The Iceman_A Novel Page 10

  “The Aussies have organized a bunch of civilians—plantation owners who lived in the Solomons before the war—who are operating clandestine radio stations in the islands. They report when Jap fleet units come down the Straits of New Georgia in daylight, headed for Guadalcanal. This gives our Marines warning and allows our naval surface units to get ready. So here’s the pattern: the Japs show up at midnight and raise hell, but then have to get out of range of the Marine air at Henderson before daylight. The cruiser Firefish got was a damaged straggler from one of the night fights around Savo Island.

  “It’s that back and forth pattern that I think has caught Halsey’s attention. They’re calling the nightly Jap striking formation The Tokyo Express. They’re calling the Straits of New Georgia The Slot. It’s the most direct deep-water route to Guadalcanal from Rabaul, six hundred miles away. But we don’t want to be operating too close to Guadalcanal because there are too many of our own trigger-happy forces there.”

  Everyone nodded. Malachi was probably the only skipper there who had not been attacked by friendly air or ships, who saw any submarine as a threat.

  One of the other skippers raised his hand. “We work for MacArthur, as I understand it. They’ve divvied up the Pacific into two theaters of operation, the central Pacific run by Nimitz, the western Pacific by MacArthur. Does Halsey work for MacArthur, too?”

  “No, he doesn’t. He works for Nimitz. But he’s been ordered to ‘cooperate’ with MacArthur wherever possible, and vice versa. So it’s possible some of our boats could end up in the Guadalcanal operation.”

  “I think there’s a bigger problem,” Burlington said. “Right now ComSubPac has all the central Pacific boats concentrating on Jap bases or Jap-controlled harbors. That gives all the advantages to the Japs. We ought to be out on their sea lines of communication, where it’s just us against some escorts. Make your presence known around a Jap naval base and they can send out aircraft, patrol boats, fishing boats, destroyers, even armed marus.”

  “I’m aware of your thoughts on this matter,” the admiral said frostily. “Unfortunately, none of the people running the show seem to agree. Now, moving on—torpedoes.”

  Every one of the skippers’ faces settled into an impassive mask.

  “I needn’t remind you that there is a critical shortage of torpedoes,” the admiral said. “Which is why I have basically rationed how many each boat can take out on patrol. BuOrd promises that more are coming, but they can’t—or won’t—say when. I guess what I’m telling you is this: don’t just ‘take a shot.’ Shoot only when you have a solid solution and you’re well within range. Otherwise, wait for another chance.”

  He looked around the table. “One of the ways you can maximize the effectiveness of your torpedo load is to employ the magnetic exploder. Three Mark fourteens hitting the side of a heavy cruiser will inflict great damage, but one Mark fourteen magnetic running under its keel will cripple it every time.”

  “If it explodes,” Burlington offered. “Most of them don’t.”

  The other skippers held their breath. Malachi, watching the admiral’s face redden, decided to keep his trap shut and see where this was going.

  “Commander Stormes: you’ve just turned in a spectacular patrol. I haven’t had a chance to read your CO’s log. How did you employ your torpedoes?”

  If he followed Reed Burlington’s advice, this is where he would say: I followed PacFleet doctrine, sir. But that would be a bold-faced lie. He saw Burlington looking at him, a definite warning in his eyes. Sorry, Reed, Malachi thought, I’m just not as smart as you are.

  “I spent three years at the Navy torpedo station in Newport,” he began. “I was intimately involved in the development of the Mark fourteen fish. As you may or may not know, each torpedo is handmade. Literally, handmade. Master machinists fit parts together by hand. Cut propeller gears on a lathe. Fit springs, wire connections, flask connections, shaft bearings by hand. Cast propellers individually. It’s all done carefully and slowly, so besides the fact that we lost so many of our fish at Cavite, that’s why there’s a shortage.

  “I used to ask why we were not mass-producing torpedoes at General Motors or somewhere like that. Every time I brought it up, some graybeard from the production shop would tell me that this was how it’s always been done. Think about that, gentlemen. Think about what that really means.”

  The admiral interrupted. “Captain, I asked you—”

  “Yes, sir, I know,” Malachi said. “But here’s the thing: because they are handmade, and handmade with enormous pride and professionalism, they aren’t properly tested. Not really tested, in bad weather, against a maneuvering target, with a real warhead, on some kind of instrumented range. Instead each one was fired once out of the window at Newport, with a water tank in place of the warhead, dutifully recovered, cleaned up, tweaked and peaked, and then sent to the fleet. That’s not testing.”

  The expression on the admiral’s face clearly showed that he was losing patience, but Malachi plunged ahead.

  “The lower tail stabilizers would come back in damaged—meaning they’d hit the bottom. We had limited depth in Narragansett Bay, so that meant that they were running deeper than set. I suspected the depth-sensing mechanism was defective, but no one wanted to hear that.”

  “I knew it,” one skipper said. “Goddammit.”

  “The contact exploder mechanism has a problem,” Malachi continued. “Often it would not make the critical connection between the torpedo’s face-pin and the electrical igniter. The Mark fourteen didn’t get a new contact exploder. They simply used the one for the Mark ten. I think the problem is caused because the Mark fourteen runs a whole lot faster than the Mark ten and the contact exploder mechanism simply cannot take the impact at the higher speed. One test shot went off course and hit a pylon on the range at an acute angle. That one worked. I suggested we strengthen the face-pin. Not invented there, so no, we won’t do that.”

  By now the admiral was listening. Malachi took a deep breath. “There’s a lot more,” he said. “And I haven’t even gotten to the magnetic exploder.”

  “Captain,” the admiral said, softly. “Please answer my question.”

  “I set all my fish for contact only. I set all my fish for ten feet, with one exception. I set all my fish for high speed, and I try to fire every fish so that it doesn’t have to make a turn upon launch. And finally, I try to make the line of attack slightly oblique to the target. I shot at what I thought was a Jap sub, but missed. One of the fish made a circular run, the other apparently just missed because it was a hip shot—in a hurry. Otherwise, we hit what we shot at, and we sank what we hit. I’m new to the PacFleet sub force, but I understand that that is not always the case.”

  “Goddamn fucking right it isn’t,” said the skipper who’d made the outburst about the depth problem.

  The admiral sat there looking down the table at nothing for a long moment. “And the magnetic exploder,” he said, finally, as if waiting for the rest of the bad news. Malachi obliged him.

  “It’s a great idea, in theory, and there’s no doubt that a fish going off under the keel is worth three banging on the side, especially with an armored warship. The problem with the Mark fourteen magnetic exploder is that it’s dependent on two things we can’t control: the magnetic field generated by the physical steel mass of the target, and the magnetic field generated by the earth itself. One is much stronger than the other.”

  Two of the skippers snorted at that.

  “The stronger field is generated by the ship, of course,” he said, as he watched the two COs blink in surprise. “The magnetic exploder doesn’t look for a magnetic field. It looks for a sudden surge of magnetism over and above the background magnetic field of the earth. Like when we load it into a torpedo tube, for instance, which is why it comes to the boat in deadhead mode. Once you shoot it, the guidance system comes on and counts the revolutions of the propeller until it reaches a number that guarantees it’s clear of the boat. Otherwi
se…”

  “We know all that,” Burlington said. “So what’s the prob?”

  “The problem is that the earth’s magnetic field varies all over the planet. Strong in some places, weak in others, and it’s constantly changing. That’s what the term ‘variation’ means when you’re using a magnetic compass. So the basis for the guidance system’s decision to fire the exploder is a constantly varying, unknown quantity. The British gave up on theirs precisely because of this problem. Not to mention that the Germans were working on one of their own and realized that one defense against a magnetic exploder was to reduce the magnetic signature of their ships by deperming them. Just like we’ve been doing to defeat Japanese magnetic mines.”

  “And yet some of the Mark fourteen exploders have worked,” the admiral said.

  “Yes, sir, and that’s to be expected. You fire enough torpedoes, you will from time to time get enough of a magnetic anomaly from the target hull to make it work. As long as the depth sensor hasn’t put the fish forty feet beneath the target’s keel instead of ten.”

  “If you know all this shit, why hasn’t BuOrd addressed these issues?” Burlington asked.

  Malachi just smiled. “You ever dealt with the Bureau of Ordnance?” he asked. “Basically it’s like this: if they want any shit out of you, they will squeeze your head.”

  “Enough of that,” the admiral said. “I’ve told all of you before, I will not tolerate insubordinate talk like that.”

  Malachi said nothing.

  “This meeting is adjourned,” the admiral announced. “I have to think about all this. Commander Stormes, you have deliberately violated SubPac doctrine and my policy in your operations.”

  “Which bagged a heavy cruiser, three escorts, and a maru,” Reed Burlington observed.

  The admiral’s face went red. The chief of staff, sensing an eruption, intervened by standing up, which meant that everyone else had to stand up because, obviously, the meeting was over. The admiral glared at everyone for a moment, then got up and went into his inner cabin without saying another word.

  “Well that was interesting,” the chief of staff said. “Oh, by the way, I happen to know that the rest of you have also disabled the magnetic exploder from ‘time to time,’ as Commander Stormes so quaintly puts it. Stay close to your boats today, gentlemen. I anticipate a follow-on meeting coming soon.”

  Down on the tender’s quarterdeck the five skippers gathered for a moment before going to their separate submarines.

  “Your ass is a grape,” Jack Carney, skipper of Grayback, told Malachi.

  “Not with that bag,” Burlington said. “You may get some kind of reprimand, in which case they may banish you to some distant sub squadron in the wilds of Australia. Oh, wait—”

  The other skippers laughed and everybody headed to work. Malachi felt better as he crossed the nest of submarines to get to Firefish. He could have done what the other skippers had apparently been doing—telling the admiral that, yes, sir, we have absolutely been using the magnetic exploders, and then disabling them once they got to sea beyond prying eyes. Throughout his career, he’d made an effort not to play any games with the truth. He’d learned that the Brits were a lot more relaxed about doing things that worked even if the Admiralty was demanding something different. There was one common thread, however, between the Royal Navy and the US Navy: results always counted. What was it Nelson had said: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy”? You would be forgiven many mistakes if you got results. Reed Burlington was probably right: they wouldn’t fire him after a patrol like that. He hoped.

  ELEVEN

  In any event, nothing happened, because later that morning a message came out from Pearl Harbor announcing several flag officer reassignments. Their admiral was being moved to Brisbane, on the other side of the Australian continent, where the other half of the American submarine contingent in Australia was based. His replacement was to be Rear Admiral Hamner W. Marsten. At dinner that night in the hotel, Jack Carney asked Malachi if he knew the incoming boss.

  “I do, in a roundabout way,” Malachi said. “He’s a gun clubber—spent a lot of time at BuOrd. For a while they were calling him the Navy’s Mister Torpedo. He was the principal impetus behind our favorite but defective Mark fourteen torpedo.”

  “Oh, God,” Jack asked.

  “Yeah, well, we’re not going to get any sympathy from him on whether or not we use the magnetic exploder.”

  “More important question—will he know you?”

  “I don’t think so. I was a relatively junior officer at Newport. None of my suggestions and technical observations ever made it to Washington. But I’ve got a bigger problem—I will not use that damned thing.”

  “Damn, Malachi—you just gonna tell them that?”

  “No,” Malachi said. “Once I get back to sea, I will have it removed from the torpedoes and then I’m going to try to figure out how to make it work.”

  Jack stared at him. “Are you shitting me?”

  Malachi shrugged. “You have to be careful handling the actual firing pistol assembly, but otherwise, it’s just a piece of equipment like anything else. It’s factory calibrated for a so-called notional magnetic field that’s supposedly good anywhere on earth. I think that’s its main problem.”

  “You gonna ask your torpedomen to remove the exploder? At sea?”

  “No, I’ll do it myself. At depth, where it’s nice and quiet and also stable.”

  “They’re gonna shit little green apples,” Jack said. “It’s one thing to turn the switch to deactivate it. I would think it’s a whole ’nother deal to remove the damned exploder itself.”

  Malachi smiled. “Yeah, you’re right. But the tender’s got a torpedo shop, and they do it all the time. I may pay those guys a visit and refresh my knowledge.”

  “Watch yourself,” Jack said. “That tender is an ants nest of scuttlebutt. Word gets out that you’re proposing to screw around with the actual exploders, the bosses will hear it in twenty minutes.”

  “Point taken,” Malachi said. “You done? If so, let’s go to the roof.”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “But I heard you didn’t drink.”

  “You heard right. One beer maybe. But I hear there’re other attractions on the roof. From time to time.”

  Jack grinned. Malachi signed his bill and then they headed upstairs. Kensie was not there that night, so Malachi ordered his single beer and retreated to a table in the corner of the roof. Wiggling ladies and horndog skippers up at the bar were pretending to talk about the weather. Malachi considered joining them but he’d been just a little bit smitten by the statuesque doctor with her sly smile. He didn’t want to have her show up later and find him on the dance floor with one of the slinky toys at the bar, so he decided to just relax and enjoy the show.

  Summer was coming on in western Australia, and the sea breezes from the harbor were turning the rooftop lounge into a comfortable oasis. There were no vent fans, hydraulic lines, periscopes, or any other reminders of Firefish. He’d met skippers of surface ships who viewed their commands with some affection. He’d never met another submariner who felt that way about his boat. Surface ships had weather decks, crew’s lounges, big wardrooms, awnings, baseball teams, and breathable air all the time. A submarine was more like a big torpedo with scant space for sixty or so men, a purely killing machine.

  His first duty station after graduating from the academy in 1930 had been the battleship New York, a coal-burning, 27,000-ton steel monster sporting ten fourteen-inch guns, several smaller caliber guns, and two torpedo tubes. Ensign Stormes was assigned as the ship’s torpedo officer, as befit the most junior officer in the wardroom. After the first eighteen months, he was getting tired of the excessively spit-and-polish atmosphere in the battleship squadron, where crews of a thousand men and eighty officers were not allowed above deck unless in a formal uniform, and the daily holystoning of teak veneered decks would have made Lord Nelson feel right
at home. The only exception to the strict uniform policy had been on coaling days, when the entire crew turned to in order to get tons and tons of coal into the bunkers down below, one one-hundred-pound sack at a time. The evolution covered the entire ship in coal dust, which then meant that the rest of the week was spent hand-cleaning every square foot of the superstructure and weather decks.

  One night he met up with one of his classmates who’d volunteered for the submarine force, who regaled him with tales of adventures at sea, both during training exercises and the ones caused by the boat itself, whose every dive could be classified as an adventure. At least you go to sea, Malachi had observed. The Depression was on, and the capital ships stayed in port for most of the year due to the limited Navy budget. The whole fleet sailed for the annual Fleet Battle Problem, but that was about it. His classmate took him aboard his submarine, which was vintage 1921, warning him that although it was relaxed in comparison with the big ships, it might be a bit claustrophobic. Malachi reminded him that he had been a coal miner once upon a time. Claustrophobia was not one of his problems.

  His reminiscences were interrupted by a light haze of perfume and two of the young women who’d been at the bar earlier, demanding that he come join the party and dance with them. Hell with it, he thought. Why not?

  The next two days were filled with a swirl of meetings, inspections, shore-patrol reports, the pile of administrative paperwork that had been waiting for them to come back in, and more meetings. By the second night Malachi was ready for his duty beer, dinner, and then a good night’s sleep. At ten-thirty, he was awakened by a call from the rooftop lounge. There was a woman up there who wanted to talk to him. Oh, God, he thought: that’s what I get for “joining the party” the other night. The girls were fun but everyone except him had gotten so drunk that it had become boring.

  “What’s her name?” he asked, turning on his bedside table light.

  “Dr. Richmond,” the bartender replied. “Oh, and she’s on her way down to your room.”