by Peter Albano
Just before dawn the boat submerged to sixty-four feet and began patrolling ten thousand yards off the entrance. With the electric motors turning over only fast enough to maintain depth and steerageway and on “silent running,” the destroyer anchored just inside the entrance was unaware of the deadly menace waiting in ambush. From the conning tower, the OOD periodically raised the periscope and took a quick look around. The destroyer never moved. Finally, Mark Allen called Brent into his cabin and ordered him to send the message.
“Use TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out).” he said.
TACAMO sent a compressed computerized code with a signal strength of only 200 watts. The transmission depended upon the reception of the signal by a U.S. Navy DC-6 orbiting over the western Pacific, trailing a four-mile-long antenna. Upon receiving the signal, the DC-6 was to relay it to Yonaga.
Brent moved to the radio room and stood behind Cryptologic Technician Simpson. “Ready to transmit, sir,” Simpson said. “Anytime we can get the antenna up.”
Brent moved to the foot of the ladder to the conning tower and looked up at Reginald Williams, who was officer of the deck and stood next to the Number Two, or night periscope. The attack periscope tapered to a small 1.4-inch exit lens, making it hard to spot, but allowing only a limited amount of light to penetrate the forty-foot length of the tube. With a much larger aperture and lens, the night periscope compensated for the lower visibility at night, transmitting much more light and sharper images. However, it could be spotted much more easily.
Brent said to the executive officer, “Radio room’s ready, Mr. Williams.”
“Very well. Up ’scope.” Williams rotated the periscope through three hundred sixty degrees. “Down ’scope.” He turned to the quartermaster of the watch. “Raise the antenna on my mark.” Brent pumped a fist. Williams shouted, “Mark!”
An electric motor whirred and the whip antenna shot up to the surface. A green light glowed on the panel in front of Simpson. The quartermaster yelled, “Locked!”
“Transmit!” Brent shouted.
Simpson punched a key and immediately shouted, “Complete, sir.”
“Transmission completed,” Brent informed Williams.
“Down antenna!” Williams ordered.
Simpson clamped his hands over his earphones, turned to Brent and smiled. “Acknowledged, sir. First crack.”
“Four-oh,” Brent said. He brought a phone to his ear and reported to Admiral Allen.
*
Four nights later a half hour before dawn, Crog, who was standing the sonar watch, reported, “Cavitations, many screws of different sizes. A large force moving toward the entrance. Range eleven to twelve thousand yards. Making more noise than a virgin on her wedding night.”
Admiral Allen and Brent Ross hurried to the control room. The old man gasped and wheezed and his face was unusually pale. In fact, Brent had to help him through the last watertight door opening on the control room. Here the red battle lamps gave his face a ghostly red pallor, veins black under the thin skin.
Hoarsely, Allen ordered the ESM antenna raised for a quick reading. Technician Matthew Dante called out, “They’ve fired up another dozen radars, Admiral. My threat library indicates emanations from cruisers London and Llandaff and at least ten Gearing class destroyers.”
“Tracking party to the conning tower,” Mark Allen shouted. He looked at Brent, pointed to the ladder. Brent understood. Usually the captain of the boat was the first man up the ladder. Allen needed help. Brent bounded up the ladder and reached down and almost pulled the admiral up into the conning tower. While the admiral steadied himself by leaning on the night periscope, the assistant attack officer, Lieutenant Reginald Williams, the helmsman, Quartermaster Harold Sturgis, Sonar Operator Radioman Tony “Crog” Romero, Talker Yeoman Randolph “Randy” Davidson, and Radarman Tadashi Takiguchi all scrambled up the ladder and took their stations.
“Manned and ready, manned and ready,” echoed through the small chamber.
“General quarters? Torpedo attack submerged, Admiral?” Williams asked, dropping the cord of the “Is-Was” around his neck.
“Negative. Negative.” The old man rubbed his forehead. Began to speak. Tightened his jaw and gritted his teeth. Every man stared at him. He sighed. Took a deep breath as if preparing to leap into icy water and rasped, “Stand by to surface.” He looked around at the surprised faces.
Williams said, “Admiral, respectfully, we’re only seven thousand yards from that ‘can’ in the entrance. Even with Deflecton Four they may get a return. Aw, hell, Admiral, they should see us.”
“Don’t tell me my business, XO,” Allen snapped. He glared at the startled faces surrounding him. Patting the Number Two periscope he said, “I’ll use the night ’scope for this observation.” Grasping the pickle, Williams took his position behind the periscope.
To Brent there was no rationale behind the admiral’s decision to surface. Everyone knew they should remain submerged and take up a firing position on either side of the channel and wait for the enemy to exit. It would be an easy firing problem — a golden opportunity dreamed of by all submariners. The old admiral appeared sick, out of sorts and highly agitated. “Sir…” Brent said. “We’re in an ideal attack position. May I suggest…”
“No! You may not…” The old man staggered. Williams steadied him. Allen pulled away, holding the tube of the periscope like a drunk clinging to a lamppost. He glared at Brent. “Why in hell are all of my subordinates trying to tell me how to run this war?” He punched the tube. “Damn it! Just follow my fuckin’ orders!”
Everyone was shocked. Obscenities were out of character for the admiral and the decision was wrong.
“Up ’scope!” The tube slid upward, Allen grasped the handles, snapped them down and took a quick look around. “Down ’scope! All clear.” He leaned over the hatch to the control room. “Surface! Surface! Surface!”
Davidson punched a button and the Klaxon hooted. The diving officer, Ensign Battle, shouted, “Blow negative to the mark! Ten degrees up!” With high pressure air driving the water out of her main ballast tanks and her planes up sharply, Blackfin clawed for the surface. Allen pulled the microphone down from the overhead. “Torpedo attack surface.” He turned to the executive officer. “Mr. Williams take the TDC. Mr. Ross on the bridge with me. Secure radar. Section Two to steaming stations.” He looked at Brent and stabbed a finger upward. “Stand by to crack the hatch.”
“Sir, this is crazy,” Williams dared, face twisted by anger. “I protest your orders.”
“Protest all you goddamned well please. Just follow my fuckin’ orders. You’re on report.”
“He’s right, sir,” Brent said.
“What is this — mutiny? Another Caine? All you shit-assed punks trying to tell me my business? Up the ladder, Lieutenant, before I have you relieved.” Brent hesitated. “On the double!”
Reluctantly, Brent climbed up the ladder. The old man was sick — out of his mind. A man that old should not be in command. There was only one Fujita. Now it was too late — maybe, too late for all of them. In a moment Brent could hear water gurgling and splashing off the upper works, and he gripped the hand wheel. “Passing three-oh-feet!” Battle reported.
“Crack the hatch!”
“Pressure one-half inch!” he heard from the diving station. Brent whirled the wheel, took a soaking as he threw back the bronze cover, scampering out onto the deck followed by Admiral Allen, who he pulled through the hatch. The old man’s arms felt bony, like a skeleton’s. In just seconds, the lookouts were above Brent’s head on their perch and Mark Allen was at his side, gasping for air. Clumsily, the admiral locked his binoculars into the TBT (Target Bearing Transmitter), a waterproof instrument that automatically transmitted target bearings to the TDC in the conning tower. Brent swung his glasses to the destroyer. Bow on, it was big and black in the entrance. He glanced to the east. A weak rosy hue hinted at the coming dawn.
The main induction valve slammed open and
the engines roared to life. Deep in the bowels of the ship, the turbo blow began its banshee screech and Blackfin began to rise higher in the water. Brent felt his stomach contort as if he were about to become sick. Unless the destroyer’s lookouts and sonarman were blind, deaf mutes, they must have been spotted.
“All ahead one-third, steer two-nine-zero,” Mark Allen said. It was his last command. Suddenly, he came bolt upright as if his spine had been replaced by a steel beam. Rocking back and forth and clutching his temples frantically as if he were trying to suppress an explosion, he shrieked — an agonizing cry that pierced Brent’s ears over the howl of the turbo blow, the roar of four diesel engines, and the hiss of air and water venting from the main ballast tanks. Brent whirled from the enemy destroyer just as the admiral vomited a yellow projectilelike stream that hit the windscreen and splattered onto Brent’s jacket and face. Twisting violently, the tortured old man fell away from Brent, bounced from the steel screen, and collapsed onto the deck as if felled by a blow from a mace. He screamed once more and then was as still as death.
“Hospital corpsman!” Brent shouted frantically down the hatch. “Hospital corpsman to the bridge on the double!”
Within seconds, Reginald Williams and a Japanese medical orderly named Chisato Yasuda were bending over the admiral. “Con the ship, Brent,” Williams shouted.
“I think he has had a stroke or a heart attack, Mr. Williams,” Yasuda said. “I feel no pulse.”
“You’re in command, Reggie,” Brent said.
Before Williams could answer, the night was split by an enormous flash as the two bow-mounted five-inch guns of the Gearing fired. Then the boom of the guns followed by the sound of ripping canvas as the shells tore overhead.
Williams shouted a stream of commands: “Lookouts below, clear the bridge, stand by to dive. Yasuda, lower the admiral. Take him to his cabin.” He gestured to a lookout. “Help the corpsman.” Yasuda and the lookout lowered the inert form down into conning tower where Crog and Harold Sturgis grabbed him and in turn lowered the limp body into the control room. More flashes and two towers of water shot up next to the sub, soaking the men on the bridge.
As the bow planes locked out with a thump, Brent and the lookouts tumbled down the ladder.
“Dive! Dive! Dive! Emergency!” Williams shouted, dropping through the hatch last and hitting the alarm button. As he dogged the hatch, the boat inclined sharply downward, water splashing over the bridge and trickling through the hatch until he dogged it with hard clockwise whirls of the wheel. Brent felt a rush of air as Herbert Battle opened the negative-tank flood valve, taking in nearly eight-tons of water forward of amidships, tilting the bow down even more. Almost simultaneously, two blasts shook the boat, a pair of shells exploding side by side not more than twenty feet off the starboard bow.
“Watch your angle, Mr. Battle!” Williams yelled. “We don’t want our stern out of the water. They’ll shoot our ass off.”
“Ten degrees and holding, sir,” Battle said from the diving station.
“Very well.”
Brent took his post in front of the TDC and Williams balanced himself by leaning on the periscope. He answered the reports from the control room — “Flooding negative,” “Green board,” “Green air,” “Pressure in the boat” — with “Very well,” and “Secure the air.”
As more shells exploded alongside, he shouted down the hatch, “Plot! Depth under keel?”
Lieutenant Cadenbach’s voice came back. “One-eight-zero, sir.”
“Bottom?”
“Coral and sand.”
“Shit!” Williams said. “Take her down to one-five-zero feet, left full rudder, all ahead flank.”
Brent heard the pitch of the four electric motors whine higher, and the boat surged forward as an electrician at the Maneuvering Control Stand opened the main motor rheostats full to the stops, pouring every volt in the battery into the propellers.
“Passing fifty feet,” Battle said from his diving station. Everyone breathed easier — they were safe from the destroyer’s shells.
“Very well. Navigator, give me a course for the hundred fathom line.”
Cadenbach’s voice came back from the control room almost immediately, as if he had anticipated the question. “Suggest course one-nine-zero.”
“Steady on one-nine-zero,” Williams said to Sturgis.
“Passing two-three-five,” the helmsman said.
Yeoman Davidson spoke: “Medical orderly Yasuda reports the admiral is dead.”
There was stunned silence. Brent could not believe the report, and neither could Williams.
“You’re sure?” Williams said.
Davidson spoke into his mouthpiece. “Yasuda believes the admiral had a stroke and then suffered cardiac arrest.”
Brent punched the TDC in grief, anger and disbelief. There was no time for mourning. It must come later. They must preserve the boat and their own lives.
Crog spoke. “The can’s started her engines, Mr. Williams.” He hunched forward, hands on earphones, staring at the scope of the old Mark IV sonar, which was calibrated from zero to only five thousand yards, “I hear a clanking, sir. She’s slipping her anchor chain and she’s pinging.” He clutched his earphones. “A powerful signal — I’ve never heard sonar this strong.”
Williams turned to the hatch, “Mr. Cadenbach. Range to deep water and what is the bottom?”
“Range six and one half miles to the hundred-fathom curve, bottom’s sand and it drops off fast, sir, into the West Caroline Basin. Three hundred fathoms at seven miles.”
“Steady on one-nine-zero,” Sturgis said.
“Very well. Let me know when we pass one hundred feet, Quartermaster,” Williams said. Sturgis glanced at the clutter of instruments on the bulkhead in front of him. Besides a helm, rudder angle indicator and engine room controls, the second class quartermaster monitored a compass repeater, pitometer repeater, compartment pressure gauge, and depth indicator repeater calibrated to a maximum of six hundred feet.
“The can’s underway, sir,” Crog said. “Speed ten and increasing, range nine thousand.” He looked up. “She’s directly astern and it’s hard to read her because of the cavitations of our own screws, and I’ve lost the other ships. But her big sonar’s bustin’ through everything.”
“Our speed through water?”
“We’re making nine knots, sir,” Sturgis said, glancing at the pitometer. He shifted his eyes to the depth gauge. “Passing one hundred feet, Mr. Williams.”
“Very well.” Williams leaned over the hatch. “Navigator! Dawn?”
Cadenbach’s voice came back. “Zero-five-forty — five minutes ago.”
“Damn!”
Another element had entered the situation. The carriers were underway, and with dawn came the threat of aerial attack. The men exchanged uneasy looks.
“She’s picking up speed,” Crog said. “Range seven thousand.” Everyone could hear the destroyer’s echo ranging apparatus hunting them. “Ping! Ping!” Fast, harsh, continuous, and implacable.
“Is he ranging us?”
“Not yet, Mr. Williams.”
“Passing one-two-zero feet,” Sturgis said.
Brent felt the down-angle soften as Ensign Battle instructed his planesmen to begin leveling. Battle’s voice came up through the hatch. “Passing one-three-zero, leveling at one-five-zero, sir.”
“Very well. Rig for silent running. Rig for depth charge,” Williams said to the talker, Randy Davidson. Randy spoke into his headset.
Brent heard the whine of the motors drop as Blackfin rheostated down to minimum speed — only speed enough to maintain depth and steerageway. Throughout the ship, watertight hatches were dogged down, sea valves and hull fittings tightly shut, fans turned off, and the ventilation system secured. Immediately, the heat shot upward and the smell of sweat and fear permeated the boat. Usually dogged for “rig for depth charge,” Williams ordered the hatch between the conning tower and the control room to remain open.
Crog had his sound-head cranked full astern. “He’s coming on fast, sir.”
Brent felt a familiar cold spring begin to flex in his viscera, sour gorge rising. Men were coming for him. Men he did not know, eager to inflict a horrible death on him.
Cadenbach’s voice: “Depth under keel, two-three-zero.
“Take her down to two-zero-zero.”
Brent could hear Battle’s calm voice instructing his planesmen and the boat inclined down sharply to at least fifteen degrees.
With the submarine dropping deeper into the safety of the depths, Brent felt the pressure on his stomach lessen. The deep is a submarine’s natural habitat. The deeper the safer, the thick cushion of ocean overhead her shelter. In the depths there is no motion, no sound except what is put there by man in his search for other men to kill. Light is soft or nonexistent, currents gentle, the abundant life snapping, popping, hissing in low key and in harmony with the primordial quietness and solitude of the depths. The destroyer was about to rip all of this to shreds.
“He has us,” Crog said quietly. Everyone could hear the destroyer’s echo-ranging bouncing off the hull, the “thump, thump, thump,” of his screws.
“Right full rudder, all ahead emergency,” Williams shouted. “We’ll make him overshoot us.”
Brent knew the executive officer’s thinking was good — if it worked. No doubt, the destroyer’s attack team had plotted Blackfin’s course and had projected their own to intersect it. Williams hoped to cut his track and force the enemy to drop his depth charges long and into empty ocean.
The sharp, churning sounds of the screws and pings grew in intensity and seemed to quicken, reverberating in the thick atmosphere of the boat, now overhead but slightly astern. Everyone stared at the overhead, anxious eyes following the sounds. Slowly, the thumps and pings “Dopplered” down.
“He’s passed us,” Crog said.
There were three clicks followed by two more. “Shit,” Williams said. “Hydrostatic detonators.” Crog turned down his gain control. Brent could see his hand shaking.
Five tremendous blasts jarred the boat and she shook like a bone in the teeth of a wild dog. The great jarring explosions compressed the hull, booming through the boat like the inside of a drum struck by a giant. Dust rose and pieces of cork packing rained on Brent’s head. He gripped the TDC.
