The same scene was being duplicated in the conning towers of Chicolar and Whitefish. Perhaps both skippers were standing in their conning towers, their stations for most of the battle to come, also peering at their radar scopes, also waiting, possibly also seeing in their own allegorical conception what it was they were about to do. The call of the wild wolf had been heard. The pack was gathering.
Richardson straightened up, indicated to Quin that he should take over the radar again, replaced his goggles. He stood silently as his eyes once again began their acclimation to the dark. Momentarily he had been blinded by the considerably brighter lights of the radarscope, his mind distracted by contemplation of the hell he was about to unleash.
The PPI ’scope, as the dial he had been watching was called, had been designed with a view to use at night. Its predominant color was red. Beside it was another hooded dial, the A ’scope, which gave precise ranges but had a profusion of green lighting guaranteed to produce instant night blindness lasting many minutes. Richardson had avoided looking at the A ’scope, but even so it would be some minutes before his night vision was fully restored. He readjusted the red goggles more comfortably, returned to the forward part of the conning tower, stopped with one foot on the ladder leading upward. “Scott,” he said to the quartermaster, “I’m going up on the bridge. We’ll be getting some kind of a radar contact before long. We’ll be picking up some islands up ahead, too, but I’m expecting ships. We might be shooting torpedoes before daybreak.”
The radar operators had all been thoroughly briefed as to the prospect of getting a return on land or small islands which would resemble ships. The whole submarine was already keyed up. His prediction about imminent combat, confirming the knowledgeable guesses already rife, would be known throughout the ship within seconds. Tension would increase, but so would alertness and readiness.
Eel’s speed might even increase a fraction of a knot as the electricians once more sought carefully to balance the loads on her four generators and, if possible, slightly increase the output of the four big diesels.
Already he could see better. One last look around the conning tower. It was businesslike, calm, efficient. This was the way a submarine should be. He climbed the few steps to the bridge, ducked under the overhang. “Permission to come on the bridge,” he called.
“Permission granted, Skipper.” Buck Williams, Officer of the Deck, had his elbows on the overhang, binoculars to his eyes, peering over the front of the metal windscreen. Richardson stood beside him, the goggles dangling again around his neck, binoculars also to his eyes.
“We should get contact pretty soon, Buck,” he said, sweeping the murk with his glasses. “We’ve got Quelpart on the radar. I guess you know that. And there’s a flock of little islands that will show up dead ahead pretty soon now. What we’re watching for is a formation of ships moving between the land formations.”
“How long before we’re in radar range of the first island?” asked Williams.
“Not sure. Maybe half an hour. Time to get my night vision settled down, I hope.”
Eel’s bow, lowered nearer to the water’s edge by the powerful thrust of her propellers, steadily, almost hypnotically, drove apart the quiet sea. Two white streamers of roiled water, several feet abaft the bullnose and on either side, formed an inverted V. In the center of the V, her bow forming its point, lay the submarine. Little else could be seen of the sea. The hollow of the bow wave formed just forward of Eel’s bridge. Aft, the returning bulge of seawater tended to sweep up the submarine’s rounded sides and occasionally lap into the base of her free-flooding superstructure. Farther aft yet, four exhaust pipes, two on each side, spewed forth a thunder of spray and steam. Occasionally a wave gurgled toward one of the yawning openings of the pipes, to be hurled backward in white confusion under the force of the exhaust gases. All the way aft, abaft the stern mooring line chock, there was a white-ribbed disturbance in the sea, a burbling from below. Immediately beyond, coming in from the sides, the dark waters hurled themselves into the cleavage behind the submarine. The only note of her passage was the straight white wake stretching out astern, growing less in the distance as quiet returned to the Yellow Sea.
The air as usual was dank, still, and cold. Richardson’s night vision was returning, but he still found it difficult to distinguish the horizon, where the sky and the water met. All was the same dark grayness. Overhead, no stars to be seen. As before, he had the impression that visibility was not unduly restricted, but that somehow there was a salt content to the air, a thin concentration which gradually brought haze of sky and haze of sea together in a unity that defied piercing.
He had no feeling at all. It was as though he were watching from somewhere else. His second self, the buried one of which he was so keenly aware, was about to take charge. This was his profession, his metier. This was what he was a master at: the relentless power of Eel’s four big diesel engines, her spinning propellers, the unimaginable potential for destruction in the ten torpedo tubes she was about to use; himself, the controller of it all—the controller, and yet as much as any one of them, controlled.
From whence had come the intelligence sending Eel on this deadly errand? Admiral Small, of course, but where did he get it? The admiral had mentioned Fort Shafter as being a special source of information. This must be what he was referring to. This must be why Mrs. Elliott, Cordy Wood, and Joan had such high security clearances. They all worked there. One of the peculiar things about Joan’s job was the strange hours. Frequently she would spend several days in a row inside the Shafter compound, never leaving, sleeping at odd times in the room assigned to her. Then she would be off for several days. Joan had once lived in Japan, and she could both read and speak Japanese. Her father had been in the diplomatic service. She said she thought he was dead, but she never talked about him. There was more to his story. Could he have been in intelligence? Could he still be? Could that be the reason for Joan’s reticence? Was she, also, in intelligence work?
It must be so. She had known about the lifeboats even before Rich had told about them. She had known about the Walrus, and what had happened to her. Submarines had been benefitting from special information about convoy movements since nearly the beginning of the war. Joan’s knowledge of Japanese would be needed to translate the messages into English. There must be a large group involved with just this part of the work, and it would be very highly classified. No wonder Joan had been so reluctant to talk about herself!
Little bits of information began to piece themselves together. Joan’s seeming familiarity with the names of the submarine skippers, for one thing. She knew who was on patrol, and who had just returned. And she knew how well they’d done and what their problems had been, almost as though she, as well as Rich, had been reading the daily dispatches. Several times he had had the feeling that she was pretending ignorance simply in order not to appear too well informed. The last night before sailing, he was suddenly struck by the notion that she knew of Operation ICEBERG. It was intuition, nothing more, and he had been trying to think of a way to find out without violating the secrecy imposed by Admiral Small, when she interrupted him in the way she knew so well, which always led to other things far removed from submarines and the war.
Obviously, if these deductions were correct, Joan must know what submarines were assigned to the various patrol areas. Although this sort of information was considered top secret by the submarine force, she would know that at this very moment Eel was patrolling the East China and Yellow seas, along with the Whitefish and Chicolar. She would know of the message about the convoy. It might even be she who had decoded it, or translated it. And she would be aware that it was sending Eel into combat and mortal danger. Now that they had been so close, that she knew Richardson so well, what would she think, or feel, about the risks she was subjecting him to? Would she worry about his safety? Or was it all part of the job? What about Jim Bledsoe and the Walrus? Through some tacit understanding, some regard for her privacy—and Jim
’s, though he was dead—he had refrained from bringing Jim up. She had told him what she felt she ought, and he had resolved to be satisfied with that.
Now it occurred to him to wonder whether Jim’s last, fatal attack on Bungo Pete’s decoy freighter could have resulted from a similar message. If so, it meant that it had been planted, and therefore that the enemy had finally realized their convoy routing code had been broken. If so, this convoy Eel was now pursuing might also be a decoy. If so, he and the other boats might be steering at full power into a gigantic trap!
But his mind refused to follow the train of thought. It could not be true. It was too far-fetched an idea. Admiral Small and the Fort Shafter people would have to be trusted not to be taken in. Anyway, it made no difference. No matter what his imagination concocted, Eel and the other two submarines had received an order for battle. They had been pointed toward the enemy, and they had been unleashed. From here on, ComSubPac did not exist. Joan did not exist. Nothing existed but the sea, and Eel’s slender prow cutting it into halves as she sped through it. Only he existed, at the center of the universe, and even he did not exist. There was not even such a thing as the will to do what he was in the process of doing, what he had been trained for so many years to do. There was only the fact of doing it.
Time had been, years ago, when he worried whether he would be able to fire torpedoes set to kill; whether he would be able to nerve himself to see the effects; whether he could hold himself together, still function, disdain the terror of the inevitable counterblow. Before the war a perfect torpedo shot was a professional triumph. It had required meticulous preparation of equipment—the angle solvers, the tubes, the ancillary parts of the submarine which brought them to the firing point, the torpedoes themselves—and lengthy, boring, often lonely practice. Success was achieved when the target signaled the torpedoes had passed beneath her keel. A bull’s-eye: accolades for all, qualifications, promotions, favorable comments in fitness reports, a conspicuous white E on the conning tower. What happened when the bull’s-eye produced instead a catastrophic explosion, a column of white water mixed with death and debris, a shattered hulk which a moment ago had been a fine ship—that was something he had thought of as happening in another world. It was imaginary, not real. It was not part of the prewar drill. He had, of course, known that ships would sink. But, before the war, he had never been able to visualize what it must actually be like.
Now he had seen it. Being the cause of it was easy, for in the process something had happened to him, too. He was split into two people, both of whom were present at the same time inside him, both able to react. But the two, the automaton and the spectator, were entirely different from each other. The automaton had been trained to be a nerveless perfectionist. The devastating result of the automaton’s perfectionism was a clinical certainty it accepted with detachment. The automaton always shouldered the spectator aside, took over the periscope or the bridge TBTs at the start of any action. Beside it, inside it, stood the spectator, observing, marveling, saddened at the destruction and the loss of life. Once in action, the automaton could not be stopped, except by the interposition of some external superior force, and if the opportunity arose, it would inevitably respond with some deadly riposte of its own. It could coldly aim a torpedo that would rip the vitals out of a ship and send it reeling to the bottom of the sea. It would watch the carnage with cool concentration, ready to wrest instant advantage from whatever developments there were.
The spectator, seeing through the same eyes, would always see the dust left floating at the spot where a ship had sunk, would mourn the doomed round black spots—the heads of men—clustering around floating wreckage. The spectator could feel compassion, imagine himself among them, wish they had not, by appearing before his sights, wrought their own destruction. Yet the spectator also had his hardness. These were the enemy. They sought his death. Though the targets of the moment were merchant ships, they were part of the enemy’s total war effort. They would not hesitate to try to bring about his own destruction with depth charges, bombs, any weapons they might happen to possess. They were not above breaking the rules of war. There had not even been a war with the United States on December 7, 1941.
They had killed Stocker Kane in the Nerka, and Jim Bledsoe in the Walrus at a moment of mercy while they were rescuing the crew of an old freighter. Its crew, part of Nakame’s outfit, had desperately signaled for rescue. The torpedo from Nakame’s carefully positioned sub struck just as Jim was bringing the life raft alongside.
What rules could there be in total war, if Stan Davenport and his men had to die in Oklahoma’s enginerooms even before that war existed? Stan’s body was found at his station near the port throttle when the big old battlewagon finally was rolled upright. Japan had initiated the war by an unparalleled act of international treachery. She had thrown away the rule book. Surprise, shock, irresistible power: these were the only currency left between Japan and the United States. The reckoning for that brutally cynical act would be cut from similar cloth. No negotiations could stop it, for whom did Japan have who could be trusted as a negotiator? After Pearl Harbor, who in America would be willing to take a similar risk again?
The spectator could even talk with the automaton, but the conversations were always one-sided, always subject to the superior demands of combat. The night was clear and beautiful, the spectator might say. The sea air was clean; the salt dust blowing was refreshing. The Japanese were admirable seamen. They built fine ships, and they knew how to operate them. He could not say they were a fine, honorable people: not after what had happened at Pearl Harbor, and then later at Bataan and Corregidor; but they were industrious and hardworking. The automaton would grimace frigidly through the TBT or the periscope, call out the crucially important observations, maneuver the critical weapon, the Eel. It never answered the spectator’s observations. It acted, with finality. Its actions were the only answers it ever gave.
Long ago, Richardson had learned that he was as much an instrument of his submarine and its torpedoes as they were of him. There was no room for emotion, no room for thinking. Yet he did think, and observe, in a strange, set-aside corner of his mind. During combat, there was only room for the trained reaction to do what had to be done quickly, effectively, and with precision. After it was over there would be again, as there had always been, a coalescence of personality. The spectator and the automaton would merge into one, and the stern compulsion would disappear. Afterward there might be a reaction to what he had seen and done. But only afterward.
A moderate breeze came over the top of the bridge windscreen, doubtless entirely the product of Eel’s speed, for the air was as still as the sea. This time he had properly prepared himself for the cold, with boots and heavy trousers in addition to his heavy jacket. The air had a bite to its chill. He spread his mittened hands to cover as much of his face as he could, held the binoculars to his eyes, elbows resting on the little dashboard behind the windscreen, scanned the nothingness ahead. Beside him, Williams silently did the same.
Above the still figures on the bridge towered the two metal cones which were the periscope supports. During daylight the four lookouts stood on little platforms high on the side of each cone. Now, swathed in foul-weather gear, they stood at the bridge level, protected by the bulwarks, binoculars still sweeping steadily.
Above them all, impervious to fog, darkness, or weather, the best lookout of all ceaselessly rotated, sending its invisible radar beams out over hundreds of square miles of ocean surface, to show by a pip on a dial in the conning tower any unusual phenomenon on the surface of the sea.
Rich had been on the bridge approximately half an hour when, from the slight bustle going on beneath the conning tower hatch, he knew that some sort of word was coming.
“Radar contact, Bridge!” Scott, relaying the word, no doubt from Quin. “Looks like land! Port and starboard. Twenty-five miles.”
“Bridge, aye aye,” from Williams. “Those are the islands we’re expecting. Keep
the information coming, but look carefully between them. We’re looking for ships, Conn.”
“Conn, aye aye,” responded Scott. “Radar has the word.”
It was perhaps another ten minutes before anything new showed on radar.
“Radar contact!” Quin’s voice, bellowing from his position at the console.
Instantly Buck pushed the bridge speaker button. “Where away, Radar? Range and bearing!”
“Zero-four-zero, Bridge. Fifteen miles! Looks like six ships, sir!”
Williams looked at his skipper. Richardson nodded. “Station the radar tracking party,” the OOD briskly called into the bridge speaker.
More bustle below decks. It could not have been more than twenty seconds before the bridge speaker blared once again.
“Radar tracking party manned and ready, Bridge.”
“Track target bearing zero-four-zero,” ordered Buck on the loud-speaking system. Then, pitching his voice to reach the helmsman down the hatch, “Steer zero-four-zero, helm. All ahead two-thirds!”
The roar of the engines eased. Eel’s bow swung slightly to the right, steadied. Richardson nodded with approval.
Putting Eel’s nose directly on the target would accentuate any discernible relative motion, enable the plotting party more quickly to determine in which direction the target was moving. Slowing down was routine—to avoid blundering prematurely into close range. Later, depending on which way the targets seemed to be moving, it might be necessary to turn around to put Eel’s stern toward them.
The TDC in the conning tower was, of course, the heart of the plotting effort. Normally Buck Williams would be operating it, but since for the time being he was occupied as Officer of the Deck, Keith would be running it for him.
Rich picked up the bridge hand-microphone which had been sent up when the radar tracking party was set. Rigged with a short extension cord, it permitted him to speak to the conning tower, control room, and maneuvering room without the necessity of fumbling for a button and leaning over to speak into the bridge speaker. Responses, of course, came as previously on the announcing system. He spoke into the mike: “Conn, this is bridge. I don’t want to get closer than fifteen thousand yards.”
Dust on the Sea Page 14