The Iceman

by P. T. Deutermann

  They both smiled. “I appreciate that, Cap’n,” the COB said. “I’ll do what I can to make everybody understand what we’re out here for.”

  “And I’ll think about ways I can do the same, although I’m not exactly a chatterbox. But I’ll try.”

  The COB got up to leave. “You know what did it, before this deal tonight?”

  “Nope.”

  “The smell of cigarette smoke coming down the conning tower trunk when we were headed in for an attack. Everybody’s grommet straining to the max and the skipper’s up there, taking time out for a smoke. Thanks for listening, sir.”

  Malachi nodded and then called the conning tower to see where they were in relation to the convoy. The exec said he’d be right down.

  Malachi poured out the remains of his coffee and lit up another cigarette. Gotta stop these one day, he thought. He remembered his father telling him that the only good thing about lung cancer was that it killed you much quicker than black lung did.

  His father. George Mallory Stormes. Big man … really big man. Big drunk, too. Whenever he was part of a face crew, it was understood by the crew that Big George was in charge. Malachi closed his eyes for a moment, looking for the image of that bloody sixteen-pound hammer.

  The exec came into the wardroom and plopped down into a chair. “You look beat, there, XO,” Malachi said.

  The exec nodded. “I am. Gotta learn to pace myself better.”

  “So where are we?”

  “The convoy’s well astern. We can’t hear anything back there. Nobody’s headed our way actively pinging. I think we’re clear.”

  “Okay, come to periscope depth, but linger for five minutes at one fifty. Let Sound do a passive search above that layer. If it’s quiet, I want to get a radar sweep, and then surface if we can. Turn back northwest, run at twelve knots so we don’t make much wake, recharge as much as we can, and go back down when it’s full daylight and hopefully before the Kawanishi flying boats come out.”

  “So we’re not going to pursue the convoy, then?”

  “No, I’ve decided that we’ll go through the Straits as we’ve been ordered and take up a patrol area in the Java Sea. I need to study the charts some more, but I’m thinking northeast of Surabaya. See if we can catch some Singapore-bound traffic. In the meantime, we’ll go back down tonight and begin creeping back toward the Straits. Let everyone get some sack time, especially if they’re as tired as you look to be.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the exec said.

  “One more thing, XO.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The COB came to see me. Says the crew’s getting scared. I need you to think of a way I can help deal with that. I’m not gonna change the way we operate. If anything, we’re going to explore some even more unusual tactics. But I need the crew to understand that some of this wild shit is not just me. It’s what the war requires if we’re going to beat these bastards all the way back to Japan, and then burn them alive in their little paper houses. They also need to understand that it’s going to take three, maybe four years to do it. The more ships we sink, the quicker this horror will be over, understand?”

  The exec nodded his head. “It should have been me telling you that,” he said. “That people are getting scared.”

  “You’d have a career to lose if I turned on you for saying that, which I would never do, by the way. The COB doesn’t. Truth is, I need the both of you to talk to me about the people side of things. It’s not in my nature to care, and that’s my deficiency. There’s history behind that which I can’t share with any of you. So, go see if we can come back up and get some air in the boat and some amps in the can.”

  They surfaced thirty minutes later, after a careful air and surface search radar sweep. They had maybe an hour of darkness left. After that, the Japs would probably dispatch some Kawanishi flying boats out to the area to see if they could find and kill the submarine who’d hurt them badly last night. The ops officer got off an attack report to Perth, claiming the three tankers and setting out their intentions to move into the Java Sea. The boat filled with the smell of frying chicken as the cooks took the opportunity to cook while the boat was on the surface and able to vent the fumes. At dawn nautical twilight they went back down and continued their creep toward the entrance to the Lombok Strait.

  Malachi met with the navigator and the operations officer once they were safely down and out of reach of the deadly flying boats. They studied the charts for Lombok and the areas around Surabaya. Malachi decided to go through the Straits submerged, using the surface search radar to navigate. He had a suspicion that the Japs would have patrol boats out after the attacks of the previous night. The Straits transit would take three hours at 8 knots, after which they’d surface on the other side to recharge until daylight drove them back down. Surabaya was an important Japanese base now because of the captured Dutch oil refineries, so he expected that there would be air assets and ships sanitizing the local operating areas.

  The transit took longer than expected due to the strong current running through the Straits. They got only two and a half hours of recharging time on the other side before an air search radar contact drove them down. There was a sharp seven-degree layer at 140 feet, so they leveled off at 170 for the day, relatively safe from prying sonars. There’d been no reaction from Perth to their attack summary, but that wasn’t unusual, given the scope of message traffic moving over the fleet broadcast system. Malachi directed the navigator to position the boat at the top of the channel between east Java and the island of Madura, through which any traffic for Singapore and points north would move. He didn’t intend to go into that channel because he feared mines.

  They surfaced after nightfall twelve miles northeast of the port of Surabaya. The battery was down to thirty percent after the hard push through Lombok, so the first order of business was to get back to a full charge. A few quick radar sweeps showed nothing within twelve miles of the boat, so Malachi had the navigator put them on the great circle track from Surabaya to Singapore. They would creep along that track, going back and forth so as to not get too far away from the Japanese base.

  The fleet broadcast had a message from ComSubPac himself, congratulating them on their destruction of three tankers using the five-inch gun. One hour later another message came in from Perth, congratulating them on sinking three tankers but ordering them not to do that again. Malachi thought about framing the two messages side by side in the wardroom. Put them up on the mess decks so the crew could see what he had to deal with. Then he had an idea. He called for the ops officer.

  “I want to build a read-board from the fleet broadcast,” he told Lieutenant Caldwell. “Nothing that’s super-secret, but war news. Jap ships reported sunk, but American losses, too. Anything on the war on the other side—in Europe. I want that put on the mess decks so anyone can read it.”

  “That’ll make for pretty dismal reading right now, Captain,” Caldwell said. “Between the Nazi U-boats and the Jap armies, things aren’t going very well for the good guys.”

  “So be it,” Malachi said. “I want people to understand what we’re up against and how important it is that we take chances out here.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Should I run it through the exec before posting it?”

  “Yes, and make a copy for the wardroom if you can, too.”

  “Uh, sir, there’s no way to make a copy of the broadcast. One of the radiomen would have to type the whole thing.”

  “Okay, then put it together, leave it in the wardroom for a day, and then post it on the mess decks. Put up a new one every three days if we receive enough interesting dope.”

  They stayed on the surface all night and encountered absolutely nothing. At dawn they went back down with a full battery and nothing to do. This pattern continued for the next two nights. No contacts, not even local fishermen. It was as if the Japs knew they were out there and were using a different route, the one from the Lombok Straits, to get in and out of Surabaya. Malachi toyed with
the idea of going back into the Straits to see, but his orders were to patrol in the Java Sea, and that’s what they were going to do.

  The chief engineer reported that they had another ten days’ worth of fuel, after which they needed to go back to Perth. The supply officer came up with the same estimate of stay time at sea. Malachi got the impression they were lobbying for a return to Perth. They’d bagged a cruiser, a destroyer, and three tankers, which was a spectacular patrol by Perth standards. Malachi simply nodded, noting that they still had some torpedoes left.

  As dawn crept in on the third night on station, they took radar bearings on known land points to get a solid navigation fix just before submerging for the day. The protective layer had dissipated by now, so he ordered the boat down to 250 feet. One hour after they submerged, Sound reported echo ranging approaching from the direction of the Surabaya base.

  “Multiple sonars in wide search mode,” Sound reported. “Steady bearing, increasing Doppler.”

  Malachi went to the conning tower, where the attack team had already assembled. They had begun a plot on the approaching destroyers. Since all they had were passive bearings, the plot did not display a range to the incoming ships, only a wide cone of where they might be.

  “It’s almost like they know where we are,” Malachi observed. He ordered the boat onto a course that would get them away from their last position on the surface but which would not present a full beam aspect to all those probing sound waves.

  For the next ten minutes the pinging noises grew in amplitude, but then the bearing began to drift behind them. Malachi ordered the boat rigged for depth-charging and silent running, with the exception of ventilation. He slowed to 4 knots.

  “Conn, Sound: I can’t figure out what they’re doing. They’ve slowed way down, and only one is pinging.”

  Malachi looked at the plot, which showed the fan of bearing lines pointing back toward Surabaya. With only one tin can pinging, they no longer had bearing information on the other three. Malachi ordered the bitchbox turned off and all comms to be done on sound-powered phones.

  He called Sound. “Were all those sonars on the same frequency?” he asked.

  “Pretty much, Captain. They may have shut down because they were interfering with each other.”

  Or, Malachi thought, they left one guy pinging and the other three listening for any returns on that same frequency. If so, this was a professional antisubmarine division. “Make your depth three hundred feet,” he ordered.

  “Conn, Sound: high-speed screwbeats approaching from zero one zero, up-Doppler, and I think I hear depth charges going in.”

  Before Malachi could answer the explosions began, punishing blasts that shook the entire boat and made people grab for a handhold. The blasts were above them and off to port, but books and charts flew off their tables.

  “Passing two seventy feet,” the OOD reported, as more thunderclaps erupted in the sea, still above them. Since the war had begun, the Japanese always set their charges for 150 feet. That certainly wasn’t the case now.

  “Conn, Sound: new screwbeats, bearing zero nine five, up-Doppler, steady bearing.”

  Time to turn, Malachi thought. “Come left with standard rudder,” he ordered.

  “Course, sir?”

  “Just keep that rudder on for now.”

  “Passing three hundred, leveling off,” the diving officer reported. “Permission to pump negative.”

  “Do not pump anything,” Malachi ordered, glancing at the depth gauge—310. “Too much noise. Use your planes to get back to ordered depth. Helmsman, shift your rudder to right standard.”

  Another pattern of depth charges began going off, a little less powerful this time as the additional fifty feet dissipated some of their explosive energy, but still terrifying with their noise and lethal shock waves.

  “Conn, Sound: number three is coming in now. They’re definitely on us.”

  “No shit,” Malachi muttered. Four destroyers, probably running a thousand-yard trapping circle, with one escort at a time turning into the circle to lay down a pattern on the hapless sub. “Shift your rudder,” he ordered again.

  He looked around at the white faces in the control room. So far the Japs were setting their charges for about 200 feet. Lots of noise and shock waves, but at 300 feet—.

  Another series of blasts erupted outside, these much closer, close enough to throw the two plotters right off their feet and scatter even more gear onto the deck plates. The hull hummed in protest, and now they could hear the steel complaining. It was one thing to subject the hull to the pressure of 300 feet; it was another thing altogether to add to that the blast effect of a 500-pound depth bomb.

  “Conn, Maneuvering: we have some leaks now. Can we come up in depth?”

  “Only once,” Malachi said.

  “Conn, Sound: number four is coming in.”

  “Steady as you go, helmsman. Maneuvering: give me full power.”

  The hull vibrated at the sudden application of full battery power. Then they clearly heard the click of a hydrostatic fuze firing, followed by a nasty explosion just behind them followed by seven more in two-second intervals, ear-bruising blasts followed by the sounds of breaking glass down in the control room. Malachi felt the boat lurch up, and then settle into a nose-down attitude. The conning tower filled with white dust and the lights blinked. The hatch above them began a fine spray of seawater onto the ladder.

  “Conn, Maneuvering: the after planes are not responding. Stuck at neutral.”

  “Better than stuck at down twenty,” Malachi responded. This wasn’t working, he thought. Okay, enough of this shit. “XO, open all outer doors, fore and aft. Make ready all tubes. Run depth five feet. Speed high. Contact exploders.”

  “Conn, Sound: another one’s inbound, bearing one eight five.”

  “Conn; aye. Control: make your depth sixty feet. Blow negative. XO, set the torpedo course on manual control, and then boresight them. I intend to come up, find a tin can, and shoot straight at him. Then I’m going to find another one and shoot straight at him. Got it?”

  “Yessir,” the exec said, his face betraying the realization of how desperate the situation had become. He huddled with the TDC crew to make the settings.

  With only one set of planes Firefish made an awkward ascent to periscope depth, helped along by the electric motors giving it their all.

  “Slow to four knots,” Malachi ordered. “Stand by all forward tubes.”

  When the depth gauge read 80 feet and the pit log showed 4 knots, Malachi raised the scope. He could feel the periscope assembly vibrating at this unusual speed, but he was pressed for time. Suddenly the scope broke the surface. He was staring at the back end of a of Kaba-class destroyer, with her distinctive tall mast all the way aft. He took a snap bearing, ordered the boat to steer that course, waited for the lineup, and fired a single fish as soon as she settled on that course. He estimated the range to be 800 yards, with the destroyer going away at 15 knots.

  “Down scope,” he ordered. “Give me full power again, and right ten degrees rudder.”

  The boat surged ahead and then leaned into the turn. A thunderous explosion shook the boat back on her port quarter, followed quickly by several more as the destroyer’s depth-charge racks went up. After one minute, he slowed back down for another observation. He swung the scope through a 360-degree arc, knocking a couple of officers aside as he scrambled around the deck plates. He caught a quick glimpse of his first target, which was obscured by a large fire. Another destroyer was turning outbound. Then he settled on the third tin can, which was headed right for them.

  “Bearing, zero five zero,” he shouted. “Come to zero five zero. Angle on the bow is zero zero zero. Down the throat. Stand by tubes two and three.”

  He stared at the approaching destroyer, bow on with a magnificent bone in her teeth as she accelerated to ram them. She was no more than a 700 yards away. “Fire two!” he yelled. “Fire three! Right full rudder, make your depth two h
undred feet. Flood negative to the mark.”

  “Captain, we have no stern planes!” the exec shouted as the torpedoes punched out into the sea. Flooding the negative tank meant they’d have a runaway dive on their hands, with only the forward planes to force the nose up once they started down.

  “Do what I say, goddammit,” he roared. “Tell maneuvering to hand crank the after planes to twenty degrees dive. Set the forward planes at neutral.”

  Instead of a sharp blast of a torpedo warhead they heard a loud clang ten seconds later, which meant one of the fish had hit but did not explode. The other was probably on its way to Surabaya. Shit! The Jap skipper had kept his cool and threaded between the two approaching wakes.

  They could now clearly hear the approaching destroyer’s propellers. He was close to being right on top of them and his sonar was pinging in the narrow beam, attack rate. Malachi swore and then concentrated on recovering from the dive. They actually heard the first depth charges hitting the water as the tin can passed overhead. The depth gauge read 180. He could feel the boat gathering speed with that lead weight in her belly, and then the depth charges started going off. Above them. Way above them. The Jap skipper must have set them to get a boat still at periscope depth, thank God, but the noise was still terrifying. The depth gauge was passing 250 and the boat was not responding to the planes.

  “Blow negative, blow all forward ballast tanks,” he ordered. “All engines stop. All back full emergency.”

  “Passing three hundred feet.”

  He could feel the screws biting in as Maneuvering reversed the electric motors, not waiting for the usual slow-to-stop and then reverse procedure. The entire back end of the boat began to shudder amid the noise of compressed air blasting the water out of the ballast tanks. Still no change in the dive angle.

  “Passing three fifty.”

  Malachi glanced at the plane indicators. Forward was at rise twenty; the after planes had barely moved, but they were up slightly on a rise. Four men were slavishly putting everything they had onto a crankshaft back aft, but for every twenty turns they got only one degree of movement.