The Iceman

by P. T. Deutermann

  With the hatch closed and the boat headed down at a fifteen-degree angle, Malachi landed on the conning tower deck plates with a bang. He ordered the exec below to take the dive. “I want to drive right under them,” he said. “There’s a tin can coming up from starboard.”

  “Conn, Sonar: active pinging, zero niner zero relative.”

  “Conn: aye,” Malachi responded. Now that he was in the tower, he became Conn instead of the XO. “Make ready tubes niner and ten. Open outer doors aft.”

  The boat’s hull thrummed as she went deep under maximum electrical power. “What was the firing bearing on the big guy?” Malachi asked.

  “Zero two five.”

  “Roger, come to course zero two five; I want to pass close under the stern of the big guy, not directly underneath him.”

  “Recommend course zero three five.”

  “Make it so,” Malachi replied, glancing at the depth gauge: 130 feet and dropping swiftly. “Sonar, Conn: has that destroyer shifted mode yet?”

  “Negative, Captain. He’s still in omni search.”

  With any luck, Malachi thought, he’s headed for where those fish came from; we’re headed for the opposite side of the action.

  “Conn, Control: two hundred feet, leveling now.”

  Malachi acknowledged, even as the first sounds of a ship breaking up began to penetrate the hull. It sounded like they were coming from the boat’s left. Destroyer? Malachi wondered. Or the big guy? That was why he’d come right instead of driving directly beneath the battleship: that destroyer might have sunk right on top of them. The real question was what had that final torpedo actually hit—the wreckage of the destroyer, or the battleship’s exposed bottom?

  “Conn, Sonar: that destroyer has shifted mode to attack, but he’s drifting right pretty quick.”

  “Probably has contact on the big bubble we made when we dived,” Malachi said. Releasing all that air from the ballast tanks would leave a bait-ball of bubbles in the water that reflected sonar pulses quite nicely. Sure enough depth charges began to boom in the distance behind them.

  “Okay, Plot, I want to get fifteen hundred yards on the other side of the big guy. If there’s no escort noise out there, we’ll come to periscope depth and see what we’ve got.”

  The noises from the sinking destroyer reached a crescendo of snapping steel plates, drowning compartments opening their last air into the sea, and exploding boilers. Then it diminished into an eerie silence.

  “Slow to five knots,” Malachi ordered. “Course to observation point?”

  “Plot recommends coming left to zero three zero, distance two thousand, five hundred yards.”

  “Make it so.”

  He felt the boat coming left. He checked the depth gauge—260 feet. Pretty good for an emergency dive, he thought. The hull wasn’t even complaining that much, and certainly not like that destroyer’s hull. He smiled and reached for a cigarette.

  Twenty minutes later they rose to periscope depth. Plot gave Malachi the expected bearing of the target. He spun the scope around to line up on that bearing. When the scope broke water he was surprised to see that it was daylight. The battleship was still there and still listing, but not as bad as before. Ahead of her was a destroyer with a huge plume of smoke pumping out of her stack as she struggled to pull the much bigger ship in the direction of Brunei Bay. This was his first really clear view of the ship, which he recognized as a prewar, Nagato-class battleship. He gave a visual bearing to the attack team, estimating her course as 110 and her speed at 3 knots. Then he pulled down the scope. Those last two fish must have hit the remains of that destroyer.

  The plotting team cranked up the TDC and got an attack solution generating. Malachi rested his eyes for a moment. It had been a surprise to see daylight. The round image of the stricken battleship seemed to be imprinted on the back of his eyes.

  There was something he was missing. Something important. Daylight. Had to do with—

  A buzzing noise began to penetrate the conning tower. Malachi’s eyes snapped open. “Take her down,” he yelled down the hatch. “Flood negative to the mark. Twenty-degree down-bubble!”

  The startled plotting crew was still staring at him when the first of a string of bombs from a Kawanishi float plane went off 200 yards away, administering a powerful punch to the boat’s hull. A second one was much closer, even as the boat passed through 100 feet, knocking a cloud of insulation out of the overhead and causing the periscope structure to whip from side to side. Then a third, which hit the boat behind the sail with an ear-shattering clang. It was big enough that it dented in the back fairing of the conning tower. For one eternally long second they all stared at that bulge in the steel and waited for the explosion, but none came. Another bomb did go off, at some distance on the other side of the boat, but Firefish was far enough under by now that it wasn’t much more than a distant depth-charge explosion.

  “Passing one five zero feet,” the exec called up. “What was that noise?”

  “Make your depth two hundred feet,” Malachi replied. “Pump negative immediately. That noise was a bomb which I think is sitting in the twenty millimeter nest right now.”

  Malachi could feel the boat go quiet as that news penetrated. The battleship forgotten, he now had to figure out how to get out of this mess. If that bomb decided to go off, they’d all get to find out what Firefish’s crush depth really was.

  The exec caught the dive and got her leveled out just past 220 feet and then brought her back up to 200 as ordered. Once she was stable at depth Malachi ordered a turn out to sea and away from Brunei. He slowed her down to 4 knots, not knowing what it would take to dislodge the bomb so that it could finish its arming routine. He looked at the dent. The bomb had to be almost 20 inches in diameter. Big bomb. Goddamned Kawanishi. He should have paid better attention to what time it was. Got fixated on what looked like a sure kill on a battleship even though she was almost an antique. This one’s on me.

  “Everything is always on you,” the exec said, quietly. Malachi hadn’t realized that the exec had come up into the conning tower, or that he’d said those last words out loud. Malachi gave him a blank look for a moment before shaking his head. He was more tired than he’d realized.

  “What do we do about that thing?” the exec asked.

  “We stay down until night and don’t make any sudden moves. Any damage down below?”

  “Nothing important,” the exec said. “And the battery is almost topped off, so as long as they don’t send destroyers, we should be able to get away. And the bomb, if that’s what it is?”

  “We’ll have to physically see it. My guess is the plane was so low it didn’t have time to arm itself. Any of the torpedomen ex-EOD by any chance?”

  “I’ll ask the COB,” the exec said. Then he saw the pushed-in steel. “Good God,” he said.

  “Yeah, exactly. Get me a damage report, minor or not. I’ll tell you what: if we can get that thing off safely, I’m ready to go back to Perth.”

  “Just say the words, Captain,” the exec said as he continued to stare at the bulge in the skin of the conning tower. “This shit’s getting real old.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  They surfaced nine hours later, still only 50 miles from Brunei Bay. The seas were calm but the barometer was falling, indicating that another storm was coming. Malachi, the COB, and the boatswain clambered up to the 20mm nest to see what they had. The gun was mangled, crushed almost beyond recognition in their red flashlight’s cones. The bomb was black, finned, with two reinforcing rings around its middle. At the nose was a small three-bladed propeller, with two of the three blades bent back to almost flat. Malachi put his light on that propeller.

  “That’s the arming mechanism,” the COB said. He’d done a one-week course at the EOD school to learn about safing and arming mechanisms in the fleet. “If this is like our aircraft bombs, they load it onto a wing pylon. Then they hook a wire that goes from the pylon to the nose of the bomb. That little propeller is hel
d in place with a pin. Once they drop it, that wire pulls the pin and the propeller spins. After it spins a certain number of turns, the bomb arms. That way, if they drop it really low, they don’t blow themselves up.”

  He shifted his flashlight to the back of the bomb. “Our really big bruisers have two propellers—one at the nose, one at the back end. They both have to work as advertised, or the bomb won’t explode. Looks to me like they forgot the one at the back—see this brass plate?”

  They all hunched down over the back end of the bomb. The two-inch-diameter plate gleamed back at them. “You unscrew those four screws and install the propeller mechanism, with the pin. Then when they bring it out to the bomber, they attach that wire I told you about.”

  “Meaning this bomb wouldn’t have exploded even if the arming mechanism had had time to arm?” Malachi asked.

  “It’s a Jap bomb, Skipper, so I don’t know. But our bombs have a plate just like that. He must have been pretty low for this to happen.”

  “Low enough that we were able to hear him in the conning tower,” Malachi said. “So that thing won’t explode unless that propeller gets to spin some more?”

  “That’s the theory, Captain,” the COB said. “But to be sure, we need to get rid of it.”

  “How much you think that thing weighs?” the boatswain asked.

  “Thousand pounds, maybe a bit more,” the COB replied.

  The boatswain whistled. “We ain’t got nothin’ that’ll lift that off,” he said.

  “First thing we have to do is secure that propeller so it can’t move,” the COB said. “We don’t know how many more turns it takes to arm this sucker.”

  “What are all those holes for, around the middle?” Malachi asked. The COB just shook his head.

  The chief engineer had joined them on the gun platform. “I’ll get some monkey shit,” he said. “We can pack that propeller thing and immobilize it.”

  They all nodded and the engineer went below to get a tube of a metallic putty-like substance known throughout the fleet as monkey shit, and used to fix just about any leak temporarily.

  The red light lit up on the bitchbox below them “Captain, XO.”

  Malachi climbed down through the tangled wreckage of the 20mm mount. There was no way they could cut all that away and move a half-ton bomb. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “I just tried the periscopes. Both are jammed. We can get the surface search radar mast up, although it’s pretty noisy. I haven’t tried the air search.”

  “Wonderful,” Malachi said looking up at the columns of steel that held the scope assemblies. They didn’t look bent, but that bomb was nosed in right at the base of the housings.

  “I give up,” he said. “Plot a course for Perth.”

  When they made it back to the harbor entrance at Fremantle two weeks later they were met by a utility boat sent out from the tender. A repair superintendent came aboard and handed them an anchorage assignment. Apparently the tender wasn’t taking any chances. Three specialist petty officers—one chief and two petty officers first class—from the explosive ordnance disposal detachment on the tender also came aboard.

  “The plan is Firefish goes to anchorage and we take everyone off except the EOD people. Once they disarm it, they’ll send out a small floating crane barge from the port and lift it off. Then you can come alongside.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Malachi told him. “I will stay aboard, though.”

  “Um, sir, the admiral was specific—”

  “It’s my boat and my bomb,” Malachi said. “Tell him whatever white lies you want to, Lieutenant.” He turned to the three EOD men, who were grinning. “Gents, let’s go topside and I’ll introduce you to your work.”

  They anchored half an hour later about three miles from the port facilities, in 70 feet of water. The weather was calm, and the disembarkation of the crew uneventful. The exec asked to stay but Malachi said no. “Keep everyone onboard the tender until this is over, one way or another. Then they can come back so we can get her into port. The EOD guys tell me that this doesn’t take that long. The only real problem is the possibility they’ve put anti-intrusion traps in it and it goes off. Then you’ll be back where we started—in temporary command.”

  The exec looked down at the deck plates. “About the only way I’ll ever get command, I guess,” he said quietly.

  “That’s not true, XO, not true at all. Now get going.”

  It took three motor launches to offload the crew and the important papers, such as the logs and the communications codebooks. By the time Malachi had climbed back up to the bridge the EOD people were huddled around the bomb as if praying over it, which possibly they were, he thought. A nice cool breeze had come up from the northeast, raising little whitecaps all the way back into the river entrance. He wondered if Kensie would be in town.

  He’d had time to think about the situation with his exec during the slow transit back to base. He’d concluded he’d tell the commodore that it was time for Marty to transfer off and go into the prospective commanding officer pool. He might not have the killer instinct, but he’d saved the boat a couple of times and more than proved his technical competence during the attacks. Their disagreement over the Kawanishi attack had been real enough, but now Malachi felt that his cold-shoulder routine had been overdone. He heard one of the EOD techs say “Okay, let’s do it,” and wondered if he should leave the bridge and go hang out way back on the fantail, or even in the after torpedo room. That would certainly take care of this Iceman moniker, he thought with a cold smile. He decided to go up and watch instead.

  To his surprise, they were working on the back end of the bomb. The chief explained what they were doing. One man was working inside the hole underneath the brass plate. A second was speaking into an Army field radio, describing everything the first tech was doing, step by careful step, to someone ashore. The chief had laid out what looked like bath towels on the only flat space available as a place to lay whatever parts the first tech removed. It almost looked like the bomb had been draped for surgery.

  “Those Japs are sneaky little buggers,” the chief tech said. “We’ve had reports of them replacing the tail fuse with a booby-trapped time-delay fuse. So first, we have to take a look.”

  “My COB said they’d probably been in such a hurry to take off they forgot or didn’t bother with the back-end fuse. We were only about ten, twelve miles offshore and in shallow water. They got buck fever, maybe.”

  The chief grunted a laugh. “See these holes right here, next to the ring? If it was a Kawanishi dropped this thing? Then this baby is a combo-bomb, built for seaplanes. The fuse assemblies are a safety feature; if the prop doesn’t complete sufficient revolutions that fuse won’t work. But these?” He pointed at the holes. “These are to let water in. Turns this beast into a thousand pound depth bomb, which bypasses the fuse’s safety features. Set to go off at two hundred fifty feet. I know that because both ends of this thing have a blue ring painted on them.”

  Malachi felt himself go cold. They’d made as much of the transit back from the operating area on the surface as they could, but there were times they thought it safer to be submerged during daylight. For once he hadn’t indulged in any deep dives—he’d set the cruising depth for 150 feet.

  “Clear,” the first tech announced, lifting out a brass cylinder the size of a tennis ball can, with several clipped colored wires extending from ports around its base.

  “That’s the detonator,” the chief said, laying the cylinder gingerly down on one of the towels. “The main explosive is type ninety-eight, pretty stable, so it takes a shot of some stuff like nitro to start the party. Now we gotta see if he’s got a brother up front.”

  “I’ll get out of your hair, then,” Malachi said, his throat still dry from the realization of what could have happened.

  Three hours later Firefish was safely alongside the tender, her sail already covered by an anthill of workers disassembling the entire periscope stack and cutting away t
he remains of the 20mm cannon. A crane barge had come out and lifted off the supposedly harmless bomb and then carted it out to deeper water. There it was lowered to the bottom with a timed explosive attached, released, and after ten minutes, it detonated with a crowd-pleasing geyser of dirty seawater punching its way into the air. Malachi had told the COB what all those holes around the middle had been for, causing that old salt to go pale in the face.

  A messenger from the tender appeared on the quarterdeck as the crew settled into the return-to-port routine of refueling, rearming, and receiving stores, food, and mail. The quarterdeck watch called Malachi in his cabin and told him that the commodore would like to see him at his convenience. Malachi finished signing for the torpedoes that were about to be onloaded and the newest book of code keys, which he turned over to the operations officer. As per regulations, ammo and fuel could not be loaded at the same time except at sea, so the boat would refuel first, then load the torpedoes. It was axiomatic in the fleet that the first thing any warship did when she returned to port was to make herself ready for sea. Several years ago he’d asked his department head why “they” would do that to a crew who’d been out on patrol and were tired if not exhausted. “They may be tired,” the department head had told him, “but they really want to get ashore. You will notice that the fuel and the ammo will get aboard in record time.”

  The commodore himself greeted Malachi on the tender’s quarterdeck with a warm welcome and congratulations for having made an attack on a battleship. Then they went to the flag quarters for a coffee.

  “I’d offer you a whiskey,” he said, “but you don’t drink, so coffee it will have to be.”

  “I’d probably accept one if you offered, sir,” Malachi replied. He told the commodore what he’d learned about “his” bomb from the EOD people. Even the commodore blanched at the thought. “Well,” he said, “that typhoon was unfortunate, but they gave you credit for damaging the battleship, the capsized tanker, and one destroyer. But it was the big boy that got Pearl really excited. She was the Yamashiro, an oldie from the thirties with fourteen-inch guns. They got her back into Brunei, where they apparently ran her aground to prevent her from capsizing.”