Torpedo Run (15 page)

Goldberg said, as though telling a bedtime story, "One time in The Slot I helped pick up the crew of a boat that had been sunk. They were all alive, for a while. But the sharks had eaten them right up to the life jackets so they didn't live long and they didn't
want
to live at all. Since then I don't wear life jackets."

"As long as you're in the Navy and under my command you
will
wear a life jacket when at your battle station."

"As long as I'm on this boat," Goldberg said quietly and with no anger, "and it's afloat, I don't need a life jacket. When the boat goes down and I'm in the water, I'm not in the Navy any more. I'm just a guy named Goldberg, and I don't want those sharks eating half of me and leaving the rest to die. I want 'em to take it all,
right now."

Goldberg turned and climbed off the bridge and went forward to his torpedo racks. Britches whispered, "What'd he do to you?"

"He's not going to do anything."

"Are you going to put it on?"

Goldberg shook his head, his skull sliding back and forth inside the helmet.

"Put Goldberg on report for direct disobedience of orders," Archer told Peter.

Peter looked at him in the dark and wondered what sort of man he was to be fiddling around with petty details while the boat was closing fast on a target that might start shooting anytime now. "Let's get on with the war," he said quietly, turning and going aft to the radar shack. He studied the scope for a moment and asked, "What's it look like to you, Willie?"

"Just one of those little barges sneaking in the way they do. Why doesn't he go ahead and sink it and get on with the patrol?"

"He is," Peter said.

By the time he got back to the bridge the word had passed from one end of the boat to the other that Goldberg was going to be court-martialed for refusing to put on a life jacket. And, for the first time, all hands now knew why Goldberg had always refused to wear one.

When Sko, in the engine room, heard it he climbed angrily off the tractor seat, grabbed a life jacket, and went up through the forward hatch. He marched over to Goldberg and shoved the jacket at him. "Put this on, you big ape. Why get your neck in a noose over a little thing like this?"

"It's headed for a noose anyway, so what difference does it make?" Goldberg asked.

"Put it on, Gerry," Sko said.

Goldberg laughed at him in the dark. "Go spit in that fancy tin hat."

Sko left the jacket on the racks and went below.

Peter said quietly, "Barge. Dead ahead."

Archer looked forward and saw the dark outline of the little
daihatsu
with the unmistakable long, sweeping line from bow to stern. She was putting along at about 7 knots and was now about three hundred yards away.

"Open fire?" Peter asked.

"I don't fire on an unidentified object," Archer said. "That may be one of our own ships, Mr. Brent."

"What are you going to do, run up alongside and ask them who they are?" Peter asked, his irritation showing.

"I am going to close until I identify," Archer said.

"I've seen and sunk a lot of these
daihatsus.
If you don't jump them first they can get pretty rambunctious," Peter told him.

Mitch and Stucky were standing by the Bofors, ready to fire, as the barge got bigger and bigger. They were so close now they could hear the low, slow sound of the barge's engine. They couldn't make out anyone aboard, but they knew that behind those low, sweeping sides the enemy was waiting.

"What's the
matter
with him?" Mitch asked crossly. "Is he going to write up another court-martial before we sink that critter?"

Archer called down to Willie, "Anything on the IFF?"

"Nothing," Willie said.

"Nothing,
sir!"
Archer reminded him.

"Listen, Adrian," Peter said, looking at the barge now less than a hundred yards away, "out here you shoot first and ask questions later. You'd better open … "

The barge opened first. Suddenly, from stem to stern, the long side began to flicker with the muzzle blasts of rifle and machine guns. The water ahead of them was suddenly pocked with little white splashes and then they got the range and Peter could hear the bullets hitting the boat, ripping into the plywood and pinging off the racks and the gun mounts.

"Open fire! Open fire!" Archer yelled.

Then, before Peter could stop him the fool yanked
Slewfoot
around, putting her broadside to the barge.

Every gun that could aim at the barge opened up so that
Slewfoot,
too, seemed to be on fire. The brass empties and clips poured out, the cannon shells made an odd, hollow clang as they hit the deck.

Peter heard somebody say in a high, surprised voice, "I'm hit. Goldberg, I'm hit." Then he saw the kid fall over against the torpedo rack.

A deck gun was blazing from the barge now, the muzzle blast a big yellow ball of fire.

Jason was raking the deck, swinging the .50s slowly back and forth and giving it to them in short bursts so the barrels of his guns wouldn't melt.

Stucky was slamming the 40-millimeter shells into her right at the waterline, each one tearing a piece out of the wooden barge.

Sko was waiting for the signal to take the mufflers off and
move.
It didn't come.

Willie heard a bullet hit close beside him. Splinters of plywood rained down on him and the radar and then bits of metal. He heard something arcing and fusing and was looking up when the lights went out.

The barge was going down. Straight down, neither bow- nor stern-heavy—just sinking straight down, ripped apart all along the waterline by the Bofors and 20.

The rifle and machine-gun fire dribbled to a stop, but the deck gun got off one more round before she sank.

This last shell came straight over the water at point-blank range and struck
Slewfoot
astern, entering her about two feet above the waterline and ten feet forward of the transom.

Fortunately for Skeeter and the Professor they were both at the forward end of the engine room when the shell came in. Sko, of course, was in his tractor seat above the center engine.

The thin plywood hull of
Slewfoot
did not offer the exploding mechanism in the nose of the shell enough resistance to trigger it, but when it struck the steel casing of the reduction-gear boxes it exploded. The concussion knocked out the lights, slammed Skeeter and the Professor to the deck, and swept Sko out of his seat and down between the No. 1 and No. 2 engines.

It did more than that. It shattered both the V-drives of the outboard engines and destroyed the reduction-gear boxes.

At the time, the engines were turning over at 1500 rpm, but when the load was suddenly removed, with no way for all that power to be transferred into the shafts and propellers, the engines ran wild. All three of them began revving up, the sound they made changing into a scream.

Sko, Skeeter, and the Professor, still dazed and hurt, fought their way up in the darkness to the controls and, one by one, shut down the engines.

Sko knew it was too late, for as the engines slowed and stopped, he could hear the grinding of the ruined main bearings.

Then it was silent down there.

Slewfoot
lay dead in the water, wallowing and hurt, as the rain closed in on her.

For a long moment the only sound on
Slewfoot
was the beating of the rain; no one moved or talked, they just stood where they were, every one of them waiting, staring aft at the place where the gasoline tanks were. Waiting for the blinding, jarring, destroying flash. But as
Slewfoot
wallowed in the moving sea and the rain fell from the black sky and there was no flash, the men began slowly to move.

Peter ran down from the bridge to the starboard rack where Goldberg was on his knees beside Britches, trying to shield the boy from the falling rain.

In the pitch-darkness it looked to Peter as though Britches had been torn apart and was now just a mass of blood.

"Is he dead?" Goldberg asked in a faint, remote voice. "Peter, is he dead?"

Peter felt down into the warm blood and found Britches' throat with his fingertips. "No. He's alive." Peter stood up and called over to the Preacher. "Preacher, help Gerry get the boy below." Then he said to Goldberg, "I've got to see to the boat. I'll bring the first-aid kit."

Goldberg slid his arms under the boy and lifted him, saying, "I don't need any help."

As Peter went down the forward hatch on the double he heard Archer yelling, "Don't leave your battle stations without orders."

This sudden loud voice seemed to daze and paralyze the men who had begun to drift away from the guns. They stopped moving and looked up at Archer who was still standing on the bridge, the wheel in his hands as though
Slewfoot
were still alive.

Except Goldberg. Britches seemed weightless in the big man's arms as he strode through the rain toward the amidships hatch.

Archer came down from the bridge and stood, blocking Goldberg's passage.

What Archer intended to say or intended to do no one would ever know. The men stood in silence, watching, as Goldberg came on through the rain and found Archer standing there, blocking the way.

Goldberg did not strike the officer. All he did, as the men would swear, was shift his grip on Britches so he could carry him with one arm and then, with his freed arm, he put his big hand on Archer's chest and pushed.

Archer moved straight aft, his two feet sliding along on the wet deck, for about four feet before he went over backwards.

As Goldberg went down the hatch with Britches, Mitch and Stucky came forward to where Archer was lying, flat on his back. They got him under the armpits and jerked him straight up and set him down on his feet.

"Did you see that?" Archer demanded. "Did you see Goldberg … "

Mitch stepped around in front of him and interrupted him in a quiet, firm voice. "You tripped on that stanchion," Mitch said, "and fell."

Stucky said, "Just tripped and fell."

"No! Goldberg … "

"You tripped, Mr. Archer," Mitch said.

Archer looked at the two men for a moment and then, silently, he pushed past them and went to the bridge. There he seemed to become himself again. "Secure from battle stations. Divisions report casualties and damage."

Willie got the emergency lights on as Peter entered the engine room. Skeeter's face was covered with blood but it was all coming from a small slit in his forehead made either by a fragment of the shell or a flying gear tooth.

Sko was aft, shaking his head at the sight.

"Can we get under way?" Peter asked, looking at the mess of torn and broken metal, rubber belts, shorn gear teeth lying in a bath of oil.

Sko rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. "If we had a paddle."

"What happened?" the Professor asked. "Sounded to me like they got in the first shot."

"They did," Peter said and turned back to Sko. "How about the engines?"

"They were going like banshees," Sko told him. "If they've got any bearings left it'll be a miracle."

"Anything you can rig up to get us moving?"

"Not before daylight," Sko told him. "If ever."

"Do the best you can. We won't look good out here in the daylight." He turned toward the door, saying, "Britches got hit."

"Oh, no!" the Professor said. "Bad?"

"I don't know," Peter said, leaving.

Peter stopped by the captain's cabin for the first-aid kit. A bullet coming through the hull had struck the silver-framed picture of Jonesy's parents, he noticed, as he got the kit and hurried into the dayroom.

It was an awful wound. The heavy-caliber bullet must have ricocheted off the torpedo rack for it had torn upward through Britches' left arm and shoulder and then up the side of his neck, leaving a bloody furrow to beyond his ear.

In the dim emergency light Goldberg's face looked like ashes, and he was standing beside the bunk rocking back and forth and making a moaning sound in his throat.

Peter glanced at him and felt, as Goldberg did, helpless. In a flash thought he remembered Jonesy, and so many other PT-boat skippers, angrily saying that at the school in Rhode Island they should have been taught a lot less naval etiquette and a lot more about how to save a man's life when he'd been hit.

"He's going to die," Goldberg said in the same remote small voice. "The kid's going to die if we don't do something."

Then Archer's voice was loud and harsh behind them. "Stop blubbering, Goldberg. Are you just going to stand there and let him bleed to death, Mr. Brent?"

He pushed between them and leaned over to look at the wound. "Get out of the light!" he snapped as he picked up the torn arm.

It took Goldberg a moment to react, then he moved toward Archer. "If you hurt him … "

Archer looked over his shoulder and said, "I'm going to hurt him, so shut up." Then he turned to Peter, who was holding the first-aid kit. "Well,
open
it!" he said.

Peter got the tin top open and Archer, looking as though he knew what he was doing, got out the rubber tourniquet and deftly wrapped it around Britches' arm, tightening it with the little handle. "Hold this," he told Goldberg. "Just tight enough to stop that blood."

Goldberg took the handles in his big hands and held them, staring down at the arm until the blood stopped pumping out.

"Sam!" Archer yelled. "Boil some water."

"Yes, sir," Sam said and they could hear him rattling pots in the galley. Suddenly there was no more rattling. "There isn't any water," Sam said. "The tanks got hit and it's gone."

Archer turned for a moment to look at Sam and he seemed to have forgotten Britches. "Tell Mitch to spread a tarpaulin and catch this rain in anything that'll hold it," Archer told Sam.

Peter said, "I read somewhere that you don't need to wash out a wound if it's clean. So why waste time for water?"

"I'm not wasting time, Mr. Brent. Britches will need that water to drink."