Ghosts of Bungo Suido

ONE

“Make your depth three hundred feet.”

The two planesmen turned their brass wheels together but in opposite directions. “Make my depth three hundred feet, aye, sir,” said the diving officer.

Gar Hammond felt the deck tipping down smoothly, but his attention remained on those screwbeats echoing audibly right through the hull as the Jap destroyer kept coming. Steady course and speed. No acceleration. Even better, he wasn’t echo ranging.

Yet.

He looked over at his exec, Lieutenant Commander Russ West, and watched him force himself to relax his grip on the console rail. “This is nuts,” West muttered, then glanced hastily in Gar’s direction, as if he’d thought it but not intended to actually say it out loud.

“Relax, XO,” Gar said, laughing. “Two thermoclines, remember? He’s deaf. As soon as he passes overhead he’ll be totally deaf.”

The exec managed a weak grin back, but the destroyer’s screwbeats were getting louder, that unmistakable pah-pah-pah sound making every man in the crowded control room clench his teeth. Gar noticed that no one in Control was making eye contact with anyone else; they’d been on enough patrols to know that fear was contagious. He also knew that someone in the control room wanted to shout out, If we can hear the destroyer’s screwbeats, why can’t the destroyer’s sonar hear us? Because, Gar thought, we’re being quiet. The destroyer is not.

This was the most dangerous phase of the tactic, the one his crew called Asking for It, behind his back, of course. Get out in front of a Jap convoy, submerge deep, let the targets and the escorts pass overhead, then rise to periscope depth behind the last escort and fire a torpedo right into his stern while the destroyer’s sonar was blinded by his own wake and propeller noises.

“Approaching three hundred feet,” the diving officer announced. The hull was creaking under the increased pressure, but Gar had taken Dragonfish down to almost 500 feet before. More importantly, back up, too, a happy modulation on that old aviator rule: You want the number of safe landings always to equal the number of takeoffs.

It was almost time to sprint.

Pah-pah-pah-pah, louder now. The destroyer was almost directly overhead. If he’d detected them, this would be the moment when depth charges would start rolling off his fantail. He can’t detect us if he’s not pinging, Gar told himself. And even if he were pinging, those two thermoclines in the 300-foot water column above them should deflect his sonar beams. “Should” being the operative word.

Pah-pah-pah-pah.

Gar waited impatiently. They’d accelerate once he passed overhead, get right behind him, rise to periscope depth, take one firing observation, and shoot. He’d done this three times since taking command, and so far he’d never missed. He was, of course, fully aware of how nervous this made his whole crew. If that single torpedo did miss and the destroyer’s lookouts saw its wake slicing alongside from astern, she’d immediately roll depth charges right into the Dragonfish’s face.

Pah-pah-pah-pah.

“Down Doppler, bearing zero five five,” the soundman in the conning tower reported, the relief audible in his voice. The destroyer was headed away from them. Everyone strained his ears to detect any noises indicating the Jap had rolled depth charges, but all they could hear was those screwbeats, steady at about 12 knots, based on turn count, in the away direction.

Okay, Gar thought. Time to kill this hood.

“All ahead two-thirds,” he ordered. “And come right to zero five five.”

He saw the exec let out another deep breath. Eight knots was just about their top speed underwater, and they would entirely deplete the battery in less than one hour if they kept that up. Both of them scanned the array of instruments and gauges all around them in the control room. Gar felt the sudden surge of power as Dragonfish heeled into her turn. Control was, as usual, crowded and tense. The air was filled with the haze of diesel fumes and human sweat, mixed with a faint tinge of ozone as the batteries dumped amps.

“I’m going up,” he told the exec. “Diving officer, bring her to periscope depth. Handsomely, please.”

Once he’d climbed up into the conning tower he told the torpedo officer to make ready tubes one and two. The attack team seemed steady, especially now that the tin can above had gone past them without loosing a barrage of 500-pound depth bombs. The deck sloped upward as the Dragon rose to periscope depth. The conning tower was under red-light conditions, just like Control. It was dark outside, and Gar needed his eyes to be night-adapted once he raised the scope. Conn was even more crowded than Control.

“Passing two hundred feet,” the diving officer reported from down below.

“All ahead one-third.”

The helmsman acknowledged the order.

“Leveling at one hundred feet,” called the diving officer.

It wasn’t very hard for Gar to keep a picture of this tactical plot in his mind. Pausing the ascent was standard procedure. The last thing they wanted was for the boat to punch through periscope depth and broach in full view of the destroyer’s after lookouts. He should be about 800 yards in front of us now, Gar thought, well within visual range even though it was past sunset. Assuming you had the time, it was always best to stabilize and trim her at 100 feet, then rise slowly to periscope depth.

“Sound, confirm bearing.”

“Mushy bearing zero five niner, Cap’n. Plus or minus five degrees. I’m listening through his wake.”

“Zero five niner, aye. Helmsman, come right to zero five niner. Indicate turns for three knots. Sound, watch that Doppler carefully.”

“Sound, aye.” The Doppler, or pitch of the audible screwbeats, was a critical indication. Down Doppler meant that the destroyer was going away from them; up Doppler meant the opposite. Steady Doppler meant he was broadside to them and thus probably turning around. They waited.

“Steady at periscope depth,” the diving officer called.

“Indicating turns for three knots, and steady on zero five niner,” the helmsman reported.

Gar went to the periscope well. “You ready?” he asked the attack team.

“We have a solution,” the operations officer replied.

“Up scope,” Gar ordered. “This will be a firing observation.”

The electro-hydraulic motors down in Control whined as they sent the attack scope up to the surface, with Gar hunched over the eyepiece handles like a monkey as it rose, all elbows and knees. He could barely hear the torpedo data computer team comparing sound data to what their predicted firing solution plot was showing.

He trained the scope around to the last reported bearing of the destroyer so that he’d be looking right at him once the scope broke the surface. His eyes took a few seconds to adjust, and then he saw him, just a black blob in the darkness dead ahead of them, but with a phosphorescent wake pointing right at Gar’s aim point.

“Bearing, mark! Range is one thousand yards. Down scope.”

One second later he heard the magic words from the plotting team. “Bearing and plot agree. Torpedo running depth ten feet. Tube one ready. Plot set! Fire any time.”

“Fire one!”

They felt the sudden impulse of pressurized air in the boat as the firing flask expelled the torpedo and then dumped its residual compressed air into the sub rather than releasing a huge bubble outside. Doctrine called for a second torpedo, but Gar disagreed: The torpedo’s gyro was slaved to the ordered bearing. On a long-axis shot like this, if the first one missed, a second one would probably miss, too. One hit, however, would blow the after end of that bastard clean off, especially if the depth charges stacked on his fantail also exploded.

“Conn, Sound, fish is hot, straight, and normal.”

“Run time, twenty-one seconds,” said the ops boss, standing at the TDC — the torpedo data computer.

They all held their breath. Nothing happened for fifteen seconds.

“Up scope.”

Gar could visualize the exec down in Control biting his lip. He and Russ had hashed this over many times before, with the exec arguing for leaving the scope down after firing when they were this close. The destroyer’s after lookout might see the approaching torpedo wake, but he’d surely see both the wake and the periscope. Gar maintained that he needed to see what happened in order to take evasive measures if the fish missed and the tin can came about. I can’t wait for sound, XO, not when we’re in the clinch.

There — a soundless, bright red flash, down low on the visible horizon.

“Got him!” Gar called down. “Down scope!” A moment later the gut-punching thump of the warhead reached the boat, followed seconds later by several smaller explosions a half mile away. The Dragon whipsawed a bit as the underwater pressure waves enveloped her.

Got him good, Gar thought, as he listened to the depth charges detonating. “Flood negative and make your depth three hundred feet. Helm, all ahead two-thirds and come left to three two five.”

The sound of smaller explosions drifted to starboard as they spiraled down and away from the sinking destroyer. The sound-powered phone talkers in the conning tower were mumbling into their phones, informing the rest of the crew that they’d killed another destroyer.

Gar, of course, felt relieved, although he knew they were just getting started. They’d counted two escorts, one ahead of what appeared to be a three-ship convoy, the other tailing astern. The second escort destroyer would be turning from the front of the convoy now, headed back to see what was going on. They couldn’t yet hear echo ranging over all that noise from the mortally injured destroyer, but Gar knew they surely would.

“Passing two hundred feet,” the diving officer called out as Dragonfish completed her turn to the northwest. This was the second, and most dangerous, phase of the tactic: fire from behind, go deep and 90 degrees off firing axis for 2,000 yards, then turn parallel to the convoy’s course again, slow down, go quiet, and wait to see what the remaining escort would do. It was dangerous because while they turned their stern to the action, they were the ones who became deaf.

As they opened out to 2,000 yards, Gar talked to the plotting team about the convoy. The first lookout sighting had been two smoke columns over the horizon, just before sunset. They hadn’t had to maneuver — the ships were coming right at them. Once the ships themselves hove into view, Gar had submerged and taken periscope observations. He was pretty sure he’d seen two tankers and a smaller something between them, plus one escort out front and the mast of another on the horizon. The exec, ever cautious, had wanted to confirm the convoy’s composition with the radar before they set up on it, but Gar had become convinced that the Japs could detect submarine radar if they radiated for too long. His standing orders were to keep surface and air-search radars in the standby mode unless there was no other way to see what was out there, and then to use only one sweep or two.

He reviewed the next phase with the attack team: After sprinting away from the scene of the first attack, they’d stay deep and quiet. If the other escort did not seem to be having any success locating them, they’d open out some more and then surface in the darkness, light off the diesels, and do an end-around run on the convoy at 22 knots to get back out in front of them. This time they’d be going for the high-value targets, those two tankers. Success during this phase depended on their having an accurate count of the enemy escorts. If they’d missed one, it could get really exciting.

Gar did the math: By the three-minute rule they’d be in the off-axis position in just under eight minutes. He was ever conscious of the battery’s limitations. Running submerged at full battery power was a chancy business for Dragonfish, although they’d done that many times, too, since he’d taken command. If they fully depleted the battery, they’d be forced to surface and duke it out with that remaining destroyer, which meant using their single deck gun against five of his, or even being rammed.

He leaned against the bulkhead near the periscopes and closed his eyes for a minute. The hatch to Control was right at his feet, and he could overhear the conversation below.

“Gotta hand it to him,” the chief of the boat was saying. “Guy can shoot.” The Dragon’s senior chief petty officer, “Swede” Svenson, was almost too tall for submarine duty; he walked in a permanent hunch to keep from banging his head on the low overhead. He had a classic Scandinavian face, all angles and eyebrows, bright blue eyes, a prominent Viking nose, and a permanently ruddy complexion. Being chief of the boat, he was, of course, called “Cob.”

“I’ll give him that, Cob,” the exec said quietly. “But this is still some crazy stuff. We should be shooting at tankers, not tin cans.”

“Maybe this is how it’s done, XO,” Cob said. “The Dragon’s sunk more Jap ships under Cap’n Hammond than she did in the two previous patrols.”

Gar smiled. Cob had that part right. It was all about results these days. No results or even skimpy results, the brass found someone else to be in command, which in fact was how he’d come to command of Dragonfish. Under Captain Mason, who’d put her in commission, they’d had several shooting opportunities and scored on none of them. Mason was a pleasant man, compassionate, tactically very conservative, and always looking out for the welfare of his officers and crew. He’d apparently been a peach to serve under, but the boat’s lack of results had resulted in his early relief.

Then the exec said something interesting. “I guess I’m just tired of being scared all the time, Cob.”

“Crew’s scared, too, XO, but they like all those Jap brag-rags on the conning tower just the same.”

The plotting team interrupted his eavesdropping. “Plot recommends coming right to zero five five, speed three, and rigging for silent running.”

“Make it so,” he replied. “Sound, you got anything?”

“Sound, negative. No echo ranging. Yet.”

“They may not suspect a sub, then,” he said as he started down the ladder into Control. There were some sotto voce groans as the ventilation shut down for silent running. The temperature in the control room rose immediately.

The exec agreed with Gar’s assessment. A tanker blowing up in a convoy always meant a sub; a destroyer going boom in the night might mean an operational accident, since subs supposedly gave destroyers a wide berth. So now they pointed the Dragon in the general direction of the convoy’s movement and waited to see what, if anything, the other destroyer did.

“XO, take the conn,” Gar said. “I need a sandwich. Have the crew stand easy on station, but let ’em know we’ll be back at it in about a half hour.”

He went forward to the tiny wardroom, where he took ten minutes to have a sandwich and a mug of coffee. The wardroom had a single table and room for six men at a time. There was a green bench on either side of the table in place of chairs. He put his mug into a dish drawer and then went to his cabin to flop for a few minutes. He needed to relax, and he also needed the crew to see that he was relaxed. What’s the Old Man doing? He’s taking a nap. Oh, okay, it must be safe, for the moment, anyway.

Thirty minutes later they called him, and he returned to the conning tower. Lieutenant Ray Gibson, the ops officer, announced, “Captain’s in Conn,” as Gar’s head cleared the hatch. Gibson was no more than five-seven in his dress shoes. He wore oversized spectacles that made him look a lot like an owl. Given that and his last name, his nickname just had to be Hoot.

Gar asked Hoot what he had for him. Gibson recited the tactical solution, their course, depth, and speed, and where they were plotting the two tankers.

“Where’s that second escort?”

“No data, Cap’n,” Gibson said. “Nobody’s echo ranging, either.”

The exec shook his head. “Two tin cans, neither one of them echo ranging? That make any sense?”

“No, sir,” Gibson said, “but there it is. Sound hasn’t heard the first ping.”

The exec eased through the crowd of people so that he could talk directly to the soundman. “Can you tune that thing, Popeye?”

“Have to take the whole system offline, XO,” Popeye Waller said. He was the ship’s senior sonar tech. “And you know what can happen then.”

What could happen was that the sometimes-balky sonar system wouldn’t come back up, and then they’d be in trouble. No sonar, no ears. The passive side of the sonar was preset into the frequency range of Japanese navy sonars. The exec wondered aloud if the Japs had changed freq.

“If he were pinging, couldn’t we just hear it through the hull?” he asked.

Popeye, who’d pushed back his headphones, rubbed his ears. “If he were pinging directional, right at us, yes, we’d probably hear that. But if he’s in omni mode, the same layer that’s protecting us would deflect most of that energy.”

“And if they’ve changed freq?”

“Then we’d never hear it until he was right on us and throwing bad shit in the water,” Popeye said. He turned around in his seat. “You think they’ve switched?”

“It’s possible,” the exec said. “We never heard the first one either, and he was right on top.”

“Okay,” Gar said. “Enough. We’ll loiter here for a little while longer, then go up and take a look. For the moment, though, I want to stay quiet until we know that second escort isn’t hunting.”

He was hoping the second escort was busy picking up survivors from the other destroyer. With their own speed limited to 3 knots, the convoy, going 9 knots faster than they were, was getting farther and farther away from them. He couldn’t risk depleting the battery with another 8-knot sprint, so at some point he’d have to get up on the surface and on the diesels and chase down the convoy. They had to be damned sure they didn’t surface into the loving arms of a vengeful Jap destroyer.

He wished he could close the hatch to the control room. All that hot, stinking air was doing what hot air always does: rise. Popeye had put his headphones back on and was steering the external sound heads around in a careful sector search. Nobody spoke. Everyone waited. The plotting team continued to update the tactical plot on the target convoy using dead-reckoning techniques, but they all knew it was only an estimate. They just had to wait it out. Gar told the exec to go below and start people back to their General Quarters stations.

After another half hour went by, he again asked Popeye what he was hearing.

“Ain’t heard a peep, Cap’n,” Popeye said. “Right now, it’s just biologics and white noise.”

“Well, that won’t do,” Gar said. “I really need to know where that second tin can is, and also what happened to the first one.”

The exec had come back up into the conning tower. “By definition,” he said, “the first one’s right where you torpedoed him. He’s either gone down, or he’s a floating wreck. Two thousand plus yards, that way. Everyone’s back at GQ, sir.”

“Good. I’m getting a bad feeling about that other escort, XO. We’re blind down here. What’s he doing and where the hell is he?”

Pah-pah-pah-pah.

“You asked,” the exec said softly.

Popeye clamped his headphones to his head and worked the sound-head controls. “No clear bearing, Cap’n. The layer’s got us. But he has to be close.”

“Right full rudder, all ahead Bendix,” Gar ordered. “Control, make your depth four hundred feet, fifteen-degree down bubble.”

The exec dropped into the control room as the Dragonfish heeled to port in her tight right turn, the bow tilting down dramatically.

Pah-pah-pah-pah.

The destroyer was close enough that they could distinguish a clear up Doppler, which meant this one was inbound with murder on his mind. They were all having to hold on as the planes bit into the Dragon’s lunge for the safety of deep water. Then Gar remembered that spiraling wasn’t the fastest way to achieve depth. He ordered the helmsman to meet her.

“Steadying on one niner zero,” the helmsman called as he whirled the small wheel, his voice exhibiting some Doppler of its own.

Now the destroyer’s screwbeats were close enough and loud enough to penetrate even the protective thermoclines, those invisible acoustic barriers formed by two layers of water at different temperatures.

Gar knew that everybody in the boat was screaming the same mental exhortation in his mind: Go, Dragon, go. The destroyer’s propeller sounds were now just a steady thrashing of the water as he passed overhead.

“Pass the word to stand by for depth charges,” the exec said.

No shit, replied the silent mental chorus.

Then they all heard it: a loud click as the first hydrostatic fuse fired.

A huge blast hammered them, followed by another and then another. A choking cloud of dust, humidity haze, and bits of cork insulation rained down. The Jap was right on the bearing, Gar thought, but their fast dive had saved them. The depth charges were going off at about two fifty, far enough above them to keep the Dragon from being imploded. Two more blasts, off to starboard. Still shallow, thank God. Gar found himself rubbing his magic charm, a chief petty officer’s collar insignia he kept on his key chain.

“Passing through four hundred feet,” the diving officer called. Gar’s arms were rigid against the ladder rails behind the periscope well. Passing through? They’d gone down too fast, and now the boat was below ordered depth. Recover? Or keep going? Keep going.

“Ease your down bubble to five degrees, and make your depth five hundred feet,” he ordered. “Left standard rudder.”

The boat heeled back the other way as she executed the sudden spiral back to the left. Four more depth charges went off in succession, each one hammering the sub’s hull in an ear-squeezing bang. He’s setting them deeper now, Gar thought. The boat’s steel hull was creaking and groaning, literally changing shape at these extreme depths, where even a small leak could sink them.

He looked over at the battery discharge meters. “All ahead Bendix” was slang for max power, regardless of what was left in the batteries, but those damned batteries kept score. They had maybe fifteen more minutes before the lights would go out.

Four more depth charges exploded, but this time, they were some distance away. He looked at the battery meters again.

Hell with this, he thought. I’m gonna go get this guy.

“Slow to four knots and come to periscope depth,” he ordered, visibly shocking everyone in the conning tower. “Make ready tubes nine and ten.”

The Dragon trembled as they came off full battery power to something more manageable and began the climb back to periscope depth, right through that protective thermocline layer that had not kept them safe this time. Why had they not detected pinging? This second destroyer had come right to them as if following a homing beacon.

Pah-pah-pah-pah. Slower now, as the tin can up above repositioned somewhere behind them for another run.

“Got him on zero seven five,” Popeye called. “Down Doppler.”

“Passing three hundred feet.”

“Level straight to sixty feet,” Gar said. No more fine-tuning. He was going to get up there, take a look, and take a shot. Right now this guy thought he was in charge. We’ll see about that. They waited as the sub came up, tipping back and forth a bit as the diving officer fought to keep her in trim.

“Sixty feet, aye,” called the diving officer.

Then they waited. The TDC team was entering sound bearings and assumed ranges, trying to coax the computer into a firing solution.

“Bearing zero eight zero, null Doppler. He’s turning.”

Coming in for another try. Gar hoped he would be set deep this time, while they would be back at sixty feet.

“Target’s entering our baffles,” Popeye announced.

Gar closed his eyes for a moment, visualizing the tactical picture. They had no idea of the range to their adversary, but he knew the tin can would steady up as he ran in to make another depth-charge run. That’s when he would become the target.

“Bearing?”

“He’s somewhere in the baffles,” Popeye replied, impatiently. As in, I just told you I can’t hear him anymore. “Dead astern.”

“Passing two hundred feet.”

He turned to the torpedo data computer team. “Set running depth to ten feet, torpedo gyro to three zero five, shoot nine and ten when ready.”

Pah-pah-pah-pah-pah-pah. Closing rapidly. The external sonar heads were blinded by the Dragon’s own propeller noises, but the destroyer was close enough now that the whole sub could hear him coming in. Three seconds passed, and then they heard and felt the first fish punch away from the stern tubes, followed a few seconds later by the second.

“Right standard rudder, make one full circle, then steady on two seven zero, periscope depth, and make ready tubes seven and eight.”

“Hot, straight, and normal,” Popeye reported.

“Run time unknown,” said the TDC operator.

“No kidding?” Gar asked, and everyone grinned for a brief moment. He’d fired blind, but there was a decent chance the destroyer would be coming at them right on that bearing.

Then came a satisfying blast, followed by a second one. Gar saw the exec wince as the whole boat shook from end to end, then realize those weren’t depth charges. The torpedoes had found their mark. Lucky, lucky, lucky! It sounded like the destroyer was disintegrating right on top of them. Time to stop that turn and get out from under.

“Steady as you go.”

“Steadying on — one eight five.”

“Passing one hundred feet. Coming to periscope depth.”

“All ahead one-third, turns for three knots.” He waited for a full minute for the speed to come off the boat. “Up scope.”

A moment later they leveled off, mushing into the surface effect of topside waves as they slowed. Gar straightened up as the scope came up, the lenses still underwater.

“Passing eighty feet.”

He held his breath. The scope might be dark, but there was no lack of sound effects. Two torpedoes had torn the approaching destroyer apart. The roar of an exploding boiler filled the conning tower, accompanied by the cacophony of rending steel as the destroyer’s shattered hull collapsed into the mortal embrace of the ever-hungry sea. Thankfully the sounds were coming from astern of them now.

“Level at periscope depth,” called the diving officer. His voice sounded more than a little bit strained.

These guys needed to buck up, Gar thought. It was one thing to lie in ambush for a fat merchant ship and blow its bottom out from a mile away. It was quite another to get in close with a Jap destroyer and go a couple of rounds — and then do it again.

He scrambled around the periscope well, completing a three-sixty quick-look. A steady rumbling noise filled the conning tower as the destroyer sank, her remaining boilers bellowing steam into the cold sea as her bulkheads collapsed in a series of loud bangs. Gar mentally pushed away images of her crew being boiled alive as they were dragged down into the depths.

Remember Pearl Harbor, you sonsabitches.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s that. Stand by to surface. Plot, give me a bearing to that first tin can datum. Radar, conduct two short-range sweeps as soon as you can.”

Everyone in the conning tower seemed to exhale at the same time, and then they all jumped in unison when the sinking destroyer’s depth charges started to go off as he plunged past their set points. The Japs always kept their ashcans armed. Any of the crew who had managed to get overboard alive were now having their insides squeezed up out of their throats.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

“Radar reports no contacts within five miles.”

Got ’em both, he thought. The three-ship convoy must have kept going once their escorts started mixing it up with Dragonfish.

“One radar sweep, long range,”

He could hear a commotion below as the bridge crew assembled down in the control room. The chief of the boat was coaxing the planesmen, who were having trouble maintaining a level depth with everybody moving around in the boat. The radar mast motors whined as it slid up to full height to improve their radar picture.

“Conn, radar: one contact, zero six five, twenty-one thousand yards.”

“Surface,” he said.

The Klaxon sounded. “Surface, surface. Lookouts to the bridge.”

There was a mad scramble down in the control room as the diving officer operated the ballast tank levers while Cob monitored the angle on the boat. The people in the conning tower had to flatten themselves against the bulkheads to admit the lookouts and the officer of the deck. Their ears popped as the first lookout opened the hatch. Everyone welcomed the cold, fresh air, even when it sprayed some seawater into the conning tower.

“XO, take the conn. Put three diesels on the line, and one for the can. Head to intercept that radar contact.”

Gar remained in Control until the surface watch had been established and the boat’s ballast tanks trimmed for surface running. He told the diving officer to make sure the negative tank remained full. If the Dragon had to submerge fast, the extra weight in the negative buoyancy tank would help get her under quickly. Satisfied, he nodded at the exec and went forward.

No radar contacts within 5 miles meant that both tin cans had been sunk, so now it was time to get back to the business at hand. They weren’t necessarily home free, though. There was always the possibility that those destroyers had sent off a distress call to the Japanese air bases on Luzon. The intel people back in Pearl had reported that the Japs had some of their new, radar-equipped night bombers in the region. Plus, there was that third, intermittent radar contact they’d seen in the convoy. It could be one of those new patrol frigates the Japs had begun using. One-third the size of a destroyer, but lethal nonetheless.

There was another ear-squeezing pressure wave as the diesels were lit off. If the air in the boat were unusually foul, the crew would crack all the watertight doors in the boat. Then the engine room crew would start the diesels with compressed air and let them take suction within the boat through the open bridge hatch for a few seconds before opening the main induction valve topside. This would quickly suck all the accumulated gases out of the boat, replacing it with air coming in from the conning tower hatch. It also created a momentary tornado in the control room, where any pieces of paper not nailed down began to fly around.

Once the diesels were on the line and warmed up, the exec would order flank speed, about 20 knots. Gar calculated the pursuit time: The convoy had been making between 10 and 12 knots, so their overtaking speed was only about 10 knots. An hour or so, then, and they’d go back to their sanguinary work.

The word came down from the bridge to secure from battle stations. This meant that all the watertight compartment hatches could be fully opened, and Gar could make a quick inspection tour. Three of the ship’s main diesels were feeding the propulsion motors; the fourth was recharging the starving batteries. He checked the hydrogen meters in the forward battery to make sure the heavy charge wasn’t building up explosive gases. Then he grabbed another cup of coffee as he passed by the wardroom, where three of the junior officers were talking excitedly about the destroyers and the skipper’s “amazing” torpedo work.

Gar knew better. That last shot had been a Hail Mary if ever there’d been one — firing two fish on a sound bearing from depth meant that the fish had had to launch, turn, stabilize their gyros, climb, and then stabilize again at ordered depth in under a minute before colliding with the destroyer’s onrushing bow. Amazing, yes, but amazing luck, not amazing skill. He asked himself again why they hadn’t detected pinging. This news would really interest Pearl. The Japs had been slow to realize that the American submarine force was becoming a much bigger threat to Japan’s survival than the big American battle fleets. They were starting to improve their sonars, depth charges, and use of radar. Their torpedoes had always been the best in the world, unlike what the American submariners had struggled to deal with for the first two years.

He held on to the bulkheads now as he progressed forward; the boat was encountering the deep swell that was always present in the Luzon Strait. At flank speed, she pitched up and down in what felt like slow motion. Some of the guys he walked past already looked a little queasy. Being submerged a lot of the time, submariners were often lacking in the sea legs department.

In Forward Torpedo the sweating crew was just finishing the reload of tube one. The interior of the sub was still under red-light conditions, and the torpedomen looked like they had been slow-roasted during the previous hours. Dragonfish had sailed from Pearl with twenty-four torpedoes: fifteen steamers, seven electrics, and two Cuties, as the new homing torpedoes were called. After Torpedo carried eight fish, four in the tubes, and four reloads. The balance lived in Forward Torpedo. Gar was not a fan of the electrics, but they were the prescribed weapon for use against Jap ships that could shoot back. The merchies, on the other hand, could only watch in horror when the telltale trail of bubbles from a steamer appeared, poised to open up their engine room.

Tonight he’d fired steamers at both tin cans, which technically was a violation of approved doctrine. The main advantage of the electrics was that they left no telltale wake to show the escorts where the submarine was lurking. Gar, however, was no slave to doctrine, especially when it was emanating from big staffs, safe back in Pearl. The second tin can had already known where they were, and the first one wouldn’t have been able to see the torpedo wake embedded in his own wake, bubbles or no bubbles. Besides, the steamers had a much bigger warhead. In any event, he was protected by the unwritten rule: Nobody in Pearl would be second-guessing his using steamers as long as the targets were on the bottom, where all Jap ships belonged. Except, he thought, the chief of staff at SubPac, Captain Mike Forrester, who was not one of Gar’s fans.

He walked back aft through the boat, talking to the men and generally taking the crew’s emotional temperature after the fight with the destroyers. The chief of the boat joined him on his way back to After Torpedo, where they’d finished reloading. As they headed back forward toward Control, he paused in the passageway and asked Cob if his predilection for engaging destroyers was truly scaring the crew.

“They love it when they sink a Jap ship,” Svenson said. “But there is a pretty high pucker factor when you decide to go one-on-one with a tin can.”

“Going after them is a better tactic than just going deep and spreading our legs,” Gar said. “You go deep and just wait for it, you hand the initiative to them. You start shooting back, you raise their pucker factor and maybe throw ’em off the scent. I’ve seen escorts run for it when we shot at ’em. The best defense, and all that.”

“Yes, sir, and I agree with you,” Cob said. “I’ve never felt so damned helpless as when we’re down below and getting hammered on. The guys’ll get used to it.”

“I hope so, Cob, ’cause this cat’s not gonna change his stripes. We’re out here to do a job of bloody work, and I’m just the guy, unfortunately, to take the fight to them for a change.”

“They’re good guys, Cap’n, but most of ’em are real young, remember?”

Gar knew Cob was right about that. The average age on board was probably twenty.

“Captain, please contact Conn,” came over the announcing system.

Gar grabbed the nearest sound-powered phone handset, set the dial for Conn, and twirled the handle once, causing a squeaking noise at the other end. The exec picked up the phone.

“Whatcha got, XO?”

“Plot has these guys zigzagging. We’re gonna be on ’em pretty quick — their true speed of advance is only six knots. I’m assuming a surfaced attack unless we discover another escort. I’d like to set battle stations, surface, in ten minutes.”

“Make it so, XO. Keep the gun team below until we know for damned sure there aren’t any more escorts. And Russ? I want you to conduct the next attacks. I’ll be up there shortly, but I’m gonna sit back and watch the whole picture while you sink these tankers. Okay?”

“Absolutely,” Russ said.

Gar hung up the phone and told Cob they’d be back at GQ in ten minutes. Cob hurried away to spread the word. Gar made his way to Forward Officers’ Country for a quick head call.

One of the submarine force’s superstars in terms of tonnage sunk, Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton, had introduced a different command-and-control approach to submarine attacks. Prior to Morton, the captain and only the captain conducted every attack. He manned the scope, supervised the TDC, approved the plot solution, chose the attack bearings and methods, and did everything but push the firing button. Morton, who became famous for conducting most of his attacks on the surface, realized that there was too much data coming at him during an attack, so he decided to step back from the minutiae of the actual attack in order to better grasp the big picture: where the target was, where the escorts were, where the next target was going to be, where the best escape routes lay, what the radar picture showed, and so on. Morton let his XO, another superstar named Richard O’Kane, execute the individual torpedo attacks, while he, Morton, made sure some other part of the tactical picture wasn’t getting ready to bite them in the ass.

The result was a superbly trained exec who could go on to a command of his own already highly experienced in attacking Jap ships, as O’Kane had amply demonstrated. To do it required a very confident captain and an equally competent exec. Gar hadn’t adopted this system yet, but, having removed the warships from this particular convoy, small as it was, he felt this was the time to let Russ have a shot and try out Morton’s system. As in every other aspect of submarine command, until you actually tried it, you never knew.

He went back to Control, where the battle teams were already taking their places in the red glow of the night-lights. He told everybody there that the XO was going to run the attacks and that he was going sit back and criticize. There were grins all around, albeit nervous grins. He knew he was going to have to work on this problem. A scared crew was a dangerous crew — a man who’s afraid will freeze faster than a man who’s on the hunt with his blood up. Training, he reminded himself. We have to do more training.

“Set battle stations, surface.”

He climbed the ladder into the dim red light of the conning tower to begin the dance. The stream of cold fresh air whistling through the hatch to the bridge was wonderful. The diesels were purring as only Fairbanks Morse engines could. The exec was getting ready to go up to the bridge, where he would conduct the torpedo attacks against the two tankers up ahead. Instead of the periscope he’d be using the target-bearing transmitters, or TBTs. These were simply a set of high-powered binoculars welded to a movable frame. The frame was connected electrically to the TDC weapons control computer. The firing officer would point the TBT at the target ship and squeeze a button. The target’s bearing would be transmitted to the computer, and a firing solution would soon materialize. The computer would then continuously communicate the appropriate gyro and depth settings to the torpedo itself, which would be launched as soon as the attack team agreed that the computed solution looked right. The TBT was a bit crude, but very effective, because the firing officer didn’t have to worry about up-scope/down-scope delays in getting the firing data into the computer. This time, Gar would stay down in the conning tower, directly below the bridge, and oversee the tactical plot and the TDC’s outputs, watching out for errors or any indications that they weren’t the only killer maneuvering out there in the dark.

The roar of the main engines subsided as the exec brought her down to 10 knots. The plotting team was back on station, and there were two target tracks unfolding on the plotting table, courtesy of some quick radar sweeps as they’d closed in. The exec could not yet see either of the two tankers, who should be running dark.

“Where’s the third guy?” Gar asked the plotting officer.

“Haven’t found him,” replied Hoot, back on station. “TDC has a solution on the lead ship; we just need to get closer.”

Gar studied the dials on the torpedo data computer. The range was 3,200 yards; they needed to get in to under 2,000 yards to ensure the torpedoes could reach the target.

“Go easy on the radar,” he said. “I don’t want it to become a beacon.”

“Actually,” Hoot said, “the exec says he thinks this guy is showing a light. He’s using TBT bearings on that. We took one radar range ten minutes ago, and we plan to take another one before he shoots.”

“Oh, my,” Gar said. “A stern light. Talk about a fatal mistake.”

“Yes, sir. Whoops, there’s a zig.”

Gar stepped back from the plot as the team tracked the target’s movements with little penciled x’s on the plotting sheet. From what he could see, the two ships were trying to zigzag in a loose column formation, which was probably why the lead ship had left a dim yellow light burning on his stern. The exec called down a course change to accommodate the targets’ new course.

Gar itched to go topside to see what the exec was seeing, but Russ needed to learn how to do this without coaching. That said, nobody was using the periscopes. The plot was clear enough, the exec had a visual on the target, and the computer was happily crunching numbers, so he stepped over to the night scope, raised it, and took a look down the indicated bearing. He saw precisely nothing.

“Target’s changed course to zero three zero,” Hoot called. “Seems to be steady on that now.”

“Give me a radar range,” the exec called down. “One sweep.”

The radar operator let the radar come up for a few seconds, then turned it off.

“Range is sixteen hundred yards, bearing one three five from us,” the operator announced.

“Stand by to mark visual bearing. Stand by — mark!”

“Plot set!” Hoot reported. “Bearings and range match. Fire any time.”

“Fire two!” called the exec, and the console operator mashed down on the mushroom-shaped firing button. Gar waited for him to fire a second fish, but the exec was apparently going to do it the captain’s way. Gar smiled, set the scope onto the firing bearing, and waited.

Hoot was holding up a stopwatch. “Run time one minute thirty,” he called.

“Hot, straight, and normal,” announced Popeye, ever vigilant for a circular runner.

“Stand by to mark visual bearing on target two. Stand by … Mark! Estimate range at twelve hundred yards.”

“Plot not ready,” Hoot said. “Range and bearing not in agreement.”

Gar left the scope and stepped quickly over to the plot, where he saw that the TDC’s course and speed on target two were not agreeing with the exec’s last visual bearing.

“He’s still turning,” the exec called down. “I’ll get another bearing in one minute.”

“Why the hell can’t we use the radar?” Hoot grumbled.

“Because we don’t know where that third target is, or, more importantly, what he is,” Gar said. “Could be a tin can, just waiting for a radar signal to home in on.”

A sudden glare of bright yellow light flooded down into the conning tower from the bridge, followed by a very loud boom. Gasoline tanker.

“Clear visual bearing on target two … Mark! Estimated range, one thousand yards.”

“Bearing close, range agrees,” called Hoot. “Solution!”

“Fire three,” the exec ordered.

Gar went back to the periscope, dialed in a glare filter, and took a look. The first tanker was low in the water and burning from end to end, great gouts of flaming gasoline pouring off her port side. He came right with the scope and saw the second tanker, about a half mile behind the first. She was larger and now completely illuminated by the fire. As he watched she began a turn to the right, but then an enormous waterspout rose up just behind the pilothouse as the Dragon’s torpedo struck home. Moments later, the dark ship began to sag in the middle as her keel gave way. This one wasn’t burning, which meant an engine room hit. The XO was on a roll tonight.

He turned the scope back to the burning ship, which, if anything, was burning even harder now. Then he continued to the left, scanning the seas, whose small whitecaps created brilliant green lines in the light of all that burning gasoline. Twenty degrees to the left of the burning ship he saw something that made his heart stop.

“Captain has the conn,” he shouted so that the exec could hear him topside. “All ahead flank, emergency,” he yelled. “Come left with full rudder. Emergency dive, dive, dive!”

The helmsman responded instantly, although the rest of the men in the conning tower just gaped at him for a second before springing into action. The dive Klaxon sounded as the propellers bit into the sea and the sub began to heel to the right. There was a roar of escaping ballast tank air outside, followed by the first of the lookouts dropping down into the conning tower, with just the tips of their shoes barely touching the rungs as they literally fell down the ladder. Then came the OOD — officer of the deck — and finally the exec, who paused only long enough to secure the hatch, creating an immediate squeeze on everyone’s ears as the main induction valve slammed shut and the diesels died away. In the space of ten seconds or so, they were back on the batteries.

Gar was still glued to the scope. “TDC, mark my bearing, prepare to emergency-fire tube number eight, running depth at twenty feet! Stand by … Mark!”

“Mark at three five zero, tube eight standing by.”

“Fire eight, shift your rudder, make your depth three hundred feet, ten-degree down bubble.”

The air in the sub pinched as the torpedo left tube eight.

“Pressure in the boat, green board,” the diving officer called out belatedly from Control. It better be, Gar thought — we’re under. “Make my depth three hundred feet, aye, sir.”

“Hot, straight, and normal.”

“Captain?” It was the exec.

Gar unstuck his eyes from the periscope as it went underwater, sent it down into its well, and refocused into the conning tower. The exec was staring at him with a what-the-hell expression on his face. His shirt was soaking wet from waves hitting the bridge as they’d executed the emergency dive.

“Periscope,” Gar said. “Clear as day.” He glanced at the compass indicator. “Ease your rudder to left standard.”

“Target number three,” the exec said, softly. “A goddamned I-boat.”

“Torpedoes in the water,” Sound announced. This stopped everyone in the conning tower cold. They should be safe, Gar thought, unless the Jap submarine skipper had guessed their course and intended depth once Gar had called the crash dive. Should be, unless the Japs had developed a homer.

“And down Doppler,” Popeye announced. “They’re going to miss astern.”

A collective sigh of relief went up.

“Where’s the layer?” Gar asked.

“Last layer was three hundred twenty.”

Deep in the distance they heard torpedo eight explode, but whether it had hit the other sub or simply reached its end of run, they couldn’t tell. The chances of their having hit the other sub were almost zero.

“Make your depth four hundred, rig the ship for silent running. Slow to four knots. We’ll head east for a while.”

Behind them they heard some breaking-up noises as the second tanker went down. Apparently the other one was still on the surface, trying to boil off the Pacific Ocean.

I need a drink, Gar thought. That had been too damned close for comfort. Instead, he told the XO he’d done good work. “Two for two, with single torpedoes. Who taught you that, anyway?”

TWO

On Monday morning Gar arrived at the SubPac headquarters building promptly at ten for his appointment with Captain Mike Forrester, chief of staff to Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded all the submarine forces in the Pacific. Normally his division commander would be there with him, but he was on home leave back in the States. The yeoman asked him if he needed coffee and then indicated that he should take a seat in the outer office.

They’d gotten back from patrol three days ago to a generous pierside reception, which included Uncle Charlie, as Admiral Lockwood was known affectionately throughout the Pacific Fleet submarine force. Nimitz had chosen well in appointing him to three stars and command of the entire force. He was a demanding boss, but one who fought fiercely for his people when other commands proposed stupid things that affected the submarine force. Gar’s being summoned for a one-on-one with the chief of staff wasn’t that unusual. He’d handed in his personal commanding officer’s patrol report on Friday afternoon, and Gar supposed Captain Forrester wanted to go over it with him.

The yeoman finally indicated that he could go into Forrester’s office. The chief of staff was a tallish, spare man who was still showing the effects of injuries he’d sustained in an especially vicious depth-charging while skipper of Albacore back in late 1942. Most of the current skippers were convinced Forrester was in constant pain, which probably accounted for his acerbic disposition. Having brought home a full bag, Gar was not anticipating any criticism, and, at first, his expectations were rewarded. Forrester congratulated Dragonfish on a highly successful patrol and told Gar that radio intercepts had confirmed almost all their kills.

“Two tankers, two freighters, and two destroyers sunk; one tanker damaged,” Forrester said. “That’s a damned good haul.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He leaned back in his chair for a moment. “One thing got my attention,” he said. “Those two destroyers in your bag. Prior to that you’ve downed three others. You’re sinking almost as many tin cans as you are Marus. That’s quite unusual. I was wondering if you were perchance hunting them deliberately.”

Gar had to think about that for a moment. Their overall mission orders charged them to sink Japanese shipping, with an emphasis on ships carrying war matériel from the Southeast Asian part of the empire back to Japan. Everyone wanted to bag a carrier or a battleship, but the Pacific submarine warfare strategy was now firmly focused on strangling the empire’s ability to wage war. Skippers were given a lot of latitude as to which kinds of targets they went after, with the only “crime” being to have a Jap ship in your sights and fail to attack.

“It’s not a vendetta or a thirst for glory,” Gar said finally. “I don’t go looking for tin cans to attack, if that’s what you mean. But I do think it makes sense to reduce the escort numbers around a convoy, if possible. There are, of course, situations when that isn’t possible.”

“Most skippers don’t deliberately set up on the escorts,” Forrester said. “They go for the high-value targets and then face the consequences if they have to.”

“Sometimes I’ve done that,” Gar said. “The problem is you give the initiative to the escort forces. They drive around topside with relative impunity, and they only have to get lucky once with a well-placed depth charge.”

“So this is a matter of taking back the initiative? Putting the escorts on notice that they’re targets, too? Back ’em off a little?”

“Yes, sir, exactly. Plus, if it’s a small convoy, taking out the escorts just about guarantees we can make a surfaced attack, where we have the speed advantage.”

“Unless you get a surprise, right?”

“Surprise?”

“Like the Jap sub that appeared in the middle of that ‘defenseless’ convoy.”

“With all due respect, sir, what’s that have to do with attacking escorts?”

“It means you didn’t get them all, doesn’t it?” he asked. “The escorts, I mean. That’s the hole in your tactic, Captain. You have to get all the escorts or you can’t surface to go chase the convoy ships, which, by the way, are moving away from you the whole time you’re screwing around with the destroyers. It might work in a wolf pack, but not when you’re all alone.”

He had a point there. In retrospect, Gar knew he’d been lucky that the I-boat embedded in that convoy hadn’t gone back to find them when that second destroyer did. If it hadn’t been for the big gasoline fire, Gar would never have seen that periscope. He tried to turn the criticism into antipathy on the part of the chief of staff, but he damned well had a point.

“Think about it,” Forrester said. “You were lucky this time, and the Dragon distinguished herself again. There’ll be a medal in that for you and whomever you’d like to recommend.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, you’ll be going into dry dock later this week. The big job will be the installation of the new FM sonar. We’re anticipating a week in dock, and then a couple weeks for training and R&R. And make sure you’re at the weekly séance with your Uncle Charles tonight at the Palace, okay?”

Late that afternoon, Gar stood in the shower, eyes closed, his two hands splayed on the end wall, as he let an unlimited supply of hot water course over his body. He was pretty sure every submariner in the hotel indulged in this absolute luxury at least twice a day. That and a real, honest-to-God innerspring mattress. Even after three days, he could still detect eau de diesel on his skin, despite the best efforts of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel’s excellent water heaters.

Early in the war, the submarine force commander had commandeered the top floors of the stately old hotel as a rest and recuperation center for the submarine skippers and their execs. It became standard procedure for a sub’s crew, returning from a war patrol, to hand the boat over to an in-port relief crew upon arrival. This allowed them to decompress from the rigors of being sealed up in their iron coffin for as long as forty-five days at a time, all alone and often deep within the empire’s territory. The wardroom officers, chiefs, and other enlisted decamped into R&R centers around the island, while the captains unwound among other commanding officers at the Pink Palace, safe from the inquisitive eyes of their ever-watchful subordinates. They could sleep, or get drunk if they felt like it; more importantly, they could talk candidly with other skippers about their experiences on patrol, forcewide equipment problems, navy politics, rumors and sea stories, and their execs. One floor down, the execs would be doing the same thing. Ladies were not permitted to be on any floor above the lobby, a regulation that Gar suspected was honored more in the breach than in the observance. There were marine guards in the lobby and concertina wire around the hotel’s perimeter to keep away prying eyes and ears.

Once a week, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, ComSubPac himself, held court in the hospitality suite, where he could share his concerns about the force, and the skippers who happened to be in port could share their feelings about how things were going in the submarine war. Gar glanced at his watch. The admiral would be arriving in thirty minutes, and all the skippers were expected to be on deck before his lordship actually showed up. He went to the closet to get a fresh uniform.

After his meeting with the chief of staff he’d gone back to the ship to gen up a list of other maintenance items they could get done with the boat in dry dock. Gar suspected that one blade on the port propeller was dinged and making noise at even slow speeds. Two outer torpedo tube doors forward leaked excessively below 250 feet, and they had several lighting fixtures that were hanging by their wiring after that depth-charging. The relief crew had been inspecting the ship, and they were also making up a list of repairs and replacements. As they got closer to the actual docking day, most of the senior petty officers and all the wardroom officers would come back aboard to bird-dog maintenance and repair work in their departments. The first weekend back from patrol was a wonderful time to do nothing at all, but after that most of them would become bored with just sitting around.

Gar stood by the tall windows overlooking Waikiki Beach, sipping on a Scotch, trying to keep his mind in neutral. Some of the other skippers at the bar had given him quiet congratulations for the last patrol’s box score, and he’d made appropriate noises back at them. There were an even dozen skippers at hand, but none of the SubPac superstars, who were either out on patrol or out on eternal patrol. The latter was a constant and depressing fact of life at these gatherings. At first no one had been willing to talk about the loss of a boat, but, as this war dragged on, the losses and their circumstances necessarily became part of the late-night tactical discussions around this very private bar.

“Excuse me,” a voice said behind him. “Are you Gar Hammond?”

Gar turned around. A young-looking commander put out his hand and introduced himself as Chandler Scott, new skipper of Batfish.

“Welcome to the Pink Palace,” Gar said.

“Heard about your latest trip,” Scott said. “Guys are saying you hunt destroyers?”

Gar smiled. “Not exactly,” he said. “I just don’t subscribe to the notion that we have to sit down there and take it every time we get in the ring with them.”

Scott nodded. “I like that idea, but every time I’ve tried to shoot one it’s been so chaotic we never seem to hit anything.”

“Once you’ve been detected and you’re evading, it’s tough, if not impossible. But — doesn’t mean you can’t shoot a steamer at him. If nothing else, he now knows you’re gonna shoot back instead of just run and hide. The best way is to sneak up on ’em from behind and put one up the kilt. If nothing else, it upsets the rest of the escorts, and you create a hole in the screen.”

“You the same Hammond who was brigade boxing champ back in ’29?”

“Yup.”

“That must color your thinking, then,” Scott said.

Gar had graduated with the class of 1930 from the Naval Academy, where he’d excelled in intercollegiate boxing, lacrosse, and lightweight football. He’d stood 100th out of a class of 280, been commissioned into the battleship force, then volunteered for sub school in 1935. For the next seven years he served in two submarines. He’d done his XO tour in a fleet boat from July 1942 to November 1943. On a prospective commanding officer patrol with one of the older hands he discovered that he was not going to run his boat that way, assuming he got one. He’d taken command of Dragonfish in early 1944 as a fresh-caught CDR.

He knew he’d come up fast once the war started, making full commander in 1944. He believed he owed his rapid advance to a combination of his own ability and wartime attrition, in about equal measures. Chandler Scott had been two years behind him at the academy, and yet here he was, a skipper now, still remembering Gar as a boxer whose style was to walk directly across the ring to his opponent and beat the shit out of him.

“How do you mean?” Gar asked.

“From sub school on, they’ve hammered one rule into us: Never mess with a destroyer.”

Gar finished his drink. “Look,” he said. “I don’t advocate setting up on a convoy and then breaking off from a fat tanker to see if I can sink an escort. The tanker is the mission. I’m just saying that if the opportunity presents itself, take the bastards out. If nothing else, it evens the odds up a bit. If we’re talking patrol craft or depth-charged armed minesweepers, forget it. They’re just too agile.”

Scott was about to reply when someone called attention on deck.

Gar turned around from the window and stiffened into a halfhearted pose of attention, his drink incongruously at his side, while the rest of the skippers stood up. The admiral came in, waved them all at-ease, and, greeting everyone by his first name, got himself a beer. An overstuffed armchair had been reserved for him, and he sat down. Gar took a seat behind the main couch as the admiral launched into his informal briefing, relating the good news and the bad, and managing throughout to direct praise at each and every one of them.

It was a polished, sincerely meant performance, Gar thought. No wonder he got his third star. Better yet, they all knew that Admiral Lockwood cared passionately about their welfare, boats, weapons, and our enlisted people, unlike some of the flag officers out in the Australian forward bases. They also recognized that one purpose of these frequent, informal visits was for Lockwood to take their measure, both emotional and physical, quietly looking for signs that a skipper had been out there too many times and needed a prolonged rest ashore. He played the same game with the executive officers, and more than once an XO had come up to Lockwood privately to express his concerns about his own CO. Since returning from the last patrol, and despite the warm pierside welcome from the brass, Gar wondered if his own exec, a veteran of four war patrols, had been whispering in someone’s ear. When one of the stewards handed him a discreet note from the chief of staff toward the end of the session, he felt that his suspicions were possibly confirmed. He’d been invited to dinner with the admiral. This wasn’t unusual, except for the fact that he hadn’t seen anyone else in the room getting notes. He put it in his pocket as the Q&A began and sat back to listen.

An hour later, the majordomo led Gar through the dining room to a corner table that was partially shielded by a three-piece Oriental screen and some strategically placed potted plants. The hotel’s dining room was full, with both submariners and other naval officers. The admiral got up to greet him. He shook hands as if they were meeting for the very first time. Up close, he looked a lot older than the last time Gar had seen him, with pronounced dark pouches under his eyes that hadn’t been so obvious upstairs. Maybe they came with that third star, he thought. The waiter brought drinks, took their dinner orders, and disappeared behind the screen. Once the drinks came, the admiral got down to business.

“So,” he began. “How are you? How’s command treating you?”

Gar wondered idly what would happen if he said he felt awful and wanted to be relieved that very evening. In fact, he felt fine. Physically tired, of course; any warship captain was always on duty, twenty-four hours a day. In a submarine command, that was true times ten. Unlike on a surface ship, where an entire team fought the ship and many of the fighting decisions could be made by decentralized subordinates, a submarine skipper had to make every decision himself, based on tactical data fed to him in the cramped confines of the conning tower, what he was seeing through hurried periscope observations, and how well he had formed the three-dimensional tactical picture in his mind.

“It suits me, Admiral,” he said simply. “I’ve got very good people, lots of veterans, and the Dragon’s a good, solid boat. When the time comes to go back out there, I’m personally ready to go.”

“That was an outstanding patrol, Gar. You guys really rang the bell out there, killing an entire convoy, an I-boat, and three destroyers.”

“It wasn’t much of a convoy, Admiral,” Gar said. “And it’d be a miracle if we actually hit that I-boat.”

“It was pretty close to a miracle that you saw that guy’s scope,” the admiral said, then sipped his drink. Ah, here it comes, Gar thought. Forrester had put the knife in. “Do you have your exec on the scope during an attack, like Mush Morton did?”

“Usually I’m on the scope,” Gar said. “But that night, once I thought I’d dealt with all the escorts, I put Russ West on the bridge for the attack on the tankers. I stayed down in the conning tower where I could watch the plot. I used the scope only after that first tanker blew up and I could actually see something.”

“And I understand you stay off the radar as much as possible?”

“Yes, sir. I do use it, but sparingly. I think they can pick it up and home in on the reverse bearing.”

“You let your XO conduct the high-value target attacks. You must think he’s ready for his own command.”

Gar hesitated. Say yes and he’d be breaking in a new exec. Say no and he’d be damaging Russ’s career. When did you stop beating your wife …

“You’re hesitating.”

Gar smiled. The admiral had read his mind. “Russ is fully qualified to take command,” he said. “And I enthusiastically recommend him for command.”

“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.”

“The word I’m hearing is that she can carry as many as three hundred planes. If she did a Wounded Bear on us, that could be serious.”

Wounded Bear, Gar thought. Every PacFleet submariner remembered that fiasco, where the big Jap carrier Shokaku, damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea, had run the gauntlet of eight waiting U.S. submarines to make it back to the Inland Sea without a scratch. He told Marty that he still thought Bungo Suido would be almost a suicide mission. Marty said he’d heard that Uncle Charlie had said the same thing to Nimitz. “You know what Nimitz supposedly said? Get a volunteer.”

“The kindly old gentleman, showing his fangs,” Gar said. Then he remembered his conversation with Admiral Lockwood. The one where he asked what Gar thought about trying Bungo Suido.

“What’s the betting on when we’ll have to invade Japan itself?” he asked, subconsciously wanting to get off the subject of those deadly straits with all those sunken submarines.

“Late ’45, early ’46,” he said. “Lots of planning already going on. More and more visiting firemen from Washington coming to Makalapa. MacArthur’s got himself a ministaff up there, making sure he doesn’t get cut out of the big show.”

“I believe that.”

“We’re seeing more generals, too. Just two days ago, some two-star named Leslie Groves showed up at the morning intel briefing — big, kinda fat guy, looked like he could be a screamer. Anyway, as soon as the general appeared, Nimitz’s aide whispered in the boss’s ear, and next thing I knew, Nimitz leaves the briefing with this guy in tow.”

“Must be one of MacArthur’s acolytes,” Gar said. “I’ve heard they’re nothing if not terribly important.”

“Still,” Marty said. “It was kinda unusual for a two-star’s arrival to make a four-star get up and leave the briefing.”

“Maybe he’s a messenger from the Joint Chiefs,” Gar said. “Way above my pay grade, anyway. My main concern these days is getting my Dragon ready for the next patrol and wondering where that’s gonna be.”

“Maybe they’ll pick you guys for the Inland Sea mission.”

“Hope to Christ they don’t,” Gar said, and he meant every word.

Gar went from the O-club to the headquarters building of the 14th Naval District, where he was met at the entrance by an armed marine guard. He checked Gar’s ID against the expected visitors list and then handed him off to a second marine to take him upstairs. Gar wondered why there were still marine guards at what was essentially an admin headquarters, three years after the Pearl Harbor attack. Surely they no longer anticipated an invasion. The nearest Japanese were thousands of miles away and being driven back into their Home Islands, albeit one bloody inch at a time.

He was there for a briefing on the new mine-detecting sonar system. Dragonfish’s weapons officer, Lieutenant Tom Walsh, and soundman Popeye Waller were waiting. The marine delivered Gar, Walsh, and Waller to a room that looked a lot like a classroom. There were two engineering duty officers standing next to a long table. Seated at the head of the table behind a viewgraph machine was a four-striper. A lieutenant commander who identified himself as a staffer from the Pacific Fleet headquarters up on Makalapa Crater came in behind him. He introduced Gar to the others, letting everybody know that he was the captain of Dragonfish. He in turn introduced the four-striper as Captain Westfall, program manager for the new sonar system.

Gar shook hands with the EDOs and the captain and introduced his guys. The four-striper told them to sit.

“Captain Hammond,” he said. “I’m David Westfall, head honcho at BuShips for the frequency-modulated mine-detection system. This system was designed and produced for minesweepers, not submarines. We’re here because Admiral Lockwood interceded with Admiral King to divert some of these systems to his boats here in PacFleet.”

The captain didn’t sound too pleased. “Was BuShips happy with these, um, diversions?” Gar asked innocently. Like most sub skippers, Gar was no fan of the navy’s Washington bureaus.

The captain grunted. “No, not that it matters. But I want you to know that there have been some difficulties in adapting this system to a submarine version.”

“As in, it doesn’t work?”

“It hasn’t worked very well so far,” he said. “We had one test on a dummy minefield using a sub, and the first time out the thing just quit. The second time it worked like a charm. The third time it worked half-ass. Like that.”

“Not reliable, then.”

He shrugged. “It’s a new electronic system. The frequency-modulation aspect means that, when it works, you can see mines underwater. See them very well, in fact. The tweaking and peaking, the subsurface environment, the ability of the operator, the quality of the power supply, the flexibility of the technicians — these are the important variables. Let’s have an overview.”

He produced a portfolio of view-graphs and proceeded to give a system technical overview briefing on the new sonar. When he’d finished he asked if there were any questions.

“You said the sub version looks up at an angle,” Tom Walsh said. “Can it see straight ahead, or down?”

Westfall fished through the slides and put up the one showing the ray path of ensonification. “It has to look up because, for the sub version, the transducer is mounted on the stem, under a sharply raked bow,” he said. “The assumption being that you would be running at depth, two fifty to three hundred feet. Our design parameters were that the Japanese-moored mines are planted from the surface down to two hundred fifty feet.”

“So if there’s one at three hundred feet, the sonar won’t see it,” Gar said.

“If you trimmed the bow at a down ten-degree angle, it probably could.”

“Probably.”

Westfall sat back and sighed. “The detection performance for all sonars is based on a probability analysis, Captain. The original idea was to give you warning so that you could avoid a minefield. Are you talking about deliberately penetrating one?”

“Not exactly,” Gar said, equivocating while trying not to think about Bungo Suido. “I’m talking about finding myself in a minefield we didn’t know about and trying to get out.”

Westfall seemed to accept that at face value. “The system would allow you to know the average depth of the mines around you, assuming that they’re all planted at or near the same depth. If it’s a random disposition, no straight lines, random ambush depths—”

“In other words, an antisubmarine field.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re screwed,” said the captain.

The two EDOs were taken aback, but Gar laughed, grateful for the captain’s honesty.

“As I said before,” Westfall continued, “this system was designed for minesweepers on the surface looking down into the sea. You’ll be deep in the sea and looking up. It’s designed to keep you out of a minefield. I wouldn’t bother running it in depths over a hundred, hundred fifty fathoms. Otherwise, turn it on, and leave it on. If you hear Hell’s Bells, back down hard, see what you got, and find some other place to go if you can.”

“Okay,” Gar said. “Now, most of our underwater sound work is passive, so as not to give listening Jap destroyers a beacon on us. This is an active system — can they hear it?”

“We think not,” Westfall said. “Detection probabilities are based on a cone of five to six hundred yards. It’s FM, so we’re trading power for enhanced discrimination, and one of the available options is to change frequency within a narrow band. We recommend that the operator do that frequently, because water conditions can affect performance without your knowing it.”

“Right,” Gar said. “Where’s the display going to be?”

One of the EDOs from the shipyard told him that it would be next to the sound display in the conning tower. “It’s being installed today, in fact,” he said.

It was Gar’s turn to sigh. More stuff in the conning tower. Surface search radar, air search radar, passive sonar, periscope, the plot, the TDC, and now active sonar. Maybe it was time to adopt Mush Morton’s method of having the XO conduct the attack with the CO standing back and absorbing all this information.

“It’s the technical wave of the future,” the captain said, as if reading Gar’s mind. “We’re turning increasingly to electronics to define the battle space. Even surface ships as small as destroyers have to dedicate an entire compartment to displaying their tactical situation these days. They call it CIC, Combat Information Center.”

“We call it the conning tower,” Gar said, “and it’s already crammed full of stuff. Could I shoot at something using this FM sonar? Like at another submarine?”

“We’ve looked into that,” Westfall said. “Right now the display shows little pear-shaped blobs wherever the sonar sees mines. Another sub would appear as a much bigger blob, depending on his aspect. If he’s broadside to you, and at your depth, the whole screen will go green on you. If he’s end on, it’ll look like a slightly bigger blob. Then there’s only one way to answer the question.”

Gar raised his eyebrows at him.

“Fire one!” Westfall shouted, then dramatically lowered his voice. “Then go really deep.”

Everyone’s a comedian, Gar thought, as the EDOs chuckled.

That night he was having a drink up in the skippers’ lounge with two other captains when Captain Forrester showed up. He came over to the Royal frequently in the evenings and even had a room down on the fifth floor. He was always welcomed into the evening BS sessions, first because he was Lockwood’s chief of staff and thereby privy to a lot of inside dope about what was going on in the war, and, second, he’d been a skipper himself. Normally commanding officers wouldn’t have much contact with the chief of staff; their direct bosses were division commanders, four-stripers who’d distinguished themselves in command. Both Lockwood and Forrester, however, made a point of keeping close to the COs, mostly because of the sorry history of American submarine torpedoes at the beginning of the war.

After a half hour or so, Forrester gave Gar the high sign, and they went to one corner of the lounge, where he produced a brown envelope. He withdrew a pair of glossy black-and-white photographs and handed one over to Gar. It showed a large, dark building, shaped like a shoebox, with what looked like a dry dock on one side and a pier on the other.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Gar said. “Looks like an aerial photograph of a dockyard building, maybe in a shipyard?”

“Correct,” Forrester said. “There’s a scale on the bottom. White lettering, bottom right. That building is fifteen hundred feet long.”

“Yes, I can see that. The dockside cranes look wrong, though. Too small. Is that a distortion of the camera?”

“No. If you look closely, they’re the same size as the cranes on the adjacent pier. It’s the building that’s really big.”

“Where was this shot?”

“Near Hiroshima, on the Inland Sea. Actually, it’s the Japanese naval arsenal at Kure. A reconnaissance B-29 flying out of China took it while he was doing a target survey.”

“Did he bomb it?”

“No, when this was taken they couldn’t reach the Home Islands with a load of bombs. This was a photo-recce plane, so it has longer range than a fully loaded bomber. That picture was taken two months ago.”

Okay, Gar thought. Big, fat building in a Jap shipyard. Even from 30,000 feet, the B-29s out of Tinian should be able to hit that. So why was he getting an oh-oh feeling about this little meeting? He looked over at Forrester, who handed him the second picture.

“This is what they were hiding under that building,” he said.

The second picture showed almost the same scene, this time with a few wispy white clouds framing the image. Where the building had been there was now the unmistakable shape of an aircraft carrier under construction. This must be the ship Marty had been talking about, Gar thought.

“That thing’s huge,” Gar said. “Same scale?”

“Same scale. Taken two weeks ago. She’s slightly over a thousand feet long. The army photo interpreters saw this, went back and found the previous shot, and then realized this needed to get back here to Pearl.”

“Well, if the B-29s can’t handle this, sounds like a job for a carrier strike force, Captain. Halsey needs to take the Big Blue Fleet in there.”

“We’re talking the Home Islands, Gar,” Forrester said. “With all due respect to Admiral Halsey, a carrier task force would get its ass kicked pretty hard, they venture into Home Island waters. Actually, Admiral Nimitz thinks this a job for a submarine.”

Oh, shit, Gar thought. Here it comes. They want a sub to get this thing, and that means Bungo Suido — and this was coming from Nimitz himself? Gar made the argument about Tinian that he’d made to Marty.

“The airfield on Tinian won’t be fully operational for another two, maybe three months,” Forrester said. “Besides, those cranes and all that stuff on her flight deck aren’t construction materials, Gar. She’s just about completed. Admiral Nimitz says that we cannot afford to let a carrier of that size get loose in the Pacific right now, especially with the invasion of Luzon imminent. The Japs are already moving large fleet forces south.”

Gar tried to ignore that sinking feeling in his gut. “She’ll have to come out sometime,” he said. “And then we’ll let one of the boats on empire patrol take her down. What’s the big deal?”

Forrester cleared his throat. “Remember the Wounded Bear, Gar?”

That was just what Marty had said. At their “chance” encounter in the O-club. First it had been Uncle Charlie casually inquiring about Bungo Suido. Then Marty. Now the chief of staff. Plus the brand-new and improved FM sonar. Oh, boy, he thought.

He tried again. “Right now we all have standing orders to stay the hell out of all the Home Island straits, especially Bungo Suido. We’ve lost five boats in and around those waters. Mines everywhere, their best destroyer forces, a zillion fishing boats and sampans to provide early warning, constant local air patrols, no really good charts of the area—”

Forrester interrupted him as if he’d heard that all before. “Nimitz proposes that we send a boat into the Inland Sea to keep that carrier from ever leaving Japan. It’s a tall order, I know, but if it can be done, they’d never expect it.”

“With good damn reason,” Gar said, realizing that all his objections had already been surfaced and overruled at PacFleet headquarters. “That would be like trying to get a sub into the Chesapeake Bay, right past all the Norfolk navy bases.”

Forrester said nothing.

“And then? Suppose we do get a boat in? He’s going to drive up to the Kure arsenal in, what, fifty, sixty feet of water? Unable to submerge? And torpedo a carrier at the pier?”

Gar had raised his voice enough to attract the attention of the other skippers in the lounge.

Forrester leaned closer and gave him a meaningful look. “Not just any boat, Gar.”

FOUR

The next day Gar spent cloistered with the hydrographic office at SubPac headquarters, studying the charts they did have of the Seto, as the Inland Sea was known in Japan. Captain Forrester had told him the entire mission was extremely close-hold, even within the already highly restricted world of sub skippers. Gar was not to discuss it with anyone yet until given specific permission. “If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “the admiral is going to have one more try at turning this brain fart off. But I have to tell you: Nimitz almost never changes his mind once he’s made a decision.” Gar had wanted to say, Nimitz was a sub skipper — if he really wants a sub to get into the Inland Sea, let him try it, then. Sadly, he was brave but not that brave.

He spent the afternoon on board the Dragon, checking on the progress of the repairs and the installation of the new sonar system. Dragonfish was a Balao class, new construction in early 1944, with the stronger hull and better everything inside. Captain Westfall was right about electronics beginning to take over warship design. The Dragon had been commissioned with two periscopes; now she would have four. She’d started out with one HF radio set; now she had six different radios and an underwater telephone system. At the beginning of the war they’d computed fire-control problems using a handheld calculator called the Is-Was and plotted the tactical picture on a copy of a chart. Now they had the torpedo data computer and a lighted plotting table that showed their position in real-time motion across a geographic plot, called a DRT. If they added one more piece of gear to the conning tower, they were all going to become very good friends every time they went to GQ, and nobody had better smile, either.

It had been difficult not to pull the exec aside and tell him about the mission that was coming their way. The closest he had come was when Russ commented on all the new gear up in the conning tower. “We’re gonna need it,” Gar had said mysteriously.

That evening Gar went down to the dining room. He didn’t bother to change from work khakis. The place was full for a change because of some big conference going on up at Makalapa. He had to settle for a deuce out on the lanai, which wasn’t all bad. Even though it was hotter than usual, the lanai was dark enough that he could avoid making eye contact with other skippers if he wanted to, and tonight he wanted to. He had a low tolerance for people in general, and having to listen to shipyard workers, the FM sonar engineers, the exec’s litany of daily problems, and some staffies from SubPac all afternoon hadn’t improved his disposition. He told the waitress when she finally showed up to start with a double Scotch rocks, and he’d decide after that whether or not to eat or drink this evening.

A few minutes later she brought his drink, and then the maître’d came though the lanai doors with the same woman he’d semirescued a few nights ago. This time she was definitely sober and actually quite attractive. Somewhat to his surprise she was wearing the uniform of a WAVE lieutenant commander. The pair were scanning the crowded room for a table, and there weren’t any. The maître’d saw that Gar was in uniform and gave him a discreet eyebrow. Gar nodded. He brought her over, and Gar stood up to greet her. She thanked him for letting her join him and introduced herself.

“I’m Sharon DeVeers,” she said.

“Gar Hammond,” he replied. She had a firm handshake and grayish green eyes that were no longer bloodshot. She still wore her luxuriant blond hair in a wave across one side of her forehead. “Are you one of the visiting firemen?”

“No, I’m assigned to CincPacFleet legal; I’m one of the lawyers up there.”

He signaled a passing waitress for Sharon, who ordered a ginger ale. When the waitress left he made a comment about expecting her to have a real drink. She smiled and said that she was still recovering from the hangover of the last time she’d been here.

“I can understand that — you were pretty hammered.”

She stared at him for a moment and then put a hand to her mouth. “That was you?”

“The one and only. And I believe you got ambushed by something called a mai-tai.”

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I have never been so drunk in my life. And the next day — God!”

“Lemme guess, a bunch of the guys from the office demanded that you just had to try one. Or three.”

“Bingo,” she said. “After the first one I thought it was just the best fruit concoction I had ever had, especially because it had very little liquor in it. Silly me.”

“Yup, that about describes it. I’m a Scotch man myself — straight up or on the rocks.”

“M-mmm, I like Scotch, but I save it for when I’m having a drink with a really close friend,” she said, with a definite twinkle in her eye. Gar tried to gauge how old she was. “Where are you stationed?” she asked.

“That’s a deep secret,” Gar said solemnly. “The entire war effort would grind to a halt if that were revealed.”

“Un-hunh,” she said. “Those are submariner dolphins, and you’re a commander, so I’d guess you’re one of those special people they have locked up on the top floors.”

“Listen,” he said.

She pretended to listen.

“Hear the grinding?”

“Nope.”

“Damn,” he said. “Most women are so impressed with that.”

“You don’t have to impress me, Captain,” she said. “You were a complete gentleman the other night, so please let me spring for dinner tonight as a small measure of my appreciation.”

“Okay,” he said immediately, and she laughed. She had a very nice laugh, for a lawyer. The waitress sailed by, depositing Sharon’s ginger ale on the fly. They toasted each other.

“You have a family back in the world?” she asked.

“Nope,” Gar said. “I’m just a fleet-average sea dog. I go from sea duty to sea duty, so I never saw the need for a wife, etc. And you?”

“I was almost married once,” she said. “Right after law school. He was brilliant and unfaithful, in about equal measure. After that I decided I’d make it all about me and never looked back.”

“So,” he said. “What does CincPacFleet need with a herd of lawyers?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at our case load. Courts-martial, courts of inquiry, like when a ship is lost. International law issues — such as when one of our subs sinks a hospital ship. The Law of the Sea. Atrocity cases. Geneva Convention. Special missions.”

“Wow,” he said. “I had no idea. Bet you never did a court of inquiry on the loss of a submarine, though.”

Her expression said, Why not?

“Nobody comes back to answer the questions.”

“Good point.”

“What is your role in all this lawyering, if I may ask.”

“If it’s a court-martial, I’m usually the military judge.”

“You don’t look old enough to be a judge,” he said. He wasn’t being gallant — she really didn’t.

“I was a judge in real life,” she said. “Before this awful war. State court. And as to age, I’m forty-one last month.”

This time Gar was being gallant. “Going on thirty-five,” he said. “How do you manage that?”

She smiled again, and that smile lit up the table. “Lots of illusion there, Captain,” she said, “and dieting, and makeup, and a really special Filipina hairdresser down on Broad Street.”

She was four years older than he was. He was entranced. A small dance combo opened up and he asked her if she’d like to dance. She asked if he had ordered yet. He said no.

“Why don’t you and I blow this pop stand, then, and just go upstairs?” she asked, while rubbing a stockinged foot against his right leg.

“The marines don’t allow ladies above the third deck,” he said, trying not to whimper.

“There are no marines on my floor,” she said. “If that helps.”

As it turned out, Miss Ginger Ale had a bottle of truly lovely single malt, which they dutifully sampled. The windows were open, and the music from the lanai drifted into the room.

“Now I’d like to dance,” she said, and so they did. She moved right in, a glass of Scotch in one hand and Gar in the other. One thing led to another, followed by a prolonged hot shower. Gar had learned a long time ago, via the good offices of older and sometimes married women in and around various navy towns, that when a woman in the mood knows what she wants, all that’s required is what one does every great navy day: follow orders willingly and to the best of one’s abilities. If the lady likes to subdue her natural inhibitions with a wee dram or three first, God love her.

They got dressed and went back down to the dining room for a late supper, and then out to the lanai, which by now had pretty much emptied out. It was another gorgeous evening in Hawaii. He asked her how she’d come to be here.

“Wanted to do my bit,” she said. “With an entire generation of young men absent at war, my work as a state court judge was pretty dull. I was single, turning forty, tired of hearing mostly frivolous lawsuits, and wanting a change of pace.”

“Get what you wished for?”

She nodded and then smiled. “Certainly did tonight, kind sir.”

“I’m very glad,” he said. “Being the male part of the equation, I felt lucky that you even looked my way.”

“I have to be careful,” she said. “Up there at headquarters, I mean. Everyone’s a bachelor, even the ones with the wife and kiddies’ pictures on their desks. The four-stripers are the worst offenders.”

“Comes with that fourth stripe,” Gar said. “The one that proclaims for all to see that you’re officially old and on a bold course for imminent pasture.”

She laughed at that. “A lot of them seem to think they’re going to be admirals pretty soon,” she said, signaling the waiter for another drink.

“One, maybe two,” Gar said. “Back in ’42 the chances were better, but now? I think this thing’s going to be over in a year or so, and then most of those admirals and their strikers will be getting Dear John letters from BuPers.”

“And you?”

“You mean after my command tour? Honestly, I have no idea. I might have to get out and find a real job somewhere. I try not to think about it.”

Sharon asked whether he would ever get married.

“Marriage?” he echoed. “As in a family, kids, a house in the suburbs? Like I said, just never felt the need, I guess. I’ve been on sea duty for my entire career except for sub school and a year at postgraduate school. My more politically savvy classmates have done tours on staffs, shore stations, Washington, but I’m a haze-gray and underway guy. Once I got into the boats my career objective was to get a sub command; the war was a bonus.”

That seemed to surprise her. “My, my,” she said. “The war was a bonus? That’s a little stark, isn’t it?”

“What’s that old British Army toast? To a long and bloody war? It originated in the fact that advancement in the British Army was strictly by seniority and length of service. If you were going to be promoted, somebody literally had to die.”

“From what little I’ve heard about losses in the Pacific submarine force, promotions ought to be rolling right along.”

He’d forgotten she was a headquarters maven, and the one thing he’d learned about staffs, especially big staffs, was that they loved to gossip. Submarine losses were closely held, mostly because the Japs were pretty quick to claim a kill every time they tangled with an American boat. It was to PacFleet’s advantage to let them think they were wiping the American submarine force off the map when in fact they were not. There was, however, just one little fly in the ointment when it came to applying British regimental logic to his own situation.

“Look,” he told her. “What we do is murder. We lie in wait, mostly invisible, until some big fat tanker or freighter drives into my field of view. Then I fire a half-ton warhead into his guts from about a half mile away, and whoever doesn’t die in that explosion gets burned to death in the resulting fire, dragged down by the wreckage, or eaten by sharks. If there are escorts, and they’re any good at their job, we in turn catch hell for the next several hours. We go deep and get depth-bombed. It only takes one, close enough to the hull, to send us down to oblivion right behind the ship we just sank. If that happens, nobody knows what happened to us except the Japs. We disappear without a trace except maybe a diesel oil slick that dissipates the first time the wind comes up. As to promotions, there’s just one problem. In the army, if the colonel of the regiment gets killed, his regiment needs a new colonel. In submarines, unfortunately, the commander always goes down with the command.”

“So it’s not about promotions or advancement, then.”

“Correct,” he said. “It’s about command itself. See, in submarines, the captain is the boat. The officers, the chiefs, the enlisted, they’re a vital part of the equation, but the captain is the boat. For better or for worse, he makes all the decisions when the time comes to fight. Plus, we’re a results-oriented outfit. I got command because I was qualified, one of many, and because the guy I replaced wasn’t getting results.”

“He wasn’t any good at murder.”

“One way of putting it, I suppose. I am good at it. I sense that the other skippers don’t like me much, but the brass loves my statistics, all that Jap tonnage on the bottom. That’s what I meant about the bonus. I’m getting to do what I’ve been trained for during all those years of peacetime, and I’m good at it.”

“That sounds a bit cocky to me, kind sir.”

He shrugged. “I’m not bragging,” he said. “Just stating a fact. Dragonfish is getting the job done. The captain is the boat. I happen to be captain.”

“And after the war’s over? I mean, we all know this can’t go on, that the Japs can’t keep doing this.”

“I try not to think about that,” he said.

“That bad, hunh?”

He laughed. “Unimaginable,” he said. “And you? I see no wedding ring. If I may ask?”

“After my near-miss, I never felt the need,” she said with a perfectly straight face. He laughed out loud.

“No, I mean that,” she said. “I was the only female in my law school class. That’s all changed now, especially with most of the men being in the service, but back then all the guys wanted to know what the hell I was doing there. Getting a JD, just like you, sport. I had the great fortune to go to work for the government as an assistant DA before the Depression really bit down. No money in it, of course, but that’s one thing about a depression or a recession — lawyers, especially prosecutors, are in demand. Everyone wants someone to blame. I got the judgeship because of the war, again, because the men who were better qualified than I was had joined up in one form or another.”

“How do all those JAG guys treat you now that you’ve joined up?”

“Well, it was kind of back to law school for a while: What are you doing here? I gave them the same answer as before: Same thing you’re doing here. Of course it’s competitive in the JAG offices — lawyers are competitive by nature, even if what they’re doing is temporary. I finally remembered that I was in the navy now. I’ve succeeded up there because I’m good at what I do, and because my competition focuses on the blond hair and as much leg as I’m willing to display and forgets all about my years as a prosecutor and then my time on the bench. Essentially, when it comes to the courtroom, they never see me coming.”

“We’re alike, then,” Gar said. “The Japs never see me coming either, except when they do. That’s what keeps it interesting.”

“As to marriage, well, I’m pretty happy with being a one-woman band. If I’d had kids at home and a husband, I probably could never have done any of this. Like tonight, for instance.”

“Speaking of tonight, can I see you again, before — um.”

She grinned. “Before you have to go back to your secret submarine and then set sail on an even more secret mission, departing at a secret time?”

“Can’t tell you, remember? It’s a secret.”

“I’ll bet my hairdresser knows not only when you’re leaving but where you’re going.”

Gar shook his head. “Probably,” he said. At this point, Honolulu was definitely a company town. “But back to the question?”

She took his hand discreetly. “The answer is that it’s never going to be as good as it was earlier this evening, not unless we happen to fall desperately in love and are willing to just die if we can’t be together day and night forever and ever.”

“That a no?” he asked with as straight a face as he could muster.

She smiled again and finished her drink. “You know I’m right about these things.”

Gar noticed she was slurring her words just a bit and decided to quit trying. “We are two of kind, after all,” he said. “I agree with you. I’d still love to prove you wrong about certain parts of your theory, but this has been a delightful interlude. It’s like we’re adhering to one of Murphy’s laws — the one that says you fool with a thing long enough, you inevitably break it.”

“There you go,” she said. “Now, if you ever need a lawyer while I’m out here, I’m your shyster.”

They said their good nights and parted company, she to her room, presumably, and Gar to his, the one that was guarded by marines. He lay in bed thinking about the evening’s delightful interlude, as he’d termed their encounter.

There were times when he questioned his decision to forgo the wife-and-family scene. Tonight wasn’t one of them. Sharon DeVeers was definitely a sport model. Gar’s first ship after graduation had been a battleship, USS New York. The Depression had landed with both feet and he was sending money home to his parents like most other junior officers, except of course the married ones. Demand for just about everything faltered badly, and when the mills closed up, so did the mines. Being on sea duty he really didn’t need much in the way of money, so he felt pretty good about being able to support the folks — and grateful that he hadn’t tied the knot as a fair number of his academy classmates had. Then the ship was reassigned to the Pacific Fleet and the so-called China station, where being a bachelor was the best of all possible worlds.

Sharon had it right, he thought. A one-night stand was part and parcel of their respective attitudes. He really liked her, of course, but there was no future in that sort of thing during wartime, and she knew it, too. Besides, he told himself, if you want to fancy yourself a lone wolf, don’t hang around the pack.

He grinned in the dark. He had almost convinced himself. Bad sign, Gar Hammond, he thought. You’re starting to believe your own bullshit.

FIVE

By the end of the week Dragonfish was out of the dry dock and back alongside a finger pier. Gar asked the exec to assemble all the officers in the wardroom. When Russ came down to Gar’s cabin to let him know they were ready for him, Gar told him to step in and pull the curtain.

“We’re going back out early,” he told him. “Special mission.”

Russ groaned. “Aviator rescue station?” The subs were increasingly being used to take up stations around the carrier battle fleet’s next strike target. It was vital duty but lousy hunting.

“Nope,” Gar said. “Empire, but with a catch.”

He saw the exec’s hopes rise. Empire patrol areas, those close to the Home Islands of Japan, meant much better hunting prospects. Then he focused on that last word.

“Catch?”

“They want us to penetrate Bungo Suido.”

The exec stared at him. “You’re kidding,” he said finally.

Gar just looked at him.

“You’re not kidding.” The exec sighed. “Five submarines not enough? They want to make it an even number?”

Gar had no answer for that. The exec was clearly stunned. The submarine force couldn’t prove that they’d lost five subs in and around Bungo Suido since early 1942, but they were pretty sure. The straits of the Japanese main islands had been proscribed since Wahoo failed to return from a patrol. The legendary Mush Morton had managed to penetrate one minefield into the Sea of Japan, and he’d done some real damage, reported that he was coming out, and that was it. Wahoo simply disappeared. The best guess was that she had hit a mine in La Pérouse Strait on the way out, but a guess was all they had when a sub didn’t come back. All SubPac could do was put a black flag on the status board in the general area of Japan. For the most part, they had no real idea of what had happened to any of them. They simply failed to come home.

“Do we know why?” the exec asked.

“Not officially,” Gar said. “We’ll receive sealed orders just before we sail.”

“And unofficially?”

“It involves a carrier. That’s all I think I should say at this juncture, and that’s between you and me.”

The exec tried to put a good face on it, but he was struggling. “I guess we’ll have a target smorgasbord in there, assuming we make it through.”

“This new sonar should make a big difference,” Gar said. “I’ve been to a briefing with the head scientist for that project. We have an updated version of it, and hopefully updated means better. It supposedly can tell you that there’s a mine within five, six hundred yards of you, and roughly where it is. It doesn’t tell you what to do next.”

“Back the hell out of there?”

“But in which direction?” Gar asked. “The Japs aren’t stupid, other than when they started this war. Originally they mined all the choke points to keep their battle fleet and their bases safe against battleships. The mines were all set shallow, and big. Now they’re aiming almost exclusively at submarines.”

“A good portion of their battle fleet being on the bottom.”

“Exactly. They’re finally realizing what the real threat is, so now the moored mines are planted at various depths, down to two hundred fifty feet in some cases. It used to be theoretically possible to go deep and drive under the minefield and hope like hell you didn’t catch a cable and pull one down onto the boat. Now it’s a true 3-D problem, hence the new sonar. In the meantime … is everybody in the wardroom?”

“Yes, sir. What will you tell them?”

“Simply that we’re going out early on a special mission.”

“Bungo Suido?”

“No. I’m keeping that close-hold, too.”

The exec nodded. Gar knew what he was thinking: If word got out that the Dragon was headed for Bungo Suido, there would definitely be some transfer requests surfacing. Submarining was a volunteer sport. If someone asked to get off a sub, it was understood in the force that he could go to other duty on surface ships with no questions asked.

“Is that fair, sir?” the exec asked.

“Fair, XO? As in, what’s ‘fair’ got to do with anything?”

“What I meant was—”

“I know what you meant,” Gar said. “All submariners are volunteers. We owe it to the men to tell them when we’re going on a particularly dangerous mission. This time I can’t do it. My excuse is going to be that I don’t know what the actual mission is yet, and won’t until I open the orders.”

“Transfer requests will be moot at that point, Captain.”

“Yup. Now that you sort of know, you want off?”

“Are we being frank, here, Captain? Because if we are, hell, yes. Bungo Suido? Any sane man would want off. But that’s different from my asking to get off. That I won’t do.”

“Good answer, Russ, and I’m expecting the same thing from the officers and crew. Nobody wants to mess with Bungo Suido. All we can hope is that the Japs will think the same way and won’t be looking too hard. They simply won’t expect it.”

“For many damned good reasons,” the exec said, echoing Gar’s own sentiments, as he pulled back the curtain. “The officers are assembled, sir,” he declared formally.

“Ducky,” Gar said.

It was their last night in port. Gar luxuriated in a final hot shower at the Pink Palace and then dressed and went downstairs for a drink and some supper. The all-officers meeting had been a bit strained. The wardroom recognized that they weren’t being told a whole lot other than that they were off on a special mission. Gar’s reluctance to answer any questions, plus the exec’s grim face, apparently spoke volumes. The officers knew better than to push it, Gar realized, but he felt that he’d been disloyal to them in one sense. He rationalized it by telling them, and himself, that the mission was the mission. Submarines were offensive weapons, and he firmly believed in the notion that they deliberately drove in harm’s way. The fact that some of his officers were married with wives and children worrying back in the States was something he had to coldly ignore. They very well might not come back from this one, but there was a war on, and the submarine force was at the tip of the spear.

He took a table out on the lanai as was his custom, ordered a double Scotch, and then sat back to enjoy the whisky and not think too much. He’d avoided the sixth-floor hospitality suite. He did not want to see or talk to any of his brethren this evening.

Where you bound this patrol?

Can’t say.

Oh, come on — we’re all in this together.

Can’t say. Hell, won’t say. Besides, it’s no big deal, although, if you knew, you’d say I was nuts. Truth to tell, you’d be right. I think the whole fucking thing is nuts. Bungo Suido, for God’s sake.

New sonar or no new sonar, the four-striper’s words hung in his memory. Works some of the time, but not all the time. Wasn’t designed for submarines, you know? Wonderful: a sonar that would let you see there was a whole minefield right in front of you, help you steer into it, for the love of Mike, and then, what — quit?

The wave of fear ambushed him. He’d felt fear before, when the depth charges were clicking and booming out there in the black depths, but this was different. This was helplessness compounded by his decision not to tell his people what the brass wanted the Dragon to do. It was the kind of helplessness you’d feel when you were out in a river and you first heard the thunder of a waterfall around the next bend. What’s the matter, there, Captain Lone Wolf: This is how you’ve played it all along, yes? What’s the problem now?

He blew out a long breath and finished his Scotch. The waitress slid by, saw the empty glass, and raised an eyebrow. Gar nodded. Yes, ma’am, hit it again, harder, please. The double had begun to work its magic, even though a part of his brain remained entirely too sober. Getting boiled tonight was not going to change anything.

“Hey there, sailor,” a familiar voice said.

He cranked his head around and saw Sharon’s face.

“Thank you, God,” he said, and she grinned and sat down. Her face was a bit flushed, and she was carrying the remains of a Scotch of her own.

“You look a bit stressed,” she said.

“I’m think I’m going quietly insane,” he said. “We’ve got a special mission, and we’re probably not coming back.”

Her face clouded. “What?”

“Can’t tell you,” he said. “But I’m scared. For the first time in my entire naval career, I’m scared. I think I know how my crew has felt during some of the last few patrols.”

She just looked at him, as if trying to figure out if this was bachelor bullshit or something much more real. Studying his face, she decided it wasn’t bullshit.

“The ‘bonus’ going a bit sour, is it?”

“Jesus Christ, lady. Your memory is annoying.”

“Lawyer memory, Captain. It’s how we get ya.”

He shook his head. “They’re sending us to Bungo Suido,” he said. “Five of our boats are already dead in that part of the sea. Five skippers and their execs whom I knew personally, three hundred or so crewmen. All with goddamned fish swimming in and out of their mouths. All—”

“Stop it, Gar Hammond,” she said. “Just stop it. And enough of that stuff, too.” She took his refill away from him and parked it on her side of the table.

He gave her a look that said, You are going to lecture me on drinking too much? She understood immediately.

“I’m a professional boozer, Gar,” she said quietly. “You’re just pretending. So, yeah, you’re officially eighty-six. You should be sober when you discover that you’re human, just like the rest of us.”

Gar closed his eyes. He didn’t need this. He was already embarrassed at revealing that finally, the big bad submarine captain was tasting real fear. She reached across the table and took his hand. “Why don’t we go upstairs?” she asked. “Now that you’re done drinking.”

He sighed. He didn’t want sex. He didn’t want any more booze, either — she was right about that. He wanted — hell, he didn’t know what he wanted.

“C’mon,” she said, pushing back her chair.

He looked around the dark lanai, as if not wanting anyone to see them, then recognized how ridiculous that was. He signed his bar chit and followed her through the dining room to the elevators.

Once in her room he sat on the edge of the bed. There were two chairs in the room, but they were covered in clothes and books, so there was nowhere else to sit. Sharon went into the bathroom. When she came back out she was wearing a full-length white slip and nothing else.

“Oh-oh,” Gar said.

She smiled at him and crossed the room, doing something with her hairdo that made it suddenly fall down.

“Up,” she said.

“Up, aye,” he said, trying to think of something really clever to say.

She took his clothes off and then pushed him back onto the bed with one finger. He did as he was ordered, and she joined him, sitting across his hips while she continued to run her fingers through her hair. Gar recognized who was in charge and simply lay back to enjoy the show, Bungo Suido and all its drowned ghosts suddenly forgotten. Sharon proceeded to bend down and apply her lips to his, and after that, to present all the other best parts for similar attention from him.

“Don’t make me whimper,” he said, after a while.

“No whimper, no joy,” she whispered.

He whimpered.

“Atta boy,” she said.

SIX

On the afternoon prior to Dragonfish’s departure, Gar was summoned to SubPac headquarters for a final briefing. The summons included the exec, Russ West. They arrived at the headquarters building, with its three-star flag fluttering on an antique yardarm outside, and were ushered into the admiral’s office ten minutes later. Gar was surprised to see that the admiral wasn’t there; the chief of staff, Captain Forrester, was. He was even more surprised to find two Japanese men sitting at the admiral’s conference table. One was wearing the uniform of a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander. The other, much older, was dressed in a long-sleeved white cotton shirt and khaki trousers. Captain Forrester made the introductions.

“Captain Hammond,” he said, “this is Lieutenant Commander Bobby Tanaka from the CincPacFleet intelligence division. Next to him is Mr. Minoru Hashimoto, who has been interned in a POW camp here on Oahu since late 1943.” He turned to the other two. “Gentlemen, this is Commander Hammond and Lieutenant Commander West, the captain and executive officer of USS Dragonfish, which is one of our submarines.”

Both of them rose at the same time. Bobby Tanaka shook hands with Gar and West. The older man bowed to them individually but said nothing. Gar tried to estimate his age but found it difficult. He was of medium height and very slim. His hair was almost white and his face severely weather-beaten. His hands and forearms, which he kept rigidly to his sides, indicated that he’d spent many years in manual labor of some kind, probably commercial fishing. Standing next to Hashimoto, Lieutenant Commander Tanaka looked positively elegant.

Gar had met Tanaka before. He was a native-born American whose parents lived in New York City. He had an Ivy League education and, being fluent in Japanese, had probably made some significant, if necessarily classified, contributions to naval intelligence efforts. He’d briefed the sub skippers a couple of times at the Pink Palace, and each time the appearance of a Japanese face in those precincts had caused quite a stir.

Forrester asked everyone to sit down and then took the seat at the head of the table. “Commander Tanaka, would you explain to Captain Hammond why Mr. Hashimoto is going to go out on Dragonfish’s next war patrol?”

What? Gar thought. A passenger? On this mission? A POW? Were they nuts?

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka said. “Captain, Mr. Hashimoto was born and raised in a small fishing village just outside of Kure, near Hiroshima City, on the island of Honshu. He started out as a fisherman’s apprentice, eventually owned his own boat and then a small fishing fleet. He lost all that to a typhoon and then set up a small boatyard near the village, where they repaired hulls and engines. Hashimoto-san’s village and boatyard were seized by the army in 1928 to accommodate the expansion of the Kure naval arsenal. The villagers were basically thrown out of their homes and livelihoods without compensation, and if they complained, the provincial governor simply put them in jail.

“When the war began, all of the local fishermen and anyone else connected with the fishing industry were put under the authority of the army military district commander at Hiroshima City. You may not realize this, but Hiroshima is an army city. It contains the Japanese Second General Army headquarters, which controls fourteen divisions in Korea and on Kyushu, as well as the Fifteenth Area Army, which has eight divisions in western Honshu and Shikoku Island. Hashimoto-san was one of thousands of civilians who were suddenly under the control of the Japanese army, not known to be a kind and loving institution. He was captured by the Albacore at the end of ’43 off the coast of Shikoku when they shot up a trawler fleet. He was brought to Oahu a month later. He has relatives back on the mainland, who’d left Japan back in 1928 and settled in California. They, of course, are now in one of the internment camps. He’s fifty-nine years old, a widower, and despises what Tojo and the militarists have done to Japan. He’s been cooperative, and looks forward to the day when America defeats the lunatics and can bring sanity back to Japan.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Gar said. “But why on earth do you want to put a civilian on board for a mission like this?”

“Your mission involves a penetration into the Inland Sea of Japan, specifically the straits of Bungo Suido. Hashimoto-san knows those waters like the back of his hand. He’s going to guide you through them. In return, you will at some point put him ashore.”

Gar thought about that for a moment. Then he turned to the old man. “Do you speak English, Mr. Hashimoto?” he asked.

Hashimoto looked over at Tanaka for guidance. Tanaka nodded his head once. “Some,” he said, in the familiar polyglot accent of the local Hawaiians. “Got pretty good pidgin now.”

“Hashimoto-san has been given English lessons in the compound,” Tanaka said. “All the Japanese POWs are learning English. It’s part of, let us say, our conversion program. He understands English better than he speaks it. You’ve heard the Hawaiian locals, Captain. He can communicate as well as they can, once you get used to the dialect. He does, of course, speak fluent Japanese, albeit with a provincial accent. Someone from Tokyo would probably make fun of him. He’s brought along something I think you’ll find to be very useful.”

He nodded at Hashimoto, who reached under the conference table and produced what looked like a rolled-up poster. He stood up, laid this out on the table, and unrolled it, revealing a hand-drawn nautical chart of the western end of the Inland Sea. He slid the chart across the table toward Gar with a short bow of his head.

A treasure indeed, Gar thought, as he examined the chart. Even though he couldn’t begin to read the Japanese kanji characters, he realized that a local fisherman would know things about that area that not even the Japanese naval hydrographers would know.

“Captain Hammond,” Tanaka said, “you need to know that the orders to take Hashimoto-san back to Japan come from the top. It was Admiral Nimitz’s office who asked my boss if there were any POWs here in the Islands who knew Bungo Suido and who’d be willing to help the U.S. Navy.”

“You raise an interesting question, Mister Tanaka,” Gar said. “The question of divided loyalties.”

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka said. “I know, especially when you consider how most Japanese army troops react to the notion of surrender. But Hashimoto-san was a civilian, and he has a very different perspective. All I can say is that when I discuss this with him, he speaks fervently about the coming destruction of his homeland and curses the militarists who have betrayed the Japanese people. The people in the Seto provinces — Seto refers to the Inland Sea — are very traditional, and they’re being treated like medieval slaves. You go ashore anywhere along the Inland Sea and you’re going way back in time.”

“Yet the reason the Albacore destroyed Mister Hashimoto’s trawler fleet was because most fishing boats out there are carrying radios and reporting to the military authorities,” Gar said. “They see a periscope, we lose a boat. Excuse me,” he said, glancing at Forrester. “Another boat.”

“That’s because they’re required to have a soldier on board any time they go to sea beyond the Seto, even for just a day. The army’s secret police, the Kempeitai, are watching them as much as they are watching the shoreline for intruders and spies. This war has been a disaster for the ordinary people in the countryside, and I think they know it’s going to get worse and that, ultimately, there will be an invasion.”

“That’s very interesting, Commander Tanaka,” Captain Forrester interjected. “But what the captain’s getting at is, can he trust Mr. Hashimoto not to lead them directly into a minefield?”

“Well, first of all, he wouldn’t have had any detailed information about minefields. When they’d go out, they’d be led out by a Japanese navy minesweeper, and brought back in the same way. Hashimoto was no longer going to sea once the war started, and only went back to fishing when they confiscated his boatyard. What he does know is the hydrography of Bungo Suido and its approaches, from both directions. He knows where the deep reefs and ledges are, the deep holes, where mines can and cannot not be planted. Things like that.”

Hashimoto said something in Japanese to Tanaka.

Tanaka rattled off some lightning-fast Japanese of his own. Even Gar could tell the difference in their accents. Hashimoto listened carefully, nodded twice, said the word hai, and then asked Tanaka another question.

“He’s asking why your ship is going into the Seto.”

Gar glanced over at Forrester for a cue as to what he could reveal, but the chief of staff’s face was a professional blank. Understood.

“Well, Commander,” Gar said to Tanaka, “I’m supposed to open sealed orders after we leave Guam. All I’ve been told unofficially is that we are to try to penetrate Bungo Suido and, assuming we succeed in getting through, conduct a special mission. Hell, you work at CincPacFleet — perhaps you can enlighten all of us?”

“Sorry, sir,” Tanaka said.

“Cannot or may not?”

“May not, sir. Truth is, I thought I knew what you were going to be tasked to do, but once this passenger business emerged, all of us snuffies on the intel staff were cut out of the loop. Anyone asking questions gets his head bitten off.”

“Well, then, you answer Mr. Hashimoto’s question, because I sure as hell can’t.”

Tanaka said something in Japanese to the old man, who grunted.

“What’d you tell him?” Gar asked.

“It’s a secret,” Tanaka said.

Got that right, Gar thought. He got up from the table and went to the windows overlooking the sub-base finger piers. A secret mission within a secret mission. The carrier was the ostensible objective, although he had no idea of how they would manage that. Either way, he wasn’t going to talk about that in front of a Japanese civilian, and a POW to boot. What upset him even more was that all these clever staffies didn’t trust him, the commanding officer, enough to tell him what the hell was going on here. Besides hurting his pride they were possibly compromising the mission: If he knew what they were really doing, he might be able to do some planning that would enhance their chances for success, preferably before they cut all ties with Pearl and went west. Taking a foreign national, an enemy foreign national, along for the most dangerous run of their lives was outrageous. They could get his chart translated if they had to, but there was no reason to let a Japanese, even one who now professed loyalty to the American side, come along.

He made a decision. “No,” he said. “I won’t do this.” He turned to the chief of staff. “I’m the commanding officer of Dragonfish, and obviously I don’t really know what this whole mission is about. I don’t think you do, either. The intel officer here says he doesn’t know. On top of that, I’m being asked to take a Japanese POW on board on what is an obviously either a highly classified mission or a harebrained idea that nobody wants to own up to. I think you need to get somebody else.”

Captain Forrester stared at him in shock. “Are you asking to be relieved of command?” he asked finally.

“I say again: If my superiors don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s really going on here, then yes, I’m asking to be relieved of command.”

“Think about what you just said, Captain, “Forrester said. “Think hard.”

Gar laughed out loud. “You think I don’t know what people say about me? That I’m some kind of nutcase because I hunt destroyers? You like the results well enough, as I recall, but I’ve seen the looks from the other COs at the Royal. Great score, man, but damn! Well, here it is: You want me to take the Dragon through Bungo Suido? With a Japanese national as my navigator? Then somebody better tell me why.”

He signaled to Russ, nodded to Tanaka and Hashimoto as politely as he could, gathered up his cap, and left the conference room. Forrester looked as if he’d just been slapped with a wet fish.

Gar finished his dinner at the Royal that night and asked for a Scotch and some coffee. Needless to say, he’d been thinking all day about what he’d said at the meeting with the chief of staff, and wondering if he’d really screwed up. Rising to command of a fleet submarine in wartime was more than likely going to be the pinnacle of his otherwise pretty undistinguished naval career, as he had explained to Sharon DeVeers. Dragonfish’s reason for being was to destroy the Japanese Empire’s ability to wage war, and that was as simple a proposition as he could imagine. Okay, some of his own tactics at sea were unconventional, but the results spoke for themselves. High-value hulls on the bottom. Destroyers blown to pieces, their crews going into the sea while their own depth charges rearranged their innards. A cruel game, but there it was. And every tin can Gar put down meant one less his boat and all the others had to fear.

The Japs had come to Pearl Harbor and started all this shit, not the other way around. Remember Pearl Harbor wasn’t just a bond-drive slogan to career naval officers. America was going to kick their asses all the way back to Tokyo, and then burn Tokyo and the rest of Japan to the ground. Old Bull Halsey had had it right from the get-go: Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. He’d heard Japan was a very pretty country. It would be even prettier once all those bloodthirsty, death-worshiping, samurai-sword-toting bastards had joined their ancestors, preferably disguised as well-done chop suey.

The waiter brought him his Scotch and coffee as he forced himself to calm down. The chief of staff had been visibly upset today, and Gar had this sneaking suspicion that Forrester might be all too ready to relieve him. For some strange reason, though, he didn’t really expect to be relieved of command. He wondered how Uncle Charlie would have handled his outburst, or whether he’d have done such a thing in the presence of the three-star. Either way, he’d drawn one of those famous lines in the sand. The Dragon was supposed to sail at 1000 tomorrow. Unless somebody in authority came to see him to explain this crazy business before tomorrow morning, he’d shut down the engines, double up the lines, and tell the crew to stand down. If another three-striper with a big grin on his face showed up on the pier as his relief, then so be it. God knows there were enough prospective commanding officers hanging around, secretly hoping for someone like Gar to make a mistake.

He and West had walked back to the boat after Gar’s sudden declaration. Once back aboard, he asked the exec to join him up on the bow, away from the chain of sweating sailors who were busy passing boxes of stores aboard back aft.

“Okay,” Gar said. “Say something.”

“I think I’m not ready to be a CO,” Russ said. “I would not have had the balls to say what you did in there.”

“Sure you would, XO,” Gar said. “Especially if you were being asked to own this bizarre trip.”

Russ had stared down at the water under the pier for a long moment. “Thing is…”

“Yeah?”

“The thing is, we were always taught not to question the orders of our lawful superiors, because there would be times when they knew something we did not or could not know. I’m just wondering…”

He had him there, Gar realized. “Yeah, me, too, of course,” he said. “But the whole deal goes off the tracks when you realize your own bosses don’t know what the hell’s going on. I think Captain Forrester’s as much in the dark as we are, and that means Uncle Charlie is, too. Especially when it comes to putting all our asses on the line while we depend on some old Jap guy to act as some kind of Injun guide. Remember Custer?”

“As I remember,” the exec pointed out delicately, “Custer ignored what his Injun guides were telling him about the lebenty-million Sioux who were right over the next hill.”

“Details, XO,” Gar said with a snort. “I’m the CO, and if I have to trust them, then they have to trust me.”

“Yes, sir,” the exec had said, even as Gar began to realize that now it was the exec who was probably indulging him, the captain. What he was really saying was, since when did a three-star have to explain his orders to a three-striper? Yes, they knew the one objective, but Gar still had this niggling suspicion that there was a whole lot more to this business of putting an elderly Japanese man ashore in the Inland Sea. Forrester had shown him the pictures of this mysterious carrier, but then he’d ducked all of Gar’s questions about how they were even supposed to get at it.

That old refrain kept ringing in Gar’s ears: WTF, over?

He became aware of a small commotion in the dining room behind him, the sound of chairs moving and people standing up, and then a voice behind him asked, “Are you Commander Hammond?”

Gar looked up, then hurriedly pushed back his own chair and stood up at rigid attention. “Admiral Nimitz?”

“May I join you, sir?”

“Yes, sir, uh, yes, of course, sir.”

Nimitz sat down, waited one beat, and then indicated that he wanted Gar to sit down as well. Gar pulled his chair back under himself and sat down at semiattention. Nimitz’s face looked like it had been carved out of stone. Gar had seen pictures and thought them posed. Not so. Nimitz fixed those famous ice blue eyes on Gar for a long moment.

“I am told,” he said finally, “that you want to know why we want you to go into Bungo Suido with the help of a Japanese POW.”

Gar took a deep breath. It was one thing to posture in front of the SubPac chief of staff. It was an entirely different proposition to defy Admiral Chester Nimitz, face-to-face, but — what the hell, he thought. “Yes, sir, I do. To go into Bungo Suido is to step across the bones of five submarines. So, yes, sir, I do want to know why.”

Nimitz nodded. “Because I say so,” he said quietly.

Gar blinked. That was clear enough. “Yes, sir.”

“I am responsible for the execution of our entire war effort in the Pacific Ocean area. Our objective remains the total and utter destruction of the Japanese war machine, and the total and utter destruction of the Japanese nation’s will to conduct this war.”

Gar sat back in his chair. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I understand that. But Bungo Suido—”

Nimitz held up his hand. “Bungo Suido is a technical problem, Captain,” he said. “If you truly think it’s beyond your capabilities, I will get someone else. There is no lack of submariners waiting for command, as I’m sure you know. That would, however, be quite disruptive a day before your scheduled departure.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have a fine boat and crew, and you personally have done very well in damaging the Japanese war effort. But above and beyond that, you need to understand that there are forces at work in this war that dwarf the Dragonfish and all its efforts. You may, in time, understand what I’m talking about, if you survive this mission. But for now, this is all I’m going to tell you: Your orders are not the result of whimsy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want you to sail tomorrow morning. Take the Japanese Hashimoto with you. He will get you through Bungo Suido and, more importantly, to your objective. What happens after that will be up to you and your crew. Am I making myself clear, Captain?”

Gar knew when he’d been outmatched. “We’ll do our best, Admiral.”

“We’re counting on that, Captain. More than you could ever imagine.” He paused for a moment and gave Gar another dose of that icy stare. “Do not ever challenge me again, young man.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Gar became aware that Admiral Lockwood and Captain Forrester were watching from across the dining room. Everyone else in the dining room had sat back down and was pretending not to watch. Nimitz stood up, wished Gar good luck, and then left to rejoin Admiral Lockwood, who gave Gar a wry smile and a sympathetic shake of his head over his shoulder as he followed his boss out of the hotel.

Well, I showed him, didn’t I, Gar thought as he tried to avoid the puzzled looks from the rest of the diners. Six yes-sirs and an aye-aye. He took some small comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the first naval officer to be steamrollered by Chester W. Nimitz. The Japs didn’t stand a chance.

We don’t, either, he thought.

His coffee had gone cold, much like the pit in his stomach. He wondered if Sharon DeVeers would have been impressed.

Probably not, he thought, but then she’d just order another Scotch and make bogeymen like Chester Nimitz go away. He saw the waiter and raised a finger for a refill. As the waiter approached, he changed his mind. Recalling the previous evening, he decided to at least pretend he was still in control of his fate, but as he remembered the image of Sharon poised above him on the bed he had to smile. His life was becoming one interesting ride after another.

SEVEN

Gar studied the sharp, bare pinnacle of granite shimmering in his periscope. “Lot’s Wife, bearing two niner five,” he reported. “Down scope.”

“That’s a pretty good match with our estimated position, Captain. A range would help.”

Gar told the exec he could calibrate the surface-search radar on Lot’s Wife, a 300-foot-high volcanic crag sticking up out of the ocean, using the attack periscope. They knew its precise height above the sea, and thus could focus the radar’s range gate using the periscope’s stadimeter. The pinnacle’s Japanese name was Sofu Gan, and it lay 400 miles south of Tokyo, at the very northern extremes of the Philippine Sea. American subs entering empire patrol areas always used it as a navigational reference point, as did, apparently, Japanese warships headed south into their ever-shrinking Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Or at least they used to, before SubPac saturated the area with submarines. “When finished, make your depth two hundred fifty feet, then put us on a course to our rendezvous point at five knots. We’ll surface after dark to get back on planned track.”

“Three three five looks good.”

“Okay. I want all department heads in the wardroom once you’re confident in the track. We’ll need the Bungo Suido charts and Hashimoto-san’s chart.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Gar went down the ladder into the control room and then forward to his cabin. It was two hours until full dark. They were twelve hours behind their projected track due to some bad weather out of Guam. Gar wanted to make up some of that time to avoid spending an entire day submerged at the entrance to Bungo Suido. He planned to surface an hour after dark if the area was clear and run on the diesels toward their objective.

He flopped down on his rack, automatically checked the course and depth indicators by his feet, and then closed his eyes. So far, so good. They’d left Pearl on time with everyone on board, including the elderly Japanese gentleman. That novelty had made for some interesting reactions among the crew, but the exec had done a good job of prebriefing everybody, emphasizing that Hashimoto-san hated the Japanese military for seizing his livelihood and drawing Japan into a war with the Americans. Lieutenant Commander Tanaka had come down to the pier to say good-bye to the old man. Standing there in his navy uniform, he’d lent some credence to what the exec had been telling them. He’d brought a departure gift for the old man, a cylindrical box wrapped tightly in tissue paper. Hashimoto-san was berthed in the chiefs’ quarters, and, after three weeks of transit across the North Pacific, he seemed to have been accepted pretty well by the denizens of the goat locker.

He’d proved his worth when No. 2 main engine tripped off the line. The motor mechs had been climbing over the Fairbanks Morse engine, trying to find the problem, when Hashimoto-san showed up. He’d watched the snipes for a few minutes and then, with a combination of Hawaiian pidgin and sign language, asked if they needed help. It turned out that the old man was a wizard with diesel engines, and in no time flat he was tearing into the fuel pump assembly, finally identifying a broken linkage as the root of the problem. After that, he was welcomed in both engine rooms and kept himself busy tweaking and peaking all sorts of machinery. He’d taught the boat’s mechanics some lessons about the Japanese way with machinery, which took “fastidious” to extreme limits. Every nut, washer, bolt, and gasket — anything that came out of or off a machine — was carefully cleaned, oiled, measured, and then reinstalled with a calibrated torque wrench, as opposed to the old-navy “give it a two-fart twist and send it home” technique. Some of the pumps ran so smoothly once Hashimoto-san got hold of them that the chief engineer had to put his hand on them to make sure they were running.

Dragonfish had been escorted all the way to Guam by a destroyer, which allowed them to run on the surface the entire time except for daily training dives. The threat from Pearl to Guam hadn’t been Japanese but trigger-happy American planes, which tended to bomb any submarine on the surface and then ask questions later. One army air force B-29 had made a low pass two days out from Guam, but they’d been mostly rubbernecking. The tin can had fired off some flares as the lumbering bomber approached, just in case. They’d also got some valuable training with their captive destroyer, making submerged approaches from all angles. The destroyer’s sonarmen had kept themselves up to date by using Dragonfish for some sonar training in return. They’d refueled in Guam, detached their escort, and headed for empire waters, a mere 1,600 miles distant.

Gar had opened the sealed orders pouch upon departure from Guam as instructed. Inside he found three things: another sealed envelope; a two-page operations order, signed by Admiral Rennsalear, the deputy chief of staff for operations at the Pacific Fleet headquarters; and a single black-and-white picture of the mysterious supercarrier. Unlike many operations orders, this one was quite succinct:

Open the second envelope once inside the Inland Sea, but not before. Otherwise, Dragonfish is to penetrate the straits of Bungo Suido, proceed submerged to the vicinity of the Kure Arsenal, and attack an unnamed aircraft carrier. Attack no other shipping en route to or once within the Inland Sea. Your sole objective is the aircraft carrier, either fitting out at the Kure naval arsenal, or wherever encountered. Upon completion of the attack, escape back to sea and report, but otherwise, maintain radio silence until clear of the Inland Sea.

Then one interesting technical note: Set torpedo running depth for 10 feet when attacking this carrier.

That made no sense at all to Gar. An aircraft carrier drew between 30 and 40 feet of water. If he’d ever encountered the Wounded Bear, IJN Shokaku, he’d have set his fish for 25 feet running depth. Ten feet? Somebody knew more than he was telling about this mysterious ship.

The picture wasn’t particularly good as a recognition photo because it was an overhead shot. Fine for dive-bombers, but their view of this ship, assuming they found her, would be from about a foot above the water. The good news was that if they succeeded in bagging this big guy, they’d accomplish in one attack a tonnage score to equal even the most famous of the PacFleet sub skippers.

Big if, though.

The sole attachment to the operations order, besides the picture, was a map of the known minefields in the Inland Sea approaches, with the clear inference that there were probably unknown minefields.

That was it. No mention of the old man, although Gar had had his orders on that score from Nimitz himself. The second envelope looked like nothing more than a letter, but it was heavily taped and labeled For Commanding Officer’s Eyes Only, upon arrival inside the Inland Sea.

He sighed and looked at his watch again. They were supposed to rendezvous later tonight with the Archer-fish, through whose patrol area they were going to transit. The skipper of that boat, a seasoned veteran named Joe Enright, would brief them on what they’d been seeing in the op area and give them any recent information on Jap patrols, radar usage, and aircraft surveillance. Archer-fish would have already made an intrusion into the approaches to Bungo Suido to confirm water and sonar conditions so that Dragonfish could optimize the setup of her new sonar before they got there. While they were surfaced for the Archer-fish join-up, Gar’s guys would be rigging the defensive cables that would shoulder away any mine mooring chains they happened to scrape up against. Gar made a mental note to remind the XO to get evening stars; an accurate fix was vital for a submarine rendezvous.

He’d met several times with his tactical team after reading the sealed orders. Everyone was interested in the carrier, and Gar had even expected some amplifying information from SubPac while they’d been making the transit. They’d heard nothing. In fact, there had not been a single message addressed to Dragonfish since they’d left. This whole patrol was one big mystery, Gar decided. Or they’d already been written off.

He’d also spent a lot of time with the exec and Hashimoto-san, whose English was better than he had first let on. They worked on making a composite of the U.S. Navy charts for Bungo Suido and the Inland Sea and the old man’s personal charts. Everything on his charts was annotated in kanji characters, and they’d labored mightily to translate depth and obstruction marks into characters that both of them could recognize. Hashimoto-san had, of course, no knowledge of minefields, but he did show them interesting hydrographic features that would make the placement of mines almost impossible. They’d slowly managed to develop a plan of attack for the penetration of Bungo Suido, and that was going to be the subject of the department head meeting this evening.

“And, last but hardly least,” Captain Forrester said, “Guam reports Dragonfish has departed for empire waters. No mechanical problems, traded in one sick fish, one emergency leave case, but otherwise she’s off to the races.”

“The original reluctant dragon,” Admiral Lockwood said, and Forrester grunted his agreement.

“That night Chester Nimitz went down to ‘share his thinking’ with Gar Hammond, I would have given a lot to hear what he said.”

“I’ll bet it didn’t take very long,” Forrester said.

Lockwood smiled. “A half-dozen yes-sirs is what it looked like. Maybe ninety seconds. Everybody in the dining room pretending not to notice. Wonderful.”

“Hammond has his moments,” Forrester said. “And a disrespectful tongue, too.”

“The real killers are that way, Mike. He’s never been married, been at sea for almost his entire career, and goes for the throat when he finds Japs. It’s just too bad he didn’t come to our attention until now.”

“If a guy like that had been out there in ’42, he probably wouldn’t still be with us,” Forrester said. “Mush Morton, Sam Dealey, they were hotshots, too, but they never gave me the impression that they were out of control like Hammond sometimes does.”

“And where are they, now, Mike, hmm?” Lockwood asked, knowing all too well the answer. “I wouldn’t want Gar Hammond for a staff officer, but for this harebrained mission, he’s perfect.”

“He asked me why we didn’t just go in and bomb the damned carrier, especially if she’s still in dry dock. I deflected him, but it seemed like a reasonable question.”

“Nimitz has his reasons, and, as I witnessed personally, one does not go asking Himself to explain why he wants something done. Anything else? I need a drink.”

“No, sir, other than to remind you that we won’t hear from Dragonfish until she gets in and back out of the Inland Sea.”

“If she gets back,” Lockwood said.

“Don’t go jinxing it, now, Admiral. They’ll get back.”

The rendezvous with Archer-fish was scheduled for 0130, and Dragonfish, courtesy of an 1830 four-line star fix, was in position at the appointed time. Gar took a long look around with the night scope. They were lying surfaced and motionless in a flat, calm sea on what appeared to be a clear, starlit night. He’d kept her at what they called radar depth, the boat’s decks awash in order to make as small a radar target as possible should any Jap planes be patrolling. Gar had their own radars in standby, and he was hesitant to put either one into radiate. They were a good 60 miles from the Japanese coast, but a radar signal could be intercepted farther than the radar itself could see. There was no one topside in case an emergency dive had to be made, and they were back to running on the battery, in deference to any prowling Jap subs.

“Like two scorpions looking for each other in the dark,” he muttered, continuing to train the periscope in a slow, continuous circle.

“Especially if one of ’em is a Jap I-boat,” the exec said. “Who makes the first move?”

“We’re the ones passing through Archer-fish’s patrol area,” Gar said. “We came to the rendezvous point on the surface and on the diesels, and then we went quiet. If he was anywhere around, he’d have heard us on the diesels, and should be looking at us right now.”

“Asking the same questions we’re asking?”

“Yeah, probably. Radar, put the SJ on short time constant, radiate for one revolution.”

“Radar, aye,” said the operator at the other end of the conning tower. “One rev, STC on. Stand by.”

They waited.

“One contact, very small, one five zero at two thousand yards.”

Should be him, Gar thought, as he spun the periscope to 150. He couldn’t see anything, so he keyed the signal light embedded in the periscope head three times in accordance with this day’s recognition code sheet. If the radar had caught Archer-fish’s shears or periscope, he should answer with two flashes.

“Got him,” Gar announced. “What’s the second signal?”

“The letter Dog. Then the letter Tare. He should answer with the letter Fox.”

Gar keyed the light: long, short, short. Pause. One long. DT.

The reply was immediate: two short, one long, one short. F. This should be Archer-fish. Since he had initiated the light sequence, Gar now spelled out a course and speed to Archer-fish and ordered Control to trim the boat up to the normal surfaced depth.

“Station the bridge watch,” he ordered. “Four lookouts. Come to course three three zero, switch to main engines, speed ten.” He turned to Russ. “XO, stay on the scope. Once he gets alongside we’ll need a light-line party forward to get a sound-powered phone circuit up. Do a one-sweep air-search radar transmission every six minutes, and a ten-mile surface search sweep every other ten minutes.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the exec said and handed Gar his jacket and binoculars. It was November in the North Pacific, and the tropical heat of the Luzon Strait was a distant memory.

Fifteen minutes later the two subs were running alongside each other at a distance of 75 feet, and Gar was on the sound-powered bridge-to-bridge phone line with Commander Enright.

“How’s the hunting?” he asked.

“Not worth a shit,” Enright said. “We’ve been out here a month, had a couple of scares, but zero worthwhile targets. Where you guys going that you need my BT logs?”

“Big secret,” Gar said. “But I’ll give you a hint: From here it’s three four zero.”

“You do that, you’ll run right into the minefields at Bungo Suido.”

“Fancy that,” Gar said.

“You out of your gourd?” Enright asked.

“Somebody is,” Gar said. “From our perspective, though, it looks a lot like a direct order.”

“The Inland Sea? Can’t be done, Gar. Hell, from twenty miles out you’re looking at pretty much constant air cover, and when they take somebody through, we’ve seen as many as a dozen escorts.”

“So there is a channel through the minefields?”

“Must be,” Enright said. “Their big ships come through there from time to time. But where the channel is, where it starts, and how far offshore? Only the Japs know that. You got one of those new FM sonars?”

Gar told him about the upgraded mine-hunting sonar. Enright said he hoped it worked.

“Do you have some BT logs for me?” Gar asked.

“That’s affirm. Last thirty days, inshore waters, or as close as we could get without somebody jumping our asses. Water’s getting colder, layer’s getting thicker, but there won’t be any layers in Bungo Suido — the tides are too big and the currents too fast.”

“That’s what we were told, too. You need any spare parts?”

“Nope, we’re good right now. We’ll trade movies if you want to, but so far, nothing’s broken down. Yet. I’ve included some pass-down notes with the BT data about their air search patterns and when they seem to quit for the night.”

“These radar-equipped planes?”

“We think so — the two times we’ve been jumped they came straight in on us.”

“You have your radar on the air when they did?”

“Once yes, once no. We only come up at night, and preferably in dirty weather. They don’t seem to like flying when it’s low viz. May be different if something big’s coming in or out. If the merchies are running, they’re way inshore under all that air cover, or over in the SOJ.”

“We have anybody there?”

“Not that I know of. Ever since we lost Wahoo, I don’t think anybody’s made it through either Shimonoseki or La Pérouse Strait.”

They talked for another few minutes, mainly about the currents running closer inshore and any communications frequencies they’d been able to monitor. There were four other American subs patrolling in the empire areas, and none of them were having much luck, either. Enright wished Gar good luck with whatever craziness they were up to, and that was it.

Gar checked with the forecastle crew to make sure the bathythermograph logs and pass-down notes had made it on board, waited for the IC-electrician to send across and then receive some movies, and then ordered the light-line to be retrieved. Five minutes later, Archer-fish rumbled off into the darkness, headed back out into her patrol area. The three-man line-handling party came to the bridge with the small waterproof bag sent over from Archer-fish and took it below to the control room. Gar decided to stay on the surface to top off the batteries as long as the radar didn’t indicate any snoopers; he told the OOD and the bridge crew to listen as well as look.

Back down in the conning tower he checked the track, adjusted the ship’s speed to make the planned entry point at the straits two hours before dawn, then went below to see what Enright had sent over. Normally he would have sent off a position report, but the orders were clear: radio silence. Archer-fish would report the rendezvous, so Pearl would know the Dragon had made it this far. Considering what they were about to attempt, that might be the last time anything was ever heard about the Dragonfish. Everyone on board except perhaps Hashimoto-san knew they might very well end up on that dreaded “missing, presumed lost in Empire Patrol Area” list, like Pickerel, Runner, Pompano, Wahoo, and Golet.

Gar tried to banish that thought. Getting through the minefields of Bungo Suido was going to be a one-man, one-sonar show, and he did not need the distraction of a bunch of drowned ghosts, wherever they were now sleeping.

EIGHT

“This is the captain speaking.”

That announcement produced the usual quiet throughout the boat. They were submerged at 300 feet and basically standing still as the boat pointed into an east-running current coming at them out of the entrance to Bungo Suido.

“We’re about to do something that is unusually dangerous. We’re going to penetrate the straits of Bungo Suido and go into the Inland Sea of Japan. We’re on the hunt for a very large aircraft carrier that has been spotted by army air force reconnaissance planes at the Kure naval arsenal. Our mission is to torpedo this ship, wherever we find her.”

Gar paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. He rarely got on the 1MC to address the entire crew. Up to now, he’d always kept his cards pretty close, but he’d finally concluded that the danger of what they were about to do justified letting his people in on the secret mission orders.

“Many of you know that our boats have been told to stay out of Bungo Suido and the other straits of the Home Islands for over a year now. We’ve lost five boats in this area, and when we go in tonight, we may be driving over their remains. Or not. Nobody knows where they actually went down. But the Japs have this place covered with destroyers, patrol frigates, land-based air, minefields, miniature submarines, and shore-based radar stations. The fishing boats that operate along this coast each have a soldier on board, a soldier with a radio. They know we’d love to get into this protected area, and they’re determined to prevent it.

“Now, we’ve had boats outside Bungo Suido, and the northern entrance, Kii Suido, for over two years. They know we’re here, and when their fleet units do come out, they come out at high speed and with lots of cover. We’ve been able to sink the occasional merchie, but rarely a major warship. One of the things we’re counting on is that they will have become complacent about the possibility that we’d try to force the straits and actually go into the Inland Sea.

“We have an upgraded version of the new FM sonar. This sonar can see mines. If we can see them, we can avoid them. That said, if we can get through the minefields, we’ll still face lots of challenges that we don’t normally have to worry about. The Inland Sea is small, and it’s relatively shallow. Lots of small islands and reefs. Thanks to Hashimoto-san, we have much better charts than what the Hydrographic Office could give us. But — we have to also get through the Hoyo Strait, where the tide causes large whirlpools. Then we have to get within torpedo range of a major Japanese naval base. We can probably do that, because the last thing they’ll expect is an American submarine hunkering down right off their piers.”

He paused again, because this was the hard part.

“If we succeed in putting a spread of torpedoes into a brand-new aircraft carrier moored to a pier, we then have to find our way out of the Inland Sea and back to the safety of deep water. How we do that is going to depend on a lot of things, and all I can say now is that we’ll surely be winging it when the time comes. Some of you might think this is some kind of suicide mission, but I can assure you that it is not. I intend to get in and get back out, and to hurt them bad in the process, but for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, I need everybody, absolutely everybody, to play heads-up ball.

“Okay. The tide out of the straits is coming up on the end of the ebb. We’ll have about an hour or so of slack water, and then the flood begins. If all goes well, we should be through Bungo Suido and then the Hoyo Strait in two hours’ time, after which we’ll have to see where we are and what we’re looking at. Keep the chatter on the sound-powered phones to a minimum, please. We’ll be at GQ stations, buttoned up but not at silent running, which means we’ll be able to breathe. Man your GQ stations in fifteen minutes. That is all.”

He hung up the 1MC microphone and left the control room. He knew the people in Control would want to comment to each other on what he’d said, and they couldn’t do that if the captain was still standing there.

Once he got to his cabin, he called the exec and asked for the chief of the boat to come see him. Cob must have been expecting it, because he was there in under a minute.

“Swede,” Gar said, “this one’s gonna be a level bitch.”

“Piece’a cake, Skipper,” the chief said.

“Yeah, right, but look: What I’ll need you to do is float. The first time we drag a mine’s mooring chain down the paravane wire, guys are going to piss their pants. I need you to buck ’em up. Keep ’em focused. Keep ’em quiet. All sorts of shit can go wrong here, and we’re going to be jumping through our asses just to stay alive. Savvy?”

“Piece’a cake,” the chief said again. “Just lemme get some diapers on.”

Gar laughed then. “Bring a set for me,” he said.

Dragonfish headed into the straits at slack water, running at periscope depth so they could do their piloting with the radar. They were trimmed bow-down 5 degrees and with the radar mast up. The night was still clear and calm, with no visible moon. On his last periscope observation, Gar had seen small patches of fog and mist here and there. He would have preferred a heavy fog, but he knew he couldn’t have everything. They had taped down the old man’s annotated chart on top of the new dead-reckoning tracer plotting table. The DRT would allow the conning team as well as the officers in Control to do radar navigation.

Hashimoto-san had told them to keep to the middle of the Bungo channel and to the left, or west, side of the Hoyo channel. They expected Bungo to be mined but had no information on Hoyo. Hashimoto-san said the water on the west side of Hoyo was very deep, and the tidal whirlpools there would make mooring mines almost impossible. There was one ledge they’d have to watch out for, but otherwise, once through Hoyo, they should have a straight shot to Hiroshima Bay.

“Gotta love this DRT,” Russ said. The plotting table had a glass top, under which a small light projected a compass rose onto the chart from below. Whichever way the submarine turned, the light, driven by a series of gears and servomotors slaved to the sub’s main gyro, turned with it, giving them a real-time view of where they were and where they were headed.

“It’s the radar fixes we believe, XO,” Gar said. “Everything else is an approximation.” He didn’t mind having the new plotting table to look at, but the downside was that it required two more plotters in the already crowded conning tower. “Speaking of which, let’s get a round of bearings.”

The radar operator called out ranges to preplotted points on the shore, and the DRT plotters penciled in the results. So far, they were right on track, moving into the not-so-loving arms of the straits at 5 knots. Because it was slack water, that was 5 knots over the ground. It also wasn’t suffocatingly hot in the conning tower for a change. The outside water temperature was a chilly 55 degrees, a far cry from the stultifying tropical waters of the South Pacific. Gar had to thread his way through the various operators to stand behind the FM sonar display. Popeye Waller was on the stack, as the operators called the display. He wore headphones and was constantly adjusting the intensity and brightness of the scope.

Gar would have preferred being down at depth so that the new sonar could look up into the minefield. The problem was they couldn’t navigate if they ran deep. He’d ordered the boat trimmed down 5 degrees to give the sonar a more level look ahead of them, but even so, the sonar would probably not see any mines right below them. He was counting on encountering only contact mines; if they had planted magnetics, the Dragon would be in deep trouble.

A gonging sound came out of the sonar speaker. Hell’s Bells.

“Relative bearing, thirty port,” Popeye said. “Drifting left, no threat.”

It was almost a relief to “see” their first mine. Gar kept one eye on the DRT and the other on the sonar scope. There was an amber smudge to one side of the scope. The smudge kept changing shape like some kind of ghost as it passed down their port side and then disappeared.

“DRT, plot every one of these contacts.”

“DRT, aye.”

It wouldn’t be a very accurate plot, but it would be better than nothing when they came back out. If they came back out.

Another gong, then a second.

The Dragon was in the minefield. The muted conversation in the conning tower went silent.

“Two contacts, relative bearing twenty port, twenty-five starboard.”

“Split the bearings,” Gar ordered.

“Recommend three three zero true to split the bearings,” Popeye said.

“Helmsman, make it so.”

As long as there was no current, the mooring chains that anchored the mines to the bottom should be standing straight up and down. They were traveling at keel depth of 60 feet. The mines were somewhere between 250 and 20 feet below the surface, each with a mooring chain leading down to the bottom. The bad news was that they were in a minefield. The good news was that no Jap destroyer could come in there after them. But a plane could, Gar reminded himself.

Gong.

“Dead ahead, range five hundred yards,” Popeye announced, his voice no longer quite so calm.

Gong. Gong.

“Two more, relative bearing twenty port, thirty port.”

“Come right to three five five,” Gar ordered. “Sound, confirm bearing drift when you get it.”

Gong.

“Relative bearing starboard twenty.”

“Mark your head, helmsman.”

“Three four two, Captain.”

“Steady, three four five.”

“Three four five, aye, sir, shifting my rudder.”

Gong.

“New one, dead ahead,” Popeye called out. “Range six hundred yards.”

“All stop!” Gar ordered, thanking God they weren’t heading into the big, 6-knot tidal current that ran through here. That didn’t mean there was no current, however.

“We have bearing drift port and starboard,” Popeye said. “Should clear.”

“Should clear?” Gar echoed. “That’s nice.”

No one laughed, and Gar realized how frightened everyone in the conning tower was.

“Range to the one dead ahead is four five oh, no drift.”

“Sing out when the beam contacts are at ninety.”

“Range dead ahead is now three five oh.”

Gar felt the boat slowing down as its forward momentum came off. He couldn’t wait much longer to turn or the diving planes would lose effectiveness.

“Two five oh, and we’re just about abeam on the side contacts.”

“All ahead one-third, turns for five knots, come right to zero one zero with full rudder.”

“Zero one zero with right full rudder aye, sir.”

“Range is two five oh, and entering the sea return. Captain, I can’t see it anymore.”

Gar watched the gyro repeater above his head, mentally shouting at it to begin turning, but the boat had so little way on that she wasn’t responding.

“Starboard stop, starboard back Bendix,” he ordered. He could hear the first threads of panic in his own voice. Steady on, he told himself. Steady on.

Then they felt the starboard propeller bite in, going astern, yanking the bow to the right. As soon as Gar saw the gyro repeater indicating that they were turning, he stopped the starboard engine and then ordered both to go ahead together at 5 knots.

Clank.

Gar felt the hair rising on his neck.

Clank. Clank. Clank.

They were hearing the mooring cable of a mine scraping down the port side of the submarine, riding that steel paravane cable strung between the bullnose, the forward portside diving plane, and the after portside diving plane. As long as it didn’t catch on anything, they’d be safe.

Gong. Gong.

“Two more, starboard twenty, starboard thirty. We need to come left.”

“Steady as you go, helmsman.”

“Aye, sir, shifting my rudder and steadying on — zero zero seven.”

The clanking sound stopped as the boat’s stern swung to the right, away from the deadly caress of the mine’s anchor chain. Gar waited for a full minute to make sure they were clear.

“Starboard contacts will clear; good bearing drift.”

Gar exhaled quietly, as did everyone else in the conning tower.

Gong.

“One more, port ten, maybe less. Contact is in and out. Probably deep.”

Gong. Gong.

“Two more, one dead ahead, one starboard ten.”

“All stop. All back full. Ranges?”

“Nearest mine is four five oh and closing.”

Gar waited until he felt the propellers going solidly astern, then stopped engines and shifted to bare steerageway ahead. He wanted the boat to drift forward with enough speed to maintain control, but not so fast as to run up on the mines ahead. He also had to make sure they didn’t back into the ones they’d just passed. He tried not to make eye contact with anyone else in the conning tower. They were deep in a box of spiders and everyone knew it. His brain was racing to find a way out. He had to keep a 3-D picture of all the mines they knew about, and the new ones ahead, too.

Gar realized he needed help.

The exec leaned in toward him. “Put a twist on?” he asked quietly. “See if there’s a hole somewhere?”

Gar nodded. Good thinking. “You got the bubble?”

In this case, “bubble” was slang for the tactical picture. Having the bubble meant you thought things were under control. Losing the bubble meant you’d become confused. Russ said yes.

“Okay, take the conn, twist us through an arc of sixty degrees, each way, and try not to make forward progress.”

“Got it,” he said.

“XO has the conn, “Gar announced. “Sound, report all around.”

He stepped back from the FM sonar stack and went to the DRT table. As the exec gave quiet maneuvering orders, he ordered the radar operator and the plotters to get a fix.

The radar mast went up and on. A quick round of ranges was taken, and then the mast came down. The resulting fix, plotted on the DRT, was sloppy but showed they were off track to the north. There was a current.

“Conn, Sound.”

“Conn, aye.”

“I have echo ranging, bearing one five zero. Faint up Doppler.”

This wasn’t Popeye reporting, but the secondary sonar operator, who was listening passively on a broader spectrum of frequencies. Gar studied the chart. One five zero was behind them. A Jap destroyer was coming up the right, or northern, side of the Bungo channel.

The sub was trembling slightly as the opposed screws twisted her to port. She didn’t twist like a destroyer — she was heavy and distinctly logy. She also had to be making a fair amount of noise. To Gar’s right he could hear the exec and Popeye exchanging information on the mine picture.

“Any luck, XO?” Gar asked. The plotters were laying down a line of passive bearings to the echo ranger. It could be anything from a small patrol craft to a full-sized destroyer.

“Not yet, sir,” Russ said. “We’re going to twist back to starboard, see if there’s a hole out there.” He turned to the helmsman. “All stop, starboard back one-third, port ahead one-third. Shift your rudder.”

Gar stood back from the plot to organize his thoughts. They had mines all around them, with no apparent escape route. Now they also had a warship of some kind coming up from astern, type and range unknown. As long as they were in the minefield, the warship could not roll in on them with depth charges in the event he gained sonar contact. The Dragon, on the other hand, could fire a torpedo at the warship from the “safety” of the minefield, but for that, they needed a range. He ordered the radar mast up again for a single sweep, range display set to 10 miles.

“Radar contact, one four five, range sixteen thousand yards.”

Then he remembered their orders: Make no attacks until the carrier had been dealt with and whatever other tasking was in that envelope had been taken care of. He instructed the attack team to set up a solution on the warship, with another single-sweep radar range mark in five minutes. He’d be prepared to shoot at this guy, but only if he made trouble. Meanwhile, they needed to get out of their spider box.

“Anything, XO?” he asked.

“We’re passing our original track heading now, Captain. I’ll twist sixty starboard. We may need to submerge below periscope depth and see what’s what, say at two hundred feet.”

Gar closed his eyes to envision the 3-D picture. Then he realized that they couldn’t do that. There might be one or more mines right below them right now.

“Continuing up Doppler on the echo ranger,” Sound announced. “But not like he’s coming right at us. Estimating he’s transiting, not attacking.”

“If he’s transiting, then he’ll know where the safe channel is, Captain,” the exec said. “If we could get behind him…”

“Popeye, can you tell the depth of the mines you’re seeing on that thing?”

“The transducer is at periscope depth, Captain,” Popeye said. “It looks up at five degrees. Everything I’m seeing is fifty, sixty feet below the surface. These are all aimed at submarines running at periscope depth.”

Gar thought fast. The boat was trimmed bow down 5 degrees to compensate for the sonar’s 5-degree up-look. If he leveled the boat to an even keel, and some of those mines around them “disappeared,” then they had a way out — on or close to the surface. First he needed another range on that Jap ship, and another navigation fix.

He ordered the radar plotters to double up, one for the ship contact, one for the navigation ranges. He couldn’t afford to make two sweeps if that warship coming up behind them was equipped with passive radar sensors. As it was, the Japs had already been given one chance to detect their presence.

“Doppler steady on the echo ranger,” Sound announced. “He’s probably at CPA.”

“Radar team ready?”

They nodded, grease pencils poised over the radar repeater’s scope. The last range to the destroyer had been at 8 miles, so there shouldn’t be a problem with the Jap’s lookouts seeing the radar mast. Gar waited for him to get past CPA, his closest point of approach.

“Do it.”

As the mast went up for its radar snapshot, he felt the trembling of the screws subside. He checked the gyro repeater. The bow was still swinging lazily to starboard. He could hear the trim pumps whining down in Control as the diving officer fiddled with the ship’s trim. Without way on, Dragonfish was essentially trying to hover, with no help from the dive planes. He asked the exec if there was a hole to starboard at sixty feet. The exec shook his head. They were still boxed in.

Gar explained what he planned to do: Wait for that destroyer to go by, come all the way up to the surface, and then get behind the tin can or whatever it was and follow him through the Bungo and Hoyo channels into the safety of the Inland Sea.

“We won’t move until Popeye thinks there are no antisurface ship mines riding just under the surface.”

“And if there are?”

“We look for another goddamned hole, XO. Nav team, you get a fix?”

“We got two ranges and bearings, Captain. Not great, but they confirm a set to the east-northeast, two knots. The tide’s still slack-water, so this is probably the base current.”

Gar turned to the TDC. “What you got?”

The weapons officer, Tom Walsh, was operating the torpedo data computer. “We have a fair solution on that guy, Captain. We have Cuties in five and six.”

“How fast is he going, Plot?”

“Twelve, maybe thirteen knots, Captain.”

“Forget the Cuties. They’re too slow. If we have to, we’ll use electrics.”

“How can we surface safely without knowing if there’s a floater right above us?” the exec asked.

My straight man, Gar thought. “Great question, XO. But we just twisted in place a hundred twenty degrees. I didn’t hear any chains scraping the hull during the twist. Control, bring us up to decks awash.”

“Control, aye.”

They were still pointed in the direction of that surface ship’s wake. As Control blew ballast tanks and the sub began to rise, Gar decided to get the boat back under control by putting on some forward motion. “XO, go all ahead one third, make turns for four knots.”

As the exec had pointed out, they were taking a big chance. Popeye still couldn’t verify that there weren’t antiship mines lurking just below the surface. He wouldn’t be able to do that until the FM sonar could see into that depth layer, but Gar knew they had to get some way on if they were ever going to keep up with that surface ship and trail him into the relative safety of the Inland Sea.

“There’s nothing showing up in front of us, Captain,” Popeye said.

“That a guarantee, Popeye?”

“Negative, sir. Anything hanging just below that five-degree up-look is not visible.”

That produced a strained silence in the conning tower. What the hell, Gar thought, in for a penny, in for a pound. Besides, if something was lurking right above them, where was its chain?

“XO, once we get behind that ship, we’ll turn to his strongest sound bearing, and then we’ll go on the diesels. We’ll never keep up on the battery.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He was beginning to like this command-and-control setup. He could stand back, take in the whole picture, and make decisions without being mired in the minutiae of steering the boat, order by order. Mush Morton had been right. On the other hand, Mush Morton and his beloved Wahoo were now dead and lying probably not too far away from here, either.

“Come left to three four zero,” the exec ordered.

“Conn, Control, we are on the surface, decks awash. Main induction is clear.”

Gar went to the night periscope for a look-around. It took a moment for his eyes to adapt, but he saw absolutely nothing.

“How far behind that guy are we?”

“By the plot, he should be at least ten thousand yards. Radar?”

“Negative.”

Five miles, he thought. Would he hear the submarine’s diesels lighting off? He sighed. They had no choice. If that guy turned to conform to the cleared channel and they missed it, they’d drive right back into the minefield. He reached for the bitch-box.

“Maneuvering, Conn, open main induction and light ’em off. Put some amps in the can, but gimme three so I can stay with this tin can.”

He turned to the exec. “XO, take a radar range from time to time, single sweep. See if we can close up on him so we don’t miss any important turns. We’ll let him do the navigating for the next hour. And open the hatch — let’s get some fresh air in here.”

“Lookouts?”

“Negative. One plane and we’re back in the soup. I don’t want to leave someone out there.”

NINE

The destroyer led them through a series of dogleg turns for the next forty-five minutes, maintaining a steady 12 knots through the darkness. The nav team made periodic radar-fix sweeps until Gar realized that there were operational navigation lights on the shore. He got Hashimoto up to the conning tower to see if he could identify the lights using the periscope and then mark them on the chart, after which they began to get much more precise navigation fixes. The mine-hunting sonar indicated that they were running on the north side of the minefields and that there were no mines above 40 feet depth, and no mines at all once they reached and passed through the Hoyo channel. The tide was just beginning to flood back in, so the famous whirlpools were not in evidence.

By midnight they were inside the Inland Sea. Gar slowed down to let their tour-guide destroyer draw away toward Hiroshima Bay, secured the diesels, and, after one final visual fix, submerged. The water depth shown on Hashimoto’s chart was 450 feet, which agreed with the boat’s own fathometer. Gar ordered the boat down to 250 feet, where they’d be protected acoustically by a distinct thermal layer hovering at 200 feet.

The exec sent the crew to midnight rations and then set a modified battle stations watch throughout the boat. He told people to get some sleep on station while they could. Gar met in the wardroom with the ops officer and the navigator to go over the consolidated chart, the U.S. Navy’s version as marked up by Hashimoto. The Inland Sea was like a bathtub, with steep sides and depths ranging from 700 to as little as 40. The islands surrounding it were the tops of drowned mountains, and there were plenty of pinnacles rising from the sea floor to just below the surface to make the navigation even more interesting. Hashimoto knew where each of them lay because that’s where the best fishing was, and he had marked the chart accordingly. It was important for them to know where the fishing boats would and would not typically go, because they were going to have to hide for most of their tenure inside this basin.

Radio had copied the fleet broadcast while on the surface, which contained a December weather forecast for the Inland Sea area aimed right at Dragonfish. A cold front was predicted to move across the Sea of Japan, bringing rain, snow, and fog over the southern Japanese islands by late morning; lousy weather for navigation, but great for hiding right under the noses of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Come the dawn, Gar expected, there’d be all sorts of traffic up on the surface — interisland ferries, tugs, cargo ships, fishing boats, not to mention harbor patrol craft, mine tenders, and even transiting naval shipping. Tomorrow they’d lie low; tomorrow night they’d make their move under the cover of all that predicted slop and try to get close to the Kure naval arsenal, and then, oh by the way, locate, identify, and attack the world’s biggest aircraft carrier — at its moorings.

Piece’a cake, as the Cob would say.

Then Gar remembered that he had one more envelope to open, but first they needed a lair. He climbed back up into the conning tower with the chart. With the navigator’s help, he drew a box enclosing the deepest parts of the Seto’s western basin on the DRT chart, clearly marking two pinnacles that rose from the bottom to within 50 feet of the surface.

“Stay in this box at two knots,” he told the nav team. “Keep the boat quiet and under the layer at all times, and be alert for set and drift as the flood tide builds back in. Use the FM sonar to locate these pinnacles, and use them as navigation reference points.”

Then he called for the exec and went to his cabin. When Russ got there, he got the second envelope out of his safe. Inside they found two pages. One contained two paragraphs addressed to CO Dragonfish, CO’s eyes only. The other was a diagrammatic set of instructions for some kind of device. Gar read the two paragraphs aloud to the exec.

“Upon safely reaching the interior waters of the Inland Sea, and before prosecuting any attack on the target aircraft carrier, proceed to the vicinity of the fishing village of Akitsu (34°19′0″ North, 132°49′18″ East). Once there, put Minoru Hashimoto safely ashore by best means available. Ensure that he takes with him the contents of the small box given to him by LCDR Tanaka at Pearl, and that he understands and agrees to the operating instructions contained on the following page.

“This part of your mission takes precedence over the attack on the carrier, which shall be conducted as soon as possible thereafter. In that regard, a mobility kill is sufficient to accomplish your objective. Maintain radio silence until Dragonfish is either safely out of the Inland Sea or the strong probability exists that your escape from the Inland Sea is in doubt.”

“In other words, Spartans, come back with your shield or on it,” Russ said.

“Lovely,” Gar said, looking at the second piece of paper. “What is this thing?”

The exec looked over his shoulder at the instruction sheet. The diagram showed a device shaped like a small thermos bottle, about ten inches tall. On the bottom was a butterfly switch, and on the top a thin, telescoping antenna. The instructions were pretty simple: Hashimoto was to go to the gardens surrounding the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, on the eastern side of the Motoyasu River in Hiroshima City itself. Once there, and without being observed, he was to turn the butterfly switch to the right to the on position, pull up the antenna, and hide the device somewhere in the gardens where it would not be visible. He was to do this on the day when paper rained from the skies over Hiroshima City.

“Paper rain?”

“Beats me,” Gar said. “Intel-speak. Get him up here, let’s see if he knows.”

In the event, Hashimoto did not know. Paper rain sounded like some kind of haiku to him. He’d brought the cardboard box containing the small thermos bottle. The switch was clearly marked OFF and ON, and the antenna could be pulled out to nearly 2 feet in length. The device weighed perhaps 3 pounds.

“This, apparently, is the price of our bringing you home,” Gar told the old man.

“Is this weapon?” Hashimoto asked.

“If it is, it’s a pretty small weapon,” Gar said. “We don’t know what it is. We are supposed to put you ashore at Akitsu and then leave the area. Do you know that place?”

“Yes,” Hashimoto said. “I have family there.”

“Do you have papers? ID card? Money?”

“Tanaka-san give me these things,” he said and pulled out some papers from a small pouch. “For police.”

“If you just show up in Akitsu, will someone report you to the police?”

“No,” he snorted. “Everyone hates police. They steal. Beat people. Family there. Safe.”

“How will you get to Hiroshima when the time comes?”

“Walk. Bicycle. Bus, maybe. No problem.”

Gar rubbed the side of his face for a moment. “I wish I could tell you what this is all about, Hashimoto-san, but I have no idea.”

“Like Tanaka-san said, secret stuff,” Hashimoto said. “I do it.”

“Okay,” Gar said. “Let’s go look at a chart. If you’re ready, we’ll get you ashore tonight.”

Captain Forrester gave the usual perfunctory knock on Admiral Lockwood’s office door and then walked in. Lockwood was reading an after-action patrol report and making some notes for his next happy hour with the skippers up at the Palace.

“Whatcha got, Mike?” he asked without looking up.

“Possibly another Awa Maru, I’m afraid.”

Lockwood looked up over his reading glasses. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“No, sir, unfortunately not. This just came down from State via CincPacFleet. A damaged Jap freighter made it into Taipei and reported that a second ship, the Hoshen Maru, had been torpedoed and sunk, and that it had been carrying four-hundred-plus British POWs. Japs claim it was marked as a hospital ship and lit up.”

“Was she precleared, like the Awa Maru?”

“No, sir, and this is the first we’ve heard about it. PacFleet thinks it’s a propaganda ploy by the Japs. Problem is that the Brits verify that there probably were some of their POWs on that ship.”

“Goddammit,” Lockwood said. “Any idea which boat?”

“We’re checking on that, sir. We need the sinking location and, of course, time and date. Ops is researching sinking reports and who’s where out there.”

“Awa Maru was cleared through diplomatic back channels as a marked and lighted hospital ship, and we put that out to all the boats. This sounds different, but still — four hundred POWs? God.”

“Yes, sir. CincPacFleet is sending down a JAG officer. If the Japs are going to make a claim, then we’ll need talking points.”

“Okay, keep me advised. You meet with the JAG. Tell him—”

“Her.”

“What?”

“Her — Lieutenant Commander DeVeers. WAVE officer. Connie White said she was the resident international lawyer.”

“Then you definitely meet with her, Mike. Lady lawyers make me nervous.”

An hour later Sharon was escorted into Forrester’s office by one of the yeomen. He stood up to greet her and offered coffee, which she declined. She was wearing whites because there had been an awards ceremony earlier that morning up at Makalapa.

“Miss DeVeers — is that correct?” Forrester asked. “Miss DeVeers? I’d address a lieutenant commander as mister, but, um…”

“That’s fine, Captain,” Sharon said, amused at his sudden discomfort as she sat down in front of his desk. The white uniform skirt highlighted some of her best features, and the good captain was having trouble keeping his eyes in the boat. “Did you get our memorandum?”

“Yes, we did. Admiral Lockwood and I are horrified at the thought that one of our boats may have killed POWs. That said, there’s no way our skippers can know what some of their targets are carrying.”

“Yes, sir, we understand that. This is not another Awa Maru, but the feeling at Makalapa is that the Japanese are going to try to make it into a major international propaganda incident just the same.”

Forrester well remembered the Awa Maru case. Through a diplomatic channel opened by the International Red Cross in Switzerland, the United States and Japan had made a deal: If the Japanese agreed to transport 2,000 tons of Red Cross relief supplies for starving Allied prisoners of war being held in Southeast Asia, the Americans would guarantee safe passage for whichever ship carried out the voyage. The Japanese were required to mark the ship as a hospital ship with large white crosses on her sides and special lighting, all of which they did. The ship went to Singapore without incident and delivered the supplies. The Japanese then took advantage of the safe-passage deal to fill her with 2,004 important passengers and thousands of tons of tin and rubber. Because of a communications foul-up, one American submarine failed to get the word and sent the 12,000-ton ship to the bottom during the return voyage. There was but one survivor, the captain’s personal steward, who was picked up by the submarine, who only then learned the name of the ship.

The uproar within U.S. Navy flag channels had been immense when the sub reported the sinking. The sub’s captain had been relieved of command at Guam and court-martialed immediately on orders of Admiral King himself. When Admiral Nimitz reviewed the court-martial proceedings, he was not satisfied with the relatively light punishment awarded to the sub’s captain, so he issued letters of reprimand to all the members of the court-martial.

“Merry Christmas,” Forrester muttered. “What are the next steps?”

Sharon consulted her notes. “We need to know which boat was the likely culprit, and whether or not any special warnings were sent out by SubPac regarding this ship.”

“Culprit?” Forrester asked. “We only have the Japs’ word that she was marked as a hospital ship or even was a hospital ship. They’ve been shipping POWs back to Japan for months now, usually on something called a hell ship, not a hospital ship.”

“Captain,” Sharon said, “please forgive my poor choice of words. We need facts, is what I should have said. Which boat was responsible, if that can be determined. When. Where. What the attack party saw when they fired.”

Forrester’s face showed surprise. “Boat? Attack party — who’ve you been talking to, Miss DeVeers?”

“I spent some time with one of your skippers,” she said. “A Commander Hammond? I believe he’s on patrol right now.”

“That’s classified information, Miss DeVeers. He should not have told you that.”

“He didn’t reveal anything, Captain. They were going back out. It’s what most boats do, isn’t it? He said there was a special mission, but he didn’t offer details and I didn’t ask. We had better things to do with our time.”

Forrester colored a little at that last remark but then quickly changed the subject. “Look here, Miss DeVeers. There’s something I need to know. Is CincPacFleet coming at this incident looking for scalps or looking for a way to pee on this fire?”

“They’re looking for the facts, Captain,” Sharon repeated. “What Admiral Nimitz will do with those facts is beyond your pay grade and mine, I suspect. It’s early days, but this is on the front burner right now, so we’d appreciate any information as quickly as possible.”

“Right,” he said. “We’ll get right on it.”

Sharon stood up to go. Forrester was staring again.

“Will you be my point of contact for this matter, then?” he asked.

Sharon smoothed down her uniform skirt. “If you wish, sir,” she said.

TEN

Two hours later, the Dragon came up to decks-awash. Gar ordered Control to trim the boat down by the stern, which exposed the forward hatch long enough to allow a small team to get a rubber raft out on deck. There was a light fog hanging over the water, and once they opened the hatch they could smell the distinctive odors of rural Asia: charcoal smoke, fish, and a whiff of sewage. There were no lights visible in the fishing village ashore, but Hashimoto had been able to steer them in toward the beach using just the fathometer. He said there was a long reef extending out from the point of land where the town’s main pier was. Once he found that, he knew where they were. Gar thought that it was too bad they had to put him ashore before they made the attempt on Kure.

Tanaka had explained some things about Hashimoto before they left Pearl. The Japanese army’s treatment of POWs was atrocious beyond belief. This stemmed from two things. First, the Japanese had never expected or planned to capture entire armies at the beginning of the war. Second, surrendering to an enemy was an extreme cultural offense in the eyes of the Japanese army. They were expected to fight to the death, because an honorable death in combat was the acme of a Japanese warrior’s entire life. They expected their enemies to match their own martial fervor. To surrender was to forfeit your personal honor and even your identity, as well as to besmirch your family’s honor forever. It was because of how they viewed surrender that they were wholly unprepared to deal with American and British POWs, who had, by surrendering, sunk to the status of pariah dogs. The POWs came to the camps believing that their war was over; in fact, it was just beginning.

Tanaka said that American interrogators, led by a civilian named Otis Cary, had devised a very different strategy to first neutralize the shame and depression of being captured, and then to turn Japanese prisoners into assets by convincing them that, once the war was over, they could play a vital role in rebuilding their nation. This was accompanied by humane, even kind treatment, respect for their cultural rules and mores, and, above all, education. It hadn’t been easy, especially for the few military Japanese POWs captured so far.

Hashimoto’s case was different. It helped that he wasn’t an army man — he’d been a civilian, owner of a successful business until the army requisitioned everything and put him back to work in a fishing boat. His relatives who’d gone to the United States and who’d tried often to convince him to join them before the war were an asset in this argument. He’d agreed readily to the mission of carrying what looked like a thermos bottle into the city of Hiroshima in return for being able to get back to his family again and, possibly, to help mitigate the reportedly awful conditions in the countryside. Gar had initially believed Hashimoto might be playing the Americans, but after a while he’d come to trust the old man’s motives.

As the boat was being readied, Gar took him aside. “Conditions in Japan are going to get much worse,” he told him. “The big bombers are coming, and life will become very hard.”

Hashimoto nodded. He’d made some friends in the crew, especially among the chiefs, and already knew a lot about what was shaping up for his homeland.

“I’ve been thinking about this thing you’re supposed to plant in downtown Hiroshima City. I think it’s a weather instrument, not a weapon. I don’t know what paper rain is all about, but when the bombers come, weather will be important.”

Hashimoto looked at him. “You tell me not to do it?” he asked finally.

Gar shook his head. “No, because I’m probably all wrong about what this thing is. All I’m saying is, once you hide it, get out of the city. Cities in Japan will become terrible places very soon.”

Hashimoto blinked and then nodded again. The word came up that the raft was ready, and Gar offered his hand and wished the old man good luck. Hashimoto shook his hand, stepped back, bowed respectfully, and then climbed up the ladder to the conning tower hatch, his ditty bag in hand.

It took forty-five minutes for the shore party to take Hashimoto in to the beach and get back out again. During that time a thicker fog bank rolled in from the south, and they had to use the radar twice to make sure the current wasn’t taking them toward that reef. This close to shore there was only 100 feet under the keel, which would not offer them much protection if a patrol boat surprised them. Gar was already uneasy about the fact that they’d neither seen nor heard any patrol craft; perhaps the Japs thought they were safe this far up into the Seto. The transit into Akitsu had taken them within hailing distance of several small islands, but they hadn’t seen a soul. Gar stayed on the bridge during the boat evolution. The shoreline was visible in the darkness as a deeper shadow, but there wasn’t a single light anywhere. Curfew, he thought. They’re all in the house for the night.

He checked his watch; nautical twilight would be upon them in about ninety minutes. The exec had the conn down in the conning tower. They’d stayed on the battery to avoid detection, but the ventilation system had been sucking in some much-welcomed fresh air while they loitered close inshore. After what seemed forever, the rubber raft materialized out of the darkness and made fast to the port side forward. Gar scanned the shore through the TBT binocs while they got the raft back aboard, deflated it, and humped it down the ladder. Then he heard the clunk of the forward hatch.

“Everybody’s back, and the forward hatch is secured,” Control announced.

“Okay, XO, let’s get out of here,” Gar said. “Once we get five miles off the beach, light off the mains and take us back out to the wait-box. We’ll submerge at dawn, find a layer, and get under it for the day.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the exec said. “Coming to two zero zero.”

Gar stayed up on the bridge as they moved out through the gathering fog. Periodically the radar mast would go high for a brief transmission. Once they got submerged offshore, they’d have about ten hours to wait for darkness and plan their next move. He’d been assuming they’d make their approach to Kure submerged, but the more they’d studied the charts with Hashimoto, the more it looked like they’d have to be running on the surface, if only because of the navigation problem. There were two very narrow channels into Hiroshima Bay, and the water depths off the naval arsenal were such that even periscope depth would be risking running aground. That meant they needed a really dark night and some lousy weather to pull this thing off. They’d also have to calculate how and when to get some charge back into the batteries before they had to submerge again to get out of Hiroshima Bay alive.

Gar finally went down below into Control, where he met with the boat officer, Ensign Brown. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“No probs, Skipper,” Brown said. “Hashimoto told us where to make a landing, which was around a point of rocks from the town. Darker’n a well-digger’s ass out there, so we just paddled until we ran aground on some gravel.”

“I take it no guard towers and searchlights?”

Brown shook his head. “We didn’t see a soul or a light. We could smell the place, though. Eye-watering. Hashimoto said they dried their fish on racks in the open air, and that’s what the stink was. I can’t imagine anyone actually eating that shit.”

“They’re an alien culture, Mister Brown,” Gar said. “We keep sinking all their merchies, they’ll be eating stone soup pretty quick. No sentries, boats, or anything moving out there?”

“Not a thing, Skipper. Dark, and totally quiet. We could see the loom of city lights to the north, probably Hiroshima, but there wasn’t a sound coming from that town, not even a barking dog.”

“Probably ate ’em all,” the Cob offered.

“Okay, good job. He took his secret box with him, right?”

“Yes, sir, he did. It was starting a light drizzle when we put him ashore, and he was trying hard to keep it dry.”

“Wasn’t raining paper, was it?” Gar asked.

“Sir?”

ELEVEN

It took three days, not one, before they could make their move. Three long, hot, stultifying days submerged out in the middle of the Inland Sea, the boat turning in a 2-degree, 5-mile-wide circle at 250 feet, trying to conserve the battery while they waited for the weather. At night they came up to recharge the eternally thirsty batteries, running just two of the mains and keeping watch all night for scout planes or the odd itinerant patrol boat. Then back down an hour before dawn to the dreaded wait-box.

The men kept busy doing light maintenance, training, and sleeping. Gar and his department heads went over their plan for the umpteenth time in daily meetings. It was simple enough: If the Inland Sea could be visualized as a bathtub, then Hiroshima Bay was like a sink attached to one side of the bathtub, and Kure was like a soap dish attached to the sink. There were two channels up into Hiroshima Bay from the larger Inland Sea, and then one long, narrow channel down between some islands and along the east coast of Hiroshima Bay to the Kure naval arsenal. The water depths ranged from fairly deep in the first two channels to around 80 or 90 feet in the bay itself to downright hopeless right outside the Kure harbor, where there was only about 60 feet. They’d have to time the tides, too, because there was a big, 6-knot current coming through those two approach channels at ebb tide. They could submerge, barely, going through either channel to avoid detection from the shore, but if they entered the bay at the ebb, they’d only be making a net of 2 miles an hour at best over the ground against such a current.

The biggest discussion item was whether to submerge at all. They could do the thing in two stages: Transit at night well up into Hiroshima Bay, then find a hole, submerge, and wait out the following day. Then they’d make the attack the next night after about a one-hour run on the surface down to Kure. After that, well, much would depend on whether the Japs figured out they had an American sub in their inner precincts. Either way they could probably get out of the Kure area and back into Hiroshima Bay for yet another day of lying quietly near the bottom. Even if they actually sat on the bottom, which itself was a dangerous proposition, there’d only be 30 feet or so of water above the periscopes. Airplane pilots were able to see down that deep out in the open ocean, and the clarity of the water in Hiroshima Bay was just one more unknown.

The other option was to accomplish the entire mission in one night. Leave the wait-box right after sundown on the surface and drive all the way through the night to Kure. Stay on the surface and thus employ the diesels, recharging as they went, and using lousy weather to shield them from visual detection in those narrow channels. Get to Kure at around one in the morning, make the attack, and then run like hell, with the tenuous option of submerging in Hiroshima Bay if the hue and cry became too pressing. They had some good charts now, thanks to Hashimoto, and a couple of candidate hidey-holes up in Hiroshima Bay if they had to go to ground. Otherwise, shoot the place up, turn tail, and make best speed back up into the bay and then back down, through one of those two channels, and out to the safety of the relatively deep Inland Sea. By the second day of twiddling their thumbs in the wait-box, Gar had made a command decision. They’d do the whole thing on the surface. If they were detected on the way up, they’d regroup and do something different.

There was another way out of the Kure Harbor area, which was to the south of the naval base. The channel was narrow — only 500 feet wide, with a bridge 36 feet overhead and a limiting depth of 18 feet at mean low water. The Dragon drew 16 feet in her normal surfaced condition. If they had to, really had to, they could squeeze through there, but anyone with even a high-powered rifle could make serious trouble for them. Checking the tide tables, they saw that high water would occur while they were raising hell up in Kure. That gave them another 6 feet under the keel, but by the time they got to that choke point, the ebb current would be running, making navigation and maneuvering both difficult and dangerous. Gar and the nav team plotted the thing out anyway; there was always a chance that their preferred escape route could fill up with patrol craft and destroyers after the Dragon started tearing things up at the naval base.

They also considered painting some fake side numbers and a red meatball on the shears just to confuse shore-watchers who might catch a glimpse of them heading into Hiroshima Bay. The problem was that they looked nothing like a Jap submarine, which had large structures up on the bow and stern to support aerials, not to mention a completely different hull line. They then considered painting a swastika on each side of the sail to make a shore station think the Dragon was a German U-boat. They were allies, after all. Gar knew there had to be shore stations all around the bay and especially at the entrance channel to the Kure base. Presumably they’d have advance notice of naval unit movements, and even recognition signals and codes. The key to all these complications was going to be the weather. They needed a dark, rainy, even foggy night, and that’s what they finally got on the third night.

“Nasake-jima should be coming up on the port hand in about fifteen minutes,” the navigator announced. “Moro-shima to starboard. How’s the visibility?”

“Shitty and gritty,” the exec reported from the bridge. The air flowing down the open hatch was indeed wet and cold, but still a wonderful change from the day’s worth of breathing their own exhalations. “No lights, that I can see,” Russ added.

Gar was down in the conning tower, continuing his Mush Morton command-and-control approach of letting the exec drive the ship while he drove the tactical problem. They were taking surface-search radar observations once every five minutes, and the steep-sided Japanese islands were giving them a good nav picture. They were operating two of their four engines to reduce noise in a channel that was just 1 mile across. Gar had the boat settled as low in the water as they could get and still keep the main induction pipe dry in order to diminish their own radar signature. He wished they had had one of those radar signal detectors, but he was counting on the choppy sea and passing rainsqualls to obscure their passage through the channel. Gar knew there was a certain element of self-delusion in that thought, but they certainly should have the element of surprise here. No American sub in its right mind, etc., etc.

About halfway through the passage the exec sang out that they were getting their first visual challenge. He reported a flashing amber light from the Nasake-jima side. The island itself was just a dark blur in the night, but the light was coming from low down, practically on the water’s edge, right where you’d expect a coastal fortification to be. Somebody had seen or heard them.

The exec gave Gar a bearing, and he put the acquisition periscope on it. After a minute he realized they weren’t sending Morse code. He had two options: send something back that was nonsense, or keep the light off entirely. It seemed to him that they could barely see the Dragon, if at all, even if one of their coastal radars had detected something in the channel. If he used their own mast-mounted signal light, they’d then have a precise bearing for the second half of the challenge: a 6-inch coastal artillery gun.

“We’ll stay dark,” he told the exec. “Clear the bridge in case we have to dive.”

The two lookouts came sliding down the ladder, followed by the exec. He started to close the hatch, but Gar told him to leave it open. He mostly wanted the people off the bridge in case the shore station fired and rained shrapnel on the bridge. He kept his periscope on the blinking light, but it was losing strength. He hoped that they were pointing it out into the channel without having any idea of where those rumbling diesels were. After a minute, he couldn’t see the signal light anymore, and there was no gunfire.

They were through their first gate. The easy one, he reminded himself.

He ordered the bridge crew back up topside and told Maneuvering to bring the other two diesels on the line. What they needed now was speed. At 20 knots, they could be at the innermost part of Hiroshima Bay in just under an hour. Then they’d turn northeast through two more tight channels and finally southeast to go down the north side of Etajima island, which happened to be home to the Japanese Naval Academy. The weather was cooperating nicely, with windy rainsqualls and even a little snow for effect. According to the weather forecasts from Pearl, this system would blow through the Seto by tomorrow night, to be followed by cold and clear. By then they had to be back in the wait-box. If this thing went as planned, they could be there before dawn. After all, he asked himself with a grin, what could go wrong?

TWELVE

They reached the next bottleneck at just after midnight. By then it was blowing snow, and they were navigating by both fathometer and surface-search radar. The water was only about 80 feet deep, so now they were pretty much committed to a surface approach on Kure. If they’d been trying visual coastal navigation under these conditions they’d have been totally lost, but Hashimoto’s chart, the rocky island cliffs, and the occasional protruding pinnacle made for great radar nav. There were still no lights showing ashore, and even Hiroshima City seemed to have been blacked out. Gar had given up trying to be sparing with the radar; it was all they had. He could only hope that the normally attentive Japanese wouldn’t be scanning for an American sub radar right here in their backyard.

By 0115 they were creeping around the headland above the naval base. The diesels were secured and they were running all-electric now. The dry-dock notches and the long flat bulkhead piers made for a distinctive radar signature, and for the first time they saw lights ashore through the snow. Electric arc welding was creating splotches of bluish white lightning along the piers, and there were some even bigger lights way up in the air, probably on the booms of harbor cranes. The city might be blacked out, but this shipyard was going full blast. Gar instructed the exec and the radar nav team to get in to about 800 yards and 40 feet of water and hold there. Gar stayed on the periscope down in the conning tower to examine the waterfront through the tumbling clouds of light snow.

Okay, he thought, as he turned the scope from left to right a degree at a time, where’s this giant aircraft carrier? There was a band of lights along the harbor’s edge, then darkened warehouses and steel-yard buildings silhouetted in the background. Spaces between the buildings were either finger piers or dry docks. He spotted two destroyers moored bow to bow along the main bulkhead pier, which put them in silhouette against the welding arcs. It looked like there were other ships inside the dry docks, either moored there or up on blocks behind a caisson wall at the head of a dry dock.

Nothing that was obviously a big carrier. Had the damned thing already sailed? Were they sitting here in the lion’s mouth, on his tongue, actually, and all for nothing?

The industrial lights and welding arcs had put the background buildings into impenetrable shadow. Even with a filter, every time he focused on something in the periscope an arc welder blinded him. It was probably blinding them, too. Then he saw two fat barges tied up to the left of the leftmost destroyer. They looked a lot like the ammunition barges tied out in the West Loch of Pearl Harbor. It was customary in the U.S. Navy to remove all ammunition before a ship went into dry dock. If a ship was going into the yards for a six-month overhaul, she would drive over to an ammunition depot and do a complete off-load. If it was going to be a quick one-or two-week repair, then barges like these would be brought alongside, the ammo off-loaded, and the barges anchored nearby. If that’s what those two fat boxes were, Gar now had a way to light the target area up.

“Open all forward outer doors,” he said softly. Then he got on the ship’s announcing system.

“This is the captain speaking,” he began. “We are in position, eight hundred yards off one of Japan’s major naval shipyards. It’s snowing outside, and the shipyard is barely visible in front of us. Once we start shooting, things will happen very quickly. Right now we appear to have the element of surprise. It’s one in the morning, the night shift is going at it over there, and the rest of the base appears to be darkened-ship. Once we ID the carrier, I’m going to fire every fish we have in the tubes, so a first priority will be reloads as quickly as possible. We’re gonna shoot this place up and then run like hell back to the deep part of the Inland Sea. We will be pursued, but as long as this weather lasts, we won’t have to deal with aircraft. Stand by to stand by, and remember Pearl Harbor.”

He called the radioman up to the conning tower. “When you hear the first fish let go, go out on the HF with that message we precanned.”

The radioman nodded and dropped back down into Control. Gar and the exec had encoded an encrypted message to Pearl that said they were presently attacking the naval arsenal at Kure. That would be the first indication at SubPac that they’d actually made it through Bungo Suido and all the way to Kure. The Japanese had an excellent high-frequency direction-finding network, which was why they’d stayed off the air so far. Once Gar started shooting, there’d be no need for them to detect the Dragon through direction finding, so he wanted to get one message off to Pearl in case they never made it back out to the open sea.

Gar took a moment to think through his tactical problem. The TDC setup would be different this time. There’d be no course and speed inputs since he’d be shooting on direct bearings at a moored target. Where the hell was that carrier? There was simply nothing there big enough to be an aircraft carrier, or if there was, he might be looking at it end on and just not recognizing what he was seeing. For that, he needed more light. He told the exec to stay up on the bridge and to look for that carrier.

First, those two destroyers. He assumed they were tied up at a shipyard for a reason and were thus probably not ready for a quick underway response, but assumptions were not in order just now. They could also be sitting there with boilers lit off and the crew ready for a five-minute jump-start, or at least able to man all those guns and start shooting back. So, business before pleasure.

“Initial firing bearing is zero eight five, range eight hundred yards. Torpedo running depth ten feet. Target is a destroyer moored to the bulkhead pier. I will then switch eight degrees to the right to shoot at a second destroyer, also moored. One fish per destroyer. Then I’m going to come back left to bearing zero five five and shoot one fish at a pair of moored ammo barges. If we get a circular runner, we will back full emergency — there’s no more useful water ahead of us. Got it?”

There was a murmur of acknowledgment.

Gar took a deep breath. “Tube one,” he said.

“Tube one is ready. Plot set.”

“Fire one.”

They all felt the familiar thump, and Gar thought he could see the steam-bubble trail unfolding in his periscope.

“Shifting targets, firing bearing is zero niner three, range eight hundred yards, tube two.”

“Tube two is ready. Plot set.”

“Fire two.”

Thump.

“Both fish hot, straight, and normal.”

Gar swung back to the first destroyer just in time to see a huge waterspout erupt amidships, breaking him into two pieces. The explosion sound reached them a few seconds later as his midships sagged into the harbor in a boil of water and smoke.

“First destroyer is down,” Gar reported. He swung right in time to see another waterspout, this one forward of center on the second destroyer. There was a red glow at the base of the water column, and then her forward magazines went off.

Okay, he thought, I was wrong about their off-loading ammo. The boom of the warhead was followed by the sound of a much larger explosion that seemed to go on forever as six hundred rounds of 5-inch ammo cooked off alongside the pier. Bet they stop welding over there now, he thought.

Lots of light, but still not quite enough.

“XO, you see any carriers?”

“That’s a negative, Cap’n,” Russ called back. “There’s something in the big dry dock to the right, but it looks more like a building than a ship.”

Gar swung around for one more confirmation bearing on the two barges and then fired a third torpedo into the outboard barge. The barges were a little bit farther out, but this time he’d guessed right about what was on board. The whole world lit up as a monstrous fireball rose into the air, followed by an ear-squeezing pressure wave. It made the second destroyer look like a campfire in comparison. They’d see that one all the way up in Hiroshima City, he thought. Two more hash marks for his destroyer score sheet. Then the second barge exploded.

“Captain,” Russ called. “Bearing zero niner niner — go high mag.”

Gar quickly swung the periscope around to the right onto 099 and took a look under high magnification. He began to hear debris hitting the water around the boat as pieces of those barges came down. They were still blowing up like a Fourth of July fountain, creating a virtual parade of booming explosions.

In the scope, the shipyard was illuminated now with garish colors of red and orange in clear detail. On the bearing was a large black building with two protrusions canted out at 30 degrees from the upper stories. Gar looked and looked, trying to make it into something recognizable. Some kind of magnesium round went off on the ammo barges, and then he saw something down low, almost on the water, which gave it away. He realized he was looking at a dry-dock caisson, the huge floating wall that is sunk in the notched end of a dry dock once the ship is inside and positioned over the blocks.

That wasn’t a building. That was their target.

The bastard was completely out of reach — he was in dry dock!

A hail of metal began to fall on the hull outside, and the exec and his two lookouts came scrambling down into the conning tower. There were some smaller explosions out in the water, which Gar hoped weren’t aimed shell fire.

“Is that it?” the exec asked.

Gar nodded, wondering what they could do now. They didn’t have much time before they’d have to get the hell out of here. The Japs would be in shock at what had just happened, but then they’d react. All the same, they hadn’t made this trip to be defeated by a goddamned caisson wall.

Gar had three fish left forward, four aft. He wanted to save the four stern-tube torpedoes to use against pursuing Japs if he had to.

Something large hit the deck forward, then rolled over the side, sounding for all the world like a depth charge. He took another look. The first destroyer had capsized; the second one was just gone.

Gar told the exec to get on the other scope and use both radars to start looking for incoming trouble. Those two destroyers were history, but there should be at least a couple of the new Hiburi-class escorts nearby somewhere, and, being diesel powered, they could get under way in a hurry. Then the second ammo barge blew up again, pulsing a fireball hundreds of feet into the night air.

“Start backing out, XO,” Gar said, as yet another large object landed close aboard the port side. It must be raining absolute death and destruction over on those piers, he thought.

He turned back to stare at the huge carrier in dry dock. Even with all the fireworks, her back end still looked like a building, and she seemed to have two hangar decks instead of just one. There were some guns mounted on the stern parapets, and now that he knew what he was looking at, he could make out the support girders for the overhanging flight deck.

“Bearing!” he called out “Mark! Make ready tube four. Range — estimate one thousand yards. Set running depth at twenty feet.”

“Four ready, plot set.”

“Fire four! Make ready five, same parameters.”

Torpedo number four left the tube with a solid thump, followed a minute later by number five. Sound reported a normal run.

Gar couldn’t tell through the periscope whether that huge ship was afloat inside the dry-dock basin or resting on her keel blocks. The caisson being closed, it was more likely that she was on the blocks. He hoped to blast away the caisson with three torpedoes and, if nothing else, upset the ship as the water rushed into the dock.

“Make ready tube six,” he ordered, and then torpedo four hit the caisson. A satisfying waterspout erupted above the caisson and then fell back into the harbor, but they couldn’t hear the warhead explosion over the cacophony of the exploding ammo barges.

Torpedo five hit just to the right of four, raising another big water blast. The caisson was now obscured by a dense cloud of dust, smoke, and debris, but he wondered if they’d done any real damage. A dry-dock caisson was just a big, hollow barrier with ballast tanks in the bottom half. To put a ship in dock you flooded the dry dock, and then a tug pulled the caisson out of the way. The ship would be pulled in, lined up over its blocks, and held in position by mooring lines. Then you pushed the caisson wall back into position at the harbor end of the dock and flooded down its ballast tanks. The caisson would settle into a notch at the end of the dry dock. Then you pumped out the dock. The pressure of the harbor water on one side of the caisson would seal it into position as the dock emptied. As the water was pumped out, the ship would settle onto her blocks, and work on the now-exposed underwater hull could begin.

He’d hit the caisson with two large warheads, but nothing seemed to have happened. He needed to dislodge it, not just damage it. He swung the scope around to put the vertical crosshair on the left edge of the caisson.

“Tube six: Bearing: Mark! Range one thousand yards. Set running depth fifteen feet.”

“Cap’n, we have two radar contacts heading this way from Etajima,” the exec called out.

“Set up a solution on them after I get this one off,” Gar said. “Where are we, Plot?”

“Tube six ready, depth fifteen feet, plot is set.”

“Fire six!”

Thump. This time he could definitely see the torpedo’s wake as it planed up to 10 feet and then settled back down to 15 and headed for the dry dock. Sound again reported a normal hot run. Gar could hear the exec in the background calling out ranges and bearings to the TDC operators on the two inbound contacts. They were probably Hiburi-class patrol frigates; small but lethal. Time to run.

THIRTEEN

Gar took the conn, ordered up the diesels, and then made a hard right turn to the south. They no longer had the option of getting out the way they’d come in. They were going to have to run the Hayase Seto notch. He swung the scope back toward the dry dock in time to see torpedo six explode. He couldn’t tell if he’d hit the caisson or the stone sidewall, because an instant later a large warehouse on the drydock’s southern side obscured his line of sight.

Oh, well, he thought, effort made. It’d take them some time to replace that caisson, so, if nothing else, he’d put their largest dry dock out of commission. If he had managed to dislodge the caisson, a 42-foot-high wall of water would have thundered down into the empty dry dock, lifted the ship off her blocks and sent her careening into the stone sidewalls of the dry dock. With luck her screws and rudders would be damaged, and if there were any large access holes cut into her sides and bottom, there’d be some serious flooding of her engineering spaces.

Luck. Would. Could. Shit!

He swung the scope back to the left, where the ammo barges had been, but there was nothing there except a towering cloud of flickering smoke. The lights were going out all over Kure. Maybe they thought it was an air raid. Now all they had to do was outrun two angry patrol craft making 30 knots in their direction.

“Gun team battle stations, and make ready tubes seven and eight,” Gar called out. He began to look for targets as they bolted south and west out of the Kure harbor at 20 knots. While they maneuvered to clear the harbor, Gar called down to Radio to put out a second message to Pearl about the attack and the frustrating news that the big carrier had been moored behind a dry dock caisson. Gar wanted to say that they thought they’d damaged her, but he knew in his heart she was probably untouched. The exec spoke up from the plotting table.

“Confirming two high-speed surface contacts, bearing three four zero, closing, range is now thirteen miles.”

The Japs could start shooting at a range of about 8 miles, if they had radar gun control, which they probably did since they were heading right for the fleeing Dragon. The notch was 2 miles ahead of them, and while he was pretty sure destroyers could not go through there, smaller patrol craft certainly could. On the other hand, Gar wasn’t sure the Dragon would make it through, either, with only 18 feet of water depth over the rock bottom at mean low water.

Time for me to go to the bridge, he thought. He told the exec to take the conn and drive them through on the radar, while he dealt with whatever was waiting for them in the notch itself.

He called down to Control to tell him what the state of the tide was right now, then ordered all scopes and radar masts down except for radar observations. The road bridge over the notch was charted at 36 feet; the Dragon’s sail structure was 25 feet above the water. The notch itself was less than 300 wide, with a sharp turn required to avoid a shoal right after going under the bridge. The tide was key: Mean low water and they’d have only 2 feet under the keel; higher tide would give them a few more feet under the keel but also might have them taking the periscopes off on the bridge trusses. There was no alternative now, though — not with those two tin cans in hot pursuit. A quartermaster helped Gar into an exposure jumpsuit and an inflatable aviation-style life jacket, then handed him his binoculars. Then he went topside.

The snow was still coming down, and the fire-and-light show back in the Kure harbor was diminishing into muttered thunder. There was no wind other than the relative breeze created by their own passage. The diesels were roaring, and the gun crew forward was loading up the 5-inch gun and waiting for orders. The Dragon had a pair of twin-barreled 20 mm antiaircraft guns mounted back on the so-called cigarette deck behind the bridge. Gar ordered them manned as well. There would be at least a surveillance station on one or both sides of the notch, if not shore guns of some kind. The 20 mm would be more effective in close quarters than the 5-inch. He looked out into the gray swirl of snow ahead and tried to think. They’d have to slow down in the actual strait to keep from causing bottom suction effect — the high power being transmitted into the water by the props could create a semivacuum in close proximity to the bottom and actually suck the hull down into a grounding. The bitch-box spoke.

“Bridge, Nav. We’ll have eleven feet of water under the keel and eight feet of clearance under that bridge.”

Tight, very tight, he thought. He could hear the 20 mm crew breaking into the watertight ammo boxes and pushing shells down into the slide magazines. Up forward the gun crew was huddled behind the gun itself against the cold. He couldn’t see much of anything, then remembered to take off the red-lens night-vision protection goggles that everyone wore down in the conning tower. Much better, but he still couldn’t see anything but flying snowflakes.

Time to think. So, first, slow down; there was no way they could go through that tiny strait at 20 knots and then do the zigzag turn around the shoals on the other side. He told the exec to slow to 10 knots. Then he tried to assemble the tactical picture, but realized immediately that he had to be down below in the conning tower for that. He hesitated. The captain’s place in a fight was on the bridge, except he was blind up here. He could just see the gun crew forward. Otherwise, they might as well have been out on the open ocean. He called down to the exec to come to the ladder.

“Get suited up and take the bridge. I need to be where I can see that radar. Your job will be to work the guns as we go through if they start shooting.”

Three minutes later Russ clunked up onto the bridge, and Gar went below, red goggles back on. There he had the DRT picture, the chart, radar, and the mine-hunting sonar scope right in front of him. He announced that he had the conn and slowed further to 8 knots. The notch was directly ahead at less than a mile. Then they heard distant gunfire coming down the hatch. Not their guns — shore batteries. Before Gar could react, the exec called down from the bridge.

“Shore batteries, port and starboard,” he shouted. “But it sounds like they’re shooting over us, way over us.”

“Don’t shoot back,” Gar ordered. “I’ll tell you when.”

“Captain, those destroyers are changing course. Heading east now. There’s some trash on the scope around them.”

Then it dawned on him. The shore batteries were shooting at their own destroyers. Gar heard more thumping booms, a steady cannon fire in the night, but there were no shell bursts rising anywhere near the Dragon.

“I think they’re shooting at their own ships,” Gar said to the plotting team. “Focus now on the nav problem. We go through, we turn hard left just past the lower channel buoy, then hard right to split the next two buoys. Then southwest for deeper water.”

The navigator pointed to a fish weir just past that first buoy. “We may hit that, sir,” he said.

Gar nodded. “If we do, we do,” he said. “Better that than actual pilings. Range to the notch?”

“Eight hundred yards,” he said. “Should be a reflector buoy coming up on our starboard hand.”

Gar passed that to the exec and asked if he saw anything. Negative. Just more snow. A long minute passed. The shore batteries were still blasting away up into the Kure harbor approaches. The two radar contacts were maneuvering in all directions.

“I can hear the beach to starboard,” the exec called down. The diesels were echoing off the steeply terraced sides of the island.

“Can you see the bridge beacon?” Gar called up.

“Negative,” he said. “Just more — wait! Wait! Affirmative. We need to come left two degrees to head right for it.”

“Finally,” Gar said. “Navigator, make it so, and you take the conn.”

The chart showed that the bridge across the strait had a lighted reference beacon right in the middle of the structure to help ships and boats come through. A minute later they sailed under the bridge, which is when the Japs heard them.

A flare of white light lit up the hatch above as shore searchlights snapped on from just below the bridge structure.

“Shoot ’em out, XO,” Gar shouted. “Use the twenties.”

Instantly the 20 mm guns began to bark topside, and empty shell casings clanged down on the overhead of the conning tower.

“Unlighted buoy abeam on the port hand,” the exec yelled over the racket of the 20s.

“Coming left to one three zero,” the navigator called out.

Their second 20 mm got into it now, and the noise down in the conning tower became deafening. Suddenly the white glare from above went out and the shore guns stopped firing.

“Come right with full rudder to two zero zero!” the navigator shouted.

Gar felt the boat heel as they made the sharp turn, and then there was a scraping and rumbling sound along the port side as they wiped out the thin pilings of the fish weir. Gar held his breath, wondering if they should have stopped the port screw, and then came the deeper rumble of that propeller entangling itself in something. Gar wanted to stop it, but they needed that prop to push them through the tight starboard turn. The rumbling became heavier, and then subsided as the engineers took it into their own hands to shut it down and lock the shaft.

“Steady two zero five,” the navigator called. “Captain, what speed now?”

Not the 20 knots we needed, he thought. “Go to full power on the starboard screw,” he said. “Head for Moroshima. Control, get me damage reports.”

Gar climbed back up to the bridge, where the gun crews were kicking 20 mm brass over the side. The snow was still falling as the boat accelerated out into the lower reaches of Hiroshima Bay.

“Anybody hurt?” he asked.

“Cookie burned his hand on the port twenty barrel,” the exec said, “but the Japs never fired a round at us. I think they were all getting flat once the twenties started in. What’d we hit?”

“That damned fish trap, I think,” Gar said. “We’ll have to stop and send a diver over, but first we need to get to deeper water.” He looked at his watch. They had three, maybe four hours left until daylight, and there would most definitely be a search on by then. On one screw they could make about 15 knots, and it was only 12 miles down to the Moroshima Strait, where the water was 300 feet deep. Once through Moroshima they’d be in the deep part of the Seto, where they could go to ground and plan the next steps.

“We need to stay on the surface, then,” the exec said.

“Yup. I don’t expect aircraft out in this weather, but they definitely know which way we’re headed. What they don’t know is which strait we’ll take to get back out to deep water.”

“Moroshima’s the closest,” Russ said. “If I had any patrol boats out, that’s where I’d tell them to converge.”

“Me, too,” Gar said. “Keep the radar off until we get right to the straits. Secure all the guns, and get these people below. We run into bad guys, we’re going downstairs in a hurry.”

“You think Moroshima’s mined?”

Gar hadn’t actually considered that. He was more tired than he realized. “The only way we’ll know is to go through submerged, with Hell’s Bells on,” he said, thinking out loud. “You’re right. That’s what we should do. Okay. Stay up here while I go below to see what the snipes think.”

Gar went down the ladder, checked the nav plot, and told Cob to let people stand easy on station, get some chow and coffee while they transited. He told the sonar team they’d be submerging at the entrance to Moroshima and possibly going through another minefield. Everyone in the conning tower looked positively delighted at that prospect. He went in search of coffee. The cooks came through — there was hot soup, sandwiches, and coffee in all the right places. Gar had one of the mess cooks take chow and coffee up to the bridge. Then he went back to Maneuvering.

The chief engineer, Billy Bangor, must have heard he was coming because he was there before Gar arrived.

“Whaddaya think?” Gar asked him.

“We tried to keep it on the line, but the vibration was just too bad,” Billy said. “I think we need to stop, send a guy over the side with a battle lantern and take a look.”

“This is a tough place to do that, Billy.”

“Yes, sir, I know. But if that prop is as badly damaged as I think it is, we gotta get rid of it. It’ll be too noisy otherwise, even if we’re just dragging it.”

“Blow it off?”

“Yes, sir. Primacord.”

“Who’s gonna set that?”

“That would be me, Cap’n,” he said with a grin. “I’m a certified diver, and I’ve been to school on Primacord.”

“You an experienced diver?”

“No, sir, not at all,” he said brightly. “But I’ve got this really super certificate from the dive school. And a secret Primacord decoder ring.”

It was Gar’s turn to grin. “Ask Cob if we have anybody in the crew who’s maybe done this before.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“We’re going to submerge just before going through the next strait. That way we’ll be able to see mines if there happen to be any. I’ll be able to give you maybe thirty minutes to look, decide, and then blow the damned thing off. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. Piece’a cake.”

Cob was obviously infectious. The more unreasonable the request, the more likely everybody would be mentioning cake.

The coffee wasn’t doing anything but pressurizing Gar’s bladder. He went forward, talking to people, telling them what they’d done and where they were bound next. He checked in with Radio, and they said they’d gotten the second message out. Finally he hit the head, and then his rack. They were transiting across the Inland Sea of Japan. By now the entire Jap navy was probably looking for them. In a snowstorm, admittedly, but in an area where they just about had to be after transiting that notch. They’d sunk two destroyers and two ammo barges, torn up the Kure dockyard, maybe hurt their new carrier, maybe not, and then got clean away while the shore batteries fired at their own approaching ships. The Dragon was down to one screw and 15 knots tops, on the surface. Underwater, maybe 5, and, more importantly, no ability to duplicate that twisting maneuver which had extracted them from their little spider box in the Bungo Suido minefield.

He looked at his watch. Forty-five minutes to get to Moroshima. He picked up the sound-powered phone.

“Conn.”

“This is the captain. When we get five miles out from Moroshima, take a radar sweep. If we’re clean, stop the boat and let the engineers take a look at the port prop. Show no lights. When the snipes are done with what they have to do, we’ll submerge for the passage through Moroshima. Tell the XO.”

“Got it, Cap’n.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

That word would get around the boat in about two minutes. He lay back on his bunk. “Piece’a cake,” he mumbled before passing right out.

FOURTEEN

Admiral Lockwood was listening to the morning briefing when a messenger came in from Communications and handed a piece of paper to Captain Forrester. He scanned it and passed it to Lockwood. The briefer, seeing there was something going on, stopped talking while Lockwood read the message and then nodded his head.

“Gar Hammond made it in,” he said and then looked up, realizing no one knew what he was talking about.

“The Dragonfish. They got through Bungo Suido and made it into the Inland Sea and they’ve attacked the Kure naval arsenal. How ‘bout that shit, eh?”

There was a murmur of approval as well as surprise among the gathering of staff officers, many of whom had had no knowledge that one of their boats was even going to try to get through Bungo Suido, much less attack a Jap naval base. Then another messenger came in with a second piece of paper. Lockwood read it and then shook his head.

“Amazing,” he said. “They got to Kure but the damned carrier was in dry dock, so Hammond attacked the dry dock! And sank two moored destroyers plus a couple of ammo barges.”

“Hammond and his destroyer obsession,” muttered Forrester. “Did they damage the carrier?”

Lockwood shrugged. “Who the hell knows, but if he sent torpedoes against the caisson wall and it collapsed, they certainly did some damage. Can you imagine an aircraft carrier coming off the blocks and then colliding with the stone sides of the dock? The Japs must be out of their minds about now.”

“Now comes the really hard part,” Forrester said. “The getaway.”

“God, yes. If there ever was a hornets’ nest stirred up, Brother Hammond has taken the cake. Get word to PacFleet, and see if they can get some air force recce assets over that base.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Forrester said as Lockwood motioned to the briefer to continue with the rest of the morning brief.

He was headed upstairs to make the call to Makalapa when the assistant operations officer intercepted him with a file folder.

“This is the information you requested on the Hoshen Maru sinking,” he said. “Looks like it was the Gar that did the deed.”

“The Gar?” Forrester repeated. “It would have to be the Gar, wouldn’t it.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.”

“Do you want me to get a copy up to PacFleet JAG?”

“No,” Forrester said. “Let me take care of that.”

He went to his office, quickly scanned the folder, and then asked his yeoman to put in a call to PacFleet JAG and ask Lieutenant Commander DeVeers to come see him.

Sharon arrived at SubPac headquarters an hour later. She was wearing her blues this time, in deference more to the month of the year than any colder temperatures. Forrester gave her the folder and then asked her to read through it to see if that was what they needed. Sharon did so while Forrester looked out the tall windows at the subs moored down at the finger piers.

“Yes, Captain, I think this will do,” she said.

“Have the Japs starting beating the drums about this incident?”

“Not to my knowledge, Captain,” Sharon said. “But State doesn’t necessarily share what they know with us.”

“Are you familiar with the operating areas discussed in the report?” he asked.

“No, sir, not really. I can figure out what ‘empire’ means, but—”

“Perhaps I can help you,” he said. “Let me give you a quick tour of the operations briefing room. We have a large graphical chart for the areas.”

Sharon wasn’t quite sure what that had to do with the price of rice, but she agreed. Forrester made a call and then took her downstairs to the ops briefing room. When they came in she saw that the three walls were covered in huge maps, some of which had curtains drawn across them. Forrester took her to the largest map, which displayed the entire Pacific theater of operations. She was aware of the watch-standers all staring at her as if they’d never seen a woman in uniform. Captain Forrester was standing quite close as he explained the various area dispositions, almost like a proud teenager with the prettiest girl at the prom.

She sighed mentally. Another amorous captain, complete with wedding ring and family pictures on the desk. Next would be an invitation to lunch in the flag mess for an in-depth discussion of submarine warfare. Then an invite to a reception somewhere, followed by some lush tropical drinking and finally a hands-on experience on the dance floor. She thought back to her brief time with Gar Hammond and realized she missed him, lone wolf BS and all. Forrester was wrapping up his description.

“So you see, Miss DeVeers, this is a really big operation.”

“Wow,” she said, playing her part. “I had no idea. Where’s Gar Hammond in all of this?”

Forrester cleared his throat and then told her that that was, of course, highly restricted information. Some of the enlisted plotters appeared to be suppressing grins when she asked about Hammond by his first name. Her question seemed to be the signal to terminate the grand tour.

As they left the briefing room, Admiral Lockwood appeared on the stairway to the second deck. Forrester made introductions, and the admiral asked her how the Hoshen Maru case was shaping up. She told him what little she knew and ended by saying that Captain Forrester had just given her the most interesting tour of the operations center.

“Is that right,” Lockwood said, also seeming to suppress a grin. “I’m sure that was very interesting indeed. Keep me informed, will you? If Washington is going to get all spun up over this, I’d appreciate a heads-up.”

“I’ll pass any information we get on to Captain Forrester,” she replied. “As he requested.”

Lockwood gave Forrester a quick why-you-old-dog look and went into the operations center. Sharon smiled sweetly at the discomfited captain, then took her leave and the folder back to Makalapa.

One squeak on the phone brought Gar back awake. “Captain.”

“Cap’n, snipes say they gotta blow it. Primacord is set. Request permission to—”

“Tell them to blow it and get back inside as soon as possible. Anything on the radar?”

“No, sir. We’re clean. The strait’s dead ahead, and it’s still snowing to beat the band.”

“What’s the fathometer showing?” Gar looked at his watch. He’d been down for an hour. It felt like a big mistake. He needed another twelve or so to get even. Had to make sure the XO got some time down, too, he reminded himself. Gar needed that brain of his.

“Two hundred eighty feet.”

He heard the sharp bang of the Primacord going off back aft. They’d wrapped it around the tail shaft just forward of the propeller. If they’d done it right, the Primacord would have cut the entire screw off the tail shaft.

“I’ll be up.”

He sloshed some water on his fuzzy face and then went aft to the control room.

“How many people we got topside?” he asked.

“Ten,” the diving officer said. “Two in the water, eight tenders all around.”

“Who did the dive?”

“Billy Bangs and Cob,” he said.

Good man, he thought. I bet he didn’t have to ask Cob, either.

“Control, Maneuvering.”

“Control.

“They got it off. Diving party’s coming in.”

Gar nodded at the phone talker. “Captain says well done.”

He repeated Gar’s message, and then Gar climbed up into the conning tower. He’d finally come to realize that this was indeed where he needed to be, not on the bridge. Here lived the tactical picture. The nav chart, with a real-time depiction of where they were on that chart. The radar. The sonars. The TDC. This was the nerve center. What had that captain said the surface guys called it? CIC? The captain on the bridge was a tradition, but only if he could see.

“Gimme the bubble,” he said.

FIFTEEN

They submerged and started into the Moroshima Strait. They stayed shallow, running at 150 feet. Gar wanted the mine-hunting sonar to tell him if there were mines ahead, but he also needed to be able to get back up quickly and shine the radar for a sweep or two, in order to see where they were and where they were going.

He’d sent the exec below with orders to get an hour of sleep.

“Just one?” Russ had asked with a weak smile.

“We’ll call you,” Gar said. “Trust me on that.”

Russ went below. Gar told the team to take them on into Moroshima.

For five minutes they waited. Then: Gong.

Fuck.

They began the dance, but this time with only one screw, which made the Dragon sluggish in tight spaces. Just to help things along, Maneuvering reported that the port stern tube was leaking, probably caused by the Primacord blast so close to the stern tube seal.

“All stop,” Gar ordered. All one engine, he thought.

“Popeye, what does the whiz-bang see?”

“Two ahead,” Popeye answered. “One to port, one to starboard. Can’t tell depth.”

The ops boss spoke up from the TDC. “The tide’s going out, so the chains oughta be straining southwest. The mines are probably deeper than they normally ride.”

Gar waited while Popeye analyzed the scope picture.

“Both have bearing drift. We can pass between them.”

Between those two, Gar thought — but what if there were a whole gaggle of the damned things down at, say 200 feet? This sonar looked up. On the other hand, he couldn’t just point down into the depths now. He realized that once they committed to a depth within a minefield, they were stuck there.

“Nothing above us?” he asked. He was conscious of the rest of the conning tower listening to this quiet conversation about 1,000-pound mines in the water all around them. He stood at his periscope observation stand, not to use it but to keep out of the way of all the plotters, phone talkers, and TDC operators jammed together in the conning tower.

“Not yet,” said Popeye helpfully. Good deal, Gar thought.

“All ahead one-third,” he ordered. If the sonar looked up at 5 degrees, then this was probably a surface field, aimed at ships not subs. Unless, of course, they’d planted two layers. He told the diving officer down in Control to see what the bottom looked like according to Hashimoto’s chart.

They crept ahead, navigating on a dead-reckoning track. There was a 5-knot current through there at maximum ebb tide, but they were two hours from the max ebb. Still, they were sweeping over the ground partly on their own power and partly in the grip of that current.

Gong.

“Two more, both to port. Should clear.”

Gar studied the chart on the DRT tabletop. The current streamed right through the strait on a course of 190, just to the right of due south. The water depth in the strait was 180 feet, but there was a hole just outside the strait where the water depth went to almost 400 feet, then back to 180 again. He told the fathometer operator to watch for that hole. They should cross right over it, and if they did, they’d know where they were without having to take a radar peek.

Gong. Gong.

“Two more dead ahead. Recommend we come right ten degrees.”

“Make it so, helmsman.”

The fathometer operator raised his hand. “Depth beneath the keel is two hundred. Two fifty. Three hundred. We’ve just crossed over a ledge. Four hundred feet.”

They were clear of the strait.

Gong.

Not clear of the goddamned minefield.

“Depth beneath the keel is now back to one eighty.”

Gar studied the chart again. To the left of their track was shallower water. Easier to moor mines over there.

“Come right to two one zero,” he ordered.

“Two one zero will clear the mine ahead,” Popeye said.

“Once we pass this one we’ll come to periscope depth and stop. Popeye, look hard as we come up.”

“Cap’n,” the ops officer called, “if we want to stop forward motion over the ground, we’ll have to back down.”

Gar nodded. He should have caught that. Backing down on one screw would probably not overcome the force of a 6-knot current. Except now that they were out of the strait, the current shouldn’t be quite that strong.

Gong.

Time to try.

The off-center pull of the single propeller began to fight the helm to the point where the helmsman couldn’t maintain directional control. That turned out to be a good thing. As the bow fell off to starboard, the gonging stopped.

“Starboard stop, starboard ahead two-thirds,” Gar ordered. He watched Popeye as he frantically scanned the screen. Then he watched the pit log, which finally came off the zero peg and showed forward motion. He slowed to one-third ahead and waited.

“Clear ahead,” Popeye said.

They waited some more. Gar wanted ten minutes of clear sailing before coming up for a radar fix. He looked at the clock on the forward bulkhead. It was 0440 local time. They had maybe an hour and a half until first light, at which point they’d have to submerge for the day.

Gar was very tired. They all were. The thought of going down to 350 feet somewhere out in the middle of the Seto and taking the rest of the day off was wonderful even if it did mean the end of fresh air.

While they waited, the radioman brought up some messages. He’d been copying the fleet broadcast the whole time they’d been tearing stuff up in Kure. Apparently, Pearl was very pleased that they’d managed to get into the Seto. Gar looked for a message acknowledging his second report — that they hadn’t been able to get at the carrier. Nothing there. Probably observing that old rule: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

“Conn, Sonar.”

“Go ahead.”

“I have a noise spoke, weak and intermittent, two seven zero. No classification.”

Gar grabbed the 1MC microphone. “Rig for silent running.”

The vent system shut down immediately, but it wasn’t so bad with that cold water outside the skin. “Start a plot. Open outer doors forward.”

A noise spoke could mean anything from a hunting destroyer to an enemy submarine to a fishing trawler.

“Bearing drift?”

“No bearing drift.”

That meant whatever it was, it was coming straight at them. Gar remembered the destroyers back in the Luzon Strait whose sonars they could not hear. The problem with a single sound bearing was that there was no way to know how far away he was, not without a few hours of fancy plotting.

“Say the fathometer.”

“Two five five beneath the keel.”

“How many fish we got forward?”

“Tubes one and two reloaded; three in progress. All steamers.”

“Control, make your depth two hundred feet. Three-degree down bubble. Popeye, keep watching. I don’t want to descend into another minefield.”

“Clear so far, Cap’n.”

“Say the layer.”

“No layer, so far.”

If there was going to be a protective layer, it was deeper than they were now. No layer, they were going to be fair game.

“Conn, Sonar, amplitude increasing slightly. Still no classification. Bearing drifting slightly right.”

“Passing two hundred feet. Trimming up.”

Gar tried to think of something brilliant, then realized he was too fatigued to think.

“Call the XO,” he said. He’d had his hour, maybe even a little more. Gar knew he needed another brain up here.

“Steady at two hundred feet.”

“A thin five-degree layer at one ninety, sir.”

Not much protection. The larger the temperature differential between one layer of seawater and another, the more sonar waves bounced off, thus masking them. The noise spoke on the screen was at 270, drifting slightly right. They needed to come left, to increase that bearing drift and make the Jap pass astern of them, but not so far left that they reengaged the minefield. Plus, there was a pinnacle to the east of the Moroshima Strait’s southern exit. Nine feet of shoal water.

Gar’s plan had been to surface and get a radar fix, but now … well, now they didn’t know exactly where they were.

“Come left to one eight zero,” he said.

“One eight zero, aye.”

“Does the fathometer depth agree with the charted depth?”

“No, sir. Based on our dead-reckoning position, depth should be three hundred feet, but shoaling ahead to two forty.”

Gar’s ultimate objective was to get back to the safety of their wait-box, where the water depth had been 600 feet. The route to the wait-box was just not deep enough for them to be safe from a serious antisubmarine search, which would surely be coming in the morning.

There was nothing else they could do, he finally decided. They had to surface and run as fast as they could before daylight drove them down again.

“Popeye, anything?”

“No, sir. Clear on my scope.”

“Sonar?”

“Noise spoke is still there, Cap’n. Bearing two niner five now; passing astern. I make it out to be a diesel.”

Diesel. That could be anything, a fisherman, an I-boat on the surface. Coming from the southwest, headed home?

“Come to periscope depth,” Gar ordered. “Stand by for visual observation.”

They came up to periscope depth. Gar put up one of the periscopes, walked around the compass circle, and saw precisely nothing. He checked the depth meter to make sure his scope was indeed above the water. It was.

Still nothing.

“Down scope. Radar, get a fix.”

The surface-search radar mast went up for about one minute, then back down. The scope operators had drawn what they’d seen in yellow grease pencil on the scope: the edges of three islands. They then measured the ranges out to those edges and drew arcs on the chart. Their position on the chart was right where those arcs intersected. You hoped for a point intersection but usually got a small triangle. It was good enough to show Gar where they had to go to achieve a good hidey-hole out in deep water. The question now was, surface and go 12 or 13 knots, or submerge again to 100 feet and go 6? The daylight problem drove the answer. They simply had to surface if they wanted to be in deep water by the time the antisubmarine forces came out in force to hunt them down.

“See that noise spoke contact anywhere?” Gar asked the radar team.

“Negative, sir. No surface contacts.”

“Sonar, is that possible?”

“Yes, sir. There may be a sound channel. He could be close aboard or twenty miles away.”

Gar looked at his watch. Time to decide. His eyes burned, and he felt his sinuses contracting. The exec climbed up into the conning tower.

“Stand by to surface. Nav, plot us a course at fifteen knots to the deep hole. XO, here’s what we got.”

He briefed the exec on the situation and then asked him to take the conn.

Gar got the chief cook on the horn and told him to prepare a hot meal while they were running on the surface. They’d be down for ten hours once they went into hiding; the sub’s atmosphere would be bad enough without the smell of cooking food. He told Maneuvering to pack the battery tight over the next ninety minutes. They acknowledged and requested permission to work on that leaking shaft seal before they went deep again. Gar had forgotten all about that, but those guys who were looking it in the eye knew what would happen to a small leak once the sub headed for deep water: It would become a big leak.

They came up fifteen minutes later. It was still pitch black and snowing outside. Another sweep of the radar revealed no surface contacts. Even the nearby islands were a little fuzzy on the scope. Don’t quit on me now, Gar prayed, looking at those indistinct images. If they lost radar, they’d be here forever.

The diesels lit off with a satisfactory roar, and they plowed south and east to find safer water. The exec stayed in the conning tower, while one officer and three lookouts went topside. The flow of cold, clean air was a welcome relief, as always. Mixed in it somewhere Gar thought he smelled frying chicken. Now that they were on the surface, the sonar had no contacts. He thought about taking a peek with the air-search radar, but the current conditions should make that moot. Should.

Gar wedged himself into a corner of the conning tower and closed his eyes. Once daylight came, he expected a full court press from the Japanese. They had to have detected the Dragon’s two HF radio transmissions. That meant they knew there was a U.S. submarine in the Inland Sea, and they wouldn’t rest until they found it. The Dragon might not have accomplished her mission of damaging that carrier, but she’d certainly embarrassed whatever admiral owned the Inland Sea. An American submarine torpedoing dry-dock caissons and moored destroyers right in front of one of their most important naval arsenals? Somebody would be on the hara-kiri list for that one.

He tried to project what he’d do next. Hide for a day in that hole, where the water was 600 feet deep. Then — what? They’d have to surface to recharge the batteries before attempting Bungo Suido again. They could, if they had to, stay down for thirty-six hours, after which the CO2 levels would begin to overwhelm the scrubbers. If I were the Jap commander, he thought, I’d look hard at the chart of the Seto and then station four destroyers right above the Hoyo Strait. They could sit there at idle for a couple of weeks. The Dragon would either have to shoot her way out of there or die trying. They’d draw a line between the Moroshima Strait and Bungo Suido and just wait for their prey to make a move.

Okay, but there was another way out of the Seto. The Kii Suido. The northern exit. What if they laid low for as long as they could and then went back northeast into the Seto? They had food for four more weeks, and some torpedoes left. Maybe go back to Kure. Damned Japs would never expect that. The water here was shallow, only 165 feet in most places, but the winter was setting in, with its shitty weather, low visibility, snow squalls, short days, and ink black nights.

We could, he thought. We could retrace our steps back into Hiroshima Bay and do it all again. Then run for the northern exit from the Seto — Kii Suido. He tried to imagine what the exec would think of that and smiled. An image of Cob’s face rose in his mind. Don’t say it, he told his weary brain.

SIXTEEN

They got to the hole at daybreak, or what passed for daybreak. The snow was still flying, and the radar showed nobody operating within 20 miles of them. Gar stayed on the surface for as long as possible to max out the batteries; then they dived and leveled off at 350 feet, 50 feet deeper than a much more generous thermocline layer. They were finally down where they belonged, in the deep, black, cold embrace of the Seto.

Then they slept. Gar had the watch officers put a 2-degree port rudder on at 2 knots, and they commenced executing a continuous circle in the black depths of the sea. They set four-hour minimal-manning watches in Engineering and Control. The rest of the crew hit their racks or slept on station in corners, on top of torpedoes, in storage cubbyholes, on mess-deck benches, in the wardroom, wherever they could find 6 horizontal feet and some quiet. Everyone was exhausted. Besides, men sleeping burned up less oxygen and produced less CO2.

Gar got some chow, hit the head to pump personal bilges, and then lay down in his own rack for eight straight hours. Bliss.

Until that port shaft seal let go.

The sound-powered phone squealed.

“Captain.”

“Major flooding in two engine room, Cap’n,” the exec said. “We need to come up.”

Gar squinted at the depth gauge—350 feet.

“Any echo ranging?”

“None heard, sir.”

“I’ll be up.”

By the time he got to Control, the diving officer was having trouble keeping the trim on the boat. She was getting stern heavy, and they were urgently transferring water through the ballast system, trying to keep her on an even keel. Gar went back to Maneuvering, where the chief engineer was on the phone with the damage control team.

“Can we come up?” the engineer asked. “It’s pretty bad back there, and the pumps aren’t keeping up.”

“The layer’s at three hundred feet,” Gar said. “Above that, if they’re up there, they’ll hear us.”

“Even fifty feet would help, Skipper,” Billy said.

Gar called Control and told them to make their depth 300 feet. The diving officer said he’d try but was worried about the up-angle getting out of control. He said they’d pulled the people out of After Torpedo. The exec showed up in Maneuvering. He’d been back to the port shaft alley, and his khakis were soaked.

“We have to get up to periscope depth,” he said. “That seal is blowing like Yellowstone.”

“We might be walking into something worse,” Gar said.

He threw up his hands. “There’ll be seawater getting into After Battery very soon,” he said. “After that…”

After that, the electrolyte in the battery would begin generating chlorine gas, and that would be the end of them.

“Stay on things here,” Gar said. “I’m going to the conning tower.”

“As soon as we can, Cap’n,” he said. “They’re getting nowhere back there.”

Gar didn’t need reminding. The sub would get so heavy aft that she’d begin to stand on her hind end as they tried to get closer to the surface. With only one shaft operational, there was the distinct possibility that they’d start sliding backward into the depths. The deep water that had been protecting them would then consume them.

When Gar got to Control, he ordered all the watertight doors closed and the men to action stations torpedo. They’d be in a torpedo fight right away if they came up into a hornet’s nest of Jap escorts, and Gar’s best antidestroyer torpedoes, the slow but deadly electric homers, were all in After Torpedo.

Which had been evacuated. Dammit!

“Come to periscope depth,” he ordered. “Power us up, but don’t blow unless you have to.”

“We’ll have to,” the diving officer said. “We’re too heavy to drive up on one shaft.”

Gar had to think fast. The batteries were depleted after a day at depth. He only had one propeller left. Ordinarily with a flooding situation, he’d have blown all ballast tanks and be driving the boat up with both screws going full bore, and even that would have been dicey.

“Do what you have to do,” Gar said. “A fight’s better than that really deep dive.”

He climbed up into the conning tower, where their trusty battle stations crew was already on station. The boat was pointed up at about a 10-degree angle, and they could all feel the throbbing of the starboard screw trying to drive them toward the surface. Then a ballast tank rumbled as it filled with compressed air. The depth gauge showed 265, but their ascent was perilously slow. The good news was that for every foot of depth they gained, the torrent of water pouring into their nether parts would be slowing down. The bad news was that they were making a hell of a lot of noise.

A second ballast tank rumbled, and the ascent angle eased off to 8 degrees. They were now passing through 245 feet.

“Sound, anything?”

“Ballast tanks,” Popeye said grimly. His gear was deaf until all that compressed air bubbling out of them got out of the way.

“Passing two hundred feet,” Control reported.

“Hold her at one hundred feet, if you can,” Gar replied, eyeing the Plexiglas status board that showed sunset happening at 1745 local time. The clock above the board showed 1730. Darkness was their friend; snow, sleet, hail, and fog would be even better.

“Passing one fifty feet.”

Gar called the exec in Maneuvering. “This helping?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, and now the pumps are effective.”

“Get people back into After Torpedo as soon as possible,” Gar said. He didn’t have to tell him why. He was glad torpedoes were waterproof.

“Leveling at one-ten feet,” Control reported. Gar didn’t say anything. The diving officer had his hands full trying to get a proper trim on the boat. They still were carrying a big slug of seawater aft. Gar could feel it. His big problem now was that they’d lost their protective layer and made far too much noise. He had no idea of what might be up there, waiting for them.

“Control, can you bring her to periscope depth without broaching?”

“Not yet, Cap’n. Trim’s way off, and the bubble is dancing.”

“When you’re stable, bring her up.”

Gar had taught all the officers who stood diving officer watch to be absolutely frank about the boat’s stability at any given moment. Trimming a submerged submarine is an art, and sometimes officers were unwilling to admit that they were having a hard time achieving trim. A submerged submarine is continuously fooling the ocean into not swallowing it whole. A diving officer had to have no illusions about how good he was. If the boat was out of trim, they were all at risk. Gar could hear the trim pumps working as the diving team worked to balance water loads in their tanks with their own buoyancy. It was a little like trying to hover a fixed-wing aircraft. He wondered who else could hear all that motor noise.

“Coming up to periscope depth now,” Control reported.

“Up scope,” Gar ordered, even though they weren’t quite there yet. He wanted to be on the eyepiece when the tip broached the surface. As soon as it broke, he did the circular duckwalk for a quick look. It appeared to be dark, with a stiff breeze blowing whitecaps soundlessly across the water. That was a good thing; whitecaps hid periscopes. Gar held the scope to just 1 foot above the water for the first look, then brought it up to 3 feet.

No company visible. Sound confirmed a quiet environment — no diesels, pinging, or aircraft sounds. Gar ordered the periscope down and the surface radar mast up for a single-sweep observation.

“Conn, Radar. I have no picture.”

“You mean no contacts, or no video on your scope?”

“No nothing, sir,” the operator said, disgustedly. “I think this goddamned thing’s broke-dick.”

Gar ordered the mast down immediately. This was a real problem. The radar techs were already tearing into the equipment cabinet. They had to have that radar. He couldn’t surface or even bring the diesels on the line without knowing what was lurking out there in the snowy darkness. For that matter, they couldn’t even get a navigation fix. After circling aimlessly all day at depth and subject to whatever currents had been at play down there, they really couldn’t know where they were other than by matching the observed water depths with the charted depth. That made for a pretty loose fix.

Gar went down the ladder from the conning tower to meet the chief engineer, who reported that the repair team needed to get back topside to pack that shaft seal from the outside, so that pressure at depth would squeeze the packing in instead of trying to push the inner seals out into the shaft alley. That, of course, meant they had to surface.

“The battery is at thirty percent,” Gar said. “Not to mention the air inside the boat becoming a diesel fog. We’ll have to surface any way we look at it. ETR on the radar?”

“They’re just getting into it,” called the exec from the conning tower. “Pray that we have the part.”

“XO, what do you recommend?”

“Battle surface guns,” he said promptly. “Go up there expecting trouble and ready to shoot. Keep the TDC team in place for a torpedo shot. If nobody shows up, light off a single diesel for battery charge and fix the seal. Anything after that is gravy.”

“I concur,” Gar said. “Make it so.”

Russ nodded and disappeared from the hatch to take charge. He was getting good at that, Gar realized, and he’d have to be once he got his own command. Gar’s reservations about him going to command had vanished. He reminded himself to tell Russ that.

Gar watched the periscope go back up as the exec took a look for himself. One of the radar techs came down the ladder with two vacuum tubes.

“Those the guilty bastards?” Gar asked.

The tech said he hoped so and went aft to one of the storerooms. Gar hoped they weren’t Easter-egging. He told Cob to get the word out that they were going to battle surface as a precaution and then fix the seal. Then he went to the wardroom. Normally for a battle-surface evolution Gar would be in the conning tower, or at least in Control, but he wanted the exec to run this one without his being right there, looking over his shoulder.

Gar could hear the bridge team assembling at the base of the ladder going topside, and the 5-inch gun team headed forward to their hatch. The Dragon’s crew was now a well-oiled machine, to the point where the GQ alarm really wasn’t necessary. Each man knew what he had to do to bring the boat up on the surface, man all the guns, get a diving team out onto the fantail and over the side with seal packing, light off the diesel engine, purge the foul air out of the boat, complete the trim pumping to lift the stern up so the divers had an easier job of it, set and maintain a tight visual watch all around, and, oh by the way, fix the damned radar. Gar was superfluous, for the moment. If a destroyer came barreling out of the dark, then he’d have a job.

“Surface! Surface! Man gun stations.”

The Dragon came up, still tail heavy and making more noise than Gar wanted to hear as the ballast tanks were emptied. Keep negative flooded, he thought, in case we need to get back down chop-chop.

“Flood negative and safety,” the exec ordered. Atta boy, Gar thought.

Mooky the cook came in with a tray of fried-egg sandwiches. Gar grabbed one and then told Control he’d be in his cabin. He knew they’d pass that word up to the exec, and he’d recognize it for the vote of confidence that it was. Gar felt the hatch open topside and waited for the blast of fresh air that was forthcoming. Oxygen was good stuff. He went forward.

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.