Robert Conroy: Rising Sun

An hour later, they were strolling in the clean warm sands of Waikiki. Both were barefoot and Tim’s pants were rolled up to his knees. Amanda wore a flowered skirt that she tied up and tucked into her waist, providing him with a mid-thigh view of her slender white legs. They strolled along the edge of the water like kids, dodging the waves and getting their feet wet. An occasional larger wave splashed them and they laughed. It was an opportunity to forget the violent world around them and they took it with gusto.

Although she’d declined to go to dinner with him, he brought a couple of steak sandwiches from the officer’s club. The meat was tender, rare, and covered with onions and mayonnaise. She’d devoured hers in a couple of minutes after commenting that rationing was already making life difficult. Tim ate half of his and told her to take the rest back to her apartment, which she said she shared with two other civilian nurses.

“Are you feeling guilty?” she asked.

“A little. I’m well fed and mending from my injuries and, tomorrow night, getting out of what used to be this island paradise. I’ve got to tell you, I’m very unhappy at the thought of you remaining here. I was kind of hoping we’d have time to get to know each other a little better.”

She smiled gently. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and her eyes were large and bright. “That makes two of us, although the latest scuttlebutt has us going by transport in a couple of weeks. The same rumors have us being escorted by the battleships that either survived the attack or were in California when Pearl Harbor was struck.”

She shuddered and leaned against him. “If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget that morning. When some of the wounded got to me, they weren’t humans anymore, Tim, they were just pieces of meat that were somehow still alive. Many of them weren’t alive for long, and that may have been a mercy.”

Tim mentioned that he too would never forget the dead and dying on the Enterprise , or the bodies that floated by the raft he and Spruance had occupied.

In the distance, a handful of sailboats, silhouetted by the moonlight, moved gracefully across the swells. It was a scene from another world, another era. Tim wondered if Japanese warships were just over the horizon or if enemy periscopes were surveying the shore, and if they could see the two of them walking together and what they thought about it. Maybe some Jap captain was laughing and planning their destruction. The enemy planes that had attacked the day before had come from a carrier that had to be out there somewhere.

Amanda looked up at the stars. “If I can’t get on a transport, I’ll sail to California.”

“You’re joking.”

She bristled and stamped her bare foot, splashing both of them. “I am not joking, and please don’t tell me you’re one of those men who thinks women are fragile and innocent creatures who can’t do anything without a big strong dumb man helping them. You may be big and strong and probably not dumb, and have nice brown eyes, but I can manage well enough alone. I can sail a boat and I have friends who can do it as well, and oh yeah, I know an old guy who owns one. Give me a decent sailboat and enough food and water and I can sail it anyplace.”

He took her hand. She did not pull it back. “If it comes to that, Amanda, do it.”

The Japanese had committed terrible atrocities when they’d taken Hong Kong and the Philippines. They’d targeted nurses and hospitals for many of their most savage outrages, slaughtering the patients and raping the nurses before murdering them as well.

She managed a smile. “Want me to look you up when I make it to California?”

“I would like that a lot.” He pulled her to him and they embraced. He felt her body shake. She was crying. He kissed her and she held him tightly. “We’ll meet in California.”

Her response was to kiss him back.

The three submarines that were to take the forty men of Spruance’s staff were docked in slips located below the fleet headquarters. It was the same building where the now-disgraced and removed Admiral Kimmel had watched both his fleet and his career destroyed.

Along with Tim and Captain Merchant, another ten men would be squeezed into what they had been told were already extremely tight quarters. Tim was well aware what that meant, having spent a couple of days in a sub before the seaplane had picked up him and the admiral. Tim was larger than average, and the average submariner was even smaller than that. For that matter, so too were pilots and many others in the military. There was, he thought ironically, simply no room for larger people in many military professions.

Before boarding, they were gathered in a conference room by their skipper, a very young, short, and lean lieutenant commander named Torelli who gave them a stern lecture.

“I know I am junior in rank to most of you, but let there be no doubt—I am the captain of this sub and I will make all decisions while you are on board. To begin with, you will be assigned bunks and you will spend as much time as possible in them and I don’t care how cramped and uncomfortable they might be. This is in order to keep you out of the way of the crew, who have assignments that must be carried out if we are to arrive safely. If we are in danger, you will lie perfectly still in those bunks and not even talk. If you have to piss or crap, do it right there and don’t worry about it. We don’t believe that the Nips have any sound-detecting devices like sonar, but we’re not certain so nobody’s taking chances. When necessary, we will run as silent as a mouse. We don’t think their radar’s all that great either, but a lot of things were proven wrong on Pearl Harbor, weren’t they?”

That comment was greated with grunts and growls. The Japanese had been terribly underestimated.

Torelli continued. “The food on board will be shitty at best and the heads are inadequate for the needs of the crew, much less an additional dozen men. Cleanliness might be a virtue in another world, but such virtue will have to wait until we reach California. For those of you who’ve never been on a sub, it will stink like a sewer when you go on board, so a little more shit odor and body stench won’t make a hell of a lot of difference, and it will get worse the longer it takes for us to get to California.”

“Will you attack Jap ships if we spot any?” Merchant asked.

“My orders are to deliver you safely and not pick any fights. We will only defend ourselves and then only as a last resort. I have four torpedoes left from my last patrol. Since we’re heading to California, the powers here declared I couldn’t have any more of their precious supply.”

“Have you sunk any ships?” Tim asked.

“Nothing to write home about,” Torelli said. “Two small freighters.”

Torelli didn’t add that most of the torpedoes he’d fired had either malfunctioned or missed, and he didn’t think his aim had been off all that often. He’d had a Japanese light cruiser dead to rights and the many torpedoes he’d fired had failed to explode, even though he’d heard two of them clang against the enemy’s hull. This was an issue that was very common and a cause of great concern among American submariners. He’d reported it up the line to Admiral Lockwood, who now commanded the sub force and was waiting for the bureaucratic shit to hit the fan.

Like children in grade school, they were paraded single file out to the dock. Tim looked around. It was two in the morning, a time when all good Japanese spies should be asleep, and all but the most essential lights were off in the harbor. Naval intelligence and the FBI said there weren’t any spies around, but who could be certain? Tim was one of many who wondered just how the hell the Japs had known so much about Pearl Harbor. The only logical answer was that there had been spies, probably Japanese consular officials, maybe others.