The Iceman_A Novel

by P. T. Deutermann

  “One more thing: it’s obvious to me that this command has been operating on a if-you-don’t-ask-me-any-questions-I-won’t-tell-you-any-lies basis. That needs to stop right now. We’re at war, and we haven’t made it back up to zero from a large negative number yet. Don’t any of you tell me anything but the cold hard truth, and don’t ever assume that by doing that you might get in trouble. This business out here is going to get harder, not easier, especially once we start really hurting the Japs. Understood?”

  There was a chorus of yessirs. The meeting broke up and the skippers congregated out in the passageway like they did the last time. One of the older skippers looked at Malachi. “Man, you got a pair of brass ones,” he announced.

  “The truth is the truth,” Malachi said. “If you’re gonna get fired for telling the truth, then why would you want to work here?”

  The others laughed, but nervously. Jay Carney stepped up. “Tonight I’m buying you a drink, pardner, and this time you’re gonna drink it, by Godfrey.”

  If you only knew how much I’d like to do that, Malachi thought, as he went back to the boat. Maybe he’d stay aboard the boat tonight. The duty section would hate that, though. After a wonderful night with Kensie back at the hotel last night, he was feeling much better about everything. They’d made love twice, the first time in a hurried frenzy and the second, sometime in the middle of the night, with a lot more patience and attention to detail. They’d almost overslept except for passing voices out in the corridor talking about the admiral’s meeting this morning. His meeting being sooner than her shift started, he’d gotten first dibs on the shower. She was facing a forty-eight-hour on-call shift, so they’d made plans to see each other the night after next.

  The following morning two bits of news spread out like a grass fire through the nest of submarines alongside the tender. First, Captain Collins, the chief of staff, was being reassigned. He was being ordered back to Norfolk to take command of the Atlantic submarine refresher training program. On the face of it, those were excellent orders, but officers in the know could read between the lines: from chief of staff of one of only two flotillas operating in the Far East, the bright and shining tip of the spear, to a training command? There were lots of knowing looks. Malachi wondered how much that meeting had contributed to the chief of staff’s sudden departure from the front lines. As far as he was concerned Collins wouldn’t be missed.

  The other news was more somber: one of the Perth boats, the Catfish, hadn’t been heard from in ten days and was now presumed lost somewhere in the Coral Sea. Malachi shook his head and closed his eyes when he heard the news. This was the hell of it when the Japs managed to sink one of the boats: no one had any idea what had happened, or even where. The best they could say about Catfish was that she was missing in the Coral Sea, an area of 1.5 million square miles. The boat and her entire crew had simply disappeared. They all knew many things could kill a submarine: a minefield, a torpedo from another submarine, a circular running torpedo that comes back to see you, a well-placed depth charge, or even a major seawater leak at depth. The result was the same: the boat would just disappear.

  Malachi asked Jay Carney if there’d be a memorial service. Carney told him that, since the war began, the Navy had made a practice of officially declaring the entire crew “missing in action” so that their dependents could keep receiving pay and benefits until the Navy could find out what really happened. Everyone in Perth knew what had really happened, but for that reason, there would be no memorial service.

  He was doing paperwork amid the clatter of repairs onboard when a messenger from the tender knocked on the bulkhead and announced that the admiral wanted to see him. Malachi acknowledged, changed into a pressed uniform shirt, and then hustled over to the tender. The admiral came right to the point.

  “I want you to figure out some kind of test we can make right here in Perth that would prove that these Mark fourteens are running deep,” he said. “I want to use warhead fish, but set on safe, and it has to be somewhere that we can recover those fish because we’re still short of assets. Your boat will be in for probably another ten days, so let’s see if we can get it done quickly.”

  “Yessir,” Malachi said. The admiral’s phone rang. He waved Malachi toward the door and that was that.

  It took two days to get everything coordinated. They ended up using two commercial fishing boats with a deep sea net strung between them. They anchored the fishing boats after the net was deployed in 120 feet of water, near a headland north of the city. The sea was calm with almost no wind. Behind the net the water shoaled all the way into a sandy beach, 500 yards away. It took a few hours to get the top of the net as close to the surface as possible, factoring in for the inevitable catenary, since the net, or the “target,” was 200 feet across and hung down in the water 100 feet. They strung a line of fish-floats to mark the top of the net, with a red flag marking the center. The tender sent out their dive boat with four SCUBA swimmers and one hard-hat diver. An Aussie frigate was assigned to patrol offshore to keep prying eyes away, and Marines from the tender guarded the beach behind the net. The admiral and some of his staff were riding a harbor tugboat, which was stationed up in the vicinity of the two fishing boats. Everything was finally ready in the early afternoon.

  Sea Lion got the job of firing the four test torpedoes. She took station 800 yards away from the red flag and then ballasted down to periscope depth. The torpedoes were set for high speed and a running depth of 20 feet. The warheads had been safed by removing both the contact and the magnetic exploders, replacing them with a bag of sand to restore the proper weight. Malachi was down in Sea Lion’s control room while Reed Burlington manned the conning tower. The plan was to fire four fish in sequence. One aimed three degrees left of the flag, one at the flag, one three degrees right of the flag, and one set for a running depth of 10 feet, which wouldn’t be fired until the first three runs had been inspected by the divers.

  Burlington called the tugboat on the radio and reported ready. The tug came back and told them to proceed. The first fish thumped out of the tube and ran in toward the beach. From the tug they were able to see the net jump, and a minute later the Marines reported that the fish had run up on the beach, its propellers still spinning. The second fish made a similar run, also ending up on the beach. The third fish broached and then commenced a circular run, causing Burlington to lay on full power to get out of the way. The torpedo made three circuits before giving up the ghost, somewhere behind the test site. Even without a warhead, getting hit with a 2,000-pound underwater missile going 46 knots was not good for watertight integrity.

  The tests were halted to let the divers inspect the net and for Sea Lion to get back in position. Burlington came down into Control for coffee. “’Bout right for the Mark fourteen,” he said. “One out of three is defective.”

  “Set for twenty feet and it still broached,” Malachi said. “That is truly defective.”

  “I’m really interested in the final shot,” Burlington said. “I set most of my fish for ten feet, and I’d really like to know how deep they’re really going.”

  It took two hours for the dive boat to get into position and put divers over to inspect the net. When they got back up and were clear of the firing range, the admiral ordered up the fourth shot. Centerline, but at ten feet this time. The fish thumped out and ran hot, straight, and normal. It hit the net and screamed in toward the beach. About the time it should have punched out of the surf and run up the sand, it exploded, scaring the living hell out of the Marines on the beach. Malachi could hear Burlington cursing up in the conning tower. Gawd, he thought. What a circus.

  Back in port the results were briefed in the admiral’s office downtown. The two fish that had run normally, and supposedly at 20 feet, had punched holes in the net 35 feet below the suspension wire. A 15-foot deviation from ordered depth. The last fish had punched a hole at 22 feet, a 12-foot deviation. Not only were they running deep, they were running inconsistently deep.
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  The matter of the exploding “disarmed” torpedo was explained by the fact that the fish had hit a submerged boulder 50 feet out into the surf, still going 46 knots. “Maybe that’s the way to make them explode,” Burlington observed. “Take out both exploders.”

  “Okay, okay,” the admiral said. “I’m forwarding this data to SubPac back in Pearl. It’s worse than we thought: if they all ran the same amount of depth deviation, we could simply compensate. But it looks random.”

  “We’d need to fire about fifty more torpedoes to get a scientifically reliable range of deviation,” Malachi offered. “And, yes, I know that’s not possible.”

  “Damned right it isn’t,” the admiral said. “We can’t recover the one that went nuts, and of course the other one went off. We lost fifty percent of the torpedoes just doing a test.”

  “What a surprise,” Burlington said. “Thing’s a piece of shit.”

  As the admiral spooled up to retort, Malachi put up a hand. “Let me remind everybody here that these things are handmade mechanical devices. They are not ‘pieces of shit’ but rather insufficiently tested. Like I just said, it would take fifty fish to get reliable data. They fired two for the magnetic exploder, remember? We need to go after the Mark fourteen’s problems, plural, in a sound engineering method. And then we need to get a manufacturing system up and running that can mass produce them to rigidly set standards.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the admiral said. “Guess who’s gonna write the report, Captain Stormes? And, by the way, I completely agree with you. Tomorrow too soon?”

  Burlington started laughing. The rest of the staff officers weren’t sure what to do, until the admiral grinned. Then they laughed, too.

  Teach me to squeak, Malachi thought.

  That night he stayed aboard the boat to compose the report. The admiral had been right in assigning him to do it—he was probably the most technically qualified CO out here to both describe the results of the testing and to make engineering recommendations. That being said, he knew what the reaction would be back in Washington, but now the Gun Clubbers had a new force to reckon with: four-star Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. A submariner, to boot.

  Malachi wrote the report as if writing it for Nimitz to read, which he probably would now that people were starting to address the problems. The Bureau of Ordnance could trash one submarine’s skipper’s report, but if Nimitz’s endorsement was as forceful as Malachi expected it to be, even BuOrd would have to do something.

  The next night, Malachi phoned the hospital to see if he could talk Kensie into a dinner date. The operator said that Dr. Richmond was not available until further notice. When he asked what that meant, the operator sighed and repeated what she’d just said. Malachi hung up and went back to the boat. Not available? Or not available to him? Or, Christmas was a week away—had she gone off for a family function somewhere? Not that Christmas was going to mean much this year. About the only good news coming from the Solomons these days was that Halsey was now in charge and the Japs might be starving on Guadalcanal. The Aussies, on the other hand, followed the fate of the remaining British Army and the rest of the Empire. Earlier in the week the Japs had bombed Calcutta, and of course they were still picking up the pieces and treating the wounded from the bombing of Darwin to the north. Nobody was walking around saying Merry Christmas. Still, he thought. Something didn’t sound right.

  He changed into civvies and called for a cab to take him to the main hospital in Perth, where Kensie was assigned. He checked in at Reception. The young and uniformed receptionist seemed surprised to hear an American accent, as the US Army had established four hospitals in the Perth/Fremantle area for American casualties over the past year.

  “I’m Commander Stormes from the submarine base,” he told her. “I just needed to speak to Dr. Richmond if I could.”

  “She’s been admitted, actually,” the receptionist said. “She’s in the intensive care section on the third floor, but they don’t ever allow visitors, other than direct family.”

  “Admitted?” Malachi exclaimed. “What happened?”

  “She collapsed during surgery,” a stern female voice said from behind him. “Total exhaustion. Who’s asking?”

  He turned to see an older woman dressed in the wimple and white robes that British nurses, called Sisters, wore in the hospital. Her expression was as severe as her voice. Malachi explained who he was and that he hadn’t known anything about her collapsing.

  The Sister gave him a fierce look, but then relented. “You are the captain? The submarine captain?”

  Malachi nodded, and the Sister’s face softened a tiny bit. “Yes,” she said, drawing him away from prying ears at the reception desk. “She’s spoken of you often. She’s recovering, but slowly, as these things must do. Worn out by two-day surgical shifts and a veritable flood of badly injured soldiers.”

  “Is she conscious?”

  “Not really,” the sister said. “She’s sedated for the most part. They ease her out of it for an hour or so each day so they can feed her, and then back down she goes.”

  “Can I see her?”

  The Sister gave him a disbelieving look. “Her father and mother are taking turns staying nearby on the ward. But it’s direct family only in the IC station. Surely you understand.”

  He nodded. “Can you do this,” he asked. “Can you tell her father that I’m down in the waiting room?”

  The Sister gave him a calculating look. “Lambert Richmond is a very important man in western Australia, Captain. Are you saying he would recognize your name?”

  “I think he would,” Malachi said. “I know she would.”

  “Very well, I’ll go tell him. But you may have a longish wait.”

  “I know how to wait, nurse,” he said.

  “It’s Sister, not nurse,” she reminded him. “Waiting room’s over there.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  An hour later, Kensie’s father sought him out in the waiting room. “I’ve got a car waiting outside,” he announced. “Will you come with me, Captain?”

  “Certainly,” Malachi said.

  The car waiting out front included a chauffeur, who whisked them from the hospital to what Malachi suspected was the nearest pub. Once inside, Lambert ordered a double whiskey. Malachi asked for a beer.

  “Poor thing worked herself nearly to death,” Lambert said. “Paused during an operation and asked the other surgeon if she could just sit down for a moment, then passed out. She’d been working two days on, a half-day off, then two more days on. Bloody stupid fucking hospital management.”

  “But they have lots of customers, don’t they,” Malachi said.

  “Oh, God, yes,” Lambert said. “British Army, our Army, they come by the boatload. Mind you, it was not like they were picking on her—the other docs are equally tired. But they must do something.”

  Malachi nodded. “Problem is, they can’t just grow more surgeons in a couple of weeks,” he said.

  Lambert nodded. “I know,” he said. “I know. Your lot have been standing up fully operational hospitals all over the city. One day, a vacant lot. The next, a fully staffed hospital. Reminds me that we’re a bit of a colonial backwater here.”

  “How can I help you?” Malachi asked.

  Lambert looked at him through whiskey-stained eyes. “Come upstairs,” he said. “Margery is really upset. I need to take her home, do you see? But here’s the thing: Kensie babbles once in a while and the name Malachi keeps surfacing.”

  “Absolutely,” Malachi said. “Let’s go right now.”

  Lambert hesitated. “There’s one more thing, Captain,” he said. “You’ve become important to our Kensie, but we both know what’s coming. The Yanks are turning on the power. In a year, I think you’ll all be gone. MacArthur’s already talking about going north with his many minions. America is mobilizing, and then you lot will annihilate Japan. When? No one can say, but I dread the day that you leave, or, even worse, that you sail off on another
bloody patrol and simply don’t come back.”

  Malachi had no answer for that.

  “She’s my only child, Captain,” Lambert said. “But she’s asking for you, not Daddy. You’re the first bloke she’s, oh, God, what’s the word? Really seized upon? But if you end up leaving her—”

  “One thing at a time, Lambert,” Malachi said, gently. “No one knows what’s going to happen, or when. But right now, I want, no, I demand to help. I have a complicated personal past, but I’ve never been married, if that concerns you. Right now Kensie has my full attention. I promise you, I will never hurt her.”

  Lambert closed his eyes for a long moment. “Bugger!” he shouted, startling the other people in the bar. “Bugger this bloody war. Goddamn the fucking Japs.”

  “Lambert, you keep yelling bugger, people are gonna talk.”

  Lambert opened his eyes “What?”

  “Lambert, let’s face it. You’re not my type, mate.”

  Lambert stared at him for a second and then started laughing. “Right,” he said. “Back to the hospital, then, Captain.”

  Kensie looked smaller in the hospital bed. She had one IV in, but otherwise looked relaxed and comfortable as she slept. The dark circles were back, however. Lambert explained to the Sister that the captain was going to take the family watch for a while.

  “For the night, actually,” Malachi said in his best captain’s voice. The attending Sister took it all onboard and then Lambert and Margery left him to it. There were no chairs in the room, so Malachi liberated one from the central hallway. He scanned all the monitoring instruments along the wall before realizing that none of them was actually on. Then he figured it out: Kensie, being hospital staff and a surgeon, had been parked in an ICU more for privacy and personal care than what was available in the wards, filled as they were with military casualties.

  He studied her sleeping face and asked himself if he was falling in love with this woman. She was lovely, tough, funny, a two-fisted drinker, a surgeon, and a hungry lover. But was this just one of those wartime romances, the mutual and somewhat frantic desire amplified by the knowledge that it could all blow up every time he went back out to sea? And with the dark secret in his past, was he even worthy of her or any woman? He was an American naval officer, a commanding officer, subject to orders that would brook no interference from personal considerations. Lambert knew the score. The whole sub squadron could be moved at a moment’s notice to anywhere in the Pacific if it meant putting the Navy’s fangs closer to the Japanese jugular. Australia had been the refuge of necessity after the boats had been bombed out of the Philippines, but Lambert was right: 1942 had been a disastrous year for the US Navy, but 1943 was around the corner and with it the coming avalanche of military power that was sliding down the building ways all across America. Lambert was right to be concerned for Kensie’s heart.