War Beneath the Waves (15 page)

For those men who were topside, it was a pleasant enough evening. The lookouts could catch the occasional aroma of flowers and soil, borne by the trade winds across the stretch of water from Borneo. Seagulls played in their wake, feasting on anything the submarine’s screws churned to the surface.

Now the radar sweeps returned no echoes other than the tiny islands north of Bali. Radio traffic was nil except for an occasional coded message that held little interest to those aboard
Billfish
. There was no sign of
Bowfin
since they last saw her near Exmouth. It appeared she was not making nearly the excellent progress that Lucas and his boat were. If there was a race to the patrol area,
Billfish
was going to win it.

On the bridge, Charlie Rush was serving as officer of the deck. He gazed all around through his binoculars, always alert, but enjoying the warm early morning sun on his back. He still had not formed an opinion of his new skipper. That was deliberate. Rush knew he’d learned from both of his former commanders, the bad one and the excellent one. But he also had learned not to make snap judgments, and especially about a skipper who clearly had the confidence of the squadron brass.

Frederic Lucas seemed competent enough. His orders to the crew were crisp and precise. He appeared to know what he was doing at the helm of a submarine, even if it was quite a different model from the only other one he had commanded.

Still, Rush overheard scuttlebutt from those who were on their second patrol with Lucas. Reports that he preferred running and hiding to boldly confronting the enemy. That he had passed up several attack opportunities rather than risk the boat even in the slightest. That his “joint operation” with
Bowfin
was all
Bowfin
and no
Billfish
.

Rush decided to withhold judgment. The stuff he overheard could just as easily be the typical grousing of sailors working in tight, smelly quarters under stressful conditions.

But he knew one thing. Frederic Lucas was not “Moke” Millican. Each skipper had his own style, his own personality. Lucas certainly had a history in submarines, albeit when nobody was shooting at him or dropping depth charges on the boat he commanded. Or submarine experience obtained from behind a desk at staff headquarters.

Millican, though, would have found out what that return on the radar was, and if it flew the Rising Sun, he would have gone in shooting. Maybe he would have stayed away from the fishing boats, as Lucas had. Maybe not.

Now, as they made their way across the Java Sea, Rush leaned casually against the rail and listened to the lookouts in the shears above him picking at each other, exchanging opinions about the looks of each other’s girlfriend back in Fremantle, arguing about the chances of their favorite baseball teams reaching the World Series next season.

“Stay alert, boys,” Rush told them during a lull. He knew they were doing just that. He called them “boys” though he was only a few years older. “It can’t be this easy all the way to the South China Sea.”

“Aye, sir,” they both answered. Several minutes passed before they resumed their good-natured arguing.

Charlie Rush grinned, cranked a bit more lens into his binoculars, and made another sweep of the horizon. If he had not known what lay ahead of them, he would have considered it a nice, casual voyage.

But he knew. He had been in these waters many times before.

Billfish
had entered the strait and the crew carefully marked their progress. A nervous, hushed vigilance replaced the calm peace of the past few hours. They were near the equator, still steaming on the surface, heading northeast toward the narrowest bottleneck in the strait. Frederic Lucas was already planning on diving—at least to periscope depth—to make the run past that point, especially since there would still be daylight when they reached it.

That was when the lookouts suddenly spotted something suspicious off to their right, a dot on the horizon. It was still too far away to determine exactly what it was. About the same time, an ominous pip showed up on the radar screen at the same bearing.

No reason to assume it was anything else but an enemy destroyer. Not in these waters. Even though it would slow their progress through the narrow passage, it was the prudent move to dive the boat immediately.

That was exactly what they did.

Through the periscope, Lucas watched the mystery vessel head quickly to the point where
Billfish
had just pulled the plug. There was no mistaking now what kind of vessel they had dodged. It was a torpedo boat—225 feet long, a three-stacker (three smokestacks). She was easily within range of
Billfish
’s torpedoes. If Captain Lucas should decide to launch an attack against her, it would be a relatively easy assault with a decent chance of success.

Miss her, though, and they could bring a rain of ordnance down on their own heads. And even if they were successful in sinking her, Lucas reasoned, they would call down a bunch of other enemy vessels and warplanes right on top of them, and especially at that point in the strait that could be a really bad thing.

“Decided against torpedo attack due to small size and glassy sea which made periscope observations hazardous,” Lucas wrote.

Reasonable assumption about the periscope. Though small and inconspicuous, the scope of a submerged moving vessel left a streak of foam on a calm sea. Lookouts on antisubmarine warships were trained to spot just such a marker.

Lucas backed his scope down into its sheath before the patrol boat got closer. He ordered the crew to go deeper and maintain a course that took them away from their diving point, leaving the enemy warship behind. As best he could determine, the warship had not seen them, nor did she have any reason to suspect they were there.

Drive away. Remain undetected. Make it to the patrol area in one piece and with a full complement of torpedoes. Do far more damage up there near Indochina without poking at the hornet’s nest way down there in the narrow Makassar Strait.

1407. Sighted smoke bearing 071 [degrees] T (Contact No. 2). Commenced approach and target was made out to be another torpedo boat, probably
Otori
or
Chidori
class, making high speed.

Now that they were running submerged, making only eight knots or so, Charlie Rush was on duty in the conning tower as diving officer. They stayed at about two hundred feet beneath the surface for the most part, operating comfortably, and reasonably safe from detection at that depth. It was only when the vessel went down about twice as far—to better than four hundred feet—that the pressure of the seawater began to do nasty things to the hull and the ship’s plumbing, not to mention the nerves of her crew. Captains of submarines ordered such dives only in the direst of circumstances.

Every ten minutes or so, doing as ordered and following standard procedure, Rush took the boat up to about sixty-five feet. That was shallow enough that he could poke the periscope just above the wave tops in the strait and have a look around.

It was on one of those bobs to the top—the tenth or eleventh, a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon—that he saw something that caused him to catch his breath.

Smoke on the horizon, back toward the east, in the direction of the island of Celebes. Smoke meant a ship of some kind. Was it a potential target or was it something they would be best to once again remain clear of?

Captain Lucas was not in the conning tower. He had gone down to the officers’ wardroom to get a bite of supper. Rush steered in the direction of the smoke. It took him only ten seconds to see what kind of menace it was beneath that black cloud. Then, moments later, he saw enough to deduce where the enemy vessel was headed and to make a good guess about what its intentions were.

He put the scope down and sent word for the captain to interrupt his meal and come to the conning tower.

“What do you have, Mr. Rush?” Lucas asked when his head popped through the hatch from below. He still chewed the last bite he had taken, and he held a cloth napkin with which he casually wiped his lips as he listened to his young officer’s report.

“Smoke on the horizon, about 070 degrees. I thought we should take a look. She appears to be a gunboat, and she’s coming our way fast. I think she knows we are here and she’s coming over to have a look.”

Lucas gave him an odd look. Then he folded his napkin and gently draped it across a nearby pipe.

“Let me take a gander.”

The skipper embraced the periscope barrel and slowly moved it back and forth in a short arc, surveying the sea in the general direction in which Rush had been looking. Then he stopped and stared hard at something for half a minute.

“I see it now,” he finally said. “Another torpedo boat. You are correct, Mr. Rush.
Otori
-class. Maybe
Chidori
. She’s making high speed, all right, but I do not agree that she is coming this way. I don’t think she has us at all.”

Either type of warship bristled with weapons, including torpedoes that could be shot through tubes similar to what
Billfish
carried, deck guns, and plenty of depth charges. They could also make better than thirty knots and drew only a few feet of water. They were extremely hard to hit with a torpedo. Or to drive away from, even on the surface. The
Otori-
and
Chidori
-class gunboats were small but very fast and maneuverable vessels. Because of their limited range, they were primarily used for coastal patrols and for enforcing blockades.

They were small but deadly.

Lucas continued to gaze almost casually through the scope. He hummed a soft tune as he moved the barrel slowly around so its optics pointed toward the front of the submarine. Charlie Rush glanced at the calibration on the scope barrel.

About ninety degrees from starboard. The enemy vessel was now almost dead ahead of them. Rush knew the son of a bitch would be clipping their periscope shortly if they did not do something.

At the speed the warship was making, and combined with the forward speed of
Billfish
—slow as the submarine might be while submerged—they would both reach the same part of the Makassar Strait in short order.

“Yes. I see what he is doing now,” Lucas said, pursing his lips. “He’s zigzagging. The angle on the bow is now . . . what? . . . ten degrees. He is not sure what is out here, so he is zigzagging to avoid attack.”

Rush’s stomach fell. Either his captain was in denial of the obvious or he was an absolute idiot! No patrol boat or destroyer was going to zigzag to avoid contact. If they were varying course, it was to try to find the exact location of the American submarine so they could blow her to hell without wasting too many barrels of TNT in the process.

“Captain, he is not zigzagging,” Rush said, just loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise in the conning tower. He amazed himself with the boldness of his own contradictory words. Not even officers were supposed to question their captain’s judgment, and especially not in front of other crew members.

Still, Rush knew he had to give Lucas the benefit of his opinion. Doing otherwise invited disaster. “I watched him, Captain. He made right for us. He has us.”

Lucas turned from the periscope, a deep frown on his face as he looked hard at his young diving officer. It would not have surprised anyone in the conning tower—including Rush—if the captain had relieved Rush as diving officer on the spot and ordered him to his quarters.

Instead, he rubbed his chin, pursed his lips, and stated his own opinion about what he saw through the scope.

“Impossible, Mr. Rush. He is much too far away. He cannot have seen us. Not our periscope. He is almost two miles away and going past us on his latest zig. He is likely headed south to intercept one of our sisters. Maybe
Bowfin
.” As if to emphasize the point, Lucas looked through the scope again, now whistling the same tune he had been humming before. “Yes, he is zigzagging. No doubt about it. He has no idea we are down here. Nonetheless, we will stay at periscope depth and maintain course, bearing 045. Use the scope only if necessary until she is well past us. I will resume my dinner. Please call me if anything changes or you see anything else that bothers you, Mr. Rush.”

Charlie Rush swallowed hard. If what he had said before bordered on insubordination, what he was about to say would be a giant step closer to mutiny. Still, he knew he had to say it. Keeping quiet was never an option. In his estimation, not speaking up would be tantamount to surrendering to certain death.

“With all due respect, Captain,” he started, and suddenly realized that he could not go back after uttering those words. He willed his voice not to break. Rush knew what he had seen in the periscope before the skipper took over. There was no doubt about his diagnosis of the situation. He had picked up more than tips and tactics from “Moke” Millican. He had acquired a keen instinct about Japanese captains and their tendencies. He had to make this captain understand what a precarious situation it was in which they had found themselves. “He has us. He is coming on an intercept course and will be pinging us in a few seconds. He knows we are here. Maybe those fishing boats we passed had some picket boats mixed in among them. Maybe the gunboat caught a glint of sun off our optics. However it was that he came to know we are here, he knows. I’m telling you, Captain, if you don’t do something right now, we are all dead.”

The control room on USS
Billfish
was nearly silent. Each crew member had his head down, doing his job, but they all heard what the fourth senior officer aboard had just told their skipper. The new kid, just about a year out of the Academy and with less than two weeks in the
Billfish
wardroom. The young man who had never even been to sub school. They had just heard him boldly challenge the opinion of one of the more experienced submarine captains in the U.S. Navy.