Ghosts of Bungo Suido (16 page)

“Probably ate ’em all,” the Cob offered.

“Okay, good job. He took his secret box with him, right?”

“Yes, sir, he did. It was starting a light drizzle when we put him ashore, and he was trying hard to keep it dry.”

“Wasn’t raining paper, was it?” Gar asked.

“Sir?”

ELEVEN

It took three days, not one, before they could make their move. Three long, hot, stultifying days submerged out in the middle of the Inland Sea, the boat turning in a 2-degree, 5-mile-wide circle at 250 feet, trying to conserve the battery while they waited for the weather. At night they came up to recharge the eternally thirsty batteries, running just two of the mains and keeping watch all night for scout planes or the odd itinerant patrol boat. Then back down an hour before dawn to the dreaded wait-box.

The men kept busy doing light maintenance, training, and sleeping. Gar and his department heads went over their plan for the umpteenth time in daily meetings. It was simple enough: If the Inland Sea could be visualized as a bathtub, then Hiroshima Bay was like a sink attached to one side of the bathtub, and Kure was like a soap dish attached to the sink. There were two channels up into Hiroshima Bay from the larger Inland Sea, and then one long, narrow channel down between some islands and along the east coast of Hiroshima Bay to the Kure naval arsenal. The water depths ranged from fairly deep in the first two channels to around 80 or 90 feet in the bay itself to downright hopeless right outside the Kure harbor, where there was only about 60 feet. They’d have to time the tides, too, because there was a big, 6-knot current coming through those two approach channels at ebb tide. They could submerge, barely, going through either channel to avoid detection from the shore, but if they entered the bay at the ebb, they’d only be making a net of 2 miles an hour at best over the ground against such a current.

The biggest discussion item was whether to submerge at all. They could do the thing in two stages: Transit at night well up into Hiroshima Bay, then find a hole, submerge, and wait out the following day. Then they’d make the attack the next night after about a one-hour run on the surface down to Kure. After that, well, much would depend on whether the Japs figured out they had an American sub in their inner precincts. Either way they could probably get out of the Kure area and back into Hiroshima Bay for yet another day of lying quietly near the bottom. Even if they actually sat on the bottom, which itself was a dangerous proposition, there’d only be 30 feet or so of water above the periscopes. Airplane pilots were able to see down that deep out in the open ocean, and the clarity of the water in Hiroshima Bay was just one more unknown.

The other option was to accomplish the entire mission in one night. Leave the wait-box right after sundown on the surface and drive all the way through the night to Kure. Stay on the surface and thus employ the diesels, recharging as they went, and using lousy weather to shield them from visual detection in those narrow channels. Get to Kure at around one in the morning, make the attack, and then run like hell, with the tenuous option of submerging in Hiroshima Bay if the hue and cry became too pressing. They had some good charts now, thanks to Hashimoto, and a couple of candidate hidey-holes up in Hiroshima Bay if they had to go to ground. Otherwise, shoot the place up, turn tail, and make best speed back up into the bay and then back down, through one of those two channels, and out to the safety of the relatively deep Inland Sea. By the second day of twiddling their thumbs in the wait-box, Gar had made a command decision. They’d do the whole thing on the surface. If they were detected on the way up, they’d regroup and do something different.

There was another way out of the Kure Harbor area, which was to the south of the naval base. The channel was narrow—only 500 feet wide, with a bridge 36 feet overhead and a limiting depth of 18 feet at mean low water. The Dragon drew 16 feet in her normal surfaced condition. If they had to, really
had
to, they could squeeze through there, but anyone with even a high-powered rifle could make serious trouble for them. Checking the tide tables, they saw that high water would occur while they were raising hell up in Kure. That gave them another 6 feet under the keel, but by the time they got to that choke point, the ebb current would be running, making navigation and maneuvering both difficult and dangerous. Gar and the nav team plotted the thing out anyway; there was always a chance that their preferred escape route could fill up with patrol craft and destroyers after the Dragon started tearing things up at the naval base.

They also considered painting some fake side numbers and a red meatball on the shears just to confuse shore-watchers who might catch a glimpse of them heading into Hiroshima Bay. The problem was that they looked nothing like a Jap submarine, which had large structures up on the bow and stern to support aerials, not to mention a completely different hull line. They then considered painting a swastika on each side of the sail to make a shore station think the Dragon was a German U-boat. They were allies, after all. Gar knew there had to be shore stations all around the bay and especially at the entrance channel to the Kure base. Presumably they’d have advance notice of naval unit movements, and even recognition signals and codes. The key to all these complications was going to be the weather. They needed a dark, rainy, even foggy night, and that’s what they finally got on the third night.

“Nasake-jima should be coming up on the port hand in about fifteen minutes,” the navigator announced. “Moro-shima to starboard. How’s the visibility?”

“Shitty and gritty,” the exec reported from the bridge. The air flowing down the open hatch was indeed wet and cold, but still a wonderful change from the day’s worth of breathing their own exhalations. “No lights, that I can see,” Russ added.

Gar was down in the conning tower, continuing his Mush Morton command-and-control approach of letting the exec drive the ship while he drove the tactical problem. They were taking surface-search radar observations once every five minutes, and the steep-sided Japanese islands were giving them a good nav picture. They were operating two of their four engines to reduce noise in a channel that was just 1 mile across. Gar had the boat settled as low in the water as they could get and still keep the main induction pipe dry in order to diminish their own radar signature. He wished they had had one of those radar signal detectors, but he was counting on the choppy sea and passing rainsqualls to obscure their passage through the channel. Gar knew there was a certain element of self-delusion in that thought, but they certainly should have the element of surprise here. No American sub in its right mind, etc., etc.

About halfway through the passage the exec sang out that they were getting their first visual challenge. He reported a flashing amber light from the Nasake-jima side. The island itself was just a dark blur in the night, but the light was coming from low down, practically on the water’s edge, right where you’d expect a coastal fortification to be. Somebody had seen or heard them.

The exec gave Gar a bearing, and he put the acquisition periscope on it. After a minute he realized they weren’t sending Morse code. He had two options: send something back that was nonsense, or keep the light off entirely. It seemed to him that they could barely see the Dragon, if at all, even if one of their coastal radars had detected something in the channel. If he used their own mast-mounted signal light, they’d then have a precise bearing for the second half of the challenge: a 6-inch coastal artillery gun.

“We’ll stay dark,” he told the exec. “Clear the bridge in case we have to dive.”

The two lookouts came sliding down the ladder, followed by the exec. He started to close the hatch, but Gar told him to leave it open. He mostly wanted the people off the bridge in case the shore station fired and rained shrapnel on the bridge. He kept his periscope on the blinking light, but it was losing strength. He hoped that they were pointing it out into the channel without having any idea of where those rumbling diesels were. After a minute, he couldn’t see the signal light anymore, and there was no gunfire.

They were through their first gate. The easy one, he reminded himself.

He ordered the bridge crew back up topside and told Maneuvering to bring the other two diesels on the line. What they needed now was speed. At 20 knots, they could be at the innermost part of Hiroshima Bay in just under an hour. Then they’d turn northeast through two more tight channels and finally southeast to go down the north side of Etajima island, which happened to be home to the Japanese Naval Academy. The weather was cooperating nicely, with windy rainsqualls and even a little snow for effect. According to the weather forecasts from Pearl, this system would blow through the Seto by tomorrow night, to be followed by cold and clear. By then they had to be back in the wait-box. If this thing went as planned, they could be there before dawn. After all, he asked himself with a grin, what could go wrong?

TWELVE

They reached the next bottleneck at just after midnight. By then it was blowing snow, and they were navigating by both fathometer and surface-search radar. The water was only about 80 feet deep, so now they were pretty much committed to a surface approach on Kure. If they’d been trying visual coastal navigation under these conditions they’d have been totally lost, but Hashimoto’s chart, the rocky island cliffs, and the occasional protruding pinnacle made for great radar nav. There were still no lights showing ashore, and even Hiroshima City seemed to have been blacked out. Gar had given up trying to be sparing with the radar; it was all they had. He could only hope that the normally attentive Japanese wouldn’t be scanning for an American sub radar right here in their backyard.

By 0115 they were creeping around the headland above the naval base. The diesels were secured and they were running all-electric now. The dry-dock notches and the long flat bulkhead piers made for a distinctive radar signature, and for the first time they saw lights ashore through the snow. Electric arc welding was creating splotches of bluish white lightning along the piers, and there were some even bigger lights way up in the air, probably on the booms of harbor cranes. The city might be blacked out, but this shipyard was going full blast. Gar instructed the exec and the radar nav team to get in to about 800 yards and 40 feet of water and hold there. Gar stayed on the periscope down in the conning tower to examine the waterfront through the tumbling clouds of light snow.

Okay, he thought, as he turned the scope from left to right a degree at a time, where’s this giant aircraft carrier? There was a band of lights along the harbor’s edge, then darkened warehouses and steel-yard buildings silhouetted in the background. Spaces between the buildings were either finger piers or dry docks. He spotted two destroyers moored bow to bow along the main bulkhead pier, which put them in silhouette against the welding arcs. It looked like there were other ships inside the dry docks, either moored there or up on blocks behind a caisson wall at the head of a dry dock.

Nothing that was obviously a big carrier. Had the damned thing already sailed? Were they sitting here in the lion’s mouth, on his tongue, actually, and all for nothing?

The industrial lights and welding arcs had put the background buildings into impenetrable shadow. Even with a filter, every time he focused on something in the periscope an arc welder blinded him. It was probably blinding them, too. Then he saw two fat barges tied up to the left of the leftmost destroyer. They looked a lot like the ammunition barges tied out in the West Loch of Pearl Harbor. It was customary in the U.S. Navy to remove all ammunition before a ship went into dry dock. If a ship was going into the yards for a six-month overhaul, she would drive over to an ammunition depot and do a complete off-load. If it was going to be a quick one-or two-week repair, then barges like these would be brought alongside, the ammo off-loaded, and the barges anchored nearby. If that’s what those two fat boxes were, Gar now had a way to light the target area up.

“Open all forward outer doors,” he said softly. Then he got on the ship’s announcing system.

“This is the captain speaking,” he began. “We are in position, eight hundred yards off one of Japan’s major naval shipyards. It’s snowing outside, and the shipyard is barely visible in front of us. Once we start shooting, things will happen very quickly. Right now we appear to have the element of surprise. It’s one in the morning, the night shift is going at it over there, and the rest of the base appears to be darkened-ship. Once we ID the carrier, I’m going to fire every fish we have in the tubes, so a first priority will be reloads as quickly as possible. We’re gonna shoot this place up and then run like hell back to the deep part of the Inland Sea. We will be pursued, but as long as this weather lasts, we won’t have to deal with aircraft. Stand by to stand by, and remember Pearl Harbor.”

He called the radioman up to the conning tower. “When you hear the first fish let go, go out on the HF with that message we precanned.”

The radioman nodded and dropped back down into Control. Gar and the exec had encoded an encrypted message to Pearl that said they were presently attacking the naval arsenal at Kure. That would be the first indication at SubPac that they’d actually made it through Bungo Suido and all the way to Kure. The Japanese had an excellent high-frequency direction-finding network, which was why they’d stayed off the air so far. Once Gar started shooting, there’d be no need for them to detect the Dragon through direction finding, so he wanted to get one message off to Pearl in case they never made it back out to the open sea.

Gar took a moment to think through his tactical problem. The TDC setup would be different this time. There’d be no course and speed inputs since he’d be shooting on direct bearings at a moored target. Where the hell was that carrier? There was simply nothing there big enough to be an aircraft carrier, or if there was, he might be looking at it end on and just not recognizing what he was seeing. For that, he needed more light. He told the exec to stay up on the bridge and to look for that carrier.