W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents

by The Fighting Agents(Lit)

  The only specific instructions Dolan gave him were course changes, and several times the "suggestion" that it would be "okay to go down another couple hundred feet."

  According to the Corps of Engineers' map (which the Corps had apparently borrowed from Le Guide Michelin), this part of Hungary was sparsely populated. There were here and there a few lights to be seen, but there was no way of telling whether they were a few lights in violation of a village blackout, or lights in single farmhouses.

  At 0500, as the sky to the east was starting to glow dull red, Dolan unstrapped himself again and got off the copilot's seat.

  "In eight minutes, maybe ten," he said, "we should see a few lights. That'll be Pecs. Or maybe Athens. If you see something round, that'll be Rome."

  Darmstadter knew he was expected to laugh, and did.

  "This has gone so well, I'm afraid to believe it," Dolan said.

  "I'll go back and tell our passengers. Janos said he wanted fifteen minutes to suit up."

  Dolan was back in his seat before they came onto Pecs, and he was the first to see it.

  "Go down on the deck, "Dolan now ordered.

  "Put that line of hills between us and Pecs. It's damned near impossible to tell the direction of an airplane if you can't see it. And the more confused we can leave these people, the better."

  Darmstadter concentrated on flying as close to the ground as he dared between lines of hills. It was light enough now to make out individual trees, and here and there a road and fields.

  And then, surprising him, he flashed over a stream, then a cut-over section of hillside, then above that a meadow on a plateau.

  "Christ, is that it?"

  "It should be, "Dolan said, "but I don't see any panels."

  Darmstadter glanced quickly at him. Dolan had a headset on and was working the controls of the radio.

  "Not a goddamned thing," he said.

  "What do I do?"

  "Stay on the deck under the hill lines," Dolan ordered.

  "And make another pass over it. I'll go see what I can see from the door."

  Five minutes later, from the other direction, the C-47 approached the meadow.

  There was no doubt now that they had found their destination. A pile of tree limbs was burning furiously at the near end of the meadow by the cut over area, the wind blowing the smoke across the meadow and into the forest.

  Dolan came into the cockpit.

  "It's up to you now, kid," he said.

  "The next pass is all we're going to get, or everybody will think we're having an air show up here."

  Darmstadter smiled uneasily.

  Dolan went back into the fuselage. There he would strap himself into a harness and take up a position by the open door. When Darmstadter turned the red light on--there were supposed to be red and green lights, but the green wasn't working--and then off, he would push the first of the parachutists through the door. When they were all gone, he would throw the three equipment bags after them.

  Darmstadter made his approach very carefully, slowing the C-47 down as much as he dared, coming in very low and shallow over the tips of the trees in the forest, one hand on the Gooney Bird's wheel, the other on the toggle switch for the light for the door.

  And then he flicked the toggle switch.

  He thought he could sense a slight change in the controls, which would mean that he had lost 1,000 pounds of weight--five parachutists--from his gross weight, and that the loss had changed the center of balance.

  He had a strange, wild, arrogant thought.

  / could have landed this sonofabitch in that meadow! The way the wind is blowing up from the stream, I was making maybe forty knots over the ground. I was going so slow I could see Camay's face! And I could have stopped it in plenty of time.

  He looked over his shoulder into the aisle for Dolan.

  He couldn't see him at first, and then he did.

  Dolan was on the cabin floor on his side, curled up. Darmstadter looked out the windshield, then back. Dolan straightened, grew almost stiff, and then went limp.

  [FOUR]

  ISO Degrees 20 Minutes West Longitude

  There were four people on the bridge of the conning tower of the USS Drum as she made fifteen knots on a course of 275 degrees through oil-smooth, gently rolling seas. They were almost exactly halfway around the world from the Adriatic Sea and Budapest, Hungary, where at that moment it was 5:25 a.m." February 21, "the next day."

  The Drum's captain, It. Commander Edwin R. Lennox, USN, and Capt.

  James M. B. Whittaker, USA AC were in clean and pressed but unstarched khakis. Commander Lennox wore a battered brimmed cap whose cover was once white, but was now nearly brown with oil stains. Captain Whittaker was hatless.

  The talker, with a headset and microphone device over his head, was also hatless. He wore a light blue denim shirt and a darker-shade pair of denim trousers, as did the lookout, who also wore a blue sailor's cap, the brim of which he had turned down all around.

  The lookout, Commander Lennox, and Capt. Whittaker all had identical Navy-issue Bausch & Lomb ten-power binoculars on leather straps around their necks.

  Commander Lennox looked at his wristwatch, and then, with a sailor's eye, at the darkening sky.

  "Anytime you're ready, Jim," Commander Lennox said, "you can go below."

  Whittaker smiled.

  "Aye, aye, Sir," he said.

  "Permission to leave the bridge?"

  "Granted," the Drum's captain replied, smiling back.

  They had grown to like each other on the voyage from Pearl Harbor.

  Lennox had thought about the growing friendship a good deal during that time--remembering what he had been told by a full lieutenant when he'd been an ensign aboard the Kingfisher- He'd been told that her skipper wasn't really such a hard-nosed sonofabitch as he seemed, but that a skipper couldn't afford to have friends, that command was indeed a lonely thing.

  He had accepted that then because he was an ensign, and ensigns believe what they are told by full lieutenants. But it was only after they had given him the Drum, his first command, that he'd really understood it The master of a man-of-war could not have friends He could be civil and courteous, but there had to be a wall between the skipper and everybody else aboard It had a little to do with "familiarity breeds contempt," but there was more to it than that.

  The captain had to appear omniscient to his crew, and one of the best ways to do that, especially if you were convinced that at least two of your officers were far smarter than you were and better leaders of men, was to be aloof, to be somewhat mysterious, to share no opinion or confidences with anybody.

  Lennox had seen in Whittaker somebody much like himself in character, and with similar command responsibilities, and with an understanding of command. Very early on, Lennox had decided that having Whittaker aboard was very much what it must be like to be captain of a cruiser flying an admiral's flag. Where the cruiser and the accompanying task force went, and what it would do, was the admiral's responsibility. But the operation of the cruiser was the cruiser captain's responsibility And Whittaker had acted as Lennox believed a good admiral would behave.

  Despite the authority the orders from COMSUBFORPAC had given Whittaker--which had in effect made the Drum his personal taxicab--he had leaned over backward to avoid even the suggestion of giving Lennox orders.

  He had asked questions, and "wondered if it would be possible to" do what he had the clear authority to order done. He had always scrupulously referred to Lennox as "Captain" or "Skipper," even long after Lennox had started calling him "Jim" And the night before, when they were alone with the talker on the bridge, Whittaker had asked "if it would be possible to" have a dry run of what would take place when they were off Mindanao.

  "They assure me, Skipper," Whittaker said, "that the outboards have been tuned by an expert But cynical sonofabitch that I am, and with no reflection intended, Sir, on the U S. Navy, I'd like to check that out."

  "What you would
really like, Jim, right, is a dry run?"

  "Yes, Sir," Whittaker asked.

  "Is that going to be possible?"

  "Does the Army use the phrase "SOP'?" Lennox asked.

  "Yes, Sir," Whittaker said.

  "I violate mine," Lennox said.

  "The SUBFORPAC SOP clearly states that when we are within the operating range of Japanese aircraft and proceeding

  on the surface, we will always be in a 'prepared to dive' condition That means all hatches except the one here will be secured, and that we will be making sufficient headway so that the sub's diving planes will have effect in case we have to make an emergency dive " They had, during the voyage, exchanged technical lore Whittaker had been surprised to learn that the diving planes on the Drum functioned like the ailerons of an airplane, controlling up and down movement of the submerged submarine He knew that because of the dynamic forces acting upon the diving planes, the faster a submarine was moving across the surface of the ocean, the quicker it could be submerged "In other words. Skipper," Whittaker said, "a dry run is a lousy ideal'" "In these waters, if I follow the SOP," Lennox said, "what I get is a boat ready to make a dive, and a crew of sweat-soaked, temperature-exhausted sailors not only getting on each other's nerves, but not able to function fast when they have to. So what I do is leave the hatches open when I can in waters like these, stationing men by the hatches to close them if they have to, and I make damned sure my lookout has the eyes of a hawk."

  "And to conduct a dry run would mean stopping the boat," Whittaker said, "increasing the time it would take you to submerge if a Jap plane spotted you."

  Lennox nodded "Spotted us" Whittaker shrugged "Okay if that's--" Lennox interrupted him "Another unpleasant situation that comes to mind," he said, "is us sitting on the surface a half mile or so offshore of Mindanao, and unable to submerge because there's a trio of Army guys in rubber boats with outboard motors they can't start."

  Whittaker looked at him but didn't say anything.

  "And while I am being the high priest of doom and gloom," Lennox said, "I have another scenario There we are off Mindanao, and we get the boats out of the torpedo room, blow them up, and they leak Since I can think of no other way to get those heavy little boxes ashore, that would mean we would have come all this way only to have to go all the way back for more rubber boats."

  "I'd like to add to that gloom-and-doom scenario, if I might, Sir," Whittaker said.

  "Go ahead, Jim," Lennox said "We are on the surface off Mindanao, the boats have inflated properly, and the outboards have even started Then the Army guys--whose total experience with rubber boats is limited to Lieutenant Hammersmith's time with an inner tube in a swimming pool--start loading those heavy boxes into the rubber boats and drop the boxes over the side, fall overboard themselves, and I'll let you figure out the rest yourself."

  "You've had no training?

  "Lennox asked, surprised and concerned.

  "No, Sir," Whittaker said.

  "There wasn't time."

  "Well, then," Lennox said, "the question is not ;/ we do a dry run, but when."

  "I think, if it's possible," Whittaker said, "we should."

  Lennox looked at Whittaker.

  If I hadn't been so obliging, he wondered, would you have pulled the rank the COMSUBFORPAC orders give you?

  "You told me, Jim," he said, "that to a pilot, darkness rises from the ground."

  "Yes, Sir, it does."

  "Then I think we should do the dry run tomorrow, at dusk," Lennox said.

  "Thank you, Skipper."

  The day had been spent preparing for the dry run. This was mostly a good thing for the boat, Lennox realized, though it was risky. The morale of the crew was helped by the chance not only to do something constructive, but to get out on deck. The risk of being spotted by a Japanese patrol plane was no greater with them there, but submerging would take longer because of the people and the equipment on deck.

  Lennox posted extra lookouts and ordered the manning of the machine gun and Bofors cannon. He didn't plan to use them, but it gave their crews a chance to get on deck and to feel useful, and he decided the price, the extra forty-five or sixty seconds it would take the gun crews to drop through the hatches and close them, was worth it.

  The rubber boats themselves, as Lennox had supposed they would, posed the greatest problems. If the chief of the boat, who by default became the rubber boat expert, had any thoughts about the idiocy of sending people with no training or experience with rubber boats to make a landing through the surf on an enemy-held shore, he kept them to himself.

  The first problem was to get the boats from the forward torpedo room through the hatch and onto the deck. The chief of the boat considered his options and decided that because of the weight and ungainly bulk it would make more sense to uncrate them below and pass them through the hatch, despite the risk that they would be impaled and torn on something sharp on the way.

  The boats, which carried their own air bottles, were designed to be inflated with the bottles. Even if the boats were thrown over the side un inflated and sank, if the pull cord for the air bottles was pulled, the boats would inflate and pop to the surface.

  Although spare air bottles had been provided, the chief of the boat decided that the smart thing to do was not to use the bottles until it was necessary. He called for the air hose normally used to charge the air bottles in torpedoes, and when he had the first boat unrolled and lying limp on the deck, filled it with compressed air.

  When that boat was expanded, he ran soapy water over it to check for leaks. When he found none, he opened the exhaust valves, and as they hissed and the boat collapsed, he looked at it thoughtfully.

  Then he went aft and stood with his hands on his hips and spoke with Lennox and Whittaker, who were on the bridge.

  "Two things. Skipper," he said.

  "Go ahead, Chief," Lennox said.

  "I think we could stow the boats aft of the conning tower," the chief of the boat said.

  "Properly stowed, we could even submerge with them."

  "Good idea," Lennox immediately agreed.

  "Second, there's no way the boats will carry all that weight."

  "Then we'll have to use the spares, too," Whittaker said.

  "I meant using the spares," the chief of the boat said.

  "The first time you flexed the boat in the surf, that weight'd rip the deck... or the bilge, whatever they call that sheet of rubberized canvas... free of the inflation chambers.

  If it didn't rip through before you got to the surf."

  "What do you suggest. Chief?" Lennox asked.

  "We got a hundred and sixty percent of life jackets aboard," the chief said.

  "I don't know what that means," Whittaker said.

  "It means we got sixty percent more life jackets aboard than there is people," the chief said.

  "And?

  "Lennox asked, "They're rated at two hundred pounds, "the chief said.

  "Which is just about what them 'film' boxes weigh."

  "You mean put a life jacket around a film box," Whittaker asked, "in case the bottom lets go?"

  "I mean wrap jackets around the boxes, tie lines to them, and tow them ashore," the chief said.

  "And around them boxes with the weapons and the ammo, too."

  "Could they be towed?"

  "There's only one way to find out, Skipper," the chief of the boat said.

  "Put people on it, Chief," Lennox ordered.

  "Carefully, Chief," Whittaker said. Both the chief and Lennox looked at him in surprise and annoyance, but then smiled when Whittaker went on.

  "If we were to lose just one of those 'film' boxes out here, your beloved captain and myself would spend the rest of our days in Alcatraz."

  "I take your meaning, Sir," the chief said with a smile.

  By midafternoon, each of the boats had been brought on deck, inflated, twin Bofors aft of the conning tower.

  The top was cut from an empty fifty-five-gallon o
il drum, and then the drum three-quarters filled with seawater. Each outboard motor was test-run for five minutes, the noise incredible inside the hull.

  The chief torpedoman was placed in charge of floating the "film" boxes. He cut the notation packets from life preservers and tied them around the 'wooden boxes. The available light line was soon exhausted, and two sailors made what was needed by first sawing through a length of four-inch manila hawser and then untwisting the strands.