by Herman Wouk
“Lady, when did all this break?”
“We picked up these clowns on sonar at about nine thousand yards. All of a sudden. We must have come out from under a thermal layer.”
“Sounds like a mess of them,” Byron said.
“Sounds like the whole goddamn landing force. This stuff is spread across a hundred degrees. We can’t sort it out yet.” Aster lightly mounted the ladder to the conning tower, gripping Byron’s shoulder as he passed.
Byron strained to hear the low conversation of Aster and the captain in the tower. A command down the voice tube, Hoban’s confident voice, quiet and tense: “Briny, come up to seventy feet. No higher, hear? Seventy feet.”
“Seventy feet. Aye aye, sir.”
The planesmen turned their wheels. The Devilfish tilted up. The gauges reeled off the ascent. The outside noises grew louder still: pings and propeller thrums, now plainly ahead.
“Seventy feet, Captain.”
“Very well. Now, Briny, listen carefully. I’m going to raise number two periscope all the way.” The captain’s voice was firm and subdued. “Then I want you to come up exactly a foot, and level off— another foot, and level off— just the way we did it in that last run on the Litchfield. Nice and easy, you know?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The narrow shaft of the attack scope slid softly upward behind Byron, and stopped.
“Coming to sixty-nine feet, sir.”
“Very well.”
A level-off. A pause. “Coming to sixty-eight feet, sir.”
The planesmen were the best on the boat, an ill-sorted pair: Spiller, the freckled Texan who said “fuck” at every third word, and Marino, the solemn Italian from Chicago, never without the crucifix around his neck, never uttering so much as a “damn”; but they worked like twins, inching the submarine upward.
“Okay! Hold it! That does it!” Hoban’s voice went high, loud, almost frantic. “Wow! Jesus Christ! Mark! Target angle on the bow forty starboard. Down scope!”
A silence. A crackling in the loudspeaker.
P-i-i-i-ing… P-i-i-i-t-ng…
The captain’s voice through the quiet submarine, controlled but with a fighting thrill in it: “Now all hands, listen to me. I’ve got three large transports in column, screened by two destroyers, one point on the port bow. The Rising Sun is flapping plain as day on all of them. It’s brightly sunny up there. This is it! I’m coming to normal approach course. Prepare the bow tubes.”
Hot pins and needles ran along Byron’s shoulders and arms. He could hear Aster and the captain arguing about the range. The periscope bobbed up behind him, and straightway down again. There was rapid talk in the conning tower about masthead heights, and the captain harried the quartermaster for recognition manuals. The echo-ranging grew sharper and stronger, the propeller noises louder. Byron had done enough work on the torpedo data computer to picture the trigonometry in his head. On the dead reckoning tracer, the problem showed clearly: the Devilfish as a moving spot of light, the enemy course and its own course as two converging pencil lines. But the target’s line was jagged. The transports were zigzagging. They were still beyond torpedo range, according to Aster; or, in the captain’s judgment, barely within range. The two men were equally adept at guessing distance by masthead heights. On a submarine there was no more precise range-finder. The transports were on a zig away, and they moved faster than the crawling sub.
Utter silence fell in the conning tower. Silence throughout the boat. All the noise now was outside, a cacophony of machinery sounds and the plangent searching probes of the Japanese sonar.
Fiiiingl Piiiiing! P-i-i-i-ing! Pt-t-i-t-ing
“Up scope. Okay, here they come! They’ve turned back! Mark! Range forty-five hundred. Mark! Bearing zero two zero. Mark! Target angle on the bow seventy starboard. Down scope!”
A pause. The captain’s voice, hushed and urgent on the PA system: “Now all hands, I intend to shoot. Open outside doors on bow tubes.”
His natural voice, in the conning tower: “Damn! An absolute setup, Lady, but an outside range. We’re not going to close them much with that angle on the bow. What stinking luck!”
“Captain, why don’t we hold our fire and track them? It’s a fantastic chance. That zigzag plan will slow their advance. Maybe we can pull ahead and close the range.”
“No, no, no. Now’s our chance, Lady. They’re making fifteen knots on a radical plan. If they zig away again we may lose the bastards. I’ve got a setup and a solution, and I’m going to shoot.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Outside doors are open, sir!”
“Very well. Slow setting!”
Concentrating on holding depth, Byron could scarcely grasp that at last this was the real thing; not the launch of a yellow-headed dummy, but a TNT warhead attack on ships filled with Japanese soldiers. Except for the different sonar sound and the choking tension, it was so much like an attack school drill, or an exercise at sea! It was going very fast now, along old familiar lines. Hoban had even used this slow setting for the hit on the Litchfield that had clinched the E.
“Up scope! Mark! Bearing zero two five. Range four thousand. Down scope!”
The aiming was harder on a slow setting, the chance for missing greater, detection of torpedo wakes by the enemy more likely. In this decision to make his first wartime shot on slow setting, Hoban was accepting marginal conditions. Fifteen years as a naval officer, ten years as a brilliant peacetime submariner, lay in back of that decision…. Byron’s heart thudded, his mouth was dry as dust…
“Fire one!… Fire two!… Fire three!… Fire four!”
With the usual jolts and rushing water noises, the torpedoes left the Devilfish.
“Up scope. Oh, wow. Four wakes! Four beautiful wakes, running hot, straight, and normal. Down scope!”
Heart-stopping expectant silence again, all through the Devilfish. Byron watched the second hand of the control room clock. It was easy to calculate the time to target, at slow setting, on the last called range.
“Up scope!”
A long, long silence. Time passed for all four torpedoes to hit. Byron stiffened with alarm. No impacts; and the periscope had been up for ten seconds, and was staying up! Maximum safe exposure was six seconds.
“Down scope. Four misses, Lady. Goddamn.” The captain sounded sick. “At least two wakes had to go under the lead transport. I saw them heading there. I don’t know what went wrong. Now they’ve spotted the wakes, and turned away. The near destroyer’s coming at us, with a hell of a bone in its teeth. Let’s go to ten knots.” He called through the tube, “Byron! Take her down to two hundred fifty feet.”
On the loudspeaker his voice turned dull and cranky. “Now all hands, rig for depth charge on the double.”
Two hundred fifty feet? Lingayen Gulf was nowhere deeper than a hundred seventy feet. The captain’s impossible order shocked and baffled Byron. He was grateful for Aster’s lively interposition. “You mean a hundred fifty, Captain. That’s about down to the mud here.”
“Right. Thanks, Lady — a hundred fifty, Byron.”
With a silent jar of acceleration, the submarine tilted and dove. Aster spoke again. “What course, Captain?”
It was almost a silly question, but Hoban was giving no order for the all-important evasive turn. Overhead on the surface of the sea, four slick white bubbly torpedo wakes certainly led straight to the Devilfish. The destroyer must be charging up those visible tracks at forty knots. The pitch of the echo-ranging was rising to a scream, and the probes were coming thick and fast on short scale: ping, ping, ping, ping!
“Course? Oh, yes, yes, left full rudder! Come to — oh, make it two seven oh.”
“Left to two seven oh, sir,” called the helmsman.
The diving vessel tilted sideways. The oncoming Japanese ship sounded much like the Litchfield in practice runs, but noisier and angrier, though that very likely was Byron’s imagination; like a train approaching on loose old tracks, ker-da-trum, ke
r-da-trum KER-DA-TRUM!
Throughout the Devilfish, shouts, slams, clangs of maximum watertight rigging.
The destroyer came closer, passed right overhead — ker-da-TRAMM-TRAMM-TRAMM-TRAMM — and moved away.
The pitch of the sonar dropped. White faces in the control room turned to each other.
Byron heard one clear click , as though a ball bearing had bounced off the submarine’s hull. Another quiet second, and the depth charge exploded.
8
CHRISTMAS carols filtered scratchily over the loud drunken talk and the clack-clack of iron wheels. Palmer Kirby disliked club cars, and Christmas carols depressed him, but he needed to drink. This express train howling toward Washington through the snowy night carried no gloomier passenger.
Rhoda Henry would be waiting at Union Station. He was hungrily glad of that, yet ashamed of his yearnings. She was the wife of another man, a battleship captain out fighting the Japanese. After stumbling into this affair, he had tried to right himself by proposing marriage to her. She had considered it, but backed off. Resuming the sex relationship after that had been ignominious; so he now thought, in his low mood. Dr. Kirby had no religious or moral scruples; he was a dour decent atheist, a widower of old-fashioned habits. This constrained and messy adultery was a damned poor substitute for having a wife. He had to limit his attentions to avoid scandal, yet his sense of honor tied him down like a husband. In his travels he now was ignoring attractive secretaries and receptionists, whose eyes sometimes glinted at this tall ugly bony-faced man with thick grizzled hair. He had been telephoning Rhoda regularly. Pug’s cable from Pearl Harbor that she had read him, AM FINE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT, had both gladdened and humiliated Kirby. He liked and admired the man he was cuckolding. It was a wretched business.
The root of Dr. Kirby’s dark mood, however, was the war. He had been touring a land legally a belligerent, yet paralyzed by frivolity, indecision, lack of leadership — and above all, by Christmas, Christmas, Christmas! This whoop-dee-do of buying, selling, decorating, gorging, and guzzling, to the endless crooning of Bing Crosby’s inescapable gooey voice, this annual solstice jamboree faking honor to the Christ child, this annual midwinter madness was possessing the country as though Hitler did not exist, as though Pearl Harbor were untouched, as though Wake Island were not falling. The Lucky Strike ads showed jolly red-cheeked old Santa Claus wearing a tin soldier hat, cutely tilted. In one sickening image, that was the national attitude.
Kirby had found some sense of war on the West Coast: hysterical air raid alarms, brief panics, spotty blackouts, confused and contradictory orders from the Army and from Civil Defense, rumors of submarines shelling San Francisco, fear of the Japanese mixed with inexplicable cocksureness that America would win the war. Eastward even this shallow awareness dimmed. By Chicago the war had faded to a topic for talk over drinks, or a new angle for making money. The thought of defeat entered few people’s minds. Who could beat America? As for the Armageddon swirling before Moscow, the terrific counterstrokes of the Red Army against the Wehrmacht hordes — to most Americans Santa Claus in a tin hat was considerably more real.
Perhaps in the muddled turmoil of Franklin Roosevelt’s management agencies, production boards, and emergency committees, now multiplying in Washington like amoebas, something was being accomplished. Perhaps in army camps, naval bases, shipyards, and airplane factories, a capacity for war was growing. Kirby didn’t know. He knew he was returning in despair from a tour of the country’s resources for producing actino-uranium. He had seen a national industrial plant so disorganized and swamped by war orders that even if the scientists solved the theory of nuclear explosives, the factories could never produce the weapons. Everywhere the wail was not enough copper, not enough steel, lack of labor, lack of parts, lack of machine tools, skyrocketing prices, ignorant government officials, favoritism, corruption, and confusion. He had travelled with good credentials from Washington, but men with such credentials were swarming over the land. He had been unable to reveal what he was after. If he could have — and he had tried some hints — it would not have helped. To the harassed factory managers, atom bombs belonged in science fiction tales with spaceships and time machines. Warning articles had long since appeared in scientific journals, and even in Time and Life. But people could not grasp that this futuristic horror was upon them.
Yet it was.
Uranium had been disintegrating harmlessly through aeons. Human awareness of radioactivity was not fifty years old. For about forty years it had seemed a minor freak of nature. Then in 1932, the year before Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler had simultaneously come to power, an Englishman had discovered the neutron, the uncharged particle in atoms, and after only seven years of further unsettling discoveries in Italy, France, Germany, and America — seven years, a micro-second of historical time — the Germans had shown that neutron bombardment could split uranium atoms and release vast primordial energies.
In 1939, Kirby had attended a physicists’ convention where chilling news had started as a whisper and swelled to an uproar. Columbia University scientists, following up on the German experiments, had proved that a splitting uranium atom emitted, on the average, more than one neutron. This answered the key theoretical question: was a chain reaction in uranium possible? Ominous answer: yes. A new golden age of available power was thus opening. There was, however, another, and very horrible, aspect. An isotope discovered only four years earlier, called U-235 or actino-uranium, could conceivably fire off in a self-sustaining explosion of incalculable magnitude. But could any country produce enough pure U-235 to make bombs for use in this war? Or would some blessed fact of nature crop up, in dealing with large lumps instead of tiny laboratory quantities, that would render the whole doomsday project a harmless failure, a physical impossibility? Nobody on earth yet knew these things for sure.
So the race was on to isolate enough of the fearsome isotope to try to make bombs. On all the evidence of Palmer Kirby’s senses, and of the information available to him, Adolf Hitler’s scientists were going to win this race hands down. They had a formidable lead. British science and industry were already too strained for an all-out atomic bomb effort. Unless the United States could overtake the Germans, the superb Nazi war plants were likely to furnish the lunatic Führer with enough U-235 bombs to wipe out the world’s capitals one by one, until all governments grovelled to him,
Such was Palmer Kirby’s view of the actino-uranium picture. If the future really held that shape, what other military plans or operations mattered? What human relationships mattered?
In a black cloth coat with a silver fox collar, a tilted little gray hat, and gray gloves, Rhoda Henry was pacing back and forth at the train gate well before its arrival time. She was taking a chance on being seen meeting him; but he had been away almost a month, and this reunion was bound to be pivotal. Kirby did not yet know that she had written Pug to ask for a divorce, that the Pearl Harbor attack had intervened, and that she was now vaguely craw-fishing. All these disclosures now lay before her.
The letter to Pug had been a desperate thing. Several bad developments had made Rhoda spring like a frightened cat. For one thing, his letter from Moscow about the California had arrived; and though that was fine news, she had feared that next he might ask her to come to Hawaii. Palmer Kirby, a much less inhibited man than Pug, had wakened late-blooming lusts in her. She dreaded giving him up. She loved Washington, and detested life on Navy bases overseas. Kirby was right here in Washington, doing his hush-hush work, whatever it was. She had never asked; his presence was what mattered.
But at the time Pug’s letter came, her relationship with Kirby had been getting shaky. His work had taken him off on long trips. The anniversary of his wife’s death had dejected him. He had once again begun muttering about feeling guilty, and about breaking off. Thoroughly scared by a long lugubrious talk over dinner in a restaurant, she had gone with him one evening to his apartment, instead of bringing him to her house. By rotten luck
they had run straight into Madge and Jerry Knudsen in the lobby. Madge had a big mouth, and the Navy wives’ grapevine was the fastest communication network in the world. A nasty story might well be winging to Pug in Hawaii!
Pushed into this corner, in a spell of three straight days of sleet and rain, alone in the twelve-room Foxhall Road house, with Kirby off on another trip, and not telephoning her, Rhoda had sprung. Now that the children were grown, she had decided, only five or eight tolerable years were left to her before she shrivelled into an old dry crone. Life with Pug had run down. Kirby was a vigorous lover, a self-made wealthy man. He was mad about her, as Pug had not seemed for many years. Perhaps the collapse of the marriage was her own fault and she was not a very good person (some of this had crept into what she wrote to her husband), but it was now or never. Divorces among four-stripers were common, after all, as Navy families grew up and apart, and the long separations took their toll. Come to that, she knew a tangy tale or two about Madge Knudsen!
So off the letter had gone. Hard upon it, by the most appalling mischance, the Japanese had attacked, and blown all Rhoda’s little calculations to smithereens. Rhoda’s reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbor had been not admirable, perhaps, but human. After the shock, her first thought had been that the start of a war spelled a quick sharp rise in the prospects of naval officers. Commanding a battleship in the Pacific, Pug Henry was poised now for a brilliant recovery to — who could say? Certainly to flag rank; perhaps to Chief of Naval Operations! In asking for the divorce just now, had she blundered like the Wall Street man who held an oil stock for twenty years, and then sold out a week before the corporation struck a new field?