Unsinkable by James Sullivan

Author:James Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

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In the small hours of the morning, an unidentified plane flew over the ship at low altitude, and Plunkett’s machine guns opened fire. With his 20mm stabbing blindly in the dark, and Ken now cognizant of a positive blip they’d just picked up on the surface radar, a tidal wave of adrenaline overwhelmed the director as the men broke from slumber. Up out of his hatch, Ken twisted around to the right and the left, trying to read something, anything, from the 20mm tracers, but the gunners were acting on hunches, the worst possible information. Their lines of fire unspooled in the weak light, each falling off in an impotent little comma of failure. Not for the first time he wondered what else he might do to refine the decision-making in the ship’s gun tubs. The 1.1-inch remained silent.

The hell with it, Ken thought. They’ve got something. He called down to his gun captains and told them to load. Jim and Bing kept up a low mutter that firmed up suddenly when the blip showed on their screens. All they had to do was grip that thing a moment and get that info down to the Mark 1 computer so they could read its course and speed, and then bang.

Bing was onto the plane for a minute, and though it was a shot in the dark, Ken let it go. A salvo spewed from the muzzles and went silent. The 20mm went quiet, and they listened. To nothing.

At dawn they stood general quarters for an hour, tried for some breakfast, and ran back to battle stations for a red alert on enemy planes coming in from the east. Plunkett was too far from the assault to offer up any gunfire, but at least had the satisfaction of seeing three planes flare out of their trajectories, downed by naval gunfire.

Ken exercised his mounts after breakfast, training them through a full circle and making sure the elevation hooked up neatly to the director. They’d recently had a problem with the air pressure in the no. 4 gun. Someone had neglected to tighten a valve, and an air leak caused the gun to fall out of battery when they tried elevating it. McManus and Richardson, another one of the ship’s gun captains, took to the mount with crowbars and got an air line into it, and 1,550 pounds of pressure again. Now, on full automatic, Ken had complete confidence in the battery as he slewed the works, as if each of the guns channeled directly into his grips on the sight. There was some extra sense at work, some preternatural feeling of confidence in the outcome.

Plunkett fell in behind Philadelphia’s stern as the cruiser steamed into position to lend fire support to a naval assault now crushing German forces on shore. Dr. Bates puttered away in one of the gigs to help a man who’d been injured on a minesweeper. There was a red alert that came to nothing in the late morning, and Ken sent the men down to the mess at lunch.

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