By this time Kensie was sitting there, staring at him, her small fist held up against her mouth. Malachi sat silent for a few moments, still sipping on that amber fire, knowing he should put it down.
“Well,” he continued, “the sheriff was my mother’s second cousin. He took over the investigation. He’d known all about my father; hell, the whole town knew. He interviewed all the neighbors personally. I guess he interviewed my mother, although she never spoke to me about the incident after that night. In the meantime, the drunks and the petty thieves in the jail had a good old time talking about my future appointment with Old Sparky, the electric chair at the state prison. Except, when I was brought up for a preliminary hearing three days later, the judge asked if I was sorry. I told him I was horrified by what I’d done, but that he was going to kill my mother and I couldn’t just stand by and let that happen. Not anymore.
“Then the sheriff stood up and told the judge what he’d found out from the neighbors. That my mother was a battered spouse, an extreme case, even for coal-country Kentucky. That he’d beaten me, and others, more than once, and that what had happened was, in his opinion, a clear case of both self-defense and defense of my mother in the presence of a violent man deranged by whiskey. The sheriff recommended all charges be dropped.
“The judge elected to do something that was common in the South in those days: if I would agree to go into the Army, and by that he meant go far away and stay away, at least for the length of a hitch in the Army, he would dismiss the charges. I was so scared after all that electric chair talk that, of course, I agreed.
“The sheriff himself took me to Louisville, our state capital. We went to the Army recruiting station. The Army wasn’t hiring, but the sergeant said the Navy was. So we went across the street to the Navy recruiter, and I was signed up. High school graduate, big and strong, no criminal record despite the fact that the sheriff took me up there. Well, of course, they knew what was going on even if I didn’t, just like I didn’t realize that my ‘preliminary hearing’ had all been staged. The sheriff gave me money to send a telegram to my mother care of the company store, because no one had telephones in those days. I never heard from my mother again. I got a letter from one of her sisters several years after, explaining that my mother blamed me for what had happened.”
He looked at the bottle, but decided his head was swimming enough, and besides, he’d probably just lost Kensie forever. There wasn’t enough whiskey left to take care of that problem.
“That’s why I never married, or even tried to. That’s why I have bad dreams and don’t ever get personal mail. That’s probably why they call me The Iceman, because I keep my own counsel and a definite distance from close and friendly relationships. Aboard the boat I don’t sleep much, because I can’t face the dreams. My chief of the boat told me my crew was afraid of me, especially when we found a target. My wardroom officers had all heard the stories of skippers getting fired because they lacked what they called the ‘killer instinct.’ They didn’t produce, in terms of enemy ships sent to the bottom. Now they had a skipper who personified the killer instinct, and all I could think of was: I know where that comes from.”
He turned in his chair to look at her face. He saw tears there, and it broke his heart. “That’s how I was until I met you, anyway. And now, well, I guess I’ve lost that chance, too. Nor would I blame you. You are the first person I’ve ever told my story to. I’m really sorry to have disappointed you, but because I love you, I couldn’t let this secret fester any longer. Please forgive me, Kensie.”
She got up and came over to him and then sat down in his lap and pulled his head to her breast. “You’re no killer,” she said, finally. “Your father was a monster who caused his own death; you just had the unfortunate fate of being the instrument. You poor man, what a cross to bear!
“And as for the submarining,” she continued, “you’re an avenging angel, not a killer. What is it you Yanks are always saying? Remember Pearl Harbor? Every bloody day I see the results of what these yellow devils have done to our troops. Every fucking day. I’m with that noisy admiral of yours, Halsey, is it? Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill more Japs. And as for me, I’m Australian. Most of our forebears were criminal deportees from Old Blighty, banished to what the POMs considered a deserted island halfway around the world, and usually for some awful crime like pinching a loaf of bread from milord’s pantry.”
She pulled his head up so she could look him in the eye. “Let’s go back to bed, Malachi Stormes,” she said. “We both need to sleep on this. You were cornered into doing a terrible thing. You’ll never just ‘get over it,’ and I’d be disappointed in you if you could manage to just forget all about it. But that catastrophe is part of who you are now, not what you are, and you needn’t ever worry about me wilting in the glare of past troubles. Besides, right now I want to hear that ‘I love you’ bit again.”
She got up and took his hand. “Bedroom’s that way,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“I dropped my wee dram of that amazing whiskey,” she said over her shoulder. “Now you’re way ahead of me.”
“I’m all done with that stuff,” he said, wearily. “Much as I like it, I’m afraid of what it can do.”
“Then I’ll just have to take care of it for you, won’t I.”
TWENTY-THREE
Firefish departed Perth on the evening tide because of the recent sinking of the Australian hospital ship HMAS Centaur. Darkness would allow her to run surfaced at full speed through the night toward her patrol station off the Bay of Brunei, in the northwest sector of occupied Borneo. Centaur, a lighted and well-marked hospital ship, had been torpedoed by a Japanese I-boat off Queensland with the loss of four hundred medical personnel. This outrage marked a desperate change in the tactics of Japanese I-boats and also proved that they were concentrating in Australian waters. American subs were well advised to get clear of the Australian coast as fast as they could.
Malachi decided not to employ a zigzag plan, but chose a narrow weave instead. There was no moon and the sky was occluded with a heavy cloud cover as the northeast monsoon built into the southwest Pacific Ocean. Running at 22 knots all night meant they could make nearly 230 miles of their 2,200-mile journey. They conducted a post-repair shakedown of all the combat and engineering systems during the run north. The after torpedo room was essentially brand new and now smelled of fresh paint rather than death and destruction. They’d gone out for one day toward the end of the repair availability to test hull fittings, with a delightful excursion to 350 feet. One of the propeller shaft tubes had sprung a leak, as had one of the after torpedo tubes’ outer doors. These were fixed again, followed by a second dive the next day, this time to 375 feet. The tender’s repair personnel, who had been ordered to go along for the watertight integrity tests, had been visibly nervous as Firefish approached 400 feet of depth. The chief engineer helpfully informed them that she’d been to 410 and were still kicking. Cracking, groaning, and creaking, too. The symphony of the deep, the COB added, helpfully, to the chalk-faced repair team from the Otus.
They arrived off Brunei Bay nine days later, two hours before sunrise, having made an uneventful passage north from Perth. Malachi had run surfaced during the day when they were out of the primary shipping lanes, and submerged when not. At night, they’d run on the surface exclusively. Their mission was to interdict Japanese shipping between Japan and Brunei, where the Japanese had established a naval base, military airfields, and an important oil depot. The northwest region of Borneo was rich in oil resources, and the Japanese had been quick to occupy it on their push into Indochina. Malachi opened the patrol orders in the wardroom, with the exec, the COB, and the department heads present. This time there was no talk of “report but do not attack.”
“Tankers, that’s what we’re after,” Malachi announced. “Outbound tankers in particular, so that we deprive them of the ship and their oil cargo.”
He read some more of the intelligence e
stimate for Brunei Bay. “Probably can’t get into the bay itself,” he continued, “because they’ve surely mined it. And there’s one airfield dedicated to HK-eight model Kawanishi flying boats, which are the most dangerous aircraft we face. If one of those beasts catches you on the surface, they can bomb you, torpedo you, and then shoot up the wreckage with twenty-millimeter cannons. They can stay out for days if the weather cooperates. They can land at sunset and spend the night floating, and then resume their patrol the next morning. Our nemesis, if we’re not really careful.”
“Is the HK-eight big enough to have a radar signal detector onboard?” the exec asked.
“They carry a crew of ten, so it’s a pretty big plane. It’s possible. More importantly, there are two other airfields for regular fighters and bombers, so they can have twenty-four-hour coverage of this area from the air if they want to.”
“Like after we sink our first tanker,” the ops officer said. “So we’re talking hide by day, attack by night.”
“Pretty much,” Malachi said. “And that means lots of radar. Talk to your operators about perfecting the quick sweep technique—for attacks: mast up, point the antenna to target bearing, on, off, and mast down. For search, one rotation, and down. Talk to the sonar guys, too—they’ll be cueing you onto the best bearing. Okay, that’s it.”
Malachi indicated that the exec should remain behind when the meeting broke up. “XO, I need you to get us to an ambush position along the most probable sea route into and out of Brunei Bay. I’ve looked at the charts and it appears that the whole bay is pretty shallow, so I’m not sure how they get tankers in and out.”
“And we’re gonna let the empty ones just go by?”
“That’s what the orders say,” Malachi said. “If nothing else, they’ll be riding high in the water; with a full load of oil they make better torpedo targets, not to mention the possibility of fire.”
“Well, we can’t shoot ’em in near the coast; the hundred fathom curve is way out at ten miles offshore.”
“We can if we’re on the surface,” Malachi pointed out. He saw the exec trying not to cringe.
Nothing happened for three days, with the sea empty of everything but small wooden fishing boats. The crew used the time to “routine” the torpedoes, refurbish the backup air compressor in the after engine room, and study Japanese oil tanker silhouettes to determine their fully loaded keel depths. They practiced crash dives at dawn each day, and then settled out at 200 feet for the remainder of the day. On the fourth day of seeing and hearing nothing, Malachi was wondering just how major this Brunei base could be. They couldn’t get close enough to get a periscope look into Brunei Bay itself, but the lack of any shipping was beginning to worry him. Had they come to the wrong place?
Thirty minutes before the morning crash dive practice, with the first lines of dawn breaking in the east, the radar operator took a long range, single-sweep of the northern horizon, being careful to turn the antenna by hand so as not to radiate toward the bay itself. Malachi was, as usual, in the conning tower to supervise the morning’s drill. The operator straightened up in his chair.
“Radar contact,” he announced. “Composition many. Range nineteen miles on a bearing of three two five. Radar off.”
“Battle stations, torpedo,” Malachi ordered, as he tripped the dive klaxon. “Make your depth one hundred feet.”
He didn’t really intend to attack anything inbound, but this was the quickest way to get the boat buttoned up and ready for action. Once all stations reported in, he started to give the order to come to periscope depth, but then decided to wait. The water offshore seemed to be extremely clear and he was afraid a passing flying boat would be able to see the shadow of the Firefish from the air. He finished his coffee and waited, along with the full conning tower team.
“Steady at one hundred feet,” Control announced.
“Very well,” Malachi responded. “Sound: set up a passive track as soon as you get noise spokes. Radar indicates a possible convoy approaching.”
“Sound: aye.”
The plotting team manned the table and began the laborious process of a passive sound plot, which involved a steady stream of bearing data from the sound heads beneath the boat. Malachi told the exec to stand down the torpedo rooms and to relax battle stations. This would take a couple of hours.
By late morning they had an estimated range from them to the convoy of seven miles; transferring the approaching ships’ course and speed to the chart confirmed they were going into Brunei Bay, or at least the approaches to it.
“Now we have to decide about which track to sit on,” Malachi told the exec down in the wardroom. “The northern one bound for Manila or Japan or the western track to Singapore. I’m favoring the northern one.”
“I understood they’ve set up a pretty big naval base at Singapore,” the exec said. “Those ships will need oil.”
“Yeah, but Singapore can get oil from Malaysia or probably even the Middle East. They’ve invaded the Philippines, and that took a lot of troops and vehicles. Besides, some of these tankers could go to Japan by way of Manila, offload some of their oil, and then keep going.”
“Should we go in tonight and scope out the anchorage? Get a ship count?”
“Let’s see how the day develops,” Malachi said. “They’ll be there for a couple of days onloading, probably from barges, and that’s time consuming. How old are the charts for this area?”
“British admiralty charts from the eighteen eighties. The sailing directions note that five rivers flow into Brunei Bay, so there’s a pretty big silt delta offshore.”
“Let’s use our submerged time to do a little hydrographic work. See where the hundred fathom curve really is, sixty years on. If we do go in, I need to know where the water gets deep enough to go down to three hundred feet and still have room for more.”
The exec nodded. “I’ll navigate us in directly toward the coast at one hundred feet, and we’ll take readings with the fathometer. When the water gets less than six hundred feet, we’ll come to periscope depth, take a single bearing radar shot at the coast, and then mark the chart.”
“Right,” Malachi said. “Then go back out ten degrees higher on the compass, come back in and do it all again.”
The radioman knocked on the wardroom doorframe and handed Malachi the yellow roll of the fleet broadcast for the day. He took it back to his cabin and lay down to get the day’s fleet news and gossip.
By nightfall they’d discovered that the underwater silt delta had come out ten miles farther than the British charts showed, and that it was shaped like an arrowhead as it spilled out of Brunei Bay. Along the spine of the delta the water was only 80 feet deep all the way out to ten miles, where the drop-off began. At its widest point, the delta was eight miles wide. They annotated the chart with the new information, and then they could begin to scope out the best points to lay an ambush for an outbound convoy.
“Where are we now?” Malachi asked.
“We’re twenty-two miles off the bay entrance,” the navigator said. “Full dark thirty minutes ago.”
“Okay, let’s go up and get some fresh air. But first come to periscope depth and take a sweep.”
Fifteen minutes later the radar operator raised the mast and did a single sweep from due south around to due north, keeping the signal away from Brunei Bay. Then he reported a contact. It was west of them, range seventy-eight hundred yards, appearing to be stationary.
“Classification?” Malachi asked.
“Haven’t seen this before, Captain. It’s bigger than a fishing boat, but not as big as a patrol boat or one of their sub-chasers. The skin paint on the scope indicates metal, though, not wood.”
Malachi called Sound. They had nothing on that bearing or anywhere else, either. “Okay,” he said. We still need to surface, but we’ll do it on the batteries. Make no noise, and show no light. Then we’ll creep over there and see what’s what.”
Once on the surface, Malachi went to the br
idge, along with four lookouts. He’d told the exec to assemble the 20mm gun crew in Control. The night was dark, which meant a fully overcast sky. There was the usual southwest Pacific haze, but the wind, such as it was, was coming from the direction of the contact. The water was a sheet of shiny black glass.
“Five knots, and keep everything quiet. Send up the gun captain.”
The gun captain was a red-faced Irishman named McReedie. He was the senior boatswain’s mate in the boat, and looked the part. “Yes, sir?” he said when he approached Malachi on the bridge.
“Boatswain’s mate, I don’t know what’s out there, but I mean to approach it on the battery to find out. I need you to get your crew up here now, quietly, and get that twenty ready to work. Again, quietly. If this is what I think it is, I’ll definitely have some work for you.”
McReedie grinned in the darkness. “Aye, Cap’n,” he replied. “And what is it that we think this is?”
“I think it’s a Japanese flying boat, landed for the night. Smell the air.”
McReedie turned his broad face into the light breeze and sniffed. Then he grunted.
“I think that’s wood burning,” Malachi said.
“Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n,” McReedie said. “That’s charcoal.”
Malachi’s eyes gleamed. The Japs had landed their flying boat for the night and were making dinner. “God loves us, Boatswain’s mate,” he said.
“True enough, Cap’n. I’ll go get my boys.”
Malachi called the exec to the bridge, and a moment later the XO’s head emerged from the dim red glow that was showing through the conning tower hatch. Despite the boat being on red lighting, he was practically blind as he climbed to the bridge. Malachi explained what he thought they had and that he intended to destroy it.
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