Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2 page)

“
Up
scope.”

Gar could visualize the exec down in Control biting his lip. He and Russ had hashed this over many times before, with the exec arguing for leaving the scope down after firing when they were this close. The destroyer’s after lookout
might
see the approaching torpedo wake, but he’d
surely
see both the wake and the periscope. Gar maintained that he needed to see what happened in order to take evasive measures if the fish missed and the tin can came about.
I can’t wait for sound, XO, not when we’re in the clinch
.

There—a soundless, bright red flash, down low on the visible horizon.

“Got him!” Gar called down. “
Down
scope!” A moment later the gut-punching thump of the warhead reached the boat, followed seconds later by several smaller explosions a half mile away. The Dragon whipsawed a bit as the underwater pressure waves enveloped her.

Got him good, Gar thought, as he listened to the depth charges detonating. “
Flood
negative and make your depth three hundred feet. Helm, all ahead two-thirds and come
left
to three two five.”

The sound of smaller explosions drifted to starboard as they spiraled down and away from the sinking destroyer. The sound-powered phone talkers in the conning tower were mumbling into their phones, informing the rest of the crew that they’d killed another destroyer.

Gar, of course, felt relieved, although he knew they were just getting started. They’d counted two escorts, one ahead of what appeared to be a three-ship convoy, the other tailing astern. The second escort destroyer would be turning from the front of the convoy now, headed back to see what was going on. They couldn’t yet hear echo ranging over all that noise from the mortally injured destroyer, but Gar knew they surely would.

“Passing two hundred feet,” the diving officer called out as
Dragonfish
completed her turn to the northwest. This was the second, and most dangerous, phase of the tactic: fire from behind, go deep and 90 degrees off firing axis for 2,000 yards, then turn parallel to the convoy’s course again, slow down, go quiet, and wait to see what the remaining escort would do. It was dangerous because while they turned their stern to the action, they were the ones who became deaf.

As they opened out to 2,000 yards, Gar talked to the plotting team about the convoy. The first lookout sighting had been two smoke columns over the horizon, just before sunset. They hadn’t had to maneuver—the ships were coming right at them. Once the ships themselves hove into view, Gar had submerged and taken periscope observations. He was pretty sure he’d seen two tankers and a smaller something between them, plus one escort out front and the mast of another on the horizon. The exec, ever cautious, had wanted to confirm the convoy’s composition with the radar before they set up on it, but Gar had become convinced that the Japs could detect submarine radar if they radiated for too long. His standing orders were to keep surface and air-search radars in the standby mode unless there was no other way to see what was out there, and then to use only one sweep or two.

He reviewed the next phase with the attack team: After sprinting away from the scene of the first attack, they’d stay deep and quiet. If the other escort did not seem to be having any success locating them, they’d open out some more and then surface in the darkness, light off the diesels, and do an end-around run on the convoy at 22 knots to get back out in front of them. This time they’d be going for the high-value targets, those two tankers. Success during this phase depended on their having an accurate count of the enemy escorts. If they’d missed one, it could get really exciting.

Gar did the math: By the three-minute rule they’d be in the off-axis position in just under eight minutes. He was ever conscious of the battery’s limitations. Running submerged at full battery power was a chancy business for
Dragonfish,
although they’d done that many times, too, since he’d taken command. If they fully depleted the battery, they’d be forced to surface and duke it out with that remaining destroyer, which meant using their single deck gun against five of his, or even being rammed.

He leaned against the bulkhead near the periscopes and closed his eyes for a minute. The hatch to Control was right at his feet, and he could overhear the conversation below.

“Gotta hand it to him,” the chief of the boat was saying. “Guy can shoot.” The Dragon’s senior chief petty officer, “Swede” Svenson, was almost too tall for submarine duty; he walked in a permanent hunch to keep from banging his head on the low overhead. He had a classic Scandinavian face, all angles and eyebrows, bright blue eyes, a prominent Viking nose, and a permanently ruddy complexion. Being chief of the boat, he was, of course, called “Cob.”

“I’ll give him that, Cob,” the exec said quietly. “But this is still some crazy stuff. We should be shooting at tankers, not tin cans.”

“Maybe this
is
how it’s done, XO,” Cob said. “The Dragon’s sunk more Jap ships under Cap’n Hammond than she did in the two previous patrols.”

Gar smiled. Cob had that part right. It was all about results these days. No results or even skimpy results, the brass found someone else to be in command, which in fact was how he’d come to command of
Dragonfish
. Under Captain Mason, who’d put her in commission, they’d had several shooting opportunities and scored on none of them. Mason was a pleasant man, compassionate, tactically very conservative, and always looking out for the welfare of his officers and crew. He’d apparently been a peach to serve under, but the boat’s lack of results had resulted in his early relief.

Then the exec said something interesting. “I guess I’m just tired of being scared all the time, Cob.”

“Crew’s scared, too, XO, but they like all those Jap brag-rags on the conning tower just the same.”

The plotting team interrupted his eavesdropping. “Plot recommends coming right to zero five five, speed three, and rigging for silent running.”

“Make it so,” he replied. “Sound, you got anything?”

“Sound, negative. No echo ranging. Yet.”

“They may not suspect a sub, then,” he said as he started down the ladder into Control. There were some sotto voce groans as the ventilation shut down for silent running. The temperature in the control room rose immediately.

The exec agreed with Gar’s assessment. A tanker blowing up in a convoy always meant a sub; a destroyer going boom in the night might mean an operational accident, since subs supposedly gave destroyers a wide berth. So now they pointed the Dragon in the general direction of the convoy’s movement and waited to see what, if anything, the other destroyer did.

“XO, take the conn,” Gar said. “I need a sandwich. Have the crew stand easy on station, but let ’em know we’ll be back at it in about a half hour.”

He went forward to the tiny wardroom, where he took ten minutes to have a sandwich and a mug of coffee. The wardroom had a single table and room for six men at a time. There was a green bench on either side of the table in place of chairs. He put his mug into a dish drawer and then went to his cabin to flop for a few minutes. He needed to relax, and he also needed the crew to see that he was relaxed. What’s the Old Man doing? He’s taking a nap. Oh, okay, it must be safe, for the moment, anyway.

Thirty minutes later they called him, and he returned to the conning tower. Lieutenant Ray Gibson, the ops officer, announced, “Captain’s in Conn,” as Gar’s head cleared the hatch. Gibson was no more than five-seven in his dress shoes. He wore oversized spectacles that made him look a lot like an owl. Given that and his last name, his nickname just had to be Hoot.

Gar asked Hoot what he had for him. Gibson recited the tactical solution, their course, depth, and speed, and where they were plotting the two tankers.

“Where’s that second escort?”

“No data, Cap’n,” Gibson said. “Nobody’s echo ranging, either.”

The exec shook his head. “Two tin cans, neither one of them echo ranging? That make any sense?”

“No, sir,” Gibson said, “but there it is. Sound hasn’t heard the first ping.”

The exec eased through the crowd of people so that he could talk directly to the soundman. “Can you tune that thing, Popeye?”

“Have to take the whole system offline, XO,” Popeye Waller said. He was the ship’s senior sonar tech. “And you know what can happen then.”

What could happen was that the sometimes-balky sonar system wouldn’t come back up, and then they’d be in trouble. No sonar, no ears. The passive side of the sonar was preset into the frequency range of Japanese navy sonars. The exec wondered aloud if the Japs had changed freq.

“If he were pinging, couldn’t we just hear it through the hull?” he asked.

Popeye, who’d pushed back his headphones, rubbed his ears. “If he were pinging directional, right at us, yes, we’d probably hear that. But if he’s in omni mode, the same layer that’s protecting us would deflect most of that energy.”

“And if they’ve changed freq?”

“Then we’d never hear it until he was right on us and throwing bad shit in the water,” Popeye said. He turned around in his seat. “You think they’ve switched?”

“It’s possible,” the exec said. “We never heard the first one either, and he was right on top.”

“Okay,” Gar said. “Enough. We’ll loiter here for a little while longer, then go up and take a look. For the moment, though, I want to stay quiet until we
know
that second escort isn’t hunting.”

He was hoping the second escort was busy picking up survivors from the other destroyer. With their own speed limited to 3 knots, the convoy, going 9 knots faster than they were, was getting farther and farther away from them. He couldn’t risk depleting the battery with another 8-knot sprint, so at some point he’d have to get up on the surface and on the diesels and chase down the convoy. They had to be damned sure they didn’t surface into the loving arms of a vengeful Jap destroyer.

He wished he could close the hatch to the control room. All that hot, stinking air was doing what hot air always does: rise. Popeye had put his headphones back on and was steering the external sound heads around in a careful sector search. Nobody spoke. Everyone waited. The plotting team continued to update the tactical plot on the target convoy using dead-reckoning techniques, but they all knew it was only an estimate. They just had to wait it out. Gar told the exec to go below and start people back to their General Quarters stations.

After another half hour went by, he again asked Popeye what he was hearing.

“Ain’t heard a peep, Cap’n,” Popeye said. “Right now, it’s just biologics and white noise.”

“Well, that won’t do,” Gar said. “I really need to know where that second tin can is, and also what happened to the first one.”

The exec had come back up into the conning tower. “By definition,” he said, “the first one’s right where you torpedoed him. He’s either gone down, or he’s a floating wreck. Two thousand plus yards, that way. Everyone’s back at GQ, sir.”

“Good. I’m getting a bad feeling about that other escort, XO. We’re blind down here. What’s he doing and where the hell is he?”

Pah-pah-pah-pah.

“You asked,” the exec said softly.

Popeye clamped his headphones to his head and worked the sound-head controls. “No clear bearing, Cap’n. The layer’s got us. But he has to be close.”

“
Right
full rudder, all ahead
Bendix,
” Gar ordered. “Control, make your depth four hundred feet, fifteen-degree down bubble.”

The exec dropped into the control room as the
Dragonfish
heeled to port in her tight right turn, the bow tilting down dramatically.

Pah-pah-pah-pah.

The destroyer was close enough that they could distinguish a clear up Doppler, which meant this one was inbound with murder on his mind. They were all having to hold on as the planes bit into the Dragon’s lunge for the safety of deep water. Then Gar remembered that spiraling wasn’t the fastest way to achieve depth. He ordered the helmsman to meet her.

“Steadying on one niner zero,” the helmsman called as he whirled the small wheel, his voice exhibiting some Doppler of its own.

Now the destroyer’s screwbeats were close enough and loud enough to penetrate even the protective thermoclines, those invisible acoustic barriers formed by two layers of water at different temperatures.

Gar knew that everybody in the boat was screaming the same mental exhortation in his mind:
Go, Dragon, go.
The destroyer’s propeller sounds were now just a steady thrashing of the water as he passed overhead.

“Pass the word to stand by for depth charges,” the exec said.

No shit,
replied the silent mental chorus.

Then they all heard it: a loud click as the first hydrostatic fuse fired.

A huge blast hammered them, followed by another and then another. A choking cloud of dust, humidity haze, and bits of cork insulation rained down. The Jap was right on the bearing, Gar thought, but their fast dive had saved them. The depth charges were going off at about two fifty, far enough above them to keep the Dragon from being imploded. Two more blasts, off to starboard. Still shallow, thank God. Gar found himself rubbing his magic charm, a chief petty officer’s collar insignia he kept on his key chain.

“Passing through four hundred feet,” the diving officer called. Gar’s arms were rigid against the ladder rails behind the periscope well. Passing through? They’d gone down too fast, and now the boat was below ordered depth. Recover? Or keep going? Keep going.

“Ease your down bubble to five degrees, and make your depth
five
hundred feet,” he ordered. “
Left
standard rudder.”

The boat heeled back the other way as she executed the sudden spiral back to the left. Four more depth charges went off in succession, each one hammering the sub’s hull in an ear-squeezing bang. He’s setting them deeper now, Gar thought. The boat’s steel hull was creaking and groaning, literally changing shape at these extreme depths, where even a small leak could sink them.