The setting sun cast a rosy glow on the canted superstructure of the California. She listed about seven degrees to port, spouting thick streams of filthy water in rhythmic pumped spurts. The smoke-streaked, flame-blistered, oil-smeared steel wall, leaning far over Pug’s head as the motor launch drew up to the accommodation ladder, gave him a dizzy, doomed feeling. The climb up the canted and partly submerged ladder was dizzying, too.
What an arrival! In bad moments in Kuibyshev, on Siberian trains, in Tokyo streets, in the Manila club, Pug had cheered himself with pictures of his reception aboard this ship: side boys in white saluting, honor guard on parade, boatswain’s pipe trilling, commanding officers shaking hands at the gangway, a sweet triumphant tour of a great ship shined up to holiday beauty and brilliance for the eye of a new captain. Often he had played a minor part in such rituals. But to be the star, the center, the incoming “old man”! It was worth a lifetime of the toughest drudgery.
And now this!
A vile corrupt stink hit Victor Henry in the face as he stepped on the sloping quarterdeck of the California, and said, “Request permission to come aboard, sir.”
“Permission granted, sir.” The OOD’s salute was smart, his sunburned boyish face attractive. He wore grease-streaked khakis, with gloves and a spyglass. Five corpses lay on the quarterdeck, under sheets stained with water and oil, their soggy black shoes projecting, their noses poking up the cloth, water trickling from them down the slanted deck toward the OOD’s stand. The smell came partly from them, but it was a compound of reeks—seeping smoke, gasoline fumes from the pumps, burnt oil, burnt wood, burnt paper, burnt flesh, rotted food, broken waste lines; a rancid mildewy effluvium of disaster, of a great machine built to house human beings, broken and disintegrating. Unshaven sailors and officers in dirty clothing wandered about. Above the filth and mess and tangled hoses and scattered shells and ammo boxes on the main deck, the superstructure jutted into the sunset sky, massive, clean and undamaged. The long sixteen-inch guns were trained neatly fore and aft, newly and smoothly painted gray, tampions in place, turrets unscathed. The ship bristled with A.A. guns. The old Prune Barge was tantalizingly alive and afloat—wounded, but still mighty, still grandiose.
“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”
“Yes, sir? Oh! Yes, sir! Captain Wallenstone’s been expecting you for quite a while.” He snapped his fingers at a messenger in whites, and said with a winning sad grin, “It’s awful that you should find the ship like this, sir. Benson, tell the C.O. that Captain Henry is here.”
“One moment. Where’s your C.O.?”
“Sir, he’s with the salvage officers down in the forward engine room.”
“I know the way.”
Walking familiar decks and passageways that were weird in their fixed slant, climbing down tipped ladders, choking on smoke, gasoline, and oil fumes, and a gruesome smell of rotting meat, penetrating ever deeper into gloom and stench, realizing that these fume-filled spaces were explosive traps, Victor Henry got himself down to the forward engine room, where four officers huddled on a high catwalk, playing powerful hand lights on a sheet of oil-covered water. By an optical illusion, the water half-drowning the engines appeared slanted, rather than the listing bulkheads.
With little ceremony, Victory Henry joined in the engineering talk about saving the ship. The quantity of water flooding through the torpedo holes was more than the pumps could throw out, so the ship was slowly settling. It was that simple. Pug asked about more pumps, about pumping by tugs and auxiliary vessels; but all over the anchorage the cry was for pumps. No more pumping was to be had, not in time to keep the battleship off the mud. Captain Wallenstone, haggard and untidy in greasy khakis and looking about sixty years old, reeled off sad answers to Pug’s other ideas. Patching the holes would take months of underwater work. They stretched over a dozen frames. Sealing off the damaged spaces by sending in divers and closing them off one by one could not be done in time. In short, the California, though not yet on the bottom, was done for. The talk was about cofferdams and cement patches, about a complete refitting in the States, about return to service in 1943 or 1944.
Wallenstone took Victor Henry up to his cabin. It was a blessed thing to smell fresh air again streaming in through windward portholes, and to see the evening star bright in the apple-green sky. The commanding officer’s quarters were intact, spacious, shipshape, glamorous, and beautiful, on this battleship sinking uncontrollably to the bottom. A Filipino steward brought them coffee, which they had to hold on their laps, for it would have slid off the tilted tables. Mournfully, the captain told Pug his experiences of the Japanese attack. Pug had never encountered this officer before, but Wallenstone appeared to know a lot about him. He asked Victor Henry what President Roosevelt was really like, and whether he thought the Russians could hold out much longer against the Germans.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, as he started to accompany Pug out, “quite a bit of mail accumulated here for you. I’m not sure that”—he opened and closed desk drawers—“yes, here it is, all together.”
Victor Henry tucked the bulky envelope under his arm and picked his way with the captain across the cluttered, stinking main deck in the twilight.
“You wouldn’t believe what this ship looked like two days ago.” The captain shook his head sadly, pitching his voice above the whine and thud of the pumps and the metallic hammering everywhere. “We had the word from Manila to expect you. I ran off a captain’s inspection on Saturday. I was at it for five hours. What a job they’d done! You could have eaten your dinner off the engine room deck. It gleamed. She was the smartest ship in this man’s Navy, Henry, and she had the finest crew that ever—oh well, what’s the use? What’s the use?”
At the quarterdeck the bodies were gone. The captain looked around and said, “Well, they took those poor devils away. That’s the worst of it. At the last muster forty-seven were still missing. They’re down below, Henry, all drowned. Oh, God! These salvage fellows say this ship will come back and fight one day, but God knows! And God knows where I’ll be then! Who would think the sons of bitches could sneak all the way to Hawaii undetected? Who’d think they’d be screwy enough to try? Where was our air cover?”
“Is that the Enterprise?” Pug pointed at a black rectangular shape moving down channel, showing no lights.
Wallenstone peered at the silhouette. “Yes. Thank Christ she wasn’t in port Sunday morning.”
“My son’s a flier on board her. Maybe I’ll get to see him. First time in a long while.”
“Say! That should cheer you up some. If anything can. I know how you must feel. All I can say is, I’m sorry, Henry. Sorry as a human being can be.”
Captain Wallenstone held out his hand. Victor Henry hesitated.
In that tiny pause, he thought that if this man had been wiser than all the rest, had held the ship in readiness condition Zed or even Yoke—after all, he too had received a war warning—and had ordered a dawn air alert, the California might be the most famous battleship in the Navy now, afloat and ready to fight. Wallenstone then would be a national hero with a clear red carpet to the office of Chief of Naval Operations, and he would be turning over a fighting command to his relief. Instead, he was one of eight battleship captains conferring with salvage officers and saying how unfortunate it all was; and he was offering a handshake to the man who would never relieve him, because he had let the enemy sink his ship.
But could he, Pug Henry, have done any better? A battleship captain who roused his crew for dawn general quarters in port, while half a dozen other battleships slept, would have been a ridiculous eccentric. The entire fleet from Cincpac down had been dreaming. That was the main and forever unchangeable fact of history. The sinking of the California was a tiny footnote nobody would ever pay attention to.
He shook Wallenstone’s hand, saluted the colors, and made his way down the ladder—which leaned nauseatingly over the water—to the luxurious and unharmed captain’s gig that the OOD had summoned. T
he gig ran darkened to the landing. In the dim dashboard light of the car, Pug glanced over the envelopes of his piled-up mail; official stuff for the most part, with a couple of letters from Rhoda and one from Madeline. He did not open any of them.
“Dad!” Warren not only was at home, he had already changed into slacks and a flowered loose-hanging shirt. He came lunging into the living room, and threw an arm around his father, holding the other stiff at his side. One ear was plastered with surgical tape. “Well, you finally made it! Some haul, clear from Moscow! How are you, Dad?”
“I’ve just visited the California.”
“Oh, Jesus. Bourbon and water?”
“Not that much water, and damned rich on the bourbon. What happened to your arm?”
“Jan told you about how I ran into those Japs, didn’t she?”
“She didn’t tell me you were wounded.”
“It’s just a few stitches. I’m still flying, that’s the main thing. Come, it’s cooler out here, Dad.”
In the shadowy screened porch, Pug bitterly described the California’s state. Warren was scornful. The battleship Navy had been a lot of sleepy fat cats primed for defeat, he said; obsessed by promotions and competition scores, ignorant of the air, and forever drilling to fight the Battle of Jutland against the Japs. But the Japs had grasped naval aviation and had made a slick opening play. “We’ll get ‘em,” he said, “but it’ll be a long hard pull, and the naval aviators’ll do it. Not the battle-wagons, Dad.”
“Seems to me a few airplanes got caught on the ground,” Pug growled, feeling the bourbon comforting and radiant inside him.
“Sure, I admit that. This whole base was all unbuttoned. Dad, I’ll tell you one thing, if Halsey had been Cincpac, none of it would have happened. He’s been so ready and eager for war, his tongue’s been hanging out. He’d have kept this goddamn fleet in condition Zed, and on dawn and dusk GQ’s for a year. He’d have run patrols till the planes fell apart. He’d have been the most hated son of a bitch in Hawaii, but by God, when they came he’d have been waiting for ’em! Why, we stripped ship in November. We’ve run darkened ever since, with warheads in our torpedoes, and bombs in the planes, and depth charges on ready. Of course he does go galloping about like an old mule with a bee up its ass.”
Warren described Halsey’s futile dart south of Oahu looking for Japanese carriers. The direction had seemed dead wrong to Warren Henry and the other fliers. The only place for the Japs to be lurking was north, where they could dash straight for home after the strike. But Halsey—so they later learned—had received a direction-finder report of heavy radio signalling to the south, so southward he had roared, launching all his torpedo planes and dive bombers. For hours the planes had scoured over empty seas, till the Enterprise had sheepishly summoned them back. The report had been the commonest of direction-finder errors, a reciprocal bearing. The Japs had lain in the exact opposite direction—north. By then, of course, catching up with them had been hopeless.
His father grunted incredulously. “Is that what happened? God Almighty, that’s nearly as stupid as the battleship performance.”
“Well, yes, somebody on that big staff should have thought of the reciprocal bearing. But nobody’s head was too clear, and I don’t know—it was one carrier against four or five, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. At least he did try to find a fight. Listen, Dad, our own A.A. shot down many of our planes, and they sure peppered me. It was just a historic snafu all around. Tell me, how’s Briny? Did you see him in Manila?”
The bourbon helped Victor Henry’s sickened spirit, but talking to Warren was better medicine. Slanting light from the living room on his son showed him changed: older, more relaxed, rather hard-bitten, the dangling cigarette almost a part of his features. He had fought with the enemy and survived. That edge was in his bearing, though he deferred carefully to Pug.
“I’ll tell you, Dad,” he said, bringing him a refill from the other room, “I’m not saying this wasn’t a defeat. It was the worst defeat in our history. The Navy will be a hundred years living down the shame of it. But by God, the Congress voted for war today with one dissenting vote! Only one! Think—what else could have accomplished that? The Japs were stupid not to move south and dare Roosevelt to come on. He’d have been in trouble.” Warren took a deep drink of bourbon. “What’s more, operationally they blew this attack. They had us flattened with the first wave. All they did the second time was paste the wagons some more and bomb a few smaller ships. What good was that? Our oil farm was sitting behind the sub base, wide open. Dozens of fat round juicy targets you couldn’t miss with your hat. Why, if they’d gotten the oil—and nothing could have stopped them—we’d be evacuating Hawaii right now. The fleet couldn’t have operated from here. We’d be staging a Dunkirk across two thousand five hundred miles of ocean. Moreover, they never hit the subs. They’ll regret that! They never touched our repair shops—”
“I’m convinced,” Pug said. “I’m sure that Jap admiral is committing hara-kiri right now over his disgraceful failure.”
“I said it was a defeat, Dad.” Warren, unoffended, came back sharply but pleasantly. “I say they achieved surprise at high political cost, and then failed to exploit it. Say, it’s another quarter of an hour to dinner. How about one more shortie?”
Pug wanted to examine his mail, but Warren’s acumen was rejoicing his heavy heart, and the strong drink was working wonders. “Well, very short.”
He told Warren about his meeting with Admiral Kimmel. The young aviator flipped a hand at the complaint of too much war material going to Europe. “Jesus, him too? Just a feeble excuse. It’s got to cost several million lives to stop the Germans. Whose lives? Could be ours! The Russians made one deal with Hitler, and they could make another one. The Communists signed a separate peace in 1917, you know. It was the first thing Lenin did on taking over. The whole game here is to keep the Soviet Union fighting. That’s so obvious!”
“You know, you ought to go over in your spare time, Warren, and straighten out Cincpac.”
“I’d be glad to, but I’ll have to move fast to catch him while he’s Cincpac.”
“Oh? You got some inside scoop?”
“Dad, the President isn’t going to resign, and somebody’s head’s got to roll.”
“Dinner, fellas,” Janice’s voice called.
“The only thing is,” Warren said, as they walked in, “those Russians are going to exact payment for all those lives one day. They’ll get to annex Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or some damn thing. But that’s fair enough, maybe. Russia keeps swallowing and then puking up Poland every half century or so. What was it like in Moscow anyway, Dad? What are the Russkis like? How much did you see?”
Pug talked straight through dinner about his adventures in Russia. Janice had provided several bottles of red wine. It wasn’t very good wine, and he wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but tonight he poured down glass after glass, thinking that red wine was really remarkably fine stuff. Continuous talking, another unusual thing for him, eased his heart.
Janice asked questions about Pam Tudsbury, which led him to relate his experiences in England too, and his flight over Berlin. Warren pressed his father for details of the bomb racks and release mechanisms, but Pug could tell him nothing. Warren interrupted Pug’s flow of words to describe his run-in with the Bureau of Ordnance over the bombing assembly of his plane, and the improved rack he had manufactured in the shipfitter’s shop, which the Bureau was now grudgingly examining for possible use in all planes. Pug tried to keep surprise and pride out of his face, saying, “You’ll get no thanks from anybody, boy. Especially if it works! Just a reputation as a troublemaker.”
“I’ll get what I want—bombs that fall straight and hit.”
Over brandy, back on the dark screened porch, Pug, now fairly close to being drunk, asked his son what he thought he should do, with the California command gone. It was an honest question. His son impressed him, and he thought Warren might give him good advice.
/>
Warren laughed and said, “Dad, learn to fly.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.”
“Well, seriously, you’d better go back to Cincpac’s staff tomorrow and pound desks till you get a command. They probably believe that you draw a lot of water with the President. You’ll get what you ask for. But you have to move fast. If Mr. Roosevelt remembers that you’re on the loose again, he’ll send you on some other mission. Although I don’t know, it must be very interesting work, at that.”
“Warren, I hope you believe me—thanks, thanks, boy, just a little more, this is damn good brandy—nearly everything I’ve been doing in the past two years has given me a swift pain in the ass. I don’t know why Mr. Roosevelt chose in his wisdom to make a sort of high-octane errand boy out of me. I’ve talked to great men face to face, and that’s a privilege, sure. If I were planning to write a book or go into politics, or something along that line, it would be dandy. But the bloom soon comes off the rose. You’re a zero to these people. It’s in their manner. You have to watch every sentence you utter and keep your eyes and ears peeled for every move, every word, every tone of some bird who may go down in history, but he’s just another man, basically, and maybe even a big criminal, like Stalin or Hitler. I think you have to have a taste for associating with great men. There are people who do, God knows, who crave it, but I’m not one of them. I never want to get out of sight of ships and the water again, and I never want to see the inside of another embassy.”
“How did it ever start, Dad? Here, have some more.”
“No, no, Warren, I’m feeling no pain at all as it is. Well, okay, just wet the bottom of the glass—thanks, boy. How did it start? Well—”