“Three rounds, salvo fire. Commence firing!” He leaned forward and stabbed the salvo buzzer button. The nerve-racking, jangling raaaa sound was almost instantly overwhelmed by the simultaneous concussion of three 4- inch guns. Even before the first rounds fell, the buzzer sounded again and the second salvo was on the way. Splashes kicked up beyond and astern of the closest enemy destroyer, but seconds later more splashes rose among the ships when their friends opened fire as well. The third salvo seemed to have the range, but it was still behind the enemy.
“They’re even faster than I thought! I guess I didn’t lead them enough,” Garrett said apologetically. He fed corrections into the computer. Somebody got a lucky hit with the first salvo, and the third Japanese destroyer belched black smoke from her curiously raked ’stack and slowed out of line. Men cheered and even Matt felt like pumping his fist. It looked like the hit came from Pope or Encounter. The remaining enemy ships continuedthe charge. They opened fire from the twin mounts on their fore-decks, all three shooting only at the damaged British cruiser.
“They’re making for Exeter. Get on them, Mr. Garrett!” To Matt, the enemy strategy was clear. They were trying to get in a few licks on the primary target and slow her down still more. Her escorts would then be forced to leave her or stand and fight. Either way, the result would be the same. Another salvo slammed out from Walker, and this one looked on target, but there were no explosions. Either they were still shooting long, or the shells were passing through the thin-skinned Japanese ships without detonating.
“That’s it!” shouted Garrett into his comm. “No change! No change! Rapid fire! Let her have it!” The geysers erupting around the advancing enemy now resembled those that had bracketed Exeter a short time before, if not in size, then surely in volume. The Japanese couldn’t know that Exeter’s fire control was out, and Matt had to admire the courage of their approach. They began to angle for Exeter’s starboard side. Knowing their gunnery was in capable hands, Matt realized his place was in the pilothouse. Without a word of distraction for Garrett, he dropped to the quarterdeck below.
“Captain on the bridge!” somebody shouted.
“As you were. I have the deck, Mr. Flowers. You keep the conn.”
“Aye, aye, sir. You have the deck. I have the conn.”
“Skipper.” PO Riggs spoke up. “Captain Blinn on Pope sends to execute a starboard turn in column and prepare to fire torpedoes.” Blinn was senior to both Matt and Captain Atkinson on Mahan and had authority over the three American destroyers.
“Very well, acknowledge. Mr. Flowers, bring us in behind Mahan when she makes her turn.”
Ensign Bernard Sandison, the torpedo officer, stood on the starboard bridgewing and adjusted his headset while an ordnance striker fiddled with the connection linking the antiquated torpedo director to the two mounts on the starboard side. As the four destroyers accelerated to block the enemy thrust, his eyes burned when they turned into their own smoke screen.
“Sir,” commented Flowers, “Exeter’s firing torpedoes.” He pointed at the cruiser, now off their port bow. Puffs of smoke drifted aft from her amidships tubes, but the splashes when the weapons hit the water couldn’t be distinguished from those of enemy shells. Then, as they looked on, there was a small reddish flash between Exeter’s two funnels. A column of black smoke rocketed skyward and a cloud of escaping steam enshrouded her amidships. Except for the racket of the blowers and the wind, there was stunned silence in Walker’s pilothouse, broken only by someone’s soft, pleading murmur.
“No, oh, no… no.”
Matt didn’t know who said it. It might have been he. Somebody cursed. Exeter’s speed dropped to nearly nothing, as if she’d slammed into a wall. Shells rained down and more began to hit as she wallowed on helplessly at barely four knots. The Allied destroyers executed another turn, in column, and ran up Exeter’s starboard side, placing themselves between the doomed cruiser and the oncoming enemy ships. Through the thinning haze of the smoke screen, the Japanese cruisers were visible, much closer than before. At the head of the line, smoke and steam spewed from Encounter as her torpedoes leaped into the sea. The two American destroyers ahead followed suit.
“Engage as they bear with the starboard tubes, Mr. Sandison.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” he replied, and cried into his microphone: “Torpedo action starboard! In salvo! Fire one, fire three, fire five! Fire seven, fire nine, fire eleven!”
Matt peered around the chart house. The amidships deckhouse was in the way, but he saw the cutoff-looking muzzles of the pair of starboard triple launchers angled out thirty degrees from the side of the ship. As he watched, the first three 21-inch-diameter, 2,215-pound MK-15 torpedoes thumped out, one after another, the sun shining on their burnished metal bodies as they plunged into the sea with enormous concave splashes. They disappeared, but a moment later dense trails of effervescent bubbles rose to the surface in their wakes. There were only three, however.
Sandison looked at his captain with an apologetic, frustrated expression. “Sir, there’s a casualty on the number-three mount. They don’t know what it is yet, but the torpedoes are secure.”
Matt swallowed a curse. It probably wasn’t anybody’s fault, just worn-out equipment. “Very well, Bernie. Let me know what you find out. Light a fire under it, though. I want those torpedoes!”
“Captain!” cried the talker. “Lookout reports torpedoes in the water!”
Matt looked at him blankly for a second. Of course there were- Then realization struck. He ran to the bridgewing and shouldered Sandison aside.
“JAP torpedoes!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Right full rudder!” Walker heeled sharply. “Signal to all ships- torpedoes inbound! Lots of torpedoes! Am evading!” During his brief glance, he saw over a dozen wakes. He looked back at the incoming streams of bubbles, which contrasted sharply with the dark, deep water. They should be relatively easy to avoid in daylight, but there were so many. They might blunder into one while maneuvering to miss another. Walker was only thirty feet wide, and Matt instinctively turned directly toward the oncoming weapons to present the smallest possible target. The rest of the column of destroyers disintegrated into chaos as they maneuvered independently as well.
“Lord, looks like the Nips just flushed a covey of quail,” said Flowers as dryly as he could manage.
“Rudder amidships!” With gratifying alacrity, Walker steadied, and the cant to the deck disappeared. She may be old, Matt thought with an unusual sense of proprietary satisfaction, but she still handles like a rum-runner. Nimbleness wasn’t a trait usually associated with four-stackers, but Chief Gray had told him an extra three feet of depth had been added to her rudder as an experiment. It worked, but there were objections to the added draft and, as far as Gray knew, only a couple of her sisters were ever altered.
“Here they come!” someone yelled. Almost everyone in the pilothouse but the helmsman rushed to the bridgewings and looked anxiously at the water as a pair of torpedoes raced by on either side of Walker’s frail hull. The one to starboard passed less than a dozen yards away. A young seaman’s apprentice named Fred Reynolds, a boy who looked all of thirteen, grinned at Matt with a pallid expression and then vomited over the rail. The malicious wind made sure that most of the spew wound up in his close-cropped hair. The salvo buzzer rang again, and the number one gun fired alone. The report stirred the bridge crew from the momentary relief of having dodged the torpedoes, reminding them that they were steaming directly toward the enemy.
“Where the hell do you think you are? Watching toy boats in a duck pond?” bellowed Chief Gray as he ascended the ladder. He gave Reynolds a malevolent glare and pantomimed dumping a water bucket on the deck. The boy wiped his mouth and staggered back to his station. The rest of the bridge crew followed suit. Matt winced inwardly. He’d been as guilty as the others, but Gray just winked at him and sighed theatrically when no one was looking. Matt nodded grimly and turned.
“Left full rudder! Helm, tack us back onto the tail of the column as it re-forms!”
There was a loud clang above their heads, and Lieutenant Rogers’s voice blared from the crow’s nest speaking tube. “JESUS CHRIST! A shell just took a notch out of the mast about two feet under me!”
The salvo buzzer rang and three guns fired again. Matt looked down at number one and was surprised to see a young man in Army khakis carrying four-inch shells from the wardroom below to replenish the ready-lockers.
“That’s Mallory,” said the Chief, reading his mind. “He came aboard with that other officer. He seems a decent sort.” Matt nodded his understanding and noted Gray’s obvious opinion of Captain Kaufman.
The column shook itself out. But their relief over evading the torpedoes was shattered when they were brutally reminded of the one member of their group that couldn’t evade anything. A towering column of water spouted directly under Exeter’s aft funnel on her starboard side. She heeled hard to port and then rolled back into a
