Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2)

by Harry Homewood

  “Neither do we Swedes, sir,” Olsen said.

  Four days later, patrolling at the western limit of his area, Mike Brannon relieved Bob Lee at the periscope for the usual hourly periscope sweep and saw the smoke of a small freighter to the west. He watched as the smoke came closer and when the small freighter crossed his bow he fired two torpedoes at a range of 800 yards. The small inter-island freighter — Brannon estimated it to be no more than 2,000 tons — rolled over and sank. Three days later Perry Arbuckle saw an inter-island freighter with a heavy deck load and Brannon attacked. He fired one torpedo and the freighter broke in two and sank. Two days later Eelfish was ordered home with twenty-one torpedoes aboard.

  Admiral Christie’s booming assurances that the Eelfish had indeed had a successful patrol did little to mollify Brannon’s barely concealed anger over the unproductive patrol area he had been assigned. The crew of the Eelfish, not unaware of the political infighting that went on constantly among the senior submarine captains to get productive patrol areas, got ready to go to the hotel for their two weeks of R & R.

  Paul Blake approached Lieutenant Bob Lee on the afterdeck before the bus arrived to take the crew to the hotel.

  “Do you think all the paper work is done yet, sir?”

  “I don’t know,” Lee answered. “I did all I could before we left on patrol. Now it’s up to the people on the Base and the tender. They have to make an investigation of the family and the woman, you know. The chaplain has to talk to the ladies we want to marry. I believe that Captain Brannon has to interview them also. Then, after all that’s been done and everything is four-oh, the whole business goes to the Admiral for his approval.”

  “That’s an awful lot of stuff to go through for someone to marry a nice girl,” Blake said. “It isn’t that Constance is a bar girl or anything like that. Her folks are just as nice as my folks.”

  “I know,” Lee said. “You know what General Sherman said: ‘War is hell.’ I’ll check with the legal officer on the tender tomorrow. We went to the same law school but he was about three years ahead of me. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I find out anything. You going to spend your rest period at her folks’ house?” Blake nodded. “I’ll get in touch with you there. Don’t sweat it. Everything will come out all right.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The night before Eelfish was to leave on patrol Captain Sam Rivers led a tall, thin, U.S. Army Brigadier General into the small Wardroom on the submarine. Captain Brannon, alerted by a message from Admiral Christie, was waiting, seated at the Wardroom table.

  “I’d like to make the area secure, Captain,” Rivers said. Mike Brannon motioned to Pete Mahaffey, who left his galley and closed and dogged the watertight door to the Forward Torpedo Room. He stopped at the Wardroom door on his way aft.

  “No one else in the Forward Battery, sir,” Mahaffey said. “Forward Room won’t allow anyone to come in until you give the word. I’ll dog down the door to the Control Room after I go through and stand watch on it. There’s a carafe of hot coffee in the galley, sir.”

  “I’m sorry about the secrecy,” Sam Rivers said, “but we’re asking you to undertake a special mission, and if word gets out there’ll be all hell to pay.” He nodded his head toward the Army officer.

  “This is Brigadier General Dennis Connelly. Captain Brannon, General. The General will take it from here, sir.” He sat back in his chair. The General put a cloth bag he had been carrying on the table in front of him.

  “Briefly, Captain Brannon, General MacArthur is going to make good on his promise. He’s going to return to the Philippines on October twentieth. He will land on that day, and President Osmena of the Philippines will be with the General.” He paused. “One cannot underestimate the symbolism here, Captain Brannon. The General will return. The hearts of all the people of the Philippines will swell with pride.

  “The invasion will be the largest of the war. The Navy is committing over seven hundred ships of all sizes.”

  “Including eighteen carriers, six battleships, seventeen cruisers, and more than sixty destroyers,” Captain Rivers interjected.

  “Yes,” General Connelly said.

  “What part does Eelfish, my ship, play in this, sir?” Brannon asked.

  “It is imperative that the landing be kept secret,” the Army General said. “We are realistic, however. We assume that someone, somewhere will find out about it, will add up some of the enormous logistics that have gone into this months-long planning and inform the Japanese. They will know what is corning if that happens.

  “There is a guerrilla leader in Leyte, an Army Sergeant who escaped from the Bataan March. He has been communicating with us for quite a long time by radio. He commands about ten thousand irregulars, guerrillas, some trained Filipino soldiers. His main camp, his base, is near Tacloban, a place at the top of Leyte Gulf on Leyte Island.”

  “I know where it is,” Brannon said. “Is that where the General is going to land?”

  “Well, yes, of course,” the General said. “We know what the enemy’s strength is in that area. We want Eelfish to go in and send a man ashore to meet with this Sergeant’s people and deliver to the Sergeant, personally deliver to him, a set of orders. Those orders will tell the Sergeant what roads to cut, what bridges to blow up so that the enemy forces in place cannot be reinforced. The landing must take place. It will take place.

  “I wanted to send a trained commando team in to take these orders to the Sergeant in charge of the guerrilla force. Admiral Christie made it quite plain that you, sir, and your crew could do this job and do it right. We accept the Admiral’s assessment of your capability.”

  “I’m sure that we can do whatever you want,” Mike Brannon said. “Will this Sergeant know we are coming, will he meet us on the beach?”

  “Yes. All that will be arranged for by radio. You will be informed of recognition signals, time to go in, that sort of thing.” He reached in the cloth sack he had brought with him and pulled out a khaki-colored webbing belt that had a long pouch on the belt opposite the strap and buckle. The edges of the pouch were sealed with what looked to Brannon like white wax, and a red string with a red wooden knob on the end of it hung down out of the wax along the edge of the pouch.

  “Your man will wear this belt. The strap goes in the back,” the Army man said. “When he makes contact with Sergeant McGillivray he will turn over the belt to him. This envelope here contains the names of the Sergeant’s mother and her maiden name, the maiden name of his wife and his service number. Your man will commit those to memory, and if the man he meets can answer those names correctly he will give him the belt.” He stopped and fingered the red knob.

  “If your man is captured or about to be captured he will pull smartly on this wooden knob. A charge of thermite inside the pouch will burn its contents to ash. If he is satisfied the man he meets is indeed the right man he must caution Sergeant McGillivray not to pull the knob, but to break the wax seals and open the pouch.”

  “I understand, sir,” Brannon said slowly. Captain Rivers laid a thick envelope on the table.

  “These are your patrol orders, sir. Orders for the special mission and for your patrol area after the mission.” He rose. “You’ll be pleased with the patrol area. Tawi Tawi! You should be able to indulge in your ability to sink Jap warships at that place!” He walked to the door of the Wardroom and looked up and down the empty passageway.

  “You will not divulge any of this to anyone, not even to your Executive Officer, until the time of the actual operation. At that time you will tell your Executive Officer and the man who will deliver the orders about the mission but you must not tell them the reason for the mission.” Rivers glanced at the General, and noting that he was not looking at him, he closed his right eye in a slow wink. “Please lock your orders and this belt in your destruct pouch.”

  Mike Brannon accompanied the two officers to the deck and shook hands with them at the gangway. As soon as they were out of sight he went back to th
e Wardroom and looked at the sealed envelope and the canvas belt. Then he asked Pete Mahaffey to get John Olsen for him and to tell the deck watch to alert him if anyone wanted to come aboard.

  Olsen listened as Brannon repeated what had been told to him by the Army General and Captain Rivers.

  “Who are you going to send ashore?” he asked.

  “I thought we might ask Flanagan,” Brannon said slowly. “For two reasons, really. One is that he’s damned well able to take care of himself. The other is that he has no dependents. He’s an orphan, you know.”

  “Charlie Two Blankets wouldn’t be a bad choice,” Olsen said. “That man knows how to take care of himself.”

  “Charlie has a big allotment going to his mother and father,” Brannon said slowly. “They depend on him for that money. I know he’s a good man in a fight. He proved that when they went in to get the ship watchers, but I don’t like sending a man who has dependents on a mission like this.”

  “I’m single,” Olsen said.

  “Not a chance,” Brannon answered.

  The next day Brannon called Chief Flanagan in to the Wardroom and explained the mission to him.

  “It’s purely a volunteer mission,” he said to the Chief of the Boat. “If you don’t want to go, no sweat.”

  “I’ll go,” Flanagan said. “Shouldn’t be too hard. If this Army Sergeant has survived all this time in the Islands I shouldn’t have anything to worry about. He must know what he’s doing a whole lot better than the Japs know.” He turned the canvas belt over in his hands.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Captain. I don’t like the idea of pulling this damned knob. If there’s enough thermite in there to burn up whatever paper is inside that pouch there’s enough to burn me in two!”

  “I thought of that,” Brannon said. “Maybe John LaMark can figure out something. He’s a good explosives man.”

  “Maybe he could cut the belt on either side of the pouch,” Olsen said, “and then sew it back with kind of weak thread. Then if you fasten the knob to the other part of the belt the Chief could rip the pouch away and just throw it and the pouch would burn up wherever he threw it.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Brannon said. He sat back in his chair. “I hate this damned cloak and dagger stuff. I don’t like the idea of General MacArthur running our damned submarine navy, doing his errands when we should be out sinking Japanese ships.”

  “Once he lands in the Islands, sir,” Flanagan said with a grin, “he’ll be so busy letting Filipinos kiss his feet that he won’t even think about us.”

  On the night of October sixth Eelfish was cruising just south of Leyte Gulf, in the Surigao Strait. Jim Michaels came down from the bridge and as was his habit, stopped in the radio shack. The radioman was busy taking a coded message, and Michaels took it from him and went into the deserted Wardroom to decode it. Fifteen minutes later he climbed to the bridge and took the message back to Mike Brannon.

  “Courier comes to bat at twenty-two hundred next. We need a home run.” He held the message sideways and read it again in the light of the moon.

  “I take it to mean that we do the operation you told us about, sir, tomorrow night. This message has a time of transmission on it of twenty-three forty-five hours, sir.”

  Brannon nodded his head. “When you go back down below will you have the watch wake up Mr. Olsen and tell him to notify me when he’s had some coffee and has his charts ready in the Wardroom?”

  When Brannon went into the Wardroom ten minutes later Pete Mahaffey was pouring fresh coffee into a cup in front of his place at the table.

  “Don’t you ever sleep, Pete?” Brannon asked. “I’ve told you before that you don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to serve coffee.”

  Mahaffey grinned. “My poppa told me when I came in this Navy, sir, to do my job and don’t let no one ever do it better than I do it. I’ll see if the baker has any fresh pastry.”

  “If we submerge here at dawn, a little before dawn,” Olsen said, touching the point of a pair of dividers to the chart, “if we submerge here and run up the coast at two knots — we’ll run well offshore and at one hundred feet — we can be right here” — the dividers touched a small pencil mark — “right here just about an hour after dark. We can surface and make a run up the rest of the way while we charge batteries. We can come in pretty close. Water’s deep all the way in to the beach almost. Be there in plenty of time to launch Flanagan at twenty-two hundred, sir.”

  “No indication of currents on that chart,” Brannon said with a frown. “I don’t want to put him off in that damned little rubber boat and have him get pushed way off course by currents.”

  “I doubt there’ll be any current to amount to anything, sir. The tide in Leyte Gulf is only two, two and a half feet, high and low water. I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

  Eelfish surfaced after full dark that night and began the run up the coast of Leyte Island. To the port side the dark bulk of the mountains loomed against the black night sky. On the foredeck of the Eelfish Steve Petreshock finished blowing up the one-man rubber boat and threw the empty CO2 cylinder over the side. He clipped a small compass with a hooded red lamp and a battery to a cross brace in the boat. He checked the spare CO2 cylinder and fastened it in its holder under the wooden seat.

  “Don’t step on this, Chief,” he said as he laid a thick billet of metal in the bottom of the boat. “That’s a new gadget they gave us in Fremantle two runs ago. It’s a Christmas tree made of aluminum. You take hold of the thick end, the butt, and you twist it with your other hand and keep pulling it out and it stretches out about eight feet with all sorts of little aluminum branches coming off of the main shaft. It goes in this clip on the back of your seat.”

  “What the hell is it for?” Flanagan asked.

  “No way the radar could pick you up in that little boat against the mountains,” Petreshock said. “With this gadget up they can grab you right away.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” Flanagan said. The Chief Torpedoman was dressed in dark blue dungarees with black socks and a pair of regulation white tennis shoes that had been colored black with shoe polish. He wore a thin black jersey that covered his heavy, sloping shoulders and a black watch cap. John LaMark, the Gunner’s Mate, came ambling up the deck and handed him a .45 automatic and two clips of ammunition.

  “Stick it in your belt,” LaMark said. “Figured you would get all fouled up if I brought you a belt. You already got that junior fireworks belt on you now.”

  “Coming up on the launch point,” Olsen said from the bridge. Mike Brannon climbed down from the cigaret deck, walked forward, and handed Flanagan a canvas haversack. “That Army guy has been in the hills since right after the war started, Chief,” he said. “Might be nice if you gave this to him.”

  “What’s in it, sir?”

  “Cook put in a ten-pound canned ham, and Mr. Olsen found a bottle of Australian scotch somewhere. Doc Wharton had a good idea and he put ten pounds of sulfa in the pack, and Fred Nelson contributed a big pinup of Betty Grable.” Flanagan nodded and put the haversack in the boat.

  “We’re at launch spot, Captain,” Olsen said.

  “Very well,” Brannon answered. Petreshock and Jim Rice eased the small rubber boat over the side as the Eelfish slowed to a stop and held on to the bow and stern lines as Flanagan climbed down into the boat. He picked up the double-ended paddle and looked up at the deck.

  “Could be, sir, like we talked about; maybe this guy’s camp is some distance away and I can’t make it back before morning.”

  “I’ll be here every damned night until the invasion force drives me away,” Brannon growled. Flanagan raised his arm and Petreshock and Rice cast off the lines. The Chief of the Boat shoved away from the side, and Brannon blinked in surprise as the small rubber boat was lost to view in seconds in the darkness.

  “Take care of him, Lord,” he breathed softly to himself. He went aft and climbed up on the cigaret deck.

&nbs
p; “Begin Condition Alert as per the Night Orders,” he said to Perry Arbuckle. He went back to the cigaret deck, catching at the periscope shears for support as the Eelfish heeled to starboard to begin running up and down a course off the landing area.

  Flanagan settled down to a steady beat with the two-bladed paddle, keeping his eye on the small ruby-red face of the compass. The landing area, according to information received from the guerrillas, was a dark portion of the shoreline just north of a white, sandy beach. He caught sight of a gleam of white sand in the starlight and corrected his course to aim the boat to the right of the beach. As he neared the beach he stopped paddling and eased the gun in his belt. He paddled gently toward a tangled mass of foliage at the dark part of the shoreline and felt the nose of the boat ground in soft muck. He put the paddle in the boat, took the pistol out of his belt, and pulled the slide back to put a shell in the chamber, letting the slide go home with a sharp click.

  “Don’t shoot, sailor,” a deep voice said out of the darkness of the shore. “I’m Sergeant McGillivray, and there’s four rifles aimed at you. Let my people come out of the bushes and pull your boat up on the shoreline.”

  Two shadowy figures came out of the dark bushes, took hold of the boat, and pulled it up toward the bushes. Flanagan sat in the boat, the gun cradled in his lap, his finger on the trigger, his thumb ready to flip off the safety. A large figure suddenly appeared, his white hair shining in the faint light of the stars.

  “Glad you made it, sailor,” the large man said. “When you get out of your cruise liner there’s about four inches of muck. Move right on up to me and we’ll get to some dry ground.” Flanagan felt his shoes sink down in soft mud as he got out of the boat. He followed the figure of the large man. He looked around as he heard a scraping, sucking noise and saw the rubber boat being pulled into the bushes. He held the pistol in front of him.