Read Online The Commodore by P. T. Deutermann - Free Book Online Page B

thought about the track back to the base in the New Hebrides Islands. Right through what everybody called Torpedo Alley, where Jap subs lay in wait for a chance to sink something in the endless convoys of transports that were keeping the Marines alive on the ’Canal.
    J. B. King left the formation when the engagement began? Someone senior would want to talk about that when they got back to Nouméa. He was glad he’d done it, that maneuver, but he might no longer be in command in a few days.

 
    SIX
    Nouméa
    Two days later Sluff found himself waiting outside the flag offices on board USS Argonne, the submarine tender that had been converted to a support ship for Commander, Southern Pacific (COMSOPAC). Looking around, Sluff thought these were rather cramped quarters for a vice admiral and his staff. He sat in one of three metal straight-backed chairs lined up against the bulkhead out in the flag passageway, like a truant awaiting a session with the principal. There’d been no offers of coffee and a distinctly chilly reception in the outer office from the assembled yeomen. It was the end of the day, and Sluff wondered if it was the end of his command tour as well.
    J. B. King had arrived in the harbor at midday yesterday, her decks crowded with survivors from the Calhoun, Morgan, and Walke . Normally a lowly destroyer would have been sent to anchorage in the beautiful harbor’s spacious roads, but because of the wounded, she went pierside. Once everyone had been taken off, they conducted a freshwater washdown, refueled, and took aboard fresh provisions. At noon the port captain discovered that a destroyer was taking up pier space and directed them out to anchorage forthwith. For the rest of the day the ship declared holiday routine, and as many people who could got some much-needed sleep.
    Sluff was not one of them. All the message traffic that had been backing up since they’d lost their long-haul communications antennas arrived like an avalanche. Some of it was not friendly. Admiral Lee had sent a more detailed report of the battleship action claiming that the sole Japanese battleship had been so badly damaged by Washington ’s fire that she’d been scuttled. The South Dakota ’s damage was extensive, if a bit superficial in terms of her fighting ability. There was a vague reference to the fact that she’d lost all electrical power a few minutes into the engagement. Investigation to follow. The loss of three out of his four van destroyers was cast in the light of a valiant sacrifice, the destroyers eating the Long Lance torpedoes obviously meant for the two battlewagons. Except for USS J. B. King, whose maneuvers raised some questions. The fact that King had been out of touch since the engagement was described as officially “worrisome.”
    When he’d read that, Sluff had called the exec and asked him to compile the track sheets from the night of the battleship fight. He had wanted to be ready for the inevitable summons to the headquarters ashore. Normally J. B. King would have had a division commander or a squadron commander to answer to, but the formation that night had been a catch team with no unit commander to boss the destroyers.
    â€œCommander Wolf, the chief of staff will see you now,” a voice announced from the flag office doorway.
    Sluff got up and followed the yeoman into one of the inner offices, where Captain Miles Browning, chief of staff to Vice Admiral Halsey, sat behind his desk like the dragon he very much pretended to resemble. He was partially bald, with a slight mustache and the look of a man who is perpetually fed up with just about everything. Sluff thought the office wasn’t very large, considering that this headquarters served the commander of all American forces assigned to the Guadalcanal campaign. There was a conference table in the middle of the room, a steel desk for the chief of staff, behind which was a bank of portholes