by Robb White
“Yes, sir.”
“Check I Now it seems to me that even a reserve officer should be able to make a plan of what he’s going to do and submit it to his commanding officer.”
“Yes, sir. Then I can assume that you will go into the lagoon?”
“What lagoon?”
Ken got out the chart and showed him the lagoon with the islands ringing it.
Stevenson sat for a long time looking at the chart. Finally he said, “I see no reason to put my boat into that trap, Mr. Braden. Do you realize that the Japs could have that entrance rigged with a net, or have it mined? That they could let us in and then slam the door on us?” He looked up at Ken. “Did you actually think—even for a moment—that I would take my boat into a place like that?”
“I hoped so, sir. With the boat in the lagoon I can get ashore very easily and—”
“Very easily,” Stevenson interrupted him. “Is your ease and comfort the main thing here, Mr. Braden?”
“No, sir,” Ken said, trying not to let any anger sound in his voice. “But if I try to get ashore from the seaward side it would mean a long swim. Then, too, a coral reef like this one is dangerous if there’s any surf breaking on it at all.”
“Didn’t you realize that there would be danger, Mr. Braden?”
“Of course, sir. But since there’s a good deal of unavoidable danger after I get ashore, why add unnecessary danger trying to get there?”
“It seems to me that you’re confining your thoughts to the danger to yourself, Mr. Braden, and not giving very much thought to the men and officers in this boat. It seems to me that you’re perfectly willing to risk all their fives so that you won’t have the inconvenience of crossing a little shelf of coral.”
Ken almost gave up as he looked at Stevenson’s washed-out blue eyes, in which he could find no sympathy, no understanding of the problem. ‘‘Perhaps so, sir. I’m sorry. Then we’ll plan on approaching the islands from the seaward side? Will you give me some idea how close to the reef you will bring the boat, sir?”
Stevenson studied the chart, then, with dividers, took some measurements. Ken felt sick as he saw the points of the dividers opening wider and wider. At last Stevenson said, “Five thousand yards, Mr. Braden.”
Ken’s whole body went slack. Three miles. Three miles. In the open ocean.
During UDT he had had to swim a mile with fins but no diving gear. He had made it in forty-five minutes and still remembered how bushed he had been at the end of it. Now —three miles in probably rough water, at night, with tanks and fifteen pounds of lead in the belt… .
“That would take approximately three hours, sir. Just to reach the reef. I don’t know how long it would take me to cross it and get the gear hidden. Say half an hour. That would mean going and coming would take around seven hours. That wouldn’t leave me much time during darkness to explore the island, sir.”
Stevenson looked up at him. “I am not concerned with that, Mr. Braden. As I said before, my job is to run my boat, yours is to get to the islands. If it takes you seven hours or twenty hours is not my concern. Do you understand?”
“Don’t you think you could come in a little closer, sir?”
“Do you see this line of shading, Mr. Braden?” he asked, pointing on the chart with the dividers. “The water there is sixty feet deep. I will not take my boat into water less than sixty feet. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right! Check! Now, if I’m not mistaken, the distance from that line to the reef is”—he measured again with the dividers on the side of the chart—“five thousand yards, give a yard or two one way or the other. Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So there’s your answer, Mr. Braden. Five thousand yards. Now take this op plan and, this time, write a detailed plan of your own. Have it ready by oh eight hundred in the morning.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Ken had been back in his cabin only a few minutes when Malone came in, his beard odd-looking in the dim red light. He was carrying two enormous sandwiches. “Want?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” Ken said.
Malone stopped in the middle of a bite and looked up at him. Swallowing, he said, “You look sort of sunk, boy. What’s the trouble? Don’t tell me you’re seasick.”
“No. But I’m sunk all right. The Skipper says he won’t go inside the lagoon. The nearest he’ll come is five thousand yards on the outside.”
Malone whistled softly. “Isn’t that kind of a long pull for you?”
Ken nodded.
“Was the Skipper really firm about this?”
“Like a rock.”
Malone gnawed on his sandwiches, taking bites out of each one. “The only man aboard who can talk with the Skipper is Phil Carney.”
“The Exec?”
Malone nodded, finishing his sandwiches and combing the crumbs out of his beard. “Let’s go talk to Phil.”
“All right.” Ken climbed down out of his bunk as Malone, still brushing his beard, said, “Phil’s the best submariner in the boat. If he thinks the boat can be taken into the lagoon he might be able to change the Skipper’s mind about it.”
Carney was in his cabin dressing.
Ken showed him the chart and explained the problem.
Carney was a rugged, blond man with short, bristly, sandy hair. There were crow’s feet fines at the corner of his blue eyes and a livid scar running from his forehead down to his throat. You could feel determination in him, and a great calmness. He’d be hard to panic, Ken thought, watching him read the chart. And tough to fight.
At last he began to shake his head. Ken’s hopes died.
“I wouldn’t take a boat in there unless I had to,” he said quietly. “But then I don’t see all the picture, Ken. What’s wrong with standing off five thousand?”
Ken felt at once that talking with Carney was entirely different from talking with Stevenson. Carney’s mind was open; Stevenson’s was closed. Carney listened and thought about the problem as a whole while Stevenson thought only about where he fitted into it.
“Well, sir,” Ken said, “first, there’s the time element. According to the dope, there’ll only be about six hours of real darkness out there at this time of year. If I have to swim ten thousand yards there won’t be any darkness left to work in.
“Next, there’s the problem of getting across the surf. I realize that I sound like a baby crying about that, but if I don’t make it, this whole mission gets to be useless.
“Next, there’s a smaller problem of finding the boat when I come back. Every yard increases the chance for error. You know a man in the water can’t see very far so I only have to miss the boat by a few yards and I’ve had it. Which also makes the mission useless.”
Carney put on his cap. I’m going up on the bridge. Let’s hash it out up there.”
Ken and Pat followed him as he went aft and then up through the control room to the conning tower. There, in the dim red light, the helmsman was at the big bronze wheel, the talkers and other watchstanders were silent in the darkness. The radar watch was hunched over the faint green dial with the thin bright line sweeping slowly around and around.
Carney said nothing as he went on up the ladder, but Ken had seen the way he had glanced at everything in the conning tower before going on.
They followed him out of the small hatch and the blast of damp, cool night air hit them in the face.
It was a beautiful, calm, starry night. Six or seven men were on the bridge, with two more in the lookout cages up on the periscope structure. No one was talking.
Carney went over to the Officer of the Deck and asked how things were going.
“Very well. That battery leak is fixed and so is the hoist, Phil.”
“Any word from the Skipper?”
“Only the night order book. Nothing else.”
Carney said quietly, “I’d be on my toes for a drill before morning, Frank. We’ve been steaming a long time with no drills.”
/> “Thanks. What do you think about some dives tomorrow, too?”
“I’ll talk to the Skipper about it. We were getting under the water too slowly back there a while ago.”
“I know it. The last dive took thirty seconds from horn to green board.”
Ken, standing behind them, didn’t even know what they were talking about. He had thought that after the months of indoctrination he could at least recognize the Navy’s way of talking but he had certainly never heard of a green board and wondered now what it meant.
Carney turned away and led them back to a small wooden seat aft. “You can smoke back here if you want to, but the smoking lamp’s out up here after we leave Midway,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
Ken sat on one side of him, Malone on the other. Ken still had the SCAN package but there wasn’t enough starlight to see the chart.
“The Skipper’s right about that five thousand,” Carney said. “You’d be asking for it to come in any closer. Coral is rough on submarines. So that leaves nothing but the lagoon.”
“Mush took Wahoo into Wewak,” Malone said. “That entrance was a lot shallower than this one and Wewak’s a big base. We didn’t see any signs of nets or booms or mines.” Carney said quietly, “Mush isn’t running this boat.”
“And I heard that Done Donaho took a boat into the lagoon at Truk,” Malone went on. “Truk’s the biggest base they’ve got out here, so if that isn’t mined or netted I don’t think they’d go to all the trouble of mining or netting the entrance to that little old lagoon where they haven’t got a thing but some sand and naked natives.”
“I don’t think so, either,” Carney agreed. “But here’s an item. The water in those lagoons is usually calm and clear as a bell. A plane flying over it could see us even if we were a hundred, maybe two hundred, feet down. So there we are, fat, dumb, and happy, not even knowing a plane is up there looking at us.”
“We wouldn’t have to stay there during daylight,” Ken reminded him.
“No, I guess not.” Carney flipped his cigarette in a long arc down to the black, rushing water. “Five thousand yards,” he said slowly, talking to himself. “That’s a long haul.” He suddenly stood up. “Well, if I can catch the Skipper in a good humor I’ll talk to him about it.”
“What’ll you say, Phil?” Malone asked.
Carney stood for a moment looking at the black water turning white as the propellers churned into it. Then he sighed. “Well, based on the information we’ve got on the chart, I’d take a chance. That is, if I was commanding this piece of stovepipe—which I ain’t. On the other hand, these charts have turned out to be all wrong a lot of times. Until this war started the Pacific Ocean was, in a lot of places, unknown; never charted. You don’t know until you get there. Remember Trigger going on the reef during the battle at Midway, Pat?”
Ken, hope coming up in him—a little—wanted to get it straight. “Do you mean, sir, that if you were Skipper you’d take the boat into the lagoon?”
Carney scrubbed his bristly hair with one hand. “If it’s like it is on the chart, the boat could get in, Ken.”
“Will you try to talk the Skipper into seeing it that way, sir?”
Carney went on scrubbing his head. Finally he said, “Yes.”
Malone and Ken watched him go forward and disappear down the hatch.
Malone said quietly, “He’ll make a good skipper someday, if they ever give him a boat. I’d go in any boat with him.”
“He seems a lot older than most lieutenants,” Ken said.
“He is. He’s thirty. You know, he enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor. Just walked into a recruiting office and signed up.
“Then, right after boot camp, he signed up for the boats. You know, all hands in the boats have to volunteer for them. There aren’t any people in the boats who don’t want to be in ’em. So Phil asked for subs and then, in New London, somebody got smart and made him an officer. An ensign, if you please. So he’s come all the way. He’s had twenty, thirty patrols and been everything in the boats except Skipper. He almost got it in Tang; laid his face open and just missed his jugular.
“I think he’s right in there with Mush and the rest of the top joes. Of course, that’s just guessing because you can’t ever tell what a man’s going to be like once he makes Skipper. I’ve seen good execs turn into lousy skippers. But I don’t think Phil would. He’s too steady. Commanding a boat wouldn’t shake him at all.”
“That must be the loneliest job in the world,” Ken decided. “Well, I hope Phil can talk our Skipper into going into that lagoon. Otherwise I’m a dead pigeon.” He stood up. “So now I’ve got the rest of the night to write a detailed plan—based on five thousand yards. By the way, where can I find a space big enough to lay down a sheet of paper?”
“The wardroom’s the only place. Just tell the acey-deucy players to give you some room.”
Ken took a last long breath of the fresh, cool, salty air and went back down the hatch into the red glow of the submarine.
Chapter 4
As the night wore on the other officers finished reading or writing or working around the wardroom table and drifted off, either to go on watch or to sleep. At last Ken was alone there with his problem.
He kept on writing down his plan although he knew that it was useless.
First, he wrote, there should be a general reconnaissance of the atoll. The submarine could move at periscope depth in as close as possible and study each of the islands. If, by doing that, any sign of a radio station was found it would save a lot of useless searching.
Second, if nothing was sighted through the periscope, Ken would have to start searching each island.
As he wrote he felt as though he were trying to stuff smoke into a bottle. He carefully detailed each of his movements and the maneuvers of the sub, but long before his time schedule got him back to the boat the night would be gone.
There simply was not enough time. The nights were not long enough.
Around two in the morning the steward stuck his head through the little opening from the galley. “You want some jamoke, Mr. Braden?” he asked.
“Some what?”
“Jamoke. Joe. Java. Boiler compound. Coffee?”
“Please.”
“I’ll fix em. How you like? We got sugar, cream, milk, anything.”
“Just plain, please. Whats your name?”
“Willy Armstrong.”
“How long have you been in submarines?”
“One thousand years, sir. Here you go.” Willy shoved a cup of coffee through the opening. “I’ll make you a sandwich, too.”
“No, thanks. This is fine. How’d you get in submarines, Willy?”
“Me? Well, sir, I went downtown one Saturday and this fellow says, ‘Boy, you better join the Navy before the Army catches you.’ And I told him I didn’t know the Army was even after me but he says they were and that if I’d rather ride than walk I’d better join the Navy. So I did.
“Next thing you know I’m on this airplane carrier. And next thing you know here come a bunch of Jap airplanes and they drop some bombs on us and shoot us up pretty bad. Fact is, we sink.
“So when they pulled me out of the water I said to myself, I’m going where those airplanes can’t see me. So I got in submarines. Nobody can see you but, man, they can sure hear you down there. Click bam swish swish swish. Man, that’s a noise I don’t ever want to hear again. I don’t even want to hear that peem peem peem”
Ken was about to ask what all this was about when a gong began to ring with a frantic, hurrying sound.
“Oh-oh,” Willy said. “I’ve been expecting this.”
“What is it?”
Before Willy could answer a voice from the loud-speaker said, “Battle stations submerged.”
Then there were a lot of noises and commands.
Through all this then came the sound of a harsh, old-fashioned automobile horn. It went ah-ooh-gah, ah-ooh-gah.
Then Stevenson’s vo
ice saying, “Dive the boat.”
“Are we going under?” Ken asked Willy.
“Were going to try,” Willy said as he ran into the wardroom and put his hand on a valve on the wall. “Were sure going to try.”
“Flood negative. Flood safety.”
“Hatch secured, sir.”
“Close induction.”
“Green board. Green board.”
“Bleed air.”
Ken felt the deck tilt a little forward and then he felt a slight pressure of air against his eardrums.
Someone said, “Air in the boat, sir.”
“Eight degrees down bubble.”
“Easy on the bow planes. Easy!”
“Blow negative.”
“All ahead one third.”
Gradually the noise and the orders stopped. Now, though, instead of the heavy pulsing of the diesels that Ken had gotten used to hearing and feeling there was a new, high, whining sound.
“When are we going to go down, Willy?” Ken asked.
“Were down, sir. At least, were supposed to be down.” He looked at the dial on the wall. “Were down to sixty feet. But were going to hear from the Skipper about it.”
“Why?” Ken asked.
Before Willy could answer, Stevenson’s voice came over the loud-speaker. It had a distant, disgusted sound. “That dive was as lousy as any I’ve ever seen in the boats,” he said, his voice going into every part of the ship. “I didn’t get a green board for thirty-seven seconds. It took sixteen seconds to clear the bridge and close the hatch. I want that down to eleven seconds. Just simply lousy, gentlemen.”
Willy whispered, “I told you we were going to hear from him.”
Stevenson’s voice started again. “Now bring her up and do it again. I want this boat down sixty feet in fifty seconds.”
Again the horn blew, orders sounded throughout the boat, and soon Ken could hear water pouring down the hull as the Shark broke the surface.
Willy went back into the little galley and Ken could see him making sandwiches and coffee. “We’re going to be doing this all night long,” he declared. “And all day too.”
As the rest of the crew practiced diving, Ken went on, hopelessly, writing his op plan.