The Iceman_A Novel Read online

  Marty blinked as he absorbed the proposed geometry. Twenty degrees down-bubble gave them no margin for error. If a diving plane jammed, they’d power all the way to crush depth. And beyond. “Aye, aye, sir,” he gulped. “I’ll go below and set up the intercept point ahead. And I’ll need COB.”

  “Good thinking,” Malachi said. The chief of the boat was one of the best diving officers onboard.

  The exec disappeared down the conning tower hatch. Malachi lit a cigarette well below the side bulkhead and then turned away from where the Japs were to take a deep drag. He looked at his watch. It was nearing 2300. He was pretty sure he’d damaged one of the big ships and that the enemy had left two destroyers behind, one to take her under tow and get her back into Rabaul harbor, or possibly one of the closer Jap bases at Buin or Kieta. The other one would act as escort.

  He could just submerge now, drive back to the formation, and open fire, but it would have to be a side-on shot. He had, however, a personal rule about firing torpedoes so that they did not have to make a turn once they came out of the tube. The TDC was able to set the torpedo to turn to a specific gyro-controlled course once fired, thus allowing the submarine to already be headed outbound sooner. But there had been documented cases of torpedo rudders locking up while making that initial turn to the firing bearing and then conducting a circular run right back at the submarine. He had resolved to always get into a firing position so that the fish didn’t have to make a turn when they came out. Yes, it put the submarine right in front of the approaching targets, but if they were in column formation, the tactic had the added advantage of sending a crowd of torpedoes into the dense column, lengthwise, thus upping the chances of hitting something.

  “Conn, XO: recommend three three five at ten knots to achieve intercept position.”

  “Make it so,” Malachi said, taking another drag. “And I need some coffee.”

  Ninety minutes later they were headed roughly south by east, submerged at periscope depth. Their final radar sweep confirmed that two contacts were close together, while the third was ranging ahead, executing a sinuous weave and obviously looking for trouble. They’d been able to establish a stable plot on the slow-moving ships, so there was no more need for periscope or radar observations. The boat was headed right for them, all outer doors open, torpedo settings entered and verified, and the plot solution agreed with the TDC.

  “Two minutes to firing point,” the TDC operator announced.

  “Sound: target bearing steady? Up-Doppler?”

  “Yes, sir, barely, but no changes. One of the targets is echo-ranging in omni mode.”

  “General search, then. Very well. Control, Captain: initial down-bubble is to be ten degrees until we’ve reached full power, then down ten more. Minimize ballast movement going down—use the planes. Begin to flatten the dive as we pass two hundred feet and then use the ballast tanks. Once all target noises are astern begin the ascent back to periscope depth and slow to three knots.”

  “Control: aye,” the exec said.

  “Sixty seconds to firing point. Torpedoes set for high speed, running depth ten feet, contact exploders.”

  “I concur. Fire when ready.”

  The first fish pulsed out of its tube, followed by three more. Once the final one took off, the sub’s bow tilted down and the rumble of the propellers coming up to full underwater speed of 7 knots could be felt throughout the hull. Malachi glanced at the depth gauge: 100 feet.

  “Run time is one twenty to the towing ship.”

  Malachi nodded and watched the depth gauge as the sub gathered speed and pointed down into the darkness. The underwater log registered five knots, then six, then seven, and then the nose dipped again, steep enough that men had to grab something to stay upright. Pencils rolling off the plotting table made startlingly loud noises, and one empty coffee mug went crashing to the deck. One hundred eighty feet.

  Two underwater blasts in quick succession shook the boat, followed seconds later by a third.

  Two hundred twenty feet. Catch her, Marty, catch her.

  A sustained roar of underwater noises rose to a crescendo seemingly right above them and then moved aft.

  Two hundred sixty feet, but the dive angle was finally flattening. Malachi, and everyone else in the conning tower, started breathing again.

  Two hundred seventy feet, and the speed was coming down, too. From a far distance astern came the thumping bangs of depth charges going off. The groaning and grinding of steel under great stress could still be heard behind them, drowning out Firefish’s own complaints about being so deep. They waited, listening to the ballast pumps whining as they pushed trim water aft, and then the first blow forward to lighten the bow. Malachi checked the speed: four knots.

  Two hundred fifty feet, and almost level.

  “Control, Conn: maintain four knots until we’re ready to level off at periscope depth.”

  “Control: aye,” the exec replied. “She’s responding well.”

  It look longer than he’d anticipated to get her stable and properly trimmed out at periscope depth and steady at three knots. It had been a violent maneuver, and they’d have to talk about the coordinated use of ballast water and planes when making a dive like that. But it had worked. The only depth charges they’d heard had been way astern, right where that destroyer would have expected Firefish to be.

  “Up scope,” he ordered. He took the obligatory 360-degree sweep to make sure he hadn’t put the scope up right in front of an enemy destroyer. Then he began a slower sweep to the east, just as the moon popped out again. He finally spotted a low-lying cloud of what looked in the moonlight like white mist, drifting slowly to the south.

  “No ships,” he announced.

  The exec had come back up to the conning tower. “There’s still that one tin can,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah, there is. He’s probably on the other side of that cloud. Run the surface search radar mast up, take a sweep.”

  They waited for the radar transmitter to warm up and then come on the air for a single sweep.

  “One contact, zero eight zero, range twelve miles.”

  “Twelve miles?” the exec snorted. “Somebody’s getting the hell out of Dodge.”

  There were grins all around.

  “Time for us to do the same,” Malachi said. “The Japs will know what happened by now and that there’s a sub out here. XO, plot a course for where we think that cruiser went down at five knots. I want to make a periscope observation there. Then we’ll surface and run to the east. That Jap task force will be coming back in about six, maybe eight hours. I don’t want to be here.”

  When they got to the estimated position of the sinking, Malachi raised the periscope high to keep any fuel oil from fouling the lenses. At first there was nothing to see, but gradually objects in the water began to come into view. Boxes that looked like vegetable crates, an oil drum, and then a float plane, sitting on the water as if nothing had happened. Next came some life rafts, and then a clot of floating debris, surrounded by heads in the water. He wondered if they even saw the periscope as it sliced slowly through the remains of a heavy cruiser—and possibly the destroyer towing it.

  “Down scope,” he ordered. “Proceed east for thirty minutes. Then surface to recharge and get a good radar fix on the islands. We’ll submerge again just before dawn.”

  EIGHT

  They were able to get almost a full charge, but just at nautical twilight a periodic sweep of the air search radar picked up an incoming patrol aircraft, precipitating a crash dive. They slipped down to 200 feet and then made a 90-degree turn in case they’d been spotted and the aircraft dropped a bomb or even depth charges. In the event, nothing happened, but to Malachi it meant that the Japs were out looking for them. They used a formidable seaplane called a Kawanishi H8K2: four engines, 20mm cannons, machine guns, a crew of ten, a range of 4,400 miles, and the ability to drop 1,500-pound bombs or torpedoes.

  Malachi was pretty sure that one of the reasons a Kawani
shi had come their way was that Firefish had come up on a high-frequency (HF) radio net to report the night’s action while on the surface. This had triggered a hit on the Japanese HFDF network, called HuffDuff. Both sides maintained HF listening stations scattered over literally thousands of miles of their respective territories. If a ship at sea began transmitting on a specific frequency and one of the stations heard it, that station would “flash the net,” and all the other stations would tune to that frequency and take a bearing. The central station would then plot all those bearings, and where they met was the location of the transmitting ship, sometimes thousands of miles away. American submarines were acutely aware of the HFDF system and made no more than one HF transmission a day, or even every other day, unless they were in trouble. Japanese submarine skippers, on the other hand, were positively garrulous in the 2-to 32-megacycle frequency, which had cost some of them their lives.

  Radio had also been able to copy the fleet broadcast from Pearl, which updated Firefish’s orders and gave news of what was happening down at Guadalcanal. The news was dramatically unpleasant as the Imperial Japanese Navy battered the US Navy in a series of almost surgical night battles around Guadalcanal. The admiral in Perth acknowledged Firefish’s previous attack on the merchant ship and its escort of the night before and exhorted her and the other sub farther south to attack those nighttime cruiser formations whenever possible.

  “Well, then he ought to like tonight’s report,” Malachi said at a late-afternoon department head meeting. He’d been careful to couch it in as accurate terms as possible, not claiming outright that he’d sunk a cruiser and a destroyer but rather that the first attack had been by radar on what looked like a cruiser-destroyer formation, followed up by an end-around run and a second radar attack and then visual confirmation of wreckage and people in the water. Once they got back to base they’d debrief the attack in detail with the admiral’s operations people and let them sort out what the probable results had been.

  Most of the officers and crewmen had spent the day getting some rest after the previous night’s exertions. The relative calm and safety of 200 feet made that possible, especially in an air-conditioned boat. The crews of the older S-class boats still operating in the Pacific had no such luxury, and their life was a miserably hot and humid hell of constantly sweating bodies and failing electrical equipment. “Ops, what was on last night’s broadcast?”

  It was a rhetorical question, because Malachi had already seen the messages, but he wanted the department heads to hear it from LTJG Caldwell, who went through the news from Guadalcanal, and then the daily intelligence estimate on what the Japs were doing.

  “Kicking American ass, apparently,” the exec said. No one smiled. Caldwell confirmed the exec’s sentiments with the latest battle results around the lower Solomons.

  “Our station hasn’t changed,” he said. “Nor have our orders: penetrate New Georgia Sound and attack the cruiser formations going down to Guadalcanal from Rabaul every night. Preferably before they get there, is what I’m reading into the wording.”

  “We can’t get them on the way down,” Malachi interjected. “They leave Rabaul and Buin in daylight, with air cover that stays on top until almost sundown. By nightfall they’re a hundred miles south from where we’ve been stationed. If the admiral wants us to attack them before they get to Guadalcanal, either Bluefish has to do it or we need to shift south about one hundred fifty miles.”

  “Should we say that in our next report to the admiral?” the exec asked. “I’m wondering if he appreciates how thoroughly the Japs own the daylight hours in these parts.”

  “No,” Malachi said. “We’ve been given a station and an operating area. In my experience, if the admiral wants suggestions from his skippers, he’ll let us know.”

  “Well, how about this, then,” the exec said. “We’re down to five torpedoes. Should we stay on station or go back to Perth to rearm?”

  Malachi raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Go back? Are we out of fuel or food?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is the machinery all working?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got some small mechanical and electrical problems, but nothing serious.”

  “Then we need to find a home for those five fish. Then we go back.”

  “We’ve been shooting a lot of fish, Captain,” the exec persisted. “Salvoes of four at a time. If we shoot four more, we’ll have one to defend ourselves with.”

  Malachi looked down at the table for a long moment. “We’re not here to defend ourselves, gentlemen,” he said, quietly. “I know torpedoes are in short supply, but nowhere in our orders does it say to bring torpedoes back to Perth. We’re here to sink Jap ships. Which means that, tonight, once we surface, we run back out into the Sound and see what turns up, and then we shoot torpedoes at it.”

  He looked around the table at the worried faces. “Look,” he said. “I wouldn’t have stationed a sub up here at the north end of the Sound, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. But I think we’ve bagged a maru, a cruiser, and two, maybe even three destroyers, so just possibly the admiral knows what he’s doing, okay? But he depends on us to take the fight to the enemy. If we exceeded the authorized number of torpedoes on any one target, that’ll become my problem, when we get back, not yours. That is all.”

  At midnight they were back out in the middle of New Georgia Sound, about 20 miles south of where they’d operated the night before. The moon was waning and the sea felt like it was waiting for something, oily calm but with a hint of a deeper swell uncoiling from somewhere to the east of them.

  Malachi sat on his metal stool in the conning tower, trying to read the Fox broadcast scroll in the red light. Down below in the control room the diving officer struggled to keep the boat at “decks awash,” which meant that only the sail, the structure that housed the conning tower, the navigation bridge, and the periscope support structures, was showing above the water. Riding at decks awash required a careful balance between air and seawater in the ballast tanks. A miscalculation could cause the boat to either broach—pop up on the surface in an unstable condition—or submerge, with the OOD and the lookouts still up there on the bridge and the main induction valve wide open. Malachi thought his diving officers needed more training, so he’d told the exec to stand watch with them while the boat was in this precarious, if tactically stealthy, condition. As few as five sailors going from the crews’ mess to the forward torpedo room could upset the balance.

  Malachi sighed as he read the broadcast. Once a week the headquarters at Pearl transmitted a fleet-wide intelligence estimate for the western Pacific. The news was generally grim. The Japanese were tightening their grip on the bulk of Southeast Asia while the Allies reeled from defeat after defeat. The American invasion of the obscure Solomons was the only sign that real resistance to the Japanese had begun, although the costs so far to the US Navy had been grotesque. Malachi heard the radar transmitter come up for the quarter-hour sweep, followed by the grinding noise of sea salt–soaked bearings up on top of the radar antenna mast. He cocked an ear.

  “Radar contact,” the operator announced. “Three four one, range twelve thousand yards.”

  “North?” Malachi said. He’d been waiting for the nightly run back to Rabaul from Guadalcanal. From the south, not the north.

  “Yes, sir,” the operator said. “I’ll wait three minutes, then sweep again to see if we can get a course and speed.”

  “Prepare to submerge,” Malachi said. The word went out over the sound-powered phone circuits. The diesels shut down and the big main induction valve closed with an authoritative thump as the OOD and the four lookouts came down the ladder from the navigation bridge. Malachi nodded when the conning tower hatch clanged down, and the klaxon sounded.

  “Periscope depth,” he ordered. “Speed three.” Three minutes later the boat was leveled out at 60 feet. “Surface radar mast up,” he ordered. A single sweep was taken, confirming the contact was still there. The radar mast w
as pulled down, and then the plotters laid out the tentative track.

  “He’s headed south, speed fifteen, based on only two marks,” the plotter announced. “Last range, nine thousand yards.”

  “Sound, Conn: hearing anything?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Open outer doors on tubes five and six. We’ll take another mark in three minutes. I’ll make a visual observation when he’s down to three thousand yards.” He looked over to the TDC operator, who had entered the first two marks and then set the computer running. If the third mark and the computer agreed, they had a firing solution. Then they waited.

  “What’s the computed bearing and range?”

  “Drawing left to three three five,” the plotter said. “Five thousand six hundred.”

  “TDC agrees.”

  “Up scope.” Malachi stared into the optics on the computed bearing as the scope cleared the surface. Even with red light, his eyes took some time to adapt. Whatever it was, it wasn’t all that big.

  “Conn, Sound: diesels on the bearing.”

  A sub, Malachi thought. A Jap sub on the surface running south on his diesels.

  “XO, confirm that there are no other US subs in this area?”

  “Affirmative, Captain. Only the Bluefish, and she should be two hundred miles south of us.”

  “Very well, down scope. Up radar mast. Take a sweep and then bring it down. This will be a firing observation. Torpedoes: speed high. Depth five feet. Contact exploders.”

  The TDC operator read back the settings as the radar operator reported his results to the plotting table.

  “We have a stable solution, sir,” the TDC operator said. “Firing time in one hundred eighty seconds.”

  “Conn: aye,” Malachi said. “Fire on TDC orders.”

  The countdown began. The approaching Japanese sub, running in a straight line on the surface, fat, dumb, and happy, while the cogs, gears, and wheels in an American TDC spun down the clock, and two torpedoes, their circuits awakened, their gyros set, their warheads programmed, the tube spheres pressurized, waited for the big thump.