Torpedo Run (3 page)

"I'll put you so close we can step ashore, skipper," Murph said, and went back into his little house.

Peter stood on the steering platform looking from the dimly lighted compass to ahead and around and back to the compass. The crew was settling down now—at battle stations, but relaxed, some lying on the deck in any shelter from the spray, others sitting around yakking quietly. This crew was used to the long, tedious patrols—sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours at a stretch—and they took it easy when they could because, at any instant, they might be in the middle of a battle.

Peter stood alone on the bridge thinking his own thoughts. Going ashore on Vadang wasn't bothering him—he and Murphy could explore the whole island in three or four hours; and if anything came along while they were ashore, the crew could take
Slewfoot
out of there and come back later.

Vadang wasn't bothering him, but this Adrian Archer was.

Slewfoot
and her crew had been fighting for a long, long time, and it was beginning to tell. The men weren't keeping the boat shipshape the way they once had; there was more oil in the bilges than water; there was a dank, unhealthy smell of unaired bedding in the quarters; rust was beginning to show where it should not have shown; the decks hadn't been swabbed down for weeks.

The neglect of the boat was one thing, and you could excuse it. The men of
Slewfoot
were living in misery, patrolling the dangerous sea at night from early dusk until late dawn; then they came "home" to the mud and bugs and crummy chow and silent jungle.

It was telling on them, Peter realized. There were more fistfights among them now; bitter fights over nothing at all. More griping, more talk of Stateside, more homesickness—and more real sickness: malaria; the "crud," which made any scratch, any leech bite a real wound; dysentery.

His men had, he thought, just barely enough strength left to fight when it was time to fight.

What was this Adrian Archer going to do to them? These were tired, worn-out men living on a razor's edge between sanity and the polite phrase for insanity: "combat fatigue." They had to be handled with care and treated with respect and decency—which they so truly deserved—and, above all, leniency. If Adrian Archer turned out to be one of these big, bull-necked men with a loud voice and a hard nose the crew of
Slewfoot
was going to slip off that razor-edge; and it wasn't going to be on the right side. Just a little of orders being bellowed at them, just a little criticism instead of praise, and this crew in the dark around him now would fall apart. Just a little
oi
that "black-shoe Navy" would totally demoralize and defeat the weary crew.

Peter hoped that Adrian Archer would turn out to be a kind and intelligent man, a man who would listen a little, and learn a little.

Above all, Peter hoped, let Adrian Archer have some courage. When you got down to the bottom of it, all that had held this crew together so far had been that courage of Jonesy's. If Adrian Archer had only a little of that the crew could go on fighting for a long time to come.

Peter turned in the semidarkness and looked over at the starboard corner of the bridge. Now it was empty. The chair wasn't there. Jones wasn't there.

How many times, Peter wondered, had he seen Jonesy sitting over in that corner during the long, long nights? In the early days, Jonesy had used an ammo can to sit on, but in some port some member of the crew—no one asked who—had swiped from somewhere a canvas folding chair like the ones movie directors use. From then on, as soon as it got dark and the boat was on its way and squared away, Sam, the Negro cook, would come up on deck with the Skipper's Chair and unfold it and set it up in the after starboard corner of the bridge for Jonesy to use when he didn't have the wheel.

Jonesy had not been the kind of man who went around saying that because he was the Captain, you do this and you do that. Whatever he wanted done always seemed to you to be, first, a thing that would make you feel better, or safer, or more useful and important. Then, second, it would be a thing to make
Slewfoot
more shipshape, more dangerous, more effective.

Jonesy never said, nor even by his actions gave you the idea, that this was
his
chair and for you not to sit in it. But no man on
Slewfoot
would have sat in the Skipper's Chair. It wasn't, Peter thought, that they wanted to but were afraid to. They just didn't want to. It was the Skipper's Chair, and he needed it and deserved it.

It was a very nonregulation chair with the wooden, folding frame painted white and the canvas dyed blue. From somewhere else one of the crew had purloined a set of those rubber feet that fit on crutches and put them on the chair so it wouldn't slide all over the bridge.

Peter remembered the night of the name. Jonesy had been using the chair for a few weeks by then; and, on this night, Peter had had the wheel and they were ghosting along the enemy shore when, from behind him, he heard the Skipper laughing out loud.

"Look what these crazy guys have done," he said to Peter.

On the canvas back of the chair someone had stenciled queen mary in white letters.

Peter, facing forward now, was startled by someone behind him touching him on the shoulder. -He whirled around and it was Murph.

"You want me to steer her, Skipper?" Murph asked. And then he made a movement to starboard with his head.

In the dark, Sam was unfolding the Skipper's Chair and setting it up in the corner.

Peter stepped down off the steering platform as Murph stepped up; but he didn't go over to the chair, just stood looking at it as Sam finished putting it in place.

There's no reason, Peter thought, why I shouldn't sit in that chair. No reason at all. Until Adrian Archer turned up he was skipper and so should sit in the Skipper's Chair.

He went over to Sam and said, "I won't need that, Sam. We're only going up the coast a little way."

"Well, you ought to rest when you can rest," Sam told him.

Somehow the men had gathered and were watching Peter. Even Sko had come up out of the engine room.

"Thanks anyway," Peter said, "but I won't need it."

One of the men said out of the dark, "Go ahead and sit in it, Captain."

Without saying anything, Peter sat down in the chair. Around him in the dark the men stood for a moment longer, and then they drifted away to their stations.

It took four hours to get to Vadang. Peter conned the boat slowly toward the dark, deserted-looking island, with the bosun standing forward with a lead line and whispering back the depths of the water. When he was in as close as he could get, Peter motioned for the anchor to be dropped and then cut the throttles.

Murph came out of the chart house looking like a one-man war. On a cartridge belt he had not one, but two big Colt .45 automatics, and every loop was filled with an ammo clip. Around his neck he had an aviator's shoulder holster with a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and a bandolier of bullets. He was also carrying an M-1 rifle and his pockets were bulging with clips for it. In case all this failed, he! had a Marine fighting knife stuck in his belt.

Peter looked at him in the dark and said, "Shoot much?"

Shadows forward came out of the hatch with the deflated rubber boat and put it down on the deck as Peter and Murph came around the bridge.

They unlashed the boat and then began pulling the CO2 bottles, which went off with a loud hissing.

In the dark Peter waited for the gas to inflate the rubber compartments, blowing them up into the shape of a more or less rectangular boat; but as the gas bottles emptied themselves and stopped hissing, the outline of the boat did not change. It just lay on the deck, a limp rubber wad.

Then one of the men said, "Look at the hole in this thing!"

They picked the boat up then and, against the dark sky, they could see where the shell that had killed Jonesy had also gone through three folds of the boat.

"What about the patch kit?" Peter asked.

"It's not meant for holes that big," the man said. "It's just for little holes, bullet holes—not for cannon."

"Is this the only boat aboard?"

"Yes, sir. You remember, the skipper of that One Twenty boat borrowed our other one; and I guess it went down with the One Twenty. They never issued us another one."

Peter looked over at the dark outline of Vadang Island. Now, with no rubber boat, it looked a lot farther away.

"Can we get in any closer, Murph?" he asked.

"Lots of coral in there," Murph said. "We might get away with it, but if we didn't it'd take the bottom out of the boat." Peter looked at the distance again. The island was at least two miles away—a long swim in anybody's league. And he didn't particularly want to meet one of those New Guinea crocodiles in the middle of the night—they were bad enough in the daytime.

He had only told the Army he would take a look, and this was as good a look as he could take. J

"Okay, let's get the anchor up and get out of here. We'll
get
a new boat and try it tomorrow i night."

Over on Vadang nothing moved, no light showed, no smoke.

To stop the advance of the United States forces through the jungles of New Guinea the enemy was pouring troops, guns, j ammunition, planes, and supplies into its great staging area on the northeast corner of New j Britain Island with the town of Rabaul as a base. No United States attacks on Rabaul had been able to stop this flowing in and, worse, flowing out of j the enemy. The best we could do was to force him to move only at night. In the daytime, U. S. Navy and Air Corps planes had just enough edge on the ! enemy's air cover to make it dangerous for him to try to get his convoys of troops and supplies under way. But at night we could not stop him.

From all over the Japanese Empire, ships carrying the stuff of war flowed through the night into Rabaul and, at night, flowed out again, bound for New Guinea.

For us it was an all-Army show except for the little PT boats of the Navy. Their job was to stop this flow of the enemy out of Rabaul into the area of the fighting on New Guinea. It was hard and dangerous work and the kind of fighting that is most dreaded by all men.

It isn't hard to fight when you know that the enemy is in a certain place and you must go to that place and fight him. You, and your buddies, thousands and thousands of them, go there and fight.

In the PT boats you had maybe a dozen buddies in a tiny boat, in the dark. You didn't know
where
the enemy was or how strong he was or when, in the black of night, he would shoot you. You did know, though, that against the enemy's ships you had to hit him with everything the boat had to kill him, while with one shell, one lucky hit of even a light deck gun, he could wipe you out.

In armies of men, war doesn't seem very personal to any one man. He's just a tiny, invisible, unimportant part of an enormous machine. In the PT boats war is personal, bitter, hard. No PT boat ever fought an even fight; the odds were always hundreds, thousands to one against the men in the PTs. When you sighted the enemy in the darkness he was always immensely bigger and stronger than you were with more and bigger guns … more
everything.
To survive in PT boats took three things, all at the same time: gunnery, seamanship, guts.

So, in the dark nights, the PT boats would fan out across the sea-lanes between Rabaul, on New Britain, and New Guinea. There they would make their lonely and dangerous patrols, all night long, their radars searching out the enemy as he tried to creep past them.

On
Slewfoot
the man in the bow called back softly, "Anchor's aweigh." Peter eased the throttles ahead, swinging the boat around Vadang Island and resuming the patrol along the New Britain coast.

The PTs usually cruised as close to the land as they could, for the land was their protection. The enemy's radar signals were reflected from the great mass of the land so that the tiny, moving blip of a PT boat was hard to pick out.

The night was clear now, but very dark, the sky covered with a high layer of solid cumulus. As soon as they were clear of Vadang, Murphy took over the wheel and Peter went back to Jonesy's chair and broke out the big night binoculars.

The only light aboard
Slewfoot
now was the tiny pool of dim light around the face of the compass and, coming up through the hatch, a faint, dim, green glow from the radarscope. There was actually more light in the phosphorescence of the sea as they slid through it.

There was almost no noise. Mixing with the whine of the superchargers, well muted by Sko, was the lap lap of water against the bow. Occasionally a man would cough, or you could hear a word or two as the watch was changed.

Silence and stealth were
Slewfoot's
real weapons, plus speed.

Murph turned around and whispered over to Peter, "Moon'll be up in about an hour. Full, too."

"The better to see you with, Goldilocks," Peter said. But he hated moonlight. To him on a moonlit night
Slewfoot
seemed to stick out like a sore thumb, making a beautiful target for anyone with a gun.

As he sat there, scanning the sea ahead and to both sides and occasionally looking aft, occasionally lowering the glasses to look around what was—for this night anyway—"his" boat, an odd feeling began to grow in him.

This
was
his boat and, because of that, these were his men.

Peter had never felt exactly this way while Jonesy had been alive and
Slewfoot
had been Jonesy's boat. He had felt then—and the men must feel this now—that his life was in Jones's hands. The boat and everything in it were the responsibility of Jones.

Sitting in the dark there this feeling got pretty big. Peter looked around at the men resting in dark heaps on the deck and thought about the others below—the motormacs in their inferno, the cook would now be trying to dish up something for the midnight change of the watch. All of their lives depended on the commanding officer now, depended on his making the right decision.