Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2)

by Harry Homewood

  “Mr. Olsen and Lieutenant Jerry Gold, who is my Battle Stations Diving Officer, performed flawlessly. As did Lieutenant Lee, who stayed in the After Room when it was flooding.”

  “I’ve looked over your recommendations for medals, Mike,” Admiral Christie said. “I’m awarding Silver Stars to Olsen, Lee, and Gold and to Chief Torpedoman Flanagan and First Class Torpedoman Nelson.” He looked up from the papers in front of him and grinned.

  “Now tell me, Mike, what in the hell did you think you were accomplishing by getting under that warhead and catching the exploder?”

  “I don’t really know, sir,” Brannon answered. “I guess I thought it was my duty, something I should do to share in the risk of the operation.”

  “Oh, hell!” Captain Rivers snorted. “If the damned war head had blown, every warhead in the torpedo room would have exploded in a sympathetic explosion and the whole ship would have been blown to bits!”

  “But it didn’t happen,” Christie said with a grin. “I’ve awarded you the Navy Cross, Mike. The medal ceremonies will be held after the R and R period. My yeoman will be in touch with you. Now let’s hear about this U-boat sighting. I looked over your contact and patrol reports, and you didn’t even have a preliminary plot. Hold it until we get a fresh pot of coffee.” He nodded at a junior staff officer, who rose from the table and went to the door. After a mess cook had delivered the coffee and left the room the Admiral nodded at Brannon.

  Brannon went through the incident slowly and carefully. Admiral Christie shook his head when Brannon told him of being called to the Conning Tower because the surface of the ocean was covered with swimming snakes.

  “Must have been a terrible sight,” Christie said.

  “Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “Eerie is the word that came to mind at the time.” When he had finished describing the sinking of the U-boat, the Operations Officer spoke.

  “The Germans have a few U-boats in the Indian Ocean. They never bother us. Once in a great while we get a report of one of them as far east as Bali. The one you sighted and sank was only the second one to ever go through Lombok and into the Java Sea that we know about.”

  “The other one was sunk by a Dutch submarine skipper,” Christie said. “Captain Goosens got the U-168 coming out of Surabaya and sank it and took survivors aboard. Two for two is about as good a batting average as you can get. Hard on the U-boats though.” He stood up, and his staff stood up with him.

  “Thank you for coming by, Captain Brannon, gentlemen. Enjoy your R and R.” He looked at Bob Lee, a small smile showing on his lips. “And you, sir, always defend your Captain when you’re right.” He stretched, the strain of the burdens he carried showing in his face.

  Seated in the car that took them away from the Bend of the Road, Olsen reached over and shook Brannon’s hand. “Congratulations, Mike! A Navy Cross! By God, you deserve it. And thanks for putting me in for a Silver Star.”

  “I put in for a Navy Cross for you, John, and for Bob and Flanagan and Nelson; you for your work as the Executive and Plotting Officer and Bob, Flanagan, and Fred for what they did in the After Room. They told me when I met with Captain Rivers before we all went in there that you would get a Silver Star, that your time was coming. Bob got knocked down to a Silver Star because he’s not Regular Navy, he’s a Reserve. Flanagan and Nelson got reduced to a Silver Star because they’re enlisted men and they didn’t die. Captain Rivers doesn’t believe in giving medals to enlisted men if he can avoid it. I’m sorry my recommendations didn’t carry much weight.”

  “I’m grateful, Captain,” Lee said. “Silver Star or Navy Cross, neither one is going to count when I hang out my shingle as an attorney after the war.”

  “That’s right, you’re a lawyer, aren’t you?” Olsen asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Lee said. “I passed my bar exam for California, and then the Navy reached out and said the proper place for a young lawyer was on a submarine. I’m sort of glad they did. I like the Eelfish, I like you people.”

  “It must have cost Admiral Christie an awful lot to admit his pet exploder isn’t working the way he thought it would work,” Brannon said slowly. “I admire that man. It took an awful lot of backbone to face up to that. I don’t think I could have done it.”

  “He’s a pretty good dude, for an Admiral,” Olsen said. “He could have jumped all over rambunctious Bob when he spoke up in defense of our torpedoes.”

  “I could have bitten my tongue off,” Lee said.

  “You got away with it because Christie is a decent man,” Mike Brannon said. “You’ve used up all your luck in that department. One other thing, John, and you can tell the Chief Petty Officers when you see them: We’re going to have to do our own refit this time. The relief crews are overworked at this particular time, several boats are in or are coming in, and because we’re going to have to wait for that outer door they decided our people would do their own overhaul.”

  “Going to be some unhappy sailors,” Olsen said. “Not that we’ve got much to do, other than painting the ship inside and out. That’s a big job.”

  “It won’t hurt them,” Brannon said.

  Flanagan found Chiefs Nuthall and Wilson in the CPO Quarters on the tender. Both men were dressing in front of their lockers.

  “We just went over the side and looked at your tube,” Wilson said. “The water in this harbor is filthy, you know that?”

  “Was the door gone?” Flanagan asked. “How did the tube look?”

  “Door’s gone clean as a whistle,” Nuthall said. “We couldn’t have taken it off any cleaner if we had tools. We scraped the paint off all around the hinges and looked for hairline cracks with a light, but we couldn’t see anything wrong. We’ll do a better job of that once we get you in dry dock.”

  “Supposing you find a few cracks?” Flanagan said with a grin. “That mean we have to go back to the States?”

  “ ‘Fraid not,” Wilson said. “What we’d do then is to throw some welds on every crack we could find, hang the door, tack weld it shut, and you’d go to sea with one less torpedo tube. You ready for chow?”

  “What are you going to do with the guy who fired that fish in the tube?” Nuthall said as the three men sat down at a table covered with snowy linen and laid with china that was decorated with the name of the submarine tender.

  “You gonna transfer him and give him to us, in the relief crew?”

  “I don’t think so,” Flanagan said. “He’s a good man. Young, but he’s good. Fred Nelson, the guy who has the After Room, wants to keep him. The Old Man is just letting him stew in his own juice for a while. I don’t think he’ll do anything unless the Staff gets stiff-necked about it.” He unfolded a white napkin and laid it in his lap.

  “You people live pretty good,” he said as he eyed the menu the messcook brought.

  “They have to treat us good,” Wilson said, a grin splitting his cherubic features. “We’re the folk who are winning the war, didn’t you know that?”

  “I’m glad someone’s winning the damned thing,” Flanagan said. He looked up at the messcook, who was standing, order pad in hand.

  “I’ll have a steak, rare, and two fried eggs with the yolks runny, if that isn’t too much trouble.”

  Wilson and Nuthall placed the same order. The messcook left and came back with three salads and a tray of dressings.

  “You don’t live too bad on the boats,” Nuthall said. “From the stores I see going aboard before a patrol run you don’t lack for much.”

  “Food’s good,” Flanagan said as he spooned dressing over his salad. “But about after ten days the milk is all gone and the eggs are used up and the spuds get soggy and go rotten. Powdered eggs for breakfast aren’t my idea of the real thing, let me tell you.”

  “I always get a kick out of watching you people go for the oranges and apples when you get in,” Wilson said.

  “I never ate salads before the war,” Flanagan replied. “Now I do. The Pharmacist’s Mate aboard Eelfish told me that I
got plenty of sunshine in peacetime. At sea we never see daylight except the first few days out and the last few days coming in. Now I find myself wanting to eat salad, lettuce, tomatoes, stuff like that.” He pushed his empty salad plate to one side as the messcook came back pushing a cart on wheels and put a steak with two fried eggs on top of it in front of each man.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it here for chow,” Wilson said slyly. “This Aussie beer is mighty powerful, and the ladies are more so. The combination of the two could make a man forget all about a torpedo tube.”

  “I took it easy,” Flanagan said. He speared a piece of steak, put it in his mouth, and chewed it slowly. “Ate dinner at the hotel, had a couple of beers in the bar, and then I watched the Shore Patrol bring my crew back. Most of them had to be carried in by the Shore Patrol, but there weren’t any charges. Kind of unusual.”

  “They’ve got orders to treat you war heroes with velvet gloves,” Nuthall said. “If the drunk is off a boat in from a war patrol they’ll treat him nice and gentle and take him back to his hotel. If he’s a tender man, doing duty on this ship or the base, they’ll bend a nightstick over his head and throw him in the brig. War is hell, they tell me.”

  Flanagan looked with approval at a piece of apple pie with a mound of ice cream melting beside it.

  “Mighty fine meal, and I thank you. If you come ashore I’d like to repay you and throw in some beer as well. Now, you got any idea when that outer door will be here? I got to give the word to the Old Man.”

  “Nothing definite,” Wilson said, lighting a cigaret. “We got an acknowledgment this morning that they had the order in New London, and for once the yeoman must not have fucked up because they didn’t ask for the requisition to be resubmitted, which is something they do almost all the time when we ask for something.”

  “What that means,” Nuthall said, “is that they will now begin trying to find a door that belongs to some boat that’s on the building ways. Once that’s done they got to cut orders to get it shipped. Then they got to cut a set of orders to ship it to the West Coast. Once it gets there someone there has got to cut orders to get it flown out to Pearl Harbor.

  “When it reaches there they got to cut orders to send it here by air — if some Supply Officer who’s queer for having an outer door doesn’t grab it and hide it — and when it gets here they got to write up a letter to tell us it’s here. Then we have to requisition the door.

  “Once they acknowledge the requisition we have to requisition a small lifting crane and a truck and some men and go and get the thing. Then we can hang it for you.”

  “Good God!” Flanagan said.

  “You asked me, I told you,” the submarine tender Chief said. “You can figure about a month to get it, nothing under three weeks. Then, if we’re lucky, we’ll get you into dry dock, hang the door, and out again in two, three weeks. We can’t ask for dry-dock space until we get the door, and if we’re unlucky the dry dock will be tied up. But we might be lucky. You never know.”

  “It ain’t anything to bitch about,” Wilson said. “The beer is good and the women, well, there just isn’t any Aussie men around who aren’t all shot to hell or old. They’re all fighting somewhere. If you aren’t married or even if you are, I’ve got a broad ashore who’s got a cousin who’s better lookin’ than my broad and willing.”

  “I’m not married,” Flanagan said. “I tried it once. All she ever did was bitch, bitch, bitch. Got rid of her years ago. Never again.”

  “I’ll drop by your hotel about sixteen thirty, maybe a little before,” Wilson said. “I’ll take you home and tell the broad I live with to call her cousin.”

  CHAPTER 11

  For most submarine men the two weeks of rest and relaxation the Navy provided in a hotel ashore, the “R & R” period, was a time to unwind, settle minor differences that had grown to major irritations during the long weeks on war patrol, get gloriously drunk, and find a woman to engage in the act of procreation. That act was, of itself, a gesture of defiance to the death all submariners faced when they returned to sea.

  Submarine officers were quartered separately from their crews. The Navy’s High Command recognized that some of its officers — after all, so many were non-career Reservists — might forget themselves and act in a manner unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The Navy felt that it was better if enlisted men did not see an officer in his cups or in pursuit of female companionship.

  The port Shore Patrol teams that roamed the city day and night were instructed to treat submariners gently, to keep them from making a disturbance, and if need be, take them back to their hotels, where they were turned over to the hotel security guard.

  Not all submariners spent their R & R time drinking or searching for women. Some explored the city, walked in the parks, sampled the Australian specialty of a steak topped with two or more fried eggs. Others, who chose to be quartered with hospitable families, fell happily into the family’s routine and more often than not smuggled a case of Nestlé Instant Coffee out of the submarine base as a reward for their generous hosts.

  Chief Monk Flanagan came down to breakfast a week after the R & R period had started. He had a dull ache in the back of his head, the result of some solitary beer drinking in his room the night before. Paul Blake saw him and waved. Flanagan walked over to his table and sat down.

  “Morning, Chief,” Blake said. “I don’t know what this cold yellow fruit is, but it sure is good. I’ve had some for breakfast every morning.”

  “It’s sliced mango,” Flanagan said. “Tropical fruit. We used to buy mangoes from kids in Manila, before the war. Cost five centavos each, that’s two for a nickel, our money.”

  The waitress, a tall, bosomy woman in her fifties, came to the table with a pot of steaming coffee and a tall glass of creamy yellow liquid. Flanagan smiled his thanks and drank the glass of liquid down in three long swallows.

  “What’s that stuff in the glass?” Blake asked. “Every morning when I eat breakfast I notice the waitresses give it to most of the guys but they never give me any. I don’t know what it is so I don’t know what to ask for.”

  “It’s a Dutch drink, I think its name is Advocat or something like that. It’s made of brandy, egg yolks, and heavy cream. Best thing in the world for a hangover. These waitresses have had sub crews in here before. They know who needs a glass of that stuff and who doesn’t. You don’t drink, do you?”

  “No,” Blake said. “My mom asked me not to drink when I enlisted, so I don’t.” He drained his glass of milk. “You know, I kind of like the idea of having a bowl of fresh fruit on the table for breakfast. Back home in Kansas my mom thought you had to have meat and potatoes and vegetables and even pie for breakfast before you went out to work in the fields.”

  “You grow up on a farm?”

  “My pop has six thousand acres of wheat,” Blake said. “The harvest crews, some of the men, used to drink pretty heavy, and maybe that’s why my mom asked me not to.”

  “What’s a harvest crew?” Flanagan asked.

  “People who come around every year at harvest time. They have their own equipment, big stuff. They’re something like submarine men, Chief. Real professionals. They stick together. They go from farm to farm during harvest — all through the wheat belt, all the way up to the Dakotas. My mom used to go over to the other farms when they’d be working those farms and help with the cooking. The other farmers’ wives would come to our farm when the harvest crew was at our farm. If you think a submarine feeds good you should see what a farm puts on the table for the harvest crew!” The waitress walked up to the table.

  “You feel like food this morning, Chief?”

  “Bring me about four eggs, sunny-side up, please. And a stack of toast.” He reached into the bowl of fruit on the table, took a passion fruit, cut through the tough outer skin, and scooped out the mass of purple seeds.

  “What are you doing with your time?” he asked Blake.

  “I’ve done a lot of sightseein
g,” Blake said. “I’ve been to a couple of movies. The Australians call movies ‘flicks,’ did you know that? And the girl who works with the Red Cross, the one I met when we were in port last time, she left a note for me. I took her to lunch a couple of times and to a movie, and this afternoon we’re going out to her house for dinner with her folks.”

  “Makin’ out, huh?” Flanagan asked.

  Blake blushed, the crimson line crawling up his boyish face to his blond hair.

  “She’s a nice girl, Chief. Her folks took my picture last time and sent it to my folks, and now I guess they’re writing to each other.” He rose as Steve Petreshock and Jim Rice came up. “See you fellas later,” Blake said. Rice and Petreshock sat down.

  “What’d we do, scare the kid away?” Rice asked.

  “You’d scare away a bear with that beard and those eyes,” Flanagan said. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

  “You hit it, Chief,” Rice said happily. “A regular wildcat got me yesterday afternoon. I was standin’ on a corner near St. George’s Square, and this nice looking broad walked up to me and asked me how long it’s been since I had a good home-cooked meal. I allowed as it had been quite a time, and she invited me to go home with her and she’d cook me a good dinner.

  “Hell, I thought maybe I was going to meet her old man and her kids. You know how nice these Aussies are, always trying to feed you or buy you beer or do things for you.

  “But she doesn’t have any kids and her old man’s been missing in action in Crete or someplace for about a year or more. She cooked me a damned good meal and then she just damn near dragged me into the bedroom by my beard, and once we got into the sack she turned out to be a regular wildcat! Man, I ain’t had anything like that in my whole life! I told her I had to get back here early this morning. A man’s got to regroup and reload after a night like that, but I’m sure as hell going back and see if her convoy needs another torpedo attack.”