Final Harbor (The Silent War Book 1)

by Harry Homewood

  “I understand, Colonel, we have that kind at Staff ourselves. But I’m a bit disappointed you didn’t want to see the inside of Mako.”

  “Love to, old chap, love to! It’s this bloody leg! Cork, you know, in a manner of speaking. From the thigh down. Bloody German got me with a burst from a Schmeiser at close range, over in Crete. Went into their bloody lines to kill some of their top wallahs and got caught. Stupid! Gives me a spot of trouble going up and down ordinary steps to say nothing of your vertical bloody ladders! When you come down to port where we are maybe we could get a bloody crane, lower me down and pick me up, eh?” He grinned and walked away and Hinman marveled that he walked as well as he did.

  The Navy PBY landed an hour later and a Lieutenant Commander in rumpled khakis climbed down the plane’s short ladder and went over to Captain Hinman and Joe Sirocco.

  “I’m Gene Puser, Captain,” he said.

  Hinman nodded and introduced Joe Sirocco. “We have a mutual friend, sir,” he said to Puser.

  “Yes,” Puser said with a grin. “Glad you remembered the name. Saves all that business of introduction and other stuff.” He handed Captain Hinman a thick envelope.

  “Your patrol orders, sir. I’m afraid you have another special mission to perform first, then you get a quite good area.” He turned and motioned to a short, barrel-chested Australian Major who had followed him off the PBY and had been loitering about out of earshot. The Major had a bright red face and a huge, sweeping mustache at least eight inches from tip to tip.

  “This is Major Jack Struthers, His Majesty’s Australian Army, Captain Hinman,” Puser said. “Major, Captain Hinman.” The two men shook hands.

  “This is my Executive Officer, my second in command, sir.” Hinman said to the Major.

  “Big lad, aren’t you?” Struthers said as he took Sirocco’s hard hand in his own muscled paw. “Bloody big man, I’d say!”

  “Did you bring me any torpedoes?” Hinman said. “And if you did, how in the hell do we get them aboard? They don’t have a torpedo carrier truck here, you know.”

  “Know that, sir,” Puser said. “They didn’t send any. They’re a bit put out that you fired two fish in heavy seas. Actually, one of the calmer heads said you could do quite well with only twenty-two fish instead of twenty-four. I did stretch my Warrant, as the Major here would say, and smuggled enough beer aboard the plane to keep your crew happy for a few hours.”

  “Smuggled?” Hinman asked.

  “The Admiral doesn’t approve of sailors’ drinking beer, Captain, but that doesn’t matter. What does is that we have enough beer. It’s Aussie beer, strong enough to knock a horse down! I’ve got the cases packed in ice but it won’t hold for too many more hours so if you want to get a working party over to the plane we can get that stuff off. I’ve got some other stuff, the Major’s gear that has to be off-loaded as well, sir. We’re going to be here for two days.”

  “Let’s go down to my Wardroom,” Hinman said. “There are some things I don’t understand and I’d rather talk down below than up here.” He motioned to Dusty Rhodes and gave him orders to get the Major’s gear off the plane and on to the dock and to supervise the beer party.

  Lieutenant Commander Puser opened his briefcase and spread a small chart on the Wardroom table.

  “I’m sorry this is the best chart we could find. Actually, it’s a page out of an atlas but it does show the area for this special mission.”

  “That’s what I want to hear about, this special mission,” Hinman said, his face grim.

  “Well, in a nutshell, sir,” Puser began. “And mind you I’m only the messenger. Some of the idea people in Australia thought that if ships in quote unquote safe Japanese harbors could in some way be sunk, not one ship but a half dozen or more at one time, that it would upset the Jap very greatly.

  “Everyone seemed to think that it would upset the Jap. The next problem was to figure out how to get into a quote unquote safe Japanese harbor. That’s when they called in Major Struthers, who is a veteran commando specialist. He came up with an idea. Build a little boat that could be disassembled and reassembled very quickly and without tools. Someone else thought of a version of the Eskimo kayak for the boat.

  “The Major thought that two men could carry ten-pound limpet mines into a harbor from a submarine and place them on the ship’s hulls at anchor. With a timing device the mines would all go off after the infiltrators had left the harbor.”

  “What in the hell is the sense of that!” Hinman snapped.

  “Don’t look at the Major, sir,” Puser said soothingly. “He was asked how it could be done. He didn’t originate the idea of the mission.”

  “Crazy bloody scheme, I call it,” the Major said softly. “Mind you, it can be done and not very hard to do, either. Dress a man in black, dye his face and hands black and in that little boat you can go right up to a ship in harbor without being seen.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Hinman snorted.

  “I hate to say this,” Puser said, “but the Major took his little boat, as he calls it, and paddled under the stern of the Isabel, the Admiral’s yacht in the Swan River in Brisbane. He went up over the stern, knocked out the watch, broke into the Admiral’s quarters and gathered all the Admiral’s papers into a pile and then set them afire and left!”

  “Didn’t hurt the bloke I knocked about,” the Major said apologetically. “Never do to hurt the Allies, would it? Gave him a bit of a sock with sand in it, was all.”

  “If the operation is a success,” Puser said slowly, “the Staff thinks it could be repeated at intervals, odd intervals of time so as to keep the Jap off balance. The net effect is likely to be that the Jap will have to strengthen his garrisons in harbors all through the territory they occupy and to assign more destroyers escort to those harbors, leaving the sea lanes a little freer of Jap ships for submarines.”

  “And if it is known that the Japanese have assigned additional troops to known areas that would make it easier for General MacArthur when he begins his promised return to the Philippines. Isn’t that so?” Hinman was staring at Puser.

  “Sir, I ventured no such opinion but I am happy to say that you have a decisive mind, sir,” Puser’s voice was patient.

  Hinman sat and thought for a long moment. Then he looked straight at Puser.

  “I don’t have any choice, do I!”

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” Puser said. “But from what Captain Rudd has told me about you I think you can pull it off. The Major shares my opinion. I’ve shown him what Captain Rudd wrote to me about you, sir.”

  “As I said,” the Major said, “I don’t like the bloody show!” He squeezed his eyelids closed and when he opened them the bright blue eyes were snapping at Hinman.

  “Mind you, Captain, done a lot of bloody chores in my time, I have. This one could come off smooth as taking off a sheila’s panties in the dark! All it needs is a man with cold steel in his guts on the ship at sea and a good man to go with me, your best man!”

  “ ‘Sheila’?” Sirocco said.

  “That’s Aussie slang for girl,” Puser said.

  “Why two men?” Captain Hinman said.

  “Because you can’t maneuver the kayak to place a mine down just below the water, takes one man to lean the other way to sort of counterbalance the little boat, the Major explained. “Bloody mines weigh ten pounds with their magnet to grip the hull. Got two dozen of them with me but I don’t think the little boat will carry more than a dozen. That’s why we want to do a day or so of practice here, try it in daylight and then at night. With some luck we shouldn’t be in the harbor more than an hour or two, and then we’ll come out.”

  “Very well,” Hinman said slowly. “Let’s have some coffee and take this thing apart, step by step.” He looked at Puser.

  “Is this special mission the whole patrol?”

  “No,” Puser said slowly. “Once this thing is over you’ll have one hell of a patrol area. You’ll probably scare Major Struth
ers half to death!”

  Hinman looked at the Australian Major, whose bright blue eyes were merry beneath sun-bleached eyebrows.

  “Somehow I doubt that Major Struthers will be scared of anything we do on a submarine,” Hinman said.

  Chapter 25

  The Mako crept cautiously down a channel at the southern end of the fiddle-shaped island of Bougainville. Captain Hinman was on the cigaret deck aft of the bridge. Major Struthers stood beside him, his short legs braced against the slow roll of the ship. Hinman lowered his night binoculars and let them hang from the neck strap.

  “Can’t see a whole lot out there with no moon. The land looks to be low, very little elevation. Probably swampy.”

  “If so, full of the little buggers that give you the malaria,” Struthers said cheerfully. The port lookout cleared his throat and the people in the bridge tensed.

  “Light bearing dead abeam to port, Bridge. On that little island over there. The light flickers like it might be a small fire.”

  Hinman raised his binoculars. “Mr. Grilley,” he called to the OOD. “Ask the navigator for that island’s name.”

  Joe Sirocco, working at his charts on the gyro table in the Control Room, heard the request and shook his head in frustration. There were no proper navigation charts for the part of the Solomon Islands where they were. He picked up a magnifying glass that Gene Puser had been thoughtful enough to bring with the page from an atlas that showed the island of Bougainville and studied the atlas page.

  “Ask the Bridge for permission for me to come topside, please,” he said to the Chief on watch in the Control Room.

  “Permission granted,” the OOD said into the bridge microphone and Sirocco climbed up to the bridge.

  “There’s no name for that island, Captain,” Sirocco said. “All it shows on this atlas page is that it’s there.” He pointed out to the starboard side of the ship.

  “When the end of this point of land hears one four zero degrees, sir, we can come right to course three one six degrees. That will put us on a course across the mouth of Tonolei Harbor. As far as I can guess we’ll have about three miles from where we turn to the center of the harbor mouth or too either side. I’d like to take fathometer readings to find that out, to find out how fast it shoals.”

  “Very well,” Hinman said. Sirocco went back below and Hinman moved back to his station on the cigaret deck.

  “Bit chancy, is it?” Major Struthers said. “No bloody charts. Bloody Limeys took over this part of the world after World War One. They should have made some charts.”

  “It wasn’t important to them commercially,” Hinman said. “Australia took this area over right after that; why didn’t your people make charts? You can’t blame the British for everything, you know.”

  “Why not?” Struthers said. “Bloody Pommey bastards!”

  The Mako swung to starboard as Grilley ordered the course change Sirocco had suggested and Captain Hinman turned to Struthers.

  “Now we find out if the Japs have got night patrols out across the harbor mouth.” He turned toward the bridge.

  “Mr. Grilley, order the machine gunners to the bridge with weapons. Deck gun crews to stand by in the Control Room. All lookouts to keep a very sharp lookout. If we’re detected in here I’m going to run for it on the surface.”

  Grilley’s repeat of Captain Hinman’s orders was followed by Joe Sirocco’s laconic voice over the bridge speaker.

  “Your course out of here will be three zero one Captain.”

  “Very well,” Hinman said. “Make turns for one-third ahead, Bridge.” He turned to Struthers.

  “That bloody big man as you called him, Joe Sirocco, doesn’t miss a thing. He had the escape course ready. He’s a hell of a lot better Executive Officer than I ever was.”

  “Would have liked to have him with me on this little walkabout,” Struthers said. “Not that I object to Chief Rhodes. He’s a rare man, too.”

  Hinman nodded. He had suggested to Sirocco that he might like to go with the Major but Sirocco had looked at him with his steady eyes and shook his head. When Hinman had tried to explore the subject further Sirocco had stopped him, saying that if he insisted he’d be advised to check with Washington first. Then he turned away.

  The Mako crept across the mouth of the harbor, wallowing in the ground swells. The harbor was quiet, wrapped in the stillness of night.

  “Advise reversal of course, Bridge,” Sirocco’s voice came over the Bridge speaker. “Advise the Captain that the fathometer shows steady shoaling. We’re past the center of the harbor and the ship channel is on the south side of the harbor entrance.”

  “Very well,” Captain Hinman said. “Mr. Grilley, come left and make one more pass across the harbor mouth.” He turned to Major Struthers.

  “I think this is about where we’ll drop you and Chief Rhodes, tomorrow night. You’ll have a good mile and a half to paddle to get into the harbor itself.”

  “Not to worry, sir,” Struthers said. “The Chief is a very strong man on that two-ended paddle. We’ll do fine from here.”

  The port lookout cleared his throat and Hinman tensed.

  “From this angle I can see a lot of big dark shapes in the harbor, Bridge. Looks like a lot of ships anchored all in a row.”

  “Very well,” Hinman said. He smiled at Struthers. “Looks like the ship watchers up in the hills were right about there being targets in this harbor. You’ll have good hunting! Mr. Grilley, please carry out the orders in the night order book and let’s get out of here, we’ve seen enough.” He listened to the quiet reply to his order and felt the vibration in the deck as Mako picked up speed.

  It was pitch black the following night as Mako crept slowly toward the center of the harbor entrance. Major Struthers and Dusty Rhodes, dressed entirely in black with black stocking caps on their heads and their faces and hands dyed black, assembled their small kayak on the deck forward of the gun. Captain Hinman had the bridge and as the Mako swung slowly in the ground swell at the harbor entrance he learned over the bridge rail.

  “This is where you get off, men,” he called down. And then, in a voice too low to be heard on deck but heard clearly by the quartermaster, he said,

  “Go with God.”

  The small black kayak rode low in the water under the weight of Struthers and Rhodes and a dozen 10-pound limpet mines. Hinman saw a paddle blade flash briefly at the side of Mako and then the kayak and its two men were lost completely to view. Hinman turned to Grilley and Joe Sirocco, who had climbed to the bridge.

  “Take over the deck, Don. Joe, I want to know where we are every minute in relation to the launching site. If everything goes well they should be back in four to five hours. I want the lookouts on half-hour shifts, Don, keep the relief lookouts in the Conning Tower in red goggles.” He punched his right fist into his left palm.

  “Now comes the hard part, the waiting.”

  The kayak paddled easily, even with its heavy load. Rhodes, sitting in the front seat hole of the tiny craft, suddenly stopped wielding his paddle.

  “Ship dead ahead,” he whispered. “Big one!”

  “Good-oh, mate,” Struthers answered in a whisper. “Under the stern we go!” Working their paddles underwater they eased forward until the kayak was under the overhang of the ship’s stern. Rhodes reached out a black hand and took hold of the ship’s rusty rudder post. They sat listening, hardly daring to breathe.

  The ship was quiet. They could hear the splashing of water from an engine room pump on the starboard side. Rhodes pointed his hand at that side and Struthers gently paddled in that direction as Rhodes fended the kayak’s bow away from the hull. They reached the sluggish stream of engine room discharge water and Rhodes raised his hand. Struthers stopped the kayak. Rhodes reached down between his legs and got a mine.

  He balanced the mine on the wooden rim that ran around his seat hole and carefully turned a knob that wound the spring-loaded timing mechanism of the mine’s detonator. He took a deep bre
ath, picked up the mine in both hands and carefully placed the top edge of the round mine against the side of the ship and then pushed the mine as far down under water as he could reach, as Struthers leaned the other way to balance the narrow kayak. When he had reached the limit of his arms Rhodes carefully let the mine rest against the ship, feeling the magnets on the mine’s underside grab at the steel hull. He sat up and the two men backed the kayak under the ship’s stern. The second ship was barely 200 yards away. The kayak moved across the dark water toward the next target.

  Rhodes was soaked with sweat as he finished placing the mine on the eleventh ship, a long vessel with high cargo booms that stood out against the black night sky. They were deep in the harbor now, three miles from where they had left the Mako. The Major gently sculled the kayak back under the ship’s stern and Rhodes clung to the rudder, breathing hard.

  “I can see three more ships, mate,” Struthers whispered. “Take a breather, cobber, and then we’ll decide to take the next in line or give all a look and pick the biggest. Should have brought more bloody mines!”

  Before Rhodes could reply there was a muffled explosion down the harbor toward the sea, followed by two more explosions and then another. A siren on a ship began to blow and then other sirens began to wail. They heard a rush of feet on the deck of the ship above them. Struthers leaned forward.

  “Bloody mines must be going off! Fucking timing devices must be crook!” His whisper sounded loud to Rhodes.

  A searchlight from one of the ships that had been mined flared into bright light and began sweeping the sky. Struthers whispered, as he leaned forward in the kayak.

  “Bastards think it’s an air raid!”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Rhodes whispered. “If we can get over next to the beach we can paddle back down the length of the harbor and get out to the ship.”