Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  "Mark! Four fathoms, starboard!"

  Byron perceived yellow coral sand slanting up, full of immense waving sea fans. Blown dry of ballast, the Devilfish was drawing about thirteen feet.

  "Mark! Three fathoms, port!"

  Eighteen feet. Five clear feet under the keel. With each swell the boat was rising and falling, staggering Byron's party and drenching them with spray. The smaller island was drifting so close that he could count the coconuts on the trees.

  On the bridge, at the bullnose and on the fantail, lookouts were combing the sky with binoculars. But in this sunlit waste of air, water, palms, and rocks, the only sign of man was the grotesque black vessel risen from the deep.

  "All engines stop!"

  From the bridge, Aster yelled through cupped hands, "Fathometer's showing fifteen feet, Briny! What do you see?"

  Slipping about, wet to the skin, Byron flailed both arms forward.

  "Okay! Keep coming!" he bawled, for the water shaded toward blue again beyond the notch. On either side of the submarine, ugly breakers were smashing and creaming on pitted brown rocks. The propellers thrashed; a heavy swell lifted and dropped the vessel. With a crunching clang, clang! the Devilfish shuddered and jolted forward. Byron caught a fragrant whiff of palm fronds as the islands slid by, near enough to hit with a thrown hat.

  "Four fathoms, port!"

  "Four fathoms, starboard!"

  Coral heads drifted below the hull like anchored mines, deeper and deeper. The bow was heading into blue water now. Over the crash and slosh of the breakers came the captain's exultant bellow. "Secure. leadsmen and lookouts!

  Prepare to dive!"

  Byron stood in his cabin naked amid sodden clothes piled on the deck, drying himself with a rough grimy towo.

  Grinning from ear to ear, Aster looked in, green eyes brilliant as emeralds. "How about this? Well done."

  "You found the hole," Byron said.

  "Lucked into it. That chart is goddamn vague. Glad the patrol plane pilots were having their noon sukiyaki, or whatever."

  "What happened there? Did we ground?"

  "Starboard screw struck a coral head. The shaft's-not sprung.

  The captain's pleased as hell, Briny. Get some rest."

  Yawning and yawning, Byron slipped into the mildewy hot bunk. The Devilfish had sneaked itself into a tight predicament, he thought, with no easy way out. However, that was the captain's problem. He turned off his mind like a lightByron could do that, and it contributed much to his health, though it had often infuriated his father and his naval superiors-and fell asleep.

  A shake and a husky whisper woke him. He smelled the tobacco-chewer's breath of Derringer, the chief of the boat.

  "Battle stations, Mr. Henry."

  "Huh? What?" Byron slid aside the curtain, and confronted the jowly smelly face in the dim light from the passageway.

  "Battle stations?"

  "Screw noises."

  "Oh ho."

  Now through the thin hull Byron heard the underwater commotion, and a high faint shuddery ping-a very familiar sound from exercises at sea and from the attack teacher. This echo-ranging was different: shriller, more vibrating, with a peculiar timbre.

  The enemy.

  They were running silent, he realized. The ventilators were off.

  The air was staffing. Chief Derringer's heavy face was tightly lined with worry and excitement. Byron impulsively put out his hand.

  The chief grasped it with a horny paw, and left. Byron's watch showed he had been asleep for an hour.

  At general quarters he was the diving officer. Hurrying to his battle station, he was reassured by the cool working demeanor of every man in the control room-the bow and stern planesmen at their big wheels watching the depth gauges, Derringer and his plotting team huddled around the dead reckoning tracer, Whitey Pringle on the trim manifold, just as in peacetime exercises off Pearl Harbor. They had been through this a thousand times. Here'was the payoff, Byron thought, of Hoban's stiff monotonous drill schedule.

  Aster, smoking a long rich Havana, stood with the chief of the boat, watching the plot take form. The echo-ranging was getting louder; so was the confused noise of propellers.

  "Ensign Quayne was at the diving officer's post Of all the men in the control room, only he had the wide-open eyes and shaky lips of fear. Quayne wasn't yet part of the team; he had just survived a sinking; he was not long out of sub school.

  With these forgiving thoughts, Byron relieved him.

  "Lady, when did all this break?"

  "We picked up these clowns on sonar at about nine thousand yards.

  All of a sudden. We must have come out from under a thermal layer."

  "Sounds like a mess of them," Byron said.

  "Sounds like the whole goddamn landing force. This stuff is spread across a hundred degrees. We can't sort it out yet."

  Aster lightly mounted the ladder to the conning tower, gripping Byron's shoulder as he passed.

  Byron strained to hear the low conversation of Aster and the captain in the tower. A command down the voice tube, Hoban's confident voice, quiet and tense: "Briny, come up to seventy feet. No higher, hear? Seventy feet."

  "Seventy feet. Aye aye, sir."

  The planesmen turned their wheels. The Devilfish tilted up.

  The gauges reeled off the ascent. The outside noises grew louder still: pings and propeller thrums, now plainly ahead.

  "Seventy feet, Captain."

  "Very well. Now, Briny, listen carefully. I'm going to raise number two periscope all the way." The captain's voice was firm and subdued. "Then I want you to come up exactly a foot, and level off-another foot, and level off-just the way we did it in that last run on the Litchfield. Nice and easy, you know?"

  "Aye aye, sir."

  The narrow shaft of the attack scope slid softly upward behind Byron, and stopped.

  "Coming to sixty-nine feet, sir."

  "Very well."

  A level-off. A pause. "Coming to sixty-eight feet, sir."

  The planesmen were the best on the boat, an ill-sorted pair: SpiHer, the freckled Texan who said "fuck" at every third word, and Marino, the solemn Italian from Chicago, never without the crucifix around his neck, never uttening so much as a, "damn"; but they worked like twins, inching the submarine upward.

  "Okay! Hold it! That does it!" Hoban's voice went high, loud, almost frantic. "Wow! Jesus Christ! Mark! Target angle, on the bow forty starboard. Down scope!"

  A silence. A crackling in the loudspeaker.

  P-i-i-i-ing... P-i-i-i-ing...

  The captain's voice through the quiet submarine, controlled but with a fighting thrill in it: "Now all hands, listen to me. I've got three large transports in column, screened by two destroyers, one point on the port bow. The Rising Sun is flapping plain as day on all of them. It's brightly sunny up there. This is it! I'm coming to normal approach course.

  Prepare the bow tubes."

  Hot pins and needles ran along Byron's shoulders and arms. He could hear Aster and the captain arguing about the range. The periscope bobbed up behind him, and straightway down again. There was rapid talk in the conning tower about masthead heights, and the captain harried the quartermaster for recognition manuals. The echo-ranging grew sharper and stronger, the propeller noises louder. Byron had done enough work on the torpedo data computer to picture the trigonometry, in his head. On the dead reckoning tracer, the problem showed clearly: the Devilfish as a moving spot of light, the enemy course and its own course as two converging pencil lines. But the target's line was jagged. The transports were zigzagging. They were still beyond torpedo range, according to Aster; or, in the captain's judgment, barely within range.

  The two men were equally adept at guessing distance by masthead heights. On a submarine there was no more precise rangefinder- The transports were on a rig away, and they moved faster than the crawling, sub.

  Utter silence fell in the conning tower. Silence throughout the boat. All the noise now was outside, a ca
cophony of machinery sounds and the plangent searching probes of the Japanese sonar' Pining!

  Piiiiing! P-i-i-i-ingl Pi-i-i-i-ing!

  "Up scope. Okay, here they come! They've turned back!

  Mark! Range forty-five hundred. Mark! Beaning zero two zero.

  Mark! Target angle on the bow seventy starboard.

  Down scope!"

  A pause. The captain's voice, hushed and urgent on the PA system: "Now all hands, I intend to shoot. Open outside doors on bow tubes."

  His natural voice, in the conning tower: "Damn! An absolute setup, Lady, but an outside range. We're not going to close them much with that angle on the bow. What stinking luck!"

  -'."Captain, why don't we hold our fire and track them? It's a fantastic chance. That zigzag plan will slow their advance.

  Maybe we can pull ahead and close the range."

  "No, no, no. Now's our chance, Lady. They're making fifteen knots on a radical plan. If they rig away again we may lose the bastards. I've got a setup and a solution, and I'm going to shoot."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  "Outside doors are open, sir!"

  "Very well. Slow setting!"

  Concentrating on holding depth, Byron could scarcely grasp that at last this was the real thing; not the launch of a yellow-headed dummy, but a TNT warhead attack on ships filled with Japanese soldiers.

  Except for the different sonar sound and the choking tension, it was so much like an attatk school drill, or an exercise at sea! It was going very fast now, along old familiar lines. Hoban had even used this slow setting for the hit on the Litchfield that had clinched the E.

  "Up scope! Mark! Bearing zero two five. Range four thousand.

  Down scope!"

  The aiming was harder on a slow setting, the chance for missing greater, detection of torpedo wakes by the enemy more likely. In this decision to make his first wartime shot on slow setting, Hoban was accepting marginal conditions.

  Fifteen years as a naval officer, "ten years as a brilliant peacetime submariner, lay in back of that decision....

  Byron's heart thudded, his mouth was dry as dust...

  "Fire one... Fire two!... Fire three!... Fire four!"

  With the usual jolts and rushing water noises, the torpedoes left the Devilfish.

  "Up scope. Oh, wow. Four wakes! Four beautiful wakes, running hot, straight, and normal. Down scope!"

  Heart-stopping expectant silence again, all through the Devilfish.

  Byron watched the second hand of the control room clock. It was easy to calculate the time to target, at slow setting, on the last called range.

  "Up scope!"

  A long, long silence. Time passed for all four torpedoes to hit.

  Byron stiffened with alarm. No impacts; and the periscope had been up for ten seconds, and was staying up!

  Maximum safe exposure was six seconds.

  "Down scope. Four misses, Lady. Goddamn." The captain sounded sick. "At least two wakes had to go under the lead transport. I saw them heading there. I don't know what went wrong. Now they've spotted the wakes, and turned away. The near destroyer's coming at us, with a hell of a bone in its teeth. Let's go to ten knots." He called through the tube, "Byron! Take her down to two hundred fifty feet."

  On the loudspeaker his voice turned dull and cranky. "Now all hands, rig for depth charge on the double."

  Two hundred fifty feet? Lingayen Gulf was nowhere deeper than a hundred seventy feet. The captain's impossible order shocked and baffled Byron. He was grateful for Aster's lively interposition. "You mean a hundred fifty, Captain.

  That's about down to the mud here."

  "Right. Thanks, Lady-a hundred fifty, Byron."

  With a silent. jar of acceleration, the submarine tilted and dove. Aster spoke again. "What course, Captain?"

  It was almost a silly question, but Hoban was giving no order for the all-important evasive Turn. Overhead on the surface of the sea, four slick white bubbly torpedo wakes certainly led straight to the Devilfish. The destroyer must be charging up those visible tracks at forty knots. The pitch of the echo-ranging was rising to a scream, and the probes were coming thick and fast on short scale: ping, ping, ping, ping!

  "Course? Oh, yes, yes, left full rudder! Come to-oh, make it two seven oh."

  "Left to two seven oh, sir," called the helmsman.

  The diving vessel tilted sideways. The oncoming Japanese ship sounded much like the Litchfield in practice runs, but noisier and angrier, though that very likely was Byron's imagination; Like a train approaching on loose old tracks, ker-da-trum, ker-da-trum, KER-DA-TRUM!

  Throughout the Devilfish, bouts, slams, clangs of maximum watertight rigging.

  The destroyer came closer, passed right overheadker-da-TRAMM-TRAMM-TRAMm-TRAMM-and moved away.

  The pitch of the sonar dropped. White faces in the control room turned to each other.

  Byron heard one clear click, as though a ball bearing had bounced off the submarine's hurl. Another quiet second, and the depth charge exploded.

  CHRISTMAS CAROLS FILTERED scratchily over the loud drunken talk and the clack-clack of iron wheels. Palmer Kirby disliked club cars, and Christmas carols depressed him, but he needed to drink. This express train howling toward Washington through the snowy night carried no gloomier passenger.

  Rhoda Henry would be waiting at Union Station. He was hungrily glad of that, yet ashamed of his yearnings. She was the wife of another man, a battleship captain out fighting the Japanese. After stumbling into this affair, he had tried to right himself by proposing marriage to her. She had onsidered it, but backed off. Resuming the sex relationship after that had been ignominious; so he now thought, in his low mood. Dr. Kirby had no religious or moral scruples; he was a dour decent atheist, a widower of old-fashioned habits. This constrained and messy adultery was a damned poor substitute for having a wife. He had to limit his attentions to avoid scandal, yet his sense of honor tied him down like a husband.

  In his travels he now was ignoring attractive secretaries and receptionists, whose eyes sometimes glinted at this tall ugly bony-faced man with thick grizzled hair. He had been telephoning Rhoda regularly. Pug's cable from Pearl Harbor that she had read him, AM FINE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT, had both gladdened and humiliated Kirby.

  He liked and admired the man he was cuckolding. It was a wretched business.

  The root of Dr. Kirby's dark mood, however, was the war.

  He had been touring a land legally a belligerent, yet paralyzed by frivolity, indecision, lack of leadership-and above all, by Christmas, Christmas,"Christmas! This whoopdee-do of buying, selling, decorating, gorging, and guzzling, to the endless crooning of Bing Crosby's inescapable gooey voice, this annual solstice jamboree faking honor to the Christ child, this annual midwinter madness was possessing the country as though Hitler did not exist, as though Pearl Harbor were untouched, as though Wake Island were not falling. The Lucky Strike ads showed jolly red-cheeked old Santa Claus wearing a tin soldier hat, cutely tilted. In one sickening image, that was the national attitude.

  Kirby had found some sense of war on the West Coast: hysterical air raid alarms, brief panics, spotty blackouts, confused and contradictory orders from the Army and from Civil Defense, rumors of submarines shelling San Francisco, fear of the Japanese mixed with inexplicable cocksureness that America would win the war. Eastward even this shallow awareness dimmed. By Chicago the war had faded to a topic for talk over drinks, or a new angle for making money. The thought of defeat entered few people's minds. Who could beat America?

  AS for the Armageddon swirling before Moscow, the terrific counterstrokes of the Red Army against the Wehrmacht hordes-to most Americans Santa Claus in a_ tin hat was considerably more real.

  Perhaps- in the muddled turmoil of Franklin Roosevelt's management agencies, production boards, and emergenq communities, now multiplying in Washington like amoebas, something was being accomplished. Perhaps in army camps, naval bases, shipyards, and airplane factories, a capacity for war w
as growing. Kirby didn't know. He knew he was returning in despair from a tour Of- country's resources for producing actinouranium. He had seen a national industrial plant so disordered and swamped by war orders that even if the scientists solved the theory of nuclear explosives, the factories could never produce the weapons.

  Everywhere the wail was not enough copper, not enough steel, lack of labor, lack of parts, lack of machine tools, skyrocketing prices, ignorant government OWals, favoritism, corruption, and confusion. He had travelled with good credentials from Washington, but men with such credentials were swarming over the land. He had been unable to reveal what he was after. If he could have - and he had tried some hints - it would not have helped. To the harassed factory managers, atom bombs belonged in science fiction tales with spaceships and time machines.