War and Remembrance (20 page)

BONG!

This second metallic thunderbolt blacked out the lights and flung the deck bow-upward. In the darkness the blue sparks kept flaring, terrified groans and shouts arose over the thunderous roaring outside the hull, and a heavy body with flailing arms fetched up against Byron, crushing his back agonizingly against the ladder to the conning tower.

This time it truly felt like the end, with the submarine on a horrible up-slant, sounds of breakage all around, Derringer weighing him down like a warm corpse — he could smell the tobacco breath — and the Japanese sonar baying loud, fast, and triumphant on short scale:
peeng-peeng-peeng-peeng!
Another explosion made the tortured hull scream and ring. A squirt of cold water struck Byron’s face.

Except for the lancing death in its torpedoes, the
Devilfish
was very weak and very slow. Even on the surface it could go only half as fast as the destroyer overhead. Underwater its sprint was eleven knots, its usual crawl three knots. The destroyer could run circles around it, probing for it with sonar; and the tumbling depth charges did not even have to hit. Water transmits an explosion in a shock wave. A miss thirty feet off could finish the
Devilfish.
It was just a tube of nine long narrow cylinders joined together, a habitable section of sewer pipe. Its pressure hull was less than an inch thick.

It had only one military advantage to balance its feeble sluggishness —
surprise; and it had blown its surprise. Now it was a creeping scorpion in a flashlight beam. Its only resort was to dive; the deeper it dove, the less the chance of being found and pinned by sound echoes. But in Lingayen that refuge was denied. The test depth of a fleet submarine, then a guarded secret, was four hundred twenty feet, and the safety margin was close to a hundred percent.
In extremis
the submarine captain could as a rule burrow down as far as six hundred feet, with some hope that his poor tube might survive the leaks springing at the fittings. Deeper, the heavy black fist of the sea would crumple the steel hull like tinfoil. Hoban would gladly have risked the
Devilfish
beyond test depth now; but the end of the line for him in most of Lingayen was shallow muck at about a hundred feet.

There were other hazards. A surface ship had a natural balance, but a submerged submarine was a waterlogged object. Trapped air bubbles in its tanks held it suspended, a wobbly thing hard to control. Water and fuel oil, pumped here and there through pipe mazes, made the long tube tilt one way or another, and the submarine unfolded planes much like an aircraft’s to steady it. But the vessel had to keep moving or the planes would not work.

Stopped for long, a submarine like the
Devilfish
was done for. It would slowly sink below its test depth — or in this case, into the muck — or it would pop to the surface to face the destroyer’s five-inch guns. And it could not keep moving underwater for more than a few hours, at any speed. For underwater there is no air for a combustion engine to consume. As it had only so much bottled air for its crew to breathe in a dive, so it had only so much stored power to use. Then it had to stop, lie on the bottom, or come up for air to burn fuel and get itself going again.

On the surface, the submarine wound itself up for moving underwater. The diesels not only drove the boat but also charged two huge banks of batteries with energy to their chemical brim. Submerged, the
Devilfish
would draw on these batteries. The faster it moved underwater, the quicker the batteries would go flat. At three or four knots it could stay down for about twenty-four hours. Doing radical escape maneuvers at ten knots, it would be finished in an hour or so. In extreme hazard, the captain could try to outwait his pursuer, lying on the bottom while the crew used up its air. That was the final limit: forty-eight to seventy-two hours of lying doggo, and a submarine had to choose between asphyxiation below and destroyer guns above.

The lights flickered yellowly on. Byron wiped the salt water off his face — from some fitting strained by the explosion but holding, thank God! The chief pushed himself off Byron, his mouth forming apologetic words the ensign was too deafened to hear. However, as through cotton wool he did hear Aster directly overhead bawling, “Captain, he’s got our depth cranked in. We’re getting creamed. Why don’t we go to fifty feet and give him a knuckle?”

The captain’s voice blared in the tube, “Briny, come up to fifty feet!
Fifty feet!
Acknowledge!”

“Fifty feet! Aye aye, sir!”

The planesmen steadied the vessel to climb. Their response was calm and expert, though both of them looked over their shoulders at Byron with round eyes in livid faces. As it climbed through the depth charge turbulence, the
Devilfish
made a sharp turn to create the “knuckle,” more turbulence to baffle the echo-ranging. The sailors clung to anything handy. Locking an elbow on the ladder, Byron noted on the depth gauges that the power plant must still be working, for at this angle and rate of climb they were making ten knots. Four more explosions shook the deck; hideous sounds, but farther off. This time nothing broke in the control room, though the sailors swayed and staggered, and particles of loose debris rattled in Byron’s face.

“Levelling off at fifty feet, Captain!”

“Very well. Everything okay down there?”

“Seems to be, sir.” Derringer was yanking at the broken sparking cable. The other sailors, shakily cursing, were picking instruments and rubbish off the deck.

Several more charges rumbled and grumbled below, each one duller and farther away. Then Byron’s heart jumped, as the pings of the Jap destroyer shifted to long scale:
p-t-i-i-ng! pi-i-i-i-ng!
In the Pearl Harbor drills that had been the moment of triumph, the hunter’s mournful wailing confession that he had lost the scent, and was forced back to routine search; and the down Doppler — the lowered pitch of the sound — betrayed that the destroyer had turned away from the
Devilfish.

A joy as intense as his previous fear, a wave of warm physical delight, swept over Byron. They had shaken loose, and he rode in a blooded submarine! The
Devilfish
had survived a depth charging! It had taken hard punishment, and it had eluded its pursuer. All the submarine action narratives he had ever read paled once for all into gray words. All the peacetime drills seemed child’s play. Nobody could describe a depth charging, you had to live through it. By comparison, the bombings he had experienced in Warsaw and Cavité had been mild scares. This was the real thing, the cold skull-grin of the Angel of Death, frightful enough to test any man at war. Such thoughts shot through Byron Henry’s mind with the joyous relief, when he heard the destroyer pinging again on long scale with down Doppler.

Things became quieter. The plotting team gathered again around the dead reckoning tracer. Aster and Captain Hoban descended from the conning tower to watch the picture form. The plot soon coalesced into two course lines; the destroyer heading toward the beachhead at Lingayen, the
Devilfish
moving the opposite way.

Aster said, grinning with relief, “I guess he figures we’d still try for the landing area.”

“I don’t know what he’s figuring, but this is just great!” Hoban turned to Byron. “All right. Tour the compartments, Briny, and let me have a survey of the damage.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And talk to the crew. See how they’re doing. We got some crazy screaming about water in the after torpedo room. Maybe a valve came unseated for a minute, or something.”

The captain spoke in collected tones, and seemed in every way himself, yet something about him was changed. Was it the vanished mustache? No, not that. It was the look of his eyes, Byron thought; they seemed bigger and brighter, yet dark-ringed as though with fatigue. Hoban’s brown eyes now dominated his face, alert, concerned, and shiny. The boss man had tasted his full responsibility. That would sober anybody. As Byron left the control room, Lady Aster, moistening the end of a Havana, gave him a contorted wink.

Every compartment had some minor breakage or malfunction to report — dangling bunks, shattered lamp bulbs, overturned tables, jammed water lines — but under the pounding the
Devilfish
had proved remarkably resilient; that was the sum of what Byron saw. Nothing essential to operations was down. The crew was another matter. Their condition ranged from pallid shock to profane defiance, but the note all through the submarine was dispirited; not so much because of the depth charging, though there was much obscene comment on its terrors — and in one compartment a strong smell of befouled trousers — but because the torpedoes had missed. They had taken the beating for nothing. It was a sour outcome after all the E’s in drills. This crew was used to success. Some sailors ventured mutters to Byron about the captain’s hasty shot on slow setting.

When Byron brought back his report to the wardroom, Aster and Hoban had their heads bent over a sketch for the battle account. The captain was diagramming his attack in orange ink for the enemy track, blue for the
Devilfish,
and red for the torpedoes. Hoban’s diagrams were always textbook models. “I
saw
those wakes, goddamn it, Lady,” he said wistfully, inking ruled lines. “Those new magnetic exploders are defective. I’m going to say so, by God, in the war diary and in the action report both. I don’t care if I hang for it. I know our range was long, but we had an excellent solution. The wakes went directly under the first and third ships. Those ships should have had their backs broken. The torpedoes never exploded.”

“Better check in with plot before you take the watch,” Aster said casually to Byron. “We’re heading for the entrance.”

“The entrance?”

The captain’s dark-ringed eyes gleamed at the puzzled note. “Of course. The whole landing area
is
on submarine alert now, Briny. We can’t accomplish
anything there. Up at the entrance we might find some fat pickings.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Over Hoban’s head, as he bent over the diagram, Aster grotesquely winked again. The implication was clear and jarring to Byron. The mission of the
Devilfish,
the only way it could now justify twenty years of maintenance and training, was to oppose the Japanese landing at the beachhead, no matter what the risk. They were being paid for extra-hazardous duty! Byron had assumed that, once out of the attack area, Hoban would unquestionably circle and make for the troop transports. This was the submarine’s moment, the reason it had been built and manned. Giving prudent arguments, Branch Hoban was abandoning the mission with an intact submarine, still loaded with twenty torpedoes.

They had evaded but not shaken off the destroyer. Its long-scale pings still shivered sadly and faintly in the
Devilsh’s
sonar receiver.

On Derringer’s plot the Japanese search plan soon became clear: a pattern of widening squares, much as in American antisubmarine doctrine. Off Pearl Harbor, in the peacetime exercises, a submarine that had gotten clear of its pursuer would send a sonar signal, and the destroyer would speed over for another attack run; the search phase being a tedious boring process that wasted time and fuel. But now the process was far from boring; it was the real thing, ugly, tense, and perilous. The searcher above intended to find and sink the
Devilfish.
His chances still were good.

For though the scorpion was out of the flashlight beam now, and crawling away in the dark, there was no satisfactory place to hide. Hoban had heavily depleted his batteries. The pursuer, fresh from Japan with full oil bunkers, could steam at eight or ten times Hoban’s normal underwater speed. In another few hours the
Devilfish
would have a “flat can” — no battery juice left. Much now depended on brute luck. Hoban was making a beeline away from the point where the destroyer had lost him. That was doctrine, though Byron (and obviously Aster, too) thought he should not be heading for the entrance. The destroyer captain, having completed two tight squares, was heading out on a wider sweep. If he happened to choose the right turns, he might pick up the unseen crawler again. But the night sea was a gloomy tossing blank, the choices were infinite, and failure was discouraging. Also, he might be called off to other duty. These were the hopeful factors in the problem; except that “problem” was a peacetime word, somewhat too bland for the dogged pursuit by this anonymous menace.

Standing watch in the conning tower, Byron heard the captain and the exec discuss tactics. The time of sunset had passed, and Aster wanted to surface. Running on the diesels, they could race out of the destroyer’s search
pattern at flank speed, and charge up the can for more underwater action; perhaps for an attack on this very pursuer. Hoban roundly vetoed the idea. “Goddamn it, Lady, surface? How can we gamble on unknowns? What’s the weather like up there? Suppose it’s a calm crystal-clear night? We might be up-moon from him — ever think of that? A black tin duck in the moonlight! Even the periscope could show up in binoculars. How reliable are our sonar ranges? Plus or minus a mile, we figure, but with five-inch guns waiting for us up there, maybe we’d better make that
two
miles, hey? All right. Plot has him at what now — seven thousand?”

“Seventy-five hundred and opening, sir, with strong down Doppler.”

“All right. Even so! At three or four thousand yards a lookout can pick us up with binoculars. It’s all poppycock that Japs can’t see in the dark. If that destroyer spots us surfaced with a flat can, we’ve had the course. Now if
we
could open the range to twelve or fourteen thousand, surfacing might make some sense. In fact, that’s the thing to try for. Byron! Go to seven knots.”