Final Harbor (The Silent War Book 1)

by Harry Homewood

  “Let me go first,” Struthers said. “My sort of game, you know. I’ll dig under and go inside and look about. Then I’ll come back and you come through.”

  “Better check that fence to see if they’ve got it wired,” Rhodes said.

  “Haven’t a bloody meter in your pocket have you?” the Major whispered. “Chances are it isn’t wired. This place was probably an old coconut plantation, lots of those hereabouts. Grew the nuts for the copra, the husk, you know.” He dug at the edge of the fence. “Leaf mold, easy to move aside.” He began to dig with his hands. Then he wriggled under the fence and disappeared. He was back in ten minutes.

  “Did a bit of a recon,” he whispered. “All’s as quiet as the bloody grave! Going to be a piece of cake, this! Follow me. I’ll go under and then you hand me the bloody mine and come along.” Rhodes nodded and squirmed through under the fence. He got to his feet and moved to the dim bulk of the bath house and went underneath where the Major was waiting, the mine in his arms. Rhodes reached up and very gently scratched at the floor of the bath house.

  “It’s tin or some kind of metal,” he whispered. “Give me the mine and I’ll activate it. When I get ready to put it up you put your fingers under the edge of the mine in case I slip. I don’t want it to bang against the metal when the magnet takes hold.”

  “Put it over near the door,” Struthers whispered. “Bit harder to see there.” They placed the mine carefully, both of them holding their breath and freezing, almost motionless, as the mine made a slight click against the metal flooring. They crouched beneath the bath house, searching the compound with their eyes. Then they drifted back to the fence, two dark shadows in the night. Rhodes backed through the trench Struthers had dug and the Major followed him, smoothing the leaf mold back into the trench as he backed through.

  They crawled through the thorn bush, dragging the kayak with them, until they reached the place where they had entered the bush the night before. Struthers went outside of the bush and lay quiet for five minutes, his sharp blue eyes studying the area. Then he stood up and waited, searching for some evidence of movement in the area. He reached down and touched Rhodes.

  “Nothing stirring that I can see,” he whispered. “But as my little Ghurka friends used to say, ‘Notwithstanding, we’ll go as quietly as death.’ ”

  They moved down the beach toward the mouth of the harbor, keeping close to the edge of the scattered bushes that grew along the long spit of land. When they had gone more than half-way to the harbor mouth Struthers stopped.

  “Might as well turn this show over to you, cobber. The going is getting muckier by the yard. Might as well be paddling as trying to walk in this shit.” They crouched and swiftly assembled the kayak. As they carried the small craft out into the water the Major grinned.

  “Think that bloody captain of yours will be waitin’? If he isn’t we’ve a long paddle to New Britain and I don’t want to go there at all!”

  “He’ll be waiting,” Rhodes said.

  “Wish I had as much confidence in my senior officers,” the Australian said as he settled himself in the kayak’s rear seat and took hold of his double-ended paddle. “I always considered the buggers to be a bit daft, you know. You’re the sailor, your show now, which way do we go?”

  “I’d like to hug the shoreline until we get to the harbor entrance,” Rhodes said. “Less chance of being seen, less chance of being set off course by currents or tides. Once we get near the harbor entrance we can cut over and head out and see if we can find the ship.”

  At the entrance to the harbor Rhodes changed course and the kayak steadied on a heading where he thought the Mako’s superstructure called out.

  “Bridge! Red light! Very dim, low down to the water!” Captain Hinman scrambled up to stand alongside the lookout.

  “Where, son?” He focused his glasses as the lookout pointed out the light. “Mr. Grilley, it’s them! Pass the word below that we have our people in sight!” He scrambled down to the bridge level.

  “I’ll take the deck, Don. Get your party ready to take them aboard. Be careful in case they’re hurt.” He bent to the bridge speaker.

  “This is the Captain. We are going to pick up our people. Ginty and Aaron to the deck with Mr. Grilley. Machine gunners to the bridge with weapons. Deck gun crews stand by in the Control Room. Mr. Sirocco, flood bow buoyancy and stand by to blow!”

  Rhodes heard the long sigh of air leaving the bow buoyancy tank before he saw the Mako’s dark bulk against the moonless sky.

  “Skipper’s flooding down forward so we can paddle aboard,” he said over his shoulder. “Told you the Old Man would be here!”

  They paddled the kayak up to the forward gun sponson and Struthers jumped in surprise as a roar up forward indicated that bow buoyancy tank was being blown dry to raise the deck above water.

  The two men packaged the kayak and Struthers hoisted it to the cigaret deck.

  “Take good care of this beauty, mate. Fine little boat.”

  Captain Hinman shook both men’s hands as they climbed over the bridge rail.

  “Damned glad to have you back, fellas. Now we can haul ass out of here.”

  “Beggin’ pardon, sir,” Struthers said. “Is it possible to stay here in this place for a bit, say until about five-thirty ack emma or shortly after? We left a surprise package for the Jap and we’d like to see if he opened it.”

  Captain Hinman looked at the Australian and then at Dusty Rhodes, who nodded slightly.

  “Maybe you’d better tell me what this is all about,” Hinman said.

  “Happy to do that,” Struthers said cheerfully. “Do you think we could do it over a spot of tucker and some hot tea? Been a good while since we had our last bread and water, so to speak.”

  “I’m sorry,” Captain Hinman said. “Mr. Grilley, secure the deck crew and the gunners, resume regular sea detail, resume the Night Orders until you hear from me. All lookouts maintain a very sharp lookout.” He followed Rhodes and Struthers down below.

  Tommy Thompson had a platter of sandwiches on a tray and pots of steaming coffee and tea set out on the Wardroom table.

  “You eat in here, in the Wardroom, Chief,” Captain Hinman said. “I’m not going to stand on custom after an operation of this sort. Tom, will you please ask Chief Maxwell to come in with his notebook? After you’ve eaten you can talk out the operation.”

  He waited patiently, sipping at a cup of coffee and talking genially with John Maxwell, the Chief Yeoman. When Tom had refilled the cups for the third time Hinman leaned back in his chair.

  “Suppose you start from the time you left the ship,” he said. “As the ranking officer, Major, you make the report. Chief Rhodes is privileged to break in any time, make any corrections or amendments to what you say. Is that all right with you?”

  “Too right, Skipper,” Major Struthers said. He reached over and took one of Joe Sirocco’s cigarets and lit it and then be began to talk. When he had finished the part about mining the bath house Captain Hinman looked at him, a tiny grin playing around his mouth.

  “Biggest practical joke I ever heard of!” he said admiringly. “But I have to think of this ship, Major.” He turned to Maxwell. “Stop writing, Chief. I’ll tell you when to start again.”

  “You must be a little crazy, Major! God only knows what the Jap has got on the way here, after all the damage you two people did in that harbor! I might get caught in this harbor mouth, have you thought of that’?”

  “Thought that if you didn’t get us back this night, sir,” the Major said pleasantly, “that you’d be here tomorrow night and the next night ad infinitum, no matter what the Jap sent here. Was I wrong?”

  “No,” Hinman said slowly. “If you hadn’t come back tonight I’d be here tomorrow night. You have a point, Major.”

  The Major sensed his advantage and pressed it.

  “Look at it this way, Captain.” He caressed his mustache lovingly. “Every time you sink a bloody Jap ship you paint a little fl
ag on the side of your Conning Tower, don’t you? Plain white flag with a red ball in the center for a merchant ship, Rising Sun flag for a warship? Got two of each up there right now, right?

  “Well, we put nine ships down last night. Eight flat on the bottom with their decks just above the water, one over on its bloody side! So by rights you can paint nine flags on your bleedin’ Conning Tower. Bloody coup, that! Nine ships in one action!

  “If the bloody bath house blows up you can paint a bath house on the bloody Conning Tower! Be the envy of the whole submarine Navy!” He sat there, his staring blue eyes dancing with delight. “If you’ll do the talking for me, sir, my good cobber and me will go with you up to Japan and we’ll go ashore and knock off a railroad train! Alongside of the bath house you’d be the darlin’ of the bloody Fleet, you would!”

  Captain Hinman shook his head and refilled his coffee cup. “What the hell do I tell the Squadron Commander when I get back to port? I’ve got no business staying here.”

  “Never tell a senior officer anything,” Major Struthers chuckled. “That’s my secret of success, never tell ‘em a bloody thing. Demand things from them! Keeps them wary of you. First off, send the buggers a bloody message demanding that some artist in port whip you out a stencil of a bath house!”

  Hinman looked at the Australian and then he sighed. He reached for the telephone on the bulkhead.

  “Bridge? This is the Captain. Remain on station. Dive the ship at zero four thirty.” He turned to the officers who were crowded around the small table.

  “I think you’d better pass the word to your people, tell them why we’re sticking around. They deserve to know.” He turned to Chief Maxwell.

  “We’ll resume the de-briefing, now. Major, after you had mined the bath house. Start from there.”

  At five-fifteen that morning Captain Hinman climbed the ladder into the Conning Tower. Rhodes and Struthers, standing in the Control Room, heard the whine of the electric motor that raised the periscope.

  “He s using the search periscope,” Rhodes said to the Major. “That one has a larger lens, you can see more with it.”

  At five-twenty Captain Hinman’s voice came down through the hatch.

  “Forty feet, Control. Hold her at forty feet.”

  Rhodes stared at his wrist watch. Five-thirty-five came and passed and suddenly they heard Captain Hinman’s feet shifting in the Conning Tower as he swung the periscope in short sweeps.

  “Damned if they’re not firing those guns again!” Hinman said in a voice loud enough to be heard in the Control Room. The Major turned to Rhodes, his red face beaming.

  “I do hope the fat one was washing his balls when the bloody mine went off! Proper way for a man to go is with his cock in his hand! Jap or no Jap!” Captain Hinman came back down the ladder.

  “Sixty-five feet,” he ordered. “We’ll leave the area now. Joe, set a course.” He turned to the Major and Dusty Rhodes.

  “I could see the guns firing. I guess we’ll paint a bath house on our Conning Tower!”

  Struthers grinned.

  Chapter 26

  Captain Hinman’s message detailing the results of the special mission arrived at a bad time in Brisbane. The Submarine Staff had just gone through a period of celebration over the successful landing of 11,000 U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal and the capture there of the new airport the Japanese had built and a landing on nearby Tulagi Island, where front line reports said heavy resistance to the Marines had developed but was being overcome.

  Hard on the heels of the good news had come the reports on the Battle of Savo Island. A Japanese cruiser force, striking boldly from Rabaul, on New Britain Island, had routed an Allied cruiser fleet inflicting terrible losses. Four Allied heavy cruisers had been shot to bits and sunk; H.M.A.S. Canberra and the Vincennes, Astoria and Quincy of the United States Navy. The U.S.S. Chicago had been badly damaged by shell fire and its Captain a suicide. More than 1,500 officers and men of the Allied naval force were dead or missing.

  The defeat, the worst in American naval history, hung over the Staff at Brisbane like a pall. It was all too clear that the Japanese admiral had out-maneuvered the American ships and the Japanese gunners had been far more accurate than the famed American gunners. Now, with Japan in control of the Solomon Sea, the U.S. Marines fighting for their lives on Guadalcanal would face even greater odds as the Japanese rushed reinforcements from Rabaul.

  When Captain Hinman’s message was read at the staff meeting in the Submarine Command, Southwest Pacific, there was a silence. Lieut. Comdr. Gene Puser broke the silence.

  “Well, that’s one piece of good news. Hinman got into the harbor and his people carried out the special mission successfully.”

  “If you can believe him!” the Operations Officer said with a frown. He looked down at his copy of Hinman’s dispatch.

  “I refuse to give him nine ships sunk! Not in a shallow harbor, not from ten-pound mines! Those ships can be repaired, will be repaired probably in a matter of days. I’ll give him credit for damaging nine ships, no more.

  “As for this nonsense about having a staff artist design a stencil of a Japanese bath house, my God! What we should do is to have a stencil made for Mako’s Conning Tower that reads quote Obey your patrol orders unquote! His patrol orders didn’t call for him to tell his demolition squad to go frolicking about on the beach blowing up shower baths or whatever they said they blew up!”

  Gene Puser looked up from his note pad.

  “Mako has twenty-two fish left, sir. Hinman’s not far from the sea route between Rabaul and Guadalcanal and Tulagi. He might be able to shoot down some of the troop transports they will probably be running down there to reinforce Guadalcanal.”

  “I’m aware of that,” his senior officer snapped. “Send him a priority message to cancel his present patrol orders and to patrol off the mouth of Rabaul Harbor until further notice.

  “Specify that these orders do not call for beach parties or the ambush of Japanese officers going to the latrine!

  “I suppose you had better send him some latitude and longitude coordinates; there are no charts of that area worth a damn. Hell, when Intelligence told us the Japs were building a new airfield on Guadalcanal we couldn’t even find the place on the charts we had!

  “While you’re at it, tell Hinman we are giving him credit for possibly damaging nine ships. Those damned Pearl Harbor Captains are all alike; they’re very good at screaming about defective torpedoes and exploders and at claiming sinkings that never happened!”

  The message, sent that night, stunned Captain Hinman. He sat in the Wardroom sipping coffee, reading the message over and over while Joe Sirocco worked at his charts to lay out a course for Rabaul Harbor. Major Struthers came in and added to the discomfiture in the Wardroom.

  “Been listening to the Jap radio frequency, Captain, courtesy of your radio chappie. Bad news for our side.”

  “What do you mean?” Hinman said.

  “Our friend the Nip has kicked the shit out of our combined naval forces at a big battle not far from here in the Solomons,” the Major said. “Took place at a place called Savo Island. The stuff I heard was plain language Japanese, the chappie doing the talking was saying that the Jap Fleet had destroyed a major American and Australian cruiser fleet without the loss of a single Jap ship! He said at least five major allied ships had gone down!”

  “I didn’t know you understood Japanese, Major,” Hinman said.

  “I don’t read it or write it,” Struthers said. He took a cup of tea from the Officers’ Cook with a smile of thanks.

  “I savvy the lingo. Wasn’t always a bloody-handed commando, you know. Was a time, it seems years and years ago, when I taught the Romance languages at the university in Sydney. Studied Japanese as a sort of hobby. Chinese, too. Bloody army wallahs figured if I could speak, read and write a half-dozen European languages that I would be an ideal commando type!

  “Must say that knowing Japanese did me some good. When our lot
got captured on New Guinea a silly cow of a sentry, thinking no one could understand his language but another Jap, told his buddy to cover for him while he went off to take a shit. With him gone and his pants down, so to speak, no trick at all to strangle the other sentry and climb the fence with my Skipper on my back. Poor bastard had the dysentery so bad he couldn’t walk. Would have died if he’d been left behind.”

  “That report you heard might have been propaganda to fool our intelligence people who monitor their radio,” Hinman said.

  “If so, pretty complicated propaganda, sir,” the Major said. “The bloke on the ratio was addressing a message from Admiral Mikawa to the Emperor himself, telling of the victory.

  “That’s about as official as you can get. If he was polishing his brass, as we’d say, and he was found with the lie in his teeth he’d have to say his prayers and open his belly. No, I’d say it was the straight goods.”

  “What the hell is there in this area to fight a major sea battle over?” Hinman said. “Nothing out here!”

  “Might be this place Guadalcanal,” the Major said.

  “Never heard of it,” Hinman said. “Where’s it at?”

  “Nor did I hear of it before,” Struthers said. “But I was talking to some of your intelligence types when this mission we did was being planned. They told me the Jap had built a big airfield on Guadalcanal, down at the southeast end of the Solomon Islands, east of where we’re going now. Caused no end of a dust-up with your people and ours. An airfield there would control the sea lanes from the U.S. and Hawaii, I was told, as well as flank the east end of New Guinea. With New Guinea flanked it would fall and that would give the Jap a port of entry to Northern Australia.”

  Captain Hinman and the Mako’s officers listened to the heavy-set Australian, their faces intent.

  “Your intelligence people said your Navy was launching a top-hole amphibious landing job, going to put thousands and thousands of your Marines ashore at Guadalcanal. Reckon the Ghurka and the American Marine are the two finest fighting men in the world, bar none, not even our own chaps. This battle the Nips are boasting about may have been the result of trying to stop the amphibious assault or it could have been an effort to throw the Marines off the island if they’d already landed.”