War and Remembrance (37 page)

Janice got out of her chair, and placed both hands on his shoulders. Leaning over him so that her scented yellow hair cascaded on him, she kissed his lips. With a businesslike rub of a thumb on his mouth she said, “Natalie’s lucky. Brothers can sure be different. What Warren has put
me
through!”

“Well, you married a hell-raiser, you knew that.”

“I did, indeed.”

Byron yawned and shook his head. “Strangely, I only got crazier about Natalie all that time. I kept thinking of her. Ursula was lovely, but compared to Natalie! Natalie’s a powerhouse. There’s nobody in the world like her.”

“Well, I envy Natalie. I envy Little Miss Ursula, too. Natalie would forgive you and her both. That’s my guess.” A bitter wrinkling smile. “Even if you had gotten into her pants, as Lady Aster would say. It’s war, you know. Good-night, Byron. Vic gets me up at five.”

Next morning she was feeding the baby in the kitchen when she heard the dying cough of a jeep. In came Warren in fresh khakis. She had not seen him in almost a month. He was strikingly bigger and heavier than Byron, and very tanned and bright-eyed. “Janice, what’s another jeep doing out here? Got some guy in a closet, with thirty seconds to live?”

As he swept her into a crushing hug, she put a finger on his mouth. “Byron’s asleep in the guest room.”

“What, Briny’s back? Great!”

Janice stammered, her mouth against his, “Darling, Vic’s in his high chair —”

Warren strode to the kitchen. The baby turned an egg-smeared face and large solemn eyes on him, then smiled from ear to ear. Warren kissed him. “He smells good. Grows half a foot every time I go out. Come along, feller.”

“Where are you taking him?”

The aviator wiped his son’s face, carried him to a crib in the nursery, and handed him his teddy bear.

“Darling, listen,” Janice protested in low tones, following him, “Byron will come stumbling out any second, looking for eggs and coffee —”

He circled her waist in a powerful arm, took her into the bedroom, and quietly locked the door.

Prone and naked, half-stuporous, she heard the scratch of a match, opened her eyes, and gave her husband a sad, heavy, mischievous look. He was sitting up in the bed. “Honestly,” she said, in an unexpected baritone voice that made them both laugh. The sun fell in golden bars on Warren’s bronzed chest, and the smoke from his cigarette made blue coils in the sunlight.

“Well, you’re a sailor’s wife.”

“Jesus. Not one of Magellan’s sailors.”

“Jan, I hear Byron stirring about.”

“Oh dear. Well, the coffee’s on. I guess he’ll find it.”

He said a shade gruffly, “I love you.” She reared up on an elbow to look at him. He dragged on the cigarette, and blew out a gray cloud. “Quite an exercise, this last one. In futility, that is. A two-carrier task force, roaring thirty-five hundred miles to the Coral Sea and back, and missing the battle by three days. If we’d got there in time we’d have smashed the Japs, instead of losing the
Lex.
The
Yorktowns
kaput, too. Seven thousand miles for nothing. Halsey’s lucky he doesn’t have to pay his oil bill.”

Janice said, “What’s this thing cooking up now? Do you know?”

“Oh, you hear scuttlebutt. Something big, that’s for sure. We sortie again in two days.”

“Two days!”

“Yep. Working parties replenishing ship around the clock.” Yawning, he put a brown arm around her. “Action will be a novelty. All we did on those seven thousand miles was patrol, baby. Patrol, patrol! Two hundred miles out, two hundred miles back, grinding along over clouds, water, hours on end, days on end. I never saw anything except whales. There was lots of leisure to think. I figured out that time’s getting precious, and that I should stop screwing around and hurting you. I’ve done too much of it. I’m sorry. No more. Okay? Guess I’ll shower up and talk to Briny. How does he look?”

“Why, why, sort of haggard and scrawny.” Stunned with delight at his contrition, Janice tried to sound just as casual. “Thick red beard, like Dad told us.” She touched his face. “I wonder how you’d look in a beard.”

“Negative! It comes in half-gray. Balls to that. Well, Dad will sure be glad to see Briny, beard and all. The
Northampton
was following us in.”

“Byron says the
Devilfish
got two Jap ships.”

“Hey, won’t that give Dad a charge!”

On the sunny wing of the
Northampton’s
bridge, maneuvering to buoys in a strong ebb tide, Pug Henry could see Spruance pacing the main deck far below. The barge lay to, waiting to take them to the
Enterprise,
where the admiral would pay his respects to Halsey Then they would walk the five miles to Warren’s house. That was their routine. As the drenched sailors down on the pitching buoys wrestled with the shackles of the massive anchor chains, Pug and Commander Grigg were talking about urgent yard repairs that they might get done before going back to sea. The magazines were still loaded from the vain Coral Sea dash, but food and fuel were low. Forty-eight hours for turnabout, after seven thousand miles of high-speed steaming! All hell must be about to break loose in the Pacific; but what it was all about, Pug Henry had no idea.

The
Enterprise
was usually bleak and quiet in port; an abandoned nest, the birds having flown off before dawn from a hundred miles out. But this time the utter lack of life was eerie: no pipings at the approach of Spruance’s barge, no loudspeaker calls for sideboys and ceremonies; the gangway deserted, not even the OOD in sight. In the cavernous hangar deck there was a cold, ghost-ship feeling. The flag secretary came toward them on the run, his tread thumping and echoing down the empty steel cavern. Unceremoniously he took Raymond Spruance aside by the elbow, turning a pale unshaven face over his shoulder. “Excuse me, Captain Henry. Had coffee with your son at 0300, incidentally, before he took off.”

Pug nodded, showing none of the relief he felt. Off the New Hebrides he had seen a Dauntless dive-bomber cartwheel from the
Enterprise
into the sea; probably not Warren, on the odds, but until this moment he had wondered and worried.

“Okay, Henry. Let’s go,” said Spruance, after a muttered colloquy. The barge rocked and clanged its way to the sub base. Spruance volunteered nothing, Pug asked no questions. The admiral’s face looked almost wooden in its calm. He broke his silence as they stepped ashore. “Henry, I have a little business at Cincpac. I suppose you want to join your family right away?” Plainly, from his tone, he hated to give up the walk.

“I’m at your pleasure, Admiral.”

“Come with me. It shouldn’t take too long.”

In a hard chair outside Nimitz’s gold-starred doors, twisting his cap round and round, Pug waited, noting the extraordinary bustle all around him; typewriter clatter, telephones ringing, hurrying foot traffic this way and that of yeomen and junior officers. The Cincpac building was as stirred up as the
Enterprise
was dead. Momentous business was in the air, and no mistake. Pug hoped that it was not another Doolittle-type raid. He was a conservative military thinker, and he had been skeptical of that Doolittle show since the task force had first sailed.

With an irrepressible spine tingle he had read over the
Northampton’s
loudspeakers Halsey’s message.
“This force is bound for Tokyo.”
But how could two carriers, he had thought at once, venture within range of the land-based Japanese air force? Through the crew’s cheers and rebel yells, he had skeptically shaken his head at Spruance. Next day, when the
Hornet
had joined up, its deckload of Army B-25 bombers had of course solved the mystery. Watching the oncoming carrier, Spruance had remarked, “Well, Captain?”

“My hat’s off to those Army fliers, Admiral.”

“Mine too. They’ve been training for months. They’ll have to go on to China, you realize. That deck can’t take them back aboard.”

“I know. Brave souls.”

“Is this good war-making, Captain?”

“Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”

For the first time since Pug had met him, Raymond Spruance had laughed heartily. They had not discussed the raid again until a few days ago. At dinner in Spruance’s quarters, Spruance had been bemoaning the way they had missed the Coral Sea battle, the first in history in which the opposed warships had never sighted each other; an all-air duel at ranges of seventy-five miles or more. “That’s something new in sea warfare, Henry. A lot of War College thinking goes overboard. Possibly you were right about that Tokyo raid. Maybe we should have been down south all that time, instead of roaring back and forth over the Pacific to make headlines. Still, we don’t know to what extent Doolittle upset the Japanese war plans.”

Spruance remained in Cincpac’s sanctum for about half an hour. He emerged with a strange look on his face. “We’re on our way, Henry.” When they were out of the Navy Yard, and plugging uphill through weedy dusty sugarcane fields on a tarred road, he abruptly remarked, “Well, I’m leaving the
Northampton.
“

“Oh? I’m genuinely sorry, sir.”

“I am, too, since I’ll be going on the beach. I’m to become Admiral Nimitz’s chief of staff.”

“Why, that’s splendid. Congratulations, Admiral.”

“Thanks,” Spruance said coldly, “but I don’t recall your leaping at staff duty when offered.”

That closed the topic. They trudged around a bend. The base came in sight, sprawled out far below, beyond flowering trees and terraced green truck gardens; the wharves, drydocks and anchorages crowded with warships, the channels full of small craft moving about; on the wrecked battleships, workmen swarming over the temporary repair structures, and — the
most striking sight — along the capsized hull of the
Oklahoma,
the long row of righting cables stretched to winches on Ford Island.

“Henry, you’ve read the
Yorktown’s
damage report dispatches. How long would you say repairs will take?”

“Three to five months, sir.”

“Captain Harry Warendorf is your classmate, isn’t he? The Captain of the Yard?”

“Yes, I know Harry well.”

“Can he put her back to sea in seventy-two hours? Because he’s going to have to. Admiral Nimitz has ordered it.”

“Harry will do it, if any man can,” Pug answered, astounded. “It’s bound to be a patch job.”

“Yes, but three carriers instead of two is a fifty percent increase in striking power. Which we’ll soon need.”

Over steak and eggs on the back porch, Byron was telling Warren about the torpedoes he had salvaged from Cavite. The brothers, both barefoot, both in shorts and beach-boy shirts, had been talking at a great rate for an hour.

“Twenty-six torpedoes!” Warren exclaimed. “No wonder you got your transfer to the Atlantic.”

Byron was enjoying, in fact revelling in, this conversation. Eternal months ago in peacetime, Warren had warned him to kowtow to Branch Hoban if he wanted his dolphins. Now Warren knew of Hoban’s cave-in, and dolphins were pinned to the sweaty khaki shirt hanging in the guest room. “Warren, Aster’s pressuring me to stay aboard the
Devilfish”

“Do you have a choice?”

“I’ve got my orders, but it could be managed.”

“Rinkydink administration in submarines.”

“Sort of.”

Warren had no ready advice to give. His self-confidence was solid and deep; he had overwhelmed Byron from boyhood; yet he had always sensed an original streak in Briny that he lacked. Attracting and marrying a brilliant Jewess, the niece of a famous writer, was a deed outside his range; and given the opportunities of wartime, Byron was fast closing the gap as a naval officer.

“Well, let me tell you a story, Byron. Halsey brought the Doolittle fliers to their takeoff point. I suppose you know that.”

“That’s the word at the sub base.”

“It’s true. When those Army bombers took off from the
Hornet,
I stood out on our own flight deck and watched them form up and head west for Tokyo. Tears ran down my face, Byron. I bawled.”

“I believe you.”

“Okay. It was a hell of a brave deed, yet what did it amount to? A token bombing to pep up the home front. There’s only one service really hurting the enemy in the Pacific right now, and that’s the submarines. There won’t be another moment like this in your lifetime. If you go to SubLant you’ll boot it. You asked my opinion, and I’m giving it to you. You know Natalie’s okay now, and —”

Janice poked her head out of the kitchen. “Your dad and Admiral Spruance are rounding the Smiths’ terrace, men, going full steam.”

Byron glanced down at his shirt and shorts, and rubbed his beard. “Spruance?”

Warren yawned, scratching a dirty bare foot… “He just drinks a glass of water and goes back down the hill.”

The bell rang. Janice went to answer. The brothers jumped to their feet, as the white-clad admiral, his face streaming sweat, walked out on the porch, followed by their father.

“Byron!” Pug grasped his son’s hand and they embraced. “Well, here’s my submariner, Admiral. I haven’t seen him since Thanksgiving.”

“My submariner’s out in the
Tambor.”
Spruance patted his crimson face with a square-folded handkerchief. “How’s the hunting been, Lieutenant?”