Harm’s Way

By James E Bassett

Rockwell Terry is a career naval captain who has served since WWI. Now is the dawn of another world war as his ship patrols outside Pearl Harbor. He leads a sheltered life, goes nowhere and sees no one. With the outbreak of the war, his past begins to emerge.

This book was the basis for the 1965 Otto Preminger film IN HARM’S WAY featuring John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Dana Andrews, Patricia Neal, Henry Fonda and others. Bassett served on the staff of Rear Admiral “Bull” Halsey, and later managed three of Richard Nixon’s political campaigns. The book examines critically and at close quarters the U.S. Navy he knew well from his own experiences - having achieved captain’s rank and been awarded a Bronze Star for his services.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786253354

James E Bassett

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Harm’s Way

By

James E Bassett

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PRECEDE 6

FOUR STRIPES 7

1. No Longer the Harem Eunuchs! 7

2. No Sea Anchor 28

3. Some Men Play God 45

4. Neither Did the Cruse of Oil Fail 61

5. Toward a Certain Gethsemane 78

6. Who’ll Play Torquemada? 94

7. No Man Is an Island 117

8. Too Much, Too Little 133

9. What Lies Beyond a Thing Called Duty? 150

10. The Japs Won’t Wait Forever 165

TWO STARS 178

11. You Can’t Simply Order a Man 178

12. Nobody Cares Whether You Live or Die 197

13. Sailors Take Warning 220

14. Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends 246

15. Season of Falling Stars 264

16. Like a Wolf on the Fold! 287

17. What’s Been Started Can’t Be Stopped 311

18. The Lock Clicks Shut 332

19. Joss Sticks Bring Good Luck 346

20. No Captain Can Do Very Wrong 368

21. Everlasting Gratitude 396

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 411

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 412

DEDICATION

For my wife, Willie, who lived through all these things, and who loved Admiral Bill Halsey as much as I did.

PRECEDE

IN THIS STORY of naval command during the year that began with Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, certain things occur which never really happened at all. Other things which did take place in that early phase of the Pacific War have been purposely omitted, for the narrative’s sake.

Thus, the historical events which form part of this novel’s framework have been telescoped to create a microcosm, a bit of everything in miniature, rather than a one-sided view of war’s more sweeping macrocosm.

Except for the historical persons whom I have not endeavored to disguise, none of the characters in this fiction are based on any actual person, living or dead. Only the heroes may have subconscious counterparts in the author’s mind. Such villains as might appear have been cut from whole khaki cloth.

For there are no villains in war.

Only war itself is the villain...

"I wish to have no Connection with any Ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way..." — JOHN PAUL JONES, USN

FOUR STRIPES

1. No Longer the Harem Eunuchs!

FRAMED by the open weather door of his cabin, where he stood peering through the obscure dawn toward Oahu’s invisible shoreline, Captain Rockwell Torrey, USN, was not unlike the ship he commanded: tall, spare, angular, and plainly fabricated out of some hard gray substance that armored both man and cruiser against the weapons of a hostile world.

Although the image he evoked was unmistakable, he would have derided the suggestion that he also resembled an absolute monarch at this precise instant, surveying his domain from a castle parapet, and contemplating what lay ahead for his thirteen hundred subjects, his steel realm, and himself, during the long day that had just begun.

Captain Torrey, feeling neither regal nor infallible, pushed back the frayed sleeve of his seersucker bathrobe and glanced at the waterproof watch on his bony wrist, as if to verify mechanically what he could not confirm visually in that pervasive semidarkness. It showed 0630, four minutes past the official sunrise decreed by the almanac. But full daylight would not arrive for another half-hour, when the sun would burst blindingly over Tantalus and Olympus, the cane-fields would change from somber black into bright yellow-green, and the twelve-hour gunnery exercise would get underway.

Consciously, with a sense of physical relief, he inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with moist salt air to exorcise the staleness caused by sleeping all night behind the closed ports of his stateroom. The cold metal plating felt good against his bare feet.

For a long moment he remained at the exit to the small veranda deck, where he occasionally sunbathed on peaceful afternoons. It lay just below the glass-windowed navigating bridge, and one level above the cruiser’s sweeping main deck. His line of vision toward Oahu, still hidden in the eastern mists, was impeded by a pair of five-inch/38s. Canvas-hooded against the dampness of the subtropical dawn and the corrosive spray that sifted back from the bow, these lean rifles provided secondary defense against surface enemies and primary protection against aerial attack.

Despite her advanced age, however, the cruiser had never fired her guns in anger, and nagging doubts about what might happen if she were suddenly confronted by an authentic foe were constantly on Torrey’s mind.

Scowling, he considered this possibility for the thousandth time in the past week before he rejected it as too improbable, or at least too premature, for valid concern just then. Meanwhile, in the endless pattern of other days, he must try again to wheedle his ship into that desirable condition which the Navy called maximum readiness. This entailed launching the cruiser’s clumsy pontooned aircraft, recovering them, shepherding the mine-sweep rehearsals of the two ancient converted four-stack destroyers, and shooting at target sleeves towed by patrol planes from Pearl Harbor, a dozen miles away.

Captain Torrey turned slowly as a knock sounded against the inner door that led to the superstructure passageway.

When he called, Yes? his voice was as thoroughly neutral, severely accentless, and utterly controlled as only twenty-seven years in the Navy could make it.

Five bells, sir, the Marine messenger announced softly.

Thanks, Torrey said. I know. I’m awake.

Commander Eddington reports that our first launching will take place at 0700 sharp.

Very well. Tell the exec I’m coming topside right away. And, Leary, have the galley send breakfast up to my sea cabin. Bacon and eggs. Toast. Black coffee. Some juice. That’s all.

Aye, aye, sir.

He could almost feel the Marine’s stiff salute through the closed door. Heavy-shod feet sounded like a one-horse cavalry charge on the steel plates outside, then faded, as the messenger clop-clopped down the ladder to alert the cooks that the captain was wide awake, hungry, and in one friggin’ hell of a hurry to get cracking.

When he swung back toward the open portal, Torrey’s grim expression eased imperceptibly, for he noted that the irrepressible tradewind was blowing lightly, north-to-northeast. This, he reflected, should simplify the always vexing problem of catapulting the scout planes. His gray-blue eyes narrowed again as he stared aft, past the 20-millimeter twin mounts uptilted in their steel tubs, past the tall smokestacks and the catapult tracks, past the squat tower that contained the secondary controls (where his executive officer would assume command if an enemy shell obliterated the bridge), and finally past the menacing three-fingered bulk of Number 3 turret with its eight-inch main battery.

Torrey cast a last lingering glance at the ocean, the sky, and his ship before he commenced his Spartan morning toilet.

In this uncertain moment just before the true dawn, which was briefly delayed by a wall of translucent clouds banked wraith-gray against the Koolau Range to the east, the cruiser seemed quite alone and friendless on the green-slag sea. Neither graceful nor swift, she plowed stolidly along her prearranged course like an old woman dark-clad in widow’s weeds crossing a deserted street. Her progress was all the more deliberate, and unhurried, because only a fraction of the 107,000 horsepower generated by her turbines had been summoned into play. Where her sharp prow engaged the easy swells barely a trace of white spume showed.

From clipper stem to speedboat stern she measured almost six hundred feet; from rail to rail she was sixty-five feet broad; her loftiest eminence, the gleaming truck light, was a hundred feet above her main deck; and she drew twenty-two feet of water when fully burdened.

Her legal limit of 10,826 tons displacement had been determined by a rather curious treaty signed at Washington, D.C., six years before her keel was laid in 1928. She was, therefore, thirteen years old on this particular morning in December—an age which in the human animal heralds budding adolescence, or the first stirrings of young manhood, but which spells creeping obsolescence in warships.

Torrey realized that all of his cruiser’s imperfections were not attributable to age alone. Viewed in silhouette against the glowering half-light that filtered across Oahu’s volcanic crown, she would betray a noticeable concavity, a downsweptness that was not unlike a bent bow, in the area between her two raked funnels. This odd spinal distortion might have been the result of a designer’s whimsical pen slip, or it could have been brought on by overwork during the Fleet’s endless war games.

But whatever the cause, from this odd circumstance sprang her nickname which was at once unlovely and affectionate: Old Swayback.

Even Torrey used this homely appellation, although he was well aware that Old Swayback was rated a proper, if not enviable, command for an officer clawing his way up the career ladder that leads from Annapolis to an admiral’s stars. (Or, he reminded himself occasionally, to the limbo of premature retirement for those overage in grade, where you tend a rose garden on some foggy hillside overlooking the fine vessels skippered by your best-fitted classmates.) After serving his stint in a heavy cruiser like Old Swayback, a senior captain could expect a battleship or even a carrier, provided he wore pilot’s wings, as the logical prelude to Flag rank. Always assuming he didn’t get bushwhacked in the jungle of high-level Navy politics, he might even wind up with a task force or a Fleet. At the apex of the whole brawling heap stood the godlike figure of CinCUS: Commander in Chief, United States Fleet.

Through the diminishing gloom Torrey could make out the shapes of the antique tincan, burying their needle noses in the moderate swells, and casting aside the gray-green seas the way properly trained spaniels cleave the waters of a duck pond in their eagerness to join their master. It was time to go to work.

Sighing a private sigh, he stripped off his blue-and-white seersucker bathrobe and strode briskly into the tiny head that adjoined his stateroom, where he showered, toweled vigorously, and prepared to shave.

From a worn red plush case he extracted one of seven straight German surgical steel razors, which lay cradled in slots marked for each day of the week. He opened the blade and began to knead it lovingly across a leather strop that was dark-polished from long use and old age. It was his Sonntag razor. If calendars had never been invented, he could have kept an infallible chronology with his seven razors. They had belonged to his father. The Old Man had also been a four-striper, although he had stumbled somehow on the penultimate rung of the ladder and had never quite achieved admiral. Nevertheless he’d refused to nurse roses after his retirement, and until the day he died at seventy-three he taught naval tactics at a frowsy little military school on the southern California coast.

Peering into the misty mirror, Torrey searched his unhandsome, yet not quite ugly countenance, as if he were studying the face of a total stranger. He had learned, especially since moving into the monastic quarters aboard Old Swayback, that this was the most naked moment of a man’s day. All defenses down, he now confronts himself solitary and unarmed, and suddenly conscious of the skin-shell within which he dwells imprisoned and alone with himself, his soul, and his conscience.

Torrey was forty-eight. He might have been taken for fifty-eight; but he would retain this agelessness for many years to come, etched deeply and varnished darkly upon his gaunt, almost equine face by sun sear and wind whip. Four parallel lines were permanently carved across his forehead, and lesser crow’s-foot wrinkles spread almost from eye to ear, like mooring lines securing ship to wharf. Even a modified crew cut could not disguise the grizzled grayness of his sparse hair. With a slight feeling of distaste, he noticed that the skin between his lean belly and his prominent clavicle was beginning to acquire an oldish-softish look, like used crepe paper.

Clothed in service blues or in starched whites, which concealed this softness, and when his slightly awed underlings imagined he was beyond earshot, he was known as The Rock. It emanated as much out of a certain admiration and even grudging affection for this reserved, withdrawn, meticulous man, as it did from the plain fact that he had been christened Rockwell Torrey.

He had no middle name.

When The Rock was born in 1893, his father had already been a struggling ensign for five austere peacetime years. It was a belt-tightening time for the steam Navy, despite Commander Mahan’s demand that America heed The Influence of Sea Power upon History, and the Old Man said he’d billy-be-damned if any son of his would revel in the luxury of a middle name while Grover Cleveland was substituting torpedo boats for battleships in the dubious interest of hard money.

As The Rock rose steadily toward the rarefied command plateau which he now occupied, awaiting the moment when he might be sought out for Flag rank, he made it quite plain that he expected—even demanded—of his subordinates this same craggy independence of attitude and action that ruled his own life. Always, of course, within the clear confines of nautical discipline.

They tried.

Torrey placed his razor gently upon the chrome-steel edge of the washbasin, mixed lather in a USN coffee mug with a decrepit badger-hair brush, and carefully soaped his face. Legs braced to compensate for Old Swayback’s predictable ten-degree roll, midriff pressed firmly against the stand, he began to shave with quick, clean strokes, pausing now and again to deposit bits of stubble-pocked foam on a neat square of tissue. Through the opened port he could hear the metallic clump and rumble of the five-inch twin mount as its crew unlimbered their battery after a night of carefree Condition Three. His eyes, above the ludicrous mask of white lather, compressed into a ruminative scowl.

Old Swayback’s daily schedule called for antiaircraft drill as well as surface maneuvers, and lately her marksmanship had ranged from a discouraging 3.2 to a mediocre 3.6, with no perfect 4.0s to brighten her record, nor any gunnery E’s for excellence to flaunt from her masthead. With a certain detached grimness Torrey speculated upon what might happen if the target-towing PBYs suddenly metamorphosed into Japs some murky dawn, and came swinging in at five hundred feet with torpedoes hanging loose-as-a-goose. Old Swayback wouldn’t last twenty minutes.

In his most recent communication with the Pacific Fleet’s cruiser commander, The Rock had observed with more truth than diplomacy: It is difficult to achieve maximum results through dry runs, dummy loading practice, or wardroom discussions devoted to theory....

Thoughtfully, he wiped the last trace of soap from behind his rather generous ears. By 1700 he would need another shave if he wanted to look properly shipshape, but unless some urgent social function impended he would let it go until next morning.

He replaced his meticulously cleaned razor in its Sonntag slot, and took a fresh pair of skivvies and a T-shirt from the steel bureau in his stateroom. Slowly, almost deliberately, he began to clothe his angular nakedness. As he slipped the short-sleeved cotton shirt over his shoulders, his gaze fell briefly upon a small tattoo on the deltoid muscle of his upper arm. He frowned again. The tiny fouled anchor, originally a bright violet, had become almost indistinguishable over the years, but it still symbolized a distant time when he was less sure of himself, less in control. Now he was marked forever by this silly little emblem which he’d acquired during a weekend in Havana on his younger cruise, a whole generation ago.

He checked his wrist watch again before he poked his long legs into his stiff-starched khaki trousers. Inconsequentially, he remembered then that this was the first Sunday of the month.

It was now 0645.

Ashore, in their self-consciously tropical cottages that nestled among the great-fronded shade trees along Nuuanu stream or that sprawled under the sunshine glare of Manoa Valley, the Fleet’s officers would be enjoying leave as usual with their families. Some would doubtless be sleeping off too many gin and tonics or rum and Cokes after dollar dinners at the Pearl Harbor Officers’ Club. The Rock didn’t really care. If Old Swayback had been in port that Sunday, he would have remained on board anyway, staying in his bunk until 0700 instead of reveilleing at his normal 0600, and maybe putting off his shave until midmorning, when he would join the cruiser’s church services on the fantail.

The ship was his home, just as a dozen Bachelor Officers’ Quarters had been home during his earlier tours of shore duty, for he had no place else to go. There was a time, of course, when he might have hurried ashore the moment his ship tied up. But that was long ago and very far away; and now he preferred not to think about it anymore, or about the proud, cold woman he had married, and the strange, unfathomable son she had borne him.

Athalie and Jere. Yes. It was one hell of a long time ago...

Actually, Torrey supposed, he should envy these brother officers who could shuck off their professional cares so cavalierly during a lazy weekend, when they painted their Lanai chairs or studied the Advertiser comics or tuned up their second-hand Fords for a spin around Diamond Head to the lovely windward beaches of Waimea and Haliewa and Kahuku. They’d carry with them basket lunches filled with civilian delicacies like deviled eggs and stuffed celery, and their Thermos jugs would glisten with the delicate sweat of daiquiris.

But The Rock felt no envy. For this, he imagined, was their escape from the tenseness that had gripped the Fleet ever since Hitler triggered the European war in September 1939, and which had a nasty way of erupting into jagged nerve peaks during the periodic false alerts, then dwindling as cooler heads decided you couldn’t cry wolf forever.

Now the tenseness was rising again, at least among the upper echelon directly concerned with such ponderous matters. Task force admirals, it was assumed, got The Word almost as soon as President Roosevelt himself; captains of ships received essential information necessary to carry out their parochial jobs; but the lesser folk had to be content with illegal and generally unreliable scuttlebutt gleaned from the omniscient yeomen who typed out secret dispatches.

The Rock’s intelligence was neither better nor worse than that possessed by his fellow skippers. Locked away in his gray-steel desk safe, and dog-eared from much handling, was a dispatch from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, which sternly ordered maximum vigilance against possible enemy submarines in American operating areas. Destroyers were told to depth-bomb any hostile contacts. These instructions, naturally, left individual captains carrying a heavy load of personal responsibility. For what is a hostile contact, exactly, when your country’s at peace? More or less.

CinCPAC’s order bore a November date—the 28th.

A day before this filtered down to Torrey’s level, even more sobering Word arrived at Fleet headquarters. But four-stripers never heard about it, because it was too highly classified for perusal by mere captains of cruisers or even battlewagons and carriers.

THIS DISPATCH, the Chief of Naval Operations radioed to CinCPAC’s busy eyrie above the great harbor, IS TO BE CONSIDERED A WAR WARNING...AN AGGRESSIVE MOVE BY JAPAN IS EXPECTED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS...UNPREDICTABLE BUT HOSTILE ACTIONS ARE POSSIBLE AT ANY MOMENT.

It was axiomatic, of course, that any irresponsible and misguided enemy (to quote the language of a confidential Fleet letter which also reposed in The Rock’s desk safe) would certainly launch its attack against the United States’ weak Far Eastern defenses, rather than against the Hawaiian chain. Pearl Harbor lay 3,500 miles from Tokyo, damned wide-open miles as a top-heavy Nip battleship steams; and it was another 2,000 miles to San Francisco. Hence Pearl was a target so difficult to reach, and so thornily protected once you got there, that only a lunatic would dream of such an adventure.

Sometimes Torrey wondered...

Unhurriedly, in the mouth-pursed fashion of a bachelor sewing on a shirt button, The Rock took a pair of tiny silver eagles from his wardrobe drawer, and pinned one to each collar wing of his khaki shirt. He considered these neat symbols of his captaincy rather typical of the Navy, and quite unlike the clumsy birds worn by Army colonels. Alongside them in the stud box was a pair of gold pilot’s wings, which Torrey ignored.

Fully clad, he cast a final appraising glance around the low-ceilinged cabin. It was also very neat and very precise, and satisfyingly different from the stuccoed warrens inhabited by the Island Command landlubbers at Fort Shafter, whom he occasionally visited under extreme social duress. Nothing marred the sterile orderliness that was the most obvious characteristic of his cabin, which measured 24-by-10 feet, or the adjoining stateroom, which was only half as large. Several nautical books occupied a rack over the metal desk, on which reposed a standard gooseneck lamp, a magnifying glass and dividers, a trim stack of Fleet correspondence, form letters from various naval bureaus, and a clipboard containing flimsies of all incoming radio messages.

Torrey’s lips tightened as his eyes strayed across the desk. The topmost dispatch was the shoot-to-kill order in the unlikely event that Old Swayback and her consorts encountered any unidentified submarines in Hawaiian waters.

His old cruiser was about as prepared for lurking subs, or enemy surface craft, as a half-blind setter was equipped to tackle a pack of timber wolves. Her mast was devoid of any radar antennae, although this fabulous electronic gear was already standard in the hard-pressed British Navy, and new American ships arriving at Pearl lately had these eyes that could pick out an enemy through darkness and fog. Nevertheless, as The Rock clapped his gold-laced cap upon his head and started topside, he was not entirely dissatisfied with his aging vessel. She was at least a ship, by God, and he had possessed her for seventeen months, during a barren time when half his classmates were enviously eating their hearts out for any seagoing command at all.

The black-dialed clock fastened to the bridge bulkhead behind the mammoth ship’s wheel now showed 0655.

The Rock went to the starboard wing where his executive officer was overseeing preparations for catapulting Old Swayback’s two Seagulls. The stubby little biplanes were perched on their outswung firing tracks like sparrows clinging to a telephone wire, awaiting the signal for launching once the ship reached proper speed into the light breeze. Even above the firecracker sound of the planes’ 550-horsepower engines a deep-throated hum was audible in the quickening air as the turbines stepped up their tempo and the cruiser’s nightlong fourteen knots accelerated toward a respectable twenty.

The exec waved his brawny right hand.

Instantly there was a puff of white smoke, a sharp explosion, and the first Seagull started down the catapult rail, rapidly gaining momentum. It veered, lurched, dipped, then climbed. After that the exec flagged off the second plane. Both pilots circled Old Swayback once, waggling their ailerons, grinning, and shamelessly exposing the inadequate 100-pound practice bombs slung against the underside of their planes’ wings.

In the abrupt quiet that followed the launchings, the exec’s voice sounded loud and harsh.

Hell of a way to fight a war, isn’t it, skipper?

Yes, Torrey snapped, and turned away.

The exec appeared abashed at this curt rejoinder, although he had known Torrey since Academy days, when he was a raw-fannied plebe and the captain was a lordly first-classman wearing the four thin stripes of a battalion commander. Perhaps he should have been smarter than to attempt heavy-handed humor with The Rock at this unholy hour. The captain hated unnecessary chatter at any time, but most of all in the morning watches before his human juices began flowing and he warmed up a bit.

Just now, however, Paul Eddington found it impossible to bridle his tongue: he was suffering from an almost compulsive urge to talk, to say anything that popped into his stupid head, even to the point of discussing the peculiar way those trade-wind clouds were beginning to detach themselves from the serrated peaks of the Koolau Range and drift high and slow over Pearl Harbor.

Eddington had a skull-shattering hangover.

He had acquired it during a couple of hours of steady drinking, alone, long after he bade the wardroom coffee klatsch good night around 0030. Guiltily, yet with a kind of clinical awareness of what he was doing, he had gone to his nearby stateroom, locked the door, and pulled the quart of 100-proof bourbon from his footlocker, which he kept padlocked. Eddington silently mouthed a prayer before he took his first stinging swallow of raw whisky.

It went something like this: For Christ’s sweet sake give us action...any kind of action...soon...please...so a man can become a man again...amen!

His clandestine alcoholism, which was only suspected by his busy subordinates, was a disease that rode him cyclically like the waves of undulant fever. It came upon him during periods of boring inactivity when he had too much time to think and far too little to keep himself occupied.

Normally, Eddington was a quiet man, with something of The Rock’s gift for self-possession. His associates prophesied that he would go places in the Navy, if, as they invariably appended, he kept his nose clean. Most of them even acknowledged that he was brilliant, despite a tendency to become a trifle erratic at odd intervals, which they attributed more to his perpetually youthful élan than to any real imbalance in his character. As the years passed, however, certain nagging doubts arose in the minds of some highly situated officers. For, after all, when a man’s forty-five, you can no longer regard him as a stripling; by then he is presumed to have acquired the seasoning he needs, and achieved the stability inherent in responsible command.

During maneuvers on the battle game board, which was set up every two weeks on a tennis court alongside the Sub Base quays, Paul Eddington proved himself a daring tactician, willing to take the most astonishing calculated risks with the flag-marked bits of painted wood that represented warships. Generally he got away with it. And the old boys smiled tolerantly again, figuring that he was—just as they’d been saying all along—a damned savvy fellow who simply needed somebody to keep a fatherly eye on him.

After these practice sessions, he and The Rock dined together in the captain’s secluded cabin aboard Old Swayback, and mulled over the day’s events. On the days when Eddington had been too exuberant with the toy warships, Torrey would chide him gently for his impetuosity.

Paul, he said once, talking slowly and gravely around the bulldog briar he smoked on such occasions, eventually you’ll get a ship of your own. Maybe after that a squadron. Then who knows? Even a Fleet, because you’re the kind of fellow we’ll be needing. Torrey rubbed the pipe against his prominent cheekbone, and inspected its fine-grain sheen, before he added: When the time comes.

"If the time ever comes," Eddington corrected him flatly.

Point is, then it won’t be a game anymore, but the real thing played with men’s lives and a lot of expensive hardware instead of little chunks of pine on a plot board.

Hell—that’s the name of the game, isn’t it?

The exec’s wide face, which still bore the marks of an over-enthusiastic Academy boxing career, split into a crooked grin. With a curious feeling of distaste, The Rock noted that his expression was too eager, almost wolfish, as if Eddington were relishing some small private preview of Armageddon.

Command, he said softly, can also be a damned dangerous business, Paul.

Danger’s our business. It’s what we’ve been training for all these unbloody peacetime years. Isn’t it? The wolfish gaze sharpened. Look what’s happened to us since the war ended in 1918—squatting on our beach-bound arses and pushing around mountains of papers, or out here pretending we’re gallant seadogs with ships that couldn’t fight their way out of a rain squall. He remembered a scornful Academy phrase, "Like the USS Tuscarora—’seven decks and a straw bottom!’ And always worrying about what the goddamned taxpayer or some fat-bellied politician’s thinking. Hell. You know what I mean. If it’s not Guam fortifications, it’s too many men in uniform eating their fool heads off." Eddington’s abrasive voice ran down like a tired sanding lathe.

The Rock rationed himself a bleak smile.

Maybe that’s what the armchair experts call our ‘peacetime mission.’ Making do with the widow’s mite.

Sure. Or playing poker against the Nips with a Fleet that’s split worse than a busted straight. Right up the middle—from Singapore to Frisco.

So we’ve got to keep our wits about us, fella. Hang tough. Stay smarter.

The exec, who chain-smoked his cigarettes, reached for an ash tray that was tooled from the base of a five-inch shell casing. He jabbed the butt savagely into the shallow brass cylinder.

Meanwhile, he growled, the Sons of the Samurai will gobble up all of eastern Asia. Great!

Only temporarily.

"We should have jumped the bastards when they sneaked into Manchuria. Or when they clobbered the Panay, by God!"

Anyhow, we know what we’re up against, Torrey said. "What’s the Nip term for it? Hakko Ichiu. Pulling all eight corners of the world under one imperial roof."

So in the bare face of all this, Eddington said, dear old Daddy Roosevelt orders every fifth combatant ship back to the Atlantic and leaves us with three lousy carriers. Makes a friggin’ lot of sense, doesn’t it?

The Rock countered mildly, That’s where the fighting’s going on.

Suppose it starts here, too?

You’ve seen Rainbow 5.

Sure. I’ve seen the noble document, Eddington said rudely. Defensive nonsense!

Many times before they had debated the Pacific Fleet’s carefully tooled war plan, and always they arrived at this same impasse. The exec viewed it with the haughty intolerance of a man whose military lexicon contains only one word: attack. Once fighting started, Rainbow 5 aimed to lure the enemy away from the Malay Barrier by quickly establishing a series of beachheads in the Marshall Islands. Even Torrey had to admit that the Japanese undeservedly inherited this choice bit of strategic real estate from the Germans as their reward for having been such pleasant chaps during the Great War.

Scant hours after hostilities commenced, the United States Fleet—wherever it was, in all its components—would get the signal to execute Rainbow 5.

Do you suppose, Eddington demanded, that the Nips will hang by their tails from the banyan trees while we move in on ‘em?

No doubt they’ve read Mahan, too, The Rock said, and realize our job would be keeping our sea lanes open, while throttling theirs. Sure. They’d retaliate—violently—whenever they decided war was inevitable.

Isn’t it?

We haven’t reached the breaking point yet. They’re still talking in Washington.

Eddington crushed another cigarette into the ash-tray rubble. Personally, I’d rather jump the bastards while they’re still in their huddle.

You don’t care what the world thinks?

Screw the world! With our superiority in planes and pilots we’d wind this thing up before the saintly Joes got their halos adjusted. Then let ‘em holler.

Torrey’s pipe had gone dead. He relit it, slowly and lovingly, before he said, No. It wouldn’t be that easy. We know the Nips have laid down a pair of battleships armed with eighteen-inch guns. Sixty-thousand tonners. Bigger than anything we’ve got blueprinted. That’s why we’re playing for time.

Wrong! The exec waved his third cigarette like a marshal’s baton. "We don’t wait. We profit by surprise. All we need is some strategic gizzard. The Nips can’t stand a full-scale war and they know it. Maybe they’d last a couple of months. After that—pau!"

The Rock’s expression mingled sorrow and annoyance. I grant you the ‘gizzard,’ Paul. But I’m not sure about your strategy. Or your judgment.

Embarrassed, and visibly angered, the exec growled, Are you suggesting I’ve got low savvy quotient, skipper?

Perhaps.

Eddington glowered at him. Then he concluded, Now I’m damned if you don’t sound like my sainted father.

Or mine.

Torrey remembered how the Old Man, stern as an avenging New Testament angel with his shock of white hair, used to prowl their small living room that gazed out upon the Pacific, pausing every so often to remark upon the duty which Jehovah Himself had set upon His humble seafaring servants. Responsibility, he rumbled in a basso accustomed to outshouting wind and waves, increased in exact ratio to the eminence which such servants reached in the careers they had selected of their own free will.

Later young Torrey would comprehend what the Old Man meant, although he didn’t fathom it in those early days before he’d been baked in the Navy’s crucible. For who is to command his fellows? And how? And, especially, why? Are great captains born? Nursed and trained into competency? Or are they merely creatures of lucky circumstance—as politicians often are—and catapulted into crises which test their leadership, to succeed or fail willy-nilly?

Torrey’s father had never been really close to this serious, questing son of his; yet both of them seemed to prefer their curiously detached relationship. Without being told, the youth understood that a commanding officer had to remain aloof, remote, even virginal in his dealings with subordinates; and the Old Man was his superior. This doctrine was hoarier than Julius Caesar and fresher than Karl von Clausewitz. It was provable by the way you could stare down a man (because you knew the answers), or bolster the same man’s courage (because he knew you knew the answers). Torrey’s relationship with the Old Man provided a classic example of the strange filial communication which existed between troops and their colonels, or crews and their captains. At all hazards such command officers saw to it that their men were properly fed, reasonably well bedded, and nursed back to useful health when they were sick or wounded. But they never, never fraternized. If relatively little genuine affection stemmed from all this, in the ordinary paternal sense, there was developed an overwhelming sense of responsibility assumed, and of dependency accepted, which made up for any lack of human warmth.

Or so the boy imagined. Because that’s how he was taught.

When he was fifteen and striving desperately to make his high school football team as a too-skinny left end, he was advised by the Old Man to shoot for quarterback instead.

That’s where the power lies, boy. In the hands of the fellow with the ball.

Much later, when he had already been called The Rock for a number of years, Torrey discovered that power also lies in the hard hands of the man who throws the switch, who urges the machine past the point of no return, who figures the deadly odds and then casts the first dice, and with whom the buck stops abruptly, positively, and forever, because there’s nobody standing reassuringly beyond him to grab it and say, Don’t worry, mister, let’s do it this way instead...

But here was Paul Eddington, looking like hell, plainly hung over, and pathetically eager to talk. Torrey turned away from Old Swayback’s biplanes, which were wave-hopping around the tincan minesweepers, and faced his executive officer, whose red-veined eyes and rufous countenance gave him no visible pleasure.

He said shortly, Let’s have a spot of coffee.

Grateful for the reprieve, Eddington snapped his fingers for the Negro messboy. Two jamokes. On the double. No cream.

When the coffee arrived, the exec cradled the thick porcelain mug in his great paws, as if he could derive some special new life strength from its blistering heat. There were no handles on the cups. Seamen prefer them that way, particularly during the cold and lonely mid-watch when the spray lancing across the forecastle can cut a man to the bone.

I’m sorry, skipper, Eddington muttered.

Torrey understood his oblique offer to do penance.

Speaking softly, so the inquisitive junior officers of the deck could not overhear, he said, Why do you do it, Paul?

Christ only knows. Maybe it’s because I see myself growing older—dry-docked—obsolescing like this sad-sack ship of ours—with all my chances slipping away.

Eddington’s right hand described a small circle that took in the cruiser’s rebuilt mainmast and her gunnery director tower. A splash of coffee hit the unpainted steel deck. He scuffed at the stain with his cordovan flight boot.

What you’re talking, The Rock said, is surrender. His lean jaw knotted. That’s something they shoot a man for in wartime—pusillanimously striking your colors in the presence of the enemy. Remember, Paul, there are all kinds of enemies.

I know. Eddington’s gravelly voice was made harsher than ever by the alcoholic phlegm that caught in his corded throat. "And I ought to be able to look you straight in the eye, Rock, and tell you it’s all finished. Pau!"

Can’t you?

No.

Why not?

The exec scratched his unshaven chin. He grinned uncertainly. Maybe I’m a little crazy. Anyhow, that’s what Beth claims.

Eddington’s glance roved toward the leeward coast of Oahu, which had begun to shimmer like square-cut jade as the sun mounted, and his face twisted into a self-pitying grimace that was almost small-boyish. The miniature flotilla was rounding Barbers Point. It was 0710 by the bridge clock. Two dozen miles across those cloud-capped mountains, due east, Beth would still be asleep in their two-room apartment on the Ala Wai canal. He could imagine her murmuring fretfully in her slumber because the warm rays would have touched her lovely cheeks through the uptilted Venetian blinds, and disturbed the pattern of her nightlong rest. He suppressed a groan.

Beth was so incredibly beautiful with her tumbled honey-colored hair and gamin face and dusky eyelashes and ripe mouth that never really needed lipstick. (Yet she always protested that he’d ruin her make-up when he came bounding up the outside staircase for a returning sailor’s kiss.) And always, too, her nubile body, felinely soft-furred in its secret places, tortured him with promises lingeringly offered and then cruelly withdrawn, like food snatched from a starving castaway.

Beth liked to wear little-girl skirts and skin-tight halters that displayed her magnificent legs and bold breasts. She was only twenty-four, a whole maturity younger than Eddington, and she frequently taunted him about this, calling him Daddy less in jest than in deliberate seriousness.

Certain of his more audacious classmates had kidded him about robbing the cradle when he married Elizabeth Havens after her graduation from Sarah Lawrence College. But the fierce frown that swept across his shallow forehead and their belated remembrance that good old Paul once held the Academy’s middleweight belt quickly silenced them. Besides, when you got right down to it, he wasn’t the first middle-aged seadog who’d snaffled off a pneumatic young piece, although he sure as hell was a damned lucky stiff.

Eddington had met Beth Havens when her Junior League visited the Brooklyn Navy Yard on a mission designed to improve the enlisted men’s harsh lot. After they’d seen to the commoners’ wants, the charitable young ladies stayed for cocktails and a dinner dance hosted by the Commandant. At that time Eddington was the admiral’s aide.

To Beth, who preferred older men, he seemed marvelously attractive in a rugged, offbeat sort of way. He was, she told him, cute.

Saffron-spinning lights, the melancholy wail of Deep Purple played Glenn Miller style by a bluejacket orchestra, and a number of very large martinis mixed five-to-one made Navy life appear every bit as glamorous as Dick Powell’s movies had promised back in Bronxville.

Beth struck with the sure swiftness of Cleopatra’s asp.

Eddington was allowed certain groping liberties in the commodious back seat of the Commandant’s big black Cadillac while the admiral’s driver took them on a midnight tour of the Yard. Beth murmured, once, that she didn’t care a hang about gantry cranes and graving docks. Her interest tended more toward personnel.

After that it was as easy as falling into bed, although Eddington didn’t realize it then, because he had never known anyone like her: so goddamn sweet (he would have said if he’d been able to articulate his thoughts) and so shyly virginal in her surrender. Beth protested a little at his fumbling eagerness. But she did surrender. Very convincingly, too.

Like a clumsy and faithful dancing bear, Eddington pursued Beth Havens through all the intricate terpsichore that led up to their not-quite-society wedding, after which he rather humbly imagined they would settle down like any other newlywed Navy couple in a small rented apartment. Beth would learn to whip up curry dishes for his compeers on Saturday nights, and she would study books explaining how to deal diplomatically with the senior officers’ haughty wives.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Beth appropriated the Navy Yard Club as her private palace, and its hard-drinking denizens as her courtiers. They took most of their meals there, and Eddington, more often than he liked, found himself blossoming into a male wallflower while his bride, dewy-eyed with the wonder of it all, danced away the night with eager-beaver j.g.’s who figured that old Paul probably would be grateful as hell for a respite from the newest dance craze called the rumba.

When he was ordered to the Pacific as Captain Rockwell Torrey’s exec, Eddington took heart, foreseeing a sea change in their rapidly deteriorating way of life once they reached the enchanted islands.

The exec stared out across the lightening waters from Old Swayback’s bridge.

In a few minutes Beth would stir in her bed, languidly stretching tanned arms and flexing sleep-softened tennis muscles, and her pale breasts would tighten, briefly, while their roseate nipples seemed to grow larger and more inviting. At such moments, when he was home, Eddington yearned to creep like a lonesome child across the mat-strewn parquet floor from his own cot-like punee to hers, and bury his battered face between those Chanel-scented mounds of pliant flesh.

He had succumbed to this desire only once. Awakened suddenly from her half sleep, Beth had hissed, Damn it, Paul, your whiskers hurt. Go ‘way!

After that he never approached her until he had shaved, showered, and donned the uniform that signified the military manhood which had first attracted her to him. She would thereupon accord him a maidenly, almost filial kiss that sent him off to his ship, puzzled and wondering. Females, he reflected morosely, had cunning ways of driving a strong man crazy...

Eddington uttered a curse. His free hand doubled unconsciously into a sledge-hammer fist and slammed down hard upon the metal bridge rail. Covertly, he glanced at The Rock to see whether his eccentric behavior had been noticed.

It hadn’t.

Torrey finished his coffee, returned his mug to the messboy with a courtly thank you, and stepped across the bridgewing to the stadimeter stand. He was squinting through the eyepiece, double-checking the junior officer of the deck’s estimate of the distance between Old Swayback and her tincans, which had now eased up to the port and starboard quarters of the cruiser.

When they quickened their stride enough to pace her by a few hundred yards, the minesweepers would stream paravanes through the choppy sea interval, just as keel depth, like finned kites. This fishing for enemy mines could be a tricky business. If anything went wrong with the expensive gear, Torrey wanted to know exactly who fouled up, and why, so he decided to oversee the operation personally before retiring into his cramped sea cabin for a solitary breakfast.

Although both destroyers were skippered by regulars, their personnel was mainly reservist. The Rock had a grudging respect for these kids who had to learn so much so fast, but he was also wary of their competence. They’d never faced a real test. Playing at war, he thought gloomily, was akin to dress-rehearsing a badly constructed drama that might never open at all because nobody wanted very much to be on hand when the curtain went up. Except, of course, the Eddingtons of this world. They were kept alive by the grimly joyous prospect of that cataclysmic Opening Night.

Torrey checked his wrist watch for the twentieth time since he had risen that morning. It was now 0730.

Up ahead the lean old tincans had managed to stream their paravanes without getting them tangled up in their propellers or fouling their lines. Through his binoculars he could see black cables extending outward and aft. He nodded briefly. The senior officer of the deck called all ahead standard, and the throttleman gave the engineroom telegraph handle a gentle nudge. Old Swayback slowed to fifteen knots, settling behind her escorts with easy dignity.

Emboldened by the coffee which had begun to heat his blood, and perceptibly refreshened by exposure to the cool post-dawn wind, Eddington spoke.

I repeat, skipper, that it’s a hell of a way to fight a war.

The Rock unbent a minuscule fraction. Yes. It’s a hell of a way to fight a war. I agree.

The exec grinned appreciatively. Perhaps he was really forgiven, now, by this avuncular man who rarely seemed to do the wrong thing. If The Rock only knew it, if he could ever get it through his blasted impervious monolithic skull, he needed a guy like Paul Eddington around him to complement those steady-Eddie qualities (so highly admired) which might even (to some) suggest a certain lack of verve, or spirit, or even that ultimate element of character in a fighting man—courage. So the exec thought. And he wished he knew what really lay behind the captain’s dry-ball demeanor, or from what deep wellsprings Torrey drew his imperturbable sufficiency.

Whatever it was, it made Eddington damned uncomfortable. Adolescent. Unsure. A small spark of resentment began to smolder deep inside him. Didn’t the captain’s tolerance simply cloak a self-righteousness which nobody should exhibit in front of his fellow men, particularly his subordinates?

Almost masochistically Eddington found himself hoping, or somehow expecting, that Torrey would unleash his quicksilver temper upon him, lowering the boom, and thereby resolving all the gloomy concern he felt for his future and all his nagging doubts about Beth. What the hell right had The Rock to be so Christly tolerant of anybody, granting reprieves for failures that were inexcusable when you viewed them cold-bloodedly, forgiving and forgetting? It was a weakness. It was unmanly. Eddington felt only contempt for softness of any sort.

If he could have put it into words, the exec would have said he feared neither God, man, nor the devil, in whichever order you chose to list them.

Eddington wore aviator’s wings on his khaki jacket, which permitted him to argue with professional validity that the surface Navy would soon vanish into the limbo of round shot and cutlasses. His vast pride in these wings made him view with much bafflement The Rock’s refusal to wear his own insignia. Torrey had gone through Pensacola only three years earlier as a very senior flight student. He had asked no quarter from the grinning youngsters who taught the manly art of self-preservation in the thin air above the seabound Fleet. Yet, having achieved his wings, he kept them hidden in the same drawer that contained the Navy Cross he’d won during World War I. The wings, and the snippet of blue-and-white silk appeared over his breast pocket only on formal occasions which (by Navy regs) demanded full uniform including decorations.

Once, when Eddington screwed up enough nerve to ask him why he insisted on this odd display of modesty, Torrey had replied frostily that he’d wear his wings when they started sprouting out of his shoulder blades. Or when CinCUS in his eternal wisdom saw fit to give him command of an aircraft carrier.

But The Rock betrayed no chauvinistic animus against this new dimension in combat strategy. Actually, he worried openly because the Fleet’s aerial reconnaissance showed a number of obvious gaps: whole pie-shaped segments that got only cursory attention from the lumbering PBYs prowling out of Kaneohe and Ford Island. He stood staunchly with the captains and admirals who pleaded for better antiaircraft weapons for their vulnerable ships; and whenever anybody would listen, he reminded them that Rainbow 5 clearly suggested the outside possibility of a suicidal air assault on the Fleet some quiet morning when it was bottlenecked bow-and-stern in Pearl Harbor.

Before he secured for breakfast, Torrey swept the skies one last time with his wide-angled glasses.

Close to the eastern horizon, almost indistinguishable against the gray-black lava outcroppings at the base of the Waianae Mountains, Old Swayback’s scout planes wheeled about their humdrum business of searching for hostile subs that weren’t supposed to be within half-an-ocean’s span of these guarded waters, as everybody damned well knew. Just to keep its hand in, gunnery was dry-running the main battery as well as the patchwork antiaircraft system. Whenever the cruiser altered course, the jug-eared director tower rumbled on its ball bearings, and the long snouts of the big rifles swung slowly toward the banking aircraft.

Nobody pretended to be very enthusiastic about these mundane chores, which had become a matter of glazed-eye rote. They performed them just proficiently enough to keep the skipper off their backs. But no better.

Nevertheless, The Rock had eyes like a housefly that seemed to peer simultaneously toward every quadrant of the compass from his vantage on the exposed bridgewing. He could spot a laggard machine-gun station as surely as he’d notice a badly trained main turret. God’s wrath was personified by the captain’s icy sarcasm, when you fouled up, and it was no less devastating because it was muted, like a Maxim-silenced revolver.

Whenever the crew bothered to remember that this was a day of rest elsewhere in the civilized world, they wished rather forlornly that Old Swayback could have remained in Pearl over the weekend, swinging off her buoy in East Loch. They could forget all about the gunnery drill. Chow would be a leisurely ritual instead of cold horse-cock sandwiches grabbed on the dead run, and a man could loll around the sun-warmed deck writing to his girl or browsing through a good western.