Trial by Fire by P. T. Deutermann

Author:P. T. Deutermann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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George and the captain watched Santa Fe come alongside and basically bounce off the much larger carrier with an ugly screech of rending metal that was audible even over the rumbling booms coming from back aft. George could see that the captain of the cruiser was personally conning the ship alongside, trying hard to keep the afterpart of his ship splayed out at an angle to avoid the cataracts of flaming gasoline spilling over the carrier’s deck edges. Franklin now had a substantial list to starboard, meaning that everything up on the flight deck that could roll, slide, or fall—burnt-out aircraft carcasses, fuming bombs and torpedoes, push-tractors, and even bodies—was starting to drop into the water between the two ships. George gasped when he saw a four-pack of 500-pound bombs on a deck-dolly come rolling off the deck edge from just behind the island, but then exhaled when he spotted that their nose and tail safety cables were still attached just before they disappeared into the sea.

Santa Fe backed away and then made a second approach. This time her skipper forced the cruiser’s port bow up against the carrier’s tilting hull and held it there with engines and rudder. Franklin was by now dead in the water, but there was a seaway that was working against his efforts. The noise of the two ships rubbing against each other was excruciating, a gigantic version of chalk going the wrong way across a blackboard, but the cruiser held her place, and there were now highline messenger ropes being shot across from Franklin’s forward flight deck down to Santa Fe’s number two six-inch gun turret and her midships replenishment station. George couldn’t see who was in charge down there until he once again spotted Father Joe, who seemed to be everywhere at once, exhorting shocked men to bear a hand, rigging the highlines, then tending to the wounded, then giving last rites to the dead or clearly dying, before once again wading into the chaos on the flight deck. George could see other officers down there but they seemed to be just huddled with their people, probably still in shock at what they’d witnessed out on the flight deck. Within minutes, the first stretcher-baskets were riding the highline trolley down to the cruiser’s deck, where Santa Fe’s docs removed the wounded and hustled them below. Other Franklin crewmen were escaping down long steel ladders hanging from the starboard side gun-tubs and dangling over Santa Fe’s number two six-inch gun turret. George winced when he saw men dropping onto the armored steel top of the turret and then tumbling out of control down onto her armored main deck, breaking God knows what.

He looked at his watch. It had been three hours since the first explosions. He thought that the noise was beginning to subside, as there could not have been much left to burn or blow up back there. Then he heard other noises and looked up. The skies around them were filled with black puffs of AA fire and the occasional flaming plane tumbling out of the sky.

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