Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  “Stay on things here,” Gar said. “I’m going to the conning tower.”

  “As soon as we can, Cap’n,” he said. “They’re getting nowhere back there.”

  Gar didn’t need reminding. The sub would get so heavy aft that she’d begin to stand on her hind end as they tried to get closer to the surface. With only one shaft operational, there was the distinct possibility that they’d start sliding backward into the depths. The deep water that had been protecting them would then consume them.

  When Gar got to Control, he ordered all the watertight doors closed and the men to action stations torpedo. They’d be in a torpedo fight right away if they came up into a hornet’s nest of Jap escorts, and Gar’s best antidestroyer torpedoes, the slow but deadly electric homers, were all in After Torpedo.

  Which had been evacuated. Dammit!

  “Come to periscope depth,” he ordered. “Power us up, but don’t blow unless you have to.”

  “We’ll have to,” the diving officer said. “We’re too heavy to drive up on one shaft.”

  Gar had to think fast. The batteries were depleted after a day at depth. He only had one propeller left. Ordinarily with a flooding situation, he’d have blown all ballast tanks and be driving the boat up with both screws going full bore, and even that would have been dicey.

  “Do what you have to do,” Gar said. “A fight’s better than that really deep dive.”

  He climbed up into the conning tower, where their trusty battle stations crew was already on station. The boat was pointed up at about a 10-degree angle, and they could all feel the throbbing of the starboard screw trying to drive them toward the surface. Then a ballast tank rumbled as it filled with compressed air. The depth gauge showed 265, but their ascent was perilously slow. The good news was that for every foot of depth they gained, the torrent of water pouring into their nether parts would be slowing down. The bad news was that they were making a hell of a lot of noise.

  A second ballast tank rumbled, and the ascent angle eased off to 8 degrees. They were now passing through 245 feet.

  “Sound, anything?”

  “Ballast tanks,” Popeye said grimly. His gear was deaf until all that compressed air bubbling out of them got out of the way.

  “Passing two hundred feet,” Control reported.

  “Hold her at one hundred feet, if you can,” Gar replied, eyeing the Plexiglas status board that showed sunset happening at 1745 local time. The clock above the board showed 1730. Darkness was their friend; snow, sleet, hail, and fog would be even better.

  “Passing one fifty feet.”

  Gar called the exec in Maneuvering. “This helping?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, and now the pumps are effective.”

  “Get people back into After Torpedo as soon as possible,” Gar said. He didn’t have to tell him why. He was glad torpedoes were waterproof.

  “Leveling at one-ten feet,” Control reported. Gar didn’t say anything. The diving officer had his hands full trying to get a proper trim on the boat. They still were carrying a big slug of seawater aft. Gar could feel it. His big problem now was that they’d lost their protective layer and made far too much noise. He had no idea of what might be up there, waiting for them.

  “Control, can you bring her to periscope depth without broaching?”

  “Not yet, Cap’n. Trim’s way off, and the bubble is dancing.”

  “When you’re stable, bring her up.”

  Gar had taught all the officers who stood diving officer watch to be absolutely frank about the boat’s stability at any given moment. Trimming a submerged submarine is an art, and sometimes officers were unwilling to admit that they were having a hard time achieving trim. A submerged submarine is continuously fooling the ocean into not swallowing it whole. A diving officer had to have no illusions about how good he was. If the boat was out of trim, they were all at risk. Gar could hear the trim pumps working as the diving team worked to balance water loads in their tanks with their own buoyancy. It was a little like trying to hover a fixed-wing aircraft. He wondered who else could hear all that motor noise.

  “Coming up to periscope depth now,” Control reported.

  “Up scope,” Gar ordered, even though they weren’t quite there yet. He wanted to be on the eyepiece when the tip broached the surface. As soon as it broke, he did the circular duckwalk for a quick look. It appeared to be dark, with a stiff breeze blowing whitecaps soundlessly across the water. That was a good thing; whitecaps hid periscopes. Gar held the scope to just 1 foot above the water for the first look, then brought it up to 3 feet.

  No company visible. Sound confirmed a quiet environment—no diesels, pinging, or aircraft sounds. Gar ordered the periscope down and the surface radar mast up for a single-sweep observation.

  “Conn, Radar. I have no picture.”

  “You mean no contacts, or no video on your scope?”

  “No nothing, sir,” the operator said, disgustedly. “I think this goddamned thing’s broke-dick.”

  Gar ordered the mast down immediately. This was a real problem. The radar techs were already tearing into the equipment cabinet. They had to have that radar. He couldn’t surface or even bring the diesels on the line without knowing what was lurking out there in the snowy darkness. For that matter, they couldn’t even get a navigation fix. After circling aimlessly all day at depth and subject to whatever currents had been at play down there, they really couldn’t know where they were other than by matching the observed water depths with the charted depth. That made for a pretty loose fix.

  Gar went down the ladder from the conning tower to meet the chief engineer, who reported that the repair team needed to get back topside to pack that shaft seal from the outside, so that pressure at depth would squeeze the packing in instead of trying to push the inner seals out into the shaft alley. That, of course, meant they had to surface.

  “The battery is at thirty percent,” Gar said. “Not to mention the air inside the boat becoming a diesel fog. We’ll have to surface any way we look at it. ETR on the radar?”

  “They’re just getting into it,” called the exec from the conning tower. “Pray that we have the part.”

  “XO, what do you recommend?”

  “Battle surface guns,” he said promptly. “Go up there expecting trouble and ready to shoot. Keep the TDC team in place for a torpedo shot. If nobody shows up, light off a single diesel for battery charge and fix the seal. Anything after that is gravy.”

  “I concur,” Gar said. “Make it so.”

  Russ nodded and disappeared from the hatch to take charge. He was getting good at that, Gar realized, and he’d have to be once he got his own command. Gar’s reservations about him going to command had vanished. He reminded himself to tell Russ that.

  Gar watched the periscope go back up as the exec took a look for himself. One of the radar techs came down the ladder with two vacuum tubes.

  “Those the guilty bastards?” Gar asked.

  The tech said he hoped so and went aft to one of the storerooms. Gar hoped they weren’t Easter-egging. He told Cob to get the word out that they were going to battle surface as a precaution and then fix the seal. Then he went to the wardroom. Normally for a battle-surface evolution Gar would be in the conning tower, or at least in Control, but he wanted the exec to run this one without his being right there, looking over his shoulder.

  Gar could hear the bridge team assembling at the base of the ladder going topside, and the 5-inch gun team headed forward to their hatch. The Dragon’s crew was now a well-oiled machine, to the point where the GQ alarm really wasn’t necessary. Each man knew what he had to do to bring the boat up on the surface, man all the guns, get a diving team out onto the fantail and over the side with seal packing, light off the diesel engine, purge the foul air out of the boat, complete the trim pumping to lift the stern up so the divers had an easier job of it, set and maintain a tight visual watch all around, and, oh by the way, fix the damned radar. Gar was superfluous, for the moment. If
a destroyer came barreling out of the dark, then he’d have a job.

  “Surface! Surface! Man gun stations.”

  The Dragon came up, still tail heavy and making more noise than Gar wanted to hear as the ballast tanks were emptied. Keep negative flooded, he thought, in case we need to get back down chop-chop.

  “Flood negative and safety,” the exec ordered. Atta boy, Gar thought.

  Mooky the cook came in with a tray of fried-egg sandwiches. Gar grabbed one and then told Control he’d be in his cabin. He knew they’d pass that word up to the exec, and he’d recognize it for the vote of confidence that it was. Gar felt the hatch open topside and waited for the blast of fresh air that was forthcoming. Oxygen was good stuff. He went forward.

  What about that sound contact? He thought about that for a good nine seconds before the sleep monster pulled him down.

  * * *

  Two hours later he awoke to the squeak of his personal devil, the sound-powered phone that hung next to his head.

  “Captain.”

  “Repairs complete on the seal, Cap’n,” the exec said. “Radar team’s still digging around in the equipment cabinets. No visual or sonar contacts. Cooks’re getting a hot meal together. I’ve pointed us south toward the straits. I’ve got the gun teams standing easy on station.”

  “What’s the weather?”

  “Dark, no precip right now, no moon. Just dark.”

  “Very well,” Gar said. “I’ll be up.”

  He got a cup of coffee on the way through Control and climbed up into the conning tower. The exec was on the scope as he arrived, walking the eyepiece around in the familiar circle.

  “Who’s topside?” Gar asked.

  “OOD, two lookouts, the twenty-millimeter team, the five-inch team. Battery’s almost at eighty percent. Surface radar still not up. Sonar is cold. Best we can tell, no contacts.”

  Gar went over to the DRT table to see the plot. They were out in the middle of the Inland Sea. The night before, they’d been surfaced in front of the Kure naval arsenal sinking two destroyers, setting off the ammo explosion from hell, and blasting the dry-dock caisson holding the biggest carrier they’d ever seen.

  No contacts?

  Gar felt a tingle at the base of his spine. If the Japs had figured out what they were doing, they’d have put a line of escorts across the escape route, down by the Hoyo channel. Then they’d follow the boat down until they could get her in a mousetrap.

  “Bring everybody inside,” Gar said quietly. “Secure the gun crews, the lookouts, everybody. Once they’re safely in the house, light off the FM sonar.”

  “You think they’re out there?”

  “I’d be very suspicious if they’re not out there. Any Jap commander who knows these waters knows this is where we have to be if we’re still in the Inland Sea.”

  “If they’re out there, what are they waiting for?”

  “Aircraft,” Gar said. “Radar, equipped night bombers.”

  “We could take a look,” he said. “The air-search radar is up.”

  “I think that would create a beacon,” Gar said. “Let’s try the FM sonar first.”

  It took fifteen minutes to get the various gun crews and lookouts back down. If there was nothing out there in the darkness, they’d stay on the surface for the night and work their way down toward Bungo Suido. They still had their rough plot of the minefield and the access channel they’d followed coming in. Gar wanted the battery topped off, the crew fed and rested, and the surface-search radar working before they made their run through Bungo Suido. They’d missed their carrier, but they hadn’t done all that bad.

  Gong.

  That sound made everyone in the conning tower freeze.

  Were they in a minefield? Way out here, in the middle of nowhere?

  Gong. Gong.

  Gar stared at Popeye, who was wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

  “Popeye,” Gar said, “we’re on the surface, for Chrissakes. What’s that thing picking up?”

  “Objects on the surface?” he asked. “It looks up, remember, Cap’n?”

  “How far?”

  “A thousand yards, tops. Three of them, forty degrees apart.”

  Gar’s blood ran cold. “You’re telling me we have three contacts within a thousand yards of us?”

  Popeye raised his hands in frustration. “They’re not mines,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. This thing’s looking into the surface layer, zero to forty feet. They’re not big, but they’re absolutely out there.”

  How long have we been sitting here, Gar thought, confident there was no enemy anywhere near us? Dear God. How I wish we had the means to detect the enemy’s radars. The Japs certainly could.

  The hatch to the bridge was still open, if nothing else for the fresh air. The two guys working on the surface-search radar were muttering to one another, oblivious of what the FM sonar had come up with. The lone diesel was rumbling happily away, making amps without a care in the world.

  The exec was looking at Gar with one of those what-now-boss looks.

  “I have to see,” Gar said.

  They’d been wearing their red goggles in the conning tower to preserve some semblance of night vision.

  “It’s pitch black out there, Cap’n,” the exec said. “Three contacts at a thousand yards are waiting for something. We need to submerge.”

  Waiting for something. What, for Chrissakes?

  Aircraft, he remembered. They were waiting for a radar-equipped bomber to come out to catch the stupid Americans sitting almost motionless on the surface.

  “I have to see,” Gar said again.

  The exec nodded and handed him the exposure suit and his life vest. Gar heard one of the radar techs swear. Still no joy in fixing the bearing radar. He took his binoculars and went topside to the target-transmitter mount. He locked the binocs into the frame and then asked for a bearing to the nearest FM sonar contact.

  The night was cold and as dark as Gar had seen it on this trip. He popped the goggles up onto his head and stared out into the darkness down the indicated bearing. The boat was making 2 knots in a southerly direction, but there was almost no wake, only the deep throbbing pulse of the sole diesel engine on the line.

  They didn’t have to stay on the surface. The battery was nearly full. On the other hand, if they wanted to reach Bungo Suido by daybreak, they needed to run on the surface. Hoyo channel was not mined, or, if it was, they knew the clear channel through. Bungo Suido was different. They knew the safe way in, but after that, they’d have to do the minefield dance to get back out. That would take time and lots of amps in the can.

  “Raise the air-search mast, take two sweeps,” Gar ordered. “Prepare to emergency dive. Switch to battery power and secure the diesel.”

  The exec acknowledged. Gar heard the radar mast coming up while he stared hard into the darkness.

  It was hopeless. There was nothing to be seen out there. The diesel engine shut down, and he heard the main induction valve at the base of the sail slam shut. Then the radar operator in the conning tower erupted:

  “Single bogey, two seven zero, inbound! Range, five miles and closing fast!”

  As Gar digested that bad news the sea lit up with the white blaze of three searchlights, each one pinned right on them. Gar stood up to say something but was interrupted by the howl of a shell coming overhead and exploding right in front of the boat.

  “Dive, dive, dive!” he yelled down the hatch as a second shell and then a third landed close aboard, flaying the sail and the bridge with shrapnel. “Take her down!”

  He was headed toward the hatch into the conning tower when a fourth shell hit close aboard, ricocheted across the water, and smacked into the bridge, the impact knocking him sideways. He was thrown into a heap in one corner of the bridge even as he heard the rumble of air leaving the ballast tanks and felt the boat tilt down, accelerating as she went.

  The hatch. The hatch was still open. They were waiting for him.

>   He rolled toward it but was defeated by yet another shell, which exploded over the bridge with a white blast of energy that knocked him flat again, gasping for air and deafened.

  He looked forward at the sea rushing up, an angry black curl of water surging around his feet as the deck plates tilted down so steeply that he couldn’t gain his footing. He rolled toward the hatch as the water swirled around him, his lower body already underwater, and did what he had to do. He tripped the latch and then slammed the hatch down and spun the wheel as best he could before the advancing wave swept him right off the bridge and into the cold waters of the Inland Sea.

  Part II

  CAST AWAY

  SEVENTEEN

  Gar popped up a moment later, suddenly conscious of the boat’s thrumming starboard propeller going by much too close for comfort. Pursued by more shell splashes, the Dragon disappeared in a roil of white water. A moment after that, as he surfaced in the tumult of her submergence, he heard the roar of aircraft engines and then the whistle of falling bombs. He literally didn’t know what to do next, but then there was a tremendous punch from below. It felt as if his innards were being strained through his rib cage, and then he was airborne, his arms and legs windmilling in the night air. The last thing he remembered was pulling the CO2 lanyard on his life vest just before hitting the sea.

  When he came to, he was lying on a wet wooden deck. He was on his belly, his head turned to one side, his arms extended alongside his body with palms up, and his legs stretched straight out behind him. His ears were still ringing, but he could hear the excited gabbling of Japanese and feel the deck heeling as whatever kind of ship he was on made a hard turn. His left ear was supported by the bulge of his still-inflated life jacket. He blinked the saltwater out of his stinging eyes and focused on the searchlights stabbing out into the darkness around him. One came from behind; another, dazzlingly bright, came from the wing of an aircraft that was buzzing overhead. In the light he saw a Japanese minesweeper boring in and dropping depth charges over an already disturbed area of the sea.