Dive Beneath the Sun

by R. Cameron Cooke

  As if none of the carnage was there, Alexander stood in the center of the room, spinning the periscope around.

  “Shit!” he shouted, in a manner uncharacteristic of his usually calm demeanor. “Damned squall’s blocking every point of the compass!”

  Trott got the sense Alexander was talking to the quartermaster down in the control room, but then Alexander took his eyes away from the scope and seemed surprised and then somewhat relieved to discover Trott standing there.

  “Frank! I need your help!” he said, like a man trying desperately to hold everything together. “We took a direct hit. They’re all dead in here. Go up to the bridge and see if anyone’s alive. Be quick about it. We’ve got to dive before that tin can blows us out of the water, and I don’t want to leave anyone behind.”

  “Dive?” Trott said quizzically, glancing once at the holes in the hull.

  Alexander sensed his hesitation. “We’ll seal off the conning tower from the rest of the ship. It’s our only chance. So, get a move on.” He jabbed a finger at the ladder that led up to the bridge.

  Trott made no further argument. He willed himself to climb the ladder and braced for more visions of death and destruction. The wet ladder rungs deflected the hard rain drops into his eyes, and he was drenched by the time he reached the bridge.

  The first thing he saw, when he emerged into the open air, was a dead sailor slouched unnaturally in one of the lookout perches above. A few paces away, on the cigarette deck, he saw the body of a man hanging upside down from the railing. The man had been lanced through the body by the broken railing, and was obviously dead. Trott heard a moan coming from the other side of the bridge. Turning the corner around the periscope housing he discover two more men on the deck, but these men were not dead. They were still moving, though both were dazed and obviously suffering from the concussion of the blasts. Trott surmised that the periscope housing had shielded them from the brunt of the explosions.

  Then he realized that one of them was Keane.

  “The captain and another man are still alive!” Trott cupped his hands to call down the hatch. “I need someone to help me!”

  Within moments, Alexander had bolted up the ladder and was there, apparently deciding that manning the periscope was no use when visibility was zero. They began dragging Keane toward the hatch first, but the movement seemed to revive the captain, and he winced every time Trott touched his right arm.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Trott said. “I didn’t realize your arm was hurt.”

  “What happened?” Keane said, his face red from the pain, but his eyes darting assertively from Trott’s face to Alexander’s. “What’s the damage? Where’s the XO?”

  “We took a hard hit, Captain,” Alexander replied. “We’ve got to get you below, so we can dive.”

  Keane looked at him searchingly. “Is the XO in command?”

  Alexander paused. “The XO is dead, sir. And we will be, too, if we don’t get you below.”

  Keane appeared to consider for a moment before clutching at their hands. “Help me to my feet.”

  Reluctantly, they obeyed and propped Keane against the bridge railing, neither letting go for fear that he might fall over. Keane looked all around, at the gray haze surrounding the ship, at the blood-stained deck, at the dead men impervious to the biting raindrops, and at the holes in the conning tower. After a moment of contemplation, he seemed to come to some decision.

  “What was the last bearing to the Jap destroyer?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly, Captain.” Alexander fidgeted with impatience. “Somewhere off the starboard quarter. For the love of Pete, sir, it doesn’t matter! We’ve got to dive! This rain isn’t going to mask us much longer.”

  Keane ignored the outburst. “Go below, George. Check the XO’s plot. He should have marked the destroyer’s position. Use it to derive a good bearing.”

  “But, Captain,” Alexander protested, “what good will that do? The TDC’s smashed. I’m not even sure of our own position! That blast could have thrown off our whole dead reckoning trace. I only managed to get one fix before we lost visibility.”

  Keane looked at him unwaveringly, though it seemed to cause him great pain to do so. “It’ll do. We don’t need the TDC. That tin can’s stuck in the minefield. She can’t move. Go below, George. Calculate the enemy’s position relative to our own, and fire the torpedo in tube seven down that bearing.”

  After a hesitant glance at Trott, Alexander cursed under his breath and dashed for the hatch.

  Trott offered to help Keane sit down, but Keane refused, instead insisting that he look after the other man. Before Trott complied, he asked carefully. “Are you sure we shouldn’t dive, Captain?”

  Keane shook his head. “No, Frank. We don’t know how bad we’re hit. We don’t know the state of the pressure hull. This is our only chance.”

  It seemed like minutes, but it was only seconds before Alexander’s voice announced over the intercom. “Firing tube seven.”

  The deck shuddered. The torpedo was away, its path, as well as the entire stern of the submarine still cloaked by the downpour. But within moments, the rain started to slacken, and then, as it often did in these latitudes, it stopped entirely, and the veil of gray lifted to reveal the broadside of the Japanese destroyer, less than four thousand yards away.

  “Shit!” Keane cursed, and Trott understood why. The enemy gun turrets were already turning toward the Wolffish. They would fire long before the torpedo hit – if it hit at all.

  Then suddenly, a clap of thunder erupted from the stern, nearly startling Trott out of his shoes. He turned to see a cloud of smoke hanging about the deck gun down on the main deck. It was manned by two men, and it had just fired at the destroyer. Trott then turned back to look at the enemy ship just in time to see the gleaming tracer shell complete its seven-second flight and strike the enemy warship just beneath its aft stack with a flash that echoed across the water several seconds later. It was a direct hit, and though the damage it caused was not apparent to Trott, amid the smoke already churning from the stricken ship, it seemed to please Keane greatly.

  “They did it!” he exclaimed. “They knocked out their hydraulics, or something. The guns have stopped rotating.”

  It was true. The two gun mounts on the destroyer’s stern were no longer moving, and even from this distance it was clear that they would have to rotate through a few more degrees in order to target the Wolffish.

  Keane raised a fist in the air and gave a weak shout of acclaim to the gun crew, now leaving their seats, presumably to fetch another shell. One of them was limping heavily, nearly crawling, but he waved back with a gleeful smile. The other man seemed to vacantly follow his comrade like a man on a tether. Trott suddenly realized that the two men were Clark and Greenberg.

  “You’ve done enough!” Keane shouted weakly. “Get below!”

  “We’ll give that tin can another shot, Captain!” Clark shouted back, as he leaned down to open the hatch to the ammunition scuttle.

  The destroyer was impaired, but not impotent. Her gun turrets were frozen, but her 13-millimeter anti-aircraft mounts were not, and a fire storm of tracer now took to the sky from the destroyer’s mid-section. It arced lazily in the air, and then came down onto the submarine in a supersonic hail that punctured the periscope housing and fairwater, and passed down the submarine’s length, slicing through railing, sparking and ricocheting in a frenzy of deadly metal.

  Trott huddled with Keane behind the bridge bulwark, flinching as each high-velocity round struck, certain that the next sweep would pass through the thin steel to eviscerate both of them.

  But it did not. Instead, the murderous fusillade abruptly stopped, followed immediately by a tremendous roar that reverberated across the water. Both Trott and Keane peeked over the bulwark to see a ship in the throes of death. The torpedo had struck the destroyer below the fantail, and appeared to have set off some of the depth charges on her stern. Her midsection now burned ferociously
. Her stern compartments filled with the sea, acting like a counterweight, raising her bow high out of the water. Within a matter of seconds, the destroyer slid back beneath the waves, and was gone.

  As Alexander’s voice howled with euphoria over the intercom, and Keane finally allowed himself to collapse to the deck, Trott darted aft looking for Clark and Greenberg. From the cigarette deck, he scanned around the deck gun, but he could not see either of them. Eventually, he found them, when he peered over the edge of the railing. Both had taken refuge behind the bulk of the conning tower, but even that steel structure had not been enough to stop all of the enemy shells. Greenberg lay flat on the deck, his unseeing eyes staring up at the gray sky. He had been hit, and, judging from the size of the gaping wound in his chest, he had died instantly. Clark knelt beside him, his head bowed low as if he were praying over the dead man.

  “There was nothing you could have done, Clark,” Trott said, resting a hand on the solemn sailor’s shoulder after climbing down to stand beside him. “It was his time.”

  Clark nodded, and then spoke gravely. “It was me, sir. I’m the one who tampered with that message.”

  At first, Trott did not realize what Clark was talking about, but then he remembered on that day when he had first met Greenberg, how the young radioman-gunner had been so distraught over learning that his squadron, and potentially his family, had not been informed that he was still alive. Clark was a radioman. It would have been easy for him to remove the critical lines about Greenberg’s rescue from a message, a cruel trick spawned by the desire for revenge, to somehow payback Greenberg for Martinez’s death. Now, Greenberg’s family, who had thought their son missing in action, would be getting a much more dismal notice.

  “Perhaps it’s better this way,” Trott offered consolingly, seeing that the guilt weighed heavily on the radioman’s mind.

  “I was wrong about him, sir,” Clark said mournfully. “I’m going to write his family. I’m going to tell them how brave he was. And how he was a first rate shipmate – like Martinez.”

  As men emerged from the conning tower to replace the gun crew, and to carry the dead and wounded below, Trott looked out at the column of smoke where the destroyer had sunk. He exhaled deeply, still shaken by the loss and destruction.

  He decided, at that moment, that he, too, would write a letter, but his would be to Greenberg’s squadron leader aboard the Antietam. Trott would do everything he could to make sure that no one ever knew the true events surrounding Greenberg’s rescue – and he would make sure that Greenberg got the decorations he truly deserved.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  The curling waves deposited Nagata onto the cool sands of Hibuson Island’s southern shore, and after trudging partway up the beach, he collapsed in the lapping surf. At last, he could rest. Every muscle in his body screamed from the exertion of the long swim.

  He finally unclenched his hand to let go of the young man he had pulled for so long through the churning ocean. The sailor lay next to him in the sand, still not moving, and now Nagata could see that he did not breathe either.

  Seaman Ito was dead.

  Deep inside, Nagata had known he was gone, but he had swum for both of them anyway, dragging Ito along at a snail’s pace, it seemed, nearly drowning himself several times to keep hold of the sailor’s dead weight, but Nagata had had to do it, as long as there was a chance Ito was still alive.

  Now, clearly, all of his efforts had been for nothing.

  He was not sure, but he believed Ito had been on the main deck fighting the fires when the torpedo struck the Yokaze’s stern and sent her to the bottom with most of her crew. By some stroke of chance, or fate, Nagata had been thrown from the bridge by the secondary detonations, and had found himself among dozens of flailing sailors trying to swim away from the rapidly sinking destroyer. In the confusion, a body had brushed against Nagata underwater, and he had reached down and pulled it up to reveal a man badly burned on one side of his face and torso. To his horror, Nagata had then realized he was looking into the face of Ito. The young sailor’s head hung limply, and displayed no signs of animation, but Nagata placed one arm across his chest and started towing him toward the dark ridges of Hibuson, just visible above the wave crests. Had Nagata not known that the island was less than three kilometers away, he might have let himself sink and die with Ito and all of the rest of his men who had not escaped from the sinking hull. But there had been a chance that Ito was still alive, and so he had swum. Through one painful stroke after another, and nearly three hours of back-breaking labor, fighting against tossing seas and strong currents, he had managed to reach the island.

  Now, as Nagata caught his breath, he saw dozens of other survivors trickling ashore, all down the beach, like a school of sea creatures driven from the water, each one collapsing from exhaustion when he reached dry ground.

  After a few moments rest, Nagata climbed up the steep slope to gain a higher vantage point, to see what remained of his ship, and what remained of the Kenan Maru.

  To the east, where the Yokaze had sunk, nothing remained but a few dwindling flames, fed by the spilled contents of the destroyer’s brimming fuel tanks. The valiant destroyer with her hundreds of compartments, her intricate engines, her vast weaponry – a ship which had taken over a year to construct and which he had led through so many desperate battles – was gone, as though she had never existed.

  Across the stirring seas to the south, the coast lay like a long black ridge, running east to west. Several thousand kilometers away, where the narrow passage between the coast and Hibuson Island afforded entry to Surigao Strait, a thick column of smoke spiraled up to the clouds. Beneath the smoke, lay the Kenan Maru. Bright orange and yellow flames burned along the freighter’s entire length. Her hull was tilted heavily to one side, the result of having been beached. Evidently, the Kenan Maru’s captain had seen no possible means of escape from the persistent submarine which had pursued her with guns blazing. He and his crew had preferred grounding and survival to sinking and certain death.

  With the Yokaze out of the picture, the submarine had pounded the freighter mercilessly, and though Nagata had not been able to witness it from his low position beneath the wave crests, he had heard every report of the submarine’s gun. It had fired nearly eight rounds per minute for a long duration, and had fired so many shots that Nagata had used the cacophony to pace his strokes.

  He had prayed that the freighter had managed to get away, that the sacrifices of the Kiku and the Yokaze, and their dead crews, might have had some purpose, something that he could include in the letters to the dead sailor’s parents, something that would give Ito’s parents some granule of satisfaction that their son – their last son – had died for something meaningful. But, sadly, that was not the case. They had all died for nothing. The Kenan Maru would never reach Japan. The freighter and her precious cargo were now a raging inferno, and the mission – Nagata’s mission – was a total failure.

  “Captain!” Nagata recognized the oil-covered man before him as the gunnery officer. He pointed to the passage beyond the burning wreck where the white bow waves of three small fast-moving craft had come into view. “Patrol boats from Surigao City. They must have received our distress signal. Perhaps they can catch the Yankee submarine before it escapes!”

  Nagata nodded soberly, but said nothing. He knew there was no chance of that. The patrol craft were already moving in close to the burning freighter, preparing to fish survivors out of the shallows. They would soon see the signal fires from Yokaze’s men on Hibuson, and come to their aid as well. They had come here to rescue survivors, not to pursue the enemy. Such a pursuit would have been in vain anyway. The enemy submarine was just a small sliver of black on the eastern horizon. She was heading for the open sea at top speed and would soon be lost in the scattered squalls.

  The enemy had won today. The sting of the defeat carved out a hollow spot in Nagata’s heart. But worse than that was the dishonor he felt at having failed his country, his
men, his family, and his uncle. Nagata knew he could not return to Japan now. To do so would be shameful. He could not allow himself to enjoy the comforts of home and family when hundreds of the men he was responsible for lay entombed in a gutted hulk at the bottom of the sea. He could never face Ito’s parents again.

  The senninbari, the belt with one thousand stitches, that Nagata had placed around his own waist at the beginning of the cruise was still there. He unbuttoned his wet shirt and tore the belt free. He would send it back to his sister, for he no longer wished for its protection. He wished to die as his men had died. He wished to die in battle. To that end he would see that any orders from his uncle intending to spirit him off to Japan were ignored. He would, instead, make his way to Brunei, where the fleet was assembling, and make himself available for any duty. Admiral Nishimura, one of the task force commanders, was an old friend. Nagata would seek him out and plead for a billet on his flagship, but if that failed, he would not give up. He would volunteer to serve as a deck hand, if necessary, but he would be with the fleet when it sortied to confront the coming Allied invasion.