War and Remembrance (14 page)

When the east showed a faint graying, the captain came up on the bridge for a look at the lowering sky. “Lady wants to submerge at 0600. Why the devil should we, with this visibility? We’re a long way from Lingayen. I’m not crawling there at three knots, and let the
Salmon
and the
Porpoise
beat me to the attack. Put on four extra lookouts. Conduct continuous quadrant searches of the sky, and go to full speed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The day brightened. The
Devilfish
nauseatingly corkscrewed and jarred through gray wind-streaked swells at twenty knots. Hoban drank mug after mug of coffee, and smoked cigarette after cigarette in a cupped hand, ignoring the spray that drenched him. Coming off” watch, Byron found Aster bent over the navigator’s chart in the conning tower, gloomily chewing a dead cigar. To Byron’s “Good morning,” he barely grunted a response.

“What’s the matter, Lady?”

With a side glance at the helmsman, Aster growled, “How do we know the Jap planes don’t have radar? They’re full of surprises, those yellow monkeys. And what about Jap subs? In daylight we’re a sitting tin duck. I want to get to Lingayen fast, too. But I want to
get
there.”

Over Aster’s shoulder, Byron glanced at the chart. The peninsula projected northwestward of Luzon’s land mass like the thumb of a yellow mitten; the U-shaped blue space between thumb and hand was Lingayen Gulf. The course line showed the submarine halfway up the thumb. Beyond the tip, the projected course was a turn east along the reefs and shoals, then a turn south, back down the whole length of the thumb to the assumed landing beach, the point nearest Manila.

“Say, Lady, did you ever hear of Gunther Prien?”

“Sure. The kraut that sank the
Royal Oak
at Scapa Flow. What about him?”

“He gave a lecture in Berlin. I was there.” Byron ran a finger along the line of reefs. “He penetrated Scapa Flow through stuff like this. Found a hole and slipped through on the surface.”

Aster turned his long-jawed face to Byron, forehead knotted, mouth corners curled in his strange cold smile. “Why, Briny Henry, you getting eager to polish medals?
You?”

“Well, we’d get there faster if we cut through the reefs, wouldn’t we? And we’d duck the destroyers up at the entrance.”

Aster’s satiric look faded. He reached for the coastal pilot book.

A-OOGHA! A-OOGHA! A-OOGHA!

“Dive, dive, dive.” Branch Hoban’s voice, urgent but calm, boomed through the boat. The deck pitched forward. Lookouts dropped trampling through the dripping hatch, followed by the OOD, the captain, and last the quartermaster, slamming the hatch and dogging it shut. Byron heard the old hiss and sigh, as though the boat were a live monster taking a deep breath, and felt in his ears the sudden airtightness, before the chief below called,
“Pressure in the boat!”
The
Devilfish
slowed, plowing sluggishly downward with loud gurglings and sloshings.

Hoban wiped his streaming face. “Whitey Pringle spotted a low-flying plane. Or maybe it was a seagull. Pringle has good eyes. I didn’t argue. The sun’s starting to break through, anyhow, Lady. Level off at three hundred.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Aster said.

Byron slithered down to the control room, and walked forward on the downslanted deck. The Christmas tree of small lights on the port bulkhead, flashing the condition of every opening in the hull, showed solid green. The planesmen at their big wheels had calm eyes fixed on the depth gauges; no trace of combat anxiety here.

“Blow negative to the mark!”

The routine procedure scarcely registered on Byron. In the forward torpedo room he found Chief Hansen and his crewmen affixing warheads to two torpedoes newly loaded aboard. Byron’s eyes smarted; he had had no sleep since the departure from Manila, but he wanted to confirm torpedo readiness for himself. Hansen reported all six bow tubes loaded; all fish checked out in working order; the new secret exploders ready for insertion in the warheads. Racked along the bulkheads were yellow dummy warheads, which in peacetime had been filled with water for practice shots; compressed air would empty them, and the torpedoes would float for recovery. Unpainted iron warheads full of TNT now tipped the torpedoes; impossible to detonate without exploders, yet Byron had seen the crew handle these gray warheads with gingerly respect for the havoc and murder in them.

As Byron drank coffee with the torpedomen, crouched on a bunk slung over a torpedo, Lieutenant Aster appeared. “By the Christ, Briny, he’s going to try it.”

“Try what?”

“Why, that notion of yours. He’s been studying the chart and the sailing directions. We’re going to surface and look for a break in the reefs. He wants to talk to you about that U-boat skipper’s lecture.”

In a sparkling noonday, the black snout of the submarine broke the surface. Byron stepped unsteadily out into brilliant hot sunshine on the pitching slippery forecastle, still aslosh with foaming seawater. Lookouts and leadsmen in bulky life jackets stumbled and slipped after him. He could not help
a swift glance up at the cloudless blue sky. After the stale air below, the fresh wind was delicious as always, and the pleasure was sharper today because of the danger. Dead ahead, where the dark ocean merged into green shallows, foaming breakers roared against tiny palm islands and jagged brown rocks. White gulls came cawing and screeching over the submarine.

“All ahead one-third! Heave your leads!” Hoban’s shout from the bridge was muffled by the heavy wash on the hull and the grinding sound of the breakers. Coral heads were showing, far down in the deep — pink spires, rounded gray domes. The
Devilfish
was heading for a notch between two rocky little islands.

“Mark! Four fathoms, starboard!”

Byron perceived yellow coral sand slanting up, full of immense waving sea fans. Blown dry of ballast, the
Devilfish
was drawing about thirteen feet.

“Mark! Three fathoms, port!”

Eighteen feet. Five clear feet under the keel. With each swell the boat was rising and falling, staggering Byron’s party and drenching them with spray. The smaller island was drifting so close that he could count the coconuts on the trees. On the bridge, at the bullnose, and on the fantail, lookouts were combing the sky with binoculars. But in this sunlit waste of air, water, palms, and rocks, the only sign of man was the grotesque black vessel risen from the deep.

“All engines stop!”

From the bridge, Aster yelled through cupped hands, “Fathometer’s showing fifteen feet, Briny! What do you see?”

Slipping about, wet to the skin, Byron flailed both arms forward. “Okay! Keep coming!” he bawled, for the water shaded toward blue again beyond the notch. On either side of the submarine, ugly breakers were smashing and creaming on pitted brown rocks. The propellers thrashed; a heavy swell lifted and dropped the vessel. With a crunching
clang, clang!
the
Devilfish
shuddered and jolted forward. Byron caught a fragrant whiff of palm fronds as the islands slid by, near enough to hit with a thrown hat.

“Four fathoms, port!”

“Four fathoms, starboard!

Coral heads drifted below the hull like anchored mines, deeper and deeper. The bow was heading into blue water now. Over the crash and slosh of the breakers came the captain’s exultant bellow. “Secure leadsmen and lookouts! Prepare to dive!”

Byron stood in his cabin naked amid sodden clothes piled on the deck, drying himself with a rough grimy towel. Grinning from ear to ear, Aster looked in, green eyes brilliant as emeralds. “How about this? Well done.”

“You found the hole,” Byron said.

“Lucked into it. That chart is goddamn vague. Glad the patrol plane pilots were having their noon sukiyaki, or whatever.”

“What happened there? Did we ground?”

“Starboard screw struck a coral head. The shaft’s not sprung. The captain’s pleased as hell, Briny. Get some rest.”

Yawning and yawning, Byron slipped into the mildewy hot bunk. The
Devilfish
had sneaked itself into a tight predicament, he thought, with no easy way out. However, that was the captain’s problem. He turned off his mind like a light — Byron could do that, and it contributed much to his health, though it had often infuriated his father and his naval superiors — and fell asleep.

A shake and a husky whisper woke him. He smelled the tobacco-chewer’s breath of Derringer, the chief of the boat. “Battle stations, Mr. Henry.”

“Huh? What?” Byron slid aside the curtain, and confronted the jowly smelly face in the dim light from the passageway.
“Battle
stations?”

“Screw noises.”

“Oh ho.”

Now through the thin hull Byron heard the underwater commotion, and a high faint shuddery
ping
— a very familiar sound from exercises at sea and from the attack teacher. This echo-ranging was different: shriller, more vibrating, with a peculiar timbre.

The enemy.

They were running silent, he realized. The ventilators were off. The air was stifling. Chief Derringer’s heavy face was tightly lined with worry and excitement. Byron impulsively put out his hand. The chief grasped it with a horny paw, and left. Byron’s watch showed he had been asleep for an hour.

At general quarters he was the diving officer. Hurrying to his battle station, he was reassured by the cool working demeanor of every man in the control room — the bow and stern planesmen at their big wheels watching the depth gauges, Derringer and his plotting team huddled around the dead reckoning tracer, Whitey Pringle on the trim manifold, just as in peacetime exercises off Pearl Harbor. They had been through this a thousand times. Here was the payoff, Byron thought, of Hoban’s stiff monotonous drill schedule. Aster, smoking a long rich Havana, stood with the chief of the boat, watching the plot take form. The echo-ranging was getting louder; so was the confused noise of propellers. Ensign Quayne was at the diving officer’s post. Of all the men in the control room, only he had the wide-open eyes and shaky lips of fear. Quayne wasn’t yet part of the team; he had just survived a sinking; he was not long out of sub school. With these forgiving thoughts, Byron relieved him.

“Lady, when did all this break?”

“We picked up these clowns on sonar at about nine thousand yards. All of a sudden. We must have come out from under a thermal layer.”

“Sounds like a mess of them,” Byron said.

“Sounds like the whole goddamn landing force. This stuff is spread across a hundred degrees. We can’t sort it out yet.” Aster lightly mounted the ladder to the conning tower, gripping Byron’s shoulder as he passed.

Byron strained to hear the low conversation of Aster and the captain in the tower. A command down the voice tube, Hoban’s confident voice, quiet and tense: “Briny, come up to seventy feet. No higher, hear?
Seventy feet.”

“Seventy feet. Aye aye, sir.”

The planesmen turned their wheels. The
Devilfish
tilted up. The gauges reeled off the ascent. The outside noises grew louder still: pings and propeller thrums, now plainly ahead.

“Seventy feet, Captain.”

“Very well. Now, Briny, listen carefully. I’m going to raise number two periscope all the way.” The captain’s voice was firm and subdued. “Then I want you to come up exactly a foot, and level off— another foot, and level off— just the way we did it in that last run on the
Litchfield.
Nice and easy, you know?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The narrow shaft of the attack scope slid softly upward behind Byron, and stopped.

“Coming to sixty-nine feet, sir.”

“Very well.”

A level-off. A pause. “Coming to
sixty-eight
feet, sir.”

The planesmen were the best on the boat, an ill-sorted pair: Spiller, the freckled Texan who said “fuck” at every third word, and Marino, the solemn Italian from Chicago, never without the crucifix around his neck, never uttering so much as a “damn”; but they worked like twins, inching the submarine upward.

“Okay! Hold it! That does it!” Hoban’s voice went high, loud, almost frantic. “Wow!
Jesus Christ! Mark!
Target angle on the bow forty starboard. Down scope!”

A silence. A crackling in the loudspeaker.

P-i-i-i-ing
…
P-i-i-i-t-ng
…

The captain’s voice through the quiet submarine, controlled but with a fighting thrill in it: “Now all hands, listen to me. I’ve got three large transports in column, screened by two destroyers, one point on the port bow. The Rising Sun is flapping plain as day on all of them. It’s brightly sunny up there. This is it! I’m coming to normal approach course. Prepare the bow tubes.”

Hot pins and needles ran along Byron’s shoulders and arms. He could hear Aster and the captain arguing about the range. The periscope bobbed up behind him, and straightway down again. There was rapid talk in the
conning tower about masthead heights, and the captain harried the quartermaster for recognition manuals. The echo-ranging grew sharper and stronger, the propeller noises louder. Byron had done enough work on the torpedo data computer to picture the trigonometry in his head. On the dead reckoning tracer, the problem showed clearly: the
Devilfish
as a moving spot of light, the enemy course and its own course as two converging pencil lines. But the target’s line was jagged. The transports were zigzagging. They were still beyond torpedo range, according to Aster; or, in the captain’s judgment, barely within range. The two men were equally adept at guessing distance by masthead heights. On a submarine there was no more precise range-finder. The transports were on a zig away, and they moved faster than the crawling sub.