Dust on the Sea (45 page)

“What happened to the second torpedo?” he asked. Then he answered his own question. “She slowed down so suddenly with the first hit that the second fish must have missed ahead.”

A second explosion. Cheers from the men in the conning tower. On the other side of the now closed control room hatch, throughout the submarine, more cheers.

“Another hit aft!” shouted Blunt. “That was our third torpedo! Our first fish slowed him down so much that the third torpedo came in and hit him halfway between the stack and the stern! He's broken in
half! The deckhouse is already half under water, the bow is high in the air. It's bent backward as though it might fall over on top of the stack! The stern is blown nearly off! Boy, those guys never knew what hit them!”

“What's the escort doing, Captain?” asked Richardson. His eagerness to see the target had vanished. There was death on the sea. The grave of a tired old ship that had never had a chance. A few survivors swimming. Chunks of debris and great globules of coal dust on the sea to mark the place where she had been.

“He's way out ahead and well clear,” responded Blunt.

“How about a look around and see if you can spot that aircraft, Skipper.”

“Oh, all right, Rich. You sure have a fixation on that airplane!” So saying, Captain Blunt began to turn the periscope in a clockwise direction, the elbow of his right arm hooked over the right handle, his left hand pushing the other. Suddenly he stopped. “By God, Rich, you're right. I never figured he could get here this fast!”

“Bearing two-zero-two,” snapped Richardson from the azimuth circle overhead. Keith would take the hint and translate it to true bearing.

“True bearing is two-five-one,” announced Keith, reading it off the dials of the TDC.

“Well, he's sure got something to look at this time,” chuckled Blunt, “but I guess we'd better not stick around with the periscope up.” He snapped up the handles of the periscope, motioned down with his thumbs. Its base sank swiftly out of sight. “Make your depth one-eight-oh feet,” he ordered. “What's the best course to get out of this place?” He was wiping his sweaty hands on the hip pockets of his uniform trousers in the characteristic gesture Rich remembered so well. “That plane was a good two miles away, maybe more. There's nothing he can do about us now. What's the bearing of the PC-boat?”

“Escort is bearing due west, shifted back to long-scale pinging and closing the target,” responded Stafford. “Sinking ship is at two-two-four.”

“Right full rudder,” ordered Blunt. “Make your new course one-five-oh. All ahead two-thirds. . . . Rich,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder, “what do you say we secure from battle stations and send for two cups of coffee, one for you and one for me? These guys can't lay a finger on us, and I'm just in the mood for a cup of that good java your boys make up forward.”

Rich forced a smile back at him. “You're giving the orders,” he said. “Right now you're still running this boat. That was the most beautifully
executed approach I've ever seen!” It sounded pompous, even patronizing. He himself would have resented the word “beautiful” in a similar circumstance. But these thoughts barely touched the fringes of his mind. A deep despair had settled upon him. He would have to talk with Keith soon. Keith alone of all the persons in the conning tower had noticed something. He had a head on him. The burden was too big, anyway, for Rich to bear alone. Keith would have some good ideas.

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“W
e have only four torpedoes left, Commodore, but
Whitefish
has sixteen. We know where the enemy is sending his ships now, but only
Whitefish
is fully effective. What we need to do now is to position her in the middle of the most likely place, and then do everything we can to make the enemy come by.”

Another evening conference over coffee in the wardroom was in progress. It differed from its interminably long predecessors, however, in one salient feature: the ebullient spirits of the wolfpack commander. The physical reaction to his strenuous athletic exertions on the periscope, and the mental ones of conducting the approach and attack, had expressed themselves in extreme fatigue. He had announced he would nap for an hour, but instead slept so soundly that it had been necessary to shake him to announce the evening meal. In the meantime,
Eel
had surfaced and was now well clear of land in the broader reaches of the Yellow Sea to the west.

Euphoria was evident in Blunt's animation and appearance. A decade had again dropped off his face. His eyes were bright and alert. The near-catatonic paralysis which had twice seemed to possess his thought processes was no longer evident. He was, Rich felt with a peculiar foreboding, again like the much-admired skipper of old. Instead of merely listening almost noncommittally to the arguments placed before him by Rich and Keith and, less frequently, one of the others, this night he joined eagerly in the discussion.

“The thing to do, Rich, is to put
Whitefish
in the Maikotsu Suido where we were, maybe all the way down at the southern end again. But how do we know the Japs will continue to run ships through it?”

“That's the main part of the problem, Commodore,” said Richardson. “They won't, if they think there's a submarine there. So far, there's still a chance they may not realize there's two of us around. If they're as confused as our headquarters sometimes seems to be, they might think a single boat got those four cargo ships the other day.

“After
Chicolar
was sunk we lay pretty low, remember, for several days. There was no reason for them to suspect more subs around, especially if they didn't get their times well coordinated. That would explain their lack of air-patrol activity, and it might even explain
Moonface. It would have been a great coup if he could have come in with proof positive of another boat in the area. Since we hit into that big convoy in the Maikotsu Suido, however, we've seen a number of aircraft. They're obviously out looking for us. If they figure they've pinpointed our location they will probably feel other areas are fairly safe. We know one thing for sure: these ships moving up the coast of Korea are vitally important to Japan's occupying forces in China. Remember the briefing we got just before getting underway.”

“What are you proposing, Rich?”

Keith's eyes were fixed upon Richardson. This had already been discussed, and Rich knew he had the wholehearted support of his executive officer. “If we send the
Whitefish
in there, Commodore,” he said slowly, “and get detected ourselves some distance away, they might think the area is clear. . . .”

“You mean deliberately get spotted by aircraft out in the middle of the Yellow Sea? They'll have their best patrol craft out looking for us, and they'll be carrying more than just the two bombs we heard the other day! When they spot us they'll keep the air saturated with aircraft! They'll prevent us from surfacing, just as we did the Nazi subs in the Atlantic! Once we zeroed in on one we stayed there till it ran out of battery, and when it had to come up, we killed it!”

A long appraising look passed between them. Blunt was now again his old self, else there would have been no chance at all for Richardson's scheme. As Keith had remarked, it made no difference whether he really had conducted a good approach or only thought he had. The effect would be the same. But though his confidence had returned, at least for the time being, his prewar submarine experience could not have prepared him to cope with the realities of aircraft. They were there, and they had to be feared, but one had a job to do regardless. Rich and Keith had realized this would be the point upon which the decision would turn. They would be pitting the vigilance of their lookouts against the speed of an airplane and an enemy pilot's ability to deliver his airborne depth charges accurately.

“Yes sir,” Richardson said, “that's just what I mean.”

The storm must have come straight down from the Gulf of Pohai, also known as the Gulf of Chihli, which was an extraordinarily apt name, thought Al Dugan. Swathed in foul-weather gear and oilskins, he, four lookouts and a quartermaster strove to keep an alert watch on
Eel
's heaving, ice-covered bridge. This was a hell of a way to fight a war. Even though he knew the scheme was to decoy Japanese antisubmarine effort away from
Whitefish
, it was just
Eel
's luck to have
to do it in a freezing norther. His own immediate misfortune was to have to spend three more hours on the bridge sticking his nose in it. This was the second day out in the middle of the Yellow Sea, and nearly all the time had been on the surface in this cursed storm. The bad weather had probably kept enemy aircraft more or less closed in also, for
Eel
had seen only half a dozen planes during the entire two-day period and, although she had deliberately dived late, the planes had never approached closely enough to drop depth charges. It was even possible the submarine wallowing in the frothy sea had escaped detection amid all the whitecapped waves. For that matter, no shipping had showed up in front of
Whitefish
's torpedo tubes either. At least, she had sent no messages. By agreement, while in the Maikotsu Suido
Whitefish
was to remain under radio silence unless her presence was revealed by an attack upon a Japanese ship.

Very likely the five cargo ships sunk during the past several days had represented a pretty fair percentage of Japan's available shipping for the supply runs to China. This alone might explain
Whitefish
's lack of contact; it was also likely that the Japanese convoy shipping officials were awaiting more certain evidence that the coast was clear before sending additional ships on the suddenly perilous voyage to the north. In the meantime, Dugan was thoroughly miserable. He hunched his shoulders inside his heavy garments, checked again to see that the hood of his parka was as tightly knotted around his face as possible. Even so, water was sneaking in, running down his neck, soaking the front of his shirt inside the fur-lined jacket which was under the waterproof parka. His mittens—he had worn a pair of woolen mittens inside a pair of leather ones—were soaked through. A thin sheeting of ice crystals had formed on the outside of the outer leather mittens, and they had lost all ability to keep out the cold. His mistake had been in thinking to warm his hands by shoving them in the pockets of his parka trousers. Water had somehow already found its way there, and it was not until he felt the wetness around his fingers inside the inner mittens that he had realized it.

The submarine was barely moving through the water, barely maintaining steerageway, keeping herself head on into the seas so that, should a sudden submergence be necessary, there would be minimal impedance by wave action. Also, to improve the diving time,
Eel
was riding well flooded down, her ballast tanks only partly emptied. She was consequently low in the water and logy in her motion, rising slowly to meet the white-crested waves as the sea thrust them relentlessly down upon her in monotonous procession. Always she rose a little, but never enough. The sea would burst through her bullnose and
over her bow in a solid mass of green icy water which would then travel aft, draining swiftly away through her slatted foredeck as she struggled to rise beneath it. It inundated the forward five-inch gun and reached the base of the bridge with sufficient force to send another shower of spray and roiled white water solidly over the forty-millimeter platform to burst against the steel bulwark behind which Dugan and his bridge crew were huddled. The lookouts had been brought down from their perches high on the periscope shears, instructed to remain close together behind the bridge bulwarks. Watching the sky was the important thing, Al had told them, repeating the instructions that all previous Officers of the Deck had told the lookouts in their turns.

“Stay especially alert for aircraft coming in low to the water,” Richardson had emphasized. There was no use to caution the lookouts about planes diving out of the sun. Until the past hour, there had been no sun. It was also unnecessary to stress to the lookouts—as all OODs had—that there was plenty of recent cause for the Japanese to be angry at any U.S. submarine they might come upon. Hopefully, they might still be willing to believe a single sub was responsible for the sinkings in the Yellow Sea, and without doubt upon finding one they would bring it under the heaviest attack they could muster. Cornelli, quartermaster of the watch, had responsibility for the after section of the sky and horizon, backing up the two lookouts assigned the port and starboard quarter. Dugan himself served that same function in the forward sector. Cornelli was also responsible for regular inspection of all six pairs of binoculars on the bridge, and for providing new dry lens paper to take the place of the wadded-up hunks of wet tissue which, after a few minutes of use, were no longer able to keep the binocular lenses clear.

It was late afternoon. The sun was low in the southwest, would be setting in another hour or so. Back aft, the feeble sputters of a single engine exhaust, constantly drowned as the sea rose above it, were a reminder that the battery was fully charged and the propellers turning over at minimum speed. It was a reminder also that, beneath them, the people inside the submarine were warm and dry. Even the men in the operating engineroom, though they might be glad for a heavy jacket, would have no difficulty avoiding the blast of cold air coming in. They could have a sandwich or a cup or coffee anytime. In the meantime, Dugan was cold, hungry, and wet.