Final Harbor

Chapter 29

Dusty Rhodes tried to swallow the lump in his throat and failed as he stood on the New Farm Wharf in Brisbane and watched the U.S.S. Mako maneuver in the Swan River to begin the trip downriver to the sea and her fifth war patrol. The Mako was the only ship that Rhodes had ever put in commission and, he feared, the last ship that he would love as a sailor. John Barber stood beside him, his face dour.

“She’s making too much smoke out of number two engine,” Barber grunted. “Damn fool on watch isn’t taking care of things like he should.”

Rhodes nodded. His eyes were on Ginch Ginty, his new Chief’s hat already battered and “seagoing,” as he secured Mako’s topside for sea. Ginty paused in his labors and Mako finished her turn in midriver and his eyes searched the wharf. He raised a hand shoulder high in salute to the two former Chief Petty Officers and then he turned his back on the wharf and went back to his work. Lieut. Comdr. Joe Sirocco, standing a yard or so away, moved up beside Rhodes and Barber.

“Hurts a little, doesn’t it?” Sirocco said softly.

“Too damned much,” Barber grunted. “That bastard on watch in the Forward Engine Room is letting that number two engine smoke too damned much!”

“It’s like watching a daughter get married, I guess,” Sirocco said. “No matter how nice the new son-in-law is, you know that he’s not good enough for your own flesh and blood.” Barber looked at him and then nodded his head and turned away as Mako, still trailing a thin plume of smoke from her number two engine exhaust, moved down the river, the pilot boat trailing astern.

Rhodes turned to Sirocco.

“What time does our plane leave, sir?”

“Eighteen hundred,” Sirocco said. “They’ll send a car for our gear at sixteen hundred. We’d better figure on eating an early lunch and an early dinner or else eat a late lunch and take along a box lunch or something. It’s a long way to Pearl.”

“How come Ginty’s doing topside?” Barber asked as the three men walked down the wharf toward the submarine tender. “DeLucia’s Chief of the Boat, isn’t he? Captain didn’t change his mind, did he?”

“No,” Rhodes answered. “DeLucia’s smart. He knew that Ginty wanted to do the topside work, Ginch is a damned good all-around sailor, so DeLucia asked him to take topside. It makes Ginty feel important and it puts him in DeLucia’s corner.” He looked at Sirocco.

“How long you going to be in Pearl? Long enough for you to come out to the house and meet our families, have dinner with us?”

“Oh, yes, long enough for that. Probably a week or more and then I’ll go back to Washington for de-briefing and write reports for about a month and wait for my next assignment.”

“I’d hate like hell to have your job,” Barber said. “You’re a hell of a good sailor, hell of a good submariner, why’d you want to be a damned undercover agent?”

“You make it sound like something dirty,” Sirocco said. His big, battered face was grinning. “I didn’t ask for it. You know how the military is, you join up and say you’re an expert cook and they put you to driving a truck or something. I’m a mechanical engineer. So they made me an intelligence agent. I don’t like it, I never wanted it but I do it because they told me to do it. All I can say is that the two patrols on Gudgeon and the two on Mako made it worthwhile.” The three of them walked by an American Red Cross booth where coffee was on sale and on down the wharf to the Salvation Army booth where coffee and doughnuts were free. Each of them dropped a pound note in the bowl the Salvation Army girl had put at the end of the coffee bar for contributions, accepted their cups of coffee and doughnuts and walked out onto the wharf and stood in the sun.

“What did she draw for a patrol area?” Rhodes asked around a mouthful of doughnut.

“Luzon Straits,” Sirocco said. “The stretch of water just north of Luzon Island and south of Formosa. Good water, deep as hell in most places, up to three thousand fathoms if I remember the chart. Lots of small islands to hide behind. The Straits are a funnel for all the Jap shipping moving between the Philippines and the Empire; in fact everything going to and from Japan goes through the Straits.”

“Sounds like a good area,” Rhodes said.

“I’d say choice,” Sirocco answered. “I heard there was some bitching from older captains when Mako was given the area. A lot of the older guys are still virgins, haven’t sunk a ship yet. They want lots of targets so they can collect their medals and get a boost in rank. Before I forget it, I saw a ship movement memo in the Squadron office yesterday. Eelfish is over in Freemantle, getting ready to go out on her first patrol. Mike Brannon’s her skipper.”

“Good man,” Rhodes said. He chewed slowly on a piece of doughnut. “Damned good man. Mako was lucky. We had Brannon as the Exec for two runs and then we had you for two runs. I don’t know about now, with Pete Simms riding as Number Two.”

“He might be all right,” Sirocco said slowly. “The Chaplain and the Squadron legal officer were waiting for him when we got in from the last patrol. His wife’s divorce went through while we were at sea. The legal officer had all the papers. Pete seemed kind of relieved that it was all over.”

“How about their little girl?” Barber asked.

“I don’t know,” Sirocco said. “Pete said something about being able to see her any time he was in the area as long as the war is going on. Once the war is over there’s some sort of an arrangement drawn up so he can see her at regular intervals.”

“Damned shame he’s such an asshole,” Barber said. “That is a nice little kid. His wife is a nice woman, ex-wife I mean. But he’s an asshole!”

“You can use that kind of language when you’re an enlisted man,” Sirocco said with a broad grin. “But officers don’t talk about fellow officers in quite that way. You have to say he’s a gold-plated asshole.”

Chief Torpedoman Ginch Ginty stood in the middle of the Mako’s Forward Torpedo Room, his Chief’s hat pushed back on his head, his meaty fists on his hips.

“Johnny Paul Shithead,” he rumbled. “You seen me get this room ready for a war patrol four times now and by now you should know what you gotta do! I put in for you to get bumped up to First Class and you better by-God do your damned job and do it right or I’ll bust your ass down to Second Class again! They’s some clothing adrift in that upper bunk aft, they’s a thirteen-fourteen tool layin’ on the work bench space up for’d and you’ll be lookin’ for that damned tool in the bilges once we take the first sea outside of the reef. The fuckin’ deck outboard of the port sound head is crummy. Do your fuckin’ job, sailor!” He turned and stomped out of the Torpedo Room, heading aft. Johnny Paul reached for the sound-powered telephone and dialed the After Torpedo Room.

“He’s comin’ aft and he’s breathin’ fire!” he said into the telephone. “Start heavin’ around before he gets there!”

Mako dropped her pilot with a wave from Captain Hinman and turned north, her bull nose meeting the first deep swells of the sea, splitting the green water and sending a clean drift of spray out to either side as Mako settled down to the long run to her patrol area. In the days that followed Mako moved northward through the Coral Sea and then west past Cape York on the northeastern tip of Australia and into the Arafuro Sea. Then she pushed on through the southern edge of the Banda Sea, through the Flores Sea until finally she turned northward. Pete Simms came to the bridge and looked up at the moon, half-covered with clouds, and then walked back to the cigaret deck where Captain Hinman stood.

“We’re steady on course three four zero, Captain,” Simms said. “We should be abeam of Makassar to starboard in an hour.”

“Very well,” Hinman said. “When will we be off Balikpapan?”

“Day after tomorrow, roughly,” Simms said. “We should be running by on the surface at night. I’ll set the course as soon as you tell me how close you want to go into the land.”

“The Permit cleared the area three days ago,” Hinman said. “She’s been off the port for the last two weeks. Her Captain’s report that we picked up the other night said she’d made some good contacts but couldn’t close to fire.” He shook his head. “I can’t understand that; if they’re there you go after them!”

“The Permit isn’t the Mako!” Simms said jovially. “If they’re there we’ll shake ‘em up!”

“Depends,” Captain Hinman said. “Permit might have made them gun shy. I’m not going to waste any time off the port, just go on by. If something’s there we’ll attack but I want to get on to our patrol area. It should be a honey! Luzon Strait is the crossroad for everything going and coming to the Empire. You’re going to have to be damned careful with your navigation, Pete; the twenty-first parallel of latitude is the dividing line for the Pearl and the Australia boats. We have to be sure to stay well south of the parallel.”

“Got it marked with a double red line, sir,” Simms said. “Damn it, it’s good to be back at sea! Good to get away from all those civilians and those shore sailors!”

“Everything all settled on your legal problems?” Hinman said in a low voice.

“It’s over,” Simms said. “Over and done with and I’m glad. Never marry a civilian, sir. Civilian women don’t know anything about how to keep a house shipshape or how an officer’s lady should act.”

“I’m sorry it happened, Pete. Sorry for you. Sorry for her and I feel really sorry for your little girl.”

“I’m not,” Simms said in a thick voice. “From the way her mother acted I’m not sure the kid is even mine!”

Captain Hinman turned his back on Simms and raised his binoculars to his eyes and began to search the horizon to starboard. Simms stood there for a long moment and then he shrugged his shoulders and went forward to the bridge and down below decks. After he had gone Hinman lowered his binoculars and let them hang from the leather thong around his neck. He tipped his head up and watched the SD radar element making its slow circles on top of the radio mast.

He had argued for hours in Brisbane for a new radar, the SJ type, to be installed on Mako rather than an old SD type set. The SD was strictly an aircraft warning radar, useless against surface ships. The Staff Communications officer had listened to his arguments with a straight face and then had suddenly smiled at Hinman.

“Captain, you’ve already demonstrated that you can see ships at night! You don’t need this new equipment nearly as bad as some of our Captains who can’t seem to see ships in the daylight! Those are the people who need the SJ to convince them they can get into position to attack at night or in a fog. When you come back from this patrol I give you my word I’ll have a brand new SJ radar set here for you and we’ll install it. And by the way,” he paused and began to draw a series of circles on his desk pad with a pencil, “I ordered the sonar gear moved out of the Control Room and back up into the Conning Tower where it was designed to go. I can’t understand why the Navy Yard where the ship was built ever shifted that gear down into the Control Room.”

“They did it, sir, because I asked them to do it,” Captain Hinman said. “I convinced them the Conning Tower was too crowded for the gear up there, that it could be put in the Control Room where it would be close to the Plotting Party. With all respect, sir, I wish you had notified me you were going to do this.”

“I didn’t think it was necessary to do that,” the Staff Communications officer said. “The blueprints show the sonar gear should be in the Conning Tower. I didn’t want to bother you on your R and R time for something so trivial.”

Lieut. Nathan Cohen shrugged his shoulders when Captain Hinman told him that his sonar gear and dials would be in the Conning Tower. Cohen made some measurements and then took his stool to the ship’s carpenter on the submarine tender and had the man cut several inches off each leg of the stool and fasten a battery-powered light to the stool seat so that he could see his dials if a depth charge attack shattered the lights in the Conning Tower, as had happened during the attack on the battleship at Truk.

Captain Hinman walked over to the port side of the cigaret deck and looked forward, seeing the long stretch of water that was now flooded with moonlight. Somewhere out there ahead was the area where he and Mako had made their first contact with the enemy. He smiled to himself. The chances he had taken! Altering the sacred torpedo exploders, making a night attack on the surface, broadcasting his defiance of Staff orders to the submarines in the area. He shook his head, smiling gently to himself. He had been bold, almost too bold. But he was still taking chances, the exploders on the torpedoes he carried on this trip had all been modified on his orders. Chief Ginty would have to put them back the way they had been if there were any still left aboard when the war patrol was over. But the risk was worth taking, he felt confident that the exploders would work, he was sure he would have targets. He relaxed, yawning, his hip resting comfortably against the cigaret deck railing as he watched the play of the moonlight on the calm water, listening with half an ear to the muffled conversation between the Officer of the Deck and the quartermaster.

Forty miles astern of the U.S.S. Mako the U.S.S. Eelfish was plowing northward on almost the same course. Captain Mike Brannon was standing on the cigaret deck, his binoculars hanging from a leather strap around his neck. His Executive Officer, a tall, lean man whose pale blond hair and bright blue eyes marked him as of Swedish descent came back to him.

“What do you have on Mako’s position?” Brannon asked.

“We should have them on radar before we dive, sir. We can overhaul and speak to them not long after we surface tonight.”

“Thank you, John,” Brannon said. “Mako’s a fine ship.”

“You were Exec in her, weren’t you?” Lieutenant Olsen said.

“Yes, under Art Hinman. They detached both of us after her second run. I was sent to take over our ship and Captain Hinman went on a tour selling war bonds. When that was over they gave the Mako back to him. I understand she was in a hell of a shape after Arv Mealey took her against that battleship and the destroyers.”

“I talked to a guy in Perth who was aboard,” John Olsen said. “Old mustang named Botts. He said he couldn’t figure out yet how the ship stood up to the depth charging she took. Told me that the depth charges blew the after gun right off the ship and that the attack periscope was bent down at right angles with the lens down near the main deck. Must have been a hell of a thing to go through.”

“She’s a hell of a good ship,” Brannon said. “The people who built her and our ship did a good job.” He smiled broadly in the dark. “I wonder what Captain Hinman will say when we speak to him tonight!”

“I hope he doesn’t set up and shoot at us!” Olsen said. “I’d better go below now, got some work to do.” Brannon nodded and lounged against the quadruple 1.1 pom-pom gun that had been mounted on the Eelfish’s cigaret deck in place of the 20-mm gun most submarines carried. The 20-mm gun was now mounted on a small bulbous swelling out in front of the bridge and below it. Brannon rubbed his chin. If Hinman agreed perhaps the two ships could run in tandem up to the point where each had to split off to go to their respective patrol areas. If they came across any targets they could mount a twin attack, the sort of thing he and Captain Hinman had spent hours talking about during their first two war patrols. The Germans were very efficient in their use of submarine wolf attacks but the Staff Commanders in Australia and Pearl Harbor had not yet decided whether it was an acceptable form of attack. If he and Hinman could work together on such an attack maybe it would jar the Staff commands into action. He took a deep breath of the humid night air and smelled the faint trace of land in the offshore breeze that was just beginning to ruffle the surface of the ocean. He smiled in the dark as he heard the punch line of a long, very dirty story that the quartermaster was telling to the Officer of the Deck. Eelfish was his ship, a good ship with a fine crew. He’d driven them without mercy in the few short weeks he’d had after the ship was commissioned and on the long haul from the East Coast through the Panama Canal and out to Western Australia. In those weeks of endless drills he’d seen the crew change from a group of inexperienced men into a close-knit group of team players, each man knowing his own job and the job of those around him. He was satisfied they could respond to any demand he could make of them, any crisis the enemy could bring. He relaxed against the gun mount, turning his head slightly as he heard the mewling cry of a lone sea bird.