The Commodore Read Online Free PDF Page B

him they were the Calhoun, the Walke, and the Morgan . Sluff asked the chief if there was a division commander embarked. Negative.
    A real pickup team, he thought, based probably on which tin cans had the most fuel. If Halsey had sent his only two available battleships to Guadalcanal, things must really be getting desperate. The tattered remains of the cruiser force he’d seen this morning reinforced that notion. Wow.
    Mose came back out for the tray and asked if the captain wanted dessert. Sluff shook his head. The more he thought about what might be coming tonight, the less he was interested in food. He would have liked to gather his department heads together in the wardroom and brief them on what to expect later tonight. The problem was that he didn’t know. In all probability, the admiral over in the Washington probably didn’t know either. Clearly, the two admirals in the cruiser force last night had been in the same predicament, and now they were both dead.
    He glanced sideways at the bridge team—the officer of the deck, the junior officer of the deck, the helmsman, the lee helmsman, the bosun, the quartermaster, the messenger of the watch, the lookouts on either bridge wing. He wondered what they were thinking now as the ship closed in on that dark line of ships whose silhouettes were becoming more and more distinct as they approached. At some point he was going to have to get on the ship’s announcing system, the 1MC, and tell them what was going on.
    â€œApproaching station,” the officer of the deck announced. The battleships were clearly visible now in the orange light of sunset, beautiful and deadly, their huge sixteen-inch guns carried low and flat along their seven-hundred-foot length, their towering fire-control structures reaching over 150 feet into the air. He’d had the stations wrong, it turned out. South Dakota was in the lead and Washington second in the line, and this presented a problem: Their orders had been to take station astern of South Dakota, but that would have put them alongside Washington. The officer of the deck had just seen the problem and turned to Sluff.
    â€œTake station astern of Washington, Mister Heimbach,” Sluff said. “Somebody screwed it up. And tell Combat the order is reversed.”
    â€œAye, aye, sir,” the OOD replied. He took a bearing on Washington ’s stern, now only three miles distant, and adjusted King ’s course to intercept a station one thousand yards astern and right in the battlewagon’s boiling white wake.
    The exec materialized next to Sluff’s chair. “Anything on the Fox sked about tonight’s operation?” Sluff asked, as he watched LTJG Heimbach conn J. B. King smoothly into Washington ’s broad wake.
    Now there was a whiff of stack gas on the breeze from ahead, courtesy of the battleship’s eight boilers directly ahead of them. The bosun closed the pilothouse’s windward door.
    â€œNot a word,” Bob said. “I keep hoping for a visual signal, but nobody’s talking. We got a radio check from CTF Sixty-Four on the TBS, but that’s it. They know we’re here.”
    The bitch-box light came on. “Bridge, Sigs, signal in the air: Corpen zero four fie-yiv tack speed two-zero.”
    The OOD looked over at Sluff, who nodded that he understood the maneuver being ordered. A phone-talker reported that Combat recommended following in Washington ’s wake and slowing to twenty knots when the signal was executed.
    The OOD told the signal bridge “signal understood.” Thirty seconds later the signalmen reported that the signal had been executed. Four thousand yards ahead they could see the lead destroyer turning to the new course of 045, or due northeast.
    â€œHeading toward Savo Island,” the exec said.
    â€œAnd over the bones of how many ships?” Sluff muttered. He glanced to his right to look at the looming bulk of Guadalcanal, some thirty