Bob Edge leaned over the hatch to the Control Room, his face worried.
“The periscope is stuck, Captain. Won’t come down!”
“What do you mean, won’t come down?” Mealey snapped. “Didn’t you lower it when we started deep?”
“No, sir,” Edge said. “That is, Botts didn’t lower it, sir.”
“Try again,” Mealey said. He turned to Simms. “Allow for the drag of the periscope on your dive angle.”
“Ain’t no drag, Captain,” Dick Smalley said as he grunted and strained at the big brass wheel that controlled the bow planes. “Feels natural, just as if the ‘scope were housed, sir.”
“Try it again,” Mealey ordered. He waited, listening to the two men in the Conning Tower talking in low voices.
“Won’t budge, sir,” Edge called down.
“Get an electrician and an auxiliaryman to look at it,” Mealey said to Sirocco. “The depth charges must have jammed something. Nate, what do you hear?”
“Three sets of twin screws well aft of us, sir, milling around.” He paused as a series of rumbling explosions shook Mako slightly.
“Those are the single screw ships up ahead of us, sir. They’re dropping charges out there.”
“Let ‘em drop!” Mealey grunted.
The minutes wore on. The air in Mako’s hull grew more fetid. Men gasped for breath after the slightest exertion. Then the pinging started again, slowly.
“I think you sank his best sound man,” Cohen said to Captain Mealey. “This one doesn’t get on us nearly as quickly and he doesn’t fasten to us like they were doing early. But the gonif has got us now!” The pinging increased in rapidity and Cohen raised his voice slightly.
“Here they come again, sir!”
The explosions battered at Mako, thundering through the thin hull. Men flinched at each crashing sound. Captain Mealey stood at the gyro table, where he had stood during most of the depth charging attacks, his face set and grim, his eyes studying the chart.
“We’re going to keep on taking it!” he said to Sirocco. “It’s what, three hours to full dark? We’ve got about four hours left in the batteries so there’s nothing else to do!”
An hour went by and the tension in Mako, long since near the point of being unendurable, rose even further. In the Forward Engine Room a sweating machinist mate, his eyes blank with utter terror, reached into a tool box and grabbed a ball peen hammer and began to beat on the deck.
“Come and get us, God damn you!” he screamed. The hammer drummed on the steel deck. “Come and get us! Come and get us!”
John Barber whipped a 12-inch crescent wrench out of his hip pocket and swung it. The man went down, blood pouring out of his nose and one ear.
“Drag him up forward by the evaporators,” Barber said. “Any more you clowns want to tell those people topside to come and get us, tell me first.”
Watching the stylus on the bathythermograph scratch gently against the smoked card, Aaron saw the needle move sharply to one side.
“Layer!” be breathed and then louder, “Layer! Sir!”
Captain Mealey pushed against Sirocco in his eagerness to get to the bathythermograph. He watched the needle.
“Thank God!” he breathed. Aaron’s broad face brightened and he smiled gently.
Another hour went by with no sound from the enemy. Twice during the hour the needle of the bathythermograph began to move back toward its previous even curve and twice Captain Mealey changed course and depth to keep Mako within and beneath the layer of colder, saltier, water.
Another two hours slipped by. Cohen had long ago lost contact with the enemy ships. Captain Mealey stood at the gyro table, the sweat dripping from his chin. Mako continued to plod through the sea, her crew near physical collapse.
“What time is it?” Captain Mealey asked.
“Twenty-one hundred, Captain,” Sirocco said.
“How long since we lost contact, Nate?”
“Almost three hours sir. No, sorry, almost four hours.”
“How much have we got left in the battery?” Mealey said to Sirocco. He waited while Sirocco talked to Chief Hendershot, his eyes taking in the scene in the Control Room.
Sirocco, standing waiting for the answer to his question, looked to be physically ill. His big frame sagged and his craggy face seemed to have acquired deeply graven lines.
Lieut. Peter Simms was in a state of near collapse, hanging on to the Conning Tower ladder for support. His eyes were closed and his chest was heaving spasmodically as his lungs fought for air in the fetid heat. Under foot the deck was greasy with sweat and there were puddles of condensation that seemed to reappear magically as soon as they were wiped up. Mealey looked at the thermometer. It read 115 degrees. Alongside it the humidity indicator read 100 percent.
“The Chief in Maneuvering reports that at this speed we’ve got maybe an hour, probably less, before we run out of power,” Sirocco said slowly. Captain Mealey nodded and his right hand went up and his forefinger brushed his mustache.
“If we go, we go fighting!” he said. He nodded at Sirocco.
“Pass the word to open the water-tight doors. Open the tube outer doors at one hundred feet. Stand by for Battle Surface action! Stand by to surface!”
The telephone talkers repeated the order and Mako’s crew began to stir, to come alive, moving slowly, fighting for breath in the oxygen-depleted air. The deck gun crews crowded into the Control Room with the machine gunners. Captain Mealey climbed into the Conning Tower.
“Surface! Surface! Surface!”
The men on the bow and stern planes threw their weight against the heavy brass wheels, sobbing with their effort. In the Maneuvering Room a haggard, sweat-drenched Chief Hendershot husbanded the fading storage batteries as Mako slanted upward through the sea. The bridge broke water and Captain Mealey opened the hatch and fought his way to the bridge through a rush of water. Three lookouts followed him and climbed up into the periscope shears. They began to report almost immediately, all clear to port, starboard, astern and forward.
Captain Mealey looked around. The night was pitch black and a very light rain was falling.
“Secure Battle Surface stations,” he said. “All main engines all ahead full. Shift to hydraulic power on the helm. Executive Officer to the bridge!”
Sirocco climbed wearily up to the bridge, relishing the gush of fresh night air that was whipping down the hatch as the four big diesels roared into life and began to pull a suction through the after end of the ship.
“That’s why we couldn’t raise or lower the periscope,” Captain Mealey said. He pointed and Sirocco saw the long, slim, attack periscope bent over in an almost 180 degree angle, its lens face down near the main deck on the starboard side.
“Bridge!” The after lookout’s voice was high, excited. “Bridge, we ain’t got an after deck gun!”
Mealey edged back on to the cigaret deck and went to the rail and looked down. Where the squat 5.25 gun had stood was a gaping hole in the wooden deck. He dropped down on the deck, followed by Sirocco and the two men knelt at the edge of the hole. They could see the heavy steel bracing that had supported the gun. The braces were torn and bent.
“My God!” Sirocco said. He hoisted himself back up on the cigaret deck and Mealey followed him.
“Captain!” Don Grilley’s voice was strangled, almost unintelligible. Mealey rushed to the small bridge. Grilley was pointing down at the forward deck, his arm and body shaking violently.
There, sitting squarely on one of its flat ends near the forward deck gun, was a Japanese depth charge.
It was Dusty Rhodes who finally figured out what to do with the depth charge. After following Cohen’s suggestion that a careful copy be made for Naval Intelligence of the characters on the face of the depth charge exploder plate, Rhodes got a small rubber boat that was stowed in the after end of the Forward Torpedo Room bilge. The boat was unrolled and laid beside the depth charge and then Rhodes and Ginty lifted the heavy charge and pla
ced it carefully on its side in the fabric and rubber folds of the boat and inflated the boat. They lashed a dozen turns of heaving line around the boat and depth charge and, standing knee-deep in water as Captain Mealey flooded down forward, they gently pushed the rubber boat and its deadly load off the ship after Rhodes had carefully made two small holes in the boat’s fabric.
As the boat drifted away, the air hissing slowly out of the two small holes, Mako raced away from the area.
Later that night Mako’s message to the submarine command at Pearl Harbor caused a duty officer to begin making telephone calls and a hastily arranged-for Staff breakfast meeting was held. On those submarines at sea on patrol where the message was intercepted and decoded there was joy and, inevitably, some envy. It read:
Please give kudos to those people who sent us the Kongo. BB arrived on schedule at northeast entrance, Truk.
Mako dove under twelve destroyer escort and fired ten repeat ten torpedoes at BB, scoring six repeat six hits. When last seen target had large fires forward and what appeared to be a substantial explosion in that area, with heavy list to starboard, but still under way slowly on one screw. Believe her captain may have been trying to beach his ship on the reef. Mako does no further report on target because of enemy retaliation which was of unprecedented ferocity.
Mako endured ten hours of repeated depth charge attacks. Near end of period Mako surfaced to periscope depth and fired one- torpedo at Fubuki-class destroyer, hitting it amidships and breaking it in two. Unable to stick around for second look but heard unmistakable breaking-up noises on sonar.
Mako regretfully reports death in action of Machinist Mate Third Class Joseph P. Richards, who was thrown against the starboard engine in the forward engine-room, fracturing his skull. The remains were buried at sea in the traditional service.
Mako reports sustaining considerable and severe materiel damage. Attack periscope is bent over until it touches deck. After deck gun has disappeared from its mount. Much of main deck has been torn away. Exhaust line welds in both engine rooms have been shattered. Starboard propeller shaft believed bent. After Trim tank ruptured. Mako is returning home for repairs.
Two nights later as Mako plowed steadily toward Pearl Harbor at a steady 18 knots Lieut. Nathan Cohen came to the bridge and handed Captain Mealey a message. Mealey held the message up in the bright moonlight so he could read it.
To U.S.S. Mako
From COMSUBPACS:
Well done Mako and well done again. Intelligence reports that Mako scored seven repeat seven hits on target. The target is now aground on the reef east of the Northeast Passage, Truk, and considered to be out of action for at least two years. Casualty list given as three hundred seventy-five dead. Mako also gets confirmed sinking of a Fubuki destroyer with all hands.
COMSUBPAC congratulates Captain Mealey on his aggressive patrol and his fourth gold stripe. We are waiting to welcome all hands. Again, a hearty well done to Mako’s Captain, Wardroom and crew.
Captain Mealey handed the message to Joe Sirocco, who had followed Nate Cohen to the bridge. Sirocco read the message and then stuck out his big hand.
“Congratulations, sir, on your promotion. You’ve earned it.”
“Thank you, Joe, but damn it, she didn’t sink! They beached her on the reef. With seven fish in her she should have sunk!”
“She’s out of commission for two years, Skipper. We had our cake and paid for it and you can eat it with a good appetite. Hitting a battleship guarded by twelve destroyers, hitting it seven times and putting it out of commission and sinking a Fubuki, that’s a whole plateful of cake!”
“I suppose you’re right,” Mealey said slowly. “But this means that I go ashore! They don’t put four-stripe captains in command of a submarine.”
“There’s that,” Sirocco agreed. “But at least you can be in a position to tell others how to do what they’re supposed to do. And I’m glad that you decided to say the cause of Richard’s death was due to battle action, sir.”
“Against my better wishes, Mister,” Mealey said shortly. “I shouldn’t have let you and Grilley change my mind!”
Chapter 20
Lieut. Comdr. Arthur Hinman’s eyes opened slowly and he rolled his head on the soft pillow, trying to remember where he was. He lay quietly for a moment, thinking. Then he smelled the faint odor of the sea and a harbor mixed with the reek of auto exhaust fumes coming through the opened window and the foreign scent of a woman’s perfume.
San Francisco.
He turned his head and looked at Joan Richards. Her crisp black hair was slightly tousled. Her eyes were closed and her full breasts were rising and falling slowly and evenly under the sheet and light blanket. He studied her face in the morning light. Without make-up her skin was clear with a rosy tint underneath. Her full lips were parted slightly, showing her front teeth. He reached out and very softly touched her hair. Her eyes opened and closed and then opened again and she smiled, a slow, soft smile.
“You’re staring at me,” she said.
“Not staring, adoring,” he said. “Did you know that you have flawless skin? It’s marvelous!”
“Of course.” She covered her mouth with one hand and yawned hugely. “You’ve been telling me for a week that I’m perfect so I guess I am. But is that all you’re going to do, just lie there and stare at me? Does a woman get a cup of coffee in this miserable life or has the war stopped room service and morning coffee?”
“I’ll call right now,” he said, throwing back the covers. He stood up beside the bed and her eyes widened.
“Forget the coffee for a little while! This woman can’t ignore a challenge like that! Get back in here, man!” He looked down at himself and grinned and got back into bed.
“Not heavy, romantic love,” she murmured as she rolled onto her side facing him. “Just fun and games on Saturday morning in old San Francisco, okay?”
“You’re the Captain,” he said, fitting himself to her. “You give the orders and I’ll obey them.”
“Now hear this!” she said. She put a leg across him and reached downward with her hand. “You’ve got the right angle on the bow and the range is right and you can load and fire that torpedo when ready! How’s that? Am I learning your submarine talk?”
“You’re doing fine,” he said. He moved in response to her guiding hand and then moved strongly and smoothly and as she gasped and closed her eyes he put his hand around her buttocks and drew himself deep into her.
Later they lay side by side, her head on his muscled arm.
“It was never like this before,” she said softly. “All week long it’s been so good! So absolutely wonderful!
“Women, girls too, dream, you know. They dream of the man who truly cares about the woman, the man who cares enough to make sure that the woman’s every need is satisfied. But that dream hardly ever comes true. Now it’s come true for me.” She sighed and let her fingers trail across his shoulder. She turned her face to him, her dark blue eyes almost black in the light.
“I want you to believe that, I truly want you to believe it!”
“I do believe,” he said gravely. “Simply because it has been the same for me. In all honesty, it was good before, with Marie.” He said the name of his dead wife with ease. “It was good. But it was different. Not like it is with you. And now it is my turn to tell you something and I ask you to believe me.” He looked at her, his eyes questioning. She nodded.
“I used to lie in my bunk on Mako,” he said, “remembering, after she was gone. I’d remember every detail of how it was with her, every detail. Now I can’t remember those details. It’s all fuzzy. Each day it gets more and more blurred. Now it’s just a warm and pleasant memory, no details at all. That’s because of you and what you mean to me.”
She reached over, squirming, and kissed his stubbled chin.
“That is a very beautiful thing to say to a woman,” she said softly. “It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. But if you don’t get me so
me coffee I’ll die! And I get to use the shower first!” She got out of bed and went to the door of the bathroom, her firm buttocks jiggling slightly. He put his arm in back of his head and grinned at her as she stopped at the door and looked back.
“You have got the finest ass this side of the Pecos River,” he said lazily. “Now get it in the shower while I call down for coffee. Then we’ll go down below and I’ll feed you.”
“It’s ‘down stairs’ here on land, sailor and I want orange juice, a stack of wheat cakes and a yard of pork sausage and then I’ll be ready to eat breakfast!” She closed the door to the bathroom behind her and he heard the water in the shower begin to drum.
The romance between the two had been slow to start. During the first week of the tour Hinman had resented Joan’s impatient coaching, her criticisms of his diction and delivery. When he would flare up against her criticism she had shrugged, lit a cigaret and changed the subject. When he had cooled down she would begin again, never wavering in her determination to make his delivery natural, his handling of reporters, friendly and hostile, smoother. It was during the second week that he realized that she was a polished professional in her own line and that her advice was sound. He realized as well that she was more than just a woman in a Navy uniform doing a job. He saw in her the deep, bubbling sense of humor that he had seen in Marie, the clear distrust of anything phony or artificial and the obvious zest she had for life itself.
One evening, a few days after he had begun to appreciate Joan Richards for the singular person she was, they dined in his hotel suite after a banquet at which each had only nibbled at the salad. He finished a piece of chocolate cake that was dessert and at the motion of her fork reached over and appropriated her piece of cake. As he ate it he began to talk.
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