Final Harbor

Chapter 16

The coral atoll that is called Truk is a drowned mountain range ringed with coral reefs. The reef encloses more than 1,300 square miles of ocean and is dotted with more than 30 small islets and a dozen large islands, ancient tree-studded mountain peaks, some of which soar 1,500 feet into the air.

There are only four main passages through the coral reefs into the waters of the atoll, dangerous passages swept by fierce tides and strong currents.

Once under German control Truk and the Caroline Islands, a part of the South Pacific’s Micronesian Island belt, had passed to Japan after World War I. Japan, always frantically concerned about its own safety, had recognized the strategic importance of Micronesia. The islands sprawled across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean and bisected the sea lanes between the United States, the Philippines, China and Japan. Japan had heavily fortified the major islands in Micronesia and none was more heavily fortified than the atoll called Truk.

All four main passages through the reef were guarded by coastal guns. The Northeast Passage, most commonly used by Japan’s naval ships, was the closest passage to the island of Dublon where the main town was located and which also held a major seaplane base, a submarine base, massive storage facilities for ammunition and torpedoes and repair facilities for ships and aircraft. The Northeast Passage was also close to Eten Island with its air strip of more than 4,000 feet where light and medium bombers were stationed.

Mako moved into position off the Northeast Entrance to Truk after full dark to wait for the arrival the next morning of the battleship and its destroyer escorts. Captain Mealey had ordered a cruising depth of 250 feet all the previous day, aware that a patrolling aircraft might detect the dark bulk of Mako in the clear water if he ran for extended periods at periscope depth. Four times during the day Captain Mealey had ordered the Mako to 65 feet where he made a quick sweep around the horizon with the periscope and then Mako had been sent down into the depths.

The atmosphere within Mako was calm. The crew went about its duties with no more apparent concern than if Mako were on a practice cruise. Underneath, however, the tension ran high. The appearance of outward calm was deliberate. It was a common belief in submarines that no matter how frightened a man might be he should not give any evidence of that fright lest it trigger an outburst from another man equally frightened.

Ginch Ginty had muted his bull-like roar to a low rumble in the Forward Room when he worked on the torpedoes prior to the arrival at Truk. As he finished each torpedo he had carefully painted a message on each warhead with white paint. “Herohito Special” was his favorite. When Johnny Paul pointed out that he had misspelled “Hirohito” Ginty had glared at Paul and rumbled:

“This son of a bitch hits that ‘wagon ain’t no one gonna know if it was spelled wrong, shithead!”

John Aaron, Radioman Second Class, USNR, read his Bible daily, underlining each verse as he read it with a thin red pencil line. It was a habit of Aaron’s; when he had read through the Bible, underlining in red, he went through the Book again, this time underlining each verse in blue pencil. Then he sent the Book to his wife Samantha and bought another Bible. He had been kidded about his habit when it was first discovered but his farm-developed chest and shoulders and the steady glare of his clear, guileless blue eyes discouraged the kidding and now his habit was not only accepted, it was welcomed by Mako’s crew.

John Barber prowled his engine rooms, searching for evidence of a pending failure of equipment, growling because he could find nothing. Occasionally Lieutenant Simms would go as far aft as the Forward Engine Room to talk with Barber. Hendershot, whenever he saw Lieutenant Simms, would smile warmly at him and Simms would turn away.

In the Wardroom, Officers’ Country as it is known all over the Navy, Captain Mealey spent hours in consultation with Joe Sirocco. Sirocco had joined the U.S.S. Gudgeon months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and in those months Gudgeon had compiled an enviable record in firing practice torpedoes. The Gudgeon’s team of Captain Elton Watters, “Joe” Grenfell and Lieut. Robert Edson “Dusty” Dornin, Gudgeon’s fire-control officer, had “sunk” thirty out of thirty-two target ships they had fired at, a record that no one had ever come close to matching. Yet, in Gudgeon’s first approach against an enemy ship that same team of torpedo firing experts missed their target despite what Captain Grenfell later said had been a virtual text-book problem.

Captain Mealey had never fired a torpedo at an enemy ship and he wanted to know why Joe Grenfell and Dusty Dornin had missed. Joe Sirocco, a trained mechanical engineer with a retentive mind, had been aboard Gudgeon during the pre-war torpedo firing record and during Gudgeon’s first two war patrols. Sirocco tried to explain why the difficulties in hitting an enemy ship existed in terms that wouldn’t offend Captain Mealey’s stiff-necked Academy pride, why the Navy’s peacetime training for submarine torpedo firing had been so wastefully inefficient.

The difficulty, as Sirocco saw it, was rather simple. Basically, seven factors had to be determined to work out the mathematical formula necessary to hit a target ship with a torpedo. The firing ship’s course and speed were known, as was the speed the torpedo would travel. The course of the target ship, its distance from the submarine at the moment of firing, and at the moment the torpedo arrived, and the distance the torpedo would have to run were not known and had to be determined.

The distance of the target ship is not difficult to determine if sufficient time for periscope observation is available. An instrument in the periscope called a stadimeter gives that distance if the height of the target ship’s masts is known. The course of the target ship can be determined by the “angle on the bow (or stern)” that the target ship presents to the officer manning the periscope. The angle on the bow or stern is purely a judgment factor made by the periscope officer. If the target changes its course, if it zigzags or if it varies its speed from time to time then these factors must also be considered and worked into the torpedo problem.

The difficulty, as Sirocco saw it, was that the Navy had used its own destroyers for submarine targets. The submarines fired torpedoes equipped with “exercise” warheads, dummy warheads that were filled with water that was blown out of the head when the torpedo run was completed so the torpedo would float, head upward. A smoke pot in the exercise head aided in the recovery of the torpedo.

Submarine officers knew the height of the destroyer masts to the inch so estimating range was simple. They knew the outline of the destroyers so well that estimating the target ship’s course by its angle on the bow or stern was routine.

There was no information on the height of Japanese masts on merchant vessels. Japanese warships periodically lowered or raised the overall height of their masts to confuse a submarine captain. The unfamiliar silhouettes of Japanese ships, the often oddly shaped bow and stern lines of those ships were also confusing and often made the determination of the vital angle on the bow or stern a matter of wild guesswork.

To further complicate the difficulty it was widely believed that in firing an “angle shot,” a shot in which the torpedo is fired out of the torpedo tube and then changes course, by means of a pre-set gyroscope within the torpedo, that if the torpedo was fired in the direction of the Earth’s spin, i.e., to the west from a ship facing roughly north or south, the torpedo would skid farther in making its turn than if it were fired in the opposite direction.

“As I see it, sir,” Sirocco summed up his arguments the afternoon before the Japanese battleship was due to arrive at Truk. “As I see it, making an approach on a friendly destroyer in peacetime and doing the same thing out here on an unfamiliar target is two different kettles of fish.”

“Granted,” Mealey said. “If Joe Grenfell and Dusty Dornin had trouble then all of us who aren’t as good as that pair at firing torpedoes are going to have a great deal of trouble. The way it looks to me is if the target is valuable enough you go in to point-blank range, eight hundred yards or less! Preferably from a place abeam of the target so we don’t get confused by the angle on the bow of a type of ship we’ve never seen before.” He reached for his coffee cup and took a swallow.

“According to the intelligence report the battleship and its escorts should show up before dawn tomorrow, just before dawn. We should be able to get a fix on them with the periscope before we dive and then we can track them on sonar. We’ll go deep, two hundred and fifty feet and hug the reef. There’s a shelf there on the chart that shows about four hundred feet of water and then it drops off to over a thousand fathoms. If we stay on top of the shelf until we’re ready to commit ourselves they shouldn’t be able to pick us up on sonar.

“When we’ve got the problem down pat with sonar bearings we’ll come up, confirm the problem factors and start shooting!”

Sirocco rubbed his craggy face with a big hand. “Armor plating,” he said. “That battleship is armor plated way below its water line. Our exploders are modified for contact hits. You’ll have to set them to run deep, hit her below the plating.”

“Armor plating usually goes down twenty feet below the water line,” Mealey said. “I’ll set the torpedoes for twenty-two feet. If they’re running deeper than the depth set as everyone complains they do, we should nail her down near her keel. The book says she draws thirty-five feet.”

“Our book’s old,” Sirocco said.

“The battleship isn’t new. No matter how they’ve modernized her she’ll draw the same amount of water or more. When I start the sonar plot, the preliminary plot, I want you and Grilley to work on that at the gyro table in the Control Room where we can talk to each other. I’m going to have Edge and Botts with me in the Conning Tower. Edge can handle the TDC. He’s bright and quick. Botts can handle the periscope motors and read off the bearings to Edge. That’s about all the old man is good for. I’m thinking seriously of recommending he be given shore duty after this run.”

“The destroyer escorts, sir. How do you think they’ll deploy the twelve destroyers?”

“I’ve tried to put myself in the place of the commander of that destroyer squadron,” Mealey said slowly. “I served as Executive Officer on a destroyer once. I’ve tried to think as he would think. If I were in his shoes I’d put at least two, probably four destroyers out ahead of the battleship to make close in and distant sweeps, to clear out any submarine that might be lying in wait. I’d put two more ships aft for the same purpose. I think I’d put the remaining ships on either side of the battleship. But who the hell ever heard of using twelve destroyers to escort one battleship!”

“Let me continue to be the Devil’s Advocate, sir,” Sirocco said. “What happens to that sort of destroyer formation when the battleship nears the Northeast Entrance? We don’t know anything at all about that entrance but there’s bound to be some strong currents running through the reef, maybe even a strong tide. We don’t have tide tables, either. How will the destroyer commander use his ships? Will those ships out from sweeping go into the atoll itself?”

“I don’t think so,” Mealey said. “There’s no danger inside. The danger, if there is any and there is — we’re here — the danger will be outside. So I think his destroyers in the van will peel off the circle until the Big Boy is well inside. Then they’ll go in to the anchorage. “That’s when I intend to go under the destroyer screen, when they’re maneuvering and getting out of the way of the Big Boy so her Captain can take her in through the reef. There’ll be enough screws pounding away that they won’t be able to hear us.”

“Aircraft?”

“There will be air cover from that big airfield on that one island,” Mealey said. “But our own peacetime experience has shown us that fliers don’t usually pick up a periscope. And the Japs have weak eyes, we know that.”

“One last point, if you don’t mind,” Sirocco said.

“1 don’t mind, I welcome it, Joe.”

“If they’re on time we should pick them up when they’re an hour or more away from attack point. If he has destroyers out in the van, sweeping, what will we be doing during that time?”

“The chart shows a shelf along the sea side of the reef,” Mealey said. “You pointed it out to me yesterday. The water there is what — four, five hundred feet deep? It falls off down the side of that submerged mountain to a thousand or more fathoms. I intend to slide along at two hundred and fifty feet so the aircraft patrols can’t pick up our shadow, on top of that shelf. When we move in to the attack we’ll bore right in, come up to periscope depth, verify the sonar plot and begin shooting!

“I intend to begin shooting at eight hundred yards. That’s point-blank range! As point-blank as you can get. We’re here, a good ten to twelve hours ahead of the ETA the intelligence report gave us. If it shows up on time, if it isn’t already inside the atoll, there is simply no way I can explain a failure to get into position and shoot. My whole Naval career is riding on this one action! If I miss this opportunity I’ll be commanding a desk in some recruiting station for the rest of my career.” He got up and went through the door and into the Control Room.

Sirocco turned to Don Grilley, who had been sitting at the far end of the Wardroom table during the discussion.

“It’s a matter of priorities, Don,” Sirocco said in a half-whisper. “The importance of the target is relative to the factor it plays in your promotion. How are the torpedoes?”

“As good as we can make them,” Grilley said. “Rhodes wore a path from the Forward Room to the After Room when they were routining them. All the air flasks are topped off to three thousand pounds to the square inch and the rudder throws have been adjusted to a gnat’s ass, to quote one Ginch Ginty. The gyroscopes were taken out, spun with air and oiled and put back in. Rhodes and Ginty did that job themselves.”

“They use sperm oil to lubricate the gyros, don’t they?”

Grilley nodded. “It has no acid to corrode anything. Put it in with a hypodermic needle. I’m sure we’ll get a hot, straight normal run out of each fish. If we fire at eight hundred yards and the wake of the torpedo shows up two hundred yards aft of where the fish is, how long does that give the target ship to get out of the way? Torpedo runs at forty-five knots.”

Sirocco fiddled with his slide rule. “A little over twenty-one seconds. Not enough time to get a ship out of the way. If he gets in close and makes good periscope observations, he’s going to get hits. It’s what happens after he unloads all the tubes that concerns me.”

“Maybe he’s thinking that if he sinks a battleship, a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor will be worth it!” Grilley said with a sad smile.

“Doesn’t help us feather merchants,” Sirocco said. He stood up and stretched, the muscles in his heavy shoulders cracking. “I’d better get to work and figure out a course along that reef. What I’d like to do is get some sleep.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Grilley answered.

Captain Mealey climbed into the Conning Tower where Pete Simms was standing by the periscope.

“Full dark came down an hour ago, sir,” Simms said. “We’ll need five hours and thirty minutes for a full battery charge.”

“Very well,” Mealey said. “We’ll go up in a few minutes. I want to check something with Joe.” He went down the ladder to the Control Room and saw Aaron with his Bible in his hand.

“I hope you’re reading that, son,” Mealey said. “Pray for our success tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll do that, sir,” Aaron said. “But I think there’s something you should know about prayers, sir.”

“What?” Captain Mealey said sharply.

“ ‘No’ is also an answer, sir, to a prayer for help.”

Mealey nodded shortly and consulted with Sirocco briefly at the chart table and then went back up to the Conning Tower.

“Sixty-five feet, Control,” he ordered. Mako crept upward in the dark sea until her periscope broke water. Mealey made two full sweeps with the periscope and then snapped the handles closed.

“Stand by to surface!” he ordered. “Let’s go up. Surface! Surface! Surface!”

Mako shuddered as compressed air blasted into her ballast tanks and she rose, buoyant, her periscope shears breaking the skin of the water, and then the Conning Tower burst through the surface, the sea water streaming in silvery cascades down the camouflaged sides. Mako wallowed on the surface and with a giant snort the four main diesel exhaust stacks cleared the residual water from the outboard exhaust lines and then the engines settled down into a steady rumble, one engine on propulsion and the other three charging the two giant storage batteries that powered Mako submerged. Overhead a thick cloud pattern hid the stars. The starboard lookout raised his binoculars and sang out.

“Lights! White lights bearing zero eight zero, Bridge! Very small white lights.”

Standing on the cigaret deck Captain Mealey raised his binoculars and studied the lights. Shoreside lights, he concluded, shoreside lights on one of the islands within the atoll. The starboard lookout cleared his throat.

“I see surf, Bridge, looks like a reef bearing all along the starboard side. Can’t tell how far away it is.”

Mealey nodded to himself. The reef should be a mile to starboard. Sirocco’s navigation was excellent for a Reservist, he reflected. The man was extremely capable. Mealey thought a moment; not only was Sirocco capable but he apparently had very powerful friends. His assignment to Mako had come directly from Washington. It was unheard of to put a Reserve aboard a submarine as an Executive Officer. He wondered, as he had wondered many times before, if Sirocco was Naval Intelligence put aboard to find out about the defective Mark Six exploders. It was possible; Commander Rudd had mentioned that Captain Hinman was going to tell the President about the exploder problem.

“Permission to come topside and dump trash and garbage?” Mealey heard the voice of the mess cook and walked to the Bridge.

“Permission denied!” he snapped. “Stow the trash and garbage in the freezer locker until further orders.”

Standing at the bottom of the ladder that led to the Conning Tower, Andy “Grabby” Grabnas, Seaman First and a mess cook, shrugged his shoulders. Behind him there were eight burlap bags of garbage, each sewn tightly closed, each with a heavy stone in the bottom of the bag that had been taken from a stock of stones carried expressly to weight down the garbage bags so they would sink.

“Should have known better, Grabby,” Chief Rhodes said with a grin. “Captain isn’t going to dump garbage this close to an enemy base.”

“That wagon won’t show up,” Grabnas said. “You think I believe that stuff? I worked on my uncle’s shrimp boat down in the Florida Keys and he was the best seaman I ever saw and he couldn’t tell you within two days when he’d get us into port.” He went aft, his shoulders sagging under the weight of two bags of garbage.

At three in the morning Joe Sirocco drew a cup of strong black coffee and wolfed down two fresh doughnuts, then went to the Conning Tower and reported that he was standing by to make periscope observations to search for the target. Captain Mealey, standing on the cigaret deck, nodded approvingly as he saw the long, wide lens of the search periscope turn first toward Truk Atoll and make a long search there before turning to look toward the open sea.

An hour went by with negative reports at five-minute intervals from Sirocco. Another half hour went by with the same negative report, no masts visible. Standing on the cigaret deck Captain Mealey could see a horizon that was four and a half miles distant. The searching lens of the periscope above him could reach out to a horizon a little more than eight miles away. Given the fact that the masts of the lead destroyers would be at least as high above the sea as the periscope lens, the tops of those masts should come into view when the destroyers were still sixteen miles distant, their superstructures and hulls below the horizon. It was not likely that any lookout on the destroyers would pick up Mako. The positioning worked out by Sirocco put Mako in a line between the approaching flotilla and the dark bulk of the large island of Truk.

Captain Mealey fidgeted on the cigaret deck. In a half hour the first light of the false dawn would begin to show and he’d have to submerge to escape detection by the morning air patrols. He gripped the twin barrels of the 20-mm machine gun on the cigaret deck and ground his teeth together in frustration. Joe Sirocco’s voice floated up through the hatch from the Conning Tower.

“Bridge! Here they come!”

Mealey pushed by the OOD and paused at the hatch. “I want the lookouts to strain their eyeballs until they pop a blood vessel! I won’t be surprised by some aircraft out early or a damned patrol boat nosing along the reef!” He dropped down the hatch to the Conning Tower. Sirocco stepped away from the periscope.

“Bearing three two two, sir,” he said. Mealey put his eye to the rubber eyepiece and stared at the distant horizon. It was bare. He moved the periscope minutely from side to side and then he saw them.

Far away, barely visible against the still dark sky he saw two tiny, hair-thin sticks, the upper masts of the leading destroyers. He clung to the periscope handles, centering the periscope’s cross-hairs on the faint lines. He watched, fascinated by the sight of the thin masts and then suddenly he realized that the thin lines were thickening, growing more distinct.

“Mark!” he snapped and Sirocco noted the periscope bearing. Mealey swung the periscope in a full circle to search the horizon and the sky and then came back to the bearing where he had seen the two masts

“Damn it!” he said. “The horizon’s getting light and they’re getting close! The bastards are an hour late! We’ll never be able to get a fix on them before we dive!”

“Bridge, sah!” The deep rolling voice of Thomas Thompson, the Officer’s Cook and a superb night lookout came down the hatch.

“Bridge! I have two small dots on the horizon bearing three two five, sah!”

“Bridge!” The starboard lookout’s voice was a yell. “Aircraft! Bearing zero nine zero, taking off and circling!”

“Down periscope!” Mealey said, snapping the periscope handles up against the barrel of the periscope as Sirocco jammed a broad thumb against the button that lowered the periscope. Mealey took two long steps to the ladder to the Control Room and turned his face toward the bridge hatch.

“Dive! Dive! Dive!” he yelled.

Sirocco heard Pete Simms yell “Clear the bridge!” and then the lookouts were thudding down into the Conning Tower, taking one practiced step backward and turning and plummeting down into the Control Room. Simms slid down the ladder to the Conning Tower deck, edging to one side to let the quartermaster reach up past him and grab the toggle that hung from a short length of bronze cable fastened to the inside of the bridge hatch. The quartermaster heaved downward on the toggle and as the hatch slammed shut and latched Simms reached up and spun the locking wheel tight. Mako’s bow buoyancy tank sighed noisily as its vent valves opened and all seven main ballast tanks burped mightily and Mako slid under the sea.

“Two hundred and fifty feet!” Mealey said to Simms as he landed on the Control Room deck. “Make it fast! We’ve only got four hundred feet of water so don’t hit our ass on the rocks!”

As Mako leveled off at 250 feet Mealey punched the Battle Stations alarm button. The clanging of the gong sent Mako’s crewmen racing through the ship to their battle stations. When all the compartments had reported all Battle Stations manned, Mealey picked up the telephone and turned a switch that would let him talk to all compartments by loudspeaker.

“This is the Captain,” he said.

“The enemy destroyer line is in sight. Somewhere astern of the destroyer line there is a big battleship.

“The battleship is our primary target.

“This morning we are going to make submarine history. No other American submarine has had a shot at a battleship. No other submarine, to my knowledge, has ever successfully broken through an escort of twelve destroyers helped out by aircraft.

“We are going to make that penetration!

“We are going to hit and sink that battleship!

“Now hear this: I want complete silence about the decks. The success of our attack depends entirely on surprise, on our ability to slip under the destroyers and attack.

“Set depths on all torpedoes at twenty-two, repeat two two, feet.

“I intend to fire all tubes forward and then swing ship and fire all tubes aft.

“As soon as possible begin a reload forward of tubes one, two, three and four. Set depth on the reload torpedoes at two, repeat two feet.

“As soon as possible aft begin a reload of tubes seven and eight. Set depth on reload torpedoes at two repeat two feet.

“Reload of torpedo tubes fore and aft will begin as soon as possible without direct orders from me. Once we shoot down this battleship we’re going to have to fight our way out of here against the destroyers.

“Rig ship for depth charge attack!”

Ginty grunted as he knelt down on the deck between the two vertical banks of torpedo tubes and set the depth at twenty-two feet on the torpedoes in tubes five and six. He snapped out the depth-setting spindles and yelled at his telephone talker.

“Tell ‘em depth set at twenty-two feet all fish and spindles disengaged!” He got to his feet and walked — back into the torpedo room and began to lay out the block and tackle, called the “Tagle,” used to pull the reload torpedoes into the tubes.

“You fuckers in this here reload crew,” he growled. “Don’t panic when you see water pourin’ in from the inner doors when they open. I ain’t gonna wait until them tubes is dry enough to sleep in before I open the inner doors! Soon’s as I can manhandle that fucking inner door it’s gonna open and when it does you get the safety strap off’n the fucking fish and start pullin’ the bastard into the tube!”

Lieut. Nathan Cohen sat in front of his sonar dials, his ears covered by the big muff-like earphones, and listened to the distant sounds of ship’s propellers. He sat loosely on a stool, his eyes closed, opening them only to note the bearings on the dials, which he reported in a soft voice to Joe Sirocco. Captain Mealey watched as Sirocco plotted in the bearings on a tracking chart. Mealey turned to Lieutenant Simms.

“We’ve got maybe an hour before they get here. You’d better review your compensation figures. Once I start shooting and they start reloading fore and aft you’re going to have to be sharp as hell, Mister!” Captain Mealey’s voice was cold, impersonal.

“You broach me or dip the periscope so I can’t see and you’ll think the end of the world has come and it will have, for you!” Simms nodded and managed a sickly smile as he took a small notebook out of his shirt pocket and began to study the rows of figures he had written down earlier.

Sirocco glanced at Simms and felt a sudden pang of sorrow for the man. Simms was an able Diving Officer but the assignment he was facing called for a sensitive feel for the ship and a mind that could coolly handle a dozen or more intricate mathematical calculations simultaneously, interpret them and then give the necessary orders.

Adjusting the trim, or balance of a submerged submarine is an intricate exercise in mathematics at any time. Determining the amount of negative buoyancy that will be just sufficient to allow the submarine to cruise at a desirable depth can be figured, can be figured so closely that a single man walking from either end to the center of the ship will cause the ship to slowly sink downward.

A submerged submarine can be compared to balancing a yardstick on the edge of a razor blade after putting dozens of tiny weights of varying sizes along the length of the yardstick. Move one weight a fraction of an inch or remove a weight and the yardstick is out of balance and will tip one way or the other. When Captain Mealey began shooting at the battleship each torpedo that was fired would represent the loss of 3,000 pounds. The water that would pour into the open torpedo tube would not be as heavy as the torpedo and when the outer door to the tube was closed that water would be blown to a Water ‘Round Torpedo (WRT) tank that was aft of the torpedo tubes. Each torpedo that was reloaded represented a different problem: the shifting of 3,000 pounds 30 feet farther forward than where it had been resting on its rack. The problems that would be raised as a torpedo was fired every 6 seconds from the forward and then the after tubes was enough to drive a diving officer mad. To solve the problems the Diving Officer had to first calculate all the weight changes and write them down and then, as was usual, adjust his calculations to the speed of the Captain’s firing. It required, as well, a perfect performance. from the machinist mate who manned the trim manifold which, with a trim pump, controlled the water pumped from or flooded into the forward and after trim tanks, two auxiliary ballast tanks, negative and safety tanks. Vic Abbruzio, a Boston Italian who had ten years on submarines, stood at the trim manifold, balanced on the balls of his feet, ready for the challenge he faced. He looked at Lieutenant Simms’ wan face and grinned, his white teeth flashing in the dense black beard that covered his lower face. He made a thumbs-up motion and Pete Simms managed a weak smile.

In the Forward Torpedo Room Ginty walked over to the port side where a small brass Buddha was fastened above a bank of gauges. He rubbed the brass belly of the Buddha with a spatulate thumb.

“Give us your luck, little Chiney man,” he said softly.

Lieutenant Cohen’s voice was soft but in the dead silence of the Control Room it carried to everyone’s ears.

“I have several sets of high-speed screws, Plot. These are screws that criss-cross each other’s bearings from two four zero to two nine zero. Somewhere in the background of those high-speed screws I have a very heavy multiple screw beat, probably four screws, that I cannot get a fix on as yet.” He paused for a moment.

“If I am permitted an educated guess I would say, estimating the decibel levels, that the range to the high-speed screws has been cut roughly in half, Plot, cut in half since we dove.”

“Mr. Cohen,” Captain Mealey’s voice was low, “the screws closest to us, those are high-speed screws? Doing what?”

“Coming closer,” Cohen said. “There appear to be four sets of those screws, sir. They criss-cross. There are some other screw noises in the background, they appear to be single screws but I can’t get any fixes on them as yet.”

“Do you think they’re making too much noise to hear us?”

“I would think so, Captain. The high-speed screws are revving up pretty strongly. I know that no one on those ships can hear anything at all over sonar. There is a chance, I’d do it if I was on the other side, that they’ve got one or two ships going very slowly and trying to listen to whatever they can hear above the sound of their own ship’s noises.”

“Let’s hope they don’t think of that,” Captain Mealey said. “Can you give me any estimate of the rate of closing?”

Cohen looked at a stop-watch that hung from a cord around his neck.

“I’d say the high-speed screws will pass ahead of us in eighteen to twenty minutes if they continue as they have been for the last hour, sir.”

Captain Mealey nodded at Sirocco and Grilley who were standing at the chart table over the gyro compass with their maneuvering boards and pencils. He climbed into the Conning Tower.

Mako waited.