slacked. She could almost certainly slip into the squall. He rubbed his forehead vigorously and looked into the wide- eyed, expectant faces of the men around him. They wanted him to do it: to give the order to turn back. They were willing it. Didn’t they understand it was death? They had a chance to live-all they had to do was abandon Mahan to Amagi’s fury.
No, they couldn’t live like that and neither could he. They’d run far enough. It didn’t matter anymore where they were. The fight was here and they would face it. Shades of gray no longer existed. Everything was a stark black and white once more. Was that what it all boiled down to? Had the entire Asiatic Fleet been sacrificed just because it was there? The salvo buzzer rang and numbers one, three, and four let loose, but he didn’t even hear. Finally his gaze fell upon Reynolds. The boy was the youngest and most junior crewman on the bridge. The look he returned was… pleading.
“Come about! Bring us as close alongside Mahan as she’ll bear.” He gestured at the bombers above. Three of them flew lazy circles, watching, as if afraid to descend into the line of fire. “Maybe we can at least keep them off her.”
“Skipper, the Jap cruisers behind us are out of the squall. They can see us now.”
“Good. Let ’em watch,” Matt snarled. Some of the men giggled nervously. “How much longer for the torpedoes, Mr. Sandison?”
“Ten seconds.”
Walker finished her turn and sprinted after Mahan. The sea frothed around her with the strikes of enemy shells. She staggered from another impact forward.
“Time?”
“Three… two… one…” Sandison looked up from his watch with a wretched expression. Damn! More duds-or whatever it was that had been wrong with the torpedoes since the war began. They were nearly even with Mahan now. Her speed was dropping off.
“See if-” Matt was interrupted by a bright snap of light, and he looked up in time to hear the detonation of the single massive explosion that disemboweled the Japanese destroyer. The ship hung, jackknifed, her bow in the air and her stern already slipping. The flames were bright against the dark squall beyond. Wild cheering erupted and Matt cheered too-but they’d missed Amagi. She was turning toward them in case there were more torpedoes in the water, and therefore, for a moment, she couldn’t fire. Shells fell in earnest from the cruisers behind, but Amagi suddenly blurred. The squall was moving over her. Toward them. They were a mile away.
“Skipper! Get a load of this!” shouted Flowers. He was looking to his left, at Mahan. A column of spray collapsed on her deck and a man struggled through the cascade. He pointed at them with his right hand and held that arm up. Then he patted his chest with the left and brought it from below, across the bottom of his elbow and up alongside the other. Then he vanished in more spray.
“What the hell?” muttered Sandison.
Mahan dropped back and they saw men on her wreckage-strewn deck heaving on the exposed steering cables. She sheared to the right and narrowly avoided colliding with Walker’s stern. With a burst of speed, she lanced forward along the starboard side. The same man as before stood between the two torpedo mounts, still rigged out. He pointed at them exaggeratedly.
“My God, they’re still loaded!” shouted Sandison. Matt ran onto the bridgewing and held up his own right arm. Then he took both arms and brought them up, diverging on either side of where his arm had first been. The man on Mahan’s deck held up an “OK” sign and scurried away.
“Left twenty degrees!” Matt shouted. “We’re going to run up both sides of her! We may not have any torpedoes, but the Japs don’t know that!”
Amagi had crept out of the squall, but just barely. It was almost as if the storm followed her. Now she was pointed directly at them and water peeled from her bow as she surged ahead. They were so close and the angle was such that only a couple of her secondaries would bear. They’re still plenty big, thought Matt, and as soon as we come alongside, the entire secondary broadside will come into play. It would happen in less than two minutes.
Mahan moved farther and farther to starboard. With the loss of her forward fireroom, Walker could barely make twenty-five knots. Mahan looked like a wreck, but she was keeping up. The roaring bombers swooped to attack in spite of the incoming shells. Machine guns clattered above and behind. The salvo buzzer rang. Antiaircraft rounds raked Walker’s bridge as the two four-stackers streamed past Amagi’s bow. Lieutenant Flowers spun away from the wheel and collapsed to the deck, and Matt jumped into his place. The maelstrom of fire and the kaleidoscope of images were beyond anything they’d experienced yet. Amagi’s side was alive with flashing muzzles, and Walker drummed with impacts as numerous as the raindrops of the previous squall.
Simultaneously, Walker heaved with the close impact of a pair of bombs, and the plane that had dropped them slanted unnaturally toward Amagi, trailing smoke. It impacted with a monstrous fireball directly atop her amidships turret. Two more explosions rocked Amagi from the opposite side and she heeled sharply toward Walker with the force of the blows. The salvo buzzer rang. WHAM!
Another bomb detonated and shells from the other cruisers still fell. Some even struck Amagi. Amid this tempest of fire, smoke, overpressure, and death, they were finally consumed by the squall.
CHAPTER 2
Elation surged in Matt’s chest as the green deluge- tinged with the reflection of explosions and flames- descended upon them. In spite of himself, a shout of exultation escaped. Instead of the comforting, drumming rain on the deck above, however, a shocking… silence… stunned his senses. He heard surprised shouts on the foredeck and then the confused murmuring of the bridge watch, but for a moment there was nothing else. He spun to look past the chart house. As the rest of the ship… materialized out of the greenness behind them, he began to hear it- the ship itself. The reassuring thunder of the blowers as they roared into being, the shouted obscenities of the number two gun crew amidships. On and on, until he heard the tumult as far away as the fantail. But other than the increasingly alarmed voices of his crew, the normal sounds of his ship, and the loud ringing in his ears caused by the din of battle, there was nothing.
But there was rain. The rain he’d expected to pound his ship at that very moment was there-but it wasn’t falling. It just hung there, suspended. Motionless. He raised his hand in wonder amid the pandemonium, waved it through the teardrop shapes, and felt their wetness on his hand. He moved out from under the shelter of the deck above and felt the rain as he moved through it, saw it wet his ship as their forward motion carried them along. Just as his initial shock began to give way to an almost panicky incredulity, the screws “ran away,” like when they left the water in really heavy seas. The sound lasted only seconds-at least Spanky was on the job-but it drew his gaze over the side. He blinked in uncomprehending astonishment. The sea was gone. Down as far as he could see, past the boot topping, past the growth-encrusted red paint of the hull, into the limitless greenish-black nothingness below, were only uncountable billions of raindrops suspended in air. Before the enormity of it could even register, the deck dropped from under his feet and a terrible pressure built in his ears. He grabbed the rail and pushed himself down to the wooden strakes of the bridge-anything to maintain contact with something real. What he’d just seen couldn’t possibly be. His stomach heaved and he retched uncontrollably. He heard the sounds of others doing the same as the sensation of falling intensified. Then there began a low-pitched whine, building slowly like a dry bearing about to fail. It built and built until it became torment. The pressure increased too. He dragged himself back into the pilothouse, careful not to take both hands off the deck at once. He scrunched through broken glass and blood until he reached his chair, attached to the angled right-forward wall, and he slowly climbed up the braces.
His eyes felt like they were being pushed into their sockets, but he saw that everyone else on the bridge was down. Reynolds met his gaze with an expression of controlled terror. Riggs sat on the deck with his palms over his eyes. Matt looked through the shattered, square-framed windows and saw men on the foredeck crawling amid empty shell casings, or trying to hold on to something as if they, like he, felt they would fly away from the ship like a feather if they let go. And all around there was nothing but the wet, greenish void. The screeching whine continued to grow until it drowned the noisy blowers. He held his hands over his ears with his arm linked through the chair, but it made no difference. The sound was inside his head. Again he fought the urge to vomit.
Abruptly, with terrifying suddenness, the deck swooped up beneath him like a roller coaster reaching the
