Brannon pulled the chart around in front of him. “We should be able to run some of the way on the surface. At least down to the point where we turn west. I don’t think there’s much, if any, shipping on the east side of Celebes. No reason to be.
“That brings up the danger of sunburn. The lookouts, none of us, have seen much daylight this trip. You’d better issue an order for shirts and hats to be worn while topside. I don’t suppose that Doc Wharton has got any suntan lotion in that magic box of his.”
“I mentioned that to him before you woke up, sir. He says he’s got cocoa butter for burns and he’s got iodine and that he can make a good suntan lotion out of that stuff. I never heard of that but he says it works.”
Brannon grinned. “I guess they’d think we were crazy if we tried to draw suntan lotion as part of our supplies. Who ever heard of needing suntan lotion on a submarine?” He looked around as a very gentle rap sounded on the bulkhead beside the green curtain that served as a door.
“Permission to speak to the Captain?” Steve Petreshock’s face appeared through the curtain.
“Of course, Steve,” Brannon said. “Come in. Sit down.”
Petreshock leaned over the Wardroom table. “I’d like to keep it low, sir. Don’t want my voice to carry up forward. It’s about the prisoner, Captain.”
“What about him?”
“Well, sir, he’s getting awfully friendly. He sits with me on watch, on the four to eights, sir. I okayed that because I thought he was kind of lonely, maybe a little scared about what’s going to happen to him.
“So I encouraged him to talk a little, to tell me about going to school in the States, his wife, that sort of thing. It sort of led from one thing to another and he’s told me about how it was in Japan after he went back for his mother’s funeral, all about his old man. He really thinks a lot of his old man. About how they drafted him into the Merchant Marine and how it is there, the living and the working on the oil tankers he’s served on.
“After I’d get off watch and go back aft I’d write down everything I could remember he said.” He reached in his shirt pocket and took out a thick packet of paper and put it on the table.
“Lot of stuff in there about Balikpapan and the oil they get from there, Captain. I thought some of it might be useful to you.”
“I think it might be,” Brannon said. “Thank you. Keep listening to him. Write down whatever he says, no matter even if it’s about girls or food or anything.”
“There’s something else, Captain. He’s sort of opening up real good now with me and with the guys who live in my room. I figured if maybe we could let him eat in the Crew’s Mess, I’d be with him all the time as a sort of guard, I figured with all the guys around him he might open up even more. I didn’t push him, but this morning he started to tell me about how many times he’d been in convoys that were attacked by submarines and what their orders were when they got attacked. I figured that if all hands were tipped off to treat him good that he might really open up.”
Brannon looked at Olsen, who nodded approvingly.
“Sounds all right to me,” Brannon said. “But what sort of reason are you going to give him for changing the way he eats, for letting him go back to regular chow?”
“I thought a little about that,” Petreshock said. “He’s a sailor and he’s an officer. He’s pretty bright. I’ll just tell him that he’s the first prisoner we ever had and that we didn’t realize that he was no danger in the mess hall at chow time and that it would be easier on us, on my people, if one of them didn’t have to carry his chow tray to him. He washes his dishes in the sink in the room, sir. Says that one of us shouldn’t have to clean up after him. I think he’ll think everything’s okay.”
“Keep coaxing him to talk a little but don’t push it,” Brannon said. “John, you’d better get hold of the Chiefs and tell them what’s going on and have them coach their people to treat the prisoner nice and to talk with him but not try to interrogate him or anything like that.”
The crew, as Petreshock had anticipated, welcomed the prisoner at the mess table. His fluent command of English, his obvious pleasure at being out of the war, and his keen engineering interest in the Eelfish led him to recount funny stories about his undergraduate days at Stanford. He began to tell stories about his shipmates in Japan’s Merchant Marine, how one day a lookout on a tanker he was serving on threw an entire convoy into panic when he sighted a periscope. Later, after heavy depth charging, a dead whale came to the surface. The lookout had seen the whale spouting and had mistaken the gust of spray from the whale’s blowhole for a periscope. Scotty Rudolph got into the act, asking the prisoner for Japanese recipes and very carefully writing down what the prisoner told him. After each meal Petreshock took the prisoner back to the Forward Torpedo Room and shackled him to a torpedo skid and then went back to the Crew’s Mess to write down everything the prisoner had said, aided by Scotty Rudolph, whose ear for gossip — a faculty shared by most ship’s cooks — and whose memory spurred Petreshock’s own memory of what had been said.
Eelfish ran on the surface for two days and nights through seas empty of Japanese shipping. As the submarine approached the Lesser Sunda Islands Brannon gave the order to submerge during the daylight hours so enemy air patrols wouldn’t spot them. It was an hour past noon on the second all-day dive when Perry Arbuckle motioned to the Quartermaster of the Watch to raise the search periscope for the hourly check on sea and sky. He swung the periscope around and gasped.
“Captain! Captain to the Conning Tower!”
Brannon scrambled out of the Wardroom and ran into the Control Room and up the ladder to the Conning Tower.
“What have you got?”
“Snakes, sir! Millions of snakes, long brown snakes with yellow bellies all over the ocean! They’re swimming with us!”
Brannon looked through the periscope and saw that the surface of the sea was covered by a mass of sea snakes, all swimming steadily westward. He shuddered and recoiled as the periscope lens brought a snake’s head into close view.
“My God!” he muttered. “Imagine swimming in the middle of those things. I’ll bet they’re poisonous, too.” He turned and went to the ladder, and started to descend. “Next time, Perry, try to pick up something we can shoot at. I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep.” He grinned at the Reserve Officer and went down the ladder.
An hour later Arbuckle walked to the periscope and waited for the Quartermaster to raise the long steel tube. He put his eye to the lens and froze.
“Captain to the Conning Tower!” Arbuckle’s voice was hardly more than an agonized croak. Mike Brannon, roused from a deep sleep, stumbled through the Control Room and climbed to the Conning Tower.
“Not more damned snakes!” he grumbled. He put his face to the big rubber eyepiece on the periscope and the Quartermaster saw his shoulder muscles bunch up.
There, almost dead ahead of the Eelfish, a submarine was lying, fully surfaced. He twisted the periscope handle to bring the submarine focus and saw the insignia on the side of the Conning Tower: U-135.
“Down periscope!” Brannon snapped. “Sound General Quarters. Rig for silent running. Set all torpedo depths two feet. Open the torpedo-tube outer doors.” He waited, fidgeting, listening to the small noises of the crew hastening to their battle stations. John Olsen, a battle telephone set hung around his neck, climbed three steps of the ladder into the Conning Tower.
“All battle stations manned, sir. Torpedo depth set two feet. Torpedo tube doors open. Sonar is manned. The Plotting Party is standing by.”
“Sonar reports no contact,” Paul Blake said from the after end of the Conning Tower.
“Up battle ‘scope,” Brannon said to Brosmer. The Quartermaster punched the button that controlled the battle periscope and the oily tube slid upward. Brannon went to his knees and caught the two handles of the periscope as they rose above the deck, snapped them outward, and rode the scope upward, his eye at the lens.
“Mark
!” Brosmer looked upward.
“Bearing is three five zero.” Brannon heard the gears in the TDC clicking as Arbuckle cranked in the bearing.
“Range is one zero zero zero, one thousand yards. Angle on the bow is zero eight zero port. There’s a lot of people on the deck and the bridge of that damned sub! They’re staring into the water.”
“You’ve got a solution,” Arbuckle said from the TDC. “Stand by Forward ... My Irish oath! A damned U-boat in this ocean ... stand by.”
“Fire one!” He counted down from six to one.
“Fire two!”
“Both torpedoes running hot, straight, and normal.” Blake’s voice was loud in the Conning Tower. Brannon hung on the periscope handles staring at the enemy submarine. He saw a man on the bridge of the submarine suddenly wave his arms and point at the surface of the sea. There was a flurry of activity among the men on the deck of the submarine and then the first torpedo from the Eelfish hit the U-boat and exploded with a great gout of water and fire. Seconds later the second torpedo slammed home into the heeling submarine and blew it apart.
“Two hits!” Brannon yelled. He pulled the periscope around in a 360-degree search for other ships.
“Come to forty feet,” he called down the hatch. “I want a radar search.” He waited as the Eelfish planed upward. Rafferty, manning the radar, reported no contacts other than two small ones bearing three five eight.
“Those are the target,” Brannon said. “Stand by to surface. Chief of the Boat to the Conning Tower with a boathook and a safety line. Two seamen to the Conning Tower for deck rescue party. Maybe we can get another prisoner.”
The Eelfish surged upward, and Brannon climbed the ladder to the bridge hatch, hanging on with one hand, turning the wheel that undogged the hatch with the other. He heard Jerry Gold say “Twenty feet, sir,” and he pushed the hatch open, gasping as the residual water in the bridge flooded down the hatch.
Ahead of the Eelfish the German U-boat had broken into two pieces, its stern rising out of the water before it began to slide down to the sea bottom. Flanagan climbed over the bridge rail followed by two seamen.
“Chief,” Brannon yelled over the bridge rail, “if we can get a prisoner I want one. For God’s sake don’t fall over the side, don’t even get down on the pressure hull.” Flanagan looked at the water and drew back. The surface of the sea was alive with long, sinuous, swimming snakes.
The submarine’s bullnose eased slowly through the snake-covered water as Brannon conned the Eelfish toward a mass of debris on the surface. He raised his binoculars and searched the debris. He saw shattered bodies, pieces of what looked like mattresses, and other debris. Flanagan and the two seamen, trotting up and down the deck looking at the water, searched for a survivor but saw none.
“You see anyone alive, Chief?” Brannon called down to the deck. Flanagan shook his head.
“Deck party below,” Brannon ordered. He waited until Flanagan dropped down the hatch and then moved to the port side of the bridge to get out of the way.
“Clear the bridge,” he ordered and as the Quartermaster followed the lookouts down the ladder he punched the diving klaxon button twice and dropped through the hatch opening, pulling the hatch closed.
“Sixty-five feet,” he ordered. He turned to Perry Arbuckle. “Make a continuous periscope observation for the next ten minutes. Then go to one hundred feet and resume regular submerged patrol. Periscope observations on the hour. I want the sonar manned for the next hour. Stand easy on Battle Stations. Smoking lamp is lighted. Close torpedo tube outer doors.” He went down the ladder to the Control Room where John Olsen was standing at the gyro table with the plotting party. Brannon picked up a telephone and thumbed the button that connected him with all compartments.
“This is the Captain,” he said. “An hour or so ago Mr. Arbuckle saw an ocean full of swimming snakes. A few minutes ago he saw a German U-boat, lying to on the surface with a lot of people on deck. I assume those people on the German submarine were looking at the snakes. We scored two hits on the U-135, and it broke in two and went down. We searched for survivors and found none.” He put the phone down and turned to Olsen.
“Damned submarine was just sitting there, John. She was lying to. Half of the crew must have been on the deck. Looked like a Sunday afternoon at New London.”
“We don’t have much of a plot, sir,” Olsen said. “Just the firing data and the one set of bearings and range.”
“Didn’t need much,” Brannon grinned. “I saw one guy on the bridge begin to wave his arms. I think he must have seen the wake of the first torpedo because the people on deck began to mill around just before the fish hit. I didn’t see anyone jump over the side, though, so I don’t know what he was waving at.
“Hell of a choice,” Olsen said. “Jump over the side into a mess of big snakes or stand still and get hit with a torpedo.”
Admiral Christie read the Eelfish contact report the next morning at a breakfast meeting of his staff.
“That’s the second U-boat that’s gone north into the Java Sea out of the Indian Ocean,” the Operations Officer said. “And it’s the second one we’ve sunk.” He grinned at the Admiral.
“I thought Mike Brannon had run out of Irish luck after he lost that outer door. So we order him to come home and he bags a German U-boat!”
“That part in the Eelfish contact report about the sea being covered with snakes, big snakes,” the Operations Officer said, squirming in his chair. “I hate snakes!” His assistant, a chubby Commander, looked up from his plate of ham and eggs.
“You’re in the right part of the world for snakes, sir. Australia is the only continent where there are more venomous snakes than harmless ones.”
“Belay the small talk,” Christie said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He looked at his Staff Engineer.
“What about repairs to the Eelfish? How long?”
“Can’t say, Admiral. Can’t tell until she gets here. We don’t know if she’s lost the outer door. We don’t know if there’s any damage to the tube itself. Have to wait until she’s here and we can send a man over the side to look. If she needs a new door, if the tube is okay, we’ll have to order a door from New London and have it flown out. That’s one thing we don’t stock in spare parts, a new outer door for a torpedo tube.”
“Have you ordered a new door?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, damn it, order one! Eelfish won’t be in here for another nine, ten days. By that time maybe we can have a new door here.”
The Staff Engineer shook his head slowly. “Sir, I’ll bet you a new set of khakis that when we get all the paperwork done and air mail it there the people on the other end will tell us that we have a Class Z priority and that they can’t ship the damned door until there’s a full moon or some other damn fool thing.”
“Never mind exercising your boundless optimism,” the Admiral said. “Get the order in by radio, not air mail.”
“Yes, sir,” the Staff Engineer said. Admiral Christie looked around the table.
“I can’t fault Mike Brannon for that casualty on the outer door. With Mark Fifteen torpedoes in the after tubes it can happen. It did. But he had a damned good patrol all the same. One tanker down, a good big one, a prisoner who speaks good English and who’s talking a blue streak, and a German submarine. He deserves a medal for this one.”
“He deserves a kick in his big Irish ass,” Captain Sam Rivers, the Admiral’s Operations Officer grumbled. “Three nice fat tankers coming along in a row. The nearest escort way back on the flank and he gets only one of the tankers. He should have got at least two.”
Admiral Christie grinned at Captain Rivers. “Sam, I do believe we’ll send you out on a war patrol. When you bag a great big Jap cruiser we’ll hold an ass-kicking ceremony on the dock because you didn’t get a battleship! You are the hardest damned man to please I ever saw!”
The Eelfish eased carefully into a berth alongside the submarine farthest outbo
ard of the submarine tender in Fremantle, and Admiral Christie bounded over the gangway.
“Damned fine patrol, Mike,” the Admiral boomed. “Shame you had that casualty, but you did a damned fine job.” The Admiral pumped Brannon’s hand and the two men walked forward on the deck.
“We’ve got the prisoner below, sir,” Brannon said. “He talked a blue streak, especially after we sank the U-boat. I’ve had all that typed up and it’s with my patrol report. I hate to say this about the enemy but I have to, sir. He’s a very nice guy. Very nice. I wouldn’t want to see him thrown into some crummy jail cell or strung up by the thumbs. What will they do with him?”
“Our intelligence people here want to have some long talks with him,” Admiral Christie said. “We notified his wife, you know. I wrote her a letter. Once our people here are through with him he’ll be sent back to the States and put in a federal prison. Probably near ‘Frisco I’d think. That way his wife could visit him.”
A Chief Warrant Torpedoman followed by two Chief Torpedomen came down the gangway and picked their way through the Eelfish crew, who were sitting on deck, eating fruit and reading their mail. The Chief Warrant spotted Flanagan and the trio came up to him.
“Monk,” the Chief Warrant said, “Good to see you. What the hell happened in the After Room?” He turned to the two Chiefs with him.
“This is Chief Torpedoman Monk Flanagan, Chief of the Boat. Monk, Randy Nuthall and Bob Wilson. They’re my tube experts. Can we go down to the After Room?”
“Glad to meet you,” Flanagan said to the two Chiefs. “Have to use the Engine Room hatch, Mr. Glover. We’ve got the reload fish for Number Seven in the middle of the room. Can’t get down the hatch.”
He led the way, and when the other three men finished scrambling under the reload torpedo and stood up at the after end of the room, Chief Warrant Pines said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Monk?”
Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2) Page 13