Sentinels of Fire by P. T. Deutermann Page A

monkey shit.
    â€œYou guys were lucky beyond belief,” he said. “Your gun boss was correct about the little propellers, but those bombs were never meant to be dropped. They were supposed to hit the ship at the same time as the kami.”
    â€œWhich means?” I asked.
    â€œWhich means those kamikaze bombs are fully armed in flight. The arming lanyard had been pulled out manually somewhere south of Kyushu. I can’t imagine why it didn’t go off, especially when you shocked it again with the sea anchor.”
    That revelation produced a chilled moment of silence in the wardroom.
    â€œBut they said there was no firing pin visible on the front end,” I said.
    â€œThere isn’t one for the kami bombs. They’re fired by setback. The pin’s inside a tube. The bomb experiences a gazillion-g deceleration when it hits the side of a ship. That little pin slams forward in its tube to complete an electrical circuit, which fires the initiator, which fires the main explosive charge, all in about one heartbeat. Like I said, lucky beyond belief.”
    â€œAnd if it happens again?” the captain asked.
    â€œBelieve it or not, you’d have been better off bringing it down to us,” the chief said. “One of us has to get inside the safing and arming compartment of the bomb, get by the anti-intrusion traps, find and disable the battery bus and then immobilize that pin and any backup exploders. Not for the faint of heart, gentlemen.”
    â€œI’ll pass that on, Chief,” the captain said. “On the other hand, would you care to go back to the picket line with us?”
    â€œThe radar picket line, Captain? Begging your pardon, sir, but hell, no. That’s really dangerous duty.”
    We all laughed and then set about our day. Marty will shit a brick when I tell him the truth about his great monkey-shit gambit, I thought.
    I was grudgingly getting used to the tin can Navy and its propensity to wing it when something had to be done and done right now. That was a trait I’d brought to my first couple of assignments, and more than once it had put me across the breakers with my department head. In the prewar cruiser Navy, appearances were everything, and junior officer initiative not much in demand. It took me some time to conform, and I think my own upbringing had a lot to do with that. My father was one of those parents who let their kids learn the hard way if the opportunity presented itself. He was an intellectual, somewhat aloof, deeply immersed in his work, about which I had no inkling while I was growing up. My mother—very pretty, very sweet, they never saw her coming—would sit down with me to analyze what I’d done to get in so much trouble as a child, and then encourage me to do better the next time but never to quit trying out new things. Now, as a junior lieutenant commander, I was exec in a destroyer, and I knew they’d be very proud. If I lived to tell the tale.
    *   *   *
    The next morning we sailed out of the fleet anchorage at just past sunrise. The tender repair people had done an amazing job of reconstructing the ship’s radar waveguide and reinforcing the mast’s foundations. Malloy ’s crew had done an equally amazing job of “midnight requisitioning” aboard the destroyer tender. As we reached the entrance to the anchorage I was surprised to see two large aircraft carriers anchored close by, one of them showing clear signs of having experienced a large fire on her port side aft. Landing craft and small boats were shuttling between a heavily laden ammunition ship and the carriers, while up on the flight decks, fighters were turning up in the still morning air. Columns of smoke in the distance indicated that another horrible day was well under way over on Okinawa Shima.
    Motivated by tales of dawn kamikaze attacks on the anchored ships, the captain ordered 25 knots as soon as we cleared the