Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2)

by Harry Homewood

  “Why that?” Bob Lee asked. “What’s different about these fish?”

  “Well, for one thing, they’ve got a sonar ear in the warhead,” Rhodes said. “It picks up screws and guides the torpedo in to the screws. So to be safe you fire them from a depth of one hundred fifty feet. That way, by the time the fish has planed up to its depth set in the tube it’s far enough away from you that it doesn’t turn around and come back and bite you in the ass. For another thing, they’re a lot slower than the Fourteens or even the electric Mark Eighteens.”

  “Have they been used?” Brannon said.

  “Captain Bennet in Sea Owl had some pretty good results with the first ones we sent to sea,” Rhodes said. “He said they weren’t much use against a fast target but they’re hell on patrol craft and picket boats, and that’s about all that’s out there right now.

  “What will they think of next?” Jerry Gold said.

  “Don’t wish for anything, sir,” Rhodes said with a grin. “I’ve got a five-inch rocket launcher up there in the shop and hundreds of rounds of rockets, and some lucky boat is going to have that monstrosity bolted to its foredeck.”

  “What can you use a rocket launcher for?” Gold asked.

  “Shore bombardment,” Rhodes said.

  “Forget I spoke,” Gold said hastily. “My mother wouldn’t want me bombarding a seashore.” Rhodes grinned and turned to Brannon. “If you can make dinner tonight I’ll send a car for you about eighteen hundred.”

  “I’d love to come to dinner,” Brannon said. “A car? Does a full Lieutenant rate a car?”

  “This is the Pearl Harbor Navy, sir,” Rhodes said. “Nothing but the best for the fighting men.”

  Eelfish slipped past the net tender at the entrance to the harbor and turned its bullnose toward the west. The destroyer that had led the submarine out of the harbor whistled in salutation and turned away to re-enter the harbor. Later, down in the Wardroom, Mike Brannon opened his patrol orders, read through them briefly, and pushed them over to Ralph Ulrich, who was sitting at the table with his charts and navigational gear.

  “Doesn’t sound very exciting,” Brannon growled. “Lifeguard duty and sweep up any picket boats that might be around to give warning of the B-twenty-nine raids. Targets must be awfully scarce out there.”

  “Did you hear about the Japanese attempt to smash up the invasion fleet at Okinawa, sir?” Ulrich asked.

  “No,” Brannon said. “One of the things you have to learn, Ralph, is that no one tells any submarine captain anything. What happened?”

  “The invasion of Okinawa took place on April first,” Ulrich said in his careful voice. “On the fifth the Japanese decided to send a task force from southern Japan down to Okinawa to smash the invasion forces. The task force was the super-battleship Yamato, a light cruiser, and seven or eight destroyers.”

  “That wouldn’t be a big enough force,” Brannon said.

  “The Japanese had been attacking the invasion ships at Okinawa with hundreds of kamikaze planes, sir, suicide planes that carried big bombs. The pilots crashed them into their targets. The Japanese figured that they had done a lot more damage than they did, although they did enough. They hit about forty ships with those planes. The task force was sent to mop up what was left.

  “Our intelligence people say the Fleet Commanders couldn’t find any oil to fuel their ships. All they had in all of southern Japan was something like twenty-five hundred barrels of oil. Not nearly enough fuel for the one-thousand-mile round trip to Okinawa. But they went anyway.

  “The intelligence experts reason that the battleship ran so low on fuel it couldn’t maneuver. It had no air cover, and our carrier planes sank the battleship, the cruiser, and some of the destroyers.” He looked at Brannon.

  “The submarines were responsible for that victory. The reason Japan hasn’t got any oil or anything else it needs to fuel its war machine is the submarines.”

  Brannon nodded. “Set the course for Midway. We’ll top off our fuel tanks there.”

  Eelfish reached its patrol station and began to prowl the area assigned to it, staying on the surface night and day. The lookouts and the radar watch reported constant aircraft contacts, bombers going to Japan to hit its cities and returning. From time to time there were reports of planes being ditched and the reports from submarines racing to pick up the survivors.

  “The trouble is,” Mike Brannon complained one evening at dinner, “we’re a little bit too much to the west of the flight line from the Marianas to Tokyo. Bungo Strait, where we are now, used to be a hot spot when Japan had warships that could put to sea. Now it’s dead.

  “Ralph, you know a lot of people in Pearl. Draft a message asking we be reassigned to a more productive area. Send it with an information tag for anyone you think might argue our case for us.”

  A week later Eelfish was moved to the north and east. Four times in a matter of seven days Eelfish raced at top speed toward an area where a plane reported that it was going into the water, and four times the Eelfish was just a bit too far away and lost the race to a closer submarine. Jerry Gold began muttering about fuel-oil supplies and hinting that high-speed chases that were likely to be fruitless before they began were draining his fuel-oil tanks.

  The emergency signal came late in the afternoon watch. It was broadcast by a “Dumbo,” one of several communications aircraft that cruised along the flight route of the big bombers that were leveling Tokyo with fire raids. A B-29 with two engines shot away was coming down. Ralph Ulrich, efficient as always, had the plane’s reported location on his plotting board in little more than a minute.

  “We’re nine thousand yards away, sir. Twenty minutes at fifteen knots. We should steer course zero four zero.”

  “Come left to zero four zero. Make turns for fifteen knots,” Brannon ordered. He turned to climb up the ladder to the Conning Tower. “Assemble the rescue party in the Control Room. I want a constant radar search.”

  Five minutes later, as Eelfish raced toward the area where the B-29 had gone down, Rafferty reported that he had a contact on radar.

  “Contact bears two six zero, repeat, two six zero. Range is one three zero zero zero yards, repeat, thirteen thousand yards, Bridge.”

  Lieutenant Jerry Gold turned in the bridge to inform Mike Brannon on the cigaret deck and saw Brannon beside him.

  “Sound General Quarters,” Brannon said. “Secure the radar for five minutes and then take another bearing.” He stood to one side in the bridge, listening to the reports that came up through the bridge speaker. Five minutes later he nodded at Gold, who ordered another radar sweep.

  “Contact now bears two five six. Repeat, two five six. Range is one one five zero zero yards. Repeat, eleven thousand five hundred yards,” Jim Michaels’s voice was calm.

  “Contact course is zero nine eight, Bridge. Contact speed is fifteen knots.” Ulrich’s report was delivered in the emotionless tone he used in times of stress.

  “Very well,” Brannon said. He bent to the bridge transmitter.

  “Plot, we have to assume this is an enemy ship. What does his course show in relation to our last position of the downed plane?”

  “He’s heading right for them, Bridge,” Ulrich said. “He’s a little over fifteen thousand yards from the plane. Request the Captain to take a look at the plot, Bridge.”

  Brannon went down the ladder to the Control Room. Ulrich pointed at the plot with a pair of dividers.

  “We can come right to course three five eight, sir, and dive now. We’re thirty-two hundred yards from his track as he moves toward the plane. Gives us plenty of time.”

  “Very well,” Brannon said. He raised his voice so it would carry to the bridge.

  “Dive the ship! Come left to course three five eight.” He heard the thuds of the lookouts hitting the deck in the Conning Tower and the blast of the diving alarm. Eelfish slid downward.

  “Forty feet, Jerry,” Brannon said. “Raise the radar mast. I want to get one more bearing
on this rascal and see if he maintains course and speed.”

  “He’s twenty-five minutes away from the plane at his present speed,” Ulrich said. “We’ll have to stooge around a little, depending on how you want to attack, sir.”

  “Depends on what he is,” Brannon said. “How did he look on the radar screen, Mr. Michaels?”

  “Small, sir. Not a big pip at all.”

  “Probably a patrol boat,” Brannon said. He looked at the plot and picked up a pair of dividers and pricked off a distance along the course Eelfish was on.

  “I don’t want to attack him when he’s close to the plane, if the plane is still there. I don’t want him to get close enough to machine-gun the fliers if they’re in rubber boats.”

  “I figured that, sir,” Ulrich said. “We can shoot him when he’s still a little over three thousand yards from where we think the plane went down. That’s well over a mile from the plane area.”

  “Give me two radar checks, three minutes apart,” Brannon ordered. He watched as Ulrich drew in the plot as the information came to him from Michaels.

  “He’s on course, still making the same speed,” Mike Brannon said. “We’ll shoot at him with a Cutie, and if that misses we’ll nail him with a regular torpedo, and if that fails, by God, I’ll battle-surface!”

  “We’re carrying Cuties in tubes Five and Six,” Flanagan said from the vent manifold. “Mark Eighteens, the electric fish, in tubes One and Two, sir.”

  “Very well,” Brannon said. “Sixty-five feet. Sonar, start tracking as soon as you’re able to get a good fix on him.”

  He watched the plot of the attack slowly develop, looking at his watch from time to time.

  “It’s time,” he said to Ulrich. He turned to Jerry Gold. “One hundred and sixty feet. Talker, inform the Forward Room that we’ll fire two Cuties from Five and Six at one hundred sixty feet and then come back up to sixty-five feet. I want the outer tube doors on One and Two opened as we hit periscope depth.”

  Blake was now the sole contact Brannon had with his target. He sat in the Conning Tower, the big mufflike earphones clamped over his ears, his whole being centered on the beat of the single propeller that he could hear coming closer and closer. As he fed his bearings to the plotting party the rate of advance of the target along the drawn-in course Ulrich had given for the enemy ship moved with mathematical precision toward the small X on the plot that marked the position of the downed aircraft. Eelfish slid through the sea, 160 feet below the surface.

  “One minute, sir,” Ulrich said. Brannon nodded. “Hell of a way to conduct a torpedo attack with no sighting of the target for, what, damned near twenty minutes. Stand by forward ...”

  “You have a solution any time, Captain,” Arbuckle said from the Conning Tower.

  “Now!” Ulrich whispered.

  “Fire five!” Brannon said. He waited the ten seconds he had been instructed to wait between Cutie firings.

  “Fire six!” Another long ten seconds crept by and then Paul Blake reported.

  “First torpedo running straight away from us, sir. Second torpedo is following the first, sir.”

  “That’s what they said would happen when they briefed me in Pearl,” Brannon said. “Once the first Cutie gets clear of the ship the second one will follow the screws of the first until the first one zeroes in on the target screws. If it hits, the second fish will go right into the explosion area.”

  “Torpedo track is sixteen hundred yards, sir. Running time to the target should be one minute fifty seconds. We should have an indication in ... in one minute, sir.”

  Brannon waited, feeling the tenseness in his legs as he stood at the gyro table staring at the plot, watching the black second hand on the stopwatch hitch its way around the dial.

  “Five seconds,” he whispered, half to himself, and then a distant rumbling sound shook the Eelfish, followed in ten seconds by another slight shock that could be felt in the hull of the Eelfish.

  “I think that was a hit, sir!” Blake called out. “Two good big explosions in my gear, sir.”

  “Sixty-five feet!” Brannon ordered. “Close the outer doors on Five and Six. Stand by to open the outer doors on One and Two.” He scrambled up the ladder to the Conning Tower and stood by the periscope.

  “Passing seventy-five feet, sir,” Gold called out.

  “Open outer doors on One and Two! Stand by for a periscope observation!”

  “Mark!” Brosmer read off the bearing and Arbuckle cranked the bearing into the TDC.

  “He’s dead in the water. Set torpedo depth two feet. Range is twelve hundred yards. There’s a fire aft, on his fantail. Angle on the bow is one zero zero.”

  “Depth set two feet on One and Two,” Flanagan said. “You’ve got a solution, sir,” Arbuckle said.

  “Stand by forward ...

  “Fire one!” He waited, his eye glued to the periscope lens. “Son of a bitch is flying his Rising Sun flag ... WOW!” A crashing explosion battered at the Eelfish.

  “Hit! Dead center. Bring me up to forty feet. Radar search all around.”

  Eelfish slanted upward, and Brannon heard Michaels report there were no contacts.

  “Machine gunners to the Control Room. Rescue party stand by. Ulrich, I want you with me on the bridge. Surface! Surface! Surface!” Eelfish shuddered as the high-pressure air slammed into her ballast tanks and she rose, bursting through the surface of the ocean with a great cloud of spray.

  “Lookouts!” Brannon shouted as the three men clambered up into the periscope shears. “We’ve got some aviators out there on the starboard bow somewhere. All ahead full on all four main engines.

  “I’ve got ‘em!” the starboard lookout yelled. “Three small rubber boats bearing zero one zero, Bridge!”

  “Come right to course zero one zero,” Brannon ordered. “Make turns for two-thirds speed. Rescue party to the deck as soon as we’re steady on the new course. Machine gunners to the bridge. Load and lock weapons. Mr. Ulrich, take the conn. I want to put the ship between that patrol boat and the fliers.” He watched as Ralph Ulrich maneuvered the Eelfish so the bulk of the submarine was between the listing patrol boat and the three rubber boats full of fliers.

  “I thought we got a good solid hit on that son of a bitch, but he’s still floating,” Brannon growled.

  “He’s got a wooden hull,” Ulrich volunteered. “They usually absorb a torpedo hit, even gunfire, better than metal ones.”

  “Get those people aboard as quick as you can,” Brannon called down to Chief Flanagan on deck. Flanagan raised an arm to indicate he understood, and with Steve Petreshock and Fred Nelson assisting he hauled the fliers out of the rubber boats and up on the deck and hustled them aft to the ladder that led up to the cigaret deck.

  “Welcome aboard,” Brannon said, smiling. “Who’s in command?”

  “I am, sir, Lieutenant Colonel Roberts, Jack Roberts.” A tall, lean man with a sweeping mustache stepped out of the group of fliers.

  “I’m Captain Brannon, Mike Brannon. All your people here? Anyone hurt?”

  “We all made it, no one hurt,” the Colonel said.

  “Small boat standing around the bow of the patrol boat, Bridge!” The port lookout’s voice was high, excited. “Man in the midships section of the boat is waving at us, Bridge. About ten people in the boat. The boat is under way on its own power, Bridge.”

  “Let’s see what he wants, Mr. Ulrich,” Brannon said. “Gunners, stand by if he tries any funny business.”

  “That’s close enough!” Ulrich yelled at the people in the small boat. “Do any of you speak English, and if you do what do you want?”

  The man in the center of the boat who had been waving at the submarine raised his voice. “I speak English, sir. Can you give us a course to steer to land?”

  “We’ll give you a course in a minute,” Brannon called out. “Do you need anything else, food, water, medicine?”

  “We have enough water for four days. We have no food. I have two men
with burns, sir.”

  “Stand clear of me,” Brannon shouted back. “We’ll make up a couple of bags of canned food for you and give you some sulfa powder for your burned men. I’ll tell you when to come alongside to get the stuff. Can you tell me the name of your ship and commanding officer?”

  “I am not required to do that under the rules of war, sir.”

  “Very well,” Brannon said. He turned as Scotty Rudolph hauled the second of two clean garbage bags bulging with cans of food up through the bridge hatch. “We can make the transfer on the port side, Captain,” Ulrich said. “Chief Flanagan has a safety line rigged, so he can put a man down on the pressure hull.”

  “Very well,” Brannon said. “What turns are we making?”

  “Making turns for three knots, sir,” Ulrich said.

  “That shouldn’t be too fast for him,” Brannon said. He waved his arm at the small boat. “Come alongside. When you have the food aboard steer course two seven five. You are about eighty miles from land. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir, and we thank you,” the man in the boat yelled back. “We should steer course two seven five and we are eighty miles from home.”

  The boat eased in toward the Eelfish. Chief Flanagan tied a safety line around Petreshock’s waist and took a turn around the barrel of the deck gun as the torpedoman eased his way down on to the curve of the wet pressure hull, clamping the fingers of his left hand between two deck boards. Fred Nelson, crouching on the deck, handed Petreshock a bag of food. The small boat drew closer, and Petreshock could see the faces of the men in the boat, closed, without expression. He swung the bag of food back and forth, gauging the distance to the small boat.

  “That’s close enough,” Flanagan shouted. The man in the boat who had done the talking to the submarine nodded and raised his right arm. Petreshock saw the sudden gout of flame, and then he collapsed on the pressure hull, legs sprawling, blood staining the sea as his body splashed into the water. Fred Nelson bellowed, grabbed the safety line, and hauled Petreshock’s body out of the water as the man in the boat fired his pistol again and again.