“We got sucked into an ambush, that’s what,” Malachi said. “They sent a destroyer out and told him to go balls to the wall, much too fast to hear anything on sonar, but fast enough to get our attention. The destroyer ran right over us and then later, probably ran right over a Jap sub that had been called in to find the bastards who’d put the troopship down. Battery status?”
“Ninety-five percent,” the OOD reported.
“Slow down and submerge. Once we’re under, go down to two hundred fifty feet and plot a course back to our patrol area. Good work, people. Their torpedoes are twice the size of ours. XO, my cabin, please.”
In the cabin, Malachi congratulated the exec for his quick thinking. “A single ping is the last thing you do to get a range if you don’t have radar. He was ready to shoot.”
“Yes, sir, they told us that back in Pearl. If he’d had radar, he’d’ve had us.”
“I think you’re right,” Malachi said. “You did exactly the right thing. Our enemy is still formidable, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Now, we’ve got to get these flyboys off. The op-order says to call for a Black Cat to come out and pick them up, but I have no idea where they’re based or if they can reach all the way out here.”
“Surely we will be told where and when,” Malachi said. “I’d go up and put up a whip antenna for the broadcast, but not while we’re being actively hunted. Tonight will be time enough.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We got complacent tonight,” Malachi said. “Correction: I got complacent. You saved our asses. Well done.”
“Thank you, sir.”
After the exec had left Malachi noticed that his hands were shaking just a little. That had been close, much too close, he thought. Marty would not have reacted as quickly as Higgins had. Your fourth patrol, Captain, the admiral had said. Sure you want to do this? Tempt the gods of war just one more time?
Ten minutes before they were about to submerge for the day, radar detected one contact, and then several more. The bearing was in the direction of the home islands, and the range was 15 miles, owing to unusually good radar conditions. Malachi elected to stay on the surface in order to develop a course and speed on the convoy, in case they need to go fast to get into position. Fifteen minutes later it became apparent that the convoy was going to pass them ten miles to the north. Malachi ordered full power and headed northeast to get into an intercept position, but halfway there the air search radar detected an incoming plane and they had to crash dive to escape a Kawanishi. As it was, the float plane delivered a punishing depth-charge attack that scared the hell out of the rescued aviators.
“All in a day’s work, gents,” Malachi told them with a smile, exuding a confidence he didn’t really feel. The cold truth was that the Japs knew they were out there, which meant they’d be hunting them as hard as they could. During the attempted end-around, a message had come in telling them to head south to rendezvous with another submarine, the Tarpon, to hand over the rescued aviators.
The join up was conducted at night, after an initially tense exchange of signals between the two boats. The seas were flat calm so Malachi drove Firefish close alongside, put out fenders, and then let the grateful aviators leap the gap between the boats in fine fashion. Firefish passed a sound-powered phone line over to Tarpon. The skipper of Tarpon relayed the news that the troopship sinking was the talk of the town down in Perth, with many Aussies saying it was an appropriate revenge for the sinking of their hospital ship, the Centaur. He also reported that a Jap submarine had been caught snooping around the entrance to Fremantle Harbour but had escaped. He didn’t tell of any more US submarine losses, and Malachi didn’t ask. In the time-honored tradition, the two boats exchanged movies and then went their separate ways.
The next seven days were a complete bust. No contacts, no convoys, no nothing. It was as if the Japanese had decided to wait out the submarine operating west of the Palaus. On the eighth night, two hours before dawn, a loud, metallic bang followed by a clattering noise erupted in the forward engine room and Firefish slowly lost forward speed. Malachi had been dozing in his usual corner on the bridge and he jumped awake. Moments later a report came up from Maneuvering that number one engine had thrown a rod. There’d been a momentary fire, which had been quickly put out, but they were officially down to three engines.
Malachi could only rub his tired face and shake his head. Hell with it, he thought. This is as good an excuse as any.
“Tell the navigator to set a course for Perth,” he ordered over the bitchbox. “And get an engine casualty report out before we have to go back down.”
Firefish turned for home with just enough fuel to get there, encouraged just before sunrise by a Kawanishi who’d flown over them and then turned around to see if what their tail gunner was reporting was true. By then Firefish was passing two hundred feet and executing a wide turn off her original course. The resulting barrage of depth charges fell comfortably astern, but not without reminding Malachi that perhaps his personal fatigue was starting to endanger the boat. He had forgotten to order periodic air search radar sweeps just because it was nighttime. Jap planes were not night-capable, but any seaplane could take off in darkness, as long as it would be light when they came back to land.
He went to his cabin and pulled the curtain. He flopped down in his bunk, noting that the boat was headed south at five knots submerged. In the privacy of the cabin he held his two hands out above his chest, palms down. The shaking was still there. He wondered if anyone else had noticed.
THIRTY-ONE
The morning they were due into Perth/Fremantle dawned sky blue and clear. They’d been running on the surface for the past three days, far enough away from known Jap fleet concentrations to be able to rely on their radars to detect other ships and aircraft. Malachi had heard that the Pearl-based subs ran surfaced almost all the way to Japan now before instituting the day-night routine.
Down below the crew was making preparations for entering port, dumping trash and garbage over the side, pumping out the sanitary tank, consolidating the diesel fuel tanks to facilitate refueling, and bragging to one another about all the upcoming conquests once they got ashore. The engineers had begun to dismantle number one diesel until they discovered that the crankshaft was broken and that three cylinders were damaged beyond repair. This meant a new engine, so there was no point in getting it ready for repairs.
The exec joined Malachi up on the bridge when they were about an hour outside the breakwater. The water had suddenly turned light brown, a sign that they were entering the Swan River delta. A huge flock of seagulls was following the boat, eager for treasures as the trash and garbage went over the side.
“About time to set the navigational detail,” Malachi said.
“They’re already at work,” Higgins replied. “We’ll go to sea and anchor detail in about thirty minutes. I’ll be glad to get in.”
“Me, too,” Malachi said, keeping his shaky hands firmly planted on the bullrail. “Hate to bring all those torpedoes back in, though.”
“I think the troopship will cover a multitude of sins,” Higgins said. “That must have really hurt the bastards.”
“Enough that they came after us, which isn’t something they usually do for more than about eight hours.” Malachi raised his binoculars. He thought he could just make out the tall buildings in Perth center.
“I can’t see them being able to sustain what they started back at Pearl,” Higgins said. “A group of tiny islands trying to control the entire western Pacific. Yes, they took it handily enough, but now what? It’s like that old saw about the pelican, whose mouth can hold more than his bellican.”
Malachi smiled. “They still have teeth,” he said. “That’ll change over time, but right now, we still can’t stay surfaced anywhere near a Jap base. In fact—”
The bitchbox came on. “Conn, Sound: I just heard what I think was a single ping coming from zero nine five relative.”
As Malachi reached fo
r the talk switch, an enormous explosion lifted Firefish’s stern completely out of the water, throwing both Malachi and Higgins to the deck and dropping two of the four lookouts all the way down to the main deck. The bow actually submerged even though the dive planes were fully rigged in, popping back up only to be buried under tons of water from the huge spout that had lifted over the stern and then collapsed in a maelstrom of water, stinking of explosives.
Malachi felt the boat collapsing behind him, everything aft of the sail no longer really part of the entire boat. As he staggered to his feet a warm hurricane of air began whistling out of the conning tower hatch. Higgins got up, fell back down, and then struggled to get to his feet as water swept into the bridge enclosure. Firefish was going down. Malachi didn’t hesitate.
“You stay topside,” he yelled at Higgins, who could only stare at him, his mouth open and his face bleeding. Malachi scrambled through knee-deep water to the conning tower hatch, where the water was already waterfalling over the coaming. He clambered into the trunk and pulled the hatch shut behind him. The roar of air fought back, and finally he had to hang his full body weight on the hatch wheel to get the hatch to close. He then dropped down into the conning tower, where several men were down on the deck, looking like they were partaking of a picnic in the woods.
He literally threw his body down the ladder to Control, where there was already two feet of water and rising. He saw several men struggling to get the watertight hatch at the back of the Control space closed. Beyond the hatch coaming he caught a glimpse of several figures in the darkness, dimly lit by battle lanterns, but he couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead in the rapidly rising seawater. Finally the men got the hatch closed. The stream of air stopped as the remaining forward half of the boat lazily flopped over onto its starboard side, throwing everybody in the control room up on the bulkhead, along with a wave of the fuel-laced water. Men struggled frantically to hang on to anything they could get a grip on. Then everything went quiet, except for the sound of small leaks spraying into the compartment and the creaking noises the after hatch was making.
Malachi found himself wrapped around the base of the periscope assembly, one hand jammed in between some piping and the attack scope column. Battle lanterns shone brightly around the space, enough for him to see the depth gauge, which was unwinding steadily, 100 feet, 150, then 180, before the hull thumped down onto what felt like a mud bottom. No one said a word.
“All right,” Malachi spoke up, trying to keep his own voice steady. “We got torpedoed. I need reports on what we’ve got left forward.”
One man, a planesman, got hysterical. “What’re we gonna do?” he cried. “What’re we gonna do?”
“Remember the tower in New London?” Malachi said. “We all had to do the tower, right?”
The men were looking at him now, some with the first vestige of hope in their eyes.
“We’re gonna do the tower, just like we did it in New London. We’re at a hundred eighty feet. We’re gonna go out the escape trunk and up to the surface, just like they taught us. But first we have to make sure we can get to the escape trunk. Someone open the control room’s forward hatch.”
“But what if it’s flooded?” another young seaman asked.
Malachi looked at him. “I need a cigarette,” he announced. “My cigarettes are in my cabin. My cabin is in the next compartment. Open the goddamned hatch.”
A couple of more senior petty officers started laughing, which is what Malachi had hoped they would do. Suddenly the crew was back, or what was left of it. He tried not to think of how many had drowned back aft. Three men sloshed through the water toward the forward hatch. They banged on it three times with a wrench. Somebody on the other side banged back. They cracked the hatch. No water poured in. Then they opened it wide. The COB was there, looking pissed off. Unlike everyone in the control room, his uniform was dry. There were faces behind him in the light of more battle lanterns. “Took you long enough,” he said. “What the fuck happened?”
Malachi climbed down from his perch. The deck plates were still awash on the boat’s tilted side, but so far the water wasn’t rising. He tried to ignore what he thought was the first faint whiff of chlorine from the forward battery compartment.
“I think we got torpedoed,” Malachi said. “I think the back half of the boat’s gone, right aft of Control. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we’re at a hundred eighty feet. We can get out.”
The COB nodded. “Hell, yes, we can,” he said. “We’re mostly dry forward. But I don’t know if the escape trunk is clear—it will be if we’re just over on our side.”
The boatswain appeared behind him and reported that there were three officers and nineteen enlisted forward, some of them injured from the whiplash effect of the torpedo. Malachi made a quick head count in the control room. An agonizingly few of the engineers plus the chief electrician had made it out before they sealed the after control room hatch, and there’d been six men in the conning tower. The rest were the control room watch along with the sonarman and one radioman. Out of his crew of sixty-eight souls, forty-six men, including himself, had survived the boat being blown in half. Thirty more minutes, he thought, and we’d have made it into shallow enough water.
“Get those leaks plugged so we have time to get organized,” Malachi ordered. “COB, let’s go check the escape trunk.”
They made their way forward, stepping over all sorts of equipment that had been blown off the bulkheads by the shock of the explosion. The only lighting came from the battery-powered battle lanterns, and a thin mist of dust and insulation filled the air. As they passed over top of the forward battery compartment they both could smell battery acid, but not chlorine.
Yet.
As always, it would be the batteries that would decide how much time they had left in the boat. Once seawater began seeping into the cells, they would start generating chlorine gas. Who knew how many hull seams had been cracked open.
The escape trunk was 36 inches wide and cylindrical in shape. There were two hatches—one inside the boat, one topside on the forecastle. Everyone aboard knew the procedure, which they’d had to practice in the 200-foot-high water tank at the sub school in New London in order to graduate from sub school.
The escape trunk worked by providing an intermediate stage between the pressure in the boat and the sea pressure outside. A man would climb into the trunk and close the hatch leading down into the boat. Then he would crack a small valve and begin to admit seawater into the trunk. As the seawater rose in the confines of the trunk, the air above it would be pressurized until the outside sea pressure equaled the inside air pressure, at which point, no more water could get in. Depending on how deep the boat was, the man would be standing in the trunk with about two feet of air between him and the outside hatch. He would then don the submarine escape apparatus, otherwise known as the Momsen Lung, which would provide some oxygen on the way up. Holding a small lanyard in one hand, he would then fully open the outer, weather-deck hatch. He and a bubble of pressurized air would then launch for the surface. The lanyard would be pulled out of his hand, which would trip the latch keeping the upper hatch open. It would drop back into place. As soon as the men waiting below began to drain the escape trunk, the hatch would be sealed by the sea pressure outside.
Once he was away, the men left inside the boat would drain all the water out of the trunk and this time three men would go inside the trunk to repeat the escape procedure. The first man out would take with him two things: a Styrofoam buoy, which had a line attached to the hull of the boat, and the first of three inflatable life rafts stored in the forward part of the boat. As the pressurized air in his lungs began to make his chest swell, he would begin a continuous exhale all the way to the surface. At school they’d called it the ho-ho-ho maneuver. The escapee would repeat that phrase all the way to the surface in order to keep his lungs from exploding. Once on the surface, he would fire the CO2 cartridge to inflate the life raft, and then climb
in. There was a sound-powered phone line wrapped around the buoy line, which terminated inside the boat. The first man out would establish comms with the rest of the survivors down below, and then the process of getting the rest of the survivors up to the surface would begin.
Malachi declared that the COB would be the first man out. He was an experienced and senior crew member who was well qualified to deal with whatever emergencies erupted on the surface as terrified junior crewmen began popping up out of the sea.
“How many SEAs do we have here?” Malachi asked.
A count was made. “Forty-five, sir,” the COB said. “The rest are back aft.”
“Back aft is long gone, COB,” Malachi said. “You and two more go up, and take the second raft with you. I’ll run the sequence down here.”
The COB looked at Malachi, as if to say: but what about the forty-sixth man? Malachi smiled at him, and told him to get going.
For the next hour, everyone still left alive in the broken remains of Firefish ascended, three by three, to the surface. The third cluster of escapees took the last lifeboat with them. The last two donned the last two Momsen lungs, trying not to look at the skipper who was helping them adjust the straps and the mouthpiece before they entered the chamber. One of them pulled the mask aside and asked Malachi if he was going to try a free ascent.
“Hell, yes, I will,” Malachi said. “Nothing scares me, right? I’m The Iceman.”
The young man, a torpedoman third class, stared at him for a second. Then he touched the facemask. “Thank you for this, Skipper,” he said.
“Get going, young man,” Malachi said. “I’ll be right behind you. Remember to grab that hatch lanyard, okay?”
He then spun the wheel of the lower hatch behind them and then waited for the rush of bubbles, which would indicate they’d launched for the surface. Then he sat down on a pile of lifejackets and looked at his watch. It was just eight-fifteen in the morning. They were going to be up there awhile before the Navy in Perth realized they were overdue. They did have the three rafts. That would provide enough flotation for almost all of them, either in the rafts or hanging alongside. As long as no one was bleeding, the sharks would hopefully take their time.
The Iceman Page 30