WHEN DUTY WHISPERS LOW (The Todd Ingram Series Book 3) Read online

  “What’s their course?” Landa’s even white teeth glinted in the new day.

  Ingram jabbed the sound-powered phone mike-button and called down to Lieutenant jay gee Tubby White, the CIC evaluator. Traditionally, Fletcher class destroyers posted their executive officers to CIC and their gunbosses to the bridge. But Landa wanted it the other way around, so he could have Ingram close-by for input.

  “Jap’s course is one-five-zero,” reported White. He was filling in for Luther Dutton as gun boss on this patrol.

  “Tubby says they’re still on the same bearing, Captain. About three-three-zero. Speed: one thirty,” said Ingram. “Range: now six thousand.”

  Next to Ingram was his talker, Vogel, who asked, “What do you think, Sir?” A first class storekeeper, Vogel had recently joined the Howell. He was a quiet dark-haired kid who kept to himself and read a lot. In fact, Ingram discovered Vogel had two years of college before he’d been drafted.

  “I honestly wish I knew. You can never tell with Japs.”

  Vogel swallowed twice. This was his first time in combat. “Maybe they’ll keep on going.”

  Ingram raised his binoculars. Don’t bet on it.

  The routine of the past few days had become a monotony. Up at 0430 for general quarters (GQ). At daybreak, look for Japs. Seldom did they attack and rarely in force. When they did go by, it usually was a sortie heading south to Guadalcanal. But Ingram had to agree with Landa’s intuition. This time, something was different.

  A pilot-house speaker screeched over the talk between ships (TBS) circuit: “Gillespie, this is Crabtree. Speed: thirty. I say again, speed: thirty. Stand by, execute. Ricochet. Over?”

  Howell’s OOD, Lieutenant Carl Offenbach, grabbed the pilot house mike and snapped, “Ricochet, Roger, out.” He ordered the lee helmsman, “All engines ahead, flank. Indicate turns for thirty knots.”

  Engineman second class Earl Bannister repeated the order in a deep Southern accent as he shoved the lee helm’s gleaming brass handles to flank speed. Bannister bent down and twirled the engine indicators to 300, reporting back to Offenbach, “Sir, Main Control acknowledges all ahead flank, three-zero-zero turns for thirty knots.”

  “Very well.” Offenbach caught Landa’s eye for a nod of approval.

  The uptakes in the Howell’s stacks squealed as her boilers hungrily gulped air, feeding the fires that generated steam to the turbines producing 60,000 horsepower. Almost immediately, Ingram felt the acceleration, as machinist’s mates in the engine rooms cracked their throttles, making the ship dig in her twin screws.

  The Howell’s lumbering motion became a desperate rise and plunge, the bow burying itself in crystal blue water, then rising to shake itself free and spew white-green foam over the forward five-inch mounts.

  Desperately, the men on the bridge swept the sky with their binoculars, searching in vain for the source of the rumbling engines. A bit of spray whipped over one lookout, a signalman; he lowered his glasses and started wiping the lense with tissue paper.

  “Dimmit! Keep an eye out, sailor,” Landa snapped.

  “Y-yes, Sir!” The signalman quickly raised his binoculars.

  Landa looked over his shoulder to Ingram. “Japs are laughing at us. They can see us, but we can’t see them.”

  “Maybe headed for Rendova,” Ingram said. He gulped the last of the coffee he’d been nursing since before daybreak, when they had called general quarters. Jamming the cup into a gear locker, he took a deep breath, trying to ignore the burning that erupted in his belly.

  “Rendova? No dice. They’re pissed and looking for us. Wouldn’t you be?”

  Ingram nodded. “Probably circling. Looking for a hole to dive through.”

  “Anything new on air cover?”

  Ingram called down to CIC. “Tubby, what’s the story on air cover?”

  There was a muffled conversation, then White came on the line. “CACTUS says they vectored four Wildcats. ETA, twenty minutes.” CACTUS was the airstrip on Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field.

  “They’re late,” muttered Ingram. The F4Fs were supposed to have been overhead at dawn.

  “What can I tell you?” White said, sounding testy. It was as if he’d been taking lessons from Luther Dutton, an MIT electronics whiz, now on loan to the Barber to replace their gunnery officer, who had been stricken with a bad case of malaria.

  “Four F4Fs enroute, Captain. ETA twenty minutes,” Ingram groaned.

  “Dammit.” Landa swept the skies to the southeast with his binoculars, looking in vain for the Navy fighters. “Call ‘em and tell ‘em to shake a leg, Todd.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  They all bitched. Even his talker, Vogel, stood beside him and muttered under his breath. Ingram couldn’t blame them. They’d been at this for a week, dashing up and down the Slot from Tulagi and back, seeking enemy supply barges and trying to sink them. Embarrassing to the U.S. Navy was that the Japanese miraculously evacuated their remaining troops from Guadalcanal two weeks ago. Like Churchill at Dunkirk, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander In Chief of The Combined Japanese Fleet, had used anything that floated -- from barges to submarines to destroyers -- rescuing 11,000 starved, emaciated soldiers during the nights of February first through the sixth, disembarking at Cape Esperance.

  Ingram felt like they’d been at general quarters round the clock, which was close to the truth. Early last evening, DESDIV 11 had bushwhacked a Japanese supply convoy, sinking three armored one-hundred foot barges off Kolombangara and damaging a destroyer. That’s why, he was sure, the planes were searching them out: retribution.

  Vogel thrust a finger into the air. “Holy smokes!”

  Ingram saw it at the same time. A speck plunging through the clouds; the morning’s new sun glinting off its canopy. “Off the port bow, Captain,” Ingram said.

  The TBS speaker screeched. Landa stepped in the pilot house, fiddled with knobs, gave an acknowledgment, then stepped onto the port bridgewing. “Otto is ordering us to come right to unmask batteries.” He grinned up to Ingram. “Actually, we got a bottle of scotch riding on who gets the first bogie today.”

  Offenbach ordered right rudder, and the Howell began slogging drunkenly through the waves, allowing all of her five gunmounts to bear on the target.

  Ingram keyed his mike. “Jack?”

  “On target and tracking,” said Jack Wilson, the main battery director officer. Throughout the ship, the five-inch gun mounts shifted into “automatic” and pointed at the speck. They were synchronized with the ships gunfire computer, which received its target range, elevation, and bearing information from the main battery director atop the pilot house where Ingram stood.

  As the Howellskidded through her turn, Ingram spotted threeBno-- five more specks diving one-by-one through the clouds, their engines screaming. The first plane was halfway down, displaying the familiar low-wing silhouette of a “Val,” a single engine Aichi D3A1 Navy (Type 99) dive bomber, its fixed landing gear helping to slow its dive. Underneath the Val’s bellies was a 500 kilogram bomb, a 100 kilogram bomb slung under each wing.

  Landa raised his hand, then dropped it. “Commence fire!”

  Ingram shouted, “Commence fire, all batteries!”

  In turn, Jack Wilson crouched inside the director and barked the order to his pointer, Ernie Williams.

  A ruddy-complected second class fire-controlman, Williams’ eye was pressed to powerful gyro-stabilized sight, its cross-hairs centered on the lead Val. He jabbed a foot treadle.

  All five gun mounts belched death at the planes, the muzzle-blasts slamming Ingram from all directions. Two seconds later, the forty-millimeter mounts opened up, followed by the strident crack of the twenties. Smoke momentarily obscured the formation, as all four ships hammered away. Soon, the sky was studded with little black puffs ranging among the diving Vals.

  “How many?” called Tubby from CIC.

  Ingram pressed a hand against his headphone. The damned guns were so loud; conversation was impossible. He
could hardly think. Finally, he managed, “What?”

  “How many Japs?”

  Ingram inhaled cordite-laden smoke from the forward gun mounts. He coughed for a moment, then rasped into the microphone, “Hard to tell. They’re coming one by one through a hole in the clouds. I’d say fifteen or so.”

  The first Val passed through 5,000 feet, and at about 3,500 dropped its bomb at the Barber. The pilothouse speaker squawked, “Maneuver independently!”

  “Come right ninety degrees, Carl!” Landa yelled.

  The Howell’s rudder whipped over, throwing her transom to port. Leaning almost twenty-five degrees, she lunged though the waves, her decks glistening with water. Then her rudder dug in and the Howell snapped through her turn like a jaguar skidding around a lumbering water buffalo.

  WHOOM! A water-column rose three hundred yards off the Howell’s port bow.

  “Rudder amidships!” barked Offenbach.

  The gunfire noise was incredible. Ingram was astounded he could hear Offenbach at all.

  Apparently the helmsman hadn’t, for Offenbach ran into the pilot house and right up to the helmsman. “Dammit! I said rudder amidships!”

  WHOOM! Another bomb cascaded fifty yards off the Howell’s port beam.

  “I have the conn,” Landa shouted. “Mr. Offenbach, stay in the pilot house and relay orders.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir. Captain has the conn.”

  The cannons pounded away, with one plane disappearing in a greasy red-orange blast, pieces whipping in all directions, throwing smoke and steam. Yet on they came. Another bomb was released over the Howell. “Left standard rudder,” Landa shouted.

  The ship rolled into her turn, the bomb smacking the water fifty yards to starboard. As the screaming Val pulled out of her dive, the two forward forty-millimeter mounts chattered away, eating into its wing root. Smoke poured out, then incredibly, the wing snapped off and the Val spun horribly around its axis, parts spewing before it thumped into the water.

  “Steady on three-zero-zero.”

  “Three-zero-zero, aye, Sir,” came the response from the pilot house, as another Val pushed over and headed down in an eighty degree dive.

  “Jeez, how many of these bastards!”

  Furiously, the guns of DESDIV 11 laced the sky with shrapnel as a dive-bomber plummeted, its 1,070 horsepower Kensei engine screaming at them. This one looked like it was locked on the Barber.

  Ingram fine-tuned the binoculars focus and made out the pilot, pitched forward in his seat, held by shoulder straps, his eye pressed to his bombing-telescope.

  “Left standard rudder!”

  On came the plane, holding its dive longer than the others. Yes, it was headed for the Barber, which at that moment leaned to port, beginning a frantic turn to starboard.

  The pilot must have noticed, for he pulled back on his stick a bit, easing from the dive. After two more incredibly long seconds, the bomb lunged clear, and the Val began its pull-out. The combined fury of DESDIV 11 clawed with all its might at the turning Val, which leveled out and raced for safety.

  “No!” Ingram heard a voice that he knew was his own.

  The bomb, as if attached to a guide wire, raced directly for the Barber. Time seemed frozen. Like magic, the bomb found the destroyer’s aft funnel and disappeared inside.

  CRACK!

  The Barber erupted in a belching plume of dark, smoking, flame. The shock wave hit Ingram in an enormous, ear-piercing explosion which hammered Kula Gulf and the surrounding islands. Tons of spinning debris and flame spewed into the air. A column of smoke rose two thousand feet, hovering over the spot the proud little Barber had occupied only moments before.

  Ingram forced his mouth to close, swallowing several times. “No.” A look at the bridge told him they too, were mesmerized. Ingram’s eyes were dumbly fixed on the smoke column. It soon cleared, showing...nothing. He felt light-headed -- the Barber no longer existed. His eyes watered. And it wasn’t from the smoke.

  Finally, he swept the sky with his binoculars. No more Vals. “Cease fire.”

  Landa looked up to Ingram with an ashen face. “Luther was aboard.”

  Luther. Good God! Ingram felt an emptiness he didn’t believe possible. It seemed there was no depth to it.

  Griffith and Issac ceased fire, the silence as loud as the recent air attack. Ingram looked back to the Barber’s pall of smoke and pressed a hand to his ear phone, as White made another report. “Commander Kilpatrick, aboard Griffith, has assumed duties as Division Commodore.”

  Tears ran down Landa’s cheeks. “Good God. Luther.”

  Ingram wiped his own tears, wondering why Landa was crying.

  CHAPTER THREE

  24 February, 1943

  U.S.S. Howell (DD 482)

  New Georgia Sound (The Slot), Solomon Islands

  The planes swooped in low from the Eastern horizon, heading directly at the three remaining destroyers. Issac opened fire with her forward forty millimeters, as Tom Kilpatrick, Griffith’s skipper and new acting Commodore, screeched over the TBS, “Cease fire, damnit!”

  An F4F wildcat roared past the Howell at masthead level, wiggling its wings. Another zipped over doing a victory roll, then a third. “Do not shoot! They’re friendlies,” Landa shouted, spittle flying from his lips, as his face turned crimson. To Ingram he muttered, “Jerks should know better than to point their noses at us.”

  They’d hove into the lee of New Georgia Island and the groundswell abated as if someone had pulled the switch of a giant wave-making machine. The wind also dropped and the three remaining ships steamed in a column over a remarkably smooth, glass-like surface. Issac was in the lead, followed by Griffith, then Howell.

  Ingram swallowed his bile. Bastard wildcats are twenty minutes late.

  The F4Fs flew on, eventually forming up and circling the smoke-column marking the Barber’s grave. They orbited twice, then ran back over the three destroyers, spreading out, two wildcats to port, one to starboard.

  Kilpatrick came back on the TBS, his voice calm, official this time, ordering a search for Barber survivors. Gracefully, the three destroyers reversed course, leaving Howell in the lead position.

  Ingram shuddered for a moment, wondering if they would find anything. Or worse, if they did find something, what it would look like.

  “Seems like they’ve finally done their arithmetic and discovered one of us is missing.” Landa watched the Wildcats passing lazily overhead at 2000 feet. “How long do we have them?”

  Ingram called Tubby White in CIC, hearing the crisp rattle of voices over the radio net in the background. “Two hours,” White said. “They apologize for being late. Apparently jumped by Japs on the way up. Lost one of theirs.”

  Ingram relayed the message to Landa, whose binoculars were riveted on the Barber’s death pall. “Hope the poor bastard was able to bail out.”

  “Nooooo.” Sitting straight up in his bunk, Ingram fumbled for the bulkhead light switch and flicked it on. Ease up. His chest heaved, and he willed to slow his breathing. Sweat ran down his face and torso; the bunk covers were shoved in a rumpled heap at his feet.

  “Damn.” He looked at his little wind-up alarm: nearly ten-thirty. Another hour and a half to Tulagi.

  The dream was so vivid, reliving the Barber’s explosion. When Ingram had turned in, he’d expected the dream, and it came as scheduled. That brand-new 2,100 ton shipBblown to smithereens before his eyes. And with her, 322 officers and men.

  Including Luther Dutton, the MIT whiz kid. It had taken months to break through Dutton’s New England facade. Once inside, Ingram discovered a talented man with a warm sense of humor. Luther was married to a concert pianist, who had been featured in a recent issue of Collier’s. To round things out, Luther had played the violin like a maestro, often entertaining the ship’s company on the fantail while anchored on balmy evenings. Luther’s wife, what was her stage name? Laura West.

  She’d played piano for them one night at a USO performance back in the State
s. It was just before Ingram had shipped out. He and his wife Helen had sat listening, arm in arm, the theater dark, the audience bound to rich, melody-filled moments. At the concert’s end, Luther joined his wife on stage, playing Die Meditation, their music seamless, beautifully crafted, as if they’d practiced this one piece all their lives.

  In fact, Ingram owed Luther Dutton money, thanks to Hank Kelly, the ship’s engineering officer. It was on their last night at the Pearl Harbor O Club. Waiting to catch a flight for Brisbane Australia, Kelly dared a moping Ingram to try calling Helen from the lobby payphone. There must have been at least two hundred officers that hot sweaty night, yelling and singing over raucous music, as Ingram dug four quarters from his pocket, walked to the cramped booth, and shut the accordion doors. The vent fan in the little dark-brown cubical didn’t work, making it swelter and smell of cheap beer. He dropped in his money, dialed the operator and, to his surprise, was immediately connected with Helen in San Pedro, California. Helen sounded like she was trapped in a giant clamshell, with some ghoul fiendishly turning the volume up and down.

  Nobody believed Ingram and he actually had to hand the phone to a wide-eyed Luther Dutton. Hank Kelly and Tubby White also took their turns to verify it was Helen. Each grinned as Helen spoke with them, promising to call their loved ones. Ingram had used all his change, and borrowed another four quarters from Luther. As Todd and Helen lingered over one another’s words, Luther ran to the bartender to break a two dollar bill to feed the damned phone. Finally, the operator cut in with a priority call; she gave Todd and Helen just five seconds to say goodbye.

  Exacting his quid pro quo, Luther Dutton tallied Ingram’s phone bill and drew up the IOU for ten dollars on an O Club bar napkin before all present. Cat-calls rang from the rafters as Ingram signed, vowing to repay Luther the next day.

  But their flight schedules were advanced, and they shipped out early the next morning on different airplanes. Then fate struck a cruel blow. Barber’s gun-boss came down with a serious case of malaria, and Luther Dutton was given temporary orders to become Barber’s gunboss. In the meantime, Tubby White, a blond, portly lieutenant junior grade, was upgraded as Howell’s temporary gunboss.