Final Harbor (The Silent War Book 1)

by Harry Homewood

  “There’s the problem with Mrs. Simms,” Agnes Mealey said.

  “Problem?” Hinman said.

  “Before you returned from your last patrol, before Arvin took over the Mako, it was common knowledge among the 0-wives that Mary Simms had, shall I say, a boarder? A civilian engineer who had been sent out here to figure out how to right the Oklahoma and the other sunken battleships. I am told she was very careful. She sent her small daughter to stay with Gloria Brannon while she entertained, I hope that’s the right word, words and their meanings change so much these days, while she entertained her boarder.”

  “Simms found out about it,” Mealey said. “He asked me for permission to stay aboard Mako during the refit, that was on the day you left for the states. I refused and he went to the BOQ.”

  “And now?” Hinman asked.

  “Mary Simms and her daughter left for the States before Mako returned from this patrol,” Agnes Mealey said. “There had been a lot of talk that the civilian was married with four children. That was wrong, he’s a widower with two children, teenagers. I have heard that Mary Simms is filing for divorce and will marry the civilian as soon as the divorce is final.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Bob Rudd said, his eyes opening wide in his beefy red face.

  “You have to go to the weekly tea parties at the O-Club, the cat-fights as Arvin calls them, to find out what’s going on,” Agnes Mealey said, smiling,

  “Maybe that will solve his problem,” Rudd said.

  “I don’t think so,” Captain Mealey said. He frowned. “It could destroy what little self-confidence the man has in himself. It isn’t the most comforting thing to know some civilian has crept into your bed while you’re at sea and your wife prefers the civilian!”

  “Oh, Arvin!” Mrs. Mealey said. “From what I’ve heard about Peter Simms I don’t think he’s without blame.” Then, with the finely honed sense of a senior Naval officer’s wife, she deftly steered the conversation into safer channels. The evening ended pleasantly and as Mealey walked Rudd and Hinman to their car he put his hand on Hinman’s arm.

  “I read your patrol report very carefully. I followed your lead on the exploders; I helped Chief Rhodes and Ginty modify them. What an incredible animal that man Ginty is! I also allowed for a deeper run on the torpedoes than the depth settings would show. You’ll find all that information in a sealed envelope in your quarters, sir.” He touched his white mustache.

  “We’re going to find out how much deeper the fish run,” Rudd said. “I wanted to use Mako for those tests but Mealey has smashed the old bucket up so badly that we can’t do that as soon as I want it done. Plunger is due in, in a few days. We’ll use her for the test firings.”

  Driving back to the BOQ where Hinman was quartered, Bob Rudd turned to Hinman.

  “I’m afraid that this time you’re in Pearl it’s going to be hello and goodbye, Art. Mako will report in the SouWestPac command at the end of your next run. General MacArthur wants to get his island-hopping campaign in high gear and he’s made a strong case for more submarines to operate out of Australia.”

  “I hate to leave your command, Bob,” Hinman said.

  “I don’t like to lose you. But we’re going to have to do a lot of talking about certain things. I’ll give you the broad picture right now; don’t modify any exploders unless you put them back the way they were before you bring any fish in to Australia. The command down there is run by old Gun Club boys and they think that exploder is holy! They’ll have your ass in ribbons if they find out you’ve touched the exploders! If it were me, and it isn’t, I know, I’d modify the damned exploders and if I had to bring any fish back I’d change them back and not say one word!”

  “That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?” Hinman said. “If I modify the exploders and get results and bring back fish with the exploders back as they were and say nothing, then those people down there will have a stronger case than ever for not even touching those exploders. Does that make sense to you?”

  “No,” Rudd said, “but it protects your ass, friend. We’re doing our best here to put pressure on them. If Nimitz wasn’t so busy, he’s on our side I think, if he wasn’t so busy we could end this damned argument in a month. Just be patient.

  “Another thing; when you tie up at Brisbane or Freemantle, whichever, you’ll be tying up in a political hornet’s nest. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, get caught up in that meat grinder or you’ll wind up as two pounds of hamburger! Keep your patrol reports as lean as you can write them, say nothing or less than that to the Command ashore and try to keep your people from talking. Now one other thing that I want to tell you.

  “If you have anything to say to me, for my ears only, you put it in a sealed envelope and hand it over to a dude on the Staff down there, Lieut. Comdr. Gene Puser. He’s my man, my eyes and ears down there. He’s absolutely trustworthy. What I learn from him I tell to Nimitz, so bear that in mind.” He stopped the car at the BOQ building.

  “Keep all of this to yourself, Art. You’ll be around for a while yet, gonna take some time to get Mako ready for the sea. We’ll talk about this a lot more. When Plunger comes in I’d like to have you aboard as an observer when we fire some test fish through a net. I think we can end this crap about the fish not running deeper than they’re set for right away if we have some proof.”

  Hinman yawned and looked up at the stars. They looked close enough to touch. He walked forward to the bridge where Joe Sirocco was being relieved of his watch.

  “Will you send me a cup of hot coffee when you go below, Joe?” Hinman asked. “But no doughnuts or sweet rolls.”

  “If it’s all right with you I’ll bring a cup back topside and drink it with you,” Sirocco said. “I’ve got to take morning stars in an hour or so.”

  “Fine,” Hinman said. He grinned at Nate Cohen, who had taken over the bridge watch.

  “How you doing, Ears?” he asked, using the nickname the crew had given to the Communications Officer.

  “Fine Captain, just fine. It’s like old times with you back. I realized that when I found the rubber spider in my bunk!”

  “Yeah, but you spoiled it,” Hinman said. “You Reserves have no respect for Naval tradition. You’re supposed to laugh when the Captain tells a joke and when you find a rubber spider in your bunk you’re supposed to holler and carry on!”

  “The Talmud teaches logic and reason, among many other things, Captain,” Cohen said. “Both argued against the presence of a tarantula on a submarine, especially a spider with only six legs instead of the eight it should have.”

  Dusty Rhodes walked into the Forward Torpedo Room where Ginty had just taken over the morning four-to-eight watch at the torpedo tubes. Ginty was sitting in a canvas chair in front of the tubes, sipping at a cup of coffee.

  “What the hell you doin’ up, Chief? They’s another chair over there outboard of that warhead. Get it out and sit a bit. Grabby Grabnas brought me up a fresh pitcher of coffee. Another cup around here someplace. Damned coffee is strong enough to kill you! I think that fuckin’ cook back there makes it double strong on the morning watch so the son of a bitch can stay awake long enough to cook chow! Put this stuff in a fish the son of a bitch would run at ninety knots!”

  Rhodes unfolded the chair and sat down and took the cup of coffee Ginty poured for him.

  “Buncha shit, this modifying the exploders is okay if you operate out of Pearl but put ‘em back the way they were if you go into Australia!” Ginty growled. “Lotta fuckin’ work, Chief! Why in the hell can’t those people get their heads together and say the exploders is ding boo how and fix ‘em so they’ll work?

  “Hell, Grilley told me that even after Cap’n Rudd fired those exercise fish out of Plunger and found the fish runnin’ eight to fourteen feet deeper than the depth setting, Grilley told me that those Admirals didn’t believe it! Hell, any damned fool of a third class torpedoman could tell you that if you put a bigger warhead out in front of that fish that it’s gotta ru
n deeper than it would with the regular warhead on it! Those fuckin’ Admirals are going to ruin this man’s Navy!”

  “Admirals live in a different world, Ginch,” Rhodes said, his voice patient. “Any Admiral who’s a member of the Gun Club, any of those people who spent any time in ordnance work, design and testing torpedoes, is going to think that whatever Newport says is the Holy Gospel. Haines, that Warrant who runs the exploder shop at Pearl, told me that Rudd is putting together so much evidence about the exploders and the deep running that pretty soon even the Gun Club will have to sit up and take notice.” He paused. “I saw the Old Man up here again yesterday afternoon.”

  “Yeah,” Ginty said. “He comes up every afternoon after he wakes up. Bullshits with all hands. Messes up my daily work routines. Tells his lousy jokes and expects everyone to laugh. He likes to keep everyone loose as a goose.”

  “He’s got the whole ship loose,” Rhodes said. “Worries me. I laid into DeLucia back aft the other day for letting stuff get adrift in his room and Hindu tells me that after I went forward the people back there started calling me ‘Mealey Junior!’ ”

  “Shit!” Ginty growled. “Keep crackin’ down! Some of these war-time sailors, an officer smiles at ‘em and says hello and they think they can throw the soojie rag in the bucket and knock off scrubbin’ paintwork! Some of these Fleet-boat sailors ought to do some time in an S-boat where you got four times as much work to do and only half as many men. The Old Man gonna stay on the surface again today? We got to be gettin’ close enough to the Islands to be divin’ mornings and runnin’ submerged all day. They must have so many Japs in those Islands by now that there’s two in every coconut tree along the beaches!”

  “I hear he’s going to stay on the surface as long as he can,” Rhodes said. “That’s a change that Captain Rudd made. Rudd says that some skippers start all-day dives one day out of Pearl and waste too much time getting on station.” He stood up and stretched his arms until his big shoulder muscles cracked.

  “Thanks for the coffee. You’d better check the room and tie down everything that might come loose. The Radio people say there’s a big storm to the west. Someone over there, forget which boat, reported it. We might be in it in a day or two. Can’t be a typhoon this time of year.”

  “Don’t shit yourself!” Ginty said. “I put sixteen years out here on the Asiatic Station and I seen typhoons in every damned month of the year! Typhoons ain’t anything to fuck with, Chief. On the S-37 we run into one had seas a hundred feet high and I shit you not! Fuckin’ wind blew the wind gauge right off’n the periscope shears, musta been blowin’ a hundred and twenty knots! Couldn’t submerge because when we tried it we’d be at a hundred feet one minute and then we’d be down to two hundred and fifty feet. So we had to ride it out rigged for dive on the surface. You want misery you ride an S-boat in that kind of weather!”

  Rhodes nodded and went aft to the Crew’s Mess to see what Johnny Johnson, the Ship’s Cook, had made for the morning meal. Usually the dour cook whipped up a batch of doughnuts or sweet rolls. This morning it was doughnuts. Rhodes picked up two of the doughnuts, drew a cup of coffee from the urn and went in to sit at a table in the mess room. Chief John Barber was sitting there with a cup of coffee. One of his off-duty firemen sat at another table. Barber stared at the man until he got the message and picked up his coffee cup and left the compartment.

  “Get your fuel injector problem licked?” Rhodes asked.

  “Yeah,” Barber grunted. “You got to tell these people the same things over and over every day. And even then they’ll forget to clean the fuel strainers. Gonna start kicking me some ass pretty damned soon. Damned people are getting sloppy!” He got up and drew another cup of coffee for himself.

  “Wanted to talk to you before this but I couldn’t find the time when we were alone,” Barber said as he sat down. He dropped his voice so the ship’s cook, busy in his tiny galley, couldn’t hear.

  “I had a pretty bad time after the last run. I hit that kid Richards a little too hard. Didn’t mean to do that, no way! But when he started beating on the deck plates with that hammer and hollering for the Japs to come and get us, after all that depth charging we’d taken, it did something to me inside. I never felt that way before about anything or anyone! I hit him too hard with that wrench.

  “I was pretty shook up afterward. Had bad dreams. Finally I had to tell Dottie about it and she told your wife and June came right over to the house. She asked me and Dottie to go into the bedroom with her and we sat on the bed and she sat on the floor and she never left the room or moved but she sort of went away. You know what I mean?”

  “She meditates,” Rhodes said. “That’s what she calls it. She talks to the old gods.”

  “Yeah,” Barber grunted. “Spooky as hell! She gets that blank look and she doesn’t hear anything you say to her. Finally she got up and went out in the kitchen and Dottie made coffee and then June sat there and told me that Richards was all right. She said that what I did had been planned that way, that Richards was supposed to go back to wherever he came from and that I was the one who was supposed to send him back. Dusty, that’s spooky!

  “Then she got up and she put her hands on my head and she said I wouldn’t have any more dreams and by God, I didn’t have any of those dreams anymore! How does she do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “All I know is that what she does is called ‘Kahuna,’ and it’s very, very old. Her people have been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years. She’s been able to do it since she was about ten years old.

  “Now let me tell you something. The day we got in from the last patrol she met me at the dock, you were there. When we got home and I’d seen the kids she took me out in the kitchen.

  “Just remember, I hadn’t told her one damned thing about the patrol and you know they kept everyone away from the dock when we came in because we were so badly busted up. So she didn’t see the ship. And she took me out in the kitchen and pointed at the calendar on the bulkhead and there was a red crayon circle around the day we hit the battleship!

  “She said that she knew that on that day we had been in great danger but that she didn’t worry because the old gods told her we’d get back home safely!”

  “I know,” Barber said, nodding his head, “Dottie told me that story after I got home. Made me feel kind of funny inside.”

  Rhodes took his wallet out of his hip pocket and opened it and took out a folded slip of paper. He handed it to Barber.

  “June gave me this the day before we left port,” Rhodes said. “Told me to keep it with me all the time.” Barber unfolded the slip of paper and read it aloud.

  “Accept what is offered even though it is not wanted.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. He handed the paper back to Rhodes, who folded it carefully and put it back in his wallet.

  “Neither do I,” Rhodes said. “She told me that the gods told her that a time would come when this would mean something to me and when that time came I should obey what was given to her, what she wrote down.”

  Chapter 23

  Mako made rendezvous with the storm in the Luzon Straits between Luzon and Formosa. As storms went in those latitudes it was not a major weather event. The winds howled at 60 miles an hour and the seas were sullen green giants 40 to 50 feet high with almost a mile of water between their tops of wind-whipped spray. Captain Hinman, dressed in rain clothes, shouted above the wind to Joe Sirocco.

  “This is where we should patrol, in Luzon Strait. All the shipping going to and from Japan uses this strait. Lots of deep water. You’d get more ships here than trying to pick them off when they come out of harbors.” Sirocco looked at the dark bulk of the mountain that was Bataan Island, rising more than 3,000 feet above the sea to starboard, and nodded and then grabbed at the bridge rail as Mako plunged her bow deep into a long, rolling sea and staggered upward, shedding the tons of water which roared down her narrow deck and broke, smashing into spray against the Co
nning Tower structure and soaking everyone on the bridge.

  “What’s our next course change?” Hinman shouted above the wind.

  “We just passed Babuyan Island ten miles to port. That mountain is over thirty-five hundred feet high. When it bears two zero four degrees relative we can come left to course two three four and come down past Cape Bojeader, that’s on the northwest tip of Luzon itself. Once clear of the Cape we can alter course to port again and, run on down the coastline, I’d suggest about forty miles off the land.”

  “Very well,” Hinman said. He studied the sullen gray sky.

  “We’ll stay on the surface today,” he said in Sirocco’s ear. “No sense in going down in this weather. I’m going to turn in. Call me if the weather changes or if we see anything. Keep the lookouts here in the bridge space and maintain a periscope watch.”

  Lieut. Bob Edge, manning the search periscope in the Conning Tower, sighted the small convoy at mid-morning.

  Captain Hinman was out of his bunk at the first rap of the messenger’s knuckles on the bulkhead of his tiny stateroom. He grabbed at his bunk rail to steady himself and pulled on pants and shirt and stuffed his feet into sandals.

  “Can you see them yet?” he yelled as he climbed up the ladder to the bridge.

  “Not yet, sir,” Pete Simms shouted from beneath his rain hood.

  “Chief of the Boat to the Bridge with a strong line,” Hinman ordered. Dusty Rhodes came up to the bridge with a small coil of manila line over one shoulder and gasped as a sudden rain squall swept over Mako, soaking him to the skin.

  “I want a safety line on a lookout,” Hinman shouted to Rhodes. “I want to put him up in the shears.”

  Rhodes swiftly tied a bowline on a bight knot in the line. One of the lookouts gingerly pulled the two loops of the knot up over-his legs and Rhodes tied the bitter end of the line around his waist.