Pacific Standoff, page 7
When Art’s turn came, Paul was on the TDC and Lou was acting as firing officer. Jack, as usual, was merely an observer. The first thing he noticed was that Art’s periscope technique was very good—he exposed just enough of it, and for just long enough, to see what he had to see. On his third observation he stopped two-thirds of the way around and said, “I have the target in sight, a naval auxiliary of seven thousand tons. Bearing—Mark!”
“0-3-4,” Ryan said quietly.
Art twirled the rangefinder knob rapidly, then more slowly. “Set masthead height at forty feet. Range—Mark!”
“Six thousand yards,” Ryan said, peering at the knob.
“Angle on the bow?” asked Paul.
“Call it twenty degrees port. Down scope.” Paul cranked that into the TDC and studied the dials as the gears inside whirred and buzzed. “Well?” Art demanded.
Paul checked the dials again before saying, “We can stay right here. If his course doesn’t change, we’ll have a nice close shot at him, and if it does, we’ll probably know it in time to make our intercept anyway. You lucked out.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion, mister, I asked for a course to intercept.”
Paul flushed as he studied the computer again. “You want the course to intercept the soonest?”
“That’s right, and I want it soonest, too.”
“Heading 1-6-0 at eight knots will put you a thousand yards to starboard of her present track.” He paused deliberately. “Sir.” His tone was just short of insolent.
“All ahead full, course 1-6-0!”
“Aye, aye, sir.” White replied from the helm.
From his place near the sonar gear, Jack watched this exchange with disbelief. What was going on here? The obvious antagonism between Art and Paul he could look into later, but what were they thinking of? To leave a perfectly good attack position and cross the presumed track of the target to attack from the other side, all to save a minute or two, and all on the basis of a single periscope observation? It was lunacy! He was strongly tempted to interfere, or at least to question the exec, but the ground rules he had laid down prohibited it unless the boat was in danger. He leaned against the bulkhead and hooked his thumbs in his belt, ready to react to any development.
If Art was concerned about the decision he had made, it didn’t show. He stood in the center of the cramped conning tower, his face expressionless, apparently oblivious to the glances he was getting from Lou and the crewmen. Finally Paul broke the silence. “We’re approaching the firing position.”
“Slow to three knots.” That was standard procedure; if the periscope was raised while the boat was making eight knots, it would throw up a rooster tail that could be seen for miles. He edged around to the front of the attack periscope, ready to place it on the correct hearing the moment it was raised.
“Three knots, sir.”
Art caught the handles of the scope and rode it up, his eye in position even before the tip had cleared the surface. Suddenly his whole body tensed and he rotated the scope to the left. “Goddammit!” he exclaimed. “The bastard zigged right on me! Angle on the bow is zero! Bearing—Mark! Range—Mark!” As the periscope descended, Ryan said quietly, “Bearing 0-6-0, range six hundred.” Art hovered over Paul as he cranked the new data in, making him so nervous that he slipped and had to correct himself.
“Hurry up, damn it, we’re at the firing point!”
“No, we’re not,” Paul replied. “We’re too close to the track. There wouldn’t be room for the torpedoes to arm themselves. We’ll have to break off the attack.”
“Like hell we will! Exercise fish don’t have to arm themselves. Ready the stern tubes!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Jack’s “Belay that!” came at the same moment. In one stride he was at the periscope. An angle on the bow of zero meant that the other ship was heading directly at them, a fact that Art seemed to have overlooked in his anger. The chances were that they had crossed its path and were safely clear, but a submariner did not survive by taking unnecessary risks.
The eyepiece of the periscope was filled by the regulation-gray bow of the sub tender. “All ahead emergency,” Jack snapped. “Dive to one hundred feet!” As the deck started to slant, the boat pitched wildly. The men paled as they suddenly realized how close they had come to disaster.
Only Art was immune. Still caught up in his own frustration, he wheeled on Jack. “You didn’t have to interfere,” he hissed. “I had everything under control. I could have made the attack if you hadn’t butted in like that.”
“Take it easy, Art,” said Jack in a low voice. “Get a hold on yourself.” The advice was wasted.
“You cooked this up, the two of you, to make me look bad, didn’t you!” He turned on Paul. “You suckered me, you son of a bitch, but you won’t get the chance to sucker anybody else. I’ll break you for this!”
“Mister Hunt!” Jack interposed in a quarterdeck rasp. “You’re out of line and I’m relieving you of duty—get below!”
The exec blinked, hesitated, then seemed suddenly to sober. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said. He almost missed his footing on the ladder and plunged to the deck of the control room.
“As for you, you young idiot,” Jack growled to a white-faced Ensign Paul Wing, “I’ll deal with you later. Surface,” he continued in a louder voice, “and set course for home.”
* * * *
Art Hunt stood at attention next to Jack’s desk. “Sir,” he said in a strained voice, “I am requesting an immediate transfer out of Manta, for the good of the service. Here is my request.” He placed the form on the desk and stared straight ahead.
Jack didn’t glance at the paper. “Sit down, Art.” The exec looked around and perched awkwardly on the edge of the bunk. “I’m going to endorse your request,” Jack continued, “but I want to be sure that you understand my reasons.”
“Sir, my conduct this afternoon was inexcusable.”
“I agree. I could have overlooked your flare-up at me, however damaging it may have been for discipline. But you endangered the boat, then tried to shift the blame onto your subordinate. In an emergency you lost your head. For both those reasons, I don’t think you are temperamentally suited to be a line officer, and I mean to say as much in my endorsement.”
Hunt was aghast. “Would you do that? That could ruin my career!”
Jack sympathized with the other man’s state; he himself had once been branded “unfit for command” and knew what a terrible blow it was for a regular officer. In this case, however, he felt he had no other choice, and he said as much to Hunt. “It’s nothing personal, but I can’t risk that my silence might let you assume a position of responsibility for sailors’ lives. You made an excellent record for yourself in staff corps, and I’m sure a post will be found where you can make a contribution. Cheer up, man, it’s not the end of the world! Staff work is the wave of the future.”
Hunt smiled wanly. “Yes, sir.” He stood up. “Permission to go ashore, sir?”
“Granted.” Jack waved toward the request for transfer. “I’ll buck this upstairs before the day is out.” And pray they act on it before we sail, he added to himself.
* * * *
Admiral Schick summoned Jack the following afternoon. “I’m approving Lieutenant Hunt’s request for transfer,” he said without preamble. “The less said about it, the better.” Jack suddenly recalled that Art had formerly been on Schick’s staff; did the admiral feel his failure would reflect back on him? Caught up in this speculation, he missed the next few words.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“I said, you’ll have to get along without a number one for a while. I don’t have the right man for you on such short notice, but I’m sure they’ll find one in Brisbane.”
“Brisbane, sir?” Jack’s heart sank.
“Are you deaf, Commander? ‘Manta is to transit Panama and proceed to Brisbane to join Asiatic Fleet under ComSubSoWePac.’ That’s pretty clear, isn’t it, McCrary?”
Too damned clear, Jack thought. Brisbane was a nice place to visit, but as an assignment it sucked. There were at least three big objections. First of all, the campaign in the Solomons was winding down, which meant the focus of the war was shifting to the Central Pacific, away from Brisbane’s bailiwick. Second, MacArthur liked to think of the Asiatic Fleet as his private navy. He was forever sending submarines off on asinine missions to carry rifles to Filipino guerrillas. Third, and most dismaying, Jack had heard a lot about the new commander at Brisbane. Admiral Bass was taking his lead from Donitz, the German U-boat commander, and directing boat movements and actions by radio. This constant radio traffic had already been disastrous, by making it fool’s play for Jap planes and destroyers to find and sink the subs. Jack made a private resolve that Manta’s radio set would “break down” two days out of Brisbane on every patrol.
“You sail at 1600 tomorrow,” Admiral Schick continued. “I’ll be down to see you off. Good hunting, McCrary!”
Chapter 7
Ensign Ted Fuller lowered the heavy binoculars from his eyes and rested them on the railing of the bridge. For a few moments he allowed himself to enjoy the blue sky, the balmy air, and the blue-green water of the Gulf Stream. Someday, after the war, he would bring Lois sailing down here. He tried to imagine what it would be like without the roar and stench of four giant diesels, without the constant edge of danger. Just the creaking of the mast and the soft hiss of the waves along the hull.… He shook his head and raised the glasses to scan the area ahead of the boat once more.
Above him, on tiny platforms welded to the periscope shears, four sailors did the same, systematically quartering the seas and skies around the submarine, alert for anything out of the ordinary. The threat from German U-boats had eased a little in the last few months, but ships were still being torpedoed within sight of the shore and vacationers at coastal resorts were still stumbling over the oil-soaked corpses of merchant seamen. A new submarine like the Manta was particularly vulnerable. She was designed to sink rapidly, after all, and had none of the extra buoyancy built into surface warships. One torpedo, or even a single three-inch shell in the wrong place, and they would all be feeding the fishes. Then, too, the crew, however well they had been drilled, were untried in battle. They lacked the final honing, the tempering under fire, that the men of the enemy boat would have.
Their best defenses were speed and vigilance. The skipper had decreed that they make the entire run down the East Coast and across the Caribbean on the surface at full speed, zigzagging to throw off the enemy’s aim. Only the dive each morning to check the boat’s trim interrupted the headlong dash southward. Ted knew from his briefing before they sailed from New London that the Type VII U-boat, Donitz’s favorite for use in American waters, had as much turn of speed on the surface as Manta and, at less than half the size, showed a much lower and less noticeable profile. In principle the radar and sonar would detect an enemy in plenty of time to evade or attack, and both were constantly manned, but the skipper refused to trust the lives of his men to gizmos, however miraculous. In the end he, and all of them, relied on lookouts with sharp eyes, alert minds, and powerful binoculars.
There was another danger that everyone recognized and no one liked to think about. After a disgracefully slow start, the United States was beginning to wage an effective campaign against the U-boat menace with air and surface patrols, as well as escorted convoys up and down the East Coast. More and more Donitz was pulling his wolfpacks back out of coastal waters into the mid-Atlantic—that was the good news. The bad news was that sometimes the antisubmarine patrols preferred to shoot first and ask questions later. Ted had the proper recognition signal ready for use, but there was no guarantee that some green pilot would remember or even bother to read it in the excitement of spotting his first “U-boat.” If the signal was not acknowledged at once, his orders were to crash-dive. He lowered the binoculars for a moment and glanced down as if to check the location of the open hatch. As officer of the watch, he would be the last man through it. He imagined a plane diving at them, strafing the bridge with cannon and machine-gun fire, while he waited for the lookouts to lay below. Would his nerve hold up, or would he discover that he was a coward?
His eyes returned to the horizon, but his mind was now a thousand miles away, back in Groton, Connecticut. Everything had happened so quickly. Three weeks ago, on a Friday, he decided to ask Lois to marry him. He was as sure as he could be that she would say yes, but when the time came he was as jumpy as he had been on his first dive. His palms were sweaty and he had to swallow several times before he could get the words out, but she put her hand on his shoulder and whispered that she would. Then they nearly had their first fight.
Having made up his mind and won her consent, he didn’t see any point in putting it off. If they married at once, they could have a little time together before his boat sailed. Lois was as eager as he, but she was also worried about what people would say. Unlike some of her friends, she didn’t have to get married, but no one would believe that; all the old biddies would smile knowingly and count the months on their fingers! Ted finally pulled out all the stops and talked feelingly of the dangers of battle. It would mean so much to him, out there facing the enemy, to know that his wife was waiting for him to come home. The words were sincere, but he felt a little like a bastard for saying them. Still they had the effect he hoped for; Lois started crying, threw herself in his arms, and was all for finding and waking up a justice of the peace at once. It took another hour to agree that they would speak to her parents in the morning.
Mr. and Mrs. Laverdiere were not surprised by the news. They had seen it coming for weeks and had made up their minds to forget all their doubts about hasty wartime marriages. Ted was a nice lad and he and Lois were obviously in love. The rest was in God’s hands. Their only condition was that the two get married before a priest. For Ted, whose First Confession had been his last contact with the church, this demand led to a good five minutes’ worth of soul-searching, but then he fell back on the attitude his father had had, that religion is women’s concern. If Lois wanted a church wedding, she would have one.
Considering the pressures on everyone, it was quite a jolly occasion. Lieutenant daCosta had been his best man, all the Manta’s officers except Mr. Hunt, who had the watch, were there, and the skipper miraculously presented them with a bottle of real French champagne and gave Ted a full twenty-four hours off. He had to take a lot of kidding when he reported back, heavy lidded, on Thursday morning, but he knew the kidders wished him well, and since most of them were single, he secretly pitied them.
The good-byes were hard, even more wrenching than he had feared, but there was a bright spot. Lois’s superior had agreed to endorse her request for transfer to ONI in San Francisco. There was no guarantee that Manta would ever put in there, but it was a lot more likely than a return to New London, and Lois said she would feel better just knowing that she was thirty-five hundred miles closer to wherever he was. So would he, he realized as she said it. Gunner’s Mate Al Fiorentino was looking ahead to their destination—not back to New London. He and Jim Ryan stood on the cigarette deck, the platform just abaft of the periscope shears whose name went back to the days when smoking was forbidden inside submarines. They had both stood the forenoon watch and were glad for a little fresh air after lunch and a chance to chew the rag without everybody else chiming in.
“No, I’m still a pollywog,” Ryan was saying. “This is the farthest south I’ve ever been. When the war started, I was in an old R-boat out of Portsmouth, and nobody would trust that tub more than two hundred miles from port. Let me tell you, brother, after an R-class, Manta Maru is a goddamned yacht! No air-conditioning, and if you’ll believe it, not enough bunks to go around, and dripping wet all the time. That pigboat scared me a lot worse than it ever scared the Krauts, I can tell you. So you are an honest-to-God shellback, are you? What’s it like Down Under?”
Fiorentino cupped his fingertips together and waved his hand in the air. “You got to see for yourself,” he said. “I was there last year, just for three days, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I’ll trade a week in Honolulu for three days in Brisbane anytime.”
“That nice, huh,” said Ryan, impressed. “Gee, and I always heard Hawaii was beautiful, too. Waikiki, and hula-hula girls, and all. I never heard that about Australia before, but you’re the man who’s been there, I guess you oughta know.”
“Well, I didn’t see too much of the scenery, you understand. I had my hands full, you might say.”
“Oh,” said Ryan, suddenly enlightened, “you mean girls.”
“Damn right. The thing is, all the Aussies are off fighting the Krauts in Egypt or some damn place, and all the women are back home looking for some way to contribute to the war effort. It’s a sailor’s dream.” He noticed Ryan’s lack of enthusiasm and frowned. “Hey, you got something against women or something?”
“Nope, but I’m a married man. I don’t screw around the way I used to, just don’t seem to get much from it.”
“Is that a fact? You and Mr. Fuller, huh? Say, did you see him when he came back from his honeymoon? He couldn’t hardly stand up straight. Ouf!”
Ryan had elbowed him in the ribs and pointed toward the bridge. Fiorentino rubbed his side and continued in a lower tone. “So you’re married—any kids?”
“Three—two girls and a boy. Oldest girl just turned four.” He whipped out his wallet and passed it over, and Fiorentino made a show of examining the photographs. “They’re living with Mary’s people while I’m at sea. Her father’s a motorman with the MTA and has a house in South Boston that’s big enough for his kids and their kids and a few cousins as well, if any should happen to appear. It was great when I was stationed at Portsmouth, I could get down every chance I got, but now… Well, at least Mary has friends around her and people to help with the kids. That ought to make it easier for her.”
