The Iceman

by P. T. Deutermann

  It had been four months since the American retreat from the Philippines, and the Aussies had bent over backwards to accommodate the US Pacific Fleet subs that had turned up without much notice, looking for a home and to put some distance between themselves and the approaching Japanese hordes. Australia in mid-1942 was convinced the Japanese were going to invade them next, which remained a distinct possibility. Singapore had fallen. The nearest Japs were in New Guinea, beginning a long slog through the jungles toward Port Moresby, at the southern tip of the island. The two biggest British ships in Southeast Asia, the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse, had gone down in the South China Sea under a hail of Japanese bombs and torpedoes. Indochina, most of China, Korea, the Malaysian peninsula, the Philippines, Java, and Indonesia were in Japanese hands or about to be. Darwin, Australia’s northernmost port, had been scouted twice by Japanese carrier planes, which meant something was coming.

  “So, COB,” Marty said, “what’ve you heard about the new skipper?”

  “Not a damn thing, XO,” he said. “That worries me a wee bit.”

  “None of the other chiefs know him?”

  “LantFleet guy is all I know,” O’Bannon said. “How about you?”

  “Admiral called me downtown yesterday,” Marty said. “Said his name is Malachi Stormes. Three striper. He’s coming from one of the S-boats we sent up to Scotland right after Pearl. Class of ’thirty.”

  “Younger guy, then,” O’Bannon observed.

  Marty made a face. He was naval academy class of 1937. The issue of aging, super-cautious captains versus the number of ships sunk was officially taboo in the Southeast Asia submarine force, but a hot topic among the younger officers nonetheless.

  The COB quickly changed the subject. “Haven’t heard shit about LantFleet boats doing anything, so far.”

  “Well, this boat did,” Marty did. “Stormes apparently cozied up to the entrance to a German minefield off St. Nazaire in France and sank three U-boats while they were transiting the swept channel outbound. Fired four fish straight down the exit channel. They don’t know how many subs were actually hit, or whether they started evading and ran into their own minefield. Spectacular results, either way.”

  “He must have been shooting Mark tens, then,” the chief said.

  “Apparently, that’s all they had up there in Scotland. All the Mark fourteens are being sent west.”

  “For our sins,” the chief observed, disgustedly.

  Marty sighed his agreement. The Mark 14 torpedoes had proven to be unreliable at best and downright dangerous at worst. It didn’t help that the admiral currently commanding the western Australian submarines had been one of the Mark 14’s principal designers when he was a three-striper several years ago. The topic of torpedo performance was another hot issue in the Pacific submarine force, with the admirals blaming the skippers for poor shooting, and the skippers blaming the torpedoes for running under their targets without exploding.

  Marty was a fresh-caught lieutenant commander and the executive officer of Firefish. He’d been temporarily acting as the commanding officer ever since their skipper, Commander Montgomery Russell, had been relieved for not having accomplished a single sinking on Firefish’s first war patrol from Australia. He wasn’t the first skipper to have been sent ashore for poor results on patrol, and the admiral’s wrath was an often-discussed matter around coffeepots in the refugee submarines. Firefish was one of the new Tambor-class fleet boats, bigger and more capable than the aging S-class boats. Much had been expected of her, which had added to the admiral’s ire. Russell was a soft-spoken Southern gentleman from the academy class of 1926, whose obvious concern for the crew’s welfare had made him something of a father figure in the boat. He had not protested his relief, admitting to his exec in private that he didn’t have the stomach for risking his boat and everyone’s lives just to sink a freighter.

  A sudden gust of wind made the flag on the fantail crack like a shot, making everyone topside jump. People were nervous, and while there was no immediate threat to Perth and Fremantle, located on the far west coast of Australia, the appearance of Jap carriers in northern Australian waters had brought the heretofore distant Pacific war home in a big way to their hosts.

  “There’s the car,” the COB said. He turned to the other sailors hanging about the deck. “Fall in,” he shouted. “Two ranks. Stand at attention.”

  The crewmen hustled into makeshift ranks as a beetle-backed black sedan made its way down the long quay toward the tender and then disappeared behind her great, gray bulk. They heard the four bells ringing out on the tender as the new skipper boarded the Otus, came down the accommodation ladder on the tender’s outboard side, and then crossed over the quarterdecks of the two inboard submarines to get to Firefish. By the time he arrived at the brow, Firefish’s crew, dressed in a variety of working uniforms, was at attention in two ranks up and down the length of the sub’s sloping topside deck. Every one of them was straining his eyes to get a look at the new skipper.

  They saw a man of average height but with the build of a fullback. He was wearing wash khakis and the brass hat of a commander, USN. It was his face that caught everyone’s eyes. Commander Russell had been a smiling, pleasant officer with the quiet dignity of a Southern plantation owner, which in fact he was. Commander Stormes’s visage matched his last name. Black hair, dark brown eyes under bushy eyebrows, and a face that was all planes and flint-like ridges. His eyes framed a beak of a nose over lips flattened in a steely, almost disapproving line. Look at this guy, Marty thought. Maybe I should have put everyone in dress whites.

  Stormes stepped across the rattling brow, saluted the national ensign on the sub’s stern, and then the apprehensive lieutenant who was standing the officer of the deck in-port watch. He stepped down onto Firefish’s steel deck and handed a thick brown envelope to the OOD. He then turned to Marty and the COB.

  “Lieutenant Commander Brandquist,” Marty announced. “XO and acting CO. Welcome aboard, sir.” He didn’t offer to shake hands, and neither did the new CO. Good thing, he thought, as he saw the new captain’s hands. They were huge and scarred. “This is Chief Cory O’Bannon, chief of the boat. Welcome aboard, sir.”

  “Log my arrival onboard, XO, and note that I have assumed command. There will be no ceremony.” He had a deep voice with the faintest hint of a Southern accent. “Is the boat ready for sea?”

  “We’re topped off on fuel and water,” Marty said. “We have eighteen torpedoes, all Mark fourteen, which is our current quota, and a full allowance of five-inch for the deck gun. Fresh provisions are being delivered at thirteen hundred. We have one generator down for a bad exciter, but the part arrived yesterday. ETR is this afternoon. Otherwise, yes, sir, she’s RFS.”

  “Very well,” Stormes said. “We don’t have sailing orders yet, but I anticipate going out soon. Send someone for my sea bag; it’s on the tender. Tell the crew to resume their duties, and then I want you to give me a tour. I got a quick look at this class boat in Pearl, but now I want to get a really good look. No secrets, please. If some piece of gear is a perpetual problem child, I need to know about it. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

  “Very well,” Stormes said. He made an opened-hand gesture that said “after you, gentlemen.”

  “When would you like to meet with the wardroom, Captain?” Marty asked as they headed for the forward hatch.

  “Once we’re at sea, XO.”

  THREE

  They showed the new captain to his “stateroom,” which was a tiny cabin just forward of the control room measuring eight feet by about five. It had a single bunk, a fold-down desk with a chair, and a foldout sink and medicine cabinet. There was a safe built into the desk; its combination and the instructions on how to change it were written on a shipping tag that had been taped to the locked-open door. Inside was a loaded .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol and a set of keys. There was a depth gauge, a lighted gyro compass repeater, and a speed i
ndicator mounted on the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk. The “door” to the cabin consisted of a heavy curtain. A reading light equipped with an optional red lens was mounted on the bulkhead at the head of the bunk, along with a sound-powered telephone handset.

  Malachi dropped his briefcase on the bunk and told them they’d start in after torpedo. They threaded their way aft along the main and only passageway, pressing past the sailors they encountered. The passageway was so narrow that it provided for one-way traffic only, so when two men met, the junior one flattened himself against the nearest bulkhead to let the senior one get by. The XO facilitated this little parade by saying “gangway” each time they entered the next compartment. By the time they reached the after torpedo room, the entire crew already knew that the new skipper was making his first inspection.

  The Tambor class was the newest iteration of the Navy’s efforts to create a so-called fleet boat—a submarine with long range, large fuel capacity, and a more lethal weapons suite than the prewar boats. They had six torpedo tubes forward and four aft, plus a large, 5-inch-bore deck gun on the weather deck. Firefish was 310 feet long and displaced 2,500 tons submerged, making her almost a third larger than the previous S-class boats. Her conning tower, called the sail or, sometimes, the shears, had been enlarged to accommodate all the principal fire-control equipment in one space so that Malachi did not have to communicate with control stations down below in the process of an attack, as he had in the S-class. The periscope array, the sonar console, the main dead-reckoning plotting table, and the torpedo data computer, called the TDC, were now all in one place, directly under the captain’s eyes. The boat was fully air-conditioned to deal with the hot and humid water conditions of the South Pacific, which meant that the crew could operate submerged and still wear their uniforms. On the surface she could do almost 22 knots; submerged, just under 10, but that for no more than thirty minutes.

  Like all submarines, Firefish was double-hulled. The outer hull was shaped principally for hydrodynamic streamlining and contained the ballast tanks by which she submerged and resurfaced, the propeller shafts and rudders, and the diving planes, fore and aft. The inner hull, called the pressure-hull, contained the equipment and the people who made her go. From the keel up there were three levels. The bottom level contained tanks for fuel, compressed air, and water plus the two massive battery compartments, one forward, one aft. The main level contained everything else—the torpedo rooms, living quarters, a galley, crew’s mess, officers’ wardroom, the control room, the radio room, the engine rooms, and the motor room. The third and final level was called the sail, a steel projection rising above the main external deck amidships. The sail contained the conning tower, which was the main command and control space, and above that, a navigation bridge for surface operations. The conning tower room was within the pressure hull; the navigation bridge was not.

  The submarine was driven by four direct-current electric motors tied to two propeller shafts. These could be powered either by the batteries or four generators coupled to four large diesel engines, hence the term “diesel-electric propulsion.” On the surface, they ran on the diesels, which needed copious amounts of fresh air to operate. Submerged, she ran on the batteries, whose capacity was measured in minutes-until-exhaustion. As large as they were, they had a finite capacity to run everything in the boat, including the main motors. When they were near to total depletion, the boat had to surface, light off the diesel engines, and recharge the batteries for several hours before she could safely submerge again.

  Malachi stood in the after torpedo room, flanked by the exec, the COB, and the boat’s third officer, Lieutenant Peter Caldwell, who doubled as the boat’s operations officer. Four torpedoes were lashed onto loading rails in front of four stainless-steel hemispheres that were the back ends of the after torpedo tubes. He silently inspected every square inch of the cramped space while four torpedomen stood by, not quite at attention but visibly apprehensive. The interior surfaces of the compartment were tangled with cables, piping, junction boxes, ventilation ducts, torpedo handling gear, and instrument panels. Two men could not stand side by side with their arms outstretched without having to bend their elbows. Malachi stood stock still, moving only his eyes as he took in every piece of equipment in the space.

  “Very clean,” he said, finally. “That’s good.”

  “I’m a perfect bastard when it comes to a clean boat,” Marty said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

  “I’m a perfect bastard squared on that particular subject, myself,” Malachi said. “Oil is unavoidable; dirt is unacceptable.”

  They retraced their steps, lifting their legs over the shiny, rounded hatch coamings that separated each compartment. At general quarters, every named space was secured by thick, vertical watertight hatches. For maximum strength against an invading sea, the hatches required a man of average height to fold himself almost to two-thirds his height to get through. They’d made it to the after diesel-generator engine room when a messenger caught up with the inspecting party.

  “Officer of the deck sends his respects,” the sailor reported, with an awkward salute, awkward because there wasn’t room in the engineering space for a proper salute. “Admiral wants to see you, Cap’n. Over on the tender.”

  Malachi turned to the exec. “Other than fresh provisions—we’re RFS?”

  “Yes, sir. That and the generator.”

  “Fuel, fresh water, torpedoes, gun ammunition, full batteries, full complement?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marty said. “Like I said, sir, RFS.”

  Stormes gave him a piercing stare. “Yes,” he said, finally. “So you did. My apologies.”

  The tender was the 6,000-ton USS Otus, a former civilian freighter that had been acquired by the US Navy just before war broke out and converted into a Navy engineering repair and support ship. She wasn’t technically a purpose-built submarine tender, but rather an internal combustion engine repair ship. She’d been stationed at the Cavite base in the Philippines, but had had to run from the advancing Japanese juggernaut along with her brood of submarines. The Japanese had caught MacArthur’s entire Army Air Force on the ground right after Pearl Harbor, dooming his Army and forcing him and his staff to evacuate ignominiously all the way to Australia.

  Malachi cooled his heels in a steel straight-backed chair outside the admiral’s office. He rubbed his forehead, where the weight of the gold braid on the bill of his cap had made a dent. He’d been promoted to full commander after the big deal made by the Royal Navy over his killing of three U-boats. Most of his classmates were still lieutenant commanders, although the war and the Japanese killing machine had put some life into the Navy’s historically glacial promotion system.

  The boat looked good, really good, he thought. She should—she was just a year old—but still. The exec had to be pretty good and he’d liked the way Marty had stood up to him when he’d questioned the boat’s readiness for sea. Now he was going to formally meet his boss, Rear Admiral Britten, the officer who’d removed Malachi’s predecessor for lack of results at sea. Britten was fifty-nine years old and looked it. He was the personification of Old Navy: rigid, authoritarian, a teetotaler, and a workaholic who never seemed to stand down. His main office was in downtown Perth at an insurance company’s corporate headquarters, which the Australian government had graciously turned over to him after getting a look at Otus’s small cabins. As a commander of fleet units, however, he’d appropriated the Otus’s captain’s cabin as his flag quarters and broken his two-star flag on her foremast. He was an admiral. Admirals rated a flagship.

  The past few months had been something of a blur. The surreal awards ceremony at Whitehall palace in London. The orders to Pearl, literally halfway around the world. It had taken him two months just to get to Hawaii. Then the frantic time at the sub base in Pearl, where he was introduced to the Tambor class boats, attended endless briefings, met Admiral Robert H. English, the commander of all submarine forces in the Pacific, made a formal five
-minute call on Admiral Nimitz, fresh from his victory at Midway, and then spent time with the clutch of sub skippers who happened to be in port.

  These had been no casual, relaxed drinking sessions, or sea-story telling nights at the Officers’ Club bar. The sub skippers were all billeted in downtown Honolulu at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki beach. Pearl Harbor still reeked of fuel oil, seared steel, and corpses, whose bloated remains kept popping up from the muck of the harbor bottom. The sight of capsized battleships, a virtual galaxy of nighttime welding arcs at the shipyard, and the spectral upper works of the cremated Arizona sucked the life right out of what had once been a pleasant duty station. The O-Club itself was closed for renovation after having hosted several hundred badly burned sailors in the days right after the sneak attack. The shock was still palpable, hanging over the whole island of Oahu like the smell from the harbor.

  “The admiral will see you now,” an impossibly young yeoman announced.

  Malachi went through to the admiral’s inner office. Britten was sitting at his desk with his service dress blues uniform coat still on, as if ready to have his portrait taken. Malachi approached the desk. He did not salute—only the Army saluted indoors.

  “Commander Stormes, reporting as ordered,” he announced, standing almost at attention.

  “Have a seat, Captain,” Britten said. The admiral’s tone was faintly imperious and not the least bit friendly. There was a single chair positioned in front of the admiral’s desk. Malachi felt like a student summoned to the principal’s office as he sat down. The flag cabin was warm; an overhead fan was trying hard but not succeeding. Otus was not air-conditioned.