The Iceman

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Passing three seventy-five.”

  Somewhere in the distance another pattern of depth charges started going off, but that wasn’t the threat now. If they couldn’t get her leveled off and rising, they’d all be dead in a few minutes.

  He called down to the Sound crew. “Give me a bearing to any destroyers you can still hear,” he said.

  “Can’t hear much over the blow noise, but zero six zero is my best estimate, Captain.”

  “Come to course zero six zero,” he ordered. The boat was still going down, somewhat slower now, but the rudder still worked, and she began a tortuous turn to the right. “How many fish left up front?” he asked.

  “Two torpedoes ready forward,” the TDC operator said.

  “Prepare to fire both. Speed slow. Running depth five feet. Magnetic exploders on.”

  The TDC operator read back the instructions and made his call to the forward torpedo room.

  “Passing four hundred feet,” the OOD said. His voice cracked when he said the number. “Coming to zero six zero.”

  “Tubes five and six, ready,” the TDC operator reported.

  “Fire tubes five and six,” Malachi ordered. Four thousand pounds of metal left the forward torpedo room. The chances of hitting anything were tiny, but getting rid of two tons from the front end might make the difference. He looked at the stern plane indicator. Five degrees of rise, and then he felt the boat start to level off. The noise of the ballast tank blow had subsided, so now they got to listen to the hull, which was not in a comforting mood at 410 feet.

  Then she began to rise, and now the problem was to control the ascent so that the boat didn’t pop up on the surface in front of three angry Jap destroyers. Malachi checked the after planes. Up seven degrees. Time for power.

  “All stop. All ahead full power,” he ordered.

  Somewhere down below a fitting let go with a blasting noise as water blew into the boat, accompanied by a lot of yelling in the control room. He checked the depth gauge: 390. Finally, coming back up. In the far distance he thought he heard more depth charges booming away.

  Then the boat began pitching over again and he had to pull the power off. They waited as the thrust came off, and then she started pointing back up. Malachi realized what was going on: the boat had momentarily achieved neutral buoyancy, so now she was seesawing. He needed to flood one of the ballast tanks aft to make her stand up and quit pitching back down. As he was about to give the order she pitched back down again. He waited, and sure enough, after a painfully long minute, the bow began to rise slowly. The commotion down in the control room seemed to have quieted down.

  “Flood after ballast tank number one now,” he ordered. That would add six thousand pounds of water aft and she should assume an up-angle.

  She did, and then, no longer at neutral buoyancy, began to slide back down into the depths. The depth gauge dropped back off to 410 and seemed to be gathering speed. The steel around them sounded like it was cracking.

  “All ahead full power,” Malachi called down to Control. The after planes were now up to twelve degrees, which would finally give them some attitude control aft. The depth gauge began to unwind again as the boat struggled up out of these dangerous depths. He’d get her up to 250 and then flood something forward. Then he had to see if he’d evaded that four-pack. Three-pack, he reminded himself, with a quick grin.

  He glanced around the conning tower at all the white faces. “Anyone got a cigarette?” he asked. Some jaws dropped and they all just stared at him.

  Two hours later they were still picking up the pieces throughout the boat. Broken light fixtures, equipment cabinets dislodged, electrical connections ripped apart, and an amazing amount of loose paper covered the deck plates. Two watertight doors had jammed shut as the hull deformed at 410 feet, and the after planes’ hydraulics were still inoperative due to broken hydraulic lines. The battery was down to twenty-five percent, and the remaining destroyers were still looking for them, although about two miles away. Malachi got her level at 260 feet and was headed in the away direction from the muted noise of the Jap destroyers. He prayed they didn’t call for air support because he had a suspicion Firefish might be trailing a diesel oil slick from cracks in the fuel tanks. The exec had brought him a damage list, and while none of it was mortal, the sum of all the damage made them operationally ineffective. He was going to have to head for Perth, but he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone until nightfall.

  They’d have to run for it on the surface once it got dark, and they’d also have to keep those radars silent. He was convinced now that the Japs had detected all those surface search transmissions they’d made navigating with some kind of shore station detection locator network. They’d come straight at him, and they’d also known when to start the trapping circle. That meant they’d put up a network of listening stations on Java, separated by enough distance to give them cross-bearings, and therefore a precise location of the submarine emitting the signal. This would be important news in Perth, and maybe even in Pearl.

  “Conn, Control: we’re having trouble maintaining trim; we’ve just lost one of the trim pumps to a short. And there’s a hydrogen gas buildup in forward battery; we’re putting the smoking lamp out.”

  Malachi sighed and mashed his cigarette into his empty coffee mug. It was going to be a long damned day and an even longer trip back to Perth.

  FIFTEEN

  Two days after getting back to Perth Malachi was summoned to the downtown office complex to meet with the new admiral, Rear Admiral Hamner Marsten. They had received a nice reception upon arrival and many congratulations for the rich bag. Repair gangs from the tender were on hand to meet them and then swarm aboard to assess the damage and the scope of repairs. Malachi handed over his captain’s log to Captain Collins, the chief of staff, who greeted him politely if not in a particularly friendly manner.

  The trip back had been one of a series of irritating malfunctions resulting from all the depth charges and probably, in the case of some leaks, their excursion to 410 feet. The major problem was the frozen diving planes aft. He’d sent a diver over the side the night after the attack by the Jap antisubmarine warfare division to see if they could do anything out there at sea, but the shaft housing on both sides was bent completely out of alignment. To get back to Perth as quickly as possible, he’d broken with the transit rules of running surfaced at night and submerged during daylight. He’d run surfaced the entire way, with only one scare when a Kawanishi flying boat jumped them. The ensuing crash dive had turned into an interesting depth-control exercise, and fortunately the Kawanishi had apparently run out of depth charges and could only strafe the disturbance in the water where Firefish had disappeared. As a result, they got back a week earlier than anyone expected.

  Malachi was still pretty tired after all the excitement, but he’d remained onboard to personally supervise the initial repair work. Last night he’d finally gone to the hotel, had a quiet beer with the other COs who were in port, and his first really good night’s sleep in weeks. The other skippers had been full of questions and were especially concerned about the possibility that the Japs could detect their radars. When he told them about going down to 410 feet a hush came over the table. When he told them he’d taken Firefish down to 400 feet on his second day aboard, they looked at him as if he was nuts.

  “Daggerfish went down to five hundred feet and survived,” he reminded them. “She’s the same class as Firefish. Now, I wouldn’t want to linger for a long lunch at that depth, but I needed to know if four hundred was a tactical option.”

  “The admiral will see you now, Captain Stormes,” the chief yeoman announced and opened the door to the inner office.

  Hamner Marsten was a handsome man and, apparently, fully aware of it. His uniform was tailor-made, his hair styled, and he shook hands with Malachi with an entirely superior expression on his face. “Captain Stormes, great to meet you and congratulations on an outstanding patrol,” he said. “Please have a seat and welcom
e home.”

  Captain Collins was also present, sitting in an armchair to one side of the admiral’s desk. Malachi noticed that the office looked different from the last time he’d been there. There were now lots of pictures on the walls—most of them featuring Hamner Marsten.

  “Another heavy cruiser, two destroyers, and three oil tankers—that’s nearly forty thousand tons. Even better, they’re all confirmed.”

  “I wasn’t sure the tankers actually sank,” Malachi said. “But they were certainly never going to carry oil again.”

  “The Japanese sank them for us,” Collins said. “A destroyer torpedoed all three because they were derelicts.”

  “And you attacked on the surface with your five-inch gun?” the admiral asked, a note of incredulity in his voice. “What led you to try that?”

  “They were basically unescorted,” Malachi said. “We’d seen their escorts waiting farther out of the Lombok, and it looked like the convoy, which was just a gaggle at that point, was headed for a rendezvous before proceeding on to wherever they were headed. We used incendiary shells. It didn’t take many.”

  “Amazing,” the admiral said.

  “If I may, Admiral: how do we know those attacks qualify as ‘confirmed’?”

  “That’s one of the reasons for this meeting, Captain. To brief you about something called Ultra.”

  “This is probably the most secret thing you will ever know, Captain Stormes,” Captain Collins said. “Naval Intelligence in Pearl has broken the Japanese naval codes.”

  “Wow,” Malachi said.

  “Wow, indeed, Captain,” the admiral said. “That’s how Midway happened. We knew where they were going, and when. And, as the chief of staff said, this is a secret that qualifies for any and all measures to keep. The next time you go out, Firefish will from time to time receive messages that only you may read. Not even the officer who breaks the encoded message can read it. He will sit on one side of the decoder machine and you will read the tape as it comes out and then destroy it, right there and then. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “These messages will be targeting messages. A carrier formation is expected to be at a certain place on a certain date. You be there, too. That kind of thing.”

  “That accurate?”

  “The Japanese are rigid adherents to schedules,” Collins said. “Once the fleet command issues an order, they stick to it like glue.”

  “Okay,” the admiral said. “Now, when you went back in to finish off that cruiser, you used the magnetic exploders. Tell me all about that, if you please. And then I’m going to want to hear all about your going down to four hundred feet.”

  Malachi explained what he’d done with the two magnetic exploder torpedoes, as a test to see if he could make them work. The admiral listened intently but without comment. Then he related the “adventure” of going a hundred feet below test depth because of the jammed plane problem. The admiral had a question.

  “I’ve heard that on your first week as CO of Firefish you took the boat to four hundred feet on purpose. Is that true?”

  “Yes, sir, it is. I’d been told in Pearl that Daggerfish went to five hundred feet after a heavy depth-charging, but recovered. I wanted to know if four hundred was a tactical option if it was ever necessary.”

  “That’s really deep, Captain,” the admiral said. “How was it at that depth?”

  “Noisy, sir,” Malachi said. “Lots of complaining from the hull and we found a few imperfect welds in the process. But the depth charges were going off two hundred feet above us, if not more. That was comforting.”

  “Is it possible that some of your damage was caused by extreme overpressure on the hull and its fittings?”

  “I don’t think so, Admiral. The Japs sent out a specialist team of four destroyers. They set up a trapping circle and bombed the hell out of us. Their charges were being set deeper than the ‘traditional’ one hundred fifty feet, too. And they knew right where to find us. I think that was our fault—we’d been using our surface search radar a lot to confirm our position off Surabaya by getting radar bearings to known landmarks.”

  “You think they can detect it, then.”

  “Yes, sir, unless they’re reading our radio traffic like we’re reading theirs.”

  “That’s not happening,” the admiral said. “But you might be interested to know that a group of electronics wizards back in Pearl made a prototype receiver that could present a bearing to the antenna emitting a radar signal, so I’m thinking you’re right on this one. I’m forwarding your report on to SubPac. Now, back to the magnetic exploder.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The chief of staff here tells me that skippers here have been deactivating that feature on their torpedoes. Have you ever done that?”

  “Yes, sir, I have. I’m relatively new to the Perth squadron, but from what I hear, everybody has. The thinking is that they’re running too deep, which is the Mark fourteen torpedo’s fault, not the exploder. The second issue is the magnetic setting—this part of the world is not Newport, Rhode Island.”

  “Then why did your two fish work?”

  “Because, I think, I had a stationary target—a disabled heavy cruiser. Ten, twelve thousand tons of steel, deep in the water after the first hits. I made a wild-ass guess at how deep she was after all the flooding, and then set the fish to run about three to six feet under her keel, assuming the Mark fourteen is running ten to twelve feet deeper than set. Both went off and she broke in half.”

  “Did you do anything else different?”

  “Yes, sir. I make it a practice to, wherever possible, set up my attack so that the fish doesn’t have to make any turns when it leaves the tube. That way you probably will never have a circular run. With that cruiser I maneuvered the boat until I had her physically aligned with the firing bearing. I could do that because the target was stationary.”

  The admiral sat back in his chair. “That’s very interesting, indeed. You still think the magnetic exploder is a bad idea?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. Combined with the problems with the Mark fourteen itself, it’s too dangerous to use the magnetic exploders. On the other hand, even the contact exploders are having problems. I had one on this patrol that hit and bounced off. Personally, I think it has to do with the initiator pin—it’s the same pin we used on the Mark ten, but this fish goes much faster. Much bigger impact.”

  “You seem to be a student of our torpedoes, Captain. Did you know that, when I was a captain, I was the manager of the Navy’s torpedo program at BuOrd for four years?”

  The admiral had a gotcha expression on his face when he said that. Malachi didn’t care for that expression. “I was assigned as a mechanical engineer at Newport for three years,” he said. “I’m intimately familiar with the Mark fourteen’s development—and testing. Or should I say, the lack thereof.”

  The admiral’s face darkened. He looked at the chief of staff, who had an I-told-you-so expression on his face. Malachi realized he’d walked into a little trap.

  “Explain that remark,” the admiral said.

  “Only two test shots with the magnetic exploder were ever done against a ship-sized target, and that was only an anchored submarine.”

  “And the Mark fourteen torpedo sank that submarine.”

  “Two shots—first one failed, second one worked. That’s a failure rate of fifty percent. By any engineering standards, that torpedo was not ready for deployment.”

  The admiral sat silent for a long moment, looking down at his desk. “You and I, Captain, are not going to get along,” he said, “not with that attitude.”

  “Admiral, I’ve answered all your questions candidly. You asked me to explain my remark about the lack of testing on the Mark fourteen. I wasn’t being impertinent. I’m new to this command, but listening to the more experienced skippers in Pearl on my way out here, the universal view is that that torpedo is not reliable, and since it leaves a big-ass wake pointing right back at the boat t
hat shot it, it’s downright dangerous. If you want me to tell you what you want to hear, I’ll be happy to oblige.”

  “Now that is impertinence, Commander Stormes,” the chief of staff said.

  Commander is it, Malachi thought. Not captain anymore. He waited for the admiral to say something, but he was busy looking through a stack of papers on his desk. Then he found what he was looking for.

  “Are you aware, Captain, that we face a critical shortage of torpedoes out here?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Was it absolutely necessary for you to throw away two perfectly good torpedoes to get out of your little excursion to four hundred feet?”

  “I thought so at the time, Admiral. I thought saving the boat and its crew was worth more than two torpedoes. And it worked.”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you, Captain,” the admiral snapped.

  Malachi said nothing.

  The admiral leaned forward and pointed his finger at Malachi. “I think you’re letting your successes out there on patrol turn your head, young man. You think you’re some kind of hot shit. But there are other skippers out here who are also successful at sinking ships, and they don’t go taking the chances you’ve been taking. Let me put it this way: one more flagrant deviation from approved policies, tactics, or operating procedures and I will relieve you. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Malachi said, with as little emotion as possible. There were lots of things he wanted to say, with “I quit” being one of them, but he held his tongue.

  “You may go,” the admiral said, turning his chair around to look out the windows of his office, as if no longer wanting to look at Malachi. The chief of staff gave Malachi a supercilious sneer on his way out.

  SIXTEEN

  That night at the hotel Malachi badly wanted something he almost never wanted: a glass of Kentucky bourbon whiskey. He knew better than to indulge, but he wanted it nonetheless.