Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  They were through their first gate. The easy one, he reminded himself.

  He ordered the bridge crew back up topside and told Maneuvering to bring the other two diesels on the line. What they needed now was speed. At 20 knots, they could be at the innermost part of Hiroshima Bay in just under an hour. Then they’d turn northeast through two more tight channels and finally southeast to go down the north side of Etajima island, which happened to be home to the Japanese Naval Academy. The weather was cooperating nicely, with windy rainsqualls and even a little snow for effect. According to the weather forecasts from Pearl, this system would blow through the Seto by tomorrow night, to be followed by cold and clear. By then they had to be back in the wait-box. If this thing went as planned, they could be there before dawn. After all, he asked himself with a grin, what could go wrong?

  TWELVE

  They reached the next bottleneck at just after midnight. By then it was blowing snow, and they were navigating by both fathometer and surface-search radar. The water was only about 80 feet deep, so now they were pretty much committed to a surface approach on Kure. If they’d been trying visual coastal navigation under these conditions they’d have been totally lost, but Hashimoto’s chart, the rocky island cliffs, and the occasional protruding pinnacle made for great radar nav. There were still no lights showing ashore, and even Hiroshima City seemed to have been blacked out. Gar had given up trying to be sparing with the radar; it was all they had. He could only hope that the normally attentive Japanese wouldn’t be scanning for an American sub radar right here in their backyard.

  By 0115 they were creeping around the headland above the naval base. The diesels were secured and they were running all-electric now. The dry-dock notches and the long flat bulkhead piers made for a distinctive radar signature, and for the first time they saw lights ashore through the snow. Electric arc welding was creating splotches of bluish white lightning along the piers, and there were some even bigger lights way up in the air, probably on the booms of harbor cranes. The city might be blacked out, but this shipyard was going full blast. Gar instructed the exec and the radar nav team to get in to about 800 yards and 40 feet of water and hold there. Gar stayed on the periscope down in the conning tower to examine the waterfront through the tumbling clouds of light snow.

  Okay, he thought, as he turned the scope from left to right a degree at a time, where’s this giant aircraft carrier? There was a band of lights along the harbor’s edge, then darkened warehouses and steel-yard buildings silhouetted in the background. Spaces between the buildings were either finger piers or dry docks. He spotted two destroyers moored bow to bow along the main bulkhead pier, which put them in silhouette against the welding arcs. It looked like there were other ships inside the dry docks, either moored there or up on blocks behind a caisson wall at the head of a dry dock.

  Nothing that was obviously a big carrier. Had the damned thing already sailed? Were they sitting here in the lion’s mouth, on his tongue, actually, and all for nothing?

  The industrial lights and welding arcs had put the background buildings into impenetrable shadow. Even with a filter, every time he focused on something in the periscope an arc welder blinded him. It was probably blinding them, too. Then he saw two fat barges tied up to the left of the leftmost destroyer. They looked a lot like the ammunition barges tied out in the West Loch of Pearl Harbor. It was customary in the U.S. Navy to remove all ammunition before a ship went into dry dock. If a ship was going into the yards for a six-month overhaul, she would drive over to an ammunition depot and do a complete off-load. If it was going to be a quick one-or two-week repair, then barges like these would be brought alongside, the ammo off-loaded, and the barges anchored nearby. If that’s what those two fat boxes were, Gar now had a way to light the target area up.

  “Open all forward outer doors,” he said softly. Then he got on the ship’s announcing system.

  “This is the captain speaking,” he began. “We are in position, eight hundred yards off one of Japan’s major naval shipyards. It’s snowing outside, and the shipyard is barely visible in front of us. Once we start shooting, things will happen very quickly. Right now we appear to have the element of surprise. It’s one in the morning, the night shift is going at it over there, and the rest of the base appears to be darkened-ship. Once we ID the carrier, I’m going to fire every fish we have in the tubes, so a first priority will be reloads as quickly as possible. We’re gonna shoot this place up and then run like hell back to the deep part of the Inland Sea. We will be pursued, but as long as this weather lasts, we won’t have to deal with aircraft. Stand by to stand by, and remember Pearl Harbor.”

  He called the radioman up to the conning tower. “When you hear the first fish let go, go out on the HF with that message we precanned.”

  The radioman nodded and dropped back down into Control. Gar and the exec had encoded an encrypted message to Pearl that said they were presently attacking the naval arsenal at Kure. That would be the first indication at SubPac that they’d actually made it through Bungo Suido and all the way to Kure. The Japanese had an excellent high-frequency direction-finding network, which was why they’d stayed off the air so far. Once Gar started shooting, there’d be no need for them to detect the Dragon through direction finding, so he wanted to get one message off to Pearl in case they never made it back out to the open sea.

  Gar took a moment to think through his tactical problem. The TDC setup would be different this time. There’d be no course and speed inputs since he’d be shooting on direct bearings at a moored target. Where the hell was that carrier? There was simply nothing there big enough to be an aircraft carrier, or if there was, he might be looking at it end on and just not recognizing what he was seeing. For that, he needed more light. He told the exec to stay up on the bridge and to look for that carrier.

  First, those two destroyers. He assumed they were tied up at a shipyard for a reason and were thus probably not ready for a quick underway response, but assumptions were not in order just now. They could also be sitting there with boilers lit off and the crew ready for a five-minute jump-start, or at least able to man all those guns and start shooting back. So, business before pleasure.

  “Initial firing bearing is zero eight five, range eight hundred yards. Torpedo running depth ten feet. Target is a destroyer moored to the bulkhead pier. I will then switch eight degrees to the right to shoot at a second destroyer, also moored. One fish per destroyer. Then I’m going to come back left to bearing zero five five and shoot one fish at a pair of moored ammo barges. If we get a circular runner, we will back full emergency—there’s no more useful water ahead of us. Got it?”

  There was a murmur of acknowledgment.

  Gar took a deep breath. “Tube one,” he said.

  “Tube one is ready. Plot set.”

  “Fire one.”

  They all felt the familiar thump, and Gar thought he could see the steam-bubble trail unfolding in his periscope.

  “Shifting targets, firing bearing is zero niner three, range eight hundred yards, tube two.”

  “Tube two is ready. Plot set.”

  “Fire two.”

  Thump.

  “Both fish hot, straight, and normal.”

  Gar swung back to the first destroyer just in time to see a huge waterspout erupt amidships, breaking him into two pieces. The explosion sound reached them a few seconds later as his midships sagged into the harbor in a boil of water and smoke.

  “First destroyer is down,” Gar reported. He swung right in time to see another waterspout, this one forward of center on the second destroyer. There was a red glow at the base of the water column, and then her forward magazines went off.

  Okay, he thought, I was wrong about their off-loading ammo. The boom of the warhead was followed by the sound of a much larger explosion that seemed to go on forever as six hundred rounds of 5-inch ammo cooked off alongside the pier. Bet they stop welding over there now, he thought.

  Lots of light, but still not q
uite enough.

  “XO, you see any carriers?”

  “That’s a negative, Cap’n,” Russ called back. “There’s something in the big dry dock to the right, but it looks more like a building than a ship.”

  Gar swung around for one more confirmation bearing on the two barges and then fired a third torpedo into the outboard barge. The barges were a little bit farther out, but this time he’d guessed right about what was on board. The whole world lit up as a monstrous fireball rose into the air, followed by an ear-squeezing pressure wave. It made the second destroyer look like a campfire in comparison. They’d see that one all the way up in Hiroshima City, he thought. Two more hash marks for his destroyer score sheet. Then the second barge exploded.

  “Captain,” Russ called. “Bearing zero niner niner—go high mag.”

  Gar quickly swung the periscope around to the right onto 099 and took a look under high magnification. He began to hear debris hitting the water around the boat as pieces of those barges came down. They were still blowing up like a Fourth of July fountain, creating a virtual parade of booming explosions.

  In the scope, the shipyard was illuminated now with garish colors of red and orange in clear detail. On the bearing was a large black building with two protrusions canted out at 30 degrees from the upper stories. Gar looked and looked, trying to make it into something recognizable. Some kind of magnesium round went off on the ammo barges, and then he saw something down low, almost on the water, which gave it away. He realized he was looking at a dry-dock caisson, the huge floating wall that is sunk in the notched end of a dry dock once the ship is inside and positioned over the blocks.

  That wasn’t a building. That was their target.

  The bastard was completely out of reach—he was in dry dock!

  A hail of metal began to fall on the hull outside, and the exec and his two lookouts came scrambling down into the conning tower. There were some smaller explosions out in the water, which Gar hoped weren’t aimed shell fire.

  “Is that it?” the exec asked.

  Gar nodded, wondering what they could do now. They didn’t have much time before they’d have to get the hell out of here. The Japs would be in shock at what had just happened, but then they’d react. All the same, they hadn’t made this trip to be defeated by a goddamned caisson wall.

  Gar had three fish left forward, four aft. He wanted to save the four stern-tube torpedoes to use against pursuing Japs if he had to.

  Something large hit the deck forward, then rolled over the side, sounding for all the world like a depth charge. He took another look. The first destroyer had capsized; the second one was just gone.

  Gar told the exec to get on the other scope and use both radars to start looking for incoming trouble. Those two destroyers were history, but there should be at least a couple of the new Hiburi-class escorts nearby somewhere, and, being diesel powered, they could get under way in a hurry. Then the second ammo barge blew up again, pulsing a fireball hundreds of feet into the night air.

  “Start backing out, XO,” Gar said, as yet another large object landed close aboard the port side. It must be raining absolute death and destruction over on those piers, he thought.

  He turned back to stare at the huge carrier in dry dock. Even with all the fireworks, her back end still looked like a building, and she seemed to have two hangar decks instead of just one. There were some guns mounted on the stern parapets, and now that he knew what he was looking at, he could make out the support girders for the overhanging flight deck.

  “Bearing!” he called out “Mark! Make ready tube four. Range—estimate one thousand yards. Set running depth at twenty feet.”

  “Four ready, plot set.”

  “Fire four! Make ready five, same parameters.”

  Torpedo number four left the tube with a solid thump, followed a minute later by number five. Sound reported a normal run.

  Gar couldn’t tell through the periscope whether that huge ship was afloat inside the dry-dock basin or resting on her keel blocks. The caisson being closed, it was more likely that she was on the blocks. He hoped to blast away the caisson with three torpedoes and, if nothing else, upset the ship as the water rushed into the dock.

  “Make ready tube six,” he ordered, and then torpedo four hit the caisson. A satisfying waterspout erupted above the caisson and then fell back into the harbor, but they couldn’t hear the warhead explosion over the cacophony of the exploding ammo barges.

  Torpedo five hit just to the right of four, raising another big water blast. The caisson was now obscured by a dense cloud of dust, smoke, and debris, but he wondered if they’d done any real damage. A dry-dock caisson was just a big, hollow barrier with ballast tanks in the bottom half. To put a ship in dock you flooded the dry dock, and then a tug pulled the caisson out of the way. The ship would be pulled in, lined up over its blocks, and held in position by mooring lines. Then you pushed the caisson wall back into position at the harbor end of the dock and flooded down its ballast tanks. The caisson would settle into a notch at the end of the dry dock. Then you pumped out the dock. The pressure of the harbor water on one side of the caisson would seal it into position as the dock emptied. As the water was pumped out, the ship would settle onto her blocks, and work on the now-exposed underwater hull could begin.

  He’d hit the caisson with two large warheads, but nothing seemed to have happened. He needed to dislodge it, not just damage it. He swung the scope around to put the vertical crosshair on the left edge of the caisson.

  “Tube six: Bearing: Mark! Range one thousand yards. Set running depth fifteen feet.”

  “Cap’n, we have two radar contacts heading this way from Etajima,” the exec called out.

  “Set up a solution on them after I get this one off,” Gar said. “Where are we, Plot?”

  “Tube six ready, depth fifteen feet, plot is set.”

  “Fire six!”

  Thump. This time he could definitely see the torpedo’s wake as it planed up to 10 feet and then settled back down to 15 and headed for the dry dock. Sound again reported a normal hot run. Gar could hear the exec in the background calling out ranges and bearings to the TDC operators on the two inbound contacts. They were probably Hiburi-class patrol frigates; small but lethal. Time to run.

  THIRTEEN

  Gar took the conn, ordered up the diesels, and then made a hard right turn to the south. They no longer had the option of getting out the way they’d come in. They were going to have to run the Hayase Seto notch. He swung the scope back toward the dry dock in time to see torpedo six explode. He couldn’t tell if he’d hit the caisson or the stone sidewall, because an instant later a large warehouse on the drydock’s southern side obscured his line of sight.

  Oh, well, he thought, effort made. It’d take them some time to replace that caisson, so, if nothing else, he’d put their largest dry dock out of commission. If he had managed to dislodge the caisson, a 42-foot-high wall of water would have thundered down into the empty dry dock, lifted the ship off her blocks and sent her careening into the stone sidewalls of the dry dock. With luck her screws and rudders would be damaged, and if there were any large access holes cut into her sides and bottom, there’d be some serious flooding of her engineering spaces.

  Luck. Would. Could. Shit!

  He swung the scope back to the left, where the ammo barges had been, but there was nothing there except a towering cloud of flickering smoke. The lights were going out all over Kure. Maybe they thought it was an air raid. Now all they had to do was outrun two angry patrol craft making 30 knots in their direction.

  “Gun team battle stations, and make ready tubes seven and eight,” Gar called out. He began to look for targets as they bolted south and west out of the Kure harbor at 20 knots. While they maneuvered to clear the harbor, Gar called down to Radio to put out a second message to Pearl about the attack and the frustrating news that the big carrier had been moored behind a dry dock caisson. Gar wanted to say that they thought they’d damaged her, but
he knew in his heart she was probably untouched. The exec spoke up from the plotting table.

  “Confirming two high-speed surface contacts, bearing three four zero, closing, range is now thirteen miles.”

  The Japs could start shooting at a range of about 8 miles, if they had radar gun control, which they probably did since they were heading right for the fleeing Dragon. The notch was 2 miles ahead of them, and while he was pretty sure destroyers could not go through there, smaller patrol craft certainly could. On the other hand, Gar wasn’t sure the Dragon would make it through, either, with only 18 feet of water depth over the rock bottom at mean low water.

  Time for me to go to the bridge, he thought. He told the exec to take the conn and drive them through on the radar, while he dealt with whatever was waiting for them in the notch itself.

  He called down to Control to tell him what the state of the tide was right now, then ordered all scopes and radar masts down except for radar observations. The road bridge over the notch was charted at 36 feet; the Dragon’s sail structure was 25 feet above the water. The notch itself was less than 300 wide, with a sharp turn required to avoid a shoal right after going under the bridge. The tide was key: Mean low water and they’d have only 2 feet under the keel; higher tide would give them a few more feet under the keel but also might have them taking the periscopes off on the bridge trusses. There was no alternative now, though—not with those two tin cans in hot pursuit. A quartermaster helped Gar into an exposure jumpsuit and an inflatable aviation-style life jacket, then handed him his binoculars. Then he went topside.

  The snow was still coming down, and the fire-and-light show back in the Kure harbor was diminishing into muttered thunder. There was no wind other than the relative breeze created by their own passage. The diesels were roaring, and the gun crew forward was loading up the 5-inch gun and waiting for orders. The Dragon had a pair of twin-barreled 20 mm antiaircraft guns mounted back on the so-called cigarette deck behind the bridge. Gar ordered them manned as well. There would be at least a surveillance station on one or both sides of the notch, if not shore guns of some kind. The 20 mm would be more effective in close quarters than the 5-inch. He looked out into the gray swirl of snow ahead and tried to think. They’d have to slow down in the actual strait to keep from causing bottom suction effect—the high power being transmitted into the water by the props could create a semivacuum in close proximity to the bottom and actually suck the hull down into a grounding. The bitch-box spoke.