Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2)

by Harry Homewood

  The stuttering roar of the twin twenty-millimeter machine guns was drowned out by Booth’s high-pitched Rebel yell. The cluster of men standing in the small boat went down under the hail of 20-mm shells. From the cigaret deck aft of the bridge the quad pom-pom also began to bark, its explosive shells ripping into the Japanese sailors, tearing at the hull of the small boat.

  Mike Brannon leaned over the bridge rail. Flanagan and Nelson had dragged Petreshock’s limp body up on the deck and were moving aft, toward the ladder to the cigaret deck. Brannon bent his head to the bridge transmitter.

  “Stand by below to take a wounded man.” He turned to Ulrich. “Circle that patrol boat. I want that boat sunk! We should be able to do it with the pom-pom and the twenties.” Flanagan touched his Captain on the arm.

  “Steve’s bleedin’ like hell, but he’s breathing pretty good. He got it in the head, above his left ear, up in the hair. I couldn’t see how bad.”

  “Very well, Chief. Get these fliers below as soon as you can. I’ll be down as soon as we get things squared away up here.” He turned as the quad pom-pom began systematically to stitch the hull of the listing patrol boat. From the gun platform below, and in front of the bridge, John Wilkes Booth was lashing at the patrol boat with the twin twenties. A sudden gush of flame erupted from the midships section of the patrol boat, followed by a dull explosion. The ship rolled over and began to sink.

  “Cease fire!” Brannon yelled. “Ralph, secure the gunnery party. As soon as they’re below dive the ship. I want to go to one hundred feet while we get this mess sorted out.” He dropped through the hatch and went down to the Control Room. Lieutenant Jerry Gold nodded toward the Crew’s Mess. “Petreshock is in the Crew’s Mess, sir, with Doc. The fliers are back there also.” He turned as the diving alarm sounded and a lookout slid down the ladder and manned the bow planes.

  “One degree down bubble,” Gold ordered. “They’re probably working on Steve back there, and I don’t want the poor bastard to slide off a mess table on deck.”

  Brannon shouldered his way through the people crowded around a mess table where Doc Wharton was working on Petreshock.

  “Far as I can tell, Captain, all he’s got is one hell of a deep slot cut in his skull. Bone ain’t broke, though. Like every other torpedoman he’s got a thick head.” He looked up as Fred Nelson, his eyes glaring fiercely from either side of his great hawk nose, growled.

  “I can clean the wound,” Wharton said, “and give him a shot to put him to sleep for a few hours. When he wakes up maybe then we can find out how much damage was done, test his reactions, how he feels.”

  “Very well,” Brannon said. “But if he needs more than we can give him let me know and we’ll head for the nearest friendly port.” He nodded to the Lieutenant Colonel. “If you and your officers will follow me, sir, we’ll go up to the Wardroom and get some coffee and something to eat.”

  Pete Mahaffey was waiting with a platter of sandwiches and pots of coffee. Mike Brannon sipped at a cup of coffee while the fliers ate. The Lieutenant Colonel put his cup down and wiped his mustache with a handkerchief.

  “We owe you a vote of thanks, Captain,” he said. “Our radioman didn’t get a receipt for our Mayday call, and we figured we might have gone down with no one knowing where we were. When we saw that Jap ship coming toward us we figured it was a prison camp for all of us for sure. But then we saw an explosion. Guess that was your torpedo. It didn’t make much of a noise or anything. I thought a torpedo hitting a ship would be like a bomb.”

  “I think we had a low-order explosion with that warhead,” Brannon said. “It happens every once in a while. Same as you get dud bombs, I guess.

  “I want my Chief Pharmacist’s Mate to take a look at all of you, Colonel. Then if you would give our yeoman your names, ranks or ratings, and serial numbers we can notify your home base that you’re all safe.” He stopped as a firm rap sounded on the bulkhead of the Wardroom. Doc Wharton stuck his head in through the curtains.

  “Steve came to while I was bandaging his head, Captain. He won’t take a shot. Says that all’s wrong with him is a big headache. He wants to go back on watch.”

  “Negative on the watch,” Brannon said. “Tell him my orders are light duty only. Keep an eye on him, Doc.” Wharton nodded and left.

  “I can’t figure out why that guy opened fire,” Brannon said. He looked at the fliers sitting at the Wardroom table.

  “We fight different battles, I guess, but it’s been evident to us for months now that this war is over. I don’t think a submarine has seen an oil tanker or any merchant ship of any size for months, now. We haven’t seen a Jap warship for, oh, weeks. The information we get is that the Japs are out of oil.”

  The Colonel nodded his head. “We hear the same thing. I’ve been flying that route from Tinian to Japan for about six weeks now. Hardly ever see a ship down there, except for those little ships like the one you just sank. Tokyo is half burned away now. Same with the other industrial areas. We drop fire bombs on ‘em by the ton. But I guess they don’t give up easy.”

  In the Crew’s Mess the off-duty crewmen surrounded John LaMark and John Wilkes Booth, the gunners who had killed the Japanese in the small boat and then sunk the patrol craft.

  “Can’t figure that dude in that small boat,” LaMark said. “The son of a bitch is looking right at those gun barrels, he can see that both of us, me and the Chief, are staring right at him, and he still begins loosing off rounds out of that damned pistol he was hiding. Hell! He knew that if he made a wrong move he was going to buy the farm but he did it anyway. Can’t figure it.”

  “Man takes on odds like that dude in that boat did,” Chief Booth said. “Just think what a picnic the Marines are going to have when they invade Japan itself. Jap kids will be dropping grenades on every round-eye head they can see.”

  Mike Brannon came in and stood at the head of the Wardroom table. “We want all of you to be as comfortable as possible,” he said to the fliers, “but you have to understand that we don’t have any extra bunks. Your people will have to hot-bunk it with our people. We hope you’ll understand and be patient.”

  “You must have done this before,” Colonel Roberts said.

  “Only once, off the Bonin Islands. We picked up a crew from a B-twenty-nine. The plane wouldn’t sink and we had to shell it. A Major was the plane captain and it upset him quite a bit when we had to sink his plane.”

  “Major Haskins,” the Colonel said. “Kind of a short fella, always trying to grow a mustache. Never could quite make it.”

  “That was his name,” Brannon said. “How is he?”

  “Dead,” the Colonel said. “Jap Zero did the suicide thing. Crashed him head on at twenty thousand feet. Both planes exploded.” Brannon nodded slowly.

  Two days later, cruising on the surface, the Eelfish was challenged by an Army B-25. Lieutenant Bob Lee, who had the OOD watch, made the correct reply by voice radio and watched as the plane swung far out ahead of him and then came back, aiming directly at the submarine. Lee yelled at the lookouts and hit the diving alarm. As the Eelfish passed 100 feet with a steep downward angle the B-25 dropped a string of bombs off to the port side. The explosions shook the submarine and later, in the Wardroom, Mike Brannon had pointed things to say about bomb-happy pilots.

  The days wore on, and life in the Eelfish became difficult. The ten extra men aboard complicated the sleeping arrangements, and Scotty Rudolph swore silently as he prepared extra meals from his shrinking food supplies. Shortly after dark on a rainy night Jim Michaels brought a message in to Mike Brannon, who was drinking coffee in the Wardroom and talking with the plane commander. Brannon decoded the message and called for Ralph Ulrich.

  “We’ve got to get out of this area,” he told Ulrich. “We’re right in the way of Admiral Halsey’s task force on its way to hit at Japan.” He looked at the pilot of the B-29.

  “If one of our own aircraft tries to bomb us I don’t want to take a chance with some edgy de
stroyer skipper.”

  Eelfish raced to the northeast, and after it circled for four days Brannon asked for orders. The answer came back in 48 hours; return to Pearl Harbor. The rescued fliers groaned in unison. All their personal belongings were on Tinian Island, in the Marianas.

  During the midwatch on the morning of August 8 the Chief of the Watch notified the Bridge that an Ultra radio message was coming in. Brannon left the cigaret deck and in the deserted silence of the Wardroom decoded the message. Ralph Ulrich, possessed of the intuition that every good Executive Officer must have, appeared in the doorway of the Wardroom holding two cups of coffee and stared at Brannon’s ashen face.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, putting the cups on the table.

  “The President has announced that the most destructive weapon known to mankind has been dropped on a Japanese city called Hiroshima. This one weapon has obliterated the entire city and killed everyone in it!”

  “My God!” Ulrich said. “Did he say who dropped this weapon?”

  “A bomber from Tinian,” Brannon replied tonelessly. “That’s the home base of our passengers,” Ulrich said. “I’ll get their skipper in here.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Roberts came into the Wardroom rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Ulrich gave him a cup of coffee and Brannon handed him the message. He read it and nodded.

  “So they finally used it,” he said.

  “It?” Brannon said.

  “We called it the ‘Thing,’ ” Roberts said. “Two weeks or so before you picked us up they cordoned off a whole corner of the field where we flew from. Never saw so many civilians in the war zone in my life. My crew chief told me they were all big-dome scientists and they had some new weapon that could wipe out a city the size of Chicago. No one believed that, naturally. But the rumors kept flying around, and when they built up this great big bomb, funny looking thing my crew chief said, big and round and fat, and then they started building a second bomb well, we sort of began to believe them. Some, not all.”

  He sipped at his coffee. “I wonder,” he said in a reflective tone, “if the shock wave from something like that would affect the aircraft?”

  The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki as the Eelfish neared Midway en route to Pearl Harbor. Before Eelfish arrived at Pearl the war was over.

  CHAPTER 26

  The war was over, but Eelfish had to wait outside the harbor for the submarine net to be dragged to one side so the submarine could enter the port. The traditional welcoming party that had always greeted a submarine returning from a patrol was absent. Only a Lieutenant with a large clipboard was waiting on the dock with the line-handling party when Eelfish pulled in. He came aboard and introduced himself to Captain Brannon and read from his clipboard.

  “We still have a curfew at sundown,” he said. “There will be no R and R period at the hotel. All maintenance work necessary will be done by ship’s company. Needed stores and supplies can be obtained from the Yard in the usual manner. You are to report to the Operations Office in seven days, sir. The Operations Officer will expect your ship to be ready to go to sea at that time, sir.”

  “Go to sea in seven days?” Brannon asked, his heart jumping wildly. “To where, Lieutenant?”

  “I don’t know, Captain,” the Lieutenant said. “I’ve got seven more submarines coming in today and tomorrow, and I have to tell each one of them the same thing.”

  A week later Brannon went up to the Operations Office, where a weary Staff officer waved him to a chair beside his desk.

  “I’m told you’re ready for sea,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “We’re ready.”

  “One last thing,” the Staff officer said. “You have to get clearance from the Materiel Office. They’ll be down to inspect you day after tomorrow. You’ll get your orders as soon as they give me your clearance.”

  “Can you tell me where we’ll be going?” Brannon asked.

  The Staff officer yawned and rubbed his face. “I suppose so, Captain, but don’t tell your crew or I’ll be in hack.” He shuffled through some papers.

  “New London.”

  Brannon fought to keep his face noncommittal. He stood up and left the Operations Office, trying not to skip with joy. New London was a short train ride from New York. His wife and daughter were with her parents in Brooklyn. He made a project out of walking slowly back to Eelfish and found Ralph Ulrich.

  “We’ve got to get clearance from some outfit called the Materiel Office. Day after tomorrow. You did a lot of duty here. What’s that involve?”

  “It involves what I’d call tough luck,” Ulrich said “Those are the people who go around checking up to see if you’ve got all your Title A gear. Your engines, periscopes, deck guns.” He looked up and down the deck. “The lifelines, which we don’t have, and an anchor and chain, which we don’t have.”

  “And?”

  “And if we don’t have those things they won’t clear us for departure from port. Where’s our anchor?”

  “In New London,” Brannon said. “They took it and the anchor chain and the lifelines and posts off before we left for the Southwest Pacific, just as they do on every submarine going into the war zone. They shouldn’t want things like that.”

  “They’ll want things like that,” Ulrich said in lugubrious tones. “That’s their mission in life, to want things like that.”

  He paused, chewing his lower lip in an unconscious imitation of Mike Brannon.

  “I know a guy who has a warehouse here, a Mustang Lieutenant, sir. Last time I was over there, before I came aboard, it was full of things like deck posts and anchor chain and bronze-wire lifelines. If I had a little bargaining power, like some whiskey, I might be able to big-deal a truck and come back here with what we need. But I know he doesn’t have any anchors.”

  “What’s he do with that stuff, why’s he got it?”

  “I don’t know why he’s got the warehouse or what’s in it, sir, but I’ve heard tell that every once in a while he finds a buyer for some of the stuff that belonged to submarines that didn’t come back from war patrol. Ghoulish business, but some people like to make a buck.”

  “Use the ship’s recreation fund,” Brannon said, “Get whatever you think you need to bribe the son of a bitch.” He started to turn away and stopped as Ulrich cleared his throat.

  “About an anchor, sir. I know he hasn’t got any anchors. But I think maybe the Chief of the Boat might have an idea or two about how to get an anchor. I don’t know, but you told me once that he was dependable.”

  Chief Flanagan knocked politely at the bulkhead of the Wardroom and went through the green curtains and sat down at Brannon’s invitation. Brannon outlined the problem.

  “I guess what we have to do, sir, is to steal us an anchor,” Flanagan said.

  “Steal?” Brannon said. “How do you steal something that must weight a ton? If I gave permission — and I sure as hell can’t do that.”

  “Twenty-two hundred pounds, to be exact,” Flanagan said. “I didn’t mean steal, sir. Borrow was the word I meant to use. Plus one hundred and five fathoms of chain.”

  “Mr. Ulrich said he might be able to find the anchor chain,” Brannon said. “Where are you going to borrow an anchor?”

  “I can’t answer that, sir, because I honestly don’t know. But I’ll tell the Captain if I find out where I can borrow an anchor, sir.”

  That afternoon a small truck pulled up on the pier. Ralph Ulrich got out and summoned a working party. The seamen from the Eelfish unloaded a tangled mass of bronze-wire lifelines and a pile of deck posts with eyes in the tops. Mike Brannon, summoned to the deck by Lieutenant Lee, watched the unloading from the bridge and then watched Chief Flanagan drive a crew of seamen and torpedomen to install the deck posts and string the lifelines.

  “Cost me a case of whiskey,” Ulrich said as he climbed up the ladder from the Conning Tower. “Would have cost more, but I argued that I was showing that big-dealer a whole new field of operations, an
d he saw my reasoning.”

  “Anchor chain?” Brannon asked.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” Ulrich said. “He didn’t have a truck that could carry a hundred and five fathoms of chain.”

  The chain arrived shortly after noon. Flanagan supervised the stowage of the chain in the chain locker and led one end of the chain through the fairlead and the chain stopper, around the wildcat gears, and down the hawsepipe. He turned to Steve Petreshock.

  “I want a small punt by late this afternoon. The kind the Yard uses to paint waterlines. But big enough to hold several people. I want a heavy-duty block and tackle, a marlinspike, and some rags. I want all that gear ready before dark.

  “Where the hell do I get a punt?” Petreshock asked.

  “You want to make Chief, Petreshock? Use your initiative. I need a punt, the heavy-duty block and tackle, a marlinspike, and some rags. Before dark.” Petreshock shrugged his shoulders and went down the hatch into his torpedo room.

  Two hours later he jumped out of the back end of a truck and signaled to Flanagan, who went up on the dock. A waterline-painting punt was in the back of the truck. The two men wrestled the small boat off the truck and laid it on the cement pier. Petreshock jumped up in the truck body and got a heavy block and tackle and a big marlinspike.

  “I got plenty rags in my room,” he said. “What do you want to do with the punt?”

  “Put it in the water,” Flanagan said. “Get your people and put it in the water and tie it up alongside. You get any oars?”

  “You don’t need oars to paint a waterline,” Petreshock said. “You pull the punt along with lines.”

  “Don’t tell me what I already know,” Flanagan said. “Oars.”