Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  Gar was cold, wet, and concussed, but he was able to work out what was happening. They’d been jumped by minesweepers, not destroyers. Wooden hulled and diesel powered, not quite 200 feet long, but armed with depth-charge racks and a mine-hunting sonar. He watched in growing dismay as the spotlighted boat made its run, then turned out of the cone of light and away from her erupting depth charges; he felt the deck heel sharply as his sweeper followed its partner in to the target area. The plane flew around the action at low level, keeping the whole area lit up as they tried to find and kill Gar’s submarine. Unable to raise his head, he closed his eyes and stopped watching.

  Had they made it down soon enough? Deep enough? Those bombs had gone off pretty close to the surface, so maybe, maybe … but there was something ominous about that large patch of foaming sea, reflecting an occasional sheen of oil. He heard orders being shouted behind him, then felt the thump of depth-charge projectors going off amidships. He could feel the wooden hull trembling as the diesels pushed the sweeper in at full power.

  Go, Dragon, go, he thought. Dive, turn, dive some more, turn the other way, all on one lone shaft, while two FM sonars and a radar-equipped plane extended electronic talons deep into the sea, hungrily grasping for one little blip.

  The searchlight above and behind Gar went out, and then came the underwater explosions on either side as his sweeper’s depth charges exploded.

  Shallow, he thought. Much too shallow. These guys were excited; they’d failed to think it through. The blasts raised tremendous waterspouts into the darkness, confirming the shallow settings. They were spectacular, but the ones that did the business had to get down to 300 feet if you wanted to see debris, bodies, dead fish, and fuel oil erupting to the surface. He felt the sweeper slowing down as they waited to see what happened next.

  Something kicked his right shoe, and he heard some more rapid-fire Japanese. It sounded like two men were arguing, probably over whether to keep his inert body on board or just pitch it over the side.

  A third voice joined in, an older, deeper voice, ringing with authority. He heard two almost simultaneous “Hai!” Argument settled, orders given. He continued to play dead, although he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to go back into the cold water. As he felt hands grasping at his wet trousers and shirt, a powerful explosion went off under the sweeper and split it into two pieces. A Cutie? The shock knocked the men who’d been grabbing at his clothes off their feet and, he was pretty sure, right over the side. Gar wasn’t hurt because they’d just lifted him a few inches off the deck when the Dragon’s farewell gift swam silently in from behind and killed the sweeper.

  One thought stuck in his mind as he tumbled back into the sea: They’d made it. They’d evaded, then sent up the acoustic homer to go find some Japanese iron. Or, in this case, wood. Then another thought occurred to him: Or had his sweeper hit a mine? He looked up over his shoulder as the front half of the sweeper leaned over and subsided into the sea with the rest of them.

  The rest of them.

  There were several Japanese swimming away from the wreck in the darkness. Gar couldn’t see them, but he could definitely hear them. It sounded like officers were telling their people to get out of there, and then he remembered why. There were depth charges on board, and once they left port, the Japs always carried them armed.

  He tried to swim away, too, but discovered that his muscles were not going to cooperate very much. His life jacket, still partially inflated, got in the way. The best he could manage was a miserable dog paddle into the dark, away from the sinking ship, the pooling diesel fuel, and all those Japs. He’d been on the bow when the explosion hit, so any remaining depth charges ought to be in the other direction. He turned to his right and paddled harder, trying to quash the nausea rising in his stomach from the fumes. His legs felt like cold rubber, and he was having trouble concentrating. A couple of times he forgot why he was swimming away from the wreckage, where there ought to be pieces to hang on to. It had been a minesweeper. There’d be wood. Of course, the Japs would figure that out, too, and he’d have to expect a fairly hostile welcome if he tried that.

  He felt rather than saw or heard a distant underwater explosion. Not a depth charge, but something else, similar to what they felt when one of their own torpedoes went off in the guts of a Jap ship a mile away. There was a second explosion, muted, as if deeper. Had the Dragon hit a mine? Gar didn’t want to think about that. Except there shouldn’t have been mines there. Too deep.

  Suddenly a white light flooded the area. Between that and the saltwater in his eyes, he couldn’t see a thing. He felt the pressure of a bow wave coming, and soon another wooden hull was bumping along beside him. Once again he heard jabbering topside, and then a bowline dropped down in front of him. Instinctively he slipped into it and was unceremoniously hauled aboard like a stinky fish, which he probably resembled at that point. Once he flopped down on the deck he heard several hissing intakes of breath. He didn’t help matters by rolling over on his side and puking all over their nice wooden deck. By then there were more shouts from alongside, and they went back to work; one guy who looked like a sumo wrestler sat on his haunches, staring at Gar like he was considering the best way to turn him into chum.

  They worked at picking up more survivors from the other minesweeper while Gar lay curled up on the deck in his own effluent. Unless the Dragon was still in the area, setting up for another homing torpedo attack, they were all probably safe for the moment. As his mind cleared in the cold night air, he realized he had real problems here. If they figured out that they’d caught the commanding officer of a U.S. submarine, Gar was bound for a torture chamber somewhere in Tokyo. He was pretty sure his jumpsuit had no indications of rank on it, but he was wearing a khaki uniform shirt underneath, complete with shiny silver oak leaves. The minesweeper crew might not know that meant he was a commander, USN, but someone ashore probably would.

  He opened his eyes to see if the sumo was still staring at him. He was gone. As surreptitiously as possible he got the oak leaves unsnapped and quietly disposed of over the side, but that still left a clear indication that there had been rank insignia on his shirt. Then he remembered his lucky charm, his CPO insignia.

  He curled up into an even tighter ball over in the shadows of the bow while the crew looked for more people in the water. It took him a few minutes to get the CPO insignia off his penknife chain and onto one collar of his shirt.

  It might work, he thought. He was the right age to be a chief petty officer. Then he remembered his dolphins, pinned above his left shirt pocket flap. They were gold. A chief’s would have been silver. Would they know that? They weren’t polished and, in fact, were pretty tarnished. Still, it was a lingering detail.

  Suddenly hands were jerking him off the deck and into a semistanding position, followed by a blast from a fire hose to wash the diesel fuel and his own various secretions off. His face must have been really foul, because they spent some time blasting him in the face with that hose. When that was over, a diminutive officer wearing white gloves and carrying a 5-foot-long bamboo stick that Gar thought was longer than the Jap was tall walked up to him and began a methodical beating the likes of which Gar had never had in the boxing ring. He later found out that the ends of the bamboo had been split into six segments to add to the effect. He screamed the whole time at Gar, who ended up curled back into a quivering ball with his whole hide on fire. It would have been far worse had Gar not been wearing his exposure jumpsuit.

  When that was finally over, they threw him literally down the hatch into the bosun’s locker up in the bow of the minesweeper, where he landed on coils of marline, hemp, mooring line, rags, cans of paint, manila mats and fenders, and bales of canvas. The hatch slammed down, and Gar was blissfully unattended. He passed out, almost gratefully.

  * * *

  Reveille came some unknown hours later in the form of a bucket of cold seawater. Gar couldn’t move—every muscle in his body was black and blue from that bamboo massage. T
he big sumo guy came down the ladder, grabbed him by his jumpsuit, and threw him up the ladder and out onto the deck. That should have hurt a lot, but Gar couldn’t tell the difference. There stood his good friend, the bamboo man, who did it all again, accompanied by loud screaming and chantlike noises each time he swung his magic stick, which was often. Gar did notice it was late daylight and snowing, and they were coming into a harbor of some kind. Actually, he recognized it. He was back at Kure. Physically, but not for much longer mentally.

  The next time he came to he was in what he thought was a ship’s steel compartment. It also felt like there were other people there, but he couldn’t see them. His eyes had been beaten shut. He tried to open them, but it wasn’t happening beyond the aching slit stage. He could see a little bit out of his right eye, but not his left. His nose was so full of clotted blood that he had to breathe through his mouth, and that hurt his teeth. He didn’t know how much time had passed since he’d been picked up and beaten half to death on the minesweeper.

  “Easy, mate,” an Aussie or possibly British voice said next to him. “Easy, now.”

  Gar managed a subdued grunt.

  “Beat you fair and proper, they did,” the voice said. “Yank, right?”

  Gar grunted again.

  “Saw those dolphins on yer shirt,” the voice said. “Know where you are, then, mate?”

  Two grunts.

  “Yer on the bloody great Shinano, you are. Can I make a suggestion?”

  One grunt.

  Gar felt the man’s fingers relieving him of the gold-plated dolphins.

  “These here’ll get you a samurai chop, they will. Yer submarines are fair killing them, in more ways than one. There was one here the other night, by God. Sank two destroyers. Peppered the whole shipyard with a barge-worth of ammo. Blew up the caisson, this whole bloody ship we’re on went off its blocks, banged in the bow, chipped a screw, flooded out a machinery room. These are gold, ain’t they?”

  One grunt.

  “Was that you lot, then?”

  One grunt.

  “Brilliant,” he said, obviously impressed. Then his accent changed.

  “Look at me,” he said quietly.

  Gar tried. His right eye was the only working option. He focused, but nothing happened. Then it did.

  A smiling Japanese face was staring right at him. “Fair dinkum,” it said, in a perfect New South Wales accent.

  Gar knew he was fucked.

  “Captain, isn’t it?” it said.

  Truly fucked.

  The Jap read Gar’s mind and, with a vicious smile, nodded his agreement with Gar’s all too obvious assessment.

  EIGHTEEN

  ComSubPac Headquarters, Pearl Harbor

  Admiral Lockwood stood behind his desk with a pained expression on his face, a message clutched in his hand. This was potentially a real disaster. Dragonfish had reported in after getting clear of Bungo Suido and the minesweeper trap. She’d been damaged by the aircraft attack and was limping back to Guam. That wasn’t the big news. The big news was that Gar Hammond had been lost overboard in the process of an emergency dive. That led to an even bigger question: Had he been killed or had he been captured? If he’d been captured, and they made him talk as only the Japs could do, the entire war effort might be in great jeopardy, because submarine captains were privy to the fact that navy cryptographers were reading the Japanese navy’s message traffic.

  “We have to assume he’s been captured,” he said. “You know, always assume the worst.”

  Forrester nodded. “Have we informed PacFleet?”

  Lockwood shook his head. “I’m gonna have to go up to Makalapa and do this one personally with Chester Nimitz. Christ on a goddamned crutch. If they find out about ULTRA…”

  Forrester got up and started pacing around Lockwood’s spacious office.

  “Nimitz will remember Hammond, won’t he,” he said. “Of all the skippers…”

  Lockwood turned toward him. “You really don’t like Hammond, do you, Mike?”

  “No, sir, I do not. Much too much ego, insubordinate, disrespectful, and generally a pain in the ass. With all the quality people we have waiting in the wings, it would just have to be a guy like that who’s now got the most important secret of the war in his hands. Jesus!”

  “Yet he managed to get a boat into the Inland Sea,” Lockwood pointed out, “through the graveyard of Bungo Suido, and then all the way to the piers at Kure. And back out again, almost, anyway. That’s no small accomplishment.”

  “When they start pulling his teeth out one at a time with red-hot rusty pliers, we’ll see about that,” Forrester said.

  Lockwood, somewhat surprised by the intensity of Forrester’s animus toward Hammond, shook his head. “I’ve never, ever, hoped and prayed for someone’s death, but just now … okay, call my driver. I’ve got to go up the hill.”

  “I’ll get a message off to Dragonfish,” Forrester said. “Get more details on what happened, and their thoughts on survivability. It is December, and Japan’s a cold goddamned place in the winter.”

  Lockwood, his lips compressed into a thin, flat line, reached for his brass hat.

  The Inland Sea of Japan

  As it turned out, it was something so trivial it was almost heartbreaking that had given him away: the two letters CO stenciled on the back of Gar’s exposure suit. The gold dolphins hadn’t helped, because Gar’s name was engraved on the back. The Japanese officer who happily explained all this to him spoke colloquial English, in various dialects, and boasted of having seven other languages besides. He was a perfect mimic and proud of it. He was also an officer in the Kempeitai, which was ostensibly the gendarmerie, or MPs, of the Imperial Japanese Army. According to SubPac briefings, however, they were really a Japanese version of the German Gestapo. This one was in his late thirties, wearing an army uniform with prominent black stripes, and he appeared to be quite fit.

  Gar tried to look around. There were several other prisoners, each sitting with his back to a bulkhead, hands tied behind him, and each blindfolded with a dirty rag. His captor lit up a cigarette for himself and offered Gar one. Gar shook his head, gingerly. He didn’t want it falling off.

  “Know where you are, Captain?” the Jap asked.

  Gar recalled him saying Shin-something, but that meant nothing to him. Unh-unh, he grunted.

  “You are onboard His Imperial Majesty’s newest aircraft carrier, Shinano!” he said, crying out the last word with great pride. “The largest carrier in the entire world. Was that why your submarine was sent here? To sink Shinano? Can’t be done, you know. Not by a single submarine, anyway. Especially with your puny torpedoes. You did frighten everyone, I’ll give you that. But sink this ship? Never!”

  Gar said nothing.

  “Listen carefully, Captain. There are, of course, things we need to know, but we will not pursue those things here and now. Later, in Tokyo. You are going to Ofuna, our navy’s special information center. Ofuna has, how shall I put this, experts in information retrieval. Especially when it comes to submarine officers, of which we see so few. I have been assigned to escort you to them. This ship is preparing to sail soon, to go from Kure to the Yokosuka naval arsenal for final fitting out. This is also how you will journey to Ofuna. Okay?”

  Gar nodded, wincing at the way his neck bones creaked. Stick to grunting, he thought. The Jap shifted to his version of a British accent. Showing off.

  “Excellent, my good man. Look here, I have a proposal for you. We shall treat each other with respect, as officers of similar rank. We are not friends, of course. We are enemies. But for now, for this voyage, we can have a truce, if you agree. I will not interrogate you or subject you to any more, um, physical stimulation. You will not attempt to escape or to inflict sabotage. In fact, I will give you a tour of this great ship. I want you to understand that Japan is not defeated, that we are much stronger than you Americans think we are. Do you agree to behave? Will you give me your word, then, as an officer?”


  Why the hell not, Gar thought. This was probably some clever Asian ploy to gain his confidence, bind Gar to his protector, and then suck up some intelligence on the sly. Fair enough. That was his job. Gar’s job was to give name, rank, and serial number, and otherwise keep from getting killed if at all possible. The fact that they knew he’d been the captain of the sub that had savaged Kure was probably what was keeping him alive right now. They had to wonder how that had happened. Captains knew things, and there was plenty of time afterward for reprisals.

  “I give you my word,” Gar said, muffling his sibilants through wobbly teeth.

  “What is your name, rank, and serial number, please?”

  Gar recited.

  His captor called in Japanese to two soldiers standing nearby. They came, lifted Gar up, and helped him limp out of the compartment and into a long passageway. Both eyes were working again, sort of, anyway, which was a relief. The deck was not tiled, as was the case with USN ships. It was shiny steel. Gar also noticed that there were no watertight doors where he would have expected hatches, but then he realized they might be well above the waterline, where hatches would be superfluous.

  He was delivered to what looked like an unoccupied officer’s stateroom. It was barely furnished, with a single two-tiered bunk bed, a desk, a chair, a washbasin, and a locker. The room was perhaps 6 feet wide and 10 long. There was a ventilation duct in the overhead, and a telephone handset was mounted on the wall. They sat him down in the chair. Gar put his stinging hands in his lap and waited for whatever was coming next.

  Moments later a steward showed up, or at least that’s how he was dressed—white cotton trousers under a white tunic, wooden sandals on his feet. He was extremely deferential in the presence of the Kempeitai officer, never once raising his eyes off the deck. He proffered a wooden tray with some rice balls, a cup of what Gar assumed was tea, and a small stack of hot, damp white cloths. Gar’s captor indicated for him to put the tray on the desk. The steward then backed out of the stateroom, bowing repeatedly as he went.