Walk in Hell (38 page)

He felt a rumble through the soles of his feet. “That’s the big turrets moving,” he said unnecessarily.

Luke Hoskins, one of the shell-jerkers, made an equally unnecessary comment: “They’ve spotted the limeys, then.” He already had his shirt off against the exertions that were to come. Even now, with him doing nothing, sweat gleamed on his muscle-etched torso.

Carsten peered through the vision slit again, looking for smoke on the horizon. He saw none, but the fire director for the main armament, up in the armored crow’s nest, enjoyed—if that was the word—a view far better than his.

All at once, a great column of water fountained up into the sky, about half a mile from the
Dakota
. Sam might not have been able to see the British ships, but the director surely could, because they could see him. “Hell of a big splash,” he said. That wasn’t surprising, either: at a range like this, only a battleship’s big guns had a chance of hitting.

A moment later, the
Dakota
’s main armament salvoed in reply. The noise was like the end of the world. “Here we go,” Hiram Kidde said. He sounded, if not happy, at peace with himself and with the world. He was getting ready to do the job he did better than anything else in the world.

“Odds are, we’re gonna sit here with our thumbs up our asses all day long, too,” Hoskins grumbled. “Anybody think we’re gonna get close enough to the limeys to really use secondary guns?”

“Listen, if we could sink ’em from a hundred miles away and they never came close to hitting us, I’d be happy as a clam,” Carsten said. Nobody in the hot, crowded sponson argued with him.

In a thoughtful voice, Kidde said, “That wasn’t a broadside we fired at the limeys, just the forward turrets. We’d better swing”—and sure enough, the
Dakota
was again heeling through the water in another turn—“or they’ll cross the T on us at a range short enough to hurt us bad.”

Carsten grimaced, and he wasn’t the only one. If the enemy crossed your path and fired broadsides at you while you could answer only with your forward guns, he was sending you twice the weight of metal you were giving back. Every admiral dreamt of crossing the T, and every one had nightmares about its being crossed on him.

More splashes rose, these closer to the
Dakota
. If somebody dropped an elephant into the Pacific from a mile up, it might make a splash like that. Shrapnel rattled off the armored sides of the battleship. Carsten whistled softly. “Wouldn’t care to be up on deck right now,” he said.

The rest of the gun crew made noises showing they agreed. “Cap’n” Kidde said, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better, too.”

Nobody argued with that, either. “Hard standing around here,” Carsten said, “waiting for something to happen or for us to get close enough to the limeys to shoot at them. I feel like I’m along for the ride, but I’m not doing anything to earn my keep.”

He looked out through the vision slit again. Some of the cruisers had started firing their main armament: guns of a range not that much longer than those he served. His turn would come before too long.

And then, as he watched, one of the cruisers, the
Missoula
, took a direct hit from what had to be a battleship shell. Its turrets went up one after the other, like the most spectacular Fourth of July fireworks display he’d ever imagined. When, bare seconds after the hit, flame reached the main magazine, the whole ship exploded in a spectacular fireball. One of the cruiser’s big guns hung suspended on top of the flames for what had to be close to half a minute. But when the flames and smoke finally cleared, only roiled water remained. Nothing else was left to show where six or seven hundred men had been—no boats, no wreckage, nothing.

“Jesus,” Sam said, and looked away. Imagining the same thing happening to the
Dakota
was all too easy.

Kidde kept peering out of his slit. “You can see the limeys, all right,” he said. “Won’t be long now”—the same thought Carsten had had a minute or so earlier.

As the main armament thundered again, Lieutenant Commander Grady stuck his head in to say, “Pick your own targets, boys. Ship’s movements will be to give the main armament the best possible firing opportunities. Us small fry down here, we have to take whatever we can find.” He hurried off again.

Not much later, Kidde whooped with glee. “Sure as hell, that’s a British cruiser out there,” he said, pointing. He stared into the rangefinder and twiddled with the controls. “I make it about twelve thousand yards,” he said, and shouted orders to the gun layers, who swung their cranks to shift the five-inch gun to bear on the foe. “Fire for effect!” the gunner’s mate yelled.

Grunting, Luke Hoskins grabbed a heavy shell and passed it to Carsten, who slammed it into the breech, dogged it shut, and nodded to Kidde. The chief of the gun crew yanked the lanyard. The cannon roared and jerked. Cordite fumes filled the sponson.

“Short,” Kidde announced, watching the splash, as Sam, coughing, got the casing out of the breech and threw it down to the deck with a clang. Pete Jonas, the other shell-jerker, passed him a new round. Ten seconds after the first one, it was on its way. No more than half a dozen rounds had gone out before Kidde whooped to announce a hit, and then another one.

And then another hit announced itself. It felt as if God had booted the
Dakota
right in the tail. All at once, she swerved sharply, and missed colliding with the next battleship in line, the
Idaho
, by what seemed bare inches. “What the hell—?” Pete Jonas burst out.

“We just lost our steering,” Hiram Kidde said matter-of-factly. “Goddamn limeys got lucky.” He looked out to see where they were headed, and his next words were much less calm: “Lord have mercy, we’re steaming straight for the British line of battle.”

Straight
was not the operative word; the
Dakota
was swinging through an enormous circle. “Rudder must be jammed hard to port,” Carsten said. “We’ve got to keep moving best way we can, though. If we’re dead in the water, we’re dead.”

They passed a burning U.S. cruiser. Afterwards, Sam figured that did more good than harm: the fire that had been directed against the less heavily armored vessel now fell on the obviously out of control
Dakota
. At the time, it was a distinction he could have done without.

“What do we do if we get right in among ’em?” he asked, that being the worst thing he could think of.

“Sink,” Kidde answered, which was very much to the point but not what Carsten wanted to hear. The gunner’s mate added, “Hurt as many of ’em as bad as we can before we go down.”

With nothing better to do, they kept firing as they spun within eight or nine thousand yards of the British line of battle. Smoke enveloped the enemy battleships: some the smoke of damage, more from the big guns the ships carried. Shells from those big guns and from the enemies’ secondary armament rained down on the
Dakota
.

Sam lost count of how many times the ship was bracketed. Seawater from near misses rained down on her, too, and fragments pattering like deadly hail. And, every so often, she would shake when another shell struck home. Damage-control parties—everyone not serving a gun or the engines—dashed along the corridors, fighting fire and flood.

“Thank God, we’re turning away,” Kidde said, peering out through the vision slit. That meant that, for the time being, his gun didn’t bear on the British fleet.
A chance to take it easy,
Carsten thought. But then the gunner’s mate let out a hoarse, vile exclamation. “We got more ships bearin’ down on us from the north.” He stared at them, out there in the distance. His voice cracked in anger: “Those aren’t limeys—they’re Japs!”

“I don’t care who they are,” Luke Hoskins said. “We’ll smash ’em up.”

Methodically, as if they were a pair of machines, he and Pete Jonas took turns passing shells to Carsten. “Cap’n” Kidde yelled like a wild man when they started scoring hits on the Japanese. “The limeys, now, they’re good,” he said. “Till the slant-eyed boys messed with us, the only fight they ever picked was with Spain. Hey, I can lick my grandmother easy enough, too, but that don’t mean I’m a tough guy.”

Carsten heard that, but paid it little mind. He was a machine himself, a sweating machine coughing in the fume-laden air but doing his job with unthinking accuracy and perfection. Load, close, wait for the round to go, get rid of the case, load, close…

Shells kept falling around and sometimes on the
Dakota
. Were they British or Japanese? They didn’t leave calling cards—not calling cards of that sort, anyhow. From not far away, Lieutenant Commander Grady screamed for sand to douse a fire. Nothing exploded, so Sam supposed the fire got doused. The guns in the turrets kept thundering away. So did all the weapons of the secondary armament that would bear on the foe.

“Christ on His cross,” Kidde said, “we’re going around through our own fleet again.”

He was right. Carsten got glimpses of other ships with spouts from near misses splashing up around them and still others aflame. But the U.S. ships were shooting back, too; smoke from the guns, smoke from the fires, and smoke from the stacks all dimmed the bright sunshine of the tropical Pacific. “Are we winning or losing?” Sam asked.

“Damned if I know,” “Cap’n” Kidde answered. “If we live and we make it back to Honolulu, we can find out in the papers.” He barked laughter, then coughed harshly. “And if we don’t live, what the hell difference does it make, anyway?”

Luke Hoskins came up with another good question: “We ever going to get this beast under control again? We’ve done one whole circle, just about, and now…”

With the five-inch gun screened from the enemy by the bulk of the ship, Sam took his place at a vision slit beside Hiram Kidde. He saw they’d come round behind most of the American fleet, and…He grimaced in dismay. “Looks like we’re going to swing toward them again,” he said.

Kidde whistled between his teeth. “It does, don’t it? Well, that means the gun’ll bear again. Get your ass back there, Sam. If they take us out, it ain’t gonna be like we didn’t give ’em something to remember us by.”

“Yeah,” Carsten said, and then, “You know, I wouldn’t mind that much if they remembered some other guys instead.” Pete Jonas handed him a shell. He slammed it into the breech.

Newsboys shouted their papers as Sylvia Enos walked from her apartment building to the trolley stop: “Battle of the Three Navies! Read all about it!” “Extra! USS
Dakota
in circle of death!” “American fleet crushes the Japs and limeys off Sandwich Islands!”

Sylvia paid her two cents and bought a
Boston Globe
. She read it on the way to the canning plant. As often seemed true in the war, the headlines screamed of victory while the stories that followed showed the headlines didn’t know what they were talking about.

The U.S. fleet hadn’t crushed those of the two enemy empires, any more than the German High Seas Fleet had crushed the Royal Navy in the North Sea the month before. The papers had shouted hosannas about that, too, till it became obvious that, even after the fight, the bulk of the German Navy couldn’t break out to help the U.S. Atlantic Fleet against the British and the French and the Rebs.

In the Pacific, though, what seemed to be a drawn battle worked for the United States, not against them as it had on the other side of the world. Where the Germans hadn’t been able to break out into the Atlantic, the British and Japanese hadn’t been able to break in toward the Sandwich Islands, which remained firmly in American hands.

Though the
Globe
hadn’t been the paper whose headlines screeched loudest about the
Dakota
, its account of the fight did prominently mention the battleship’s double circuit straight into the guns of the opposing fleets. “The valiant vessel sustained twenty-nine hits,” the reporter said, “nine definitely from the enemy’s large-caliber guns, eleven definitely from smaller shells, and nine that might have come from either. Although drawing thirty-six feet of water at the end of the battle, as opposed to thirty-one at the outset, the
Dakota
and the heroes aboard her also inflicted heavy damage on the ships of the foe and, miraculously, suffered only fourteen killed and seventeen wounded, a tribute to her design, to her metal, and to the mettle of her crew.”

Sylvia left the newspaper on the trolley seat when she got out and hurried over to the plant: let someone else have a free look. She’d wondered why the Navy, in its wisdom, had sent George to the Mississippi rather than the open sea. Now she thanked God for it. The
Dakota
had got off lightly as far as casualties were concerned, but what about the cruisers and destroyers and battleships that had gone to the bottom with all hands, or near enough to make no difference?

Going down with all hands could happen to a monitor, too. Sylvia made herself not think about that. Coming up the street toward the factory was Isabella Antonelli. Sylvia waved to her friend. “Good morning,” she called.

“Good morning,” Mrs. Antonelli answered. Seeing her, though, did not take Sylvia’s mind as far away from the war as she would have liked. Isabella Antonelli wore black from head to foot, with a black veil coming down from her hat over her face. In her imperfect English, she said, “All this talk of the big Navy fight, I think of you, I think of your husband, I pray he is all right—” She crossed herself.