Silent Sea

CHAPTER 6

Admiral Christie was in a testy mood. Mike Brannon got word through the grapevine before he went to a conference about his new patrol area. The gossip had it that General MacArthur’s politicking had undercut Christie in some manner. Brannon was warned to be on his best behavior, to say as little as possible.

“Those tankers that come out of Balikpapan.” Admiral Christie walked over to a chart standing on an easel near the conference table. He pointed at the port city of Balikpapan on the east coast of Borneo. “Those tankers are supplying Admiral Koga’s fleet based at Truk. Those tankers have got to be stopped. That’s our first priority.”

Mike Brannon shifted in his chair and stared at the chart. It had been just north of Balikpapan that Mako had gone roaring in on three loaded tankers and four destroyers in a night surface attack earlier in the war. Brannon remembered the awful moment of fear he had felt as he watched the bubbling trail of the second torpedo he fired from Mako’s stern tubes at a destroyer that was coming full tilt at the Mako’s stern. Those brief seconds that had seemed like hours after the wake of the torpedo led into the side of the destroyer’s bow and then the tremendous explosion as the torpedo sheared off the entire bow of the attacking destroyer.

“Are you paying attention, Brannon?” Christie’s voice was sharp, petulant.

“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “I was Exec under Captain Hinman in Mako’s third patrol off Balikpapan.”

“I know that,” the Admiral said. He pointed at the chart again. “The oil coming out of those fields there is said to be so pure that they don’t have to refine it before using it. They just run it through a filter. The Australians have ship watchers in the hills along the coast of Borneo, the east coast. Those ship watchers report that the tankers leave Balikpapan, go north of Celebes and then toward the Pacific. We have other intelligence reports that the tankers are going to Truk, to supply Koga’s fleet.” He paused and looked at his assembled staff and Mike Brannon.

“If Koga ever decides to move that fleet out of Truk, we haven’t got anything in the area strong enough to stop him. The only thing we can figure that’s held him in port so far is that he’s short of oil for his fleet. But if he gets enough oil, if he moves out to sea, he can cut us to ribbons. And once he’s done that, well, there wouldn’t be any General MacArthur returning to the Philippines.

“It boils down to stopping the tankers. That’s our first priority. They’ll be escorted, but ignore the escorts. Get the tankers.”

“Tankers are hard to sink, as you know.” Sam Rivers, the Operations Officer, a squat, heavyset four-stripe Captain spoke up. “We’ve had reports from submarine Captains who tell us of hitting a tanker with as many as six torpedoes, hitting them in the sides of the hull. Those tankers are so compartmented that they can suck up a half-dozen torpedo hits at or below their waterlines.

“What you have to do —” the Operations Officer paused a moment, looking hard at Brannon. “What you have to do is to believe in the Mark Six exploder. If you fire one, no more than two torpedoes set to run beneath the tanker, if you make your approach properly, then you’ll have a kill. No tanker, no matter how well compartmented, can live with its keel, its back broken.”

“The tankers burn,” Brannon said. “The two we hit off Balikpapan in Mako burned like blast furnaces. Maybe that unrefined oil has something in it that makes it burn easily.”

“That’s been thought of,” Rivers said. “We’ve been trying to find a Dutch engineer who worked at the oil fields in Borneo who might know the chemical makeup of that oil, but we haven’t found him yet. Your safest bet is to rely on the Mark Six exploder. I worked with Admiral Christie developing that exploder and we know it works.” Brannon nodded, his face carefully expressionless.

“We’re putting Eelfish just north of Celebes,” the Admiral said. “You should have good targets, good hunting. You can expect the tankers to be well guarded. Ignore the escorts, go after the tankers.” He rose from the chair where he had been sitting while his Operations Officer was talking.

“I know that once you’ve hit and sunk destroyers you get a sort of fever, you want to keep going after them. Take an aspirin, do something, don’t let that fever overcome your priority, the tankers. Just bear in mind that if Koga gets enough oil at Truk he’s going to go out to sea, and if he does General MacArthur’s invasion route to the Philippines will be vulnerable.”

Mike Brannon leaned against the pom-pom gun mount on the cigaret deck, aft of the bridge, looking at the long, straight fluorescent wake the Eelfish trailed behind her as the ship walked the long sea miles up through the Indian Ocean on a course for Lombok Strait. In another ten or eleven days Eelfish would be on station, north of the northernmost tip of the oddly shaped island called Celebes. As he so often did when it was quiet on the bridge he let his thoughts run back to the night when the Mako had gone down, hearing again in the innermost parts of his mind the slow, steady pulsing of the Mako’s sonar beam spelling out the words of the Twenty-third Psalm.

The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that John Olsen’s shrewd conjecture that Mako had been ambushed was correct. Mako, without surface radar, had probably bored in to attack what the lookouts had been able to see, a line of small freighters proceeding cautiously down the east coast of the island of Samar. What the lookouts had not seen, what a surface radar would have picked up, was the presence of two enemy destroyers lurking closer to the coast, their silhouettes lost against the island’s bulk. Once committed to the surface attack, Mako had been trapped by the destroyers, riddled with gunfire, and then fatally damaged before the ship could dive deeply enough to evade the destroyer attacks.

It was strange, Brannon thought, how the odds of success veered so sharply in the problems of attacking with a submarine or being attacked while in a submarine. An attacking submarine, if it could make its approach undetected, carried the odds in its favor. If the Captain made all his observations correctly, if the torpedoes ran hot, straight, and normal, if the exploders worked properly, then the target could be hit and destroyed.

The chance of escape from the retaliatory attacks by the enemy’s destroyers were not good. If the destroyer Captains were experienced; if they were dogged and patient; if the water in which the attack was made was not deep enough to give the submarine ample room to maneuver, to go very deep; if there were no layers of heavier saltwater under which the submarine could hide the odds were with the destroyers.… He turned as he heard Lieutenant Bob Lee going through the ritual of taking over the OOD watch at midnight. The Quartermaster going off watch came back to the cigaret deck.

“Mr. Lee brought you a cup of coffee,” he said.

“Thank you,” Brannon said. “Nice night.”

“Yes, sir,” the Quartermaster said. “Hope it’s raining when we get to Lombok Strait. That place scares me.”

“Me, too,” Brannon said. “Pray for rain or at least an overcast.

Eelfish, running at full speed, traversed the dangerous strait between the islands of Bali and Lombok and raced out into the Java Sea, heading for Makassar Strait. Six days later Eelfish submerged an hour before dawn off the northernmost tip of Celebes Island.

Lieutenant Michaels, who wore several hats as the ship’s Commissary, Radio, Radar, and Sonar Officer, came into the Wardroom an hour after Eelfish dove. He handed Mike Brannon a sheet of paper covered with groups of numbers.

“This message came in before we dove,” he said. “I broke it down, but all I get is another code, sir.”

“Okay, Jim,” Brannon said. He nodded at John Olsen, who was sitting at the table with his charts in front of him. “Let’s go into my stateroom, John, and see what we’ve got.”

An hour later Brannon looked at the words he had decoded from the message Michaels had given him. He handed the paper to Olsen, who whistled in surprise. Brannon reached for the chart Olsen had brought in with him. He laid the chart on his bunk, and with a pair of parallel rulers he covered the compass rose on the chart, then moved the rulers to Eelfish’s position and drew a light pencil line on the chart.

“They’re coming right down our street,” he said to his Executive Officer. “Where are the dividers?” He took the dividers, pricked off the distance along the course line, and leaned back.

“I make it they’ll be here about midnight tonight, maybe a little after midnight.”

“If the people in Pearl Harbor who got this information know what they’re doing,” Olsen said slowly. “Seems too good to be true, three tankers and only three destroyers? Big tankers?’

“They know their business in Pearl,” Mike Brannon said. “I didn’t tell you this before, but Admiral Christie told me that those people in Pearl who work with the Japanese codes have gotten so good that last April they broke a coded message that said Fleet Admiral Yamamoto and his staff were going to fly out of Rabaul to visit bases in the Solomons on an inspection tour. The code breakers had his itinerary, the numbers and types of planes in his party, down pat.

“A big bunch of long-range P-38s flew out of Guadalcanal and ambushed Yamamoto’s planes and shot every damned one of them down. The Japanese lost the best Admiral they had and his Chief of Staff and a lot of other high-ranking officers.”

“I never heard about that,” Olsen said.

“Damned few people have,” Brannon said. “From what the Admiral told me they had a hell of an argument in Pearl about using the information they had gotten from the codes. The people who broke the codes were afraid that if they went after Yamamoto the Japanese would know that their codes were broken and the code breakers would have to start all over if the Japanese changed their codes. But Admiral Nimitz and Admiral King in Washington figured that Yamamoto was so valuable to the Japanese war effort that they gave the order to go ahead with the ambush.”

“Japs didn’t realize their codes had been broken?”

“Two things argued against it,” Brannon said. “Or that’s what I’ve been told. First of all, there were some heavy storms, real bad ones, along Yamamoto’s route. One of the planes sent a message about the storms. Apparently none of Yamamoto’s planes reported an attack by the P-38s. And we have never claimed any credit for shooting down the Admiral and his group. But keep that to yourself, all of it. I don’t think the other Wardroom people need to know about it.”

Eelfish surfaced a half-hour after full dark, the water streaming from her superstructure, the four big diesel engines coughing into life and then settling down to a muted roar as three of the engines went on the battery charge.

In the Forward Torpedo Room Steve Petreshock checked and rechecked the torpedo tubes, his anxious eyes searching for evidence of any small fault that would hamper a successful firing. Jim Rice watched him.

“What I’d like to know,” Rice said, “is how those people in Fremantle know we’re supposed to see a convoy of three big oil tankers and some destroyers out here? Hell, we ran all the way up here and never saw one damned ship, not even a fishing boat.”

“I don’t know how they know,” Petreshock said. “Get some oil and take care of that gyro spindle on number two tube, will you? Son of a bitch feels a little sticky to me, and I don’t want a fucking spindle hanging up.”

“Does seem funny, though,” Rice said as he went between the tubes with an oilcan. “If those tankers do come along it will be the first damned thing that’s happened the way it was supposed to happen since I been in this fuckin’ submarine navy.” He squirted some oil on the gyro spindle shaft and worked the spindle back and forth gently.

“So far, seems to me, the Jap is outfumbling us. If he was half as smart as the Japs is supposed to be, he’d have won this damned war by now.” Paul Blake leaned out of his bunk above the reload torpedoes on the port side of the room.

“If the Japs had good sense they would have invaded Pearl Harbor. If they had they’d have won the war right then.”

Lieutenant Arbuckle came out of the Officers’ Head, buckling his belt.

“If the Japanese ever bombed the Panama Canal, they’ve got submarines that can carry small planes, or if they used saboteurs to blow up the Canal locks we’d be in a nasty pickle. I share the wisdom of the bearded savant, Mr. James Rice, Esquire: The Jap is just outfumbling us.” He ducked his head and lifted his leg to go through the watertight door opening to the Wardroom, to Officers’ Country.

Brannon heard the sharp word “Contact!” come up the bridge hatch, and he turned and went forward to the bridge space.

“Contact, Bridge.” The voice of the Chief of the Watch was tinny over the bridge speaker. “Radar contact bearing zero zero five, repeat zero zero five. Range is one four zero zero zero repeat fourteen thousand yards. Several pips on the radar, Bridge.”

“Sound General Quarters!” Brannon snapped. The muted clanging of the alarm floated up through the bridge hatch and Brannon could hear the steady thud of feet down below as the crew raced to Battle Stations. He listened to the reports coming over the bridge speaker.

“All Battle Stations manned, Bridge. All torpedo tube outer doors closed. Repeat closed. Depth set on all torpedoes is four feet. Repeat four feet. Plotting party standing by in the Control Room.”

“Very well,” Brannon said into the bridge transmitter. He turned to Lieutenant Lee.

“Go below, Bob and start the plot. I’ll take the bridge. I want intermittent use of the radar. I don’t want them to pick up the radar if I can help it. Tell John Olsen I want him up here for a minute.”

Olsen climbed the ladder to the bridge and stood beside Brannon.

“They’re a good quarter-hour behind schedule, Captain.”

“We’ll have to speak to them about that,” Brannon said. “How far north of Celebes are we?”

“Fifteen miles north of Celebes, sir. We’re about dead center between Celebes and that little island of Biaro. We should have a three-quarter moon in about an hour.” Both men looked upward as the radar antenna moved in a small arc.

“Targets bear zero zero two, Bridge. Range is closing. Range is now one three zero zero zero. Repeat thirteen thousand yards. We’d like to double-check range with another radar observation in three minutes.”

“Target speed?” Brannon asked.

“We make that fifteen knots, Bridge, but we’d like to double-check that, too.”

“Very well,” Brannon said. He stood, chewing his lower lip as he worked out the problem in his head. At 13,000 yards the targets were almost seven and a half miles away. At fifteen knots the targets would cover a mile in just under two minutes. That meant the targets would be abreast of Eelfish in about fifteen minutes. He turned to Olsen.

“I’m going to attack submerged. We have to assume they have radar. We’re too far away from Celebes to use the island as a background. Right now we’re too small a target to be picked up, but they’ll sure as hell find us if we stay on the surface. Go below and take over the plot. Tell Mr. Gold that when I dive I want to run at forty feet so I can use the radar as long as I can.” Olsen nodded and dropped down the hatch. His voice came over the bridge speaker a few minutes later.

“Recommend we stay on this course, Captain, at least until we have a better picture of the targets. Mr. Gold has the word on depth. Plot is running.”

“Very well,” Brannon answered. He looked upward at the lookouts.

“Clear the bridge!” he shouted and stood to one side as the three lookouts thudded down into the small bridge space and then dropped through the hatch. Brannon punched the diving alarm twice with his fist and slid down the ladder, pulling the hatch cover closed behind him. Brosmer spun the hatch wheel closed, dogging the hatch down tight.

“Forty feet,” Brannon called down to the Control Room.

“Forty feet, aye,” Jerry Gold answered. He watched as the bow and stern planesmen eased the Eelfish down to forty feet and leveled the ship off.

“Forty feet, zero bubble, sir,” Gold called up the hatch, his voice betraying his pride. His last-minute shifting of water from the variable ballast tanks to compensate for the fuel consumed during the four and a half hours Eelfish had been on the surface and for the flour the baker and the messcooks had lugged from the Forward Torpedo Room to the Crew’s Mess had resulted in a perfect diving trim.

“Very well,” Brannon said. “Mr. Michaels, please come to the Conning Tower ladder.”

Michaels climbed a few rungs and leaned his back against the rim of the open hatch. Brannon looked down at him.

“I’m going to depend on your radar for as long as I dare stay at this depth,” he said. “I want quick readings, on and off. I’ll give you bearings from the periscope so you don’t have to waste time searching for the targets.” Michaels acknowledged the order and went back down the ladder. Brannon turned to Paul Blake on the sonar.

“Let me know if you hear anything at all out there.”

“I’m just beginning to get some faint propeller noises, sir,” Blake said. “Too faint to tell anything.”

Brannon nodded and relaxed, leaning against the chart desk. Lieutenant Perry Arbuckle, wearing one of his telephone ear muffs cocked on his temple, grinned at Brannon.

“Life in the Navy is just one long waiting in line,” he said. “You wait in line to eat, you wait in line to get paid, you wait in line to go ashore, and now we wait to shoot.”

Brannon grinned at the irreverent Reserve Officer. “I’m glad we’re not in that line of ships coming toward us,” he said. “Might get noisy.” He turned as Blake spoke.

“I’ve got steady propeller noises bearing zero zero two, sir. Solid heavy propeller beat.”

“Radar,” Brannon called down the hatch. “Sound has a bearing at zero zero two. Give me a picture.” He waited, hearing the muffled conversation between Michaels and Rafferty down below.

“We have six targets on the radar scope, sir,” Michaels called out. “Range to the first target, a big pip, sir, is one one zero zero zero. Repeat eleven thousand yards. We have three big pips, one behind the other. We have one smaller pip out to port and ahead of the three big pips. We have two more small pips well back, well astern on the starboard side of the three big pips, sir.”

“Very well,” Brannon said. “Secure the radar. Plot, how does it look from here?”

“We can stay on course for another four minutes, sir,” Olsen said. “That will bring the targets to within fifty-five hundred yards, sir. At that point we can come right to course zero zero two and let them come right across our bow.”

“Very well,” Brannon said. He stood quietly in the Conning Tower, glancing at his wrist watch from time to time as he sorted out the factors of the problem in his head, plotting the intricate approach to the moment of the final truth that faces every submarine commanding officer in war; when to give the orders that would send torpedoes shooting out toward the enemy, what the guarding escort vessels might do in retaliation.

“I have several sets of propeller noises, sir,” Blake said. “Slow and fast screws. Pretty broad spread of sound, sir, but I’d say the first heavy screws bear zero one zero, sir.”

“Very well,” Brannon said. He looked at his watch.

“Radar bearing,” he said.

“Targets bear zero one three, sir. Range is five three zero zero. Repeat fifty-three hundred yards. We have the same formation, sir. Three big pips in a line, one ship out ahead to the port side of the convoy. Two ships well aft to the starboard side of the convoy. Target course is zero eight eight. Target speed is one five, fifteen knots, sir.” Olsen’s voice followed hard on the heels of Michaels’s report.

“Recommend we come right now to course zero zero two, Captain.”

“Execute the course change,” Brannon said. He looked at Arbuckle, who had cranked the data Michaels had given into the TDC.

“Give me the torpedo track distance to the targets,” Brannon said.

There was a short silence from below, and then Olsen said, “First target will be in position in six minutes, sir. Torpedo track will be two thousand yards.”

“Too far!” Brannon snapped. “Give me a speed that will shorten that down to a thousand yards. Give me one more radar bearing.”

“First target in line bears three four three, sir. Target course is zero eight eight. Target speed is one five knots. Repeat, fifteen knots. Range is six zero zero zero yards. Repeat six thousand yards.

“Recommend we come right to course zero two zero, sir,” Olsen called out. “Recommend we make turns for five knots, sir.

“Secure the radar. Execute speed and course change. Sixty feet.” Brannon snapped out the orders, bracing himself as the deck slanted down sharply.

“Sixty feet, sir,” Gold called out. Brannon nodded at Brosmer to raise the periscope. He put his eye to the big rubber eyepiece that shielded the periscope lens. He saw the ships ahead of him and to his port side, three big oil tankers, one behind the other. Out ahead of them a destroyer was moving away from Eelfish. He swiveled the periscope to the left. One destroyer, far back along the starboard side of the convoy was moving toward him. He turned the periscope, searching for the other destroyer.

“Damn it,” he said. “I’ve got two destroyers up here. Can’t see the third one.”

“He might have gone around the stern of the convoy, sir,” Michaels said. “He did that once before and then came back, sir.”

Brannon stared through the periscope. The ships were lit clearly by the moon, moving in a line like ponderous elephants. Below him he could hear the small sounds of the Control Room, the muttered commands of Jerry Gold to the men on the diving planes, the shuffle of paper as the Plotting Party penciled in the last bearings of the targets.

“Let’s start the dance,” Brannon said. “Open all torpedo tube outer doors. Stand by for shooting bearings.” Brosmer, the Quartermaster, moved over and stood on the far side of the periscope, his head turned upward, ready to give the bearings to Arbuckle on the TDC. Brannon centered the cross hairs in the periscope lens on the first tanker.

“Bearing on the first tanker in line… Mark!”

“Three four two,” Brosmer said.

“Range…” Brannon cranked the range knob with his right hand. “Range is two thousand yards.” He swung the periscope around to his right. “The lead destroyer is way over on the other side.” He focused the periscope on the lead tanker. “Come on, you big, fat cow! Come on, baby!” He swung the periscope to the left. “Destroyer on the convoy’s starboard beam is well back. Range to that destroyer is… three five zero zero yards. Thirty-five hundred… Plot. What’s the time factor to close to one thousand yards?”

“One minute, sir.”

“We’ve got a constant shooting solution, sir.” Arbuckle’s voice was steady, calm.

Brannon watched the lead oil tanker loom larger and larger in the attack periscope’s lens. Farther back — he estimated about 750 yards — the second tanker was following in the first tanker’s wake

“Twenty seconds, sir,” Arbuckle said. “Shooting problem is go, sir.”

“I’m going to shoot two at the first tanker and then we’ll set up and try for two more at the second and two at the third… stand by…”

“Fire one!” Brannon felt the jolt in his legs and feet as the first torpedo hurtled out of its tube. He counted down from six to one.

“Fire two!” Brannon swung the periscope to his left. “Number one and two torpedoes running hot, straight and normal, sir,” Blake reported from his sonar station.

“Mark!” Brannon snapped.

“Three four six,” Brosmer said.

“Range to the second target is eleven hundred yards.” Brannon’s voice was quiet.

“We’ve got a solution to shoot,” Arbuckle said. A muffled boom shook the Eelfish.

“That was a hit!” Olsen said from the Control Room. “It timed out for a hit, sir.”

“Fire three!” Brannon barked. He counted down.

“Fire four!”

“Both torpedoes running hot, straight and normal, sir,” Blake reported, his young voice loud in the Conning Tower. Brannon swung the periscope to the right and saw the first tanker listing to starboard but still underway. He swung the periscope back to the left and saw a sudden gout of spray shoot up near the bow of the second tanker. Then he saw a huge orange flame back near the tanker’s stern that swelled and burst into a tremendous explosion.

“Hit!” he yelled. “Hit on the second target!”

“I’ve got fast screws bearing two six zero, sir!” Blake said suddenly. Brannon swiveled the periscope around and saw the destroyer that had been farther back on the convoy’s starboard beam racing toward him. He swung the periscope to the right. The first target, still listing, was underway but with no sign of smoke or fire. Brannon saw the white bow wave of a destroyer cutting across the listing tanker’s bow.

“Right full rudder,” he snapped. He swung the periscope back and forth, looking first at one destroyer and then the other.

“Down periscope!” he snapped. “Take me down! Four hundred feet! Fast, damn it, fast!” He grabbed at the bridge ladder for support as the deck tilted sharply beneath his feet as Eelfish burrowed deeper into the sea.

“Fast screws bearing two six one. More fast screws bearing three five four,” Blake reported. He was shifting on his stool, gathering his legs beneath him, his face dripping perspiration as he tried to sort out the welter of sounds in his mufflike earphones.

“Passing two hundred fifty feet, down angle fifteen degrees,” Jerry Gold said.

“Very well,” Brannon replied. “Rig for silent running. Rig for depth charge.”

The destroyer screws could be heard now, drumming through the submarine’s hull in a high, thin sound that seemed to set everything in the submarine vibrating. The sound got louder and then one ship passed almost directly overhead, the Eelfish shaking in the volume of sound.

“Rudder amidships,” Brannon ordered. He looked up as a high, sharp, cracking sound penetrated the Eelfish, the sound of a depth-charge exploder mechanism going off, and then the depth-charge explosion shook Eelfish savagely. Another sharp crack and then two more pierced through the tremendous noise of the first depth charge, and the world of the Eelfish crew became a nightmare of explosions that twisted and racked the submarine’s thin hull, twisted the ship in the vortex of underwater explosions, knocking loose everything that wasn’t screwed or bolted down. Cork insulation rained from the overhead and light bulbs and gauge glasses shattered. Shards of glass were scattered over everything.

“More fast screws, sir, I can’t tell you a bearing, too much noise!” Blake’s face, powdered with flecks of pale green paint from the cork insulation, was agonized as he tried to get a bearing on the destroyer above. He winced as the sharp crack of a depth-charge exploder mechanism sounded in his earphones, and then the Eelfish was caught again in a roaring, smashing, series of depth-charge explosions.

“Left full rudder, five hundred feet,” Brannon said. He looked upward as the drumming sound of a destroyer’s propellers filled the interior of the Conning Tower with sound. Eelfish staggered through the explosions of the sinking depth charges that twisted the long, slim length of the ship, straining the rivets and welds that bonded the thin skin of the ship to its frames, throwing men off their feet:

“Damage reports,” Brannon ordered. Olsen spoke quietly into the sound-powered telephone set that hung around his neck. He turned his face upward to the Conning Tower hatch.

“Some small leaks, sir. Nothing serious. Most of the lights are broken, using battle lanterns in all compartments. Some bruises, one bloody nose. No broken bones, sir.”

“Very well,” Brannon said. He dropped through the hatch to the Control Room and looked at the plot.

“Didn’t get a chance to shoot at the third tanker,” he said calmly. “Didn’t dare take long enough to shoot at the two destroyers. They were coming at us from two different angles.” He looked up as Blake’s voice came down the hatch.

“Two sets of twin screws aft, sir, one bearing one seven five, one bearing one six zero, sir. Both coming this way.” In the Control Room Brannon could hear the sound of the screws building to a thunder. He looked at his wrist watch.

“Right full rudder, all ahead two thirds,” he said.

The destroyers attacked as a team, depth charges rolling from their squat sterns, their Y-guns hurling the clumsy charges far out to each side. The Eelfish staggered under the attack.

“They might not stick around too long,” Olsen said in a low voice. “You blasted that second tanker. You hit the first one, I timed that one for a hit. The tankers are more important than we are to them. They might leave in a while.”

Brannon nodded and reached for a towel that Pete Mahaffey had hung from the fathometer. He mopped his dripping face and looked at the thermometer hanging near him. It read just over 105 degrees. The humidity reading on the dial just below it stood at 98 percent. He handed the towel to Olsen, who rubbed it over his face and neck.

“Here they come again!” Blake called down. “First ship bears three four five. Second ship bears three five eight, sir. Both coming fast!”

Once again the thunder of the destroyers’ screws filled the Eelfish hull. Brannon looked briefly at the plot. “Right full rudder,” he said. The helmsman strained at the big brass wheel, pulling it around by brute force.

“He’s dropped!” Blake’s voice had a sudden maturity. Brannon braced himself at the gyro table, his knees bent to take the shock of the explosions. He heard the helmsman muttering to the brass wheel.

“Take it easy, old girl,” the helmsman said. “This ain’t nothing to what you can take.’’ He grabbed at the wheel as the Eelfish reeled to port and then to starboard as the depth charges exploded. John Olsen pressed the talk button on his phone and spoke softly. He listened and then turned to Brannon.

“No serious damage, sir.”

“Very well,” Brannon said. “Let’s hope you’re right, John. Maybe they’ll put more weight on protecting the tankers we didn’t get than keeping on us. They aren’t too good. They haven’t used a sonar on us once. They’ve been attacking using passive listening and by guesswork.”

“Damned good guesswork,” Olsen said. The two men looked upward as Paul Blake reported.

“One set of screws, dead slow, bearing one six zero, sir. Other set of screws has speeded up and is going away from us bearing one nine five. That set of screws is going away, sir!

Brannon reached for the towel and mopped his streaming face. “You’re guessing pretty good, John. One of the dogs has gone back to his sheep. All we have to do is be cute and let the other one get discouraged and maybe he’ll leave. Pass the word, dead silence about the decks. I don’t want to hear anyone even cough. Make turns for dead slow.”

An hour crept by with whispered reports from Blake that the enemy destroyer was still above but far out to one side. Eelfish crept away from the destroyer, running as silently as possible. Olsen looked at the clock on the bulkhead above the helm. The glass face of the clock had been shattered, but its black hands continued to move.

“Another hour should take us in the clear,” he whispered to Brannon. “He’s got to get discouraged and go back to his other ships.”

The eerie silence in the Eelfish was suddenly shattered by a whining scream from the after end of the ship. Brannon whirled around.

“Belay that damned noise!”

The high, whining sound kept rising in pitch. Blake’s voice came down the hatch.

“Destroyer is picking up speed, sir. He bears two seven five! He’s speeding up.”

“Damn it, shut down that noise!” Brannon snapped. Olsen looked up from his telephone, his face stricken.

“After Torpedo Room reports that the torpedo in Number Seven tube was fired accidentally with the outer door closed! The torpedo is running hot inside the tube!”

“Here he comes!” Blake wailed from the Conning Tower.