The Edge of Honor (12 page)

Brian reached down and switched his intercom set from the electrical intercom to the sound-powered control circuit.

“Director One, Control.”

Silence. The snouting of orders in CIC got louder and then diminished.

Without power, the sixty men in Combat were next to useless.

“Director One, Control!”

“Control, this is Plot. We’re up on the JC and JP circuits. I’ll get him for you.”

“Control, this is Director One on JC.”

“Yeah, Jack, okay. What’s happening out there?”

Brian felt Hood beginning to wallow from side to side as she lost speed.

The sound of another ship’s five-inchers was much louder now, a steady double blam sound clearly audible throughout the CIC.

“Control, Director One, Berkeley’s hauled out and coming by on our port side, still firing. I can’t see a fucking thing astern but black smoke—we must look like we’re on fire or something. It looks like a refinery fire behind us.”

Brian thought fast, reviewing procedures for a power failure. He knew the ship’s emergency generators would be lighting off in a moment.

“All stations, Control, it looks like the snipes lost the load, both ends, and we’re going DIW. Strip down all power loads so we don’t overload the emergency diesels.

Plot, we got a hot gun back there? Gimme a bore report.”

“Plot, aye, yes, sir, we technically have a hot gun— fifty-six rounds in less than two minutes. Hang on.”

There was a long moment of silence, then the chief’s voice returned.

“Mount reports bore’s clear, so no problem.”

Brian acknowledged and reported the bore clear to the captain, who gave him a distracted thumbs-up acknowledgment as he listened to the chief engineer on the squawk box. Benedetti’s voice rose hysterically out of the box from Main Control. He was almost drowned out by the sounds of engineers yelling and the sound of steam or compressed air escaping in the background.

Brian took a deep breath and wiped his face with his hand. With the air-conditioning systems gone, the temperature in Combat was already rising. Fifty-six rounds. Not too shabby, as they said out here in the Seventh Fleet. But also not 150. He wondered fleetingly whether the power failure had saved him from the embarrassment of a gun failure.

We’ll never know, said a voice in his head. He felt relieved and guilty simultaneously.

The CIC watch standers were grabbing for loose gear as the ship began to roll more heavily. The only fight came from battery-operated battle lanterns positioned around the bulkheads. Console operators were fastening their seat belts and talking quietly. The sounds of Berkeley’s guns moved forward and away from them as she raced past outside at twenty-seven knots, rocking Hood with her wake moments later. With CIC hot, dark, and blind, the captain left D and D to go out to the bridge.

Brian was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he heard a rapid-fire thump-thump from somewhere aft. Every man in CIC heard it at the same time. Not a one of them had ever heard that sound before and yet every man knew instantly what it was.

“Whoa, Control, Plot this is Director One! Counterbattery!

Counterbattery!” shrilled Ensign Folsom over the sound-powered phones.

“Port side, astern of us, three hundred yards! Right on the edge of the smoke.”

Having been a gunnery officer, Brian knew the drill: Direct Plot to switch control of the gun mount to the director officer. The mount would be slaved electrically to the director’s movements, so when the director officer pointed his optics at the gun flashes on the beach, assuming he could see where the shooter was, the gun’s barrel would be pointed where the optics were looking. He was keying down his mike when he remembered that, without power, none of this would work. The ship was helpless, unable to shoot back until power was restored.

“Well, you might as well sit back and enjoy it, Director One. Ain’t shit we can do about it now,” drawled Chief Vanhorn from down in Plot.

“We need to turn this hog around and get back in our own smoke screen,”

shouted Folsom.

“COUNTERS ATTERY, COUNTERS ATTERY,” announced the 1MC, as if no one knew that the ship was under fire. “ALL HANDS TOPSIDE. TAKE COVER, ON THE DOUBLE!”

The voice on the 1MC sounded to Brian like that of the exec. He doubted anyone topside needed to be told to take cover. Hood was really beginning to roll now. With almost no “way” on the ship, she was turning across the wind and the seas. Brian felt utterly useless, but technically he could not leave his station. He could no longer hear the other destroyers’ guns. The noise level in Combat was down to next to nothing; the men looked anxiously at one another and waited to see what would happen next. Brian knew that the ship had two emergency generators, but from the sound of things down in Main Control, it did not appear likely that the engineers had things sorted out yet. His thoughts were interrupted by a sound like a giant sheet of canvas being ripped in two above the ship, followed by two more thumps that were clearly a lot closer than the first two.

“Control, Director One, those were pretty fucking close!”

“At least they’re going off in the water, Director One,” said the calm voice of the chief. “They go to frag, you sightseers are in for some interesting shit.”

“Easy for you to say, Chief. You’re below the waterline.”

Brian broke in. “Keep your head down, Jack. I’m sure the snipes are busting their asses to get some steam up. They can hear those things in the main holes, too, you know.”

“Director One, aye.”

Across the room in D and D, Austin was conferring anxiously on a sound-powered phone with the computer r center one deck below as the electronics technicians assessed the damage from the power drop. The ship’s complex radars and computers were very sensitive to power fluctuations. A clean power drop usually did little damage, but a lingering voltage ramp-down like this one often burned out vital electronic components. Brian 4 wedged himself in between the engagement controller and the fire control systems coordinator consoles to keep upright as the ship rolled deeply. They must be almost dead in the water. The two chiefs sitting the consoles [ looked up at him and shook their heads.

“Fucking snipes,” growled Chief Iverson, the senior missiles radar chief. He was worried about his SPS-48 radar. If the 48 had been damaged, their whole PIRAZ capability was endangered.

The sound of ripping canvas came again and everyone tensed, trying to shrink into their seats without anyone seeing. There was a second of deathly silence, followed by a single thump. As everyone began to exhale, there was a loud bang from the port side, followed by a very loud rattle of what sounded like hail all along the port [ side bulkheads of CIC. A fluorescent light fixture exploded in a dusty popping noise over the aisle leading to the ASW module, and a radarman third class named Festerman, standing by the tracking table, grabbed his left hand.

“Fuck me!” he howled, staring at his hand as blood welled up through his fingers and dripped all over the dead-reckoning tracer table. Several men got up at once to help Festerman, who continued to stand there in shock, staring at his bloody hand.

“Director One, you catch any of that?” Brian asked.

His throat clenched as he realized that the enemy’s shrapnel had penetrated the CIC.

“Looks like we finally got the paint chipped out on the director, Control, but we’re all okay. You should see the spray pattern that one made. This isn’t little stuff they’re shooting.”

The surface module team quickly bandaged up the radarman’s hand as Austin, his face pale, reported one injury in CIC and possible equipment damage from shrapnel. The ship was rolling steadily now, making it difficult to stand up. Brian felt like the proverbial fish in a barrel, standing in a darkened and useless CIC while the bad guys fired heavy artillery at them. He decided to go to the bridge. He passed over the headset to Chief Iverson.

“I’m going out to the bridge, Chief. You have control.”

“Aye, sir. Keep your head down.”

Brian opened the front door to CIC, stepped into the small vestibule by the navigator’s chart room, and then stepped through another door out into a blaze of morning sunlight. He blinked against the glare and saw the captain and the exec standing over on the port bridge wing, binoculars to their faces, the captain now wearing his steel helmet and flak jacket. The lookouts were clustered in the pilothouse with the rest of the bridge team, with everyone trying to stand on the starboard side without seeming to do so. About a mile off the port bow, he could see that both Berkeley and Hull were turning around.

They were steaming across the glinting gray sea in a loose column at high speed, pointed to pass between Hood and the shooters on the beach.

Both ships were streaming copious amounts of black smoke from their stacks. As he watched, Berkeley swung her forward gun mount to face the shore and opened a brisk fire. Hull joined her a moment later with two guns.

Brian started over to join the captain and the exec on the bridge wing, when the tearing sound of two more incoming shells stopped him in his tracks. This time, he got to watch as one burst underwater off the port bow, creating a bright green ribbon of bubbles underwater before punching up a dirty spout of water and smoke eighty feet into the air.

He was looking for the second splash when a giant swung a hammer down on the pilothouse roof with an earsplitting clang, followed seconds later by another waterspout burst one hundred yards off the ship’s starboard side. Light bulbs, acoustic tiles, a radio speaker, and a cloud of dust rained out of the overhead while the men on the bridge team grabbed their helmets against flying debris. Brian, still standing in the doorway, realized that the shell had ricocheted off the deck of the signal bridge above before whining off to the starboard side. He found himself, covered in dust and paint chips, staring at the captain and the exec through a cloud of cordite smoke blowing back across the pilothouse from the blast to starboard. The captain said something to the exec and then hurried across the pilothouse to his chair, where he mashed down the squawk box key and called the engineers. The debris littering the deck of the pilothouse began to slither around as the ship rolled again.

The exec came into the pilothouse and gave Brian a bleak smile.

“Welcome to WESTPAC, Mr. Holcomb. Bet they don’t do this shit over there in NATO, do they?”

“No, sir, they do not.”

The exec came closer. “Have you left your GQ station for a reason, Brian, or were you just getting a little nervous back there in the CIC?”

He deliberately spoke in a soft voice so the enlisted men could not hear.

Brian felt his face flush. “Uh, yes, sir, I came out to … uh—”

“Yeah, okay. You’re not used to doing everything from Combat. But maybe you better go back in there. We get power back, the Old Man’s gonna want to shoot at least some token rounds before we slink away from this fiasco, okay?”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

“Attaboy.”

Brian, his face still red, waited for the ship to steady after a deep roll, then headed back into Combat as the smoke screen from the two destroyers blotted out the sunlight in the port-side bridge windows. The booming of the Hull’s guns followed him through the vestibule doorway.

He almost collided with Austin as soon as he reentered Combat. Berkeley, for some reason, had stopped firing.

“Snipes say they’ll have a boiler back on the line in two minutes,”

Austin said. “I’ll need a status report on the combat systems ASAP, especially the forty-eight radar.”

Brian nodded and went to the weapons control module.

As he grabbed for a stanchion to steady himself through another deep roll, Chief Iverson swiveled around in his console chair.

di

“Good news, Mr. Holcomb. The radar guys say they had the system offline for the gun shoot—they were worried about shock and vibration.

So it should be okay for the power drop.”

“Very good news, Chief. What about the missile systems and the MK Sixty-eight?”

“No status till they get the juice back, boss. Apparently, that’ll be comin’ up most skosh.”

As if in answer to Iverson, the sound of the ventilation systems spooling up throughout the ship filled the unnatural quiet of CIC.

Overhead, the fluorescent light fixtures buzzed on in concert with the twittering of digital alarms from the consoles. Austin came back into CIC as the rumble of propellers shook the ship.

“All right, everybody, get your systems back on the line and get me reports of any electronics casualties.

Surface, D and D, when you get a radar, give us a course directly away from the coast.”

“Surface, aye, and we need one-four-zero to go directly away.”

“Evaluator, aye. Pass that recommendation out to the bridge.”

The ship’s head was already swinging around to the southeast when two more rounds came overhead, falling long now that the ship was hidden behind the destroyers’ smoke screen. For some reason, Brian found the sounds of incoming fire to be less threatening now that the ship had mobility and combat systems power back up. The chief was tugging his sleeve.

“We get the gun system back up, we ought to set up on the beach and scatter some rounds up and down the coast.”

“But we don’t have a target.”

“Yes, sir, I know that. But those tin cans couldn’t really see anything, either—once they shifted from their point targets inland, they were just setting up on a band a thousand yards wide along the coast and hopin’ the shooters were in there somewheres. I mean, what the hell, it would make everybody feel good …”

The destroyers had swept by and were now somewhere astern of them, but on the other side of the massive pall of black smoke they had laid down.

Hood’s gun mount was on the fantail, so she could fire and still drive away from the coast. Brian grinned at him.

“Okay, Chief, get it set up. I’ll see if Austin wants to play.”

He walked over to D and D from the weapons control module. Austin was talking to the captain on a sound powered phone handset. The ship was steadying on a southeasterly heading and gathering speed. Brian waited for an opportunity to break in, then made his pitch.