The Commodore (41 page)

“Please don't,” he said. “I've upset you. I—”

She paused in the doorway. “I
have
to go,” she said. “Mostly because I cannot stay. I like you, Harmon Wolf, but I am barely holding it together. I see too much, I hear too much. I simply can't—”

Then she was gone.

He lay back in the bed with a sigh and watched the sunset paint the back wall of his room in amazing colors. Damn, he thought. I took her for granted. That calm, brave, all-the-way-to-Tokyo façade, and, yet, underneath all that, she was still grieving. Her husband, his ship, all the wardroom officers they'd both known, reduced to chum by a Jap submarine as
Juneau
crawled back toward Nouméa with a broken back.

And all I can think about is me, he realized. He tried to imagine what his uncle, the Mide, would have said if he'd watched all that. Shit-fire, man, you can do better than that.

One day later the SOPAC machinery had him discharged and on a flight back to Pearl. He kept the cane.

 

FORTY

Pearl Harbor

“Mornin', Commodore,” Mose said. “Got us some fresh hot cin-min rolls and some a that Kona coffee this mornin', yes we do.”

Sluff was up, dressed, and sitting at his small desk reading the morning message traffic that had been delivered earlier that morning. He was one of four captains living in a spacious white house at the edge of the Makalapa crater, but he was the only one who had a steward assigned. The house, one of eight laid out in a row of senior officers' quarters, was set up as a BOQ. There were four bedrooms and two baths upstairs, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room downstairs, with a small bedroom behind the kitchen for a steward. The other three captains all worked up the hill at Nimitz's headquarters in various staff positions. Sluff was the only one who had what was technically a seagoing command. From the front porch there was an expansive view of Pearl Harbor below. On the street behind the row of BOQ houses were the much bigger flag quarters for Nimitz and his senior aides.

“Mose, thank you very much,” Sluff said. “Put it all right there. Everyone else already gone to work?”

“Yes, suh, they have,” Mose said. “That Cap'n Weaver, now, he gets on outa here at five thirty, every mornin', no matter what. He must be real important.”

“He seems to think so, Mose,” Sluff said, dryly. “Let me know when my car shows up.”

“Yessuh, will do. I'm goan get us some fresh fish for supper tonight. You will be comin' back this evenin'?”

“I will, Mose,” Sluff said. “The Lord willing and the creeks don't rise.”

Mose grinned. “Ain't no creeks on this island, boss,” he said. “So you be here.”

After Mose left he sampled the coffee and one of the fat pills. He wasn't sure where Mose was getting this stuff but he wasn't going to ask any questions, either. He looked out the window, which gave him a view of the harbor some three hundred feet below the Makalapa quarters area and about a crow-fly mile away. It was January, which was to say that the days were a few degrees cooler than, say, July, but not by much. The weather never changed here, and he missed the roll of the four seasons. It would have been a spectacular view except for the blackened battleship wrecks over on Ford Island.

Gonna be here for dinner? Well, that depends, Mose, he thought. It's kind of one day at a time with this head bone of mine. Never know when it's going to fall apart and put me on the ground. Or in it.

He'd had some episodes since coming back to Pearl, but nothing too alarming. He'd been given an enthusiastic if almost embarrassing welcome when he'd arrived at Pearl, including a five-minute office call on Nimitz himself. The admiral exuded his usual quiet charm and encouraged Sluff to get his new training squadron up and running as soon as possible, because the crews coming from the East Coast were seriously green. He'd also given Sluff the name of a captain on his staff who would be available when Sluff ran into any bureaucratic problems.

“When, not if,” Nimitz had said. “It's not a case of obstinacy in the face of change, but rather that the demands on every resource here are overwhelming and getting bigger every day.”

“We'll make do, Admiral,” Sluff had replied. “We didn't have all that much out around Savo, either.”

He finished his breakfast, got his cane and specially modified brass hat, and went out to the front porch to wait for his staff car. He worked a seven-day, ten-hour schedule, much like everyone else assigned to the Pacific Fleet's main base. No more hazy, lazy Sundays with just a scant duty section up and about, not after December 7, afloat or ashore. Even though a year had passed since that disaster, the smell of death and oil was always tainting the otherwise lovely tropical breeze, and the fourteen-inch guns, dismounted from some of the sunken battlewagons and then embedded up on the cliffs above Waikiki, were kept loaded.

His car drove up and the driver, a pretty young Wave named Sally Simpson, jumped out and ran around to the curb to open the right rear door. Sluff smiled at the sight, as he did every morning.

“Morning, Commodore,” she chirped as she saluted.

He returned the salute and the greeting. Then they were off to the boat landing, where he would take a launch out to Ford Island and his sumptuous headquarters in a steel Quonset hut, bristling with aerials and altogether too close to the drowned nightmare that was
Arizona,
where over one thousand men lay irretrievable in her burned, armored bowels. His staff was, in his opinion, absolutely first-rate, all battle-scarred veterans of Ironbottom Sound. Officers, chiefs, and some senior enlisted, sent to him with two objectives: to pass on the lessons learned under fire against the Japs, and to have some time to heal, if possible, before going back out to rejoin the coming offensives up the Solomons chain. The thump of canes and crutches added a certain dignity to the schoolhouse atmosphere.

Sluff knew he would not be going back, but when he sat down in the evening with the skippers and execs of the new ships coming through the squadron after they'd spent the day being put through their paces by his veterans, they paid attention. That steel plate in his head, the unruly mop of bright white hair, the Navy Cross, Purple Heart, and other decorations, and the word in the Fleet about the Indian fella who'd destroyed an entire Jap squadron all helped, but he made sure they understood that he was no water-walker, and that what they would be facing could only be characterized as chaos. The ships would stay in the special training squadron for two weeks, and occasionally, three, and then head west, to be replaced by even more new faces and freshly painted ships. He was a commodore again, but his “squadron” featured an ever-changing sea of new faces. Not too different when he was out there, when he thought about it, but for much better reasons.

After the first month, Nimitz directed that, except for submarines,
all
warships and not just destroyers chopping to PacFleet for the first time would go through the special training squadron. That created the occasional problem when a cruiser skipper, technically senior to Sluff, got stiff-necked about reporting to a junior captain, even if he was called
Commodore
Wolf. When that happened, Sluff would actually go to sea, taking his three senior lieutenant commanders along. They would then put that ship through a series of drills and self-imposed casualties to both men and machinery that would usually end with the ship dead in the water and unable to function. The lieutenant commanders would wander through the ship, unplugging vital electrical circuits, telling key officers and petty officers that they were now “dead,” or tripping steam machinery off the line to simulate battle damage. After a day of that, attitudes usually changed and things went much better.

Sluff would then invite the embarrassed CO up to his quarters or to the officers' club for a quiet dinner, one-on-one, over which he would describe his own personal experiences in and around Ironbottom Sound, to include the news that however much the skipper might think he was in control, once the eight-inch shells began to come through the bridge windows, the ship's survival would depend much more on how well the crew had been trained than on anything he, the captain, might do from the wreckage of the pilothouse. The next day, his staff would usually report a remarkable change aboard the USS whatever, and then they could get to work in earnest.

Twice a week, Sluff would have himself driven to the sprawling Army hospital complex up on Fort Shafter, situated in a valley above Pearl. It looked a lot like the field hospital in Nouméa as it frantically expanded to meet the demands created by the intensifying conflict in the South Pacific. Taking a page out of Halsey's book, he would walk through the wards of no-longer-critical patients, carrying a briefcase of the things that might be hard to get in a military hospital and an open bottle of Coke. He quickly discovered that
the
favorite thing was a cigarette, which were not allowed on most wards. Sluff would sit down among a cluster of hospital beds, talking to the men, asking them what ship or unit they were from and where they'd been hurt, while waiting for the nearest nurse to be called away, and then light up three or four cigarettes and pass them around. If the nurse was spotted returning, the cigarettes would be passed quickly back to the strange-looking Navy captain with a plate in his head and doused in the half-empty Coke bottle.

The ward nurses were, of course, on to the game, but allowed it because they were just a little bit intimidated by the muscular four-striper with his scowling Indian visage. After a while, he became a fixture as the word got around about his briefcase full of Camels, and sometimes even a ward nurse might sneak a quick puff or five, egged on by her patients. The word also got around Pearl Harbor circles because one night Chester Nimitz himself sent his car around to pick Sluff up at his quarters, and then the two of them, followed at a discreet distance by two aides and Nimitz's four Marine bodyguards, made the rounds. When they'd been there about an hour Nimitz indicated he had to get back, but he asked Sluff where he'd come up with the idea.

“Admiral Halsey does it twice a week out in Nouméa,” Sluff said. “The troops are usually glad to see him, and, from what I saw, he's pretty good for their morale.”

After hearing that, Nimitz set up a schedule to do the same thing. Sluff found that out when the admiral's aide called and asked which nights Sluff would be up there, so that Nimitz wouldn't interfere.

“You tell me when the admiral might be going up there and I'll just stay home,” Sluff had responded.

“No, sir, Commodore, that's not what the admiral wants. You go up there Tuesday and Thursdays? He'll go up there Wednesdays. How about that?”

“Sounds good,” Sluff said, marveling not for the first time at the magnanimity of C. W. Nimitz.

He was there one night in February, doing his hush-hush cigarette-girl act, when a voice from over his shoulder said, “What is it with you, Harmon Wolf? You like being in the hospital? And do I smell cigarette smoke, gentlemen?”

It was Tina, now sporting the insignia of a nurse corps lieutenant commander. The patients looked uncertainly from her face to his and then realized they knew each other. For one thing, the notorious scowl had vanished.

“No, ma'am, you do not,” Sluff asserted, the Coke bottle in his hand hissing in a definitely guilty fashion. “There's no smoking allowed in this ward.”

“There better not be,” she said, trying hard for a severe frown, but the twinkle in her eyes gave her away. Some of the patients were nudging each other with knowing grins. “Come with me, sir,” she said in her best boss-nurse voice. “While I explain this hospital's rules and why we have them.”

Sluff got up, leaving the briefcase full of cigarettes, and followed her down the line until they went through the batwing doors out into the main corridor that connected the ward buildings. Seeing no one around, she gave him a big hug and then a kiss.

“God, I'm glad to see you, Harmon Wolf,” she said. “I've had this terrible feeling that…”

He smiled down at her. “And I'm very glad you even gave me a thought,” he replied. “Now, let's try that again, with feeling this time.”

Her eyes widened as if she'd taken offense, but a moment later, maybe two, they parted and then, almost sheepishly, sat down on one of the benches out in the hallway.

“I've done okay,” he said. “Some moments, but nothing scary. One day at a time.”

She nodded. “Oh,” she said, reaching into her purse and handing him a small white envelope. “This is for you.”

He looked at the envelope, which had his name and rank handwritten on it, and a return address that said only: WFH. He opened the envelope. Inside was a white card with four blue stars engraved across the top. A hand-scrawled note read: Nimitz delighted with what you're doing. Wish you were here instead. Best regards, Bill Halsey. PS, I've sent you a present.

“What's it say?” she asked.

“It's from Halsey, if you can believe that,” Sluff said. “Says Nimitz is happy with the training squadron.”

“Oh,” she said. “That's it?”

He gave her a big grin. “No, that's not ‘it.' However, we're going to have to know each other a whole lot better before I tell you. So: I have a car and a driver. I'll bet we can get a drink down at the O-club in Pearl.”

She drew herself up as best she could sitting on a hallway bench. “I'm not that kind of girl, Captain,” she said. “It has to be drinks
and
dinner.”

“Deal,” he said, feeling for the first time since his stroke that maybe, just maybe, there was a future.

Then they just sat there, grinning at each other like two idiots.

 

ALSO BY
P. T. DEUTERMANN

THE CAM RICHTER NOVELS