-  4  -

It was with a sense of calm, even peace, that Richardson gave the orders for getting Eel underway the next afternoon. Actually he had little to do with it. Keith had already handled all the arrangements. Al Dugan, the engineer, would have the honor of being Officer of the Deck and giving the commands which would take Eel to sea once more.

By custom, submarines departing on patrol got underway in the midafternoon. If more than one left the same day, the most senior departed last. This, of course, was Eel. Whitefish and Chicolar, at adjacent piers, had backed clear a few minutes before, and Whitefish had already rounded Ten-Ten Dock on her way out the Pearl Harbor entrance channel. Eel was the third of the three submarines to get underway, befitting her status as flagship for Blunt’s Bruisers, the wolfpack code name.

Admiral Small was the last to say good-bye. He shook hands with Richardson, then Blunt. “Good luck and good hunting,” he said. A warm smile for Rich, a meaningful one for Blunt. He stepped quickly ashore.

From the bridge, Al Dugan: “Take in the brow!”

Four sailors, who had stepped into position alongside of it—again the ceremonial brow was in use—seized its rails in unison. In one coordinated movement they yanked it clear of Eel’s forecastle.

The mooring lines had already been singled up, reduced to a single strand from each of the four cleats on Eel’s deck to corresponding cleats on the pier. “Take in all lines!” said Al. “Rudder amidships! All back one-third!”

Eel’s engines, idling quietly with a small spatter of water from their mufflers, took on a slightly deeper note when her controllermen in the maneuvering room put the motors in reverse and began to draw power from her generators. Slowly she moved backward. When clear of the pier, Dugan ordered the rudder full right. Eel’s stern began to curve to starboard as she entered the harbor waters.

Richardson stood alongside Blunt on the cigarette deck. At just the right moment Dugan shifted the starboard propeller from “back one-third” to “ahead two-thirds,” and a moment later the rudder from “right full” to “left full.” Now well in the channel, Eel began to twist on her heel, continuing to cast to port. Her backward motion slowly ceased. She began to gain headway.

The crowd on the dock had not yet begun to dissipate. The band was playing “Sink ’Em All.” How many times had he heard it? Originally it had been “Bless ’Em All.” Some submariner had written new words for it.

Under Buck Williams’ rapid direction, order was appearing on deck. All topside gear not necessary to the patrol had already been removed, and now the remainder was swiftly stowed. As Eel rounded Hospital Point in her turn, and caught sight once again of Whitefish and Chicolar in column ahead, the last man went down below and the last hatch on deck was dogged shut.

Williams appeared on the bridge. “Main deck secured, anchor secured for sea, sir,” he said to Dugan, with a nod to Keith. He stepped a few feet aft. “Main deck secured, topside secured, Captain,” he said to Rich. He gave an unnecessary salute, probably for Blunt’s benefit.

Gravely, Rich returned the salute. “Very well,” he said.

Williams returned to the fore part of the bridge to where Al Dugan had assumed his watch station behind the windscreen. “There are no unauthorized personnel topside, Al. The captain, wolfpack commander, and executive officer are on the bridge. . . .”

“I know about the bridge, Buck,” said Dugan in a tone of friendly sarcasm. “But thanks anyway.”

“Oh, go to hell, Al.” Williams grinned. “Permission to go below, sir.”

Dugan grunted assent and Buck disappeared down the hatch into the conning tower. This hatch, the main induction, and the engine exhaust valves were now the only openings not tightly closed.

In a few minutes Rich would hear from below decks, “Ship is rigged for dive!” From that moment he, or any Officer of the Deck, had but to give the order to submerge to have it happen. All main vents would instantly spring open; the main engines would shut down; the main induction and engine exhaust valves would be closed; the motors, which had been getting their power from the generators on the ends of the diesel engines, would begin drawing current from the battery. Bow planes would rig out, and the ship would plunge precipitantly beneath the surface of the sea.

Richardson’s feeling of well-being persisted as Eel passed the channel entrance buoys. It was here the Kona wave had nearly swamped the ship. Here was where he might have been swept overboard. He might have been able to swim to shore, or he might have drowned. It would have been a test. He might even have welcomed it at the time. . . .

Eel felt taut beneath him. Clean. Fresh-smelling. She had been repainted. The two TBTs in their new locations on either side of the bridge had proved their increased convenience during the week-long exercises just completed. In place of the after TBT there was now located a twin twenty-millimeter machine gun mount. The guns themselves, not sufficiently corrosion-resistant to stand submergence, were stowed in cylindrical tanks installed vertically under the bridge deck. They could be brought up and made ready in less than a minute.

On either end of the bridge was a forty-millimeter automatic gun. These were too heavy to manhandle for stowage and hence had been permanently mounted. Cadmium plating protected their unpainted surfaces. Ranged about them were various strategically located racks to hold extra ammunition.

On the main deck there were now two stubby, five-inch guns, one forward and one aft of the bridge. Near them, built into each end of Eel’s bridge structure, were two large cylindrical tanks with hatchlike closures. Each held twelve shots of ready five-inch ammunition, and a rough bore-sight tool of Buck Williams’ invention. Submergence or depth charging might ruin the delicate alignment of the pointer and trainer telescopes, Buck had warned. This could easily be checked by fitting his new tool, which contained a small telescope with cross-hairs, into the open breech, then check-sighting the guns on designated marks on deck forward and aft.

On the forecastle, also at Williams’ suggestion, the forward torpedo room hatch now carried emplacements welded on either side to accommodate a fifty-caliber machine gun. The gun would be served by two men standing on a plank placed across rungs inside the opened hatch. The forward hatch trunk was ideal for this “foxhole” function, as Buck had enthusiastically explained, because it was fitted with a lower hatch which could be shut to preserve watertight integrity while the gun was engaged. If the ship were forced to submerge suddenly, its crew had only to shut the upper hatch to be safe inside. And if they couldn’t make it, the lower hatch would at least protect the rest of the ship from flooding.

Six fifty-caliber mounts had been installed on the bridge also, three on each side, with stowages for the three demountable guns arranged nearby. From the center area of the bridge, protected by its armored siding, a very respectable fusillade could be maintained in case of necessity. Repeated drills had been held for all guns. All-in-all, Eel could fire a great arsenal of weapons if it came to surface gun action.

Under Keith’s supervision, the bridge lookout platforms now had an upturned edging, or rim, that the men could feel with their toes. This would give them a feeling of security when the ship began rolling in a seaway, and in consequence they would keep a more effective watch. To facilitate quick descent from the lookout stations, sections of pipe had been installed in the manner of firemen’s poles. The guard rails within which they stood had been made smaller and raised several inches so that they could also function as arm rests while binoculars were held at eye level. Reduction of arm fatigue and of concern for holding on as the ship rolled, Keith had argued, was the answer to the lookout weariness which had worried them.

Below decks little visible change had been accomplished, except that the top of the shower in the forward torpedo room had been restored to its proper dimensions. Richardson had thought of offering his own stateroom to Captain Blunt in deference to his rank, but after discussion with Keith had not done so. “You’re still captain of this ship,” Keith had said. “You’ll need all those dials, call buttons and squawk boxes, and he won’t. When the OOD needs you, he’ll need you very much, and we’ve got to have you right at the other end!” It was this last argument that convinced him.

The matter had never been discussed with the wolfpack commander. Perhaps it should have been, thought Richardson uneasily, when, to everyone’s surprise. Blunt insisted on taking the least desirable bunk, that on the wardroom transom, even though there was a spare bunk in one of the staterooms. It was not until determined protest had been made, pointing out that this would greatly reduce the usefulness of the wardroom for early breakfasts and late coffee, as well as its myriad other functions, that he permitted himself to be assigned one of the three bunks in Keith’s room, across the passageway from Rich.

During the refit the biggest job, involving the most anxiety, had been the overhaul of the hydraulic system. It had been taken apart completely and thoroughly inspected. Nothing specific had been found wrong except slight scoring on the inner walls of the accumulator. When put back together, the entire system had been pronounced perfect. All during the training period it had functioned as predicted, its cycling time restored to the original specifications. It would cause no further trouble, the relief crew skipper had said. Al Dugan, when asked privately, expressed the same opinion, but Richardson, looking back later on their brief conversation, could recall a fleeting impression that Dugan had less than full confidence in his own words.

The other major improvement was the installation of one of the new radar periscopes. Unfortunately, its top was considerably larger than that of the original night periscope which it replaced; inclusion of radar had necessitated a four-foot reduction in effective length, and removal of the optical range-finder. To obtain a radar range, which was the only kind it could get, the now club-headed instrument had to be raised several feet higher out of water than had been necessary with the old optical periscopes.

But the radar periscope did give very precise ranges, and Richardson had practiced assiduously with it, along with Rogers, the teen-aged operator who came aboard with it from the Fleet Radar School. Fortunately, the attack periscope was still the old type with a very thin, tapered head, almost invisible if adroitly used. For the latter stages of a submerged attack, Richardson had resolved, he would revert to the optical system to gain the advantages of deeper submergence and a less visible periscope.

In sum, a truly extraordinary amount of work had been done on Eel during the refit period. Her new paint job topside and all her new equipment had virtually made her a new submarine. Satisfaction filled her skipper, tempered by the realization that with Blunt aboard he would not be entirely her master. Something else was nagging the back of his mind also, something unstated, unarticulated. The controversy over Blunt’s bunk had been a minor thing. But was it indicative of something, a state of mind maybe? Surely it was not worthy of further thought. Blunt probably had not intended to appear disappointed. Probably Richardson had misread him. Best put all this behind, lay it to the pressures and problems of Pearl Harbor.

He would concentrate on the thought that a certain degree of relaxation would be his during the patrol to come, for the big decisions to attack or not to attack, to risk his life and that of his crew, or not to do so, would be made by someone else. And as his own responsibility decreased, his freedom of mind to think through the dilemmas of the past two months would be correspondingly greater. He should be able to follow Blunt’s lead implicitly, as he had before in the Octopus. Once Blunt had shaken off the miasma of Pearl Harbor, he would be his old self again. The weight of Richardson’s responsibility would be confined only to the efficient operation of the Eel as a submarine.

Even as he rehearsed the thought, however, it occurred to him that on the other hand perhaps the worst thing would be to have nothing to occupy his mind as he lay sleepless in his bunk, studying the shadowed metal walls surrounding him. This had been his trouble on the way back from the last patrol. It had become progressively worse the farther Eel voyaged from the battle zone.

As night came on, he almost dreaded the prospect of once again lying there sleepless, the memory of Pearl Harbor’s activity—and Joan—fading, while all the familiar objects and sounds associated with that difficult trip home were free to reassert their depressing dominance.

The three submarines, proceeding on parallel but well separated tracks, did not sight each other until they rendezvoused for refueling at Midway Island.

Next morning they set forth again, running separately and in radio silence. Blunt had decided there had been adequate exercise in convoy techniques and there need be no drills en route to the patrol area. All submarines were to run as fast as they could consistent with safety and conservation of fuel, remaining on the surface at all times except for morning dives to get a trim or—after entry into enemy waters—when submerging to avoid detection.

The days passed with monotony as the three submarines approached the far western Pacific. With increasing urgency Richardson began to make the point that some coordinated drills were essential to maintain the unity of the newly created wolfpack. There need be little loss of time, virtually no additional expenditure of fuel. The three members of Blunt’s Bruisers had had no joint operating experience except for the short time together at Pearl. To his surprise, his arguments had no noticeable effect. Blunt listened, but with scant attention, saying only that rest was necessary for everyone before entering enemy controlled waters. Then everything would fall into place.

The second cup of coffee after dinner in Eel’s tiny wardroom became the occasion for a daily discussion. Near-pleading by Richardson, stubborn refusal by his superior. Twice Richardson privately cautioned Leone not to try to help. Emotion was creeping into the disputation; it would be the wrong thing to do.

With the first landfall on Japanese-held islands due in four days, Richardson changed debate tactics, concentrated on the needs of Eel herself. Every skipper had the right and duty to satisfy himself as to the state of training of his crew. This was his responsibility, not that of the wolfpack commander. The skippers of Chicolar and Whitefish, traveling out of sight, were making such decisions for themselves. Eel’s crew must not be allowed to go stale. It was purely a matter for each individual ship. He would carry out a full day’s drill, lasting from before dawn until long after sunset. Convoy exercises were not involved. Blunt need pay no attention, could remain in the wardroom.

It was obligatory, however, to inform Blunt that he had determined to devote a day to drilling Eel’s crew. Acquiescence was surprisingly reluctant, even for this unassailable position.

It had never been a part of his old skipper’s previous character to oppose training or drills of any kind. Quite the reverse. There was something under cover, some syndrome of fatigue in him, which Richardson must think about and try to alleviate. The voyage across the Pacific had been more of a strain than Richardson remembered from previous patrols, but as the day’s work began, with Buck Williams on the TDC, Keith Leone as assistant approach officer, Stafford on the sonar, and Quin, the yeoman, wearing the battle telephone headset, he began to renew the confidence he had felt the last days in Pearl. Larry Lasche was assigned to the automatic plotting table in the after part of the conning tower, opposite the TDC—unfortunately with his back to Buck, with whom he was to coordinate, but this could not be helped. Young Rogers, fresh out of high school and an electronic hobbyist since childhood, was on the radar console. In the forward end of the conning tower, Scott was on the helm as before, with Oregon, senior quartermaster, on one side keeping the log, and Quin on the other.

Immediately beneath the hatch leading to the control room, on the port side of the control room, was the ship’s diving station, where at battle stations Al Dugan held sway, assisted by Chief Starberg at the hydraulic manifold a few feet to his right. Sargent, number two in the auxiliary gang under Starberg, operated the air manifold across the compartment, on the starboard side of the control room. Communication with Dugan was through the open hatch or by telephone—or by the ship’s general announcing system.

As the day’s drills progressed, Richardson could feel the sinews of control tighten, their cohesiveness renew itself. The sharp edge of readiness, so painstakingly instilled, had been whetted.

During night surface approaches, the fundamental difference in stations was that Dugan and Richardson, along with a specially selected set of lookouts, moved to the bridge. Should it be necessary to dive, Richardson would drop into the conning tower, while Al Dugan and the lookouts, descending an additional level, would simply shift to the submerged condition at the diving station.

For surface gun action, day or night, however, the procedure was very different. Certain deck hatches would have to be open. A large number of men would be on deck to serve the two five-inch guns, plus extra men on the bridge for the automatic weapons. Immediate diving would not be possible. In an emergency it would be necessary to sacrifice guns and ammunition left topside. Exercising the guns with Eel already near to possible enemy air patrols would be unnecessarily hazardous. Richardson decided against it. The guns, so seldom used anyway, would have to go with whatever residual readiness remained from the training already received.

Deep in Richardson’s mind, underlying the strenuous activities of the day, were Admiral Small’s words about the impending operation against Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was of maximum importance to the U.S. cause to prevent any possible Kwantung Army reinforcement of the troops already in these two islands. The day’s workout was just what Eel’s crew needed to get them fully geared up for what might lie ahead.

Two weeks after leaving Pearl Harbor, having transited at night through the Nampo Shoto south of Iwo Jima, the three submarines separately passed north of Okinawa, timing their transit of the Ryukyu chain again for the dark hours. After a short detour to avoid a reputed mine field, they headed up on a northwesterly course into the operating area. During the entire voyage, neither ship nor plane had been seen.

That night, after the debris of the evening meal had been cleared away, Richardson deliberately brought the conversation around to the business at hand.

“Commodore,” he said, “Keith and I have been studying our area and reading up on the dope ComSubPac put in the operation order.” Keith produced a rolled up chart which he spread out on the table. “The two main Japanese focal points for shipping to and from China are Shanghai and Tsingtao. There is a little traffic, too, out of Tientsin, up here in the Gulf of Pohai. These three ports are pretty far apart.”

“Yes, I know,” said Blunt, stuffing tobacco from a pouch into his pipe.

“So it looks to us that the smart thing for the Japanese to do, considering the submarine danger, is to stay as close inshore as possible. These island chains shown here along the coast of Korea, west side and south side, practically provide an inland passage for them. There’s a beautiful one here on the west coast, the Maikotsu Suido. The track charts of subs previously in the Yellow Sea show that our boats have seldom gone after them there.

“Any ships departing Tsingtao for Japan will most likely hug the coast of the Shantung Peninsula on a northeasterly course until they get to the narrowest part of the Yellow Sea. They’ll run across at full speed, up here near the tip of the peninsula, and then head south along the Korean coast and through the Maikotsu Suido. The shortest route is of course straight across to the southwest tip of Korea and then into the Shimonoseki Strait and the Inland Sea, but from their point of view it’s also the most foolish. The smart thing for all ships, including those from Shanghai, is to run up the coast of China and cross at the narrowest possible place. Once they know we’re in the area, they might run even farther north, into the Gulf of Pohai.”

Keith nodded his agreement.

Richardson dropped his voice. “Almost surely, Tsingtao will be the departure point for Kwantung Army divisions deploying to the war zone. That’s the place we should watch most closely. But we don’t want to be too obviously blockading it, because that would alert the enemy and increase the escort forces they’ll provide.”

Blunt, using his thumb to pack the tobacco into his pipe, said nothing. After a moment’s pause, Rich continued.

“So, what we should do is blockade Tsingtao from a distance. We should send one boat into the Maikotsu Suido right away. It will be the ideal place to start. The other two, patrolling outside to the north and south, will be in position to take care of any ships diverting outside. If we hear anything from ComSubPac, all of us will be able to reach Tsingtao very——”

“Maybe so,” interrupted Blunt, lighting his pipe and puffing. “But we haven’t had any submarines in the Yellow Sea at all for a while. I think the Japs are probably running straight across, where there’ll be more sea room. Anyway, that’s where I want to start, where we can surface patrol for maximum coverage. Set up the regular patrol line, oriented north and south. We should be in position by morning. Something will turn up in a couple of days.”

Abruptly he heaved himself up from the settee, drained his coffee cup, and walked out of the wardroom.

Richardson found Keith looking at him with a puzzled expression. “What was that about?” he said. “He didn’t even listen. What’s this business about sea room? Is he ticked off about something?”

Richardson shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he said. “Probably he knows a lot about what they’re doing that we don’t.” But the uneasy feeling had begun to grow again.

Shortly before dawn next morning, Richardson climbed up on the bridge. Keith was there with Oregon, still shooting his morning stars for a careful fix of position.

“Ready for our morning dive for trim, Keith?”

“Nearly, sir. One more star.”

Swiftly Leone inverted his sextant, sighted on one of the pinpoints still showing through the rapidly graying atmosphere, with his left hand made a quick rough adjustment on the inverted sextant arc. Then, reversing the sextant to its correct position, he squinted at the star, gently rocked the sextant from side to side, carefully twirled the vernier scale knob with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “Stand by,” he said. “Stand by—mark! Did you get it, Oregon?”

“Got it,” said the quartermaster. Oregon held a notebook and a large pocket-watch in his left hand, was writing in the book with a pencil with his other hand. “Watch time was six thirty-seven and twenty-one seconds.”

“Sixty-one degrees, fourteen minutes, and three-tenths,” read Keith from his sextant scale. “That’s it, Skipper. I’ll figure it up right away. We’re not far off our dead reckoning position, though. Should be right at our patrol spot.”

Then to Buck Williams, who was Officer of the Deck, “Navigator and quartermaster going below, Buck.” Keith and Oregon swung down the hatch.

Dawn was breaking rapidly. It was becoming perceptibly lighter. There was a muggy haze to the atmosphere, grayness creeping into the sky. The stars were already too dim to be viewed. The horizon was becoming more visible, though its outline was still far from clean. Keith must have had considerable difficulty in getting a sharp enough horizon for his sights. Eel lazed gently ahead, a single exhaust pipe aft burbling.

Rich put down the binoculars through which he had been surveying the sky and the sea, looked at Williams.

“We’re ready to dive, Captain,” reported the OOD. “We have two hundred fifty feet of water under the keel, going ahead one-third on one main engine. Battery charge is completed. So far as I know, we are on station.”

“Very well, Buck,” said Richardson. “Take her down.”

“Clear the bridge!” yelled Buck. At the same time, he reached forward to a switchbox placed on the center of the bridge overhang just behind the windscreen, placed his entire mittened hand upon it, pressed distinctly two times. Simultaneously he shouted “Dive! Dive!” down the open hatch. The sound of the diving alarm reverberated loudly twice on the ship’s general announcing system. At the order “Clear the bridge,” the four lookouts posted on the periscope shears behind Williams hastily tucked their binoculars into their windbreakers, stooped through their lookout guard rails, grasped the fireman’s poles, and slid swiftly down the intervening eight feet to the bridge deck. They landed with a thump. Half doubled over, protecting their binoculars with their left arms, they dashed forward to scramble one after the other down the hatch.

Quartermaster Scott and Larry Lasche, now a lieutenant (junior grade), who had been standing their watch on the after part of the bridge, walked forward more deliberately, waited until the four lookouts were below, and then themselves disappeared. Scott would wait in the conning tower alongside the bridge hatch to assist in closing it when the last man came down.

At the instant the diving alarm had sounded, a series of small geysers—mainly air, but with a little water mixed in—appeared in quick succession on either side of the main deck from forward to aft: the main vents, jerked open by hydraulic power from the control room. Simultaneously, the exhaust noise from aft ceased. There was a clank as the main induction valve, the air intake both for the engines and for ventilation, seated itself under the forty-millimeter gun in the center of the cigarette deck. There was increased turbulence of water astern. In accordance with standard diving procedure, the electrician mates in the motor room had put both motors on “ahead full.” Up forward, the bow planes were beginning to rig out and take a bite into the water.

Eel’s bow began to slide down toward the water’s surface. The sea burst through the large bullnose casting on her bow.

Richardson grinned at Williams. Seeing the bullnose go under had always given him a small thrill of pleasure. It provided a means, also, for testing or hazing his officers. Calmly, Williams put his binoculars to his eyes, made a pretense of taking another look around the horizon.

“Okay, Buck, I’ll go below,” said Rich, knowing that he had lost this little game of chicken. It was, after all, the Officer of the Deck’s duty, as well as his prerogative, to be the last man off the bridge. Rich gripped the hatch hand rails, dropped lightly down the ladder into the conning tower. Williams, a couple of seconds behind, swung down on the wire lanyard attached to the hatch, bringing it down with his weight. The hatch latched shut. Scott swiftly remounted the ladder, reached up, and twirled the handwheel on the underside of the hatch, extending the dogs and locking it securely shut.

“Hatch secured!” called Scott. Instantly there was a loud noise of air blowing from the control room below. A rapid increase in air pressure was noticeable in the ears.

Williams released the lanyard, stepped swiftly to the control room hatch, and a moment later was at the diving station where the lookouts had preceded him. The first two had their hands on the large chromium bow plane and stern plane wheels. The submarine had already taken a five-degree bow down attitude. Williams held up his right hand, palm and fingers open in the habitual signal, scrutinized an aneroid barometer on the diving instrument panel.

“Secure the air!” bellowed Williams above the noise, clenching his fist and shaking it for emphasis. The roar of air blowing from an open pipe stopped. Air pressure stopped rising. Ears adjusted. There was a pause as Williams carefully watched the barometer. “Pressure in the boat is two-tenths, Captain. Holding steady,” he announced up the hatch. Then, raising his voice, he called over his shoulder, “Blow negative to the mark!”

Lichtmann, standing watch on the air manifold on the starboard side of the control room, was expecting the order, promptly twisted the blow valve open. The roar of high-pressure air, slightly more muted because it was blowing into a tank under the pressure hull instead of freely into the control room, again filled the compartment. The chief petty officer to Williams’ right, facing the main hydraulic control manifold with its triple row of handles, stood up to inspect a gauge on the panel above them. He traced the needle with his finger as it slowly moved counterclockwise, suddenly held up his clenched fist. The blowing stopped.

“Negative blown to the mark, sir.” Klench, the chief, sat down on his padded tool bench, his hand on one of the shiny levers before him.

“Shut negative flood valve!” said Williams.

Klench pulled the lever toward him. There was a faintly perceptible thump somewhere below. “Negative flood valve is shut,” he said.

“Vent negative!” Klench leaned forward, pulled another handle. There was the low-pitched whoosh of a large volume of air issuing from a big opening. Air pressure in the control room again perceptibly increased. When the blowing noise stopped, Klench pushed back the lever he had been holding open. “Negative tank vented, sir. Vent shut,” he reported.

“Negative tank is blown and secured, Conn. Passing sixty feet. Trim looks good.” Williams tilted his head back, projected his voice through the open hatch so that Richardson in the conning tower could hear him. Negative tank, always kept full of water when the submarine was surfaced, gave her negative buoyancy when the ballast tanks were flooded on diving. Thus it increased the speed of submergence, after which, to achieve the desired state of neutral buoyancy, the tank had to be emptied again. This would be done after Eel had broken clear of the surface and was adequately tilted down by the bow, but it was important also that the tank not be blown at too deep a depth, for to do so would cause a tremendous volume of air, at a relatively high pressure, to be vented back into the submarine.

Williams tilted his head back again, snapped an order up the hatch. “All ahead two-thirds!”

“All ahead two-thirds answered, sir.” The helmsman, Cornelli, was a new quartermaster just taken aboard from the relief crews. He was inexperienced, but he had worked out well in the training period before departure. Richardson noticed, however, that Scott, the quartermaster in charge of the watch, was standing by him at his post in the forward end of the conning tower. He appeared to be totally engrossed in writing something in the quartermaster’s notebook, but his eyes had flickered more than once in the direction of the new helmsman. It was a good thing to see.

Approximately a minute had passed since the dive had been initiated. Eel’s decks still held a steady five degree down angle, as measured by the curved bubble inclinometers on the diving stand and in the conning tower.

“Passing one hundred feet, Conn,” said Williams. “Trim still looks good, sir.”

It was unnecessary, but Richardson felt impelled to say something in reply. He leaned over the open hatch so that he could see the top of Williams’ head. Buck was supporting himself on the ladder with one foot on the lowest rung, intently watching the action of bow and stern planes, depth gauges, inclinometer bubble, the diving crew about him and the auxiliaryman behind him. “Level off at one-five-oh feet, control. Let me know when you have a one-third speed trim.”

“One-five-oh feet. One-third trim, aye aye,” responded Williams, as though he did not already know that this was exactly what he was expected to do. “Passing one-two-five feet, Conn.”

Richardson also had a depth gauge in the conning tower, did not need this piece of information, but he seized the opportunity to note that his own depth gauge registered the same amount as that which Williams had just announced to him.

“Ease your bubble,” Buck said suddenly to the stern planesman. “Watch it! Don’t overshoot!”

Leaning back and raising his voice, he called up the hatch, “All ahead one-third!”

“All ahead one-third answered,” came the reply from Cornelli, a split second after the annunciator clink.

To the bow planesman Williams said, “Ease your bow planes. Try to hit one-five-oh feet with a zero bubble and hold it.”

“One-five-oh feet, sir, zero bubble,” responded the man operating the right of the two large shiny wheels in front of Williams. He had been progressively lightening himself, removing his binoculars, divesting himself of foul-weather bridge jacket and at the same time holding the bow planes on full dive with a free hand or occasionally a knee. Now he took the bow plane wheel, leaned into it counterclockwise. The bow plane indicator rose toward the zero position.

A moment later, Williams swung to his left, spoke to the man on the trim manifold, pointing to him for emphasis. It was the first order he had given him. “Flood forward trim from sea, one thousand pounds.”

“Flood forward trim from sea, one thousand pounds,” echoed the man, fitting his wrench to the manifold and turning it. Watching one of the gauges above it, in a moment he reported completion of the operation.

Buck Williams continued to concentrate on the diving panel. “Stern planes on zero,” he ordered.

The stern planesman put his planes exactly on zero, held them there. Attentively, Williams watched the gauges. His concentration increased.

“Pump from forward trim to after trim, five hundred pounds,” he ordered. This maneuver completed to his satisfaction, he continued watching the instruments, his posture gradually relaxing.

“Pump from auxiliary tanks to sea five hundred pounds,” he ordered. This done, “Bow planes on zero.”

The ship’s speed, as indicated on a dial on his diving panel, had dropped below four knots. Keel depth was a fraction less than one hundred and fifty feet. For a long minute Williams watched his dials, said nothing. Then, leaning back again, he called up the hatch to the conning tower. “Final trim, sir. One-five-zero feet, one-third speed.”

To Klench he said, “Damn good compensation, Chief. You were right on, fore and aft. I figure she was only five hundred pounds light overall, maybe less, once she starts soaking up a bit.”

“Thanks, sir,” said Klench, obviously pleased. “I did figure she’ll soak up about five hundred pounds when she gets settled down.”

“Control,” called Rich from the conning tower. “I have the conn. Make your depth six-five feet. Bring her up easy.” To the sonarman in the conning tower he said, “Search all around. Let me know when you have completed your search.”

With planes on full rise, her propellers turning over at minimum speed, Eel slowly swam toward the ordered depth. It took several minutes to get there because of the slow speed, and the further fact that on the way up Rich ordered ten degrees right rudder in order to permit the sonar to listen on the bearing which had been blocked by Eel’s screws. Satisfied, he allowed Williams to bring her all the way up without interference, raising the tall attack periscope as the ship passed seventy-five feet in order to take a quick look as soon as its tip broached the surface. He was rewarded by the sight of the underside of the water, now under full sunlight, looking exactly the same as it would from above the surface. The Yellow Sea obviously deserved its name. The water was not yellow, but the color of light brown mud.

The periscope broke the surface, surged upward. With his right elbow crooked around one handle, holding it to his chest, his left hand pushing on the other, he quickly walked it around, inspecting first the horizon, then the air. Nothing in sight.

He walked around a third time with the periscope elevated at maximum elevation. Nothing.

Back to the horizon for a more leisurely search. Still nothing. He lowered the periscope.

“Control,” he ordered. “Five-eight feet. Prepare to surface.”

The radar periscope had better optics than the attack periscope because of the larger diameter and greater simplicity of its lens system. His next search would be through it.

“Five-eight feet, aye aye. Prepare to surface, aye aye.”

Buck Williams had come one more step up the ladder from the control room. “Captain, how soon do you figure to surface?”

Williams, who had been up since 3:30 that morning, was really asking whether he would have to bundle up again and go back on the bridge, or whether he could turn that chore over to Al Dugan. Al, no doubt, had already been called and was probably having breakfast at that very moment.

“Sorry, Buck,” said Richardson. “You’ll have to take her up yourself. The visibility is excellent. We can triple our area coverage on the surface, and I want to get back up there.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Buck.

Suddenly Williams stepped off the ladder to make room for someone to come up to the conning tower. Blunt. “Rich,” he said. “Why are you surfacing?”

“Your orders, Commodore. We’re just finishing our trim dive. We’re on station in the middle of the area, with no land nearer than a hundred fifty miles. Visibility is excellent, so we’ll have no trouble seeing enemy aircraft before they see us.”

“I gave no such order, Rich. I said you should use your best judgment about running on the surface in the area. I also said I don’t want to be detected.”

Rich was uneasily conscious that Scott and Cornelli, the other two persons in the conning tower, had expressions of irresolute surprise on their faces. “Let me show you on the chart, Commodore,” he said. Perhaps if he could get Blunt into a low-voiced conference in the back of the conning tower it would be possible to straighten things out with no further damage to morale.

A large-scale area chart was already laid out on the plotting table. “Your written orders say remain on the surface whenever possible, and last night you sent the wolfpack a message to conduct surface patrol on a north-south line,” said Rich. He indicated a lightly penciled dot with a small circle around it. “Here’s our morning dead reckoning position. Saisho To, here, or Quelpart Island, is the nearest land. There are no airfields indicated, although I suppose there could be some. Here are the other two boats—Whitefish is twenty miles to the north of us and Chicolar is twenty miles to the south. We are in the middle of the area, right on the line between Shanghai and Sasebo. If anybody comes through here, one of the three of us should see him and be able to vector at least one other boat into position for a submerged attack.”

“I know,” growled Blunt, testily sucking his pipe. “But they don’t know we are in the area yet. That’s why we have to stay submerged. I don’t want to be detected or have our presence known until we get our first big convoy.”

Richardson stared at him. Blunt’s cheeks were sagging, his eyes streaked with tiny red veins. This was exactly the opposite of what he had said the previous night. “But Commodore,” Richardson protested, “we sent the ‘surface patrol procedure’ signal to the other boats last night, along with the coordinates of the patrol line!”

“Well, countermand it, then. I want to patrol submerged! I can’t stay up all night and all day, too!” Blunt turned away from the chart, stuffed his pipe in his mouth, and went below.

Dilemma: to send a message, Eel would have to surface; but if Rich was any judge of Blunt’s state of mind, it would be necessary to gain his specific approval to surface even for a short time.

In the meantime Whitefish and Chicolar would be surfacing after their own trim dives. At this very moment, in obedience to orders, they would be setting a daylight surface patrol routine. Squatting on his heels to talk through the control room hatch to Williams, who, once the wolfpack commander had passed, again had partly mounted the ladder, Richardson explained that surfacing would be delayed slightly. Then he sent for Keith.

“Keith, how’s your fix coming? Can you take over the conning tower for a while?”

“Sure. The computation is finished. Oregon can plot it. We can’t be more than a mile off our dead-reckoning position anyway. What’s up?”

“Fine. Make routine periscope observations and put this message in our wolfpack code while I go talk to the commodore.” He handed Keith a piece of paper.

“Captain Blunt won’t let us surface?” guessed Keith.

“That’s right. He’s changed his mind from last night.”

“You know, Skipper,” said Keith as Richardson stepped on the ladder rungs preparatory to descending into the control room, “he must have been up all night. The chiefs say he just wandered back and forth, and sat up in the wardroom drinking coffee. He never even lay down. Maybe he’s not feeling well.”

“Maybe so,” said Richardson as he ducked down the ladder. He had the feeling that Keith had not said all he might have liked to say, that his eyes were trying to convey something to him.

Ten minues later, when he returned to the conning tower, Keith handed him the completed message. “How are we going to get it out?” Keith asked.

“I’ll take over again, Keith. The commodore has okayed our broaching long enough to get the message off. You take the message to the radio room, and as soon as your antennas will load up, send it out. Let me know on the bridge speaker when you get a receipt.”

“Will do,” said Keith.

Richardson crossed to the control room hatch, squatted on his heels again. “Buck,” he said, “are you ready to surface?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. We’re not going to surface all the way; I just want to broach on high pressure air. We’ll not cut in the main engines, but flood negative tank in case we have to make a quick dive.”

“Got it,” said Buck. “Do you want lookouts?”

“Yes, we’ll need the lookouts, but nobody else. Send them up to the conning tower now. We’ll shut the control room hatch before we come up, just in case she ducks under again.”

Rising to his feet, Richardson said to his exec, “Better get below, Keith. . . . Another thing . . .” as Keith stood poised in the control room hatch opening, “in case we have to dive suddenly, she might go down pretty fast, so you might find yourself in charge for a while. Don’t worry about us up here. We’ll get in the conning tower somehow.”

In a few moments the four lookouts, in full foul-weather gear with binoculars slung around their necks and inflatable belts around their waists, were in the conning tower. A jacket and belt had been handed up to Richardson also. “Scott,” said the skipper, “I want you to remain in the conning tower and stand by the bridge hatch. Shut it if water comes in. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shut the lower hatch!” Williams pulled the control room hatch lanyard from below. It slammed down. Scott stepped on it, held it down with his weight on one foot as he kicked its two dogs home with the other.

Richardson made a final sweep with the periscope, pressed the toggle on the intercom. ‘Control, this is conn. When ready, broach the ship.”

The whistle of high pressure air. A springlike lifting effect. The depth gauge needle began to revolve counterclockwise. Richardson swung the periscope around rapidly several times, stopped momentarily, looking dead ahead. “Bow’s out,” he said. He swung aft. “Stern’s coming up.”

Williams had already stopped blowing. Now came the noise of negative tank taking on the water which, when ballast tanks were again flooded, would give Eel thirteen tons negative buoyancy.

“Stern’s up,” said Rich, still looking aft the periscope. He swung it around forward. “Bow’s going under . . . good!” The noise of high pressure air again could be heard from the control room. Watching his depth gauges and bubble inclinometers, Buck was giving another shot of air to the forward ballast tanks to compensate for the water taken into negative tank.

Rich snapped up the handles on the periscope. “Down periscope,” he said. One of the lookouts pushed the hydraulic control lever. “Crack the hatch!” Scott, already standing on the rungs of the ladder, quickly spun the handle. There was a slight hiss of escaping air as the small volume of air in the conning tower quickly equalized to the atmosphere. “Open the hatch,” ordered Rich. Scott released the latch, shoved the hatch upward, stepped back. In three quick leaps up the ladder rungs, Richardson was on the bridge.

A swift look around with his binoculars: all clear. “Lookouts!” The four men clambered up the ladder, climbed to their places. One of them ran to the after part of the periscope shears, tugged briefly on the rope knotted there, released the whip antenna. A spring swung it upward into a vertical position.

The skipper and lookouts surveyed the horizon and the air. There was nothing in sight. Eel rode easily on a quiescent mud-brown sea, her main deck at the water’s edge, her main structure, except for bridge and periscope shears and the two five-inch guns, visible only from directly overhead.

From the bridge one could see tiny little rivulets of water sloshing among the slats of her wooden deck, or swirling alongside as the submarine moved sluggishly ahead under the leisurely thrust of her motors.

The bow planes were still rigged out. They would be kept on rise for their planing effect. The sky was gray, not overcast. Simply gray and dank. There was a musty odor to the atmosphere. The sun could not be seen, but visibility, Richardson judged, was at least fifteen miles, maybe more.

Water still dripped from the bridge structure as a multitude of tiny pockets slowly drained away. With unaccustomed clarity of sound, because there was no engine murmur from aft to preempt the ears, the water streams could be heard dropping directly on the sea which half-covered the conning tower beneath Richardson’s feet.

The Yellow Sea is far from the coldest body of water in the world, but Richardson was beginning to feel the December chill. He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket, put on the mittens which he customarily kept ready in its pockets, checked his rubber lifebelt for the carbon dioxide cartridges which should be there to inflate it on need. What could be holding up the message, he wondered.

“Bridge!” Keith’s voice. “Chicolar has the message. We can’t raise Whitefish.”

He might have guessed. Whitey Everett was taking his own time about surfacing. No doubt he would greet the instruction to patrol submerged with pleasure, maybe relief, but in the meantime his being submerged and out of communication was keeping Eel on the surface and in a very uncomfortable cruising situation.

Rich had argued strenuously with the wolfpack commander for a normal surfacing operation, pointing out that the ship was customarily able to dive to periscope depth in about forty-five seconds, even with a start at slow speed. But Blunt, already climbing into his bunk, had refused to permit it, had finally agreed to broaching as the only compromise he would accept. Well, he, as well as the rest of them, would simply have to wait.

There was one thing which had not been discussed, however, and it could therefore be accomplished without disobeying any order. Rich pressed the bridge speaker button. “Control, this is bridge. Equalize pressure through the main induction.”

“Control aye aye,” from Buck Williams.

The quiet on the bridge was eerie. Richardson could clearly hear the remote operating gear engage the inboard induction flapper in the forward engineroom. Then came a whoosh of air under the cigarette deck, in the midst of which, barely distinguishable, was the clank of the thirty-six-inch-diameter main induction valve. There had been a lot of air inside the submarine, what with negative tank twice having been vented into the hull. The noise lasted about three seconds, was followed by the clank of the main induction shutting and the further noise when the engineroom flapper snapped shut on its spring.

After half an hour Richardson, inadequately prepared for cold weather with only his jacket, guessed that Whitey Everett must be having breakfast submerged. Nearly an hour after Eel broached, by which time he had decided Whitey had added a nap to his breakfast schedule, the welcome news came from Keith in the radio room that Whitefish had received the message.

“Clear the bridge,” he said. The lookouts went below. He took a last look around with the binoculars. This would be a good drill, he thought. “Take her down!” he shouted, a spurious alarm in his voice. He hit the diving alarm twice, jumped for the hatch. Scott slammed it shut behind him, dogged it. He could feel the bow planes reversed to full dive, digging in, the increased drive of the propellers as the motors suddenly went to full speed. The main vents were open, but there was understandably little noise of air vented and water entering, since the ballast tanks had been only partly emptied.

“Did you start a watch?” he asked Scott. Without replying, the quartermaster held out his left hand. In it, suspended from a piece of cord which he had looped around his thumb, lay a stopwatch. The hand was passing fifteen seconds. At that moment the sea, which could be heard gurgling around the outside of the conning tower, closed over it. Several more seconds passed. “Forty-seven feet,” said Rich, who had crossed to where he could watch the depth gauge.

Scott stopped the watch. “Twenty-four seconds flat, Captain,” he said, holding it out for him to see. “Not bad, sir.”

Rich nodded, pleased. He would say something congratulatory to Buck Williams also.

A quiet discussion with Keith confirmed what he had suspected. “I know darned well he was submerged,” said Keith. “Either that or his radio had broken down. When we finally heard him, he came in loud and clear.”

Nelson, the chief radioman, shook his head. “He wasn’t broken down, sir,” he said. “I could hear him loading down his wet antennas when he answered us. He had just surfaced.”

For a short time Rich worried about what he should report to Blunt when the latter asked him the reason for his long delay on the surface, until it came to him that the wolfpack commander must have slept through it all.

At the end of four days Richardson realized that he had become distinctly restive. So had Keith, and so, he could see, had Buck Williams and a number of the other members of the crew. They would quickly go stale, lose their fine edge of alertness and training, if some change in the deadly routine could not be made. Every night for four days, with the area chart spread out on the wardroom table, he had gone over the same arguments with Blunt.

“They have to come through here,” Blunt would say, banging his pipe on the chart in the approximate center of the area, scattering ashes and sometimes small glowing tobacco embers on it. Richardson would argue the Japanese had long ago learned that the shortest distance between two points at sea was not necessarily the straight line which crossed the center of a submarine patrol area.

“Look,” he would say, “the only things we’ve seen since we’ve been here are wooden sampans. Maybe some of them are on antisub patrol, as they told us about at the briefing. The big cargo ships must be going up and down the coast of China close inshore. We’ve not seen any out here. They probably enter harbor at night, anchor in the mud flats off the Chinese coast, or travel inshore of some of these small islands. The chain of islands off Korea forms almost a protective barrier against submarines.”

For four nights in a row Keith and Richardson had pored over the combined contact and patrol track chart which someone in ComSubPac headquarters had compiled from all submarine patrol reports for the area. The chart clearly showed that of all the submarines which had been assigned AREA TWELVE since the beginning of the war, most had patrolled in the center of the area. By far the majority of contacts, however, had been made on the periphery. The submarine which had turned in the best patrol to date had never been in the center of the Yellow Sea except to cross it en route from one side to the other.

The arguments had no effect on Blunt. The wolfpack commander would not permit them to patrol surfaced during daylight, nor to shift their patrol areas closer inshore. Several times he pointed out that a submarine built for a test depth of four hundred feet, like Eel, was not able to realize her entire potential in the shallow water of the Yellow Sea. Even in the deepest part of the area it was impossible to achieve maximum submergence. Richardson decided not to bring up the fact that this was known before the Yellow Sea had been selected for their combined patrol area, and that unless ComSubPac was to abandon AREA TWELVE altogether, some submarine would have to patrol it.

The fifth night, however, brought a change. Ensign Johnny Cargill had the coding watch. “It’s one for us,” he said simply, handing a decoded message to his superiors.

The message said: SPECIAL TO BLUNT’S BRUISERS 151800Z X SIX SHIPS 34 DEGREES 10.1 MINUTES NORTH 127 DEGREES 30 MINUTES EAST X COURSE WEST X SPEED TEN 151016Z X

“That’s three o’clock tomorrow morning our time,” said Leone.

“How long will it take to get there?” demanded Richardson.

Using a pair of dividers Keith picked off the distances. “One hundred twenty miles for us,” he announced. “About one hundred three miles for the Whitefish and one hundred forty or so for the Chicolar.”

“It’s nearly twenty hundred now. We have seven hours. Barely time,” calculated Richardson. He seized a piece of paper and Keith’s thin wolfpack code book.

“Chicolar and Whitefish will have got the message too, don’t you think?” said Keith.

“They’re supposed to. . . . Johnny, tell the officer of the deck to shift the battery charge to one main engine and the auxiliary diesel, and go to full power on the other three engines on course zero-two-five. Tell him we’ll adjust the course later. Tell him also as soon as we can put that fourth main on propulsion, I want him to do it.” As he spoke, Richardson was busying himself with the code book, in a moment handed two separate pieces of paper, one in plain language, the other coded, to the wolfpack commander.

Through the entire rapid exchange, he suddenly realized, Blunt had said not one word. Carefully Blunt read, perhaps for the third or fourth time, the message Rich had drafted: REFERENCE COMSUBPAC 151016Z X PURSUE AT MAXIMUM SPEED X JOE This was what they had trained for in Pearl Harbor. Exactly this situation had been foreseen, this message sent in drill. Time after time, under various different contingencies, they had rehearsed how they would respond to exactly the contingency now before them.

As Blunt held the two papers in his hands, Rich could hear the air discharge signaling the starting of two more main engines. The gyrocompass repeater in the overhead of the wardroom began to spin. He could feel the different motion as Eel changed course and began to pick up speed. There had been two main engines on battery charge, with just a trickle of electricity going to the motors. The time fully to recharge the battery would unavoidably be longer when one of the charging mains was replaced by the auxiliary, but three main engines wide open on propulsion would drive Eel at nearly seventeen knots. Already he began to feel the drumming of the water along Eel’s sides. There was a low shriek of blowers from the control room area. The OOD had ordered the low pressure blowers put on to expel the remaining water in the ballast tanks. In anticipation of another night of slow cruising on station, they had not been entirely emptied.

“We should send the message as soon as we can, Commodore,” said Rich urgently. “The other boats will be expecting orders.”

Still Blunt said nothing. His face looked strained, the jowls on either side of his chin more prominent. Intuitive understanding struck Richardson. Despite all his years in submarines, Blunt had never been at sea in the war zone before. This was his first experience! He held authority, but he had never been tried. How many other wolfpacks must also have had this specific problem! Strange that no one had mentioned it. . . . Obviously, the flagship skipper must carry the load for his neophyte superior—this must be why Admiral Small had insisted Eel be Blunt’s flagship! But it was an intolerable burden; it was not fair. . . .

Rich hesitated, his brow furrowed. He tore a third sheet off the pad, copied the encoded message on it. “I’ll be right back, Commodore,” he said, stepping swiftly out of the wardroom and walking aft.

In a moment he was at the radio room, a small compartment just off the passageway in the after portion of the control room, “Here, Nelson,” he said, handing the message to the chief radioman, “get this out right away to the other boats. Commodore’s orders.”

Back in the wardroom he picked up the dividers, a pencil, and a plotting protractor. “Here’s our position, sir,” he said. “And here’s this convoy. It’s just south of the island chain on the south coast of Korea. My guess is they’re going to round the southwestern tip of Korea and head north. Anyway, where they are right now—or will be at three this morning if this dope is correct—they can’t head north yet, and it would make no sense to go south. So I figure if we head for this spot, right here, we’ll be in good shape to pick them off. At their speed of ten knots we ought to be able to overtake them pretty easily even if they do pass through there a little ahead of us; and if we get there quickly enough, we’ll intercept them before they get to the point on the tail of Korea where they’ll probably change course and head up through the Maikotsu Suido. That’s why we have to go to full speed, sir.”

For the first time Blunt spoke. “I can’t risk my submarines in the shallow water around those islands,” he said.

“You won’t have to, Commodore. Look.” Rich pointed with the closed dividers. “These islands aren’t all that close together. The water around the outlying ones is as deep as it is anywhere in the Yellow Sea. If these ships are closer inshore than the message says, we can trail them from seaward until we find a spot where there’s enough room to attack.”

Blunt stared at the chart, still said nothing. Richardson wondered how he could state the clincher argument without being too obvious. “Maybe they won’t be there at all,” he finally said, “and we’ll have to send a message to ComSubPac that his dope was no good.”

Just possibly, Rich later concluded, Blunt realized he was really telling him their explanations of failure would also have to carry proof of adequate effort. He well remembered the sarcasm with which Blunt himself had in the past occasionally referred to certain submarines which, for one reason or another, seemed to have so much difficulty finding the enemy.

The race for position ran on through the night and into the morning. Around midnight, the rate at which Eel’s two main storage batteries could continue to accept a charge had diminished to such a degree that the charging rate could be carried on the auxiliary engine alone. Thenceforth, on four big ten-cylinder diesels, trailing four exhaust plumes behind her, she raced at full top speed for the designated spot on the chart.

Everyone not on watch or actively engaged had been directed to try to get some sleep. Richardson lay down at about 11 o’clock and actually dozed off, to awaken, momentarily confused, a couple of hours later. Keith, he noted, turned in the moment he knew his skipper was on his feet. Blunt remained virtually in the same place he had been, drinking cup after cup of coffee and incessantly smoking his pipe in the wardroom.

At about two in the morning, first carefully adjusting his red goggles to protect his night vision from the white lights, Richardson took one last tour through the ship. As he had expected, nearly everyone was already in the vicinity of his battle station, some dozing quietly, others intensely alert.

Immediately abaft the control room, on the after side of the dividing watertight bulkhead, was the ship’s galley, with the operating mechanism for the main induction valve directly above the stove. Here he found the entire complement of ship’s cooks manufacturing a mountainous pile of sandwiches. “Just figured we might be needing ’em, Skipper,” said one.

In the crew’s dining space adjoining the galley were the gun crews of both five-inch guns and the ammunition resupply team. Some of them, he saw, were already wearing red goggles. There was no one in the sleeping space abaft the dinette, but in the next compartment aft, the forward engineroom, there was a double watch of engineers, most of them standing around idly. Here and there a toolbox had been opened, its contents laid out for easy access.

The after engineroom was the same. Both enginerooms were thundering with the full power of twenty huge diesel cylinders and twice that number of pistons in each. The compartments were also frigidly cold—windswept—as the frosty atmosphere of the Yellow Sea whistled in through the main induction outlet in the overhead of each, was sucked into the voracious engines, and spewed overboard through their exhausts. Beyond, in the electrical maneuvering room, steaming hot from the loaded electric motors and control systems, again there was a double complement of engineering personnel, in this case, electrician’s mates. And down below, through the open hatch leading into the cramped motor room, he could see two men watching the temperature gauges.

The last compartment aft was the after torpedo room, with its four large bronze torpedo tube doors matching the six in the forward torpedo room. Counting the four torpedoes in the tubes and the six reloads—two more than the designed load—the after torpedo room had ten torpedoes compared to the forward torpedo room’s sixteen.

With approval the skipper saw, already laid out as in the forward torpedo room, the special equipment which Keith and Buck had designed to make possible a torpedo reload even with the ship pitching and rolling on the surface.

Still wearing the red goggles, Rich returned to the control room, passing forward through the broiling hot maneuvering room with its two huge motors beneath the deck, and the contrastingly cold engine rooms with their roaring diesel monsters and whirling electric generators on either side.

In the crew’s dinette, one of the mess tables now held a large oval tray with a mound of sandwiches covered with a dampened cloth. Several were already being eaten, Rich noticed, and he filched one from under the cloth as he went by. In the galley two more loaded trays had been put aside for use later. They would be needed.

The watertight door to the control room was closed to protect its darkened condition. Rich lifted the latch, stepped over the coaming, relatched it. Through the goggles he was instantly aware of the red lights glowing about, but at first could see very little else. In a moment, however, thanks to the protection given by his goggles, he was able to distinguish the familiar objects.

Since the ship was on the surface, the diving station was secured. The bow planes were rigged in, the stern planes locked on zero. Al Dugan was loitering about on the diving station in desultory conversation with the battle stations bow and stern planesmen, who were sitting on the toolboxes which doubled as seats when they were operating the planes. Al gave a thumbs-up signal as Rich started up the ladder into the conning tower.

It too was dimly lighted, had been “rigged for red” since surfacing. The roar of the engines came more clearly here through the open hatch in its forward starboard corner. Also could be heard the rush of the sea through which Eel was cleaving, the muttered monosyllabic words of the watch on the bridge deck above, the occasional response from the helmsmen or the quartermaster in the forward part of the conning tower.

The speed indicator, mounted on the forward bulkhead just above the helmsmen’s head, stood at just a shade below twenty knots. Its needle indicator, in reflective paint, stood out sharply in the soft glow of the instrument lighting.

Eel pitched softly, rolled gently, but there was a purposefulness to her motion. The very steel fabric of the submarine exuded a determination to go about her deadly business.

In the after port corner of the conning tower, the Torpedo Data Computer—the TDC—purred softly, its instrument panel lights glowing. It had been turned on for hours, and the automatic inputs from ship’s own course and speed had been checked and rechecked. Buck Williams had long ago reported the TDC in readiness to receive the observed inputs of target course and range, plus the all-important item of exact target bearing from radar, sonar, the TBTs on the bridge, or the periscope. With this information it could help determine target speed and automatically make the necessary computations to set the correct gyro angles on the torpedoes. Then, when the firing key was pressed, the selected torpedoes would be sent on their deadly mission aimed with the most accurate information the human mind and the mechanical computer together could devise.

On the starboard side of the conning tower, opposite the TDC and a little forward of it, was the radar control console, glowing with suppressed green, orange and red lights. Faint flashes shone through crevices in the light shrouding covering it. A figure stood bent over the console, his face pressed into a conical rubber hood shaped to fit a man’s forehead and the bridge of his nose. The man, his two hands on the face of the instrument, fingering its dials, was relaxed but simultaneously all attention. In the darkness above the bridge, at the top of the periscope shears, the rotating electronic antenna was searching the area, probing the night, bringing in the information down to this vitally important instrument.

Rich recognized the slight figure peering into the radar receiver as he stood beside him. “Quin,” he said, putting his hand on the yeoman’s shoulder, “how is the watch going? See anything yet?”

“No, sir,” said Quin, keeping his face against the hood. “I’ve been up here since midnight, and all I’ve got is Quelpart Island, off on our starboard beam about forty miles away. Also, there’s radar sweeps coming in on our starboard and port quarter.”

“Our friends, right?” said Rich.

“Yessir. They’ve got rotating radars just like ours, and they’re on the same frequency. I can see them sweep across, so I figure it must be them.”

“Let me see, Quin.”

Quin stood up, stretched gratefully. Rich pulled the red goggles from his eyes, let them hang on their elastic thong around his neck, leaned into the hood. He was looking at a large circular dial, perhaps twelve inches in diameter, from the center of which a white shaft of light the thickness of a pencil line rotated ceaselessly in a clockwise direction. Faint concentric circles—the range markers—were visible as the moving pencil line illuminated them in passing.

At the 2 o’clock position, out near the periphery of the dial, the jagged outline of land appeared clearly every time the rotating wand passed it, slowly faded as the wand continued around the circle, was regenerated when it passed over it again. Rich watched as the radiant wand made several passes, noticed when from slightly below the 5 o’clock position there appeared the faint evidence of another wand, also sweeping. When it intersected Eel’s wand, a series of dashes was produced. The 8 o’clock position had a similar, fainter wand rotating from it which could occasionally be seen.

“That’s Chicolar over on our starboard quarter and Whitefish on our port quarter, Quin,” said Rich. “That’s where they should be. It looks as though we’re out ahead of both of them.”

“The one to port seems to be dropping behind,” volunteered Quin. “But the one to starboard—it’s been there all the time I’ve been up here.”

Theoretically, Whitefish should be a shade faster than either Eel or Chicolar, or so Whitey Everett had argued. Perhaps her battery had been more depleted and he had not yet been able to put all four main engines on propulsion.

Richardson mentally projected himself out into the space covered by his moving radar beam. To starboard, silent and massive, the bulk of Quelpart Island, a mountain rising out of the water, divided the Yellow Sea into two parts. The ships he sought were coming toward him north of the island. Ahead, not yet near enough to be picked up on the radar, the rocky coast of Korea formed a corner projecting into the sea, its long side extending nearly due north, the short side stretching eastward to create a funnel through which the convoy passing to the north of Quelpart must come. Strewn about the Korean coast, extending northward and eastward, many small islands, rocky and inhospitable, stood like protective sentinels guarding the mainland. Soon one or more of them would become a jagged blob on the radar. Eel, scenting game, was racing toward them. In a little while a group of tiny symmetrical pips would appear among the jagged blobs. They would be arranged in some man-designed, coherent way, and they would move, whereas the islets would only grow nearer. Then would the prey be flushed, and the wolf of the sea gather her pack together. They had already been called to follow. They would pursue it, fall upon it like the ravening wolves they were, rend it to pieces. Man would eat man. It was as though Richardson stood omnipotent in the heavens, searching the sea below and seeing both the past and the future.

The same scene was being duplicated in the conning towers of Chicolar and Whitefish. Perhaps both skippers were standing in their conning towers, their stations for most of the battle to come, also peering at their radar scopes, also waiting, possibly also seeing in their own allegorical conception what it was they were about to do. The call of the wild wolf had been heard. The pack was gathering.

Richardson straightened up, indicated to Quin that he should take over the radar again, replaced his goggles. He stood silently as his eyes once again began their acclimation to the dark. Momentarily he had been blinded by the considerably brighter lights of the radarscope, his mind distracted by contemplation of the hell he was about to unleash.

The PPI ’scope, as the dial he had been watching was called, had been designed with a view to use at night. Its predominant color was red. Beside it was another hooded dial, the A ’scope, which gave precise ranges but had a profusion of green lighting guaranteed to produce instant night blindness lasting many minutes. Richardson had avoided looking at the A ’scope, but even so it would be some minutes before his night vision was fully restored. He readjusted the red goggles more comfortably, returned to the forward part of the conning tower, stopped with one foot on the ladder leading upward. “Scott,” he said to the quartermaster, “I’m going up on the bridge. We’ll be getting some kind of a radar contact before long. We’ll be picking up some islands up ahead, too, but I’m expecting ships. We might be shooting torpedoes before daybreak.”

The radar operators had all been thoroughly briefed as to the prospect of getting a return on land or small islands which would resemble ships. The whole submarine was already keyed up. His prediction about imminent combat, confirming the knowledgeable guesses already rife, would be known throughout the ship within seconds. Tension would increase, but so would alertness and readiness.

Eel’s speed might even increase a fraction of a knot as the electricians once more sought carefully to balance the loads on her four generators and, if possible, slightly increase the output of the four big diesels.

Already he could see better. One last look around the conning tower. It was businesslike, calm, efficient. This was the way a submarine should be. He climbed the few steps to the bridge, ducked under the overhang. “Permission to come on the bridge,” he called.

“Permission granted, Skipper.” Buck Williams, Officer of the Deck, had his elbows on the overhang, binoculars to his eyes, peering over the front of the metal windscreen. Richardson stood beside him, the goggles dangling again around his neck, binoculars also to his eyes.

“We should get contact pretty soon, Buck,” he said, sweeping the murk with his glasses. “We’ve got Quelpart on the radar. I guess you know that. And there’s a flock of little islands that will show up dead ahead pretty soon now. What we’re watching for is a formation of ships moving between the land formations.”

“How long before we’re in radar range of the first island?” asked Williams.

“Not sure. Maybe half an hour. Time to get my night vision settled down, I hope.”

Eel’s bow, lowered nearer to the water’s edge by the powerful thrust of her propellers, steadily, almost hypnotically, drove apart the quiet sea. Two white streamers of roiled water, several feet abaft the bullnose and on either side, formed an inverted V. In the center of the V, her bow forming its point, lay the submarine. Little else could be seen of the sea. The hollow of the bow wave formed just forward of Eel’s bridge. Aft, the returning bulge of seawater tended to sweep up the submarine’s rounded sides and occasionally lap into the base of her free-flooding superstructure. Farther aft yet, four exhaust pipes, two on each side, spewed forth a thunder of spray and steam. Occasionally a wave gurgled toward one of the yawning openings of the pipes, to be hurled backward in white confusion under the force of the exhaust gases. All the way aft, abaft the stern mooring line chock, there was a white-ribbed disturbance in the sea, a burbling from below. Immediately beyond, coming in from the sides, the dark waters hurled themselves into the cleavage behind the submarine. The only note of her passage was the straight white wake stretching out astern, growing less in the distance as quiet returned to the Yellow Sea.

The air as usual was dank, still, and cold. Richardson’s night vision was returning, but he still found it difficult to distinguish the horizon, where the sky and the water met. All was the same dark grayness. Overhead, no stars to be seen. As before, he had the impression that visibility was not unduly restricted, but that somehow there was a salt content to the air, a thin concentration which gradually brought haze of sky and haze of sea together in a unity that defied piercing.

He had no feeling at all. It was as though he were watching from somewhere else. His second self, the buried one of which he was so keenly aware, was about to take charge. This was his profession, his metier. This was what he was a master at: the relentless power of Eel’s four big diesel engines, her spinning propellers, the unimaginable potential for destruction in the ten torpedo tubes she was about to use; himself, the controller of it all—the controller, and yet as much as any one of them, controlled.

From whence had come the intelligence sending Eel on this deadly errand? Admiral Small, of course, but where did he get it? The admiral had mentioned Fort Shafter as being a special source of information. This must be what he was referring to. This must be why Mrs. Elliott, Cordy Wood, and Joan had such high security clearances. They all worked there. One of the peculiar things about Joan’s job was the strange hours. Frequently she would spend several days in a row inside the Shafter compound, never leaving, sleeping at odd times in the room assigned to her. Then she would be off for several days. Joan had once lived in Japan, and she could both read and speak Japanese. Her father had been in the diplomatic service. She said she thought he was dead, but she never talked about him. There was more to his story. Could he have been in intelligence? Could he still be? Could that be the reason for Joan’s reticence? Was she, also, in intelligence work?

It must be so. She had known about the lifeboats even before Rich had told about them. She had known about the Walrus, and what had happened to her. Submarines had been benefitting from special information about convoy movements since nearly the beginning of the war. Joan’s knowledge of Japanese would be needed to translate the messages into English. There must be a large group involved with just this part of the work, and it would be very highly classified. No wonder Joan had been so reluctant to talk about herself!

Little bits of information began to piece themselves together. Joan’s seeming familiarity with the names of the submarine skippers, for one thing. She knew who was on patrol, and who had just returned. And she knew how well they’d done and what their problems had been, almost as though she, as well as Rich, had been reading the daily dispatches. Several times he had had the feeling that she was pretending ignorance simply in order not to appear too well informed. The last night before sailing, he was suddenly struck by the notion that she knew of Operation ICEBERG. It was intuition, nothing more, and he had been trying to think of a way to find out without violating the secrecy imposed by Admiral Small, when she interrupted him in the way she knew so well, which always led to other things far removed from submarines and the war.

Obviously, if these deductions were correct, Joan must know what submarines were assigned to the various patrol areas. Although this sort of information was considered top secret by the submarine force, she would know that at this very moment Eel was patrolling the East China and Yellow seas, along with the Whitefish and Chicolar. She would know of the message about the convoy. It might even be she who had decoded it, or translated it. And she would be aware that it was sending Eel into combat and mortal danger. Now that they had been so close, that she knew Richardson so well, what would she think, or feel, about the risks she was subjecting him to? Would she worry about his safety? Or was it all part of the job? What about Jim Bledsoe and the Walrus? Through some tacit understanding, some regard for her privacy—and Jim’s, though he was dead—he had refrained from bringing Jim up. She had told him what she felt she ought, and he had resolved to be satisfied with that.

Now it occurred to him to wonder whether Jim’s last, fatal attack on Bungo Pete’s decoy freighter could have resulted from a similar message. If so, it meant that it had been planted, and therefore that the enemy had finally realized their convoy routing code had been broken. If so, this convoy Eel was now pursuing might also be a decoy. If so, he and the other boats might be steering at full power into a gigantic trap!

But his mind refused to follow the train of thought. It could not be true. It was too far-fetched an idea. Admiral Small and the Fort Shafter people would have to be trusted not to be taken in. Anyway, it made no difference. No matter what his imagination concocted, Eel and the other two submarines had received an order for battle. They had been pointed toward the enemy, and they had been unleashed. From here on, ComSubPac did not exist. Joan did not exist. Nothing existed but the sea, and Eel’s slender prow cutting it into halves as she sped through it. Only he existed, at the center of the universe, and even he did not exist. There was not even such a thing as the will to do what he was in the process of doing, what he had been trained for so many years to do. There was only the fact of doing it.

Time had been, years ago, when he worried whether he would be able to fire torpedoes set to kill; whether he would be able to nerve himself to see the effects; whether he could hold himself together, still function, disdain the terror of the inevitable counterblow. Before the war a perfect torpedo shot was a professional triumph. It had required meticulous preparation of equipment—the angle solvers, the tubes, the ancillary parts of the submarine which brought them to the firing point, the torpedoes themselves—and lengthy, boring, often lonely practice. Success was achieved when the target signaled the torpedoes had passed beneath her keel. A bull’s-eye: accolades for all, qualifications, promotions, favorable comments in fitness reports, a conspicuous white E on the conning tower. What happened when the bull’s-eye produced instead a catastrophic explosion, a column of white water mixed with death and debris, a shattered hulk which a moment ago had been a fine ship—that was something he had thought of as happening in another world. It was imaginary, not real. It was not part of the prewar drill. He had, of course, known that ships would sink. But, before the war, he had never been able to visualize what it must actually be like.

Now he had seen it. Being the cause of it was easy, for in the process something had happened to him, too. He was split into two people, both of whom were present at the same time inside him, both able to react. But the two, the automaton and the spectator, were entirely different from each other. The automaton had been trained to be a nerveless perfectionist. The devastating result of the automaton’s perfectionism was a clinical certainty it accepted with detachment. The automaton always shouldered the spectator aside, took over the periscope or the bridge TBTs at the start of any action. Beside it, inside it, stood the spectator, observing, marveling, saddened at the destruction and the loss of life. Once in action, the automaton could not be stopped, except by the interposition of some external superior force, and if the opportunity arose, it would inevitably respond with some deadly riposte of its own. It could coldly aim a torpedo that would rip the vitals out of a ship and send it reeling to the bottom of the sea. It would watch the carnage with cool concentration, ready to wrest instant advantage from whatever developments there were.

The spectator, seeing through the same eyes, would always see the dust left floating at the spot where a ship had sunk, would mourn the doomed round black spots—the heads of men—clustering around floating wreckage. The spectator could feel compassion, imagine himself among them, wish they had not, by appearing before his sights, wrought their own destruction. Yet the spectator also had his hardness. These were the enemy. They sought his death. Though the targets of the moment were merchant ships, they were part of the enemy’s total war effort. They would not hesitate to try to bring about his own destruction with depth charges, bombs, any weapons they might happen to possess. They were not above breaking the rules of war. There had not even been a war with the United States on December 7, 1941.

They had killed Stocker Kane in the Nerka, and Jim Bledsoe in the Walrus at a moment of mercy while they were rescuing the crew of an old freighter. Its crew, part of Nakame’s outfit, had desperately signaled for rescue. The torpedo from Nakame’s carefully positioned sub struck just as Jim was bringing the life raft alongside.

What rules could there be in total war, if Stan Davenport and his men had to die in Oklahoma’s enginerooms even before that war existed? Stan’s body was found at his station near the port throttle when the big old battlewagon finally was rolled upright. Japan had initiated the war by an unparalleled act of international treachery. She had thrown away the rule book. Surprise, shock, irresistible power: these were the only currency left between Japan and the United States. The reckoning for that brutally cynical act would be cut from similar cloth. No negotiations could stop it, for whom did Japan have who could be trusted as a negotiator? After Pearl Harbor, who in America would be willing to take a similar risk again?

The spectator could even talk with the automaton, but the conversations were always one-sided, always subject to the superior demands of combat. The night was clear and beautiful, the spectator might say. The sea air was clean; the salt dust blowing was refreshing. The Japanese were admirable seamen. They built fine ships, and they knew how to operate them. He could not say they were a fine, honorable people: not after what had happened at Pearl Harbor, and then later at Bataan and Corregidor; but they were industrious and hardworking. The automaton would grimace frigidly through the TBT or the periscope, call out the crucially important observations, maneuver the critical weapon, the Eel. It never answered the spectator’s observations. It acted, with finality. Its actions were the only answers it ever gave.

Long ago, Richardson had learned that he was as much an instrument of his submarine and its torpedoes as they were of him. There was no room for emotion, no room for thinking. Yet he did think, and observe, in a strange, set-aside corner of his mind. During combat, there was only room for the trained reaction to do what had to be done quickly, effectively, and with precision. After it was over there would be again, as there had always been, a coalescence of personality. The spectator and the automaton would merge into one, and the stern compulsion would disappear. Afterward there might be a reaction to what he had seen and done. But only afterward.

A moderate breeze came over the top of the bridge windscreen, doubtless entirely the product of Eel’s speed, for the air was as still as the sea. This time he had properly prepared himself for the cold, with boots and heavy trousers in addition to his heavy jacket. The air had a bite to its chill. He spread his mittened hands to cover as much of his face as he could, held the binoculars to his eyes, elbows resting on the little dashboard behind the windscreen, scanned the nothingness ahead. Beside him, Williams silently did the same.

Above the still figures on the bridge towered the two metal cones which were the periscope supports. During daylight the four lookouts stood on little platforms high on the side of each cone. Now, swathed in foul-weather gear, they stood at the bridge level, protected by the bulwarks, binoculars still sweeping steadily.

Above them all, impervious to fog, darkness, or weather, the best lookout of all ceaselessly rotated, sending its invisible radar beams out over hundreds of square miles of ocean surface, to show by a pip on a dial in the conning tower any unusual phenomenon on the surface of the sea.

Rich had been on the bridge approximately half an hour when, from the slight bustle going on beneath the conning tower hatch, he knew that some sort of word was coming.

“Radar contact, Bridge!” Scott, relaying the word, no doubt from Quin. “Looks like land! Port and starboard. Twenty-five miles.”

“Bridge, aye aye,” from Williams. “Those are the islands we’re expecting. Keep the information coming, but look carefully between them. We’re looking for ships, Conn.”

“Conn, aye aye,” responded Scott. “Radar has the word.”

It was perhaps another ten minutes before anything new showed on radar.

“Radar contact!” Quin’s voice, bellowing from his position at the console.

Instantly Buck pushed the bridge speaker button. “Where away, Radar? Range and bearing!”

“Zero-four-zero, Bridge. Fifteen miles! Looks like six ships, sir!”

Williams looked at his skipper. Richardson nodded. “Station the radar tracking party,” the OOD briskly called into the bridge speaker.

More bustle below decks. It could not have been more than twenty seconds before the bridge speaker blared once again.

“Radar tracking party manned and ready, Bridge.”

“Track target bearing zero-four-zero,” ordered Buck on the loud-speaking system. Then, pitching his voice to reach the helmsman down the hatch, “Steer zero-four-zero, helm. All ahead two-thirds!”

The roar of the engines eased. Eel’s bow swung slightly to the right, steadied. Richardson nodded with approval.

Putting Eel’s nose directly on the target would accentuate any discernible relative motion, enable the plotting party more quickly to determine in which direction the target was moving. Slowing down was routine—to avoid blundering prematurely into close range. Later, depending on which way the targets seemed to be moving, it might be necessary to turn around to put Eel’s stern toward them.

The TDC in the conning tower was, of course, the heart of the plotting effort. Normally Buck Williams would be operating it, but since for the time being he was occupied as Officer of the Deck, Keith would be running it for him.

Rich picked up the bridge hand-microphone which had been sent up when the radar tracking party was set. Rigged with a short extension cord, it permitted him to speak to the conning tower, control room, and maneuvering room without the necessity of fumbling for a button and leaning over to speak into the bridge speaker. Responses, of course, came as previously on the announcing system. He spoke into the mike: “Conn, this is bridge. I don’t want to get closer than fifteen thousand yards.”

“Recommend you slow down even more, Bridge,” said Keith on the bridge speaker. “The range is closing rapidly.”

Williams had heard too. With a quick look at Richardson he gave the order. “All ahead one-third!”

Several minutes passed. The bridge speaker blared again. “Bridge, conn.” Keith’s voice again, “We have six ships. Looks like three big ones and three little ones. The three big ones are in a column, and there’s a little one ahead and on each flank. Estimated speed ten knots. Estimated course two-seven-oh. The range is now twenty thousand. The way we have them set up, they’ll pass about ten thousand yards away at the closest point of approach.”

Blunt was on the bridge. Rich was conscious of his presence even though he had not voiced the customary request to come up.

“Buck,” said the skipper, “they’re going to pass us too close aboard. Reverse course and put our stern on them.” Speaking into the microphone he continued, “Conn, this is the bridge. We’re reversing course to put our stern to the target.”

“Conn, aye aye,” from Keith.

Buck, as was his right as OOD, gave the orders. Slowly Eel swung to the right, her port side diesels muttering a little louder than before in response to the small speed increase he had directed.

“When you get around, Buck, go to all stop. We’re at a good range now. Then go ahead just enough to keep the range at fifteen thousand.”

All this had been rehearsed before. Should the range begin to decrease radically, indicating a zig toward, it would be easy to increase speed and pull off the track. Should plot indicate a zig away, now that a firm radar contact had been obtained it would be a simple matter to reverse course once more and maintain the desired distance.

“Commodore,” said Richardson, “it looks like we’re the trailer.”

Blunt seemed not to have heard. Rich waited a moment, then spoke into the bridge microphone, “As soon as we’re around and steadied on the new course, Conn, give me another reading on enemy course and speed. I want to send a message to the other boats as soon as possible.”

In a few moments Keith reported that enemy course appeared to be 260, speed ten. “Range is now seventeen thousand. Closest point of approach about thirteen thousand.”

“Better kick her ahead a little, Buck,” said Richardson.

Then to the mike, “Keith, do you have tactical communications with the other boats?”

“Yes, sir. All set.”

“Make up the contact report.”

Keith clicked the bridge speaker switch twice. In a few minutes he read the message aloud: TALLYHO X THREE AND THREE X COURSE TWO-SIX-OH X SPEED TEN X POSITION QUEEN FOURTEEN X RICH ONE X

“Let her go, Keith,” called Richardson through his microphone.

He could visualize Leone speaking into the radio microphone which had been installed in the conning tower. It must have been less than a minute before he announced, “Roger from Les, Bridge. Roger from Whitey.”

Minutes passed. Keith again, “Bridge, Conn, zig to the convoy’s right. It looks like they’re going to pass north of the closest island. New course three-zero-zero. We’re getting speed eleven now. I’ve made up another message to send to the other boats.”

“All right, Keith, go ahead and send it. What course do you recommend to maintain contact?”

“With the island shielding them, we should come in closer, Captain. Recommend we close at full speed to get around to the other side and pick them up as they come in the clear again.”

“Right,” said Richardson. He motioned to Buck. With the latter’s order, the main engines once again lifted their wild monotone. The propellers began their thrashing. Eel swung around again to the right, steadied on a course a little west of north.

During all of this Blunt had been a quiet but interested observer. Now he spoke. “Rich, why did you turn tail to the enemy when you first contacted him?”

Richardson was surprised at the question. “That was agreed procedure, sir,” he said. “We made first contact, so we have to trail and avoid getting too close ourselves.”

“It looked as if you were avoiding combat. But now you’re closing in again, and you’re getting in among the islands, too. I don’t like it, Rich, it’s too shallow. Our charts aren’t that good.”

He spoke rapidly. His voice had a nervous quality.

Richardson stared his amazement. It wouldn’t do to let Buck Williams or the lookouts hear this exchange. He crowded over toward Blunt, dropped his voice, “Commodore, this is actually the deepest place in this whole section of the Yellow Sea! Take a look at the chart. These islands are narrow pinnacles coming up out of the bottom. It’s over fifty fathoms where we are right this minute! Besides, there’s plenty of sea room around and between these islands. We can see them on radar, and we can see them with the naked eye. This is our chance, sir. Your chance to start this patrol off with a real bang!”

“We’re on the surface too close to land, Rich,” muttered Blunt. “What if a plane takes off from one of these islands to provide air cover?”

“They’ll never see us at night, Commodore. We’ll soon merge in with the land return of these islands so their radar won’t work, either!” Richardson terminated the exchange by putting his binoculars to his eyes. Fighting the ship was his responsibility, not the wolfpack commander’s. Later there might be more to discuss, even recriminations, but this was out of place now. The sweep of events was beginning to move too rapidly.

Eel was again at full speed, throwing spray from both bows. Holding the now clearly outlined bulk of a relatively steep, slab-sided land mass on her starboard bow, she raced to regain contact on the other side. In the meantime Keith was sending another message to the other two submarines. When contact was regained, the message explained, Eel would slow down again, remain close inshore, wait until the convoy had passed on ahead, and then follow from astern at a greater distance.

In between observations of the convoy the radar kept swinging about, searching in all directions. It was during one of these searches that Rich saw the wolfpack training bearing fruit.

“Radar contact!” Rogers’ boyish voice. He had relieved Quin when the tracking party was called. Rich could hear him clearly, without benefit of speaker.

“Radar contact, bearing two-zero-zero! He’s got a radar too. I think it’s the Chicolar!”

“I’ll check it, sir.” Keith. In a moment the exec reported, “It is the Chicolar, Captain. He acknowledges with his radar.”

During convoy college a means had been devised for handling the radar of two submarines for precisely this eventuality. “Now that we have him on the radar, Captain, I’ll give him a vector to the target.”

In a few moments Keith’s voice again on the bridge speaker, “Bridge, conn, tallyho from Chicolar. He’s going in on our vector, figuring to pick them up on his own radar on the way.”

This was, of course, just like Les Hartly. Richardson would never have attacked with so little information on the target. He was surprised to hear Blunt mutter approvingly.

Once out from behind the island, and again with a good radar contact on the enemy convoy, Eel slowed down, closed the island shoreline. Her diesels growling softly, she lay to in the quiet water, her stern again toward the enemy. Her radar still ceaselessly patrolled the night, and short contact reports still went out to Whitefish.

Chicolar, now in contact on her own, needed no further information except possibly early notification of any change in enemy course and speed. In any case, she would be monitoring the transmissions to Whitefish.

“Captain”—Keith’s voice on the speaker—“We’ve got the whole picture on the PPI ’scope. Chicolar is going in on their port bow, and she’s about ten thousand yards from firing position right now.”

“Commodore,” said Richardson, “why don’t you go down and watch it? I can’t because it would hurt my night vision. We’ll go to battle stations as soon as Chicolar finishes. . . .”

Blunt dropped down the hatch. Several more minutes passed.

“Bridge, conn! Target has zigged to his left!” This was bad. If it zigged far enough, this could put Chicolar dead ahead, and the leading escort would be upon her in a matter of minutes.

“Bridge, conn. Target course checks at two-four-five! Chicolar is now sharp on their port bow!”

Richardson had to fight the impulse to run down below to see for himself. He could visualize the situation well enough. The enemy bearing, which had steadily been drawing left for Chicolar, had suddenly stopped drawing to the left and was now steady. Because of Les Hartly’s approach technique, they were almost dead ahead of him. The target was coming directly for Chicolar, making eleven knots, and Chicolar was heading for the target at twenty knots.

He grabbed the bridge microphone, “Commodore!” he yelled. “Recommend an emergency message to Chicolar! Target is heading right for him!” Chicolar had held radar contact on the enemy such a short time that his plotting party could not yet have fully assessed the enemy’s zigzag plan. He very likely would not discover the sudden deterioration of the situation until long after Eel’s tracking party had seen it in their plot.

No answer from the conning tower. The commodore must be there. Keith, alone, would have answered immediately. If necessary he would have sent the message in name of the wolfpack commander. There was no time to lose, not even time to encode a message in their simple wolfpack code.

“Keith!” bellowed Richardson. “Emergency message to Chicolar!” No answer. Cursing, Rich shouted to Williams, “Take the conn, Buck! I’m going below!” He dashed down the ladder, rushed to the after part of the conning tower.

The commodore’s squat bulk blocked the radar. He had pushed both Rogers and Keith aside, was staring at the PPI ’scope. Its hood had been removed. In his right hand he held the radio transmitter microphone. Keith, his eyes much bigger than usual, looked at him helplessly.

“Commodore! We’ve got to warn Les!”

Blunt did not move. Peering over his shoulder at the unhooded ’scope, Richardson could take in the entire panorama of disaster at a glance: the single gleaming pip with swirling, spiral-dotted radar indications emanating from it; and only a little distance beyond, three or four miles on the radar ’scope, six pips arranged like the head of an arrow—three large pips in a column, three small ones in a triangle formation around the leading pip—headed directly for the pip that was Chicolar.

“What did Blunt say?” he hissed to Keith.

“Nothing,” whispered Keith. “He hasn’t said anything. He just grabbed the radio mike and won’t let it go.”

Richardson turned to Blunt, “Commodore, there’s barely time—he can still dive. . . .” He reached for the microphone, grabbed it. Blunt’s fingers were clenched. No time to wrestle for it. Rich fumbled for the button, leaned over, shouted into the microphone, “Les, this is Joe. Emergency! Zero angle on the bow! Get out of there! Les, this is Joe. Emergency! Zero angle on the bow!” He repeated the message twice. Still no sign from Blunt. He could feel Keith crowded against his right shoulder. Rogers, too, on the other side. The range could now be no more than three miles.

Some division was occurring in the enemy convoy. The three smaller pips continued as before, but the three larger ones, still in column, were drifting to the right. In a minute the shaft of the arrow had broken away from its head, had headed up more to the north. The three little ones, however, were converging directly upon the little pip from which the dotted sweeping wand of radar emanated.

“Captain!” Buck Williams’ voice on the bridge microphone. “Gun fire to the north!”

“All ahead flank! Right full rudder!” shouted Richardson. He broke away from the group in the conning tower, dashed to the bridge. “Buck,” he said, “I’ll take back the conn. Sound battle stations, and take your post on the TDC. Get your gun crews ready also. They’re shelling the Chicolar. We’ll have to go and help.”

“Roger, Captain. We’re lying with our head one-seven-oh, all stop, except for your last order.”

“Right, Buck. I have the conn. . . . Keep your rudder right full!”

“Can you see all right, sir? Maybe I’d better stay up with you a few minutes.”

“Okay, Buck, do that. Go ahead and sound battle stations anyway, right away.”

The pealing notes of the general alarm rang through Eel. Within seconds the report came up. “Battle stations manned and ready!”

“Conn!” Richardson shouted into his bridge microphone. “Range and bearing of Chicolar!”

There was some delay. Finally Keith replied, “Range to Chicolar, eleven thousand yards!”

“Buck!” said Richardson savagely, “I can see well enough up here! Get down there and get Blunt away from the radar!”

Williams dashed below.

“Helm!” Richardson called down the hatch to the helmsman, “make your new course three-five-zero!”

“Three-five-zero, aye.” Scott. The helm was his battle station. Richardson did not know the exact bearing of Chicolar, but 350 would do for a start. He picked up the microphone, “Conn, bridge; bearing and range to Chicolar!”

“Three-four-five, Bridge. Range eleven thousand two hundred.”

“Steady on three-four-five, helm!” ordered Richardson.

Under the thrust of four suddenly aroused diesels, Eel was picking up speed swiftly, curving to the right, straightening out on the ordered course. Up ahead Richardson could see flashes on the horizon.

Damn Les Hartly and his all out bows-on approach! This was exactly the situation which had been predicted, and now he was caught! Maybe Eel could get there in time to create a diversion, but Chicolar needed only one shell through her pressure hull to end her career. He leaned over, pressed the bridge speaker button. “All hands hear this,” he said. “Chicolar has been caught on the surface by enemy tincans. They are shelling her now. We’re going over to try to help. Gun crews stand by in the control room and crew’s mess!”

Rich was conscious that the battle lookouts, men specially designated to take lookout stations during surface action and who were also trained to operate the two bridge forty-millimeter guns and the twenty-millimeter pair, were coming up one after the other and taking their stations.

Al Dugan would be coming shortly, was there. “I’ll keep the deck, Al,” he said. “You run the routine. If we can get close enough to open fire with all weapons, maybe we can take the heat off Chicolar and they can dive.”

“What are you going to do about the convoy, Rich? Are you going to let them get away?” Blunt’s voice. He had again come on the bridge without anyone being aware of it. “Rich,” he went on, “I have a report to make about your executive officer. I want you to relieve him of duty and confine him to his room. He was insolent to me just now, pushed me, even.”

Rich could feel his eyes narrowing. He answered rapidly, “Can we talk about that later, sir? We’ve got to see what we can do to help Chicolar!”

“That’s what I mean,” said Blunt, shifting back to the first subject as though he had never mentioned the second. “We’ve got three ships now that are about to get away. They’re unescorted, too. Those are our targets. That’s what we came out here for. Leave the Chicolar. Go after them. That’s an order, Richardson!”

“Commodore, the Chicolar is worth a dozen of those old ships! She’s in trouble!”

“You heard me, Richardson! The Chicolar can take care of herself. You go after those three ships. Do I make myself clear?”

“Bridge”—this was Keith on the speaker—“Chicolar has dived.”

“Keith, what’s the range and bearing of the convoy?”

“Convoy has reversed course, Bridge. They bear zero-zero-zero, thirteen thousand yards, course zero-nine-zero, speed twelve.” In one way Blunt was correct. Unescorted, the three freighters, or whatever they were, would be easy meat.

No doubt the three escort ships would depth charge the area where Chicolar had dived. They would be out of action for some time. Whatever Eel did had to be done immediately.

Raising his voice, Rich shouted into the bridge hatch, “Come right to zero-three-zero. . . . Keith,” he said into the hand mike, “give me a course to intercept the convoy.”

“Zero-three-zero looks good, Bridge!”

In the distance, far on the port beam, the flashes of gunfire had ceased. Richardson could hear the detonations of explosions. No doubt they were depth charges. Keith confirmed it. “We can hear distant depth charges below,” he reported.

Richardson’s night vision was returning rapidly. At ten thousand yards he could see the dark blobs of three ships on his port bow. With her superior speed Eel drew abreast of them, maintaining her distance.

“Conn, bridge. Target course?”

“Steady on zero-nine-zero, Bridge,” Keith responded. “Convoy is not zigzagging. Three ships in column. Speed twelve.”

Obviously they were trying to make as much distance away from the scene of action as they could. Anticipating only a single submarine in the area, they had ceased to zigzag, had probably gone to emergency speed. Rapidly Eel opened out on the convoy’s starboard bow.

“We’ll fire two fish at each ship,” Rich said to Keith. “Give me a course for a ninety track on the middle ship. We’ll shoot all fish to hit, and take them in order from forward aft.”

“Aye aye, Captain. Looks pretty good right now, sir; come on around anytime. Recommend course north.”

All this time Eel had been plying along at nearly twenty knots through a calm, motionless, almost oily sea. Richardson felt again the curious sense of detachment he always felt at just this moment. “Stand by,” he ordered. “Left full rudder. Helm, make your new course zero-zero-zero! . . . All right, Keith,” he called into the bridge microphone, “we’re making our approach now. Call out the ranges as we come in!”

The range closed swiftly. At seven thousand yards Rich ordered two-thirds speed ahead. He could see the large bulks of the three ships looming clearly, shadowy shapes in his staring binoculars. Swiftly he swept from one to the other. They were running in very close formation, hardly three ship-lengths apart. Two were relatively new ships, not large, perhaps three thousand tons each. Engines aft—probably the products of a war construction program. The third ship was a trifle larger and looked older, an old-type freighter with a tall stack and a small deck house amidships. Possibly four-thousand-ton size.

Eel was now as committed as Chicolar had been, with three basic differences: she knew a lot more about the enemy, having tracked them for a considerably longer time, she was coming in for attack on their beam, and there were no escorts.

“Range four thousand yards”—from Keith on the bridge speaker. Eel’s speed had been reduced to about ten knots. At three thousand yards range, with the leading ship just on her port bow, Richardson ordered the outer doors to the forward torpedo tubes opened. He could almost hear the six consecutive thumps as the hydraulic mechanism banged them open.

“All ahead one-third! Stand by forward!” he ordered.

“Range twenty-five hundred yards!”

“Why don’t you go ahead and shoot, Rich?” Blunt. He had not spoken for more than a quarter of an hour. Richardson had completely forgotten his presence on the bridge.

From the high plane of the objective professionalism which somehow possessed him, Richardson heard himself say, “I seem to remember an old skipper of mine saying once you get in there to take your time and do it right. They can’t see us.”

“Range to leading ship sixteen hundred. Gyros six right. Torpedo run one-six-zero-zero!”

“Conn, bridge, we’ll shoot with the port TBT,” continued Richardson into the bridge mike, setting his left shoulder into the bulge built in the port side of the bridge. “Bearing, mark!”

“Port TBT, aye aye. Range sixteen hundred. Torpedo run one-five-two-five. Gyros ten right. Ready number one!”

“Stand by, forward,” said Rich once more. He looked through the TBT binoculars, thumbed the button buzzer with his right thumb. “Shoot!” he said into the microphone hanging on its wire looped over the top of the pressure-proof binoculars.

“One’s away”—Keith from the conning tower. He could hear someone counting seconds. “Two’s away.”

“Shift targets,” said Rich. He swung the TBT to the second target. “Bearing, mark!” He pushed the button.

Keith answered as before, “Ready with number three!”

“Shoot!” he said again.

“Three’s away! Four’s away!”

“Shift targets! Bearing, mark!” He thumbed the button a third time.

“Ready number five!”

“Shoot!” said Richardson for the third time.

“Five’s away! Six away! All torpedoes fired forward!”

Richardson had felt the mild lurch as each torpedo was ejected. Eel was firing electric torpedoes and therefore there was no wake, no sign that anything had happened in the water, but he knew that six times three thousand pounds of highly complicated mechanism, carrying a total of twenty-four hundred pounds of TNT, was running in the dark water.

“Aren’t you going to maneuver, Rich?” asked Blunt.

“No, sir,” said Richardson. He felt perverse detachment. Standard tactics called for maneuvering to avoid, but he would not do it. He had dealt death again, and now he must watch it happen. “These ships have had it,” he growled in justification. “Besides, they’re unescorted. There’s nobody there who can hurt us.”

There was a flash of light at the water line of the first freighter. The ocean was riven as a huge plume of water and air suddenly obscured the doomed ship’s midsection. Seconds later another similar plume covered the after portion. Then the noise of explosions came in—three times; three loud booms.

“What happened, Rich? I distinctly saw you fire only two torpedoes at the first ship.”

“We heard them through air and water both, Commodore,” rapidly responded Rich. “The middle two probably overlapped each other and reached us around the same time.” He shifted his attention to the second ship just in time to catch the two explosions enveloping her. He shifted the TBT to the third ship. Nothing. The torpedoes could not have missed!

Then, as he watched it, the ship seemed to divide into two parts. Her midship section disappeared. Bow and stern rose toward the sky, closed together, swiftly shrank. Both sections were already half under water when the thunderous explosion of the torpedoes beating in the old freighter’s ancient bottom reached them.

“Six hits for six torpedoes! Bully good shooting, Rich!” shouted Blunt ecstatically, slapping him across the shoulders and slamming his eyes unexpectedly into the rigid rubber-protected eyepieces of the heavy TBT binoculars. “Great work!” Blunt was almost babbling with excitement and pleasure. Curiously, Richardson felt totally let down. This had been ridiculously easy. The ships had had no defense whatever. Chicolar had taken the escorts out. His attack had been made without warning, and he had had all the advantage of modern technological science. It had been nothing but murder.

“All ahead, flank! Left full rudder!” he ordered.

“Where are you going now, Rich?” said Blunt.

“Back to the Chicolar. Maybe we can help her a little.” He spoke into his command microphone. “Conn, bridge, what have you got on the Whitefish? And where are the three tincans working over Chicolar?”

“Nothing on the Whitefish, Captain. We’ve not seen her radar for quite a while. Maybe she’s dived. Morning twilight will be in half an hour. The three tincans are where they were before, still in a group fifteen miles bearing two-six-five true.”

“Make your course two-six-five, helm,” said Rich.

“Rich, they’re fifteen miles away. Day will be breaking before we get there.”

“Then we’ll dive and make a submerged approach. They won’t be expecting a second submarine.”

“After what you did to that convoy? By the time we get there they’ll know what happened to it, and that another submarine was responsible!” Blunt seemed totally oblivious to the fact that four lookouts, a quartermaster and Al Dugan were all crowded together on Eel’s tiny chariot bridge and could not avoid hearing every word that was said.

“Commodore,” muttered Rich, trying to give his voice an urgent piercing quality while at the same time lowering his tone so that only Blunt could hear, “Commodore, they won’t have any idea what has happened to their convoy! Besides, the Chicolar is in trouble! She may have been hit before she dived! We’re still recording sporadic depth charging over there, and the radar shows the three Jap escorts still clustered around the same spot. We’ll be able to dive outside visual range and make a dawn attack. . . .”

“Absolutely not, Rich, I forbid it! That’s an order!” Blunt spoke as loudly as before. “Our mission here is to sink Japanese ships, not to go off shooting at windmills on some wild goose chase! Chicolar can take care of herself. Les Hartly is an experienced skipper. I want this ship to remain undetected. Whitefish is already submerged, and you are to do the same. I want you to head southwest and return to your patrol position. This was a good night’s work. I won’t let you spoil it now!”

Night was beginning to give way to the gray haze of the approaching dawn. Blunt’s face was seamed, its once craggy lines now only sagging gray flesh. His eyes had a strange intensity, a hint of fervid determination. Rich had never seen him this way before. Abruptly Blunt turned. He stooped for the grab rail above the hatch to the conning tower, swung himself below.

After the commodore disappeared there was silence on the bridge. Dugan, not a loquacious individual anyway, wisely was using his binoculars and paying no apparent attention to the exchange between his skipper and the wolfpack commander. Obviously the strain of the war patrol, Blunt’s self-isolation on board the submarine, and his background in prewar submarine tactics might contribute to a sort of bewilderment which could be responsible for his present attitude. It was also possible, Richardson had honestly to admit to himself, that he had deeper information, better knowledge, than possessed by the submarine skippers. One thing sure, he was the senior officer present. The three submarines in effect were his fleet. His orders must be obeyed.

“All ahead two-thirds. Come left to course two-two-five,” Rich ordered down the hatch. In the stillness on the bridge, the clink of the annunciators answered him before the acknowledging call came from the helmsman. “Al,” he said to Dugan, “take over the deck. Check with the forward torpedo room to be sure that no torpedoes are loose in the room. When you’re satisfied that everything is secure, go ahead and dive. Take a quick sounding first. We should have at least forty fathoms under our keel.”

Richardson fought down a feeling of bitterness as he descended the ladder into the conning tower. He waited there, withdrawn and uncommunicative, as Dugan gave the necessary orders, received the correct responses, and supervised the operation of submerging. Instead of the wild exultation of successful combat, the satisfaction over destruction of three enemy cargo ships without having received a shot or a depth charge in return, gloom enveloped him. The three ships sunk had been far less offensive than Bungo Pete. They had not shot at him, had not even known he was there. Their only offense was that they happened to be on the other side of a war.

They had had nothing to do with starting the war, nor, for that matter, had he, nor had Bungo Pete. Perhaps, as Blunt had once suggested, he spent too much of his time thinking about the lifeboats. Was that why he had wished to rush to the aid of Les Hartly and the Chicolar? Was he still impelled to rush headlong into danger in order to satisfy his unconscious craving for absolution? If so, perhaps Blunt was right. He had no right to risk his men or his ship to fulfill some inner psychological compulsion of his own.

He waited in the conning tower until the dive was complete, and Eel was cruising quietly at periscope depth. Suddenly he felt tired. Keith had been standing silently in the after part of the conning tower alongside Buck Williams, facing the now quiet TDC. Neither had said a word to him. Perhaps they had some inkling of the inner turmoil which possessed him.

“Keith,” he said in a low voice, “secure from battle stations. Set the regular submerged watch. I’m going below.”

He swung himself onto the ladder leading to the control room, went down with his back to the ladder, his heels on the rungs, supporting himself from falling by hands on the opposite side of the hatch coaming.

In the control room, Al Dugan obviously wanted to say something. He beat him to it. “Al,” he said, “Keith has the conn in the conning tower. We’ll be securing from battle stations in a minute. He’ll turn over to you.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Al. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Captain?”

“What is it?”

“We have a problem coming back, Captain; it’s the hydraulic system. I didn’t want to bother you about it before with all that was going on, but she’s recycling fast again. If we’re going to have a few hours, I’d like to turn to on it with a couple of men. We’ll have to put the planes in hand power, and secure the plant. You won’t be able to use the periscopes for several hours.” Dugan’s normally stolid face was clearly worried.