Pacific Standoff, page 5
DaCosta wanted to argue, but in the end his Navy training was too strong. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said, and climbed down from the bridge. As he passed through the conning tower on his way to the wardroom and a badly needed cup of coffee, White, still at the helm, gave him a look of concern but kept his mouth shut.
Paul Wing was less discreet. He collared Lou in the control room and hissed, “What in hell happened up there?”
“Nothing. We had to dodge a freighter, and then things got sticky for a while. It’s okay now, I guess.”
“Lou, you’re holding out on me!”
For answer he glanced around at the rigid backs of the crewmen. Paul got the point. “Join me for a drink at the club tonight?” he said, elaborately casual.
On the bridge Art was rehearsing the report he would have to submit on today’s exercises. Somehow he was going to have to hide the fact that the few minutes following the near collision were completely blank in his mind. He could get the bare facts from the log, of course, but while that might satisfy the brass, it didn’t satisfy him. One moment he had been maneuvering to avoid that ship, and the next moment the boat surfaced, daCosta was in command, and everyone was evading his eye. Those eggs had tasted funny this morning; could that be it? Just a touch of food poisoning, nothing serious; certainly he was still fit for duty. It might be a long time before he had another opportunity to command a boat, and he was damned if he’d lose it by going on sick list.
The loudspeaker crackled. “Maneuvering to bridge!”
He thumbed the push-to-talk button. “Bridge, aye, aye.”
“Permission to take number three off the line. We’ve got a problem in the timing gear.”
“How bad is it, Charlie?”
“It’s minor for now, but it could lead to big trouble. Something must have been knocked out of alignment by that jolt.”
What jolt? the exec wondered. “Very well, permission granted. If we head for the barn now, maybe your boys can get it fixed before tomorrow morning.”
He turned the selector to speak to the control room. “Come around to course”—he squinted down at the bridge compass; the dirty glass made it very hard to read—“course 0-1-2. We’re going home.”
Chapter 5
On Saturday morning Jack’s father was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The war did not respect weekends, but even so, quite a few of his classmates and friends managed to attend the ceremony. The last time Jack had seen so much gold braid in one place was when he was rescued from the sunken Sebago. Admiral King was not there, but he had sent an aide to represent him. There was even an assistant undersecretary of the Navy to pay respects on behalf of President Roosevelt, who recalled a slight acquaintance with Admiral McCrary from his own days in the Navy Department.
Afterwards the mourners lined up in order of rank and seniority to offer condolences. Jack knew many of them, by sight at least, but to his relief, his friend Keith Stimson, who held some sort of liaison post on King’s staff, stood behind him and murmured each flag officer’s name as he approached. The captains and lesser ranks had to introduce themselves. At last Jack and his sisters were free to start down the path to the car. As they did so, Captain Thaddeus Richards fell into step beside Jack. Jack remembered him from before the war, as a commander on ComSubLant staff; then Richards had gotten his fourth stripe and command of a PT boat squadron and they had lost touch.
“A sad loss, McCrary,” said Richards. “I didn’t know him, but I know the respect he commanded in the service.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“I hear you have a new Gato-class sub. Still at New London?”
“Yes, we’d just started training when this happened. If there hadn’t been so much business to take care of, I might not have stayed around for the funeral. Dad would have understood.”
“When are you going back, then?”
Jack laughed shortly. “As soon as I can get transport. So far the best offer I’ve had is a plane ride to Presque Isle, Maine.”
“Hmm. Can you leave at once? I have a compartment on this afternoon’s Bay State Limited which you’re welcome to share.”
Jack thought quickly. His father’s lawyer had already found a tenant for the house in Georgetown, and Helen had offered to stay around long enough to put everything in storage. “Certainly, sir. Thanks very much. I won’t be inconveniencing you too much, will I?”
“Not at all. To be perfectly frank, I came over this morning in the hope of having a word with you—and to pay my respects to your father, of course. This way we’ll have time for a long talk.” They had reached the cars by now. Richards took a small notebook from his inside pocket and consulted it. “Union station at 1430, then. It’s car 1472, compartment B. You can square it with the conductor once we’re under way.”
“I’ll be there, and thanks again, Captain.”
“Don’t mention it, McCrary. I have my reasons.”
As the old but beautifully kept Chrysler limousine purred across the bridge on the way back to Georgetown, Jack tried to think what Richards’s reasons might be, but without knowing what his present assignment was, he couldn’t even begin to guess. He put the subject aside and concentrated on what he had to do in the next two hours.
The most important item on the list was a heart-to-heart talk with Helen. This turned out to be even more difficult than he expected. She flatly refused to discuss her personal life with him, and when he made a few comments about avoiding married men and the desirability of settling down, she lashed out at him.
“You really have your nerve,” she cried, “to go tomcatting around the seven seas and then come back here to preach at me! The way you talk, anyone would think you’d joined a monastery instead of the Navy! Do you think Angela Schuyler didn’t tell me all about her romantic trip to Honolulu? And what about Sue Beaufort? I suppose you were just good friends? Good friends, my ass!”
Jack was a little shocked to hear a woman—and his own sister, at that!—using such language. He muttered something about it being different for a man.
“Really?” Helen retorted. “How? It’s women you’re doing it with, isn’t it? Or are you all a bunch of pansies? I’ve always wondered what you do on those long patrols.”
“That’s enough, Helen!”
“No, it isn’t, not by a long shot! I don’t try to tell you how to run your life, and I don’t like you interfering in mine. I’ll see who I please, yes, and sleep with them, too, if I want to. It’s no concern of yours.”
“The hell it isn’t!” She had goaded him into anger. “How do you think I feel, knowing my sister has the reputation of a tramp? If you keep on this way, what decent man will even look at you, much less think of marrying you?”
Two red spots burned in her cheeks. “Plenty of them, if you must know! Not everyone is still living in the Dark Ages like you. Why, Bunny Wilkinson proposed just last week.”
“Bunny Wilkinson!”
“Yes, Bunny! What’s wrong with that? He’s good looking, and terribly rich, and very brave. Unfortunately he has all the sex appeal of boiled asparagus, so I said no—but he did ask!”
Jack stared at her, doing his best to maintain a stern expression, but finally the laughter bubbled to the surface. She looked affronted at first, but soon gave him a grin that took ten years off her age. He gave her a quick hug and said, “I’ll take back tramp if you’ll take back pansy.”
“It’s a deal. And I’m not a kid anymore, I have learned to be more discreet.”
“That’s all I really meant to ask. What you do in private is none of my business, but I don’t want you to get hurt. By the way, who was that major you were with at Penn Station last week?”
“Jack McCrary! If you weren’t leaving this afternoon, I’d sneak into your room and put itching powder in your BVD’s. My God, look at the time! You’ll miss your train!”
The Pennsylvania Railroad, with a delicate sense of class privilege, had placed the Pullman cars at the rear of the train, nearest the gate from the concourse. Even so, Jack had to run the last few yards, dodging a baggage truck and nearly colliding with a large lady in a fur stole, and jump for the vestibule. A conductor watched impassively; at least he hadn’t shut the door in Jack’s face.
“Car 1472?” Jack asked, panting.
“Third car forward,” the conductor growled. After years of service on the Washington-New York-Boston run, he was civil only to bankers, movie stars, and important politicians. A lieutenant commander in the Navy didn’t qualify under any of those headings. By contrast the porter greeted Jack as if he rode this train at least twice a week and escorted him to Captain Richards’s compartment with a flourish. Richards was looking out the window at the dreary northern stretches of the city, a newspaper forgotten on his lap. He stood as Jack entered, shook hands, and asked the porter to bring coffee and sandwiches.
When they were seated in facing armchairs, Jack thanked him again for the accommodation. Richards waved it aside. “You’re partly responsible for my making this trip,” he said, “so it seems only fair to let you share it.” He glanced around to make sure the door was closed. “Admiral King has asked me to go to Newport and look into the torpedo situation. That was a fine piece of work you and Mount did. It lit a fire under more than one butt, I can tell you!”
Jack took a grim pleasure in this news. During his last tour of duty as skipper of Stickleback he had been plagued by defective torpedoes and driven almost mad by the brass’s refusal to admit there was anything wrong with them. After months of complaints by every sub commander, and quite a bit of discreet string-pulling, ComSubPac had assigned Jack’s boat to assist Ben Mount in running a series of tests on the Mark XIV torpedo. The results were conclusive proof of all the faults the skippers had been complaining of.
“The credit belongs to Commander Mount, sir,” said Jack. “All I did was provide him with a boat.” This was not quite true, but he felt it was the least he could do to make up for his unfairness to Mount in the past.
“I heard a different version from him, but let it pass. What I’d like from you are your conclusions about the deficiencies in our torpedoes. What was it the Packard ads used to say? ‘Ask the man who owns one.’”
“I assume you’ve read Commander Mount’s report—”
“Assume that I know nothing at all about the problem.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Jack took a moment to get his thoughts straight. “Well, one defect with the Mark XIV is that it usually runs a lot deeper than set, as much as twelve feet deeper. It’s easy enough to compensate by using shallower settings, but there are two catches to that solution. First, I said ‘usually.’ Sometimes it runs at the set depth. Second, if set too shallow, it tends to porpoise, which throws it off course and alerts the target.”
Richards jotted a couple of notes and looked up again.
“Next, the magnetic exploder: it’s a complete disaster. It almost never works, and when it does, it’s generally when you don’t want it to. You probably know that both the British and the Germans experimented with similar exploders years ago and abandoned them as unreliable. We should have done the same, but we didn’t, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.
“Third, and this one surprised me, the contact exploder is untrustworthy as well. The firing pin is so fragile that it crumples before it detonates the warhead, and that’s most likely to happen with a ninety-track shot, which is ordinarily the most desirable. Those are the three major defects we point to in our—that is, in Commander Mount’s report.”
“I get the impression you think there are others as well?”
“Yes, sir. I nearly lost my boat because of a fish that circled back at us; that was one time I was damned glad the magnetic exploder didn’t work! And I learned to avoid any gyro setting much off zero—the torpedoes went somewhere, but just where was anybody’s guess. But beyond that, the simple fact is that our torpedoes are too slow and too small. I’d be willing to bet that they’re the slowest, with the smallest warhead, used by any major power. That’s why BuOrd was so wedded to the magnetic exploder: five hundred pounds of torpex is just not going to do much damage to a warship unless it goes off under her keel and breaks her back, and that means a non-contact exploder.”
“Hmm. Anything else?”
“The propulsion system. I know we’ve had an electric torpedo in the works for years, and maybe before the end of the war we’ll have a chance to see how they do, but for now we’re stuck with steam fish. The wakes give away our position every time we fire a salvo; we might just as well send up flares and hire a brass band! The Japs, on the other hand, have an oxygen-fueled fish that leaves no wake at all, moves five or ten knots faster than ours, and carries a warhead that’s half again as big. Our subs are miles ahead of theirs, but that’s not much help with inadequate armament.” He stopped, wondering if he had been too outspoken. It would not be the first time he had said more than was welcome to a superior officer.
“I appreciate your frankness, McCrary. Your impressions will be very useful to me in carrying out my assignment. By the way, you may have a chance to try out the Mark XVIII electric torpedo before too many months are out, but your statement that we’ve been developing it for years is a little off. We were working on an electric, it’s true, but we got nowhere. The Mark XVIII is a quick and dirty copy of the German G7e. A few duds ended up on our beaches and were rushed to Westinghouse.”
Jack snorted. “Then it’s a shame we didn’t find a stray Jap ‘Long Lance’ about five years ago. We would have won the war in the Pacific by now.”
“Aren’t you letting your enthusiasm for your present assignment carry you away? There’s an awful lot of territory out there for the Marines to reconquer.”
“No, sir, I’m not.” Jack welcomed the chance to pass on his views to someone who had the ear of Admiral King. “Japan is even more vulnerable to blockade than Britain. She imports every drop of oil she uses and a good deal of food. Destroy her merchant fleet, particularly her tankers, and you make her warships helpless and her conquests of no value to her. I’d say that a single patrol by a single fleet submarine in Japanese home waters contributes more to winning the war than several divisions of foot soldiers—although I wouldn’t say it out loud with a Marine officer nearby!”
Richards joined his laughter. “No, I don’t think that would be very tactful. Well, you certainly present an interesting viewpoint. There’s no denying that the U-boat blitz off the East Coast last year seriously hampered our war effort—much more seriously than the public has ever been told—and we are not, after all, an island nation. Still, our antisubmarine patrols and use of convoys seems to have brought the danger under control. Why couldn’t the Japs do the same?”
Jack paused to think through his answer. “When you say ‘under control,’ Captain, what I think you mean is that we’re building ships faster than the Germans are sinking them. But I would be willing to bet that the Japs are already suffering a net loss of tonnage, even though our sub fleet is still fairly small and too many boats are being diverted to nonessential missions. If we really tried to mount a submarine blockade of the Home Islands, the Japs would be driven from the seas in a matter of weeks and capitulate not very long after that.” He regretted the last sentence as soon as he said it. He saw from Richards’s expression that, by overstating his case, he had lost his audience.
“Well, perhaps so, Commander,” Richards said, reaching for his newspaper, “but I think you overlook the fanaticism of the Japs. Quite a few people who know the country well think that we will have to invade and conquer inch by inch, that their army will mount a suicidal resistance rather than surrender. It’s a grim prospect. Anything we can do to soften them up is a real contribution, even if it doesn’t lead directly to victory.”
“Of course, sir.” The captain opened his paper and Jack turned his head to look out the window. The passing countryside may have been pretty or ugly; he didn’t notice. His attention was turned inward: how long before they would listen?
* * * *
Ensign Woody Stone paused on the steps of the officers’ mess and turned up the collar of his leather jacket. He had the evening free, but that freedom only made it more obvious to him that he was lonely and unhappy. He was a long ways from Conroe, Texas, and that was for damn sure! The guys from the Manta were all right, but because he had the least seniority of any of the officers, Woody was “George,” as in, “Let George do it,” and the others tended to treat him just a little less seriously than he would like. It wasn’t as if Paul and Ted were that much older than he, either, but they had regular assignments, the one as diving officer and the other as assistant engineering officer, and that seemed to make all the difference.
The door behind him opened and a commander came out and stopped beside him to look at the night sky. “Fine weather, isn’t it?” he remarked. “There’s a bomber’s moon later.”
“Yes, sir.”
The commander nodded to Woody and continued down the steps to his jeep. As the engine warmed up, he shouted, “Headed for town, Ensign? You can have a ride if you like.”
The offer solidified Woody’s intention and he hurried over and climbed in. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate it”
As they drove off, he said, “What’s your billet here?”
It took Woody a moment to understand the question. “I’m posted to Manta, sir; sixth officer.”
“Manta…new boat, is she? Who’s your skipper?”
“Commander McCrary, sir.”
“Jack McCrary? Son of a gun! I didn’t see him at the mess. Is he living aboard?”
“No, sir, he’s been away the last few days. His father just died.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. Next time you see him, tell him Sixteen-knot Sexton said hello, will you? Does this look like a good spot for you?” He stopped at a corner next to a lit drugstore; farther down the street was a movie marquee. It sure wasn’t Times Square, but it would have to do. Woody hopped out, thanked Commander Sexton, and entered the drugstore.
