“Two more sets of screws coming fast, sir! This is an attack run!” He got to his knees and reached for his stool and then thought better of it and sat on the deck, his stool cradled between his legs, his eyes on his dials.
“Left full rudder!” Mealey snapped as he got to his feet. “Come back to zero zero zero!”
“Both ships have dropped charges, sir!” Cohen said.
Mako bucked and rolled under the impact of a dozen or more depth charges dropped by Eagle’s Feathers One and Three. A spray of water jetted across the Forward Engine Room and Chief John Barber scrambled to the fitting with a wrench in his hand and brought the stream down to a trickle.
“Damage reports!” Captain Mealey snapped. Sirocco spoke softly into his telephone set.
“Nothing major, Captain. Electrical power is being restored, circuit breakers jumped out for the lights and auxiliary systems. Some minor leaks, nothing serious. Few bruises and bumps but no broken bones.”
“Very well,” Captain Mealey said. “What do you hear, Nate?”
“Hard to hear anything right at the moment because of all the disturbance from the depth charges, sir,” Cohen said. “That’s why he isn’t pinging on us. But he’ll be back in a minute.”
Mealey touched Dick Smalley, the Gunner’s Mate who was manning the bow planes, on the shoulder.
“Our depth charge exploder mechanisms have a limit of what, four hundred feet, Gunner?”
“Yessir,” Smalley said. “But the book says if you screw the spring down to more than three seventy-five you might rupture the diaphragm and get a dud. Chief I know on a tin can told me that they had orders never to set charges for deeper than three fifty, sir and that they had failures even then.”
“Let’s hope their depth charges have the same limitation,” Mealey said, “but from the sound of that last barrage they seem to be deeper than that. If we can stay below his depth charges we can get out of here with nothing worse than a bad shaking up!”
The destroyer designated as Eagle swung back in a long curve, heading for the place where the bulk of the depth charges had been dropped.
“All lookouts keep their eyes open,” the destroyer Captain said. “Look for an oil slick, debris of any kind or large air bubbles.”
“I hope with you,” the Professor said softly to the younger man. “But I don’t think we got him! A beautiful attack! But I am sure this man down there is a thinker. It is easy only in the classroom, eh? Do we still have contact with him?”
The radio operator overheard the question and answered without being asked.
“Eagle’s Feather Two has resumed sonar search, sir.” A junior officer trotted on to the bridge with a message flimsy in his hand, saluted and handed over the message and then retreated.
“This is an intercepted message, sir,” the destroyer’s Captain said to the Professor. “The Captain of the battleship is reporting to the command at Truk that he has grounded his ship on the reef. Fires are still out of control. A list of casualties will follow later. At present he is estimating three hundred or more dead.”
“If this were an American movie we’d all be going through the ceremony of Hara-kari,” the Professor said with a small smile. “And then who would be left to catch this man underneath our keels, eh?”
“The ceremony is an honorable one!” The destroyer’s Captain spoke in stiff, formal tones.
“Oh, I grant you that!” the Professor said “But so wasteful when there is so much work to be done. Arte purire sua, the old Romans were fond of saying. ‘One perishes by one’s own cunning.’ This is a cunning fox we fight. We must help him perish by his own cunning!”
“Contact!” the radio operator’s voice was loud. “Eagle’s Feather Two has contact with the enemy, sir!” The destroyer’s Captain looked at his superior officer.
“Again, sir, would you like the honor of conducting this attack?”
“And again, no thank you. But I appreciate your courtesy.”
“Sir, this man below us is clever! I would feel better if you were in charge.”
“Very well,” the Professor said. “We will enjoy a joint effort, the two of us pitted against the one man below. I have one suggestion; we know that he turns to one side or the other as soon as one ship begins its high speed run to drop charges. Then he comes back to his original course to foil the other two who are attacking and staying well outside the first ship’s run.
“Eagle’s Feather Two has done all the sonar work so far and her commander must be impatient. So I suggest that you issue him orders to make a delayed attack up the middle of the attack plot and see if we can catch this fellow after he sneaks back on his original course, eh?”
The younger man nodded, a small grin touching his lips. The Professor was a tricky man, he had sent many a destroyer commander almost weeping in rage and frustration to his quarters at his anti-submarine school. He issued the necessary orders in a harsh, chopped voice and the destroyers under his command began to form up for the attack. As his own ship heeled in a tight turn and took position he nodded at the signal officer and a bright flag at the foremast yardarm snapped open as its binding cord was pulled and Eagle moved to the attack, its screws biting the water, the depth charge crews standing ready. The second assault on Mako was under way.
The first attack had done little real damage to the submarine. The electricians had quickly replaced the few light bulbs that had broken. The cork insulation that had rained down in the first burst of charges and the broken glass from gauge faces had been tidied up.
Ginty was swearing softly in the Forward Room as he massaged a purpling bruise on his massive thigh, suffered when he had been thrown from his feet against the face of one of the torpedo tubes. Dusty Rhodes wore a large bump on his forehead from hitting a torpedo tube rack. Johnny Paul, his face white, managed a smile.
“God! I’m glad that’s over!”
“Shit!” Ginty rumbled. “This is on’y the beginnin’! They’s twelve fucking tin cans up there and that means they got a lotta depth charges!” He looked at the small clock near the torpedo tube doors.
“It’s only zero nine hundred, means we got about nine, ten hours of daylight up there! Them fuckers got plenty of time to throw everything they got at us and time to run more charges out from that base they got inside the reef!”
In the After Torpedo Room Mike DeLucia looked at Grilley. “It ain’t fun, sir!”
Grilley nodded and squinted at a pressure gauge on the board next to the tubes. He did the mathematics in his head; 310 pounds of sea pressure divided by 44.4 pounds for each 100 feet. He blinked his eyes in surprise: 700 feet?
“My God,” he said in a wondering tone. “We’re at seven hundred feet!” In a bunk up near the overhead on the port side a man began to sob uncontrollably. Grilley moved to the bunk and stood on tiptoe so his head was just above the bunk rail. He saw the man’s contorted face, the tears staining his cheeks.
“We’re gonna die!” the man sobbed, spittle spraying from his bitten, bloody lips.
Grilley felt suddenly helpless. He reached out hesitantly and put his hand on the man’s shoulder and felt his body shaking violently. He patted the bare shoulder.
“You’re not going to die, none of us is going to die! Look at that pressure gauge over there! We’re down at seven hundred feet! Depth charges can’t hurt us down that deep, they just make a lot of noise! The Captain knows what he’s doing. It’s going to be noisy for a few more hours but we’ll be all right!”
The man’s head turned toward him and Grilley saw the naked fear in the man’s eyes. The man’s mouth opened and then shut and Grilley saw his teeth clamp together on his lower lip and bite in and a fresh stream of blood ran down the man’s chin. He patted the shaking shoulder again.
“Now get yourself under control, fella! We’re going to need you for another reload in a little while, okay?”
He turned away, a sick feeling in his stomach. How did you deal with that kind of terrible fear? DeLucia
saw the indecision on Grilley’s face and, with the wisdom of years of submarine service, spoke up.
“You heard the Lieutenant! Were under any depth charges that go off so they ain’t gonna do any harm! The Old Man knows what he’s doing! Got right under twelve Jap destroyers and punched that Jap battleship fulla holes, didn’t he? So he knows what he’s doin’! All you guys button your fucking lips and listen to me. And to the Lieutenant. All we got to do is wait it out!”
“That’s what I don’t like,” one of the reload crew said. “While we’re waitin’ the Jap is figurin’ things out. Japs are good at figurin’ things out, Mike, real good! They’ll figure what we’re doin’ and they’ll stay after us!”
“They can figure all they want but they won’t know,” Grilley said. “Now let’s knock off the talking and noise.”
In the Control Room Captain Mealey was studying Sirocco’s plotting board. He reached for an eraser hanging from the edge of the gyro table by a cord and erased a long pencil mark left by the pencil Sirocco was holding when he was thrown across the gyro table.
“We’ve got five ships on the plot, Joe. Where are the other eight destroyers?”
“I lost contact with Gamma, the single-screw ships we had earlier, Captain,” Cohen said. “All I have now is the Delta group, four fast ships with twin screws, the ones who have been attacking.” He rattled off four sets of bearings and Sirocco plotted them in on his chart.
“They’re sitting up there waiting to see what we’re going to do,” Captain Mealey said. “Aaron, what do you have on that bathythermograph?”
The bathythermograph, a crude instrument, measured the temperature of the water and the submarine’s depth in a line scrawled by a tiny stylus on a piece of smoked paper. Some years earlier oceanographers had discovered that there were random areas in the oceans that were saltier than the surrounding waters. The saltier areas were colder by a few degrees than the water around them and dense enough to cause a sonar beam to deflect, or bounce off them and continue without bouncing back to the transmitting ship’s receiver. The effect was that the searching ship would believe its sonar beam had hit nothing and therefore there was no ship in the area.
If a submarine could locate one of those saltier areas, or “layers” as they were called, and could stay under it, the chances of being detected by searching ships was very small. The hunters could not hear the submarine. Nor could the submarine hear the hunters but that drawback was acceptable to a submarine under attack.
“All isothermal, sir,” Aaron said. “No layers.”
A ringing ping! hit the ship and then another and another.
“Here they come!” Cohen said. “One, two, no, three ships coming very fast!”
The growing thunder of the destroyers moving to the attack shook Mako’s hull. Within Mako the crew could hear the sharp “crack!” of the depth charge exploder mechanisms going off and then the massive, shattering, thundering explosions began, shaking Mako like a rat in the teeth of a terrier. Lights shattered and cork insulation rained down, gauge glasses shattered, the glass shards scattering across the deck. Ginty shook his head, as a prize fighter will when he is badly hurt, his teeth clamping tightly together as he fought the terrible impulse to scream aloud. Dusty Rhodes reached for a towel on a bunk and fought his way aft, clutching at the torpedo skids, grabbing at handholds to keep his feet as Mako bucked and shook under the violent attack. He reached an after bunk and used the towel to stanch the flow of blood from the face of a vacant-eyed man who had been thrown upward out of the bunk he was lying into the springs of the bunk above him. Rhodes wiped the blood from the man’s face and slapped him lightly on the cheek, slapped him again very lightly and the man’s eyes came into focus.
“You’re not hurt, just a couple of scratches,” he said. “Trouble with you, sailor, is you haven’t got any lead in your ass! You went flying right up in the air when those charges went off!”
The man managed a wry grin. “Last time we had reload drill you told me to get the lead outa my ass, Chief! Now you’re saying I got it outa my ass and they’s why I went flyin’ up inna air!” Rhodes looked at him narrowly, knowing that the line between jocularity and a screaming loss of control was very narrow. He punched the man on the shoulder lightly.
“Won’t ever tell you that you’ve got lead in your ass again,” he said solemnly. He went back forward to where Ginty stood.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said to Ginty, “he’s near the edge.”
“Makes three I got to watch,” Ginty growled. “That kid, the seaman we took aboard last time in, up there in the top bunk. He’s passed out and he’s shit himself if you ain’t smelled it yet! And this fuck head wearin’ the telephones is like an old lady, so fuckin’ scared I don’t think he can talk!”
“I can so!” the man said, his chin chattering up and down. “I can do my fuckin’ job!”
“Do it then and stop slobberin’ spit all over the fuckin’ telephone mouthpiece!” Ginty said.
Captain Mealey studied the faces of the depth gauges in front of the bow and stern planesmen. The long black needles read 690 feet.
“Seven hundred feet,” he said in a low voice. “Keep us at seven hundred feet!” He turned to Sirocco.
“I’m going to stay this deep, she seems to be taking it, and go right out of here! I think we can take anything they throw at us. God knows it couldn’t be any worse than that last attack!” He looked over at the bathythermograph.
“Maybe if we can keep going we can find a layer.”
“Here they come again!” Cohen said.
Chapter 19
“Send Eagle’s Feather Two up the enemy’s track, please,” the Professor’s voice was gentle but underneath the soft tones there was the assurance of command. “I want to know, exactly, how deep the enemy is running.” He took off his billed cap and rubbed his bald head and then smoothed the ruff of gray hair that fringed his head. He waited, his face serene.
“Eagle Feather Two reports enemy is steady on a course of zero zero zero, sir and he is at depth seven hundred feet, seven zero zero feet, sir,” the radio operator on Eagle’s bridge said.
“Seven hundred!” the professor’s eyebrows went upward a fraction of an inch. “We set our charges too shallowly!”
“Our experience, sir, has been that American submarines do not operate below four hundred feet sir,” the destroyer captain’s face was stricken. “That is why I ordered the depth charges set at five hundred feet.”
“All life is an experience, one new experience after another,” the Professor said kindly. “So now we have learned something. The submarine is relatively safe from attacks at seven hundred feet. We can do him no structural damage of any consequence. If he makes a mistake, comes up from that depth for any reason, then we can get him but,” he paused. “Will you please call your gunnery officer to the bridge, Isoruku?” He used the younger man’s given name deliberately, to soften the rebuff he had just given.
The Gunnery Officer, a young Lieutenant, hastily buttoned his uniform jacket and set his hat straight on his head as he went toward the ladder that led to the bridge.
Why does he want to see me? he said to himself. One depth charge did not explode, that fool of a gunner forgot to pull out the safely key, but that old man couldn’t know that, he couldn’t count each explosion in the middle of an attack. Or could he? He walked out on the bridge and stood rigidly at attention.
“Oh, stand at ease, sir,” the Professor said. “I have a technical question to ask you. What is the very deepest, the absolute maximum you can set our depth charges to explode?”
The Lieutenant let his breath out slowly and carefully, he didn’t want his apprehension to show.
“With the new exploder mechanisms, sir, seven hundred feet. But the instruction manuals all say that six hundred and seventy-five feet is the maximum for consistent performance. When the tension spring is screwed up to seven hundred feet the pressure on the diaphragm is excessive and there is a danger
of diaphragm failure. That would mean no explosion, sir.”
“But you rechecked each diaphragm on my orders, did you not? And you replaced all diaphragms that were not seated properly or appeared to be old or defective?”
“Yes, sir. All the ships in the squadron did this.”
“So we have good diaphragms which means we have a certain explosion of the depth charge at six hundred and seventy-five feet but an uncertain explosion at seven hundred feet?”
The Lieutenant saw the trap yawning at his feet. “I would say that, sir, if we could be sure of every diaphragm. Even some of the replacements we unpacked had cracks in them.”
“I won’t hold you personally responsible for what some civilian has manufactured, young man,” the Professor smiled gently. “Tell me if I am correct if I say this: If all the diaphragms in the exploders are properly made, if they are all carefully seated, if we use care in exerting maximum spring pressure against the diaphragms then we could expect performance at seven hundred feet? The reason I ask is that the enemy submarine is now cruising at that depth.”
“At seven hundred feet?” the gunnery officer’s eyes opened in surprise.
“Precisely,” the Professor said. “Now please answer my questions.”
“We found over twenty percent of the diaphragms in the depth charges to be defective sir. Those were replaced.” The friendly air of the small man with the four circles of salt-stained gold on his rumpled jacket sleeve emboldened the young Lieutenant.
“I would say that we have a better than eight-to-one chance that all our depth charges will function at seven hundred feet, sir!”
“Good!” the Professor said. “I am always happy to see young officers who are sure of themselves, even at eight-to-one-odds! Set all depth charges on the racks at seven hundred feet. Do not change the settings on the Y-gun charges. If he decides to come up a little shallower I don’t want to waste time re-setting charges.” He turned to the destroyer’s Captain.
Final Harbor (The Silent War Book 1) Page 21