Secret sea; (4 page)

As Pete rigged his uniform, putting on the brand-new two-and-a-half stripe shoulder boards and then pinning his ribbons above the left breast pocket, the exec hung around. "Think you're in trouble, Captain?" he asked.

"Possibly. I generally am," Pete said, pinning the Purple Heart and the Navy Cross above the pre-Pearl Harbor, American and Pacific Theater ribbons, and the Philippine Liberation with star. Then he was ready to go. Shining the toes of his shoes on the caly^ of his legs, he started out.

"I hope the admiral doesn't take your command away from you," the exec said. "But that business yesterday was pretty foolish."

Pete turned in the doorway and faced his exec. Then he decided that this was not the time to start straightening out the exec, and he went on down the passageway.

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The admiral was walking up and down in the small oifice when Pete opened the door and went in. Two fans set on the floor made a humming noise but didn't do much about the heat.

Pete stood at attention, his cap in his hand, and said, *'Good morning. Admiral."

"Carry on," the admiral said, sitting down at his desk. **How's that ship of yours?"

"Fine, sir."

"How do you like this milk-run duty?"

Pete smiled a little. "It's a vacation, sir."

The admiral laughed. "Want to get back in the fightin' war, Martin?"

Pete studied the admiral's thin, intelligent face and wondered what was coming next. "I'd like to go back to the Pacific as a—commanding officer. Admiral," P^te said.

"All right," the admiral said. Then he got up and began to walk up and down again. "Do one more job down here, and we'll send you out."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Tonight some civilians are coming aboard your ship to install an underwater detector, Martin. The thing is absolutely top secret; so I want you to set up space for it and keep an armed guard on it around the clock. I want no one to even look at that thing except you and the special operator we're sending along with it."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"In case you get into any kind of trouble, 34

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destroy it. There are electric detonators rigged into it, and the operator has instructions to obey you."

The admiral sat down again. **The Bureau of Ships claims that this detector is absolutely cold forty. They claim that it can locate a ten-cent piece in a hundred fathoms on a dark night. We've got submarines to operate with you on the test runs and we also want you to see if it will locate subs that we think we've sunk around in the Gulf. Here's a chart with the sunk subs spotted in on it." He handed Pete a rolied-up chart.

"As soon as you give this thing a real workout, ni get you back into the shootin' war, and I'll get you out of the PCs and into subchasers. Or would you rather ride as exec on a destroyer escort or even one of the small cans?"

"I'd rather be commanding officer if it's only a raft," Pete said.

"I would too," the admiral said. ''C.O.'s the best job in the Navy. . . . All right, the civilians will be down there now. And remember, Martin, this is top secret."

"I will, Admiral."

As Pete turned to leave the admiral asked, "How old are you, Martin?"

"Twenty-four, sir."

"You must be the youngest two-and-a-half-striper in the Navy."

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Pete shook his head. **There must be a lot of the zoomie boys younger than I am, Admiral."

The admiral leaned back and laughed. **They don't count," he said.

Back aboard his ship Pete watched as the civilian workers installed the supersonic detector. He had had a small compartment emptied for the thing, and the metalsmith was welding a new hasp so that it could be locked. Pete got all the keys for the new lock from the first lieutenant and had the exec arrange with the division officers to keep a heel-and-toe watch on the door.

Going back to his cabin, he unrolled the chart and studied the positions of the submarines marked in red ink. These were the German subs which had presumably been sunk, and Pete planned the next day's cruise to take in as many of the positions as he could.

When he finished, he sat back in the soft chair, put his feet up on the desk panel, and stared at the gray steel overhead. The pit of his stomach began to feel cold as he thought about going back into the Pacific. He began to remember that October day aboard the Hoel; he heard the swhoosh of the salvo coming in. Pete thought, If I'd just said to the admiral, ^^I've had enough shootin', Admiral. I've done my share. . . ." Pete thought about Randle, the exec. For almost three years Randle had been riding ships in water as safe as

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his grandmama's bathtub. Why couldn't they get the feather merchants into the war?

Then all that went away and Pete realized that, actually, he would be glad to go out again. The monotony of the milk-run was getting him down. The sloppiness of the feather merchants, the red tape, and all the rest of it were worse than the terrible nights and days in enemy water.

Pete lowered his feet and stood up. Out loud he said, "Ole Pete Martin's goin' back to dee wah." He looked at his serious face in the mirror and suddenly laughed. Then he got serious again as he saw the dull purple on the ribbon. "But I don't want a star on that Purple Heart," he said quietly.

He put the chart in the safe, turned the dial, and went below to watch them rig the detector.

The heavy weather of the day before was gone and the Gulf of Mexico, as though apologizing for its bad behavior, was as calm as a millpond. As soon as Pete conned his ship into open water, he turned the bridge over to the officer of the deck and went down to the little compartment.

It was stinking hot in there, and the operator was sweating through his dungarees. Pete sent the messenger for an electrician's mate, who came soon and installed a fan.

"Is this thing as good as they claim it is?" Pete asked the operator.

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"It was good on shore, sir. The test runs in the lab were really something!"

"How does it work?"

"There's nothing new about it, sir. It's just a hopped-up sounding device. Instead of using sound waves going down to the bottom and being caught in a receiver on the way back, this one uses electronics. Nothing interferes with them on the way down and back, and it is much faster. As you go along, you get a very accurate picture of the whole area on this screen."

Pete watched the wavering lines of pale green on the dark, curved screen. "Can you measure length and depth with it? I mean, if you get a hump—say a sub—can you measure how long it is and how thick?"

"Yes, sir. This scale gives you the distance of whatever you're looking at from the bottom of the ship. That gives you a constant to use in interpolating the dimensions of the object." The operator turned and grinned at Pete. "Anyway, that's what they told me."

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"Well, we'll give it a workout," Pete said.

One by one they found the submarines which had been marked on the chart as "Sure." Pete spent the day between the bridge and the detector room and by the time they knocked off for the night he was convinced that the detector was good. In each area marked "Sure" the wavery green lines had perfectly outlined the hull of a submarine. They were unmistakable—long, thin, and, if on their sides, even the conning tower was outlined.

Before turning in Pete wrote up the Night Book and then prepared his courses for the next day's work, which would be to the west of Cuba where the Nazi subs had made their wolf-pack runs on the Gulf coast shipping. There were not many "Sure" kills in the area because most of the subs had been attacked by aircraft from the land and they could not verify a kill the way destroyers and subchasers could with sonic apparatus.

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By noon the next day they had found subs at two "Sures" and two "Probables" but, after careful searching, had found nothing in areas of one "Probable" and two "Doubtfuls."

"Chow down," Pete said to the operator. "After chow we'll work out these three and I think that'll satisfy all hands, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

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"Tomorrow we'll get the base to send out some subs and we'll work on them. I wouldn't be surprised if this gadget gives 'em a bad time."

The operator grinned. "They won't have a chance. We'll be all over them Kke a blanket."

Feeling a little sleepy from eating too much, Pete sat with his feet propped on a wastebasket while the exec conned the ship back and forth through a square of water. In June 1943 a torpedo-plane, fighter-plane team had reported a probable kill but had not given a very good fix on it.

"Don't believe the airedales got that one," the operator said.

Pete watched the screen. "Doesn't look like it."

"Did you notice the drop she took, sir? The bottom is almost flat at a hundred and ten feet and then it breaks off as sharp as a knife blade and goes down to nearly a thousand."

"Must have missed that," Pete said. "Watching that thing makes me sleepy. Let's run over it again." He phoned the bridge and then watched the thin lines as the ship changed course.

"Now watch," the operator said.

Suddenly, with no warning, the ocean floor reflected in the screen went from a hundred to a thousand feet.

"Let's run along the edge of that," Pete said, phoning a change of course to the bridge.

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Pete watched the screen as the ship moved inch by inch, the screws barely turning over.

Suddenly the lines humped up a little, ran roughly for about two hundred feet, then sloped down to level bottom again.

''"Wonder what that was?*' the operator said. "Can we go back over that, sir?"

Pete ordered a 180 turn.

As the green line humped up again the operator made swift notes. As the line leveled off he said, "Something down there about two hundred and fifty-five feet long and forty feet thick. Funny shape for a sub, isn't it, sir?"

"Pretty tubby," Pete said.

"Can we take a run across it, sir?"

Pete gave the order and the ship turned.

"Wow!" the operator said. "Look at that. Whatever ship that is, she went down right on the brink of that deep. It looks like two more feet to the south and she would have gone down another thousand feet."

They ran back over it again and this time, after the line dipped down into the chasm, it picked up something else. Pete had the ship sail a grid over it and the operator said at last, "That's a sub, all-right. The airedales got it after all."

Pete got up and went over to the admiral's chart. Underneath the "Probable" he wrote carefully the latitude and longitude of the submarine

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and the depth—1020 feet. As he finished he looked at the chart for the next search.

His writing, the numbers of the latitude and longitude, ran through the shaded area which marked an island. Near that was another shaded area. Two islands. Two small islands.

Suddenly, as though Narvez's log was in front of him, Pete saw the spidery Spanish writing. ". . . there are upon the chart two islands to the eastward, one of them distant four leagues, the other nearly five. . . ."

Pete didn't know how long he had been standing there staring at the chart, wondering if that shape, that mass of something lying on the brink of the sea's chasm, was the hulk of the Santa Ybel. A league was about three miles and the distances were approximately right. Two islands . . . two small islands . . . lying to the eastward. "One is barren," the log had said, "and small, whereas the other is larger and with vegetation upon it. . . ."

"What next, sir?" the operator asked.

It brought Pete back into the hot little room. "Er—let's call it a day. Shut her down and let's get some air."

As Pete climbed up to the open bridge, he found that his knees were shaking a little. On the bridge the exec moved to his side as Pete went to the shield.

Pete was almost afraid to look through the big telescope mounted on its stand, but at last he put

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his eye against the rubber piece and slowly swung the scope eastward.

*Tut her on 90. Standard," Pete ordered.

The engines began to throb, white water sliced away at the bows. Pete watched the horizon with the glass and slowly, almost like small, low clouds, the islands appeared.

Pete was holding his breath and his knees were shaking again.

One island was very small and not so much as a blade of grass grew on it. The other island was dark green with palm trees bending above it and a little lagoon formed by an arm of coral.

For a long time Pete studied the two islands as the ship passed between them. Then he put the caps back on the scope and rigged it inboard.

Then he went down to the detector room again, let himself in, and locked the door. Standing in front of the chart, he memorized the numbers he had written on it so that he would never forget them.

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