The Apache led the horse over to the side of the corral, his right hand entwined in the mane.
“Here’s your horse, Mr. Biggs,” the Indian said. “He knows a man can hurt him and he knows a man can be gentle with him. Treat him kindly and you’ve got a good animal. Now I got to get dressed before this sun gives me a bad burn.” He vaulted over the top rail of the corral and pulled his shirt over his bronzed shoulders. Flanagan walked over to him as he finished dressing.
“I’m damned glad you didn’t get yourself killed, Charlie. I’m damned glad you hadn’t bullshitted people about the way you can ride.”
“Indians don’t speak with forked tongue, Chief. Only white man has a forked tongue. Didn’t you ever see any cowboy and Indian movies when you were a kid? Now I want to see some of these wiseass submarine sailors ride.”
The Australian walked over to Charlie. “I’ve been talking with my two chaps, sir. They want to know what kind of a tribe you come from. Can’t very well tell them about America, the Outback is all the world they know. They think they may be related to you by tribe, and I’ll thank you not to laugh, sir. To be related to an Abo is the highest honor they can think of. They’d like to touch you so their medicine and yours can mix.”
“I understand,” Charlie Two Blankets said. He faced the two aborigines and drew himself to his full six feet of height. He bowed his head slightly toward the two smaller men and stretched his arms out, his palms facing the sky. His voice rolled out in a sonorous chant, the liquid vowels and clipped consonants of the Apache language hanging in the still Australian air. The two aborigines stood quietly, watching him. When he had finished they stepped forward, their arms outstretched, palms upward. Gravely, they turned their hands and touched the Apache’s hands, palm to palm. The older of the two aborigines turned his head and spoke briefly in his own tongue to Biggs.
“He says he doesn’t understand your language, breaker of horses, but he would like to know what you said. He is sure you made a prayer to the Rain God. That’s the most powerful god these people have because water is so scarce.”
“I made a prayer to the gods,” the Apache said. “I asked my gods to protect them and give them many children.”
Biggs turned and spoke to the two aborigines, his deep voice chopping at the guttural speech. The two men smiled.
“Right thing to say, cobber,” Biggs said. “Children and water are the only resources these poor devils have when they’re on their own. Tonight they will pray to their gods and ask that their strength enter you while you sleep.”
On the bus that evening Chief Wharton walked down the aisle and perched on the arm of the seat where Charlie Two Blankets was sitting.
“I take back everything I ever said when I kidded you on the ship. You are just one hell of a horse rider. And some kind of rifle shot, too. You must have hit that one kangaroo at about two hundred yards and that damned thing was running and jumping.”
“I don’t like to kill a pretty animal like that,” the Indian said. “You should never kill animals unless you can eat them and that Australian fella said the only part of a kangaroo you can eat is the tail. He said they were pests, that they eat his crops. I don’t think I’d want to eat that thing’s tail.”
“Might be better than roast sheep,” Wharton said. “I’ll be tasting that mutton for a week.”
The next morning Flanagan went looking for Paul Blake. He found him in the hotel dining room eating his breakfast.
“Mind if I sit down?” Flanagan asked.
“No, I mean, yes, sit down, Chief.”
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Flanagan asked. “I thought you’d sign up to go out on that thing we went on yesterday. Hell of a good time. You hear about the Indian?”
“Yes, sir,” Blake said. “Everyone who didn’t go has heard about that. Must have been something to see. The reason I didn’t go …” He blushed suddenly, and Flanagan felt awkward.
“Reason I didn’t go, Chief, I met a girl. I mean, it’s not, I’m not living at her house or anything like that. She took me home to meet her parents, she lives with them. They’re real nice folks, just like my own folks. Her father is in charge of the Port Customs or something like that.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“Day before yesterday some Red Cross people came to the hotel to see if they could do anything for us, for the crew, like sew on buttons or even write letters home. Most of the fellows were out somewhere. I was the only one here. I was sitting in the lobby and I was trying to write a letter to Ginny, that was my girl back home until she decided I was too far away.” Flanagan saw the younger man’s eyes blink a little bit.
“Well, anyway, I had tried and tried to write a letter to Ginny and I couldn’t say what I wanted to say and there were some crumpled up pages on the deck around my feet and she asked me if I’d like her to write the letter. So I gave her the letter from Ginny.”
“The Dear John letter?” Flanagan asked softly. Blake nodded.
“And she wrote Ginny a real nice letter. She just seemed to know what to say. So I asked her if I could buy her lunch and she said yes and then we went to the zoo and walked around and she took me home to meet her father and her mother. Real nice people, Chief. Her father walked me back to the streetcar, they call them trams here, and invited me to go back there for supper tonight. You could go with me if you want.”
“Thanks, but no,” Flanagan said. “You go ahead, but don’t foul things up by making a run on the girl or something like that.”
Blake’s face flushed. “I wouldn’t do anything like that! She’s a nice girl. Her mother and father treated me like I was their son. They’re going to take my picture today and send it to my folks.”
Flanagan stood up. “Okay, son. Take things easy.” He walked away, glad that the boy’s disappointment over the Dear John letter had evaporated quickly. He saw Lieutenant Lee coming across the hotel lobby, motioning at him. He stopped and waited until the officer came up to him.
“You mind if I ask you to come out to the ship, Chief?” Lee said. “They’ve got some sort of a problem with some torpedoes. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I’ve got to go out there, and I’d like you to come along if you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take long.”
“I don’t mind,” Flanagan said. Lee led the way outside to a jeep, where a sailor sat behind the wheel.
The Eelfish was now moored inboard, next to the bulk of the submarine tender. Flanagan walked down the steep gangway and saw that some relief crew sailors were closing the torpedo-loading hatch to the After Torpedo Room. Up forward Steve Petreshock was supervising a relief-crew gang as a torpedo was being lowered to rest in the loading skid.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Flanagan said to Petreshock. “You’re supposed to be in the hotel and what in the hell is going on, taking fish aboard? We’re not supposed to get new fish until after we get back from the hotel.” He turned to Lee.
“We’re not going to have our usual week to ten days in port after the R and R,” Lee said. “They want us back at sea as quickly as we can get there. So they load the fish today.”
“And you?” Flanagan said to Petreshock.
“Well, we got the word yesterday morning that they were going to load fish, so me and Nelson decided to come down today and make sure they did it right,” Petreshock said. “Nelson’s in the After Room, and he’s got some kind of problem. Don’t know what it is. I been busy up here.”
Flanagan nodded and went to the Crew’s Mess hatch and went down the ladder, followed by Bob Lee. Fred Nelson was in the After Room with a crew of torpedomen from the submarine tender.
“What’s the problem, Fred?” Flanagan asked.
“These people are giving us destroyer fish, Mark Fifteens, for the tubes back here,” Nelson said. “Mark Fourteens for the reloads.”
“What difference does that make?” Lee asked.
“Mark Fifteen fish are longer than our regular Mark Fourteen torpedoes
,” Flanagan said. “I’ve heard you could use Fifteens in the After Room because the tubes back here are a lot longer than those up front so’s the fish will clear the screws and the stern planes. But I never heard of any boat firing Fifteens.”
“It’s a real fuck-up!” Fred Nelson said. He stared at the tender torpedomen balefully, glaring at them from his six feet four of brawn, his eyes hot.
“Way it is with these damned fish,” Nelson said. “Way it is is that the fish are just that much too long so when the fish is lined up with the tube you can’t open the inner door because the warhead sticks out too far.
“That makes it that when you want to load a fish you got to open the inner door first and then jockey the damned fish back and forth until you get it lined up. That ain’t too bad sittin’ in port. But when we have to pull these bastards to routine them at sea it means we do the routining with the inner door open and the Old Man wants them inner doors closed when a fish is outa the tube.
“And that ain’t the only thing. They had to put a modified guide stud on these here Fifteens because the regular guide stud don’t line up with the stop bolt in the tube. Means that when you load you got to bleed down the impulse air and dry-fire the tube and hold down the firing key. Then you got to ease the fish in the tube inch by inch until you can feel the stop bolt touch the guide stud and then you ease it in a little bit more until you can feel the stop bolt drop down into the slot on the guide stud.”
Flanagan stood quietly, his mind sifting through the problem. He looked at Nelson.
“That would mean that when you want to pull the fish to routine it you have to bleed down the impulse air and dry-fire the tube and hold the firing key down while you pull out the fish. Hell, you can’t do that unless you bypass all the safety interlocks!”
“You got the picture,” Nelson said sourly. “With them safety interlocks disconnected any clown goes between the tubes and touches a firing key and we’ve got a fish fired in the tube with the outer door closed.”
“There’s another thing.” One of the relief crew torpedo-men spoke up. “When you pull a fish for routining you got to be awful sure you dry-fire the tube and hold that firing key down because if you try to pull the fish without doing that the modified guide stud will bend up and the only way you’ll get that fish out of the tube is to go topside, open the After Trim tank manhole, go down in the tank and take off the stop bolt housing, and then remove the guide stud. That ain’t anything I’d want to do out in a patrol area.”
“How come you give us these fish?” Flanagan asked.
“We’re short of torpedoes,” the relief crew man said. “We’re putting four fish, Mark Fifteens, in the after tubes of every submarine until further orders.”
“Big pain in the ass,” Nelson said.
Riding back to the hotel in the jeep Lieutenant Lee turned to Flanagan.
“What do you think, Chief?”
“I guess it will work out,” Flanagan said slowly. “I don’t like the idea, but if they’re short of fish they’re short of fish. Nothing we can do about it. Thing that bothers me is that we’ve got to change routines back there in the After Room. With the safety interlocks on the tubes disconnected, having to dry-fire the tube to pull a fish for routining, you have a chance of a casualty. We’re going to have to work out some new routines, do a lot of drilling back there.” He sat back on the uncomfortable seat.
“What’s important, sir, is that we’ve got some damned good people in charge of those two torpedo rooms. Nelson and Petreshock gave up one of their rest days to come back to the ship to supervise loading the torpedoes. That’s a hell of a thing to do, you know.”
“I know,” Lee said.
CHAPTER 6
Admiral Christie was in a testy mood. Mike Brannon got word through the grapevine before he went to a conference about his new patrol area. The gossip had it that General MacArthur’s politicking had undercut Christie in some manner. Brannon was warned to be on his best behavior, to say as little as possible.
“Those tankers that come out of Balikpapan.” Admiral Christie walked over to a chart standing on an easel near the conference table. He pointed at the port city of Balikpapan on the east coast of Borneo. “Those tankers are supplying Admiral Koga’s fleet based at Truk. Those tankers have got to be stopped. That’s our first priority.”
Mike Brannon shifted in his chair and stared at the chart. It had been just north of Balikpapan that Mako had gone roaring in on three loaded tankers and four destroyers in a night surface attack earlier in the war. Brannon remembered the awful moment of fear he had felt as he watched the bubbling trail of the second torpedo he fired from Mako’s stern tubes at a destroyer that was coming full tilt at the Mako’s stern. Those brief seconds that had seemed like hours after the wake of the torpedo led into the side of the destroyer’s bow and then the tremendous explosion as the torpedo sheared off the entire bow of the attacking destroyer.
“Are you paying attention, Brannon?” Christie’s voice was sharp, petulant.
“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “I was Exec under Captain Hinman in Mako’s third patrol off Balikpapan.”
“I know that,” the Admiral said. He pointed at the chart again. “The oil coming out of those fields there is said to be so pure that they don’t have to refine it before using it. They just run it through a filter. The Australians have ship watchers in the hills along the coast of Borneo, the east coast. Those ship watchers report that the tankers leave Balikpapan, go north of Celebes and then toward the Pacific. We have other intelligence reports that the tankers are going to Truk, to supply Koga’s fleet.” He paused and looked at his assembled staff and Mike Brannon.
“If Koga ever decides to move that fleet out of Truk, we haven’t got anything in the area strong enough to stop him. The only thing we can figure that’s held him in port so far is that he’s short of oil for his fleet. But if he gets enough oil, if he moves out to sea, he can cut us to ribbons. And once he’s done that, well, there wouldn’t be any General MacArthur returning to the Philippines.
“It boils down to stopping the tankers. That’s our first priority. They’ll be escorted, but ignore the escorts. Get the tankers.”
“Tankers are hard to sink, as you know.” Sam Rivers, the Operations Officer, a squat, heavyset four-stripe Captain spoke up. “We’ve had reports from submarine Captains who tell us of hitting a tanker with as many as six torpedoes, hitting them in the sides of the hull. Those tankers are so compartmented that they can suck up a half-dozen torpedo hits at or below their waterlines.
“What you have to do —” the Operations Officer paused a moment, looking hard at Brannon. “What you have to do is to believe in the Mark Six exploder. If you fire one, no more than two torpedoes set to run beneath the tanker, if you make your approach properly, then you’ll have a kill. No tanker, no matter how well compartmented, can live with its keel, its back broken.”
“The tankers burn,” Brannon said. “The two we hit off Balikpapan in Mako burned like blast furnaces. Maybe that unrefined oil has something in it that makes it burn easily.”
“That’s been thought of,” Rivers said. “We’ve been trying to find a Dutch engineer who worked at the oil fields in Borneo who might know the chemical makeup of that oil, but we haven’t found him yet. Your safest bet is to rely on the Mark Six exploder. I worked with Admiral Christie developing that exploder and we know it works.” Brannon nodded, his face carefully expressionless.
“We’re putting Eelfish just north of Celebes,” the Admiral said. “You should have good targets, good hunting. You can expect the tankers to be well guarded. Ignore the escorts, go after the tankers.” He rose from the chair where he had been sitting while his Operations Officer was talking.
“I know that once you’ve hit and sunk destroyers you get a sort of fever, you want to keep going after them. Take an aspirin, do something, don’t let that fever overcome your priority, the tankers. Just bear in mind that if Koga gets enough oil at Truk he�
�s going to go out to sea, and if he does General MacArthur’s invasion route to the Philippines will be vulnerable.”
Mike Brannon leaned against the pom-pom gun mount on the cigaret deck, aft of the bridge, looking at the long, straight fluorescent wake the Eelfish trailed behind her as the ship walked the long sea miles up through the Indian Ocean on a course for Lombok Strait. In another ten or eleven days Eelfish would be on station, north of the northernmost tip of the oddly shaped island called Celebes. As he so often did when it was quiet on the bridge he let his thoughts run back to the night when the Mako had gone down, hearing again in the innermost parts of his mind the slow, steady pulsing of the Mako’s sonar beam spelling out the words of the Twenty-third Psalm.
The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that John Olsen’s shrewd conjecture that Mako had been ambushed was correct. Mako, without surface radar, had probably bored in to attack what the lookouts had been able to see, a line of small freighters proceeding cautiously down the east coast of the island of Samar. What the lookouts had not seen, what a surface radar would have picked up, was the presence of two enemy destroyers lurking closer to the coast, their silhouettes lost against the island’s bulk. Once committed to the surface attack, Mako had been trapped by the destroyers, riddled with gunfire, and then fatally damaged before the ship could dive deeply enough to evade the destroyer attacks.
It was strange, Brannon thought, how the odds of success veered so sharply in the problems of attacking with a submarine or being attacked while in a submarine. An attacking submarine, if it could make its approach undetected, carried the odds in its favor. If the Captain made all his observations correctly, if the torpedoes ran hot, straight, and normal, if the exploders worked properly, then the target could be hit and destroyed.
Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2) Page 8