Ghosts of Bungo Suido (21 page)

What about that sound contact? He thought about that for a good nine seconds before the sleep monster pulled him down.

*   *   *

Two hours later he awoke to the squeak of his personal devil, the sound-powered phone that hung next to his head.

“Captain.”

“Repairs complete on the seal, Cap’n,” the exec said. “Radar team’s still digging around in the equipment cabinets. No visual or sonar contacts. Cooks’re getting a hot meal together. I’ve pointed us south toward the straits. I’ve got the gun teams standing easy on station.”

“What’s the weather?”

“Dark, no precip right now, no moon. Just dark.”

“Very well,” Gar said. “I’ll be up.”

He got a cup of coffee on the way through Control and climbed up into the conning tower. The exec was on the scope as he arrived, walking the eyepiece around in the familiar circle.

“Who’s topside?” Gar asked.

“OOD, two lookouts, the twenty-millimeter team, the five-inch team. Battery’s almost at eighty percent. Surface radar still not up. Sonar is cold. Best we can tell, no contacts.”

Gar went over to the DRT table to see the plot. They were out in the middle of the Inland Sea. The night before, they’d been surfaced in front of the Kure naval arsenal sinking two destroyers, setting off the ammo explosion from hell, and blasting the dry-dock caisson holding the biggest carrier they’d ever seen.

No contacts?

Gar felt a tingle at the base of his spine. If the Japs had figured out what they were doing, they’d have put a line of escorts across the escape route, down by the Hoyo channel. Then they’d follow the boat down until they could get her in a mousetrap.

“Bring everybody inside,” Gar said quietly. “Secure the gun crews, the lookouts, everybody. Once they’re safely in the house, light off the FM sonar.”

“You think they’re out there?”

“I’d be very suspicious if they’re
not
out there. Any Jap commander who knows these waters knows this is where we have to be if we’re still in the Inland Sea.”

“If they’re out there, what are they waiting for?”

“Aircraft,” Gar said. “Radar, equipped night bombers.”

“We could take a look,” he said. “The air-search radar is up.”

“I think that would create a beacon,” Gar said. “Let’s try the FM sonar first.”

It took fifteen minutes to get the various gun crews and lookouts back down. If there was nothing out there in the darkness, they’d stay on the surface for the night and work their way down toward Bungo Suido. They still had their rough plot of the minefield and the access channel they’d followed coming in. Gar wanted the battery topped off, the crew fed and rested, and the surface-search radar working before they made their run through Bungo Suido. They’d missed their carrier, but they hadn’t done all that bad.

Gong.

That sound made everyone in the conning tower freeze.

Were they in a minefield? Way out here, in the middle of nowhere?

Gong. Gong.

Gar stared at Popeye, who was wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

“Popeye,” Gar said, “we’re on the surface, for Chrissakes. What’s that thing picking up?”

“Objects on the surface?” he asked. “It looks
up,
remember, Cap’n?”

“How far?”

“A thousand yards, tops. Three of them, forty degrees apart.”

Gar’s blood ran cold. “You’re telling me we have three contacts within a thousand yards of us?”

Popeye raised his hands in frustration. “They’re not mines,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. This thing’s looking into the surface layer, zero to forty feet. They’re not big, but they’re absolutely out there.”

How long have we been sitting here, Gar thought, confident there was no enemy anywhere near us? Dear God. How I wish we had the means to detect the enemy’s radars. The Japs certainly could.

The hatch to the bridge was still open, if nothing else for the fresh air. The two guys working on the surface-search radar were muttering to one another, oblivious of what the FM sonar had come up with. The lone diesel was rumbling happily away, making amps without a care in the world.

The exec was looking at Gar with one of those what-now-boss looks.

“I have to see,” Gar said.

They’d been wearing their red goggles in the conning tower to preserve some semblance of night vision.

“It’s pitch black out there, Cap’n,” the exec said. “Three contacts at a thousand yards are waiting for something. We need to submerge.”

Waiting for something. What, for Chrissakes?

Aircraft, he remembered. They were waiting for a radar-equipped bomber to come out to catch the stupid Americans sitting almost motionless on the surface.

“I
have
to see,” Gar said again.

The exec nodded and handed him the exposure suit and his life vest. Gar heard one of the radar techs swear. Still no joy in fixing the bearing radar. He took his binoculars and went topside to the target-transmitter mount. He locked the binocs into the frame and then asked for a bearing to the nearest FM sonar contact.

The night was cold and as dark as Gar had seen it on this trip. He popped the goggles up onto his head and stared out into the darkness down the indicated bearing. The boat was making 2 knots in a southerly direction, but there was almost no wake, only the deep throbbing pulse of the sole diesel engine on the line.

They didn’t have to stay on the surface. The battery was nearly full. On the other hand, if they wanted to reach Bungo Suido by daybreak, they needed to run on the surface. Hoyo channel was not mined, or, if it was, they knew the clear channel through. Bungo Suido was different. They knew the safe way in, but after that, they’d have to do the minefield dance to get back out. That would take time and lots of amps in the can.

“Raise the air-search mast, take two sweeps,” Gar ordered. “Prepare to emergency dive. Switch to battery power and secure the diesel.”

The exec acknowledged. Gar heard the radar mast coming up while he stared hard into the darkness.

It was hopeless. There was nothing to be seen out there. The diesel engine shut down, and he heard the main induction valve at the base of the sail slam shut. Then the radar operator in the conning tower erupted:

“Single bogey, two seven zero,
inbound
! Range, five miles and closing fast!”

As Gar digested that bad news the sea lit up with the white blaze of three searchlights, each one pinned right on them. Gar stood up to say something but was interrupted by the howl of a shell coming overhead and exploding right in front of the boat.

“Dive, dive,
dive
!” he yelled down the hatch as a second shell and then a third landed close aboard, flaying the sail and the bridge with shrapnel. “Take her
down
!”

He was headed toward the hatch into the conning tower when a fourth shell hit close aboard, ricocheted across the water, and smacked into the bridge, the impact knocking him sideways. He was thrown into a heap in one corner of the bridge even as he heard the rumble of air leaving the ballast tanks and felt the boat tilt down, accelerating as she went.

The hatch. The hatch was still open. They were waiting for him.

He rolled toward it but was defeated by yet another shell, which exploded over the bridge with a white blast of energy that knocked him flat again, gasping for air and deafened.

He looked forward at the sea rushing up, an angry black curl of water surging around his feet as the deck plates tilted down so steeply that he couldn’t gain his footing. He rolled toward the hatch as the water swirled around him, his lower body already underwater, and did what he had to do. He tripped the latch and then slammed the hatch down and spun the wheel as best he could before the advancing wave swept him right off the bridge and into the cold waters of the Inland Sea.

Part II

CAST AWAY

SEVENTEEN

Gar popped up a moment later, suddenly conscious of the boat’s thrumming starboard propeller going by much too close for comfort. Pursued by more shell splashes, the Dragon disappeared in a roil of white water. A moment after that, as he surfaced in the tumult of her submergence, he heard the roar of aircraft engines and then the whistle of falling bombs. He literally didn’t know what to do next, but then there was a tremendous punch from below. It felt as if his innards were being strained through his rib cage, and then he was airborne, his arms and legs windmilling in the night air. The last thing he remembered was pulling the CO
2
lanyard on his life vest just before hitting the sea.

When he came to, he was lying on a wet wooden deck. He was on his belly, his head turned to one side, his arms extended alongside his body with palms up, and his legs stretched straight out behind him. His ears were still ringing, but he could hear the excited gabbling of Japanese and feel the deck heeling as whatever kind of ship he was on made a hard turn. His left ear was supported by the bulge of his still-inflated life jacket. He blinked the saltwater out of his stinging eyes and focused on the searchlights stabbing out into the darkness around him. One came from behind; another, dazzlingly bright, came from the wing of an aircraft that was buzzing overhead. In the light he saw a Japanese minesweeper boring in and dropping depth charges over an already disturbed area of the sea.

Gar was cold, wet, and concussed, but he was able to work out what was happening. They’d been jumped by minesweepers, not destroyers. Wooden hulled and diesel powered, not quite 200 feet long, but armed with depth-charge racks and a mine-hunting sonar. He watched in growing dismay as the spotlighted boat made its run, then turned out of the cone of light and away from her erupting depth charges; he felt the deck heel sharply as his sweeper followed its partner in to the target area. The plane flew around the action at low level, keeping the whole area lit up as they tried to find and kill Gar’s submarine. Unable to raise his head, he closed his eyes and stopped watching.

Had they made it down soon enough? Deep enough? Those bombs had gone off pretty close to the surface, so maybe, maybe … but there was something ominous about that large patch of foaming sea, reflecting an occasional sheen of oil. He heard orders being shouted behind him, then felt the thump of depth-charge projectors going off amidships. He could feel the wooden hull trembling as the diesels pushed the sweeper in at full power.

Go, Dragon, go, he thought. Dive, turn, dive some more, turn the other way, all on one lone shaft, while two FM sonars and a radar-equipped plane extended electronic talons deep into the sea, hungrily grasping for one little blip.

The searchlight above and behind Gar went out, and then came the underwater explosions on either side as his sweeper’s depth charges exploded.

Shallow, he thought. Much too shallow. These guys were excited; they’d failed to think it through. The blasts raised tremendous waterspouts into the darkness, confirming the shallow settings. They were spectacular, but the ones that did the business had to get down to 300 feet if you wanted to see debris, bodies, dead fish, and fuel oil erupting to the surface. He felt the sweeper slowing down as they waited to see what happened next.

Something kicked his right shoe, and he heard some more rapid-fire Japanese. It sounded like two men were arguing, probably over whether to keep his inert body on board or just pitch it over the side.

A third voice joined in, an older, deeper voice, ringing with authority. He heard two almost simultaneous “
Hai!
” Argument settled, orders given. He continued to play dead, although he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to go back into the cold water. As he felt hands grasping at his wet trousers and shirt, a powerful explosion went off
under
the sweeper and split it into two pieces. A Cutie? The shock knocked the men who’d been grabbing at his clothes off their feet and, he was pretty sure, right over the side. Gar wasn’t hurt because they’d just lifted him a few inches off the deck when the Dragon’s farewell gift swam silently in from behind and killed the sweeper.

One thought stuck in his mind as he tumbled back into the sea: They’d made it. They’d evaded, then sent up the acoustic homer to go find some Japanese iron. Or, in this case, wood. Then another thought occurred to him: Or had his sweeper hit a mine? He looked up over his shoulder as the front half of the sweeper leaned over and subsided into the sea with the rest of them.

The rest of them.

There were several Japanese swimming away from the wreck in the darkness. Gar couldn’t see them, but he could definitely hear them. It sounded like officers were telling their people to get out of there, and then he remembered why. There were depth charges on board, and once they left port, the Japs always carried them armed.

He tried to swim away, too, but discovered that his muscles were not going to cooperate very much. His life jacket, still partially inflated, got in the way. The best he could manage was a miserable dog paddle into the dark, away from the sinking ship, the pooling diesel fuel, and all those Japs. He’d been on the bow when the explosion hit, so any remaining depth charges ought to be in the other direction. He turned to his right and paddled harder, trying to quash the nausea rising in his stomach from the fumes. His legs felt like cold rubber, and he was having trouble concentrating. A couple of times he forgot why he was swimming away from the wreckage, where there ought to be pieces to hang on to. It had been a minesweeper. There’d be wood. Of course, the Japs would figure that out, too, and he’d have to expect a fairly hostile welcome if he tried that.

He felt rather than saw or heard a distant underwater explosion. Not a depth charge, but something else, similar to what they felt when one of their own torpedoes went off in the guts of a Jap ship a mile away. There was a second explosion, muted, as if deeper. Had the Dragon hit a mine? Gar didn’t want to think about that. Except there shouldn’t have been mines there. Too deep.

Suddenly a white light flooded the area. Between that and the saltwater in his eyes, he couldn’t see a thing. He felt the pressure of a bow wave coming, and soon another wooden hull was bumping along beside him. Once again he heard jabbering topside, and then a bowline dropped down in front of him. Instinctively he slipped into it and was unceremoniously hauled aboard like a stinky fish, which he probably resembled at that point. Once he flopped down on the deck he heard several hissing intakes of breath. He didn’t help matters by rolling over on his side and puking all over their nice wooden deck. By then there were more shouts from alongside, and they went back to work; one guy who looked like a sumo wrestler sat on his haunches, staring at Gar like he was considering the best way to turn him into chum.