He sat by himself in the rooftop bar, nursing his customary single beer and thinking about his unpleasant séance with the new admiral. He should have listened to Jay Carney, who’d told him to say nothing and then go do what you want once you get to sea. In his tenure as a skipper, he’d destroyed three German U-boats, two imperial Japanese Navy heavy cruisers, a clutch of destroyers, and four marus. By some accounts he was the third-highest scoring skipper in the Pacific submarine force since the war began, if measured in sheer tonnage sent to the bottom.
And yet his boss was mad at him, the boss’s chief of staff was actively trying to get rid of him, and his crew was apparently afraid of him. His one-year-old boat was beat up; her hull possibly deformed by going down below test depth. Some of the other skippers, their ears ever attuned to the waterfront jungle drums, had been politely avoiding him after his testy meeting with the admiral.
“Penny for your thoughts?” a pleasant female voice asked, her words framed by just a hint of perfume as she walked up to his corner table. He stood up. Kensie was dressed in khaki slacks, a long-sleeved white blouse, and her hairdo was different. She looked demure and delicious at the same time.
“They’re not worth even that much tonight,” he said, surprised that he was glad to see her. “But I’d love it if you’d join me, Kensie.”
“Actually,” she said, “why don’t you join me. It’s my thirty-ninth birthday, and I’ve booked a table at Dannigan’s. You’ll like it.”
“Absolutely,” he said, finishing up his beer and still wanting a whiskey.
She drove a dusty Land Rover–type vehicle that the Aussies called a Ute, which showed both its age and its full-time occupation as a farm vehicle. Dannigan’s was a combination Irish pub and steakhouse. The parking lot was full, always a good sign in Malachi’s opinion. Inside, the place was noisy, filled with Aussies doing what they do best. The bar and dance floor area was on one side; the dining room on the other, but there was a steady flow of people moving from one room to the other. A harried hostess took them to a table for four back in one corner, next to a window that overlooked a large pond. The table was raised one step up from the rest of the dining area, and was obviously reserved for special customers.
“Others coming?” he asked, still a little startled by the amount of noise in the room.
“You’ll see,” she said. She snagged a passing waiter and ordered a whiskey for herself and a beer for Malachi. He didn’t fight it, rationalizing that a second beer was better than a double Bourbon, which probably didn’t exist on this side of the world anyway.
The drinks came quickly. Kensie offered him a salud and then began to scan the room. Almost immediately two men showed up at their table and plopped down in the two extra chairs. Both were in their late thirties and well ahead on their drinking for the evening. Kensie introduced them as two of the doctors with whom she worked in the hospital. Both politely shook hands and then tried to get Kensie to join them in the bar. She demurred, but when someone announced that it was her birthday, she was whisked away and onto the dance floor with about five men claiming her. The music was coming from one of those new Victrola’s, which could stack and automatically play up to six LP records. The current stack was mostly fast jazz.
Malachi just sat back and watched the fun. She was being a good sport about it all, and not turning down a sip from many of the drinks pointed her way. It went on like that for another thirty minutes, with new table-hopping visitors arriving about every five minutes asking where was the birthday girl. He just pointed out to the happy mob on the dance floor. Malachi was a bit taken aback by how many people Kensie seemed to know, or who purported to know her. She finally saw him consulting a menu and broke it off, coming back to the table with a flushed face and totally out of breath. She grabbed his half-full beer glass and finished it in one big gulp.
“It’s official,” she burst out when she caught her breath. “I am too old for that anymore.”
“You looked like you were having fun out there,” he said.
“Oh, I was, in between fending off the gropers, humpers, and bumpers. But then I remembered I had a guest, and then it took some advanced shimmy-shimmy to get away.”
He grinned at her. One year from being forty, and tonight was her first realization that middle age was looming. “I take it you’re a regular here,” he observed while looking over the menu.
“God, yes,” she said. “Our ranch provides the beef and my father’s company owns the restaurant. I recommend the filet—the big one. Get it rare.”
“I’ll try anything once,” he said. “All our meat on the boat has been frozen since the first world war, I think.”
They ordered and Kensie signaled for a second whiskey. Malachi ordered a second beer to replace the one Kensie had polished off. He knew if he went too fast he’d eventually join her on the whiskey train and that that might not end well. Even so, Aussie beer was a lot more authoritative than American, and he could already feel it.
“So what’s happened that your thoughts are so depressing?” she asked. Her lovely eyes were brightened by the whiskey and the exertions on the dance floor, and for a moment he just stared at her.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head. “You’re so pretty, that’s what,” he replied. “Lost my train of thought, I guess.”
She grinned. “Well, thank you, kind sir. Now, out with it.”
He told her about his meeting with the new Big Boss, having to speak louder than usual over all the noise in the dining room. The bar was getting even rowdier. He left out the operational details about the sinkings, saying only that their patrol had been successful by anyone’s measure. He couldn’t say anything about the torpedo problem, either, so he attributed it all to a personality conflict, ending with the old truism about Navy personality conflicts: the boss had a personality; the subordinate had a conflict.
She laughed out loud. He thought that nearby diners probably assumed he’d just told a dirty joke. “If the patrol was successful,” she said, “and you badly hurt the Yellow Peril, then what’s his problem?”
“I’m not sufficiently … respectful, I suppose,” he said. “Someone asks me a question—talking Navy business, now—I’ll answer it, straight up, whether that’s in my best interests or not. Sometimes it’s not what the boss wants to hear.”
“Believe it or not, we doctors face the same problem from time to time,” she said. “But in medicine we have one absolute metric that’s bloody hard to argue with.”
“What’s that?”
“The patient dies. Or doesn’t.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. In that vein, we submariners have a similar metric: we either come back or we don’t.”
She blinked at that, but then the steaks arrived and they tucked in. Australian beef was different from American beef, but wonderful when compared to what came out of those frozen boxes marked “beef, miscellaneous cuts, USDA utility grade” that they’d been getting from the tender when they replenished. The Pearl boats, being only 2,500 miles from the US mainland, apparently fared much better than the exiles out in Australia.
They fell to and enjoyed the food, which Kensie now enriched with a glass of Australian red wine. As they were finishing up, an older man approached their table with a glass of whiskey in hand. He was in his sixties, almost six feet, round-faced with a red tinge to his complexion, eyes that almost glared, and a full head of gray hair. He was powerfully built and exuded an air of absolute authority. Kensie looked up.
“Oh, hi, Dad,” she said. “This is Captain Malachi Stormes.”
The big man extended a meaty paw. “Lambert Richmond,” he announced in a booming voice. “Kensie told us about meeting you, Captain. Welcome to western Australia.”
“Thank you, sir,” Malachi said. He’d begun to stand up but her father had stopped him. “We Americans are really delighted to be here.”
“So I’ve noticed,” Richmond said, with a sly smile. “Giving all the local b
lokes a run for their money. And their Sheilas. Good on you, I say. Kensie, dear, why don’t you bring the captain out to the station for a better view of western Aussie hospitality. Captain, do you ride, sir?”
Malachi grinned and shook his head. “Rode a mule once, and only once. I come from Kentucky coal country, Mr. Richmond. I rode trains, coal cars, and coal-skips growing up.”
“We have plenty of accommodating horses at the station,” Kensie interjected. “We’ll just find him a nice husband-horse.”
Malachi saw a flare of alarm in Lambert’s eyes at her use of the word “husband”; then he saw her impish grin. Oh, boy, he thought; Kensie teasing the patriarch.
“I’ll give it a try,” Malachi offered, bravely.
“We have lots of vehicles, of course,” Lambert said. “It’s just that horses kick up much less dust. Gives you time to really see things out there in the bush.”
“I’ll sort it, Dad,” Kensie said. “We’d both have to check our schedules.”
“Good, oh,” Lambert declared. He tipped his glass in their direction and then melted back into the cigarette smoke and the noise. Malachi and Kensie wandered out onto one of the screened porches overlooking the pond, or billabong as she called it. Normally he would have had a cigarette, but the rooms inside had made him feel like he’d already had an entire pack. They found a table in the shadows, lit only by the lights from the bar room, and sat down.
“Was your dad serious about my coming out to the station for a few days?” he asked.
She snorted. “If he wasn’t, I am. The problem is getting enough time away to make it worthwhile. The Australian Navy is getting ever more involved in the Solomons campaign, which means our caseload is increasing monthly. I’m one of just six surgeons; the other half of the staff went into the field with MacArthur’s blokes.”
“I’m content to see you when we both can manage it, Kensie,” he said. “You’re an absolute delight to be with.”
At that moment, the record player fired up an American band whose music was meant for slow dancing. She cocked her head for a moment, as if to make sure, and then asked him to dance. They joined one other couple who were barely swaying to the music in an open corner of the porch. She moved her body into contact with his, and suddenly he wasn’t tired or depressed anymore. This was different from their time together the other night. This was a time for something much better than that.
“Back to the hotel?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t drive,” she said. “Well, I can, but…”
“I can,” he said.
The trip back to the hotel turned out to be pretty funny, as Malachi confronted the Australian rules for driving on absolutely the wrong side of the road, and from absolutely the wrong side of the front seat. Kensie’s giggling didn’t help. When they were finally stopped by a Perth city police car, Kensie had to bail them out by declaring that it was her car, but she was too drunk to drive and that the Yank here, who didn’t drink, was having trouble with the new driving situation. The cop just shook his head and waved them on.
Once in the hotel room she slipped into the bathroom ahead of him. He sat down on the bed he usually slept in, waiting his turn to pump bilges after two point two beers. She came out wearing nothing but her panties and motioned that the bathroom was all his. He went in, took care of business, hung all his clothes on the bathroom door, and came back out.
When he came out she was sitting up in “his” bed with the covers folded down to her waist. The overhead light was off, but the bedside table light was still on, casting a yellow light over her bare breasts and an expression on her face that clearly said: hurry up.
He did.
SEVENTEEN
The following morning the admiral called a skippers’ meeting aboard the tender. There were six boats in port now, which made for a rather slim audience, and Malachi noticed that the staff officers outnumbered the commanding officers. The admiral reviewed several policy and matériel issues, shared some strategic planning news from Pearl, and then asked for questions or matters of interest from the COs. To Malachi’s surprise, none of them had anything to ask the admiral. He himself had some pointed questions but decided that this might be a good time to just keep quiet.
“Nobody has anything at all?” the admiral asked.
Jay Carney, skipper of Grayback, finally raised his hand. “Admiral, is there any progress being made on improving the Mark fourteen’s performance? Is BuOrd saying, or doing, anything?”
The admiral frowned. “The Bureau of Ordnance maintains that there’s nothing wrong with the torpedoes and that operational failures are attributable to poor fire-control solutions or other operational errors. As a matter of fact, Firefish just sank a damaged heavy cruiser using magnetic exploders on two torpedoes, so it can be done.”
“Anything special about the attack geometry?” another CO asked, looking over at Malachi, who suddenly realized that this line of questioning had some basis in his hotel bar talk with the other skippers.
“Captain Stormes?” the admiral said.
Malachi related the sequence and the setup, emphasizing that he’d tried to run the fish within only a few feet of the flooding cruiser’s hull.
“How’d you know what depth to set?” the CO asked.
“I assumed they’re running deep—maybe as much as ten to twelve feet deep. So I calculated the cruiser’s normal draft, added ten feet because he was down by the bow, and set the running depth three feet below that. Truth be told, I wanted to know if the magnetic exploder would work if it came much closer to the target. It happened to work out, but I realize now that I can’t with any certainty say which exploder did him in. Even worse, when I examined both exploder mechanisms, I couldn’t see a way to disable the contact exploder in order to test the magnetic on its own.”
The admiral perked up at that. “Are you saying, Captain, that you opened up a Mark fourteen and fiddled with the exploder circuits?”
“I did open one up, yes, Admiral. But I didn’t ‘fiddle’ with anything. I was looking for a way to change the magnetic reference level to fit with where we are operating. I concluded that can’t be done on the boat.”
The admiral just stared at him. “You are telling me you opened up the guidance section of a warhead torpedo, in the boat, out at sea?” he said, his voice rising with every word.
Malachi knew he was deep in the muck, so, in for a penny, in for a pound, as the Brits used to tell him. “Admiral, I can disassemble a Mark fourteen torpedo’s guidance system right down to its smallest components and put it back together, all in about an hour. Where I do that doesn’t much matter, although I’d prefer the final assembly building at Newport to Firefish’s forward torpedo room. It’s just a machine. It has defects. We need to address those defects, and the BuOrd response that it’s all the operators’ fault is bureaucratic, CYA bullshit. So if they’re not gonna fix it, then the fleet’ll have to.”
The admiral looked around at the other skippers, who themselves looked like they wished they could just execute a nice little dive right about then. “Have any of the rest of you ever opened up a fish at sea? I’m not talking routining, I mean the guidance and arming section?”
Jay Carney said yes, that he’d opened the guidance section on all of his torpedoes once at sea in order to disable the magnetic exploders. Now the admiral looked like he was about to give birth.
“Admiral,” Malachi interjected. “Routining the fish is something we do all the time at sea. And before you do anything, you open a port on the warhead and put the dowel in—I’m sure you remember, the wooden dowel that goes all the way through the firing train so that nothing, not even a static spark from a wrench, can fire the warhead? Then we check the fish out.”
“All in order to disable a part of the guidance system that fires the goddamned warhead?”
“It doesn’t work, Admiral,” Jay Carney said. “Under real-world, tactical situations, the fucking thing doesn’t work. And I believe it’s causing the
prematures, because there’s no way the contact exploder can cause a premature.”
The admiral took a deep breath and then started to calm down. “I’d heard rumors to that effect,” he admitted. “Skippers deactivating the magnetic exploders. I just didn’t believe them. But my predecessor didn’t say anything about that.” He turned to the chief of staff. “Did you know?”
Collins squirmed in his seat. “Um, I’d heard rumors, too, Admiral. But the only one who flat out told me he’d done it was Commander Stormes. Admiral Britten had made it clear that he wanted the magnetics to be used. He wanted to relieve Commander Stormes, but Firefish had just come in from a spectacular patrol and he thought SubPac would have a cow.”
“Oh, right,” the admiral muttered. “That reminds me. Commander Stormes, no, excuse me, Captain Stormes, if you will please stand up. He reached into the middle drawer of his desk and pulled out a small, white box that he opened. Inside was a gold star resting on a bed of blue felt. When the other skippers saw that they all stood up, too. The admiral came around the desk and handed the box to Malachi. “A gold star representing the second award of the Navy Cross medal for the exceptional results of your second patrol from Perth. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Malachi replied, accepting the firm handshake. He appreciated the admiral calling him captain after the chief of staff’s petty condescension. His rank was commander, USN, but his title was properly captain. The admiral went back to his desk and sat down.
“Okay, gentlemen,” he said. “I’m going to stop here. I need time to think about this problem of the Mark fourteen. I’m recently promoted to rear admiral, and that was undoubtedly based in part on my getting the fourteen fielded in the first place. Which means I own some of this, personally. I will tell you now that I accept responsibility for our current problems, and I’m going to get them fixed. And I agree with Captain Stormes: if the Bureau won’t fix it, then, by God, we will.
The Iceman Page 16
