Silent Sea

CHAPTER 10

Flanagan rapped at the bulkhead outside Brannon’s stateroom and went through the green curtain in response to Brannon’s reply. Brannon turned from the washbasin and the small locker above it where he was packing his shaving gear.

“Chief Warrant Glover came aboard with a couple of his Chiefs, tube experts, a while ago, Captain. They’ll look at the tube tomorrow morning. I guess the two Chiefs will go over the side with shallow-water diving gear. I’m coming back to the tender for the noon meal and they’ll give me a report then.”

“I’d appreciate it if you get in touch with me,” Brannon said, and Flanagan nodded.

“There’s something else, sir. You’re not supposed to know it so when you get told, Mr. Glover would be happy if you look surprised.

“Admiral Carpender over in Brisbane has been relieved and a new Admiral, Kincaid, has taken over. He’s issued orders to modify the Mark Six exploders, just like they do in Pearl. Mr. Glover, I knew him a long time ago when I was Second Class and he was a Chief Torpedoman, he says not to worry about our exploders back aft not being put back the way they were.”

Brannon smiled. “Ah, that’s a load off my mind, Chief. What about the tube door, have they got one?”

“No, sir. They’ve ordered one from New London. What will happen, I guess, is that they’ll scavenge a door from a boat they’re just starting to build. One of the Chiefs said it might be three, four weeks getting here, and when it gets here, not before he said, then they’ll requisition time for us in the dry dock so they can hang it. Provided the tube itself hasn’t been damaged.”

Brannon cleaned out the small locker over the washbowl and packed the shaving gear in his bag. “Looks like we’re going to be here awhile. I don’t like it but there’s nothing we can do about that.

“I’ve told Mr. Gold to muster the crew when the buses get here. That will be just before noon. Mr. Olsen and Mr. Lee and I have to go to a debriefing at headquarters. One of the Staff officers told me that the paymaster will be in the hotel lobby right after the noon meal at the hotel. Keep the crew together until everyone’s been paid. And please get in touch with me after you talk to the two Chiefs tomorrow.”

“Will do, sir,” Flanagan said.

The Operations Officer, his lined face grim above the silver eagles on his collar tabs, turned to face Mike Brannon.

“The point is, Captain Brannon, you damn well know that you disobeyed orders and modified those torpedo exploders. Your patrol report conveniently leaves out the depth setting for the torpedoes. You people must think we’re idiots! You know your orders; you are to set torpedoes to run at a depth of from five to ten feet below the estimated draft of the target so the magnetic exploder will detonate the warhead beneath the target and break its keel. You fired two torpedoes at the first tanker and missed. You fired two at the second tanker and got one hit. That’s damned bad shooting, Mister!”

“We got a hit on the first tanker, sir,” Brannon said. His normally pleasant face was set and grim. “I observed a low-magnitude explosion against the starboard bow of the first target. I so reported in my contact report and my patrol run report. I observed a hit and exploder failure against the hull of the second tanker. The second torpedo fired at that target worked and the target blew up. Three hits out of four torpedoes is not, I submit, bad shooting.”

John Olsen, sitting beside Brannon at the table in the conference room of the headquarters building, could feel the chill in the air. Bob Lee, sitting beside Olsen, stirred restlessly. Olsen turned his head as Brannon took a deep breath.

“With all due respect, Captain Rivers, I am not going to argue about the Mark Six exploders. Too many submarine commanding officers have already done that. I can add nothing to that argument. You must know, again with all due respect to Admiral Christie, to you and the Staff, sir, you must know that most submarine Captains have very little faith in the Mark Six exploder.”

“You are coming dangerously close to insubordination, sir!” Captain Rivers’s harsh face was set, his eyes blazing.

“With all due respect, sir, I am a ship’s captain —”

“At our pleasure,” Captain Rivers snapped.

“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “I submit that I intended no insubordination. If I gave that impression then I apologize for stating my thoughts in a clumsy manner.” Brannon stared past the close-cropped head of the Operations Officer, his eyes looking out the window at the lush greenery of the grounds.

“Sam, let me say a few words,” Admiral Christie said from his place at the head of the table.

“Mike, I helped develop the Mark Six exploder, as you know. I helped develop the Mark Fourteen torpedo. I know that the exploder, the torpedo, work. If the approach to the target is made correctly, if the observations by the Commanding Officer are accurate, if the torpedoes are fired to run at the correct depth, if those torpedoes have been properly cared for — remember that part, Mike, because I am going to come back to that — if all those things are done I know that we have a torpedo and an exploder that are far superior to those of any other submarine navy in the world!

“Now let me say this, and what I am going to say does not apply to you or to the Eelfish.

“I have submarines come into this port and into Brisbane with their torpedoes so poorly maintained that those torpedoes would not have run if fired. I have seen some torpedoes with alcohol and water tanks half full. They wouldn’t have run five hundred yards if they were fired.

“I have seen relief crews rig block and tackle and have to use the tender’s crane, sir, to get torpedoes out of the tubes! The tube rollers were so poorly cared for that the torpedoes were literally frozen in the tubes. If they had been fired they wouldn’t have even gone out of the torpedo tubes!”

“Sir,” Bob Lee blurted out, “sir, every torpedo on the Eelfish is pulled out of the tubes and routined on a regular maintenance schedule. Every torpedo we have will leave the tube and run properly when it is fired!” His eyes widened and then squeezed shut as he suddenly realized what he had done. He, a Reserve Lieutenant, Junior Grade, had interrupted an Admiral, had spoken without being asked, had dared to contradict an Admiral.

Admiral Christie, his square jaw set, stared at Lee. Then the Admiral’s glare softened.

“Well said, youngster. I am delighted to hear that.” He turned to look at Mike Brannon.

“You see my point. I am faced with constant criticism of the Mark Six exploder and the Mark Fourteen torpedo by submarine Captains.

“I am faced, also, with the disturbing fact that some of those who criticize the loudest come into port with torpedoes that I know will not run if fired, not run properly.” He lowered his head and stared at the table top for a long minute. Then he raised his head.

“Perhaps there is justification for criticism on both sides. Whatever there is, it is ended as of today. The Mark Six exploders will be modified in the shop before you get them. And I will relieve at once any Commanding Officer who does not command as he should, who is not sufficiently aggressive against the enemy.

“Now that we have passed that barrier, I want to commend you, Mike, Olsen, for the cleanliness of the Eelfish. “ He nodded his head toward Bob Lee. “And you, sir, for the excellence of the torpedoes you brought back and your conduct during that casualty in the After Room. That’s what we want to hear about next; will you tell us, in full detail, Mike, what went on back there?”

Brannon wet his lips and nodded. He carefully went through each step of the casualty, from the accidental firing of the torpedo in Number Seven tube to the disarming of the exploder and the removal of the fulminate of mercury cartridge.

“You must have had a helluva time keeping a decent trim with the After Room flooding and under depth-charge attack,” Captain Rivers said.

“Mr. Olsen and Lieutenant Jerry Gold, who is my Battle Stations Diving Officer, performed flawlessly. As did Lieutenant Lee, who stayed in the After Room when it was flooding.”

“I’ve looked over your recommendations for medals, Mike,” Admiral Christie said. “I’m awarding Silver Stars to Olsen, Lee, and Gold and to Chief Torpedoman Flanagan and First Class Torpedoman Nelson.” He looked up from the papers in front of him and grinned.

“Now tell me, Mike, what in the hell did you think you were accomplishing by getting under that warhead and catching the exploder?”

“I don’t really know, sir,” Brannon answered. “I guess I thought it was my duty, something I should do to share in the risk of the operation.”

“Oh, hell!” Captain Rivers snorted. “If the damned war head had blown, every warhead in the torpedo room would have exploded in a sympathetic explosion and the whole ship would have been blown to bits!”

“But it didn’t happen,” Christie said with a grin. “I’ve awarded you the Navy Cross, Mike. The medal ceremonies will be held after the R and R period. My yeoman will be in touch with you. Now let’s hear about this U-boat sighting. I looked over your contact and patrol reports, and you didn’t even have a preliminary plot. Hold it until we get a fresh pot of coffee.” He nodded at a junior staff officer, who rose from the table and went to the door. After a mess cook had delivered the coffee and left the room the Admiral nodded at Brannon.

Brannon went through the incident slowly and carefully. Admiral Christie shook his head when Brannon told him of being called to the Conning Tower because the surface of the ocean was covered with swimming snakes.

“Must have been a terrible sight,” Christie said.

“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “Eerie is the word that came to mind at the time.” When he had finished describing the sinking of the U-boat, the Operations Officer spoke.

“The Germans have a few U-boats in the Indian Ocean. They never bother us. Once in a great while we get a report of one of them as far east as Bali. The one you sighted and sank was only the second one to ever go through Lombok and into the Java Sea that we know about.”

“The other one was sunk by a Dutch submarine skipper,” Christie said. “Captain Goosens got the U-168 coming out of Surabaya and sank it and took survivors aboard. Two for two is about as good a batting average as you can get. Hard on the U-boats though.” He stood up, and his staff stood up with him.

“Thank you for coming by, Captain Brannon, gentlemen. Enjoy your R and R.” He looked at Bob Lee, a small smile showing on his lips. “And you, sir, always defend your Captain when you’re right.” He stretched, the strain of the burdens he carried showing in his face.

Seated in the car that took them away from the Bend of the Road, Olsen reached over and shook Brannon’s hand. “Congratulations, Mike! A Navy Cross! By God, you deserve it. And thanks for putting me in for a Silver Star.”

“I put in for a Navy Cross for you, John, and for Bob and Flanagan and Nelson; you for your work as the Executive and Plotting Officer and Bob, Flanagan, and Fred for what they did in the After Room. They told me when I met with Captain Rivers before we all went in there that you would get a Silver Star, that your time was coming. Bob got knocked down to a Silver Star because he’s not Regular Navy, he’s a Reserve. Flanagan and Nelson got reduced to a Silver Star because they’re enlisted men and they didn’t die. Captain Rivers doesn’t believe in giving medals to enlisted men if he can avoid it. I’m sorry my recommendations didn’t carry much weight.”

“I’m grateful, Captain,” Lee said. “Silver Star or Navy Cross, neither one is going to count when I hang out my shingle as an attorney after the war.”

“That’s right, you’re a lawyer, aren’t you?” Olsen asked.

“Yes, sir,” Lee said. “I passed my bar exam for California, and then the Navy reached out and said the proper place for a young lawyer was on a submarine. I’m sort of glad they did. I like the Eelfish, I like you people.”

“It must have cost Admiral Christie an awful lot to admit his pet exploder isn’t working the way he thought it would work,” Brannon said slowly. “I admire that man. It took an awful lot of backbone to face up to that. I don’t think I could have done it.”

“He’s a pretty good dude, for an Admiral,” Olsen said. “He could have jumped all over rambunctious Bob when he spoke up in defense of our torpedoes.”

“I could have bitten my tongue off,” Lee said.

“You got away with it because Christie is a decent man,” Mike Brannon said. “You’ve used up all your luck in that department. One other thing, John, and you can tell the Chief Petty Officers when you see them: We’re going to have to do our own refit this time. The relief crews are overworked at this particular time, several boats are in or are coming in, and because we’re going to have to wait for that outer door they decided our people would do their own overhaul.”

“Going to be some unhappy sailors,” Olsen said. “Not that we’ve got much to do, other than painting the ship inside and out. That’s a big job.”

“It won’t hurt them,” Brannon said.

Flanagan found Chiefs Nuthall and Wilson in the CPO Quarters on the tender. Both men were dressing in front of their lockers.

“We just went over the side and looked at your tube,” Wilson said. “The water in this harbor is filthy, you know that?”

“Was the door gone?” Flanagan asked. “How did the tube look?”

“Door’s gone clean as a whistle,” Nuthall said. “We couldn’t have taken it off any cleaner if we had tools. We scraped the paint off all around the hinges and looked for hairline cracks with a light, but we couldn’t see anything wrong. We’ll do a better job of that once we get you in dry dock.”

“Supposing you find a few cracks?” Flanagan said with a grin. “That mean we have to go back to the States?”

“ ‘Fraid not,” Wilson said. “What we’d do then is to throw some welds on every crack we could find, hang the door, tack weld it shut, and you’d go to sea with one less torpedo tube. You ready for chow?”

“What are you going to do with the guy who fired that fish in the tube?” Nuthall said as the three men sat down at a table covered with snowy linen and laid with china that was decorated with the name of the submarine tender.

“You gonna transfer him and give him to us, in the relief crew?”

“I don’t think so,” Flanagan said. “He’s a good man. Young, but he’s good. Fred Nelson, the guy who has the After Room, wants to keep him. The Old Man is just letting him stew in his own juice for a while. I don’t think he’ll do anything unless the Staff gets stiff-necked about it.” He unfolded a white napkin and laid it in his lap.

“You people live pretty good,” he said as he eyed the menu the messcook brought.

“They have to treat us good,” Wilson said, a grin splitting his cherubic features. “We’re the folk who are winning the war, didn’t you know that?”

“I’m glad someone’s winning the damned thing,” Flanagan said. He looked up at the messcook, who was standing, order pad in hand.

“I’ll have a steak, rare, and two fried eggs with the yolks runny, if that isn’t too much trouble.”

Wilson and Nuthall placed the same order. The messcook left and came back with three salads and a tray of dressings.

“You don’t live too bad on the boats,” Nuthall said. “From the stores I see going aboard before a patrol run you don’t lack for much.”

“Food’s good,” Flanagan said as he spooned dressing over his salad. “But about after ten days the milk is all gone and the eggs are used up and the spuds get soggy and go rotten. Powdered eggs for breakfast aren’t my idea of the real thing, let me tell you.”

“I always get a kick out of watching you people go for the oranges and apples when you get in,” Wilson said.

“I never ate salads before the war,” Flanagan replied. “Now I do. The Pharmacist’s Mate aboard Eelfish told me that I got plenty of sunshine in peacetime. At sea we never see daylight except the first few days out and the last few days coming in. Now I find myself wanting to eat salad, lettuce, tomatoes, stuff like that.” He pushed his empty salad plate to one side as the messcook came back pushing a cart on wheels and put a steak with two fried eggs on top of it in front of each man.

“I didn’t think you’d make it here for chow,” Wilson said slyly. “This Aussie beer is mighty powerful, and the ladies are more so. The combination of the two could make a man forget all about a torpedo tube.”

“I took it easy,” Flanagan said. He speared a piece of steak, put it in his mouth, and chewed it slowly. “Ate dinner at the hotel, had a couple of beers in the bar, and then I watched the Shore Patrol bring my crew back. Most of them had to be carried in by the Shore Patrol, but there weren’t any charges. Kind of unusual.”

“They’ve got orders to treat you war heroes with velvet gloves,” Nuthall said. “If the drunk is off a boat in from a war patrol they’ll treat him nice and gentle and take him back to his hotel. If he’s a tender man, doing duty on this ship or the base, they’ll bend a nightstick over his head and throw him in the brig. War is hell, they tell me.”

Flanagan looked with approval at a piece of apple pie with a mound of ice cream melting beside it.

“Mighty fine meal, and I thank you. If you come ashore I’d like to repay you and throw in some beer as well. Now, you got any idea when that outer door will be here? I got to give the word to the Old Man.”

“Nothing definite,” Wilson said, lighting a cigaret. “We got an acknowledgment this morning that they had the order in New London, and for once the yeoman must not have fucked up because they didn’t ask for the requisition to be resubmitted, which is something they do almost all the time when we ask for something.”

“What that means,” Nuthall said, “is that they will now begin trying to find a door that belongs to some boat that’s on the building ways. Once that’s done they got to cut orders to get it shipped. Then they got to cut a set of orders to ship it to the West Coast. Once it gets there someone there has got to cut orders to get it flown out to Pearl Harbor.

“When it reaches there they got to cut orders to send it here by air — if some Supply Officer who’s queer for having an outer door doesn’t grab it and hide it — and when it gets here they got to write up a letter to tell us it’s here. Then we have to requisition the door.

“Once they acknowledge the requisition we have to requisition a small lifting crane and a truck and some men and go and get the thing. Then we can hang it for you.”

“Good God!” Flanagan said.

“You asked me, I told you,” the submarine tender Chief said. “You can figure about a month to get it, nothing under three weeks. Then, if we’re lucky, we’ll get you into dry dock, hang the door, and out again in two, three weeks. We can’t ask for dry-dock space until we get the door, and if we’re unlucky the dry dock will be tied up. But we might be lucky. You never know.”

“It ain’t anything to bitch about,” Wilson said. “The beer is good and the women, well, there just isn’t any Aussie men around who aren’t all shot to hell or old. They’re all fighting somewhere. If you aren’t married or even if you are, I’ve got a broad ashore who’s got a cousin who’s better lookin’ than my broad and willing.”

“I’m not married,” Flanagan said. “I tried it once. All she ever did was bitch, bitch, bitch. Got rid of her years ago. Never again.”

“I’ll drop by your hotel about sixteen thirty, maybe a little before,” Wilson said. “I’ll take you home and tell the broad I live with to call her cousin.”