Days of Infamy (6 page)

He started to reach up to grasp the steering wheel and inwardly cursed. He no longer had his claw on. Fumbling, he braced the steering wheel with his legs, using his right hand to shift into reverse.

She stepped back from the car, tears streaming down her face.

“But if you get yourself killed, I’ll never forgive you,” she said.

It was an old line, she had said it a hundred times or more when early in the mornings, in what seemed like an eternity ago, he’d get up before dawn to take his Aeronca Chief out for a dawn flight, before the winds kicked up. But now it was real, it was deadly and real as more flashes snapped across the sky, the echo of incoming shells rattling the heavens, bursting with thunderclaps down along Waikiki Beach.

He backed out into the road, awkwardly turning the steering wheel and shifting into first, not looking back.

Damn it hurt, his left arm throbbing, as he used it to brace the wheel as he shifted into second.

Far down the highway, beyond Honolulu, he could see Pearl Harbor, where he was now heading. Though the bombarding fleet had not yet hit it, there was no need for gunnery fire directions tonight, for the fires ignited by the three air strikes still burned
brightly, consuming what was left of eight battleships, oil tank farms, hangars, workshops, and the bodies of more than two thousand men.

“GOD DAMN IT!”

Admiral Halsey angrily rose from his chair, gaze fixed on the loudspeaker, as if it were an offending messenger and somehow he could take his rage out on it.

He turned to his signals officer.

“Broadcast that through the entire ship.”

“Sir?”

“Are you deaf? You heard me. I want that broadcast through the entire ship now.”

“Sir.” It was Captain George Murray, who was in direct command of
Enterprise.
“The crew is exhausted. They need to get some sleep.”

He hesitated for only the briefest instant, weighing the option.

“I want them to hear this. I want them to hear what they are fighting. Switch it on!”

He stalked out of the CIC and up to the bridge, the blackout switch automatically turning off the light in the corridor as he pulled the door to the bridge open, the glassed-in bridge illuminated only by red lighting.

“Admiral on the bridge.”

No one turned, though all stiffened even as they stayed focused on their duty.

He looked over at the senior officer on the bridge, a young lieutenant, only a few years out of Annapolis.

“No change, sir,” he reported stiffly, “heading 355, at ten knots. Course change to heading 040 degrees to commence in”—he paused
and looked at the chronometer, illuminated by a dull red light—“in ten minutes, sir.”

“Carry on.”

He walked out onto the open bridge, again the ritual of announcing his presence, no one daring to look back at him, observers posted at each corner, scanning with night binoculars, watching both their escorting destroyers, one of them silhouetted by the moon, which was now coasting higher in the southern sky.

Damn, a good night for a hunting sub.

It made his stomach knot up. Take but one torpedo now, on this the first day of the war. Take me out of this fight before we can even start. The thought was enough to make him sick.

He knew the crews of his escorts were on full alert, double watch posted, but they were moonlit on a sea that was flattening out. One of those bastards could be out there right now, setting up for a shot.

The loudspeaker out on the open bridge crackled.

“All hands, all hands.” It was Captain Murray. “By order of the admiral. This is a broadcast from a civilian station in Honolulu.”

The loudspeaker crackled again, signal lost for a moment, wavering, and then came in clear.

“Three more explosions. I can see them. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel is burning.” The signal wavered for a moment. “A Jap ship is lying in close to the shore at Waikiki. I can see the flashes of its guns.” A long pause. “I’ve just been handed this. Do not leave your homes. The island is under martial law. Only military personnel or those authorized civilians reporting to bases, hospitals, or emergency centers will be allowed onto roads. I repeat… stay in your homes. Turn off all lights, turn off gas lines. Do not use your phones….”

No one on the bridge spoke, Halsey stood silent, looking out to sea, to the northeast, as if somehow he could actually see the flashes of battle.

“Oh my God, this is close, I think right over my head.” A rumbling sound overwhelmed the announcer’s voice, followed several seconds later by an explosion that overloaded the broadcast signal.

“That was damn close,” the announcer gasped, barely audible. “They’re bombarding downtown Honolulu now. I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be on the air.”

A moment later he could feel
Enterprise
beginning to heel over slightly as it turned forty-five degrees to starboard, zigzagging. He looked back into the bridge. It was exactly two minutes past midnight.

A minute later they trimmed out onto their new heading. His helmsman was good—not the slightest deviation, no need to correct by even a degree or two. In the moonlight he could see the one escort on the exact same heading.

“I can see explosions. I think they’re hitting Hickam,” the radio crackled, signal wavering for a moment. “I’ve just received this. There is a desperate need for all negative type blood, especially AB negative, and positive as well. Please report to your nearest fire station where blood banks are being established. If stopped by military patrols, have them escort you to the nearest fire station…. There’s more explosions, they’re pouring it in now. My God it’s horrible, just horrible.”

Damn, he wished now someone would get the damn station to shut up. The Japs would, of course, be listening as well, helping them to adjust fire.

He went back in to the bridge, picked up a phone linking him back to the CIC.

“Turn that off, put me on.”

“This is Halsey,” he said, voice cold, even-pitched, his voice echoing through the ship.

“You just heard it. The damn Japs are bombarding Honolulu. Our civilians are now targets. Some of you men have families there, all of us have friends there. Now you know what we are fighting. At dawn we launch and we’ll send those bastards to hell.

“That is all.”

He slammed the phone back down into its cradle.

No one on the bridge spoke. He stalked over to his chair and settled in.

At first light he’d launch, with only sixty-four planes on board. Instinct
told him that the bombarding force might very well be a lure to bring him into range and reveal his position. But there was no way in hell he was going to back off now. If anything, he just might get in the first punch and catch them by surprise.

Go in harm’s way!

That had been drilled into him nearly forty years ago back at the Academy. John Paul Jones’s words were engraved on the soul of every midshipman. He had trained for this moment across all the years since. He knew the odds. There had to be at least four Jap carriers out there, maybe five or six, and if he launched first against the bombarding fleet, he could expect a full counterblow.

After the first two attacks, there had been an attempt to set a rendezvous with
Lexington
, but both ships were now holding to complete radio silence after the third attack and what was assumed to be the destruction of CinCPac on Oahu. Without radio contact from the island to coordinate their movements without their having to reply, neither he nor his counterpart on
Lexington
, Admiral Newton, was willing to risk disclosing their location by maintaining radio contact. He and
Lexington
would have to go it alone. To try and coordinate could very well bring in every Jap sub and surface ship within a hundred miles. Anyway, American doctrine had been for carriers to fight in units of one and avoid offering the enemy a bunched-up target. Being on his own felt comfortable and was exactly what they had practiced in peacetime.

If this was
Enterprise’s
last day, they would take as many Japs as possible with them.

“COMMENCE FIRING ON
Pearl Harbor,” Captain Nishida Maseo, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship
Hiei
, announced.

Around him was a flurry of action. His gunnery control officer turned and picked up the telephone linking to the fire control center, where their elite crew, who had so long anticipated this moment, was standing ready. The bombardments of the last hour and a half, hammering the air and army bases at Kaneohe and Fort Bellows, with several salvos into Fort Shafter and Honolulu, had been but a preliminary. They had saved the bulk of their precious fourteen-inch shells for this moment, this moment when the real bombardment, the unleashing of hell would truly begin.

With their sister ship
Kirishima
following a mile astern, firing three hundred shells as well, they would lay down the equivalent destructive load of a six-hundred-plane air strike in the next two hours. Let Yamamoto talk of his carrier-based planes. Now was the moment to prove that it was battleships after all that would ultimately prove who was still the queen of battle upon the seas. The additional weight of the five-and six-inch secondary batteries on both ships, and the guns of their escorting destroyers and cruiser, would add yet even more chaos.

He could feel the vibration, the four massive turrets, each packing two guns of fourteen-inch caliber, rotating, imagine in the fire control room the final coordinates being fed in, observations from the scout plane circling above Pearl, even now dropping illumination flares over the still flaming dockyards, oil tanks, submarine pens, workshops, and hulks of the now impotent American battleships. If the Americans
thought they had faced the fury of Japan before, they were mistaken. In a few more minutes they would know what true fury was.

Each salvo would be eight shells, each loaded with half a ton of high explosives, each shell capable of shattering anything within a hundred meters of impact. A hundred of them, capable of completely obliterating a square kilometer of ground and anything resting upon it.

The massive turrets, illuminated by the beams of moonlight, were visible from the armored bridge. To stand in the open now would shatter the eardrums of any man not well protected.

A klaxon sounded, the signal that the huge batteries, the massive fourteen-inches guns raised, were poised, waiting for the moment when stabilizing gyroscopes indicated that the guns were laying true and level.

The first turret lit off, its minute adjustments in angle and declination decided by the fire control team decks below in the armored citadel where the guns were controlled, though individual turret commanders could direct fire as well if need be.

The recoil of the fourteen-inchers actually staggered the ship. Those ill prepared and not braced for the blow were knocked off their feet by the massive recoil. Number two turret followed suit several seconds later, and then number three and four aft fired. Tons of shells winged upward, climbing to well over twenty thousand feet, reaching apogee, and then started to shriek down on the island. A mile astern the
Kirishima
exploded with a similar salvo. Sixteen massive blows were about to impact the wreckage-strewn Pearl Harbor and Hickam.

HE FINALLY LEFT
his car in a side parking lot, beyond the main gate into the naval base. Traffic into the base was a mad tangle, stalled by
a head-on collision between a Dodge convertible and an Army truck that apparently had come barreling out of a side street and plowed into the Dodge. Corpsmen were working on the driver of the Dodge as James stepped around him, the poor man a bloody mess, the driver of the army truck standing there woodenly, bleeding from a bad scalp wound and a broken nose.

As he looked around, he wasn’t sure where exactly to go now that he was here. His headquarters was gone. He was not, in a sense, a fighting man. There were more than enough sailors, marines, and even some infantry swarming about in confusion, toting Springfields and BARs. A team trotted past carrying a heavy .50-caliber water-cooled machine gun.

He felt out of place now, wondering if he was just getting in the way. He couldn’t even pitch in to help with the wreckage, or lift a stretcher; hell, he felt so light-headed he wondered if he should be on a stretcher himself.

Everything was illuminated by a lurid dim light, the flaming oil tank farms burning close enough that he could feel the radiant heat. Out in the harbor,
Arizona
, or what was left of it, was still awash in flames, thick coils of oily smoke from all the fires casting a heavy pall over the entire harbor and base, choking, dulling the illuminating fires so that there was a Dantesque feel to the entire scene, as if he had stepped into the first circle of hell.