The Richard Deming Mystery Megapack

by Richard Deming

  Externally Manta incorporated all the hard lessons taught by the war. Rows of free-flooding limber holes took precious seconds off her crash-dive time. The shears that supported the two periscopes and the SJ radar mast were left bare, to cut down her silhouette when surfaced. A four-inch deck gun, mounted forward of the bridge at Jack’s request, replaced the ineffectual three-inch gun of the earlier boat. Most striking to those who remembered the sleek streamlining of prewar submarines, the fairwater, the plated structure that surrounded the conning tower, had been reduced to a small area immediately around the bridge. On the small elevated decks created by its removal were mounted two twenty-millimeter Bofors antiaircraft guns. Jack had tried hard to get a forty-millimeter Oerlikon in place of one of the Bofors, but at this point in the war there simply were not enough of the bigger antiaircraft weapons to go around. As a consolation prize the shipyard had agreed to weld four mounts for fifty-caliber machine guns along the edges of the deck. Already in this war he had run into some strange combat situations, and this time he hoped to have the armament to deal with whatever came up.

  The admiral’s car was coming down the road to the pier. As if on signal the white caps and blue blouses of Manta’s seventy-man crew started popping rapidly from the deck hatches and forming up aft. Jack hurried down the short slope; protocol required him to welcome the admiral aboard.

  For someone who did not understand its significance, the commissioning ceremony might have seemed brief and unimpressive. Jack took his place in front of his officers and between the ranks of the crew and read his orders; everyone saluted while the colors were run up at the stern; then Jack turned to his executive officer and said, “Mr. Hunt, set the watch.” That was all, but it meant that the Manta was now the newest member of the fleet.

  The lunch with the admiral was unavoidably a rather stiff occasion, but Jack used the opportunity to get to know his officers better. Art Hunt, the exec, was an Academy graduate who had been serving in the submarine force since before the war, though because of a tour of duty on SubLant staff he had not yet been on a war patrol. A full lieutenant, Hunt seemed to think that he was overdue for promotion to lieutenant commander. Jack resolved to keep an open mind on that question until he had seen his exec in combat.

  Lieutenant (jg) Lou daCosta had seafaring in his blood. His grandfather had emigrated from Portugal to New Bedford, Massachusetts, fifty years before, and his father now owned a sizable fleet of fishing trawlers that were doing double duty as submarine spotters for the Coast Guard. Charlie Andrews, on the other hand, was the son of a garage mechanic in Kansas and had never seen the ocean until after he joined the Navy. Not that he would see much of it aboard the Manta; as engineering officer he spent most of his waking hours aft in the maneuvering room.

  Jack still thought of the three ensigns collectively as “the kids.” They were all fresh from submarine school and green as they come. Their eagerness and their tendency to bump into things reminded him of a litter of puppies. The senior of the three, Paul Wing, had drawn the short straw and was back on the boat as duty officer, but Ted Fuller and Woodrow W. ‘Woody’ Stone sat at the end of the table talking and joking with each other, apparently not at all awed to be eating lunch with the admiral. Jack was glad to see that Fuller’s exploits of a few nights before had left no scars. The war in the Pacific would leave its marks on all of them soon enough.

  After lunch Jack gave the other officers the rest of the afternoon off and returned to the boat with Art Hunt to continue drawing up the watch rosters that listed the battle station, watch station, and cleaning station of every man in the crew. The three watches had to be approximately balanced in the specialties and level of experience of their members as well. At sea the submarine was both a closed community and an industrial plant. Their ability to do their assigned task, even their chances of returning safely to port, depended on every man knowing precisely what he was expected to do under every likely set of circumstances. When the watch rosters were complete, Jack started devising the training schedule for the next three weeks. Before Manta left for the war zone, he would make sure that each watch could dive and surface the boat unassisted and that all of his officers were prepared to carry out every task from supervising the big diesels to firing a torpedo at a target.

  A light snow was falling the next morning as the dark gray submarine backed into the river and glided through the two drawbridges and past the Electric Boat complex to the waters of Long Island Sound.

  Beyond New London Light, in the Race, the boat ran into a short, hard chop. Like most submarines, Manta had a habit of rolling when cruising on the surface. On the bridge Jack stood, knees slightly bent, unconscious of the movements he was making to compensate for the motions of the boat. Part of his mind was monitoring the course and speed, the landmarks and buoys, the feel of the deck beneath his feet, but another part, the more active part, was locked on the memory of another morning, almost four years before, and sailing down the Thames from New London on another untried submarine. The Sebago. Was it only coincidence that had given him the same diving area today? Perhaps they had short memories at the sub base; but he didn’t. He remembered all too well.

  The first time the Sebago dived, the main induction valve, a yard-wide opening that supplied air to the engines, failed to close properly. The ocean invaded at once, sending the boat plummeting to the bottom and drowning all the men in the engine room, Jack’s younger brother Edward among them. Another fatality was the skipper, Commander Dunlop, whose death of a heart attack left the young Lieutenant McCrary to rally the survivors for the long, agonizing wait for rescue. He still recalled the foul taste of the stale air and the way the slightest effort left him drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. At times, as the rescue attempt ran into one obstacle after another, he had wondered if his brother and the other men in the aft compartment weren’t the lucky ones, if a quick death by drowning wasn’t far preferable to slow suffocation.

  As always he shied away from thinking about the aftermath of the tragedy. Wracked by guilt over the death of his brother, he had tried to fix the blame for the disaster on his Academy classmate, the brilliant engineer Ben Mount. When Mount was vindicated by a board of inquiry, Jack’s career was ruined. It took a combination of persistent string-pulling and blind luck to get him posted to a submarine again, just as the country was being dragged into the war. His combat record as skipper of the Stickleback had gone a long way to erase the effects of his early misstep, but he knew very well that many of his superiors still thought of him as unreliable.

  DaCosta was officer of the deck. He took another set of cross-bearings and nudged Jack. “We’re entering our assigned area, skipper,” he said.

  “Thanks, Lou.” Jack focused his thoughts entirely on the present. “Rig the boat for diving.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” As the command was passed to the control room, the diving planes at the bow unfolded from their recesses, ready to slice into the waves and force the bow under.

  “Boat rigged for dive, sir,” daCosta reported.

  “Very well; clear the bridge.”

  “Clear the bridge!” The two lookouts jumped down from the crow’s nests on either side of the periscope supports and wriggled through the hatch to the conning tower. Jack was next; as officer of the watch, daCosta was the last to leave the bridge. Not waiting for him, Jack continued down the ladder to the control room. He intended to watch every detail of the Manta’s first dive under his command.

  He had assigned Paul Wing to serve as diving officer. “Okay, Paul, take her down.” Jack pushed the large black button of the diving alarm, and twice the sound of a Model T klaxon echoed through the boat. A carefully choreographed series of movements and commands followed. Valves opened to allow seawater to flood the ballast tanks; the great diesels fell silent, as the motors were switched over to the banks of storage batteries that powered the boat underwater; and just before the conning tower disappeare
d beneath the waves, Radioman Joe Pulaski sent off a coded message giving the exact time and location of their dive. If anything happened, at least New London would know where to start their search.

  The chief of the boat, “Dutch” van Meeringen, was in charge of the diving station and the “Christmas tree,” the board of red and green lights that indicated the position of every hatch, valve, and opening in the hull. “Green board, sir,” he reported, and turned a valve. High-pressure air hissed into the compartment, and he watched closely as the needle of a gauge crept upward. The theory was that, if there was any leak in the hull, the pressurized air would escape through it. “Pressure in the boat, sir.”

  “Take her down to one hundred feet,” Jack ordered, “and put her in standard trim.”

  “One hundred feet, aye, aye.” Ensign Wing was well trained, but now he was discovering the difference between training and a real dive. Soon he was sweating freely, constantly aware of the skipper’s presence in the control room. As the depth gauge passed sixty feet, he ordered, “Blow negative.” The negative tank, located under the control room, made the submarine heavy forward and helped to get the bow under quickly. Once the boat started down, however, the negative buoyancy supplied by the tank was not needed. The bow and stern diving planes controlled the dive more accurately.

  Manta leveled off at one hundred feet, and Wing began the delicate task of pumping ballast from one tank to another, to bring the boat into exact balance with the sea. On patrol putting the boat in trim would be the first task every day. Finally the ensign was satisfied. The inclinometer, a gadget almost identical to a carpenter’s level, registered zero. “Zero bubble, sir,” Wing reported to Jack, who was standing right behind him.

  “Very well; sixty feet.” Wing passed the order on to the seaman at the big stainless-steel wheel that controlled the bow planes, and the boat started to rise.

  The planesman knew his job; as the needle neared sixty feet, he brought the planes from rise to zero and then slightly back to dive, to correct for the upward momentum of the boat. The needle quivered, then settled exactly on the sixty mark.

  Jack nodded approvingly. Manta was lucky: over half her crew were experienced submariners, rotated back to new construction after tours of duty on other boats in the Pacific. There were even a couple of veterans of Stickleback on board. The presence of so many old hands was going to make the training phase a lot shorter and easier. “Steady as you go,” he told the helmsman, and quickly scaled the ladder to the conning tower. DaCosta was there, as was the quartermaster, waiting by the additional wheel linked to the helm in the control room.

  The control for the number one periscope dangled by its cord from the overhead. Jack grabbed it and pushed the button. The two steel hoisting cables whizzed by. As the handles emerged from the well, he grasped them and clicked them down into position in a smooth, practiced motion, stooping to meet the eyepiece as it rose. He circled once, then again with the tip at greater elevation, before lowering the scope and saying, “Surface!” Manta had been assigned this operating area, but he was taking no chances. The German U-boat campaign along the Atlantic coast had made a lot of people very nervous. He would prefer not to surface suddenly under the nose of some green Air Corps bomber jockey who had been taught that the only good submarine is a dead submarine.

  The conning tower was getting crowded. White stood on the ladder, ready to crack the bridge hatch, and the two lookouts were standing by. Something on the superstructure—a guy wire, maybe—hummed loudly as it sliced through the water. Jack made a mental note to have it located and corrected. A noise like that could give away their location to a Jap destroyer.

  “Twenty-eight feet,” came the call from the control room.

  “Okay, White, open the hatch. Lookouts to the bridge!”

  Lou was right behind them as they scrambled up onto the bridge and into the crow’s nests, protecting their heavy binoculars with their forearms. When Jack reached the bridge, Lou was already scanning the horizon. “All clear, skipper,” he reported. Even as he said it, the port lookout shouted, “Aircraft on the port quarter!”

  Lou leaned over the fairwater to look back in the indicated direction. It took him completely by surprise when Jack suddenly said, “Clear the bridge! Dive, dive!” The bow was already starting under by the time they had sorted out the confusion and gotten everyone down the bridge hatch.

  “Rudder hard left, all ahead full. Come to heading 030.” As the helmsman acknowledged Jack’s order, he turned to Lou and grinned. “If you’re caught off base, you’re out, daCosta,” he said. “You know that. We may be in Block Island Sound, but we’re pretending it’s the Bungo-suido. Any aircraft we see is out to kill us, so we get promptly out of its way. By the end of next week we’re going to be able to clear the bridge and pass sixty feet depth in less than a minute, and by the time we hit Pearl I mean to have it under forty-five seconds.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” DaCosta reddened. “I’m sorry, sir. The first dive was so…er, so regular that I wasn’t expecting to crash like that. It won’t happen again.”

  Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s forgotten, Lou. Take her up and let’s try another of those ‘regular’ dives. Before your watch is over, you’re going to think you’re running an elevator.”

  Jack kept the crew practicing standard dives for the rest of the day, and it was well after dark when Manta slipped into her berth at the sub base. Each dive had been a little faster and a little smoother than the last, even though the skipper kept changing the watch and putting different officers in the control room. The men were aware that they had done pretty well, and along with their tiredness felt a touch of complacency, as if they had gotten over the worst of the training.

  The next few days changed their minds. Now that he knew they could handle the boat under ordinary, non-battle, conditions, Jack started putting on the pressure. Crash dives, surprise summonses to battle stations, orders blaring from the loudspeakers to rig the boat for depth charges, to rig for silent running, to rig for battle surfacing—every evolution they were likely to need in the Pacific, they practiced in Long Island Sound. Halfway through the second day they were jumpy as cats, wondering what was coming at them next and where the skipper would turn up, stopwatch in hand, to watch them make fools of themselves. By the end of the third day they were starting to feel that the situation was under control; they knew what they had to do, and they were getting better at doing it. By the time they reached the Pacific, they would be the best damned boat in the Submarine Navy, and then the Japs had better watch out!

  Chapter 3

  A messenger was waiting on the pier when they docked; Admiral Schick’s compliments, and would Captain McCrary please report to his office at once? Jack hurried up the road, wondering what he was in trouble for this time. The training had been going very well, all things considered, and as far as he knew, he hadn’t stepped on any more toes since that night of the fire, so it must be some sin from the past catching up with him. He started to review the possibilities, then gave up; he would find out soon enough.

  The admiral’s face was grave. His first question threw Jack into confusion. “Are you satisfied with your exec, McCrary?”

  “Lieutenant Hunt, sir? Yes, sir.”

  “I know he served ably on staff,” Schick continued, “but sea duty is a different matter. Do you have enough confidence in him to place him in charge of training for a few days?”

  What was this? “Admiral,” Jack said levelly, “if I didn’t have confidence that he could take command of Manta, should anything happen to me, I would ask for his transfer at once.”

  “Good. I thought you’d say that.” The admiral looked down at his desk, suddenly ill at ease. “There’s no easy way to say this, McCrary,” he said at last. “I’ve had word from Washington. Your father is in Bethesda Hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. The doctors are not hopeful. I’m sorry.”

/>   “I see.” Jack searched his mind for thoughts, emotions, memories, anything, but he was trapped in a flat calm. Nothing stirred, and it seemed to him that nothing would stir again, that it had all ended and he had not noticed. It was time to be practical; detail added to detail would rebuild a sort of world. “Do—” He cleared his throat and started again. “Do they say when…”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve told you as much as I know. My yeoman has secured a berth for you on the night express, leaving New London at 2240. I expect you will want to brief Lieutenant Hunt and pack.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Jack stood up and hesitated. He wanted to say something else, but there was nothing else to say.

  Like every train Jack had seen in his months Stateside, the Washington Express was jammed to overflowing. Servicemen on their way to new posts, war workers looking for a shipyard or aircraft plant more to their liking than the ones they had left, businessmen hoping for war contracts, wives and children off to stay with relatives for the duration—it seemed that every person in the country had some reason to go to some different section of the country than the one he found himself in. As a Navy brat Jack had moved around, or been moved around, a great deal as a child, and he felt none the worse for it. But he had always known that he was an oddity. Most Americans grew up, lived, worked, and raised their families in the place they were born. Now the war was giving people an excellent excuse to escape, and from the looks of this train, a great many of them were seizing it.

  After wriggling through the packed aisles of four coaches and lurching precariously across the equally packed vestibules between them, Jack found his Pullman car. The berths were already made up. Coming from the crowded, noisy, and essentially cheerful coaches, he found almost spectral the long, empty aisle flanked narrowly by swaying green curtains and lit by dim antique ceiling fixtures. He was not a very imaginative man, but he would not have been terribly surprised to see a bloody dagger emerge from behind the curtains. The heavy air of secrecy created by the twin walls of baize cried out for melodrama.