to Fort Atkinson or the Baalkpan wall.” He shrugged. “They may not put anyone ashore there at all; flank attacks don’t seem their style. We rolled up their flanks time and again on B’mbaado, and it always took them by surprise. That stuff Mallory said about Tjilatjap keeps coming back to me, though, so keep your eyes peeled.”
The sun was near the jungle horizon when the last cluster of barrels went into the dappled sea. As powerful as he was, Silva hurt all over from the backbreaking chore of manhandling the heavy depth charges. He tried to use his grimy T-shirt to wipe the burning sweat from his eyes, but the shirt was so soaked it only made it worse. He glanced at the mouth of the bay. He was surprised Walker hadn’t returned and was struck by the irony of that. On the world they came from, she’d been an insignificant, expendable asset, a relic of an almost ancient war-in terms of technological advancement. She hadn’t been in the same league with her smallest modern counterparts in the Japanese Navy. Most of her sisters weren’t even frontline warships anymore; they’d been converted to seaplane or submarine tenders, minelayers, transports, even damage-control hulks… Now Dennis was surprised she wasn’t already back from facing maybe a hundred enemy ships, with only three sailing frigates to assist her. Nobody else seemed to think it was a big deal either, and he guessed that was really more of a testament to their faith in her captain than the dilapidated ship herself. Still…
Several times during the afternoon, they thought they heard the faint booming of Walker ’s guns, and duller, rippling broadsides of muzzle-loading cannon. Maybe not. The wind was wrong, and the fighting had to be closer than they’d expected if it was so, but regardless, Walker and her little fleet were doing their job: buying the time they needed to finish their little surprise.
He looked at the evidence of their hard day’s work. Across the lightly choppy water, hundreds of clustered barrels bobbed from the shallows on one side of the channel to the other. Some supported a deadly cargo. Beyond the barrels, and even mixed with them where they could, they’d set the posts supporting even more explosives. The minefield looked more impressive than it was, and the first storm that came along would carry it away. Eventually the barrels would leak and the depth charges would sink and detonate without warning. That was one of the main reasons they’d waited so long to prepare the “surprise”; so itnelayerht= would be fresh and ready when the enemy came. He noticed there was a kind of vague pattern to the floating shapes, and it occurred to him the pattern was broken along the side of the channel they were on. It’d be obvious to anybody-especially some Jap lookout in Amagi ’s top-there was a free pass right through the minefield. The other side looked tight, but that was where they’d deliberately set most of the dummies so Walker and the frigates would have a safe path to return. He looked tiredly around. There were still ten depth charges left, but all the barrels on the barges were gone.
“Hey, Bosun,” he said, getting Gray’s attention. “I think we missed a spot.” Before Gray could answer, a growing, clattering drone approached from the southwest. Looking up, they saw the abbreviated outline of the PBY. “Coming back,” Silva muttered. “I wonder how far behind our ship is?”
Another drone was approaching. He looked toward Mahan, loitering a safe distance from the semicircle the barges had formed, and saw a launch drawing near. A few minutes later it bumped alongside, and Lieutenant Sandison hopped onto the barge carrying a large, canvas-wrapped object in his hands.
“Is this the last of them?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” Gray replied.
“All right. I want you to set them all for, oh, say, a hundred and fifty feet; then we’ll tie a cable off to one and put it over the side.”
“One fifty?” Gray asked, surprised.
“You heard me.”
“But the water here’s only about eighty feet deep.”
“I know. Trust me; you’re going to like it.” Securing one end of the rope to the barge, they dropped the depth charge attached to the other over the side.
“Now,” Sandison instructed, “rig all the rest to slide down the rope so they’ll rest together on the bottom. All except one. Chief? I might need your help with this. I’m a torpedo guy, after all.”
“Well, I ain’t no depth-charge man,” Gray growled. “We ought to have Campeti.” He paused, pointing, while Sandison unwrapped his object. “What the hell’s that?”
“It used to be a MK-6, magnetic torpedo exploder. It’s the one we took out of that fish we put in Amagi -the one that went off. We worked it over, and now it’s been redesignated the Silly Six, Sandison Surprise.”
“Silly’s right. What the hell’s it good for?”
“Well, as you can see, there’ve been a few modifications.” He held it up. “First, the contact-exploder mechanism has been entirely removed-leaving just the magnetic trip mechanism…”
“Okay.”
“… which is now just a glorified magnetic switch.” There was a loud splash behind them as another depth charge rolled over the side. Half a dozen men and Lemurians held the rope taut as it sank. “I will next put the switch backfor company…”
“I’ll be damned!” Gray muttered, realization dawning.
“Almost certainly,” Sandison agreed. “You’ll see there’re two long wires trailing out of the canister? I want the canister secured tightly to a rope by its handles, the other end of the rope wrapped around the depth charge. Make the distance about sixty-five feet. When you do that, we’ll wrap these two wires around the cable-loosely, with lots of slack-until we get to the charge.”
“But how are we going to set it off?” Gray asked. “If we try to run those wires in through the hydrostatic fuse, the damn thing’ll leak.”
Sheepishly, Bernie fished a hand grenade from his pocket. Two more wires ran out of the top where the fuse had been, and it was carefully sealed around them. “I got this from Reavis. He had the duty.”
“Why that little…!” Silva began, gasping from exertion.
“Don’t be too hard on him, Dennis. Spanky gave me a note.”
Gray just shook his head. Another heavy splash. “So,” he said, pointing to another object. “What’s that? It looks like a big-ass cork.”
Sandison nodded. “It’s a float for a Lemurian fishing net. Buoyant as hell. I can’t remember what they call it; ask one of your guys.” He gestured around. “Whatever it is, I think it’s ’Cat for ‘big-ass cork.’ It’ll hold our trigger up.”
Gray stared, hands on his hips. “You know? If that crazy gizmo works, it’ll probably be the first time in the history of the war against the Japs one of those magnetic bastards did anything right.”
“Maybe,” Sandison agreed; then he pointed to the open lane in the minefield that led to it. “But if it doesn’t, we’ll have even more reason to curse them-only we probably won’t be able to.”
Gray nodded as another depth charge splashed over the side. “Yeah. Thank God this ain’t the main deal. I’d hate to think everything was riding on it.”
Silva stopped heaving on the next depth charge in line and wiped his brow. “What the hell do you mean, this ain’t the main deal?” he demanded between gasps for air. “We been doin’ all this work for a sideshow?” Shortly after 2100 that night, the new construction frigates, USS Tolson and USS Kas – Ra – Ar, displayed the proper lantern-light recognition signals, and were allowed to pass under the guns of Fort Atkinson. Mahan was waiting for them, having returned the barges to the yard. Now she signaled them to heave to and wait for a launch to bring a pilot to take them safely through the minefield. As the ships passed in the night, Jim Ellis saw they’d taken quite a pounding, and though their masts still stood they didn’t look new anymore. Of Walker and Donaghey there was no sign for almost another hour. Finally a flare went up, declaring an emergency, and Walker appeared, towing the wallowing, dismasted hulk of Lieutenant Garrett’s ship. The launch took Gray across so he could guide the two ships inside the bay. With her searchlights sweeping the surface of the water, the old destroyer picked her way into the clear, where andl thinking. He sighed.
Wishful thinking wouldn’t solve their ammunition problems, either. Walker had sortied with another twenty of the “new” shells, reloaded with a solid copper projectile and black powder. As Ellis reported, the projectile worked okay, after a fashion. They went off, and even flew reasonably straight, but with a much lower velocity than the targeting computer was accustomed to, so local control was the only way to go. It also took every one they had to sink six ships. It went without saying that the copper projectiles would be worse than useless against Amagi. Sandison hadn’t been pleased to learn how the rounds performed when Ellis first told him. He, Garrett, and Campeti had plenty of ideas how to improve them, but they just didn’t have the time. They’d have to fight with what they had. He shook his head.
Looking out to starboard, Matt made out Mahan ’s outline in the dark as the other ship closely paced them. It
