Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  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, apparentl
y. 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.”