Dive Beneath the Sun

by R. Cameron Cooke

  The plane sank quickly in a flurry of bubbles, but Trott did what he had been trained to do. He swam well away from the spot to avoid the eddies and whirlpools, and then deployed his raft, a small self-inflatable rubber tube that was hardly worthy of the name. It could barely hold his five-foot ten frame with his legs and arms dangling into the water.

  Still stunned by Louie’s death, a thousand things ran through his mind at once. How far was he from the shore? He could see the low mountain ridge to the west and the tops of palm trees, but his height of eye was too low to see the beach itself. From the pre-flight briefing, he knew the tide was ebbing, so he should be drifting away from the shore, and that was good. The fact that these were shark-infested waters was also imparted during the pre-flight briefing, and that was bad. It had been added as a humorous anecdote by the squadron intelligence officer, who went so far as to draw a dorsal fin in grease pencil on the large wall chart that had shown the squadron’s flight plan. It had been funny at the time, and Trott had laughed with all of the others, but it did not seem so funny at this moment as he peered over the edge of his raft into the unseen depths beneath him. He decided to go ahead and use his shark repellent, just to make himself feel better. Perhaps he should have saved it, for there was no telling how long he would be floating here, or if he would even be rescued.

  Shading his eyes from the mid-morning sun, he saw a few small dots in the sky, too distant to make out with any certainty. They appeared to form up and head south. Surely, they had seen him. But why had they not done a final fly-over to give him that reassurance? Probably because they only had just enough fuel to get them back to the carrier. Yes, that was it, he kept telling himself. That had to be it. They would relay his position back to the carrier, a rescue would be arranged, and surely he would be picked up before sundown.

  But, as he watched those planes heading away, carrying the only friendly faces within three hundred miles, he wished he was with them. Within a few hours, they would be safely aboard the Antietam, drinking the squadron’s stash of smuggled scotch to the completion of another successful mission, and to lost comrades. Even the tedium of the post-mission debriefing would be a welcome joy.

  Trott began to wonder if the mysterious admiral would be there – the strange, impersonal flag officer that had spoken to the squadron in the final moments of the pre-flight briefing earlier that morning. Trott had never laid eyes on him before that moment, and still was not exactly sure who he was. The unfamiliar admiral did not fall anywhere in the chain of command of the Antietam’s task group, as far as Trott understood it, yet the admiral had spoken with a sense of his own authority that one might have expected only from Nimitz himself. He had stressed the importance of the target, and the maximum effort expected by all, never once acknowledging the dangers to the pilots and crews, or the gravity of the task he was ordering them to undertake. Would he meet with the news of the losses suffered with the same detached indifference? Would he even recognize the losses?

  A final cluster of bubbles broached the surface where the Helldiver had disappeared, and with it a wave of guilt washed over Trott. The image of Louie, still strapped to his seat, riding the plane all the way to the bottom, was imprinted on his mind. Trott had decided to go back for another pass at the target, and that decision had gotten Louie killed. But he had no choice, right? This admiral, whoever he was, expected success, and that’s what Trott had been trying to deliver. Wasn’t it his duty to try, no matter the danger?

  Laying his head back on the pillow-like edge of the raft, Trott looked up at the empty sky.

  They will send someone. Hold on a little longer. They will come.

  The lap of the water against the raft was oddly soothing in nature, and he found his eyes struggling to stay open. Perhaps ten minutes had passed, perhaps an hour, before his ears prickled on the droning of a distant plane. The sound was getting louder. The plane was approaching. Within moments, he caught sight of it above the swells, a gray-painted, single-engine craft, with seaplane skids. It banked just to the south of him and then turned in his direction. Between flashes of reflection he made out the red meatball of the rising sun painted on its fuselage.

  A Japanese plane.

  It drew closer, obviously searching for him, and got close enough for him to confidently identify it as a Paul reconnaissance seaplane – or Aichi E16A, to get technical. His yellow raft must have stood out against the dark sea like a solitary rose on a bush, because the plane found him easily, turning slightly to line up on a direct course to intercept him. It was coming in fast and low, and Trott felt certain that he was about to be torn to pieces by the twenty millimeter cannons mounted in its wings, but he was surprised when it pulled up at the last moment and began circling his position.

  It went around three times, the faces of the two Japanese crewmen clearly visible as they stared back at him. The plane performed a wide sweeping arc that carried it some distance downwind, where it turned and then began a landing descent.

  So, that was it, he thought. He was to be taken prisoner. And now he wished for those sharks, for they had not been the most menacing part of the pre-flight briefing. The intel officer had also spoken of unusually cruel treatment of captured airmen – men who had been seen to ditch or bail out, but had oddly never appeared on the Red Cross register. Rumors abounded of nameless, half-starved ghouls kept in bamboo cages, left in the elements, beaten regularly, and sometimes beheaded. Not wishing to endure such a fate, Trott half-thought of driving his utility knife through the inflatable raft and sinking away to the bottom. It would be a far more pleasant death than the one the Japanese had in store for him. But, as the seaplane’s floats splashed into the water, skipping twice, and throwing up feathers of spray, the instinct for survival won the internal struggle within him and he abstained.

  The plane decelerated, quickly transforming from a vehicle of the air to a vehicle of the sea, its engine revving high as it drove towards Trott’s position. Trott tried to remain calm as the seaplane pulled up within thirty yards of him, and the forward and aft cockpits slid open.

  The Japanese pilot stared at him curiously, his face outlined by a leather helmet and goggles, his hands remaining unseen and presumably on the plane’s controls. The man in the rear cockpit, however, was much more active. He immediately unstrapped his harness and swung the rear swivel gun around to point it directly at Trott. This man was not dressed in flight gear, but wore a green army officer uniform. Aside from the absence of a field hat, he looked as though he might have come straight from the parade ground.

  The officer shouted something in Japanese, something that sounded very threatening. Trott did not understand any of it, and so chose not to move. This, evidently, was not the desired response, because the officer pulled back the slide on the machine gun and fired a staccato-like burst into the water only a few yards away. The gunfire was enormously loud, each report pulsating inside Trott’s throbbing head. Instinctively, he raised his hands, hoping such a gesture would show that he was not armed and did not intend to be any trouble.

  The Japanese officer seemed satisfied with this. He threw one leg over the fuselage and began to climb down the wing to the flotation skid. Trott noticed that he wore a pistol in a holster under one arm, and this he drew out and pointed at Trott once he had gained his footing. The Japanese officer then made sweeping gestures with his free hand. Trott understood the meaning, and began to slowly paddle over to the plane.

  This was it. The moment he would fall into enemy hands to be subject to who knows what kind of torture. The thought of it made him paddle much slower. This hesitation sent the Japanese officer into a rage. Again, he shouted at Trott in a threatening manner, pointing the pistol directly at him. Trott was about to comply, when a great disturbance suddenly appeared in the sea off to his right. It was like a giant, bulbous ripple moving through the water, and it grew larger with each passing second. The Japanese officer saw it, too, and shouted in alarm when he comprehended it was heading directly f
or the plane. Trott realized what it was just as the cascading water fell away to reveal the onrushing, black steel of a submarine conning tower. A surge of joy erupted in Trott’s breast as the panicked officer desperately climbed back to the cockpit, completely forgetting about him.

  The pilot revved the engine, and the plane surged forward in an attempt to get out of the way, but it was too late. A tight cable stretching from the submarine’s conning tower to some point on the bow came up under the plane’s tail, lifting it slightly. This sent the aircraft into a spin, its full throttled engines driving it around in a small circle that intersected with the path of the rising conning tower. The spinning propeller came into contact with the steel structure and disintegrated, sending twisted shards of metal in all directions, some slicing up the water near Trott. The plane’s sea skids were then pushed up unevenly by the submarine’s rapidly rising deck, toppling the plane over, and throwing the unharnessed Japanese officer well clear. The capsized plane immediately sank upside down until only the floatation skids were visible. The pilot never emerged.

  Within moments, the submarine was fully exposed, its conning tower and decks shedding the sea in great foaming streams.

  Trott had the wherewithal to start paddling in the direction of his salvation. Faces appeared above the conning tower, staring down at him. Then a hatch opened on the side of the structure, and several men in t-shirts and shorts ran out onto the deck with poles and lifelines. He managed to reach one of the tossed lines, and a team of men began reeling him in. Two men on deck were armed with M14 carbines, and these they pointed at something in the water to his right. Trott looked to see an angry face swimming towards him, shouting indignantly with every breath. It was the Japanese officer. He had murder in his eyes and did not appear the slightest bit concerned for his own safety. The gun-carrying men on the submarine did not fire and appeared to be debating the officer’s true intentions. Certain now that he would have to defend himself, Trott groped for the pistol under his arm, but the inflatable vest was in his way. He then reached for his knife, but before he could get it out of its sheath, he heard a command shouted from the submarine’s bridge.

  “Shoot him!”

  The next moment, gunfire resounded and a hail of bullets tore up the sea around the swimming officer. He sank quickly in a red-laced mix of bubbles.

  Trott was soon pulled up the steel side and onto the submarine’s wooden deck. The sailors gathered around him were all dressed in an assortment of motley attire. Some wore full beards, some were even shirtless. There was little to indicate that they belonged to any navy. It was as if he had just stepped aboard a pirate ship of the Spanish Main. An uncharacteristic wave of emotion suddenly came over him as he realized how close he had come to wasting away in a POW camp, to unspeakable torture, or worse.

  “Looks like we got another fucking Jonah to jinx our boat,” said a dark and brooding sailor, who almost looked angered by Trott’s presence. A few sailors, who appear similarly annoyed, chuckled at the remark.

  “Stow that shit, Clark!” the stubble-bearded man said as he glared at the group. “Now get this gear stowed! All of you, get a move on!” This man looked younger than Trott, though he was obviously revered by the gathered men judging from the prompt manner in which they snapped to, getting the ladder pulled in and the lines stowed. Trott overheard one sailor call the man chief, and that explained everything. The chief petty officers were the backbone of every ship in the navy, and this chief was broad-shouldered and intimidating in appearance. He did not have the muscles one gains though athletics in a gym, but those won by a life spent working on a farm or in a steel mill. He looked like a hardened piece of iron.

  “I think that Jap bastard wanted to kill you, sir,” the chief said cheerfully. “I’m Chief Hicks, the chief of the boat. Welcome aboard. Can you walk okay, sir?”

  Trott nodded, but was still recovering from his near bout with death, and only manage to stutter out gibberish.

  Before he could say anything intelligible, a nearby explosion made him duck for cover. One hundred yards off the submarine’s beam, a geyser of foam reached high into the air. Two seconds later, another explosion erupted half the distance to the first.

  “Chief Hicks!” A black-haired, tanned face shouted from the bridge above. The man wore the khaki shirt of an officer, and he was the first man Trott had encountered thus far that looked like he belonged to a naval organization. “You better quit your skylarking, and get our guest below!”

  “Aye, aye, Captain!” Chief Hicks threw up an informal salute in the direction of the bridge, and then turned to Trott and said under his breath. “Damned officers are always so demanding. No offense, sir.”

  “None taken,” Trott managed to say.

  The chief gave an appreciative nod. “We’d best get below, sir. Them shore batteries will get a bead on us if we stay up too much longer.”

  Trott nodded and followed Hicks. The chief gave short quick orders that were more like grunts, and the others jumped to without having to be told twice.

  The submarine began to pick up speed again, but it moved noiselessly, with only the sound of the folding sea along its metal skin. Trott remembered somewhere in his training that submarines normally used diesel engines on the surface, which generated enough power to propel the boat through the water as fast as most surface ships. But those diesels required great gulps of air that were not to be found when a submarine was deep under water. When submerged, the sub got its energy from a noiseless battery, and Trott assumed that this was what was being used now.

  The bows had swung out to point back to the open sea by the time the next salvo struck the water, this time only about fifty yards off the port beam and close enough to splatter the conning tower with seawater. It was all Trott could do to stay on his feet as he was ushered with urgency through the side hatch and down an abrupt ladder.

  As the hatch clanked shut above him, Trott looked around him to see that he had gone from the freedom of the skies and the open sea to a cramped world filled with sweat-covered faces and stained t-shirts jammed between a myriad of pipes, electrical conduits, and air ducting.

  “Hang out here, sir, until we dive,” the chief told Trott before disappearing into the crowd.

  Most of the men in the room were busy. Those that were not stared at Trott curiously. There was a chart table in the center of the room, around which a sailor in blue dungarees and an officer in khaki hovered with dividers, pencil, and parallel ruler. One step away stood a panel of giant brass wheels, valve actuators and electrical switches. The sailors operating these controls were directed by a gray-haired lieutenant, who looked twenty years Trott’s senior, and who Trott concluded must have started out in the navy as an enlisted man to be only a lieutenant at his age. The older man smiled pleasantly and nodded once to Trott and then turned his attention back to the gauges.

  A sharp whack suddenly filled the compartment, followed by a tremble that ran through the deck plates and the bulkheads. It sounded like someone hitting the side of a tin shed with a two by four.

  “Conning tower, bridge,” the speaker in the overhead squawked. “That last one was close. We’d better get down. Helm, mark speed by log.”

  “Bridge, helm, speed by log eight knots.”

  “Helm, bridge, aye.” This was followed immediately by two long blasts on a loud klaxon before the speaker came on again. “Dive, dive!” Once again the klaxon sounded.

  The faint noise of rushing water seemed to come from all around Trott as the ballast tanks quickly filled with seawater. Somewhere in the compartment above, a hatch slammed shut. Every man rushed to his assigned diving station, even the lingerers, leaving Trott standing there in his dripping flight suit feeling quite out of place. The somewhat friendly chief was nowhere in sight and the gray-haired lieutenant who had acknowledged his presence was now fully engaged, giving orders to the sailors manning the giant wheels.

  “Green board,” the lieutenant called out. “Pressure in the boa
t. Continuing with the dive.”

  The deck began to tilt forward, and Trott got the sense that the sub was slowing considerably. The hull shook periodically as the swells fought to keep it on the surface. But eventually, the weight of the two-thousand-ton boat, and the water spilling over her extended bow planes pulled her under.

  Forty-five feet…Forty-six…Forty-seven,” the lieutenant droned, reading out every movement of the needle on a large depth gauge.

  It was all very unsettling, having no visual reference other than a handful of instruments, much like flying a plane in zero visibility. But Trott was used to planes. He was not used to this, and now he heard every creak and moan of the hull as the submarine began to descend more rapidly.

  “Sixty feet…sixty-five feet…seventy…”

  Just as Trott was beginning to contemplate the increasing water pressure on the other side of the hull, and how he might have preferred the rubber raft to this rank, overcrowded steel tube, a man in a white t-shirt and blue dungaree trousers emerged from a watertight door at the forward end of the room. He instantly made eye contact with Trott and made his way over to him wearing a friendly smile.

  “Hello, sir,” he said cheerily. “Welcome aboard the Wolffish. I’m Hansen, the wardroom steward.”

  “Frank Trott, VB-22, USS Antietam,” Trott said appreciatively, thankful for the attention. “Pleased to meet you, Hansen. Where is your CO?”

  “He’s up in the conning tower, sir.” Hansen pointed to an open hatch at the top of a ladder. “He’s a bit busy at the moment, but don’t worry. He’ll get around to giving you a proper welcome. Now, if you’ll just come with me, sir, I’ll get you all set up.”