Protecting Pachinko. Picking up survivors.
When the fog thinned enough, they’d start hunting. They’d radio for reinforcements. For the next few days at least, this entire stretch of sea would be crawling with ships and planes searching for American submarines.
“Final depth, 200 feet,” Bryant said. “Open the bulkhead flappers. Start the ventilation. Good trim. Speed, three knots.”
“Secure from battle stations,” Charlie said.
“Aye, aye.”
He eyed Liebold, who sagged against the firing board. “Jack, get some sleep.”
The man nodded. “I think I will, thanks.”
“I’ll be getting some rack time as well, Bryant. That is, if you’re good to carry on as officer of the deck until the end of the watch.”
Bryant laughed. “Are you kidding? I couldn’t sleep right now if my life depended on it. You two go ahead. I’m too keyed up.”
Liebold was already gone. Charlie headed toward his bunk, where he’d sleep like a rock until somebody woke him.
Jane caught sight of him from the wardroom. “Charlie!”
His heart thumped. After everything he’d gone through, the sight of her somehow managed to quicken his pulse. “Hi, Jane.”
She yanked the curtain closed, giving them a brief moment of privacy in the passageway. She pulled down her surgical mask. “You did it.”
“We sure did.”
Jane said nothing, just smiling at him with a devious gleam in her eyes. God, how he wanted to kiss her right now.
He stammered, “How’s the captain—?”
The beautiful nurse stepped forward and planted a wet kiss on his lips.
“That’s from all of us,” she said.
Charlie reeled, his face hot. “Well.”
Her blue eyes flashed. “And this,” she added, “is from me.”
She leaned in again.
The second kiss lasted a lot longer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
GAS
Touch and go.
Sabertooth fled north toward the Philippines in the hope the Japanese wouldn’t expect that. She paused to send a flash message to Pearl. Then she struck far to the east before resuming her southerly course.
Daytime periscope checks revealed black smudges on the horizon—the belching smokestacks of IJN destroyers. They were out there, hunting the audacious American submarine after her successful surprise attack on their carriers. Even at night, when the boat had to surface to replenish her batteries and fresh air, things got dicey, and patrolling ships and seaplanes frequently forced them to dive.
Meanwhile, Jane happily reported, Captain Hunter was recovering.
“Great,” Charlie told her. “Now I can find out how much trouble I’m in.”
With Liebold on duty as officer of the deck, they spoke in the privacy of Charlie’s stateroom.
She sat next to him on his bed and touched his arm. “Why would the captain be angry with you?”
He could have laughed at that. Where should he begin? He’d gone ashore with Braddock and surprised a platoon of Japanese soldiers, which had jeopardized the mission. He’d ordered the torpedoes modified. He’d taken the damaged boat into combat while it was crowded with refugees.
But he couldn’t tell her any of that. “That’s between me and the captain.”
He’d sunk Yosai. Everything he’d done had to be worth that.
Jane snorted. “You submarine types. Everything’s a big secret.”
He smiled. “You do realize we call it the ‘Silent Service.’”
“I was wondering if I got you in trouble.”
“You? How?”
“Planting that smooch on you. I thought maybe somebody had seen us.”
“Nobody saw us.” At least he hoped not. Another transgression.
She said, “Well, you’ve been avoiding me for days.”
Which was true, but he didn’t know how to explain that either. He liked Jane. Liked her a lot. He could easily fall in love with her. She was beautiful, yes, but also tough at the core, so unlike the male ideal of feminine submissiveness. She’d gone through hell, and while it darkened her around the edges—lent an occasional haunted cast to her eyes—it did nothing to dim her sunny disposition. She understood him in a way Evie never could.
But he didn’t trust his feelings. He wasn’t sure what he felt about Evie anymore, not after she told him she’d moved on. That didn’t mean he wanted to fall in love again. Not during this war. War demanded everything, and it showed no mercy to men and women in love.
Jane caught the anxious look on his face. “You know, I can take a hint.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“You got a girl back home?”
“I did. I ended it when I signed up for Submarine School.”
She sighed. “Oh, damn. You married the war.”
“Something like that.” He thought about it and added, “I can’t think about the future when I need to fight now.”
“You can dream about it, can’t you?”
“Maybe.” He remembered Rusty’s words. “Something to fight for, not just against. Every sailor in this war wants that. But whatever I dream, I don’t want to be tied to it, know what I mean? It can’t be real for me.”
When Charlie fought, he had to commit everything. Put his life on the line. He knew full well he might not survive this war.
Jane looked away and said quietly, “I know what you mean.”
She said nothing more, and Charlie had a chance to look at her. She leaned back on the thin mattress, the sleeves of her T-shirt rolled up to expose her tanned shoulders. Her braids hung low behind her back.
He very much wanted to kiss her again.
Seemingly sensing his desire, she blushed and pretended to find the stateroom’s drab wood paneling interesting. “We don’t need a future, Charlie. We have right now. Like you said, that’s all that matters, and it may be all we’re going to get.” Jane looked him in the eye. “Now kiss me. God, I can’t believe I actually have to tell you to do that.”
Charlie’s cheeks flushed with heat. He knew boat skippers often second-guessed themselves if they hesitated.
He didn’t hesitate.
The general alarm gonged across the boat.
He leaped to his feet as if electrified.
Jane shot up. “What’s going on?”
Liebold’s voice over the 1MC: “Chlorine in battery aft!”
Chlorine!
Along with fire and flood, it haunted submariners’ nightmares. Seawater contained large amounts of chlorine. If seawater contaminated the battery wells, it reacted with sulfuric acid in the battery, producing chlorine gas.
Chlorine gas had been used as a chemical weapon twenty years ago, during the Great War. Once inhaled, it attacked living tissue and produced severe nausea, coughing, labored breathing, chest pains, headache, and muscle weakness. It didn’t take much in the air to do damage. With prolonged exposure, it was deadly.
The damaged hull opening must have started leaking again. Leaking in a big way. Right now, the compartment was not only filled with gas that was spreading to the rest of the boat, it was also likely flooding.
They had to get to the surface fast.
“You’re safe here,” he told Jane. “Don’t move!”
He threw the curtain aside and ran toward the control room. The diving alarm was already sounding, three loud blats.
Liebold over the 1MC: “Surface, surface, surface!”
Broad daylight up there, possibly crawling with Japanese ships.
Charlie reached the control room as Sabertooth angled for ascent. Dripping-wet sailors tramped through the control room, coughing hard as they headed forward to safety.
He snapped, “Report!”
“Chlorine gas and flooding in battery aft!” Liebold said. “We’re surfacing the boat!”
“What’s our depth?”
“Passing one hundred feet.”
“Belay the order
to surface! Planes, sixty-five feet!”
He kept an eye on the depth gauge as Sabertooth clawed her way toward periscope depth. Heavy with water, powered by a single battery, the maneuver took an agonizingly long time.
The torpedo officer picked up the phone and said into the mouthpiece, “Silence on the line! Engineering, report … Roger. Carry on.” He looked at Charlie. “Chlorine and flooding checked in battery aft. Bryant says the compartment is sealed. The berthing and mess are being evacuated forward.”
“Very well.”
Ensign Miller: “Sixty-five feet and holding, Mr. Harrison!”
“Up scope!”
He crouched as the periscope slid out of its well, and he rose with it, already circling with his face pressed to the eyepiece. He rotated three times, sweeping the water for enemy warships. Then he spun again, scanning the skies for planes.
“Down scope!” Nothing but calm sea and blue sky. Thank God. He coughed as his throat began to sting. “Surface! Put the Sugar Dog and Sugar Jig on standby.”
The radarman warmed up the radar.
Charlie coughed again. He had to hurry this along, or they’d all be suffering soon. “Lookouts to the conning tower!”
The entire control room was coughing now. He glanced at the depth gauge. Almost there. A moment later, Sabertooth’s more than 2,000 tons broke the water and settled at a depth of twenty-five feet. Gibson called down, all clear topside. The lookouts mounted to their stations.
Liebold said into the phone, “Open the main induction. Answer bells on main engines. Put one main on charge. Standard speed will be fifteen knots.”
“Helm, all ahead standard,” Charlie said. “Get us back on a heading of one-nine-oh.”
“All ahead standard, aye, sir,” the helmsman responded.
The aft battery compartment had been sealed, but a lot of gas had escaped, posing an immediate threat until the boat could be ventilated, the leak repaired, and the water pumped out. It was time to evacuate the boat and prepare for her defense.
Charlie activated the 1MC and said, “Battle stations, gun action. All personnel without imminent duties will evacuate topside.”
“Fill the ammunition train,” Liebold barked into his phone’s mouthpiece. “Open gun access hatch. Gun crew on deck.”
“I want everybody armed up there except the civilians, Jack. Empty the small arms locker.”
The torpedo officer passed on the order. Then he leaned over and coughed long and hard into his fist.
“How long are we going to be sitting here with our ass hanging out?” Charlie wondered. Right now, Sabertooth was surfaced in daylight on a calm sea, easily visible to Japanese seaplanes.
Liebold caught his breath and said, “Could be hours. Bryant doesn’t know yet. They’re putting down soda lime to soak up the atmospheric chlorine.”
“I’m going to the bridge. I’ll need you at your station here, if you’re able. Give me just ten minutes, and then somebody will relieve you.”
“I’m able. Go.”
“SJ and SD radar checks every five minutes.”
“Aye, aye.”
He mounted to the bridge as one of the lookouts called out he’d spotted something.
A plane.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SIEGE
The yeoman handed Charlie a Thompson submachine gun when he reached the bridge. Charlie checked the box magazine and pulled the charging bolt.
“Plane, far, bearing oh-nine-five,” Gibson said, pointing to the northwest. “Elevation, five thousand feet, crossing the stern!”
Charlie shouldered his weapon and trained his binoculars on the distant black dot that lazily crossed the blue sky.
“He’s turning,” Gibson said.
Right now, the pilot was radioing the location of the enemy submarine to his superiors, who would notify any IJN ships in the area.
That wasn’t the immediate threat.
The plane headed straight for them.
“He’s going to try a bombing run,” Charlie called out. “Ready on the guns!”
“Harrison!” a voice barked behind him. “What the hell is going on?”
The captain staggered onto the bridge. Back on his feet but barely, still weakened by his fight against the disease.
The plane was coming fast. He could hear its engines now.
“We’re under attack, Captain.”
“Yeo!”
“Captain?”
“Get those civilians back below!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Belay that!” Charlie snapped. “Captain, the boat’s filled with chlorine gas. I’ve got a skeleton crew in the control room on ten-minute shifts.”
“Looks like a Dave, Mr. Harrison,” Gibson muttered as he inspected the distant plane through his binoculars.
A Nakajima E8N single-engine plane with 7.7mm machine guns. It carried two seventy-pound bombs.
The plane screamed as it dove out of the clouds. Mounted on each side of the sail, Sabertooth’s 40mm Bofers anti-aircraft guns swiveled on their mounting plates, cocked and locked. The 20mm cannon and 50-caliber machine gun angled skyward.
Hunter growled, “You’re going to have to tell me how you managed to break my boat and put her on the surface in enemy waters, Harrison.”
“Bust me later, sir,” Charlie said and roared, “Commence firing!”
The anti-aircraft guns pounded an arcing stream of metal into the sky. Bright tracers streaked at the plane, but it kept coming, close enough now Charlie could see the pontoons mounted under its fuselage.
The plane’s gunner opened up with his machine guns. The civilians screamed, hugging the crying children. The bullets thudded into the deck and stitched a line across the water as the pilot veered away from Sabertooth’s withering AA gun fire. Two men flew backward in a spray of blood. The rest fired at the plane’s belly as it roared overhead, tracing a flickering shadow.
The plane swerved, circled, and made another howling dive across the beam.
Charlie slapped a fresh magazine into his Thompson. “Here he comes! Keep it hot!”
He saw the bomb fall. It whistled through the air.
It struck the water close aboard on the port beam and exploded, raising a hill of water that drenched the deck with its spray. Men toppled as the boat rolled. The children wailed. Charlie somehow kept his footing and fired his Tommy gun as the plane passed directly over the sail.
“Give me a goddamn weapon!” Hunter shouted.
The plane traced another tight circle, turning for another bombing run. The men fired at long range, throwing everything they had at it and screaming their heads off. The starboard AA gun pounded metal, making contact.
The plane bucked and swerved off, trailing black smoke from one of its wings. The bomb boomed in the water far astern, sending a geyser of water exploding in the air. The pilot had dumped it.
The plane veered again, this time toward the northwest, and kept going.
The men cheered. Charlie scanned the crowded deck, looking for Jane. He spotted her tending one of the men who’d been shot.
Captain Hunter lowered his smoking carbine and glared at him. “Now you can fill me in, Harrison.”
“Well,” Charlie said, “we sank Yosai and a heavy cruiser.”
Already pale, the captain turned even whiter.
“And damaged Pachinko,” Charlie went on. “We were on our way home when a heavy leak flooded the aft battery compartment, produced heavy chlorine gas, and forced us to surface. And here we are, sir.”
Hunter stared at him, partly with admiration, partly with open resentment. “How in God’s name did you sink Yosai?”
“We found him in heavy fog and got lucky—”
“Bridge, Control!” Liebold’s voice. “Radar contact. Surface ship, bearing oh-one-oh True, range 10,000 yards.”
“Very well,” Hunter said. “Keep me posted.” He sighed. “It looks like our luck’s run out, Harrison.”
An IJN warship was now
on an intercept course.
The captain said into the bridge microphone, “Control, Bridge. How long until we can dive?”
“Bridge, Control. Bryant says an hour, tops.”
Hunter nodded. He’d been racked with pain and fever in delirium for days while his green lieutenant had bagged an aircraft carrier and possibly changed the outcome of the war. He’d recovered just in time to preside over disaster.
“Very well,” he said. He leaned against the gunwale with his eyes closed.
“Sir, we could come east—”
“Stow it, Harrison.” The captain took a deep breath and let it go. He opened his eyes. “If anything bigger than a patrol boat gets here before we can dive, we won’t be able to fight it off, and you know it.”
Charlie swallowed that bitter pill. “Aye, Captain.”
Gibson said, “I’ve got him. A Momo-class destroyer. Coming on with a bone in his teeth.”
“Damn it,” Hunter said. “Prepare—” He made a choking sound.
“Captain?”
“Prepare to abandon ship.”
The order shot across Sabertooth’s crew like a thunderbolt. The men muttered loudly. They’d won—how could it end like this?
Charlie went below. Liebold greeted him with a curt nod and then smashed the radio to bits with a hammer.
“‘Damn it’ is right,” Charlie muttered.
Ensign Miller huffed into the control room with a rucksack filled with codebooks, weighted down with broken tools and ready to be thrown overboard. The man coughed loudly and ascended the ladder, leaving Charlie and Liebold as the last crew members in the control room.
“Looks like this is it,” Charlie said. “We’ll be spending the rest of the war in a POW camp.”
Liebold laughed bitterly, which turned into a coughing jag.
Charlie said, “You’d better get topside, Jack. You’ve been down here too long.”
“POW camp?” the man rasped, breathing hard. His voice sounded like sound paper rubbed together. “Is that what you think?”
“What are you saying?”
“We just sank one of their carriers, pal. If we’re lucky, they’ll line us up on the deck and shoot us. If we’re not, they’ll torture us first.”
Silent Running: a novel of the Pacific War (Crash Dive Book 2) Page 14