Ghosts of Bungo Suido (6 page)

“Okay, you’ve said the requisite words. But?”

“He’s a thinker,” Gar said. “For instance, he thinks that my going after destroyer escorts is tactically nuts.”

“How do you know that?”

Gar smiled again. “He said it out loud,” he said. “We were in Control, waiting for one of the escorts to go overhead. I don’t think he meant to say it. He was just thinking it, and out it came.”

“A moment ago, you hesitated,” the admiral said. “Let me ask you something—does your hesitation have to do with what I’ll call, for want of a better term, lack of killer instinct?”

“I feel like I’m being disloyal to my XO,” Gar said, looking away for a moment. “Russ West is technically competent, experienced, respected by the wardroom and the crew, and rarely makes a mistake.”

“You’re avoiding my question.”

He was right. Gar was avoiding his question. “It may just be a matter of style, Admiral,” he said. “He would be a lot more cautious than I am, I think. He likes to wrap his brain around a tactical situation, think it through, and then do something. Me, I like to get to it. When in doubt, attack the bastards.”

The admiral smiled. “The ideal skipper is one who can do both—absorb a tactical situation, think through the options, and then go for the throat. That said, I haven’t met any ideal skippers yet. But I keep hoping.”

“Lets me out, then. I never expected the third contact in that convoy to be an I-boat.”

“But you were looking,” he said. “You weren’t down below, considering all your options. You were looking by the light of a burning tanker, and you’d already killed two destroyers. Yes, the XO was conducting the torpedo attacks, but you’d put that in motion. That’s why you get the Navy Cross and he gets the Silver Star. You’re the captain.”

“For better or for worser,” Gar said as the waiter approached.

“Exactly. Let’s eat.”

After dinner, the admiral ordered two more drinks and coffee. Gar could hear the voices of some of the other skippers in the dining room, but the screen was doing its job. The admiral ruminated about the course of the war and other generalities, and just when Gar thought that dinner with the boss was coming to a close, the admiral asked a surprising question.

“What do you know about Bungo Suido?”

“I know to stay the hell out of there,” Gar replied promptly. “We’ve lost, what, five boats in or around there? Killer instinct won’t save you in that patch of water.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now,” Gar said. “You’re facing shallow water, mines on top of mines, shore-based radar, easy air cover, day and night, not to mention the whirlpools and hundreds of fishermen in boats and sampans out there, all with radios.”

“But lots of important targets, including their remaining capital ships. The Inland Sea is kind of like their Pearl Harbor.”

“As long as they’re holed up in there, they don’t threaten anybody. Given the minefields of Bungo Suido, I’d say stationary targets are Halsey meat. And if they do come out, they have to get through multiple submarine patrol areas. Coming or going.”

The admiral nodded. He suddenly seemed distracted and then looked at his watch. Gar took the hint, stood up, and thanked him for dinner and the drinks. The admiral got up, too, thanked Gar for joining him, and then left the dining room. Gar sat back down, finished his drink, and then made his way toward the beachside doors. He didn’t know if any of the other skippers in the dining room had seen them talking, but he didn’t want anyone making a big deal about his three-star dinner date.

He hoped he hadn’t damaged Russ’s chances for his own command. He was a good solid exec, and Gar had meant what he’d said about differences in command style. The first two years of the submarine war had been very frustrating, what with defective torpedoes, the lack of a clear submarine warfare strategy, and the residual effects of three decades of peacetime navy. The so-called superstars, officers like Sam Dealey, Mush Morton, and Dick O’Kane, were so-called because they quickly broke the peacetime mold, came up with new and far more aggressive tactics, and started to sink lots of enemy ships. Increased aggressiveness was the primary feature of their command style, and that question was always lurking in the minds of the admirals when they assigned an officer to command: Was he a scrapper or a thinker? If you were a scrapper, how far did you take it? Like Gar’s going after destroyers—was that going too far? Gar knew that some of his contemporaries thought so; now he surmised that his own exec probably agreed with them.

Oh, well, he thought. That’s why the decision on who goes to command gets made at the three-star, not three-stripe, level.

He stepped out onto the expansive lanai overlooking the hotel’s private section of Waikiki. Music and the sound of women’s voices drifted up from the beach pavilions, which were in silhouette against a setting sun. “Now that’s more like it,” he said to himself and headed down toward the water. As always he was struck by the incongruity of the dreamlike scene along Waikiki Beach when contrasted with the realities of submarine warfare, where professional success meant you bathed your submarine in the body-filled debris field of another ship, and failure meant you rode your own tomb down to the abyss and an instant death when the submarine collapsed, creating the same conditions inside the sub that occurred in the cylinder in a diesel engine at the instant of ignition.

He’d come a long, long way from Somerset County in southwestern Pennsylvania’s coal country. His father, now dead, had been a miner, and his family had lived on a small place in the country some nine miles from the mine. The place was still there, but his mother, who had begun a descent into dementia, now lived with her younger sister. His younger brother had gone into the mine at eighteen but had been killed in a car accident three years later. Gar had wanted nothing to do with the mines and had used his talents as a football player and a boxer to finagle a scholarship to Penn State for one year and from there an appointment to the Naval Academy.

His reverie was interrupted by the sight of a very inebriated woman coming toward the hotel. Either that or she was executing a serious zigzag plan to confuse lurking submarines. When she staggered into a palm tree not far from where he was standing, he hurried to rescue her. She was backing away from the offending tree, cursing it roundly as Gar materialized in front of her. She looked up at him, focused intently, and announced that she had to pee.

“Looking for the ladies’ room, right?” he asked.

“Damn right,” she said. “Who’re you, anyway?”

“The guy who knows where the ladies’ room is,” he said, taking her by the arm. “Follow me.”

“You gotta pee, too?” she asked, leaning into him. He hadn’t quite seen her face, but the rest of her was most definitely female. Her hairdo was one of those waterfall numbers, dense straight blond hair that draped over half her face. She reeked of rum and was decidedly unsteady on her feet, due in part to the loss of a shoe somewhere back on the beach. She was wearing a buttoned-up sleeveless blouse and tan slacks. He put his arm around her back and steered her gently toward the hotel.

“You sure you know where we’re going?” she mumbled, clinging to his arm.

“Right through here,” he said. “Down the hall by the dining room, and there’s the ladies’ room. I’ll see you to the door. Did you get into mai-tais?”

“Jesus,” she said, then hiccupped loudly. “Some kinda rum drink. Lots of pineapple juice. Oh, shit, I think I’m gonna—”

Gar put the rudder over just in time to steer her into the darkness beyond the lanai and let nature take its course. Good thing about pineapple, he remembered. Tastes about the same coming back up as it does going down.

Once the gastric excitement subsided, he helped her back onto the sidewalk, where she exhaled forcefully, probably killing many innocent insects. He handed her a handkerchief.

“C’mon,” he said gently. “You still have to pee.”

“Still gotta pee,” she echoed. “Sorry about that. My name’s—my name’s—shit.”

“I doubt that very much,” Gar said with a grin as she sagged again.

He managed to get her to the door of the ladies’ room without any further drama but then faced a command decision. She was legless, as the Brits liked to say. She’d undoubtedly slide down to the carpeted floor if he let go.

“Here we are,” he said hopefully.

“Here we are,” she said, trying hard to focus on the door. He finally got a look at her face. She had pretty eyes except for the fact that they were so bloodshot. Her lipstick was smeared, and her cheeks were pale. He realized that, although she was amply proportioned, her forehead came up to about his breastbone. She’d looked bigger outside, but he guessed it was that mop of blond hair. She was actually rather petite.

At that moment the door opened, and an older woman stopped short. Gar had seen her before at the hotel but didn’t know who she was—one of the managers, perhaps.

“Um,” he said. “Can you possibly—”

The woman gave him a wilting look, asked him if he was proud of himself, and then took his drunken waif back with her into the ladies’ room.

Gar stared at the door for a moment and then decided that the evening’s portents had turned against him. Too bad, he thought. Cleaned up, she was probably a beautiful girl. He wondered if he should wait.

Nope, he thought. Gotta pee.

THREE

Gar watched from the bridge as the
Dragonfish
rose out of the water in the clutches of the floating dry dock. Russ West, the exec, and the ship’s diminutive ops boss, Lieutenant Hoot Gibson, stood alongside him. A second sub was being dry-docked right alongside the Dragon, and her XO was perched on the so-called cigarette deck, smoking a cigar and reading his morning message traffic. The Dragon was being docked for a new screw, work on three ballast tank valves, replacement of two torpedo tube doors, and the installation of a fourth periscope mast, which also had a radar embedded, and the new frequency-modulated sonar. The underwater hull would also be cleaned of marine growth, which was extensive enough to reduce the ship’s top speed by 2 knots.

“Does this new sonar system really see mines?” Gibson asked.

“The guys who’ve used it call it Hell’s Bells,” the exec said. “That’s what the mines sound like when the gear finds ’em.”

“Seems to me like the right answer to a mine contact is right full rudder.”

“Unless you’re trying to get
through
a channel where there are known minefields. This thing would let you skirt the edges—the Japs always plant mines in lines.”

“How in the world do they know where the Japs have planted minefields?”

“Somebody goes boom in the night?” the exec suggested. “PacFleet intel says they’ve changed the type of their fields this year, from antisurface to mainly antisubmarine. That means deeper.” He peered over the side. “Looks like we’re about there.”

“Where’s the new sonar going?”

“Bottom of the bow. It looks out and up and reportedly sees out to five, maybe six hundred yards. Enough warning to maneuver. Skipper’ll get a brief next week once it’s installed.”

The walls of the dry dock were now completely dry, and water was spilling off the ends as the platform deck surfaced. Hardhats were already walking around in rubber boots down on the platform deck, kicking dying fish back into the water. The pungent aroma of all the marine life that had been sucked into the strainers around the Dragon’s hull over the past year filled the dry dock. Gar could see the captain of the other sub and their own ship’s superintendent walking down the zigzag ladder on the wing-wall.

“Any word on when we’re going back out, Cap’n?” Gibson asked Gar, making a face at the smell.

“I’ve no idea,” he replied. “XO, let’s go down in the dock. You won’t get to see the Dragon naked very often.”

After the ship had been safely dry-docked, Gar took a shuttle bus over to the officers’ club for lunch. There he ran into Lieutenant Commander Marty McVeigh, a classmate and friend who’d gone into the naval intelligence business right after graduation. Being in the staff corps instead of the line, he was a grade behind Gar in rank and was assigned to the ever-growing staff up in Makalapa Crater working for Admiral of the Fleet Chester Nimitz. They had lunch together and shot the breeze on the course of the war, who’d been getting promoted, who’d been fired, and all the usual navy gossip. Then Marty gave Gar the first indication that their lives on
Dragonfish
were about to get really interesting.

“There’s scuttlebutt coming out of Nimitz’s office that he wants a submarine to penetrate into the Inland Sea,” Marty said.

“That would mean trying to get through Bungo Suido,” Gar said. “We’re talking death wish there. Any idea why?”

“Word is that the Japs have a brand-new, really big aircraft carrier about ready to come out. Much bigger than anything we have. With the Philippines invasion under way, Nimitz does not want that thing joining the fray.”

“So why don’t we bomb the damned thing?” Gar asked. “We’ve got the Marianas now—Guam, Tinian. If you listen to all the army air force guys, there’s not much the B-29
can’t
reach from there.”

Marty lit up a cigarette and perversely waved away the resulting cloud of blue smoke. “Those zoomies are great on propaganda,” he said, “not so great at long-range bombing, apparently. Yes, they could reach it, but the word is they can’t hit anything with precision. It’s too far for fighters to go with them, so they’re dropping from thirty thousand feet and mostly blowing up rice paddies. Anyway, the Joint Chiefs have told the army that the B-29s are to work Japanese cities. Japanese ships are the navy’s problem. You know how it is—interservice politics
über alles
.”

Gar could only shake his head. Next thing we know, he thought, the flyboys will want their own service.

“How soon before we invade the main island in the Philippines?” he asked.

“Next sixty days or so; they’re still trying to decide where to go in, if you can believe it. MacArthur has his ideas; Nimitz has his. Same old shit.”

“And they want a sub to force Bungo Suido for one carrier? I mean, hell, I’d love to get a carrier, but why not wait for him to come out? We’ve got boats all along that coast now.”