnance officer was shouting into his phone.  On the signal bridge above them, a fire control officer was also yelling.  Grissom was amazed by their intention.  They were going to use the forward eight-inchers like hunting rifles.  In spite of the odds against a hit, he did not stop them.  It would be something to tell, if they could be that lucky.  The forward turret began swinging around.

Green Stripes was already bracketed by six-inch shells.  The next instant the larger guns erupted.  One of the high-explosives caught the side of its long neck.  A gusher of blood rifled out.

Unrestrained cheering broke out in the pilothouse.

Standing next to Grissom, Dr. Singleton eyed every movement made by the wounded creature.  "It's all wrong."  He turned to the exec.  "They move so quickly, over such long duration.  Not like the larger reptiles at all."

"But not too quick for our guns!  They--why are they slacking off?"  Grissom whirled on the ordnance officer.  "We have two more targets out there!"

1545 Hours

Many of the gunners on the upper decks had stopped to do what Grissom had done: cheer. Their shouts of triumph quick-marched down the companionways, leaving the men below the main deck with the impression they had just massacred the entire lot of devil spawn.

Midshipman Davis banged his hand painfully on the hull as he gave a jubilant shout.  Through the gunport he saw little more than a smoky haze.  But the sounds from abovedecks were so enthusiastic neither he nor the other gunners could resist.  The exuberant pounding of feet could be heard even through the three-inch floorplates.  The hot breech added to the heat of the chamber and the moment.  They did not care.  This was their first battle.  They had won, hands down.

The smoke cloud broke.  Davis craned forward.  "Look!"

Only a couple of men could look out at the same time.  What Davis and the gunstriker who joined him saw was a green-striped creature twisting its neck in bloody convulsions.  It streaked first one way, then another.  Davis saw its jaws open wide, thought he heard a desperate animal moan.  Curiously similar to heavy machinery dragged across a flashplate.

"Look at the blood.  Poor bastard."

"Poor bastard?"  The gunstriker gave him a look of amused incredulity.

Davis grinned sheepishly.  "Well...."

His last word.

His last emotion: embarrassment.

Then confusion and terror.

1552 Hours

The mother Tu-nel leapt from the ocean and landed her massive weight athwartships.  Casemates and gun decks crumpled, crushing twenty-four men to death in an instant.

The moment before their deaths, the oil buffer attached to Davis' gun burst, searing the flesh off the men in the casemate.  The longitudinal keys at the top and bottom of the jacket grated like a train hitting ties as the rear of the gun snapped from the breech ring.  The firing gear was percussive.  Both Davis' gun and the gun above discharged.  One of the one-hundred-pound shells clipped the serpent's abdomen before plowing underwater.  The other was knocked sideways.  Its shell severed a bluejacket as he was flung back from a ladder, then struck the ammunition hoist just as a shell was coming up.

The cordite flareback had already ignited the buffer oil, sending blue-green flames across the deck.  The explosion spread the fire, killing every man on the gun platforms overhead.  A dozen men were knocked back so powerfully they rebounded off the wood and armor shields and fell below.  The creature snapped at the tumbling sailors, but missed.  The explosions and fire girdling her belly grew uncomfortable.  She raised her enormous front flippers and slid back into the ocean.