Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [135]
“Nothing. We’re there.” Harding pointed off the port bow and handed Willie the glasses. Willie saw, at the horizon, on the line between sea and sky, a thin irregular smudge, perhaps a fingernail wide. “Roi-Namur,” said Harding.
Tiny yellow flashes appeared along the smudge. Willie said, “What’s that?”
“The battle wagons peeled off and went ahead a couple of hours ago. I guess maybe that’s them. Or maybe it’s planes. Somebody’s giving that beach hell.”
“Well, this is it,” said Willie, a little annoyed at the thumping of his heart. “If there’s no change, I relieve you.”
“No change.”
Harding shuffled off the bridge. Now the sound of the shore bombardment came rolling across the sea to Willie’s ears, but at this distance it was a mere trivial thumping, as though sailors were beating out mattresses on the ship’s forecastle. Willie told himself that these vague noises and little colored flashes represented hellish destruction that was being rained on the Japs, and tried for a moment to imagine himself as a slant-eyed soldier crouching and shivering in a flaming jungle, but the picture had the unsatisfying false effect of a magazine story about the war. In plain fact, Willie’s first glimpse of combat was a disappointment. It appeared to be an unimportant night gunnery exercise on a very small scale.
The night paled to blue-gray, the stars disappeared; and day was brightening over the sea when the fleet came to a halt, three miles offshore. Attack boats began to drop from the davits of the transports, clustering and swarming on the water like beetles.
And now Willie Keith found himself in an honest-to-goodness war; one-sided, because there was still no firing from the beach, but the real deadly business, none the less. The green islands trimmed with white sand were already aflame and smoking in many spots. Tubby old battleships, targets of so many journalists’ sneers in peacetime, were briskly justifying thirty years of expensive existence by volleying tons of shells into the tropic shrubbery every few seconds, with thundering concussions. Cruisers and destroyers ranged beside them, peppering at the atoll. Now and then the naval fire stopped, and squadrons of planes filed overhead and dived one by one at the islands, raising clouds of white smoke and round bursts of flame, and sometimes a skyscraping mushroom of black, as an oil dump or ammunition pile went up with a blast which jarred the decks of the Caine. All the while the transports kept disgorging attack boats, which were fanning out along the gray choppy water in neat ranks. The sun rose, white and steamy.
The appearance of the atoll was not yet marred by the attack. The orange billows of flame here and there were decorative touches to the pleasant verdant islands, and so were the freshly blossoming clouds of black and white smoke. The smell of powder drifted in the air, and, for Willie, somehow completed the festive and gay effect of the morning. He could not have said why. Actually, it was because the odor, with the incessant banging, reminded him of fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Keefer paused beside him for a moment on the port wing. Wisps of black hair hung out from under the gray dome of the novelist’s helmet. His eyes glittered in their deep shadowed sockets, showing all the whites. “Like the show, Willie? Seems to be all ours.”
Willie swept an arm around at the swarms of ships closed in on the frail-looking islands in the pearly sunrise. “Multitudes, multitudes. What do you think of the Navy at this point, Tom?”
Keefer grinned, twisting one side of his mouth. “Christ,” he said, “the taxpayers ought to be getting something for their hundred billion dollars.” He bounded up the ladder to the flying bridge.
Queeg appeared, hunched almost to a crouch, his head moving ceaselessly to and fro over the bulky collar of his kapok life jacket. His eyes were squinted nearly shut, and he seemed to be smiling gaily. “Kay, Mr. OOD. Where’s this bunch of LVT’s we’re supposed to take in to the beach?”
“Well, I guess