Pacific Standoff (Periscope #1). Richard Deming
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order on to the seaman at the big stainless-steel wheel that controlled the bow planes, and the boat started to rise.
The planesman knew his job; as the needle neared sixty feet, he brought the planes from rise to zero and then slightly back to dive, to correct for the upward momentum of the boat. The needle quivered, then settled exactly on the sixty mark.
Jack nodded approvingly. Manta was lucky: over half her crew were experienced submariners, rotated back to new construction after tours of duty on other boats in the Pacific. There were even a couple of veterans of Stickleback on board. The presence of so many old hands was going to make the training phase a lot shorter and easier. “Steady as you go,” he told the helmsman, and quickly scaled the ladder to the conning tower. DaCosta was there, as was the quartermaster, waiting by the additional wheel linked to the helm in the control room.
The control for the number one periscope dangled by its cord from the overhead. Jack grabbed it and pushed the button. The two steel hoisting cables whizzed by. As the handles emerged from the well, he grasped them and clicked them down into position in a smooth, practiced motion, stooping to meet the eyepiece as it rose. He circled once, then again with the tip at greater elevation, before lowering the scope and saying, “Surface!” Manta had been assigned this operating area, but he was taking no chances. The German U-boat campaign along the Atlantic coast had made a lot of people very nervous. He would prefer not to surface suddenly under the nose of some green Air Corps bomber jockey who had been taught that the only good submarine is a dead submarine.
The conning tower was getting crowded. White stood on the ladder, ready to crack the bridge hatch, and the two lookouts were standing by. Something on the superstructure—a guy wire, maybe—hummed loudly as it sliced through the water. Jack made a mental note to have it located and corrected. A noise like that could give away their location to a Jap destroyer.
“Twenty-eight feet,” came the call from the control room.
“Okay, White, open the hatch. Lookouts to the bridge!”
Lou was right behind them as they scrambled up onto the bridge and into the crow’s nests, protecting their heavy binoculars with their forearms. When Jack reached the bridge, Lou was already scanning the horizon. “All clear, skipper,” he reported. Even as he said it, the port lookout shouted, “Aircraft on the port quarter!”
Lou leaned over the fairwater to look back in the indicated direction. It took him completely by surprise when Jack suddenly said, “Clear the bridge! Dive, dive!” The bow was already starting under by the time they had sorted out the confusion and gotten everyone down the bridge hatch.
“Rudder hard left, all ahead full. Come to heading 030.” As the helmsman acknowledged Jack’s order, he turned to Lou and grinned. “If you’re caught off base, you’re out, daCosta,” he said. “You know that. We may be in Block Island Sound, but we’re pretending it’s the Bungo-suido. Any aircraft we see is out to kill us, so we get promptly out of its way. By the end of next week we’re going to be able to clear the bridge and pass sixty feet depth in less than a minute, and by the time we hit Pearl I mean to have it under forty-five seconds.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” DaCosta reddened. “I’m sorry, sir. The first dive was so…er, so regular that I wasn’t expecting to crash like that. It won’t happen again.”
Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s forgotten, Lou. Take her up and let’s try another of those ‘regular’ dives. Before your watch is over, you’re going to think you’re running an elevator.”
Jack kept the crew practicing standard dives for the rest of the day, and it was well after dark when Manta slipped into her berth at the sub base. Each dive had been a little faster and a little smoother than the last, even though the skipper kept changing the watch and putting different officers in the control room. The men were aware that they had done pretty well, and along with their tiredness felt a touch of complacency, as if they had gotten over the worst of the training.
The next few days changed their minds. Now that he knew they could handle the boat under ordinary, non-battle, conditions, Jack started putting on the pressure. Crash dives, surprise summonses to battle stations, orders blaring from the loudspeakers to rig the boat for depth charges, to rig for silent running, to rig for battle surfacing—every evolution they were likely to need in the Pacific, they practiced in Long Island Sound. Halfway through the second day they were jumpy as cats, wondering what was coming at them next and where the skipper would turn up, stopwatch in hand, to watch them make fools of themselves. By the end of the third day they were starting to feel that the situation was under control; they knew what they had to do, and they were getting better at doing it. By the time they reached the Pacific, they would be the best damned boat in the Submarine Navy, and then the Japs had better watch out!
Chapter 3
A messenger was waiting on the pier when they docked; Admiral Schick’s compliments, and would Captain McCrary please report to his office at once? Jack hurried up the road, wondering what he was in trouble for this time. The training had been going very well, all things considered, and as far as he knew, he hadn’t stepped on any more toes since that night of the fire, so it must be some sin from the past catching up with him. He started to review the possibilities, then gave up; he would find out soon enough.
The admiral’s face was grave. His first question threw Jack into confusion. “Are you satisfied with your exec, McCrary?”
“Lieutenant Hunt, sir? Yes, sir.”
“I know he served ably on staff,” Schick continued, “but sea duty is a different matter. Do you have enough confidence in him to place him in charge of training for a few days?”
What was this? “Admiral,” Jack said levelly, “if I didn’t have confidence that he could take command of Manta, should anything happen to me, I would ask for his transfer at once.”
“Good. I thought you’d say that.” The admiral looked down at his desk, suddenly ill at ease. “There’s no easy way to say this, McCrary,” he said at last. “I’ve had word from Washington. Your father is in Bethesda Hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. The doctors are not hopeful. I’m sorry.”
“I see.” Jack searched his mind for thoughts, emotions, memories, anything, but he was trapped in a flat calm. Nothing stirred, and it seemed to him that nothing would stir again, that it had all ended and he had not noticed. It was time to be practical; detail added to detail would rebuild a sort of world. “Do—” He cleared his throat and started again. “Do they say when…”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve told you as much as I know. My yeoman has secured a berth for you on the night express, leaving New London at 2240. I expect you will want to brief Lieutenant Hunt and pack.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Jack stood up and hesitated. He wanted to say something else, but there was nothing else to say.
Like every train Jack had seen in his months Stateside, the Washington Express was jammed to overflowing. Servicemen on their way to new posts, war workers looking for a shipyard or aircraft plant more to their liking than the ones they had left, businessmen hoping for war contracts, wives and children off to stay with relatives for the duration—it seemed that every person in the country had some reason to go to some different section of the country than the one he found himself in. As a Navy brat Jack had moved around, or been moved around, a great deal as a child, and he felt none the worse for it. But he had always known that he was an oddity. Most Americans grew up, lived, worked, and raised their families in the place they were born. Now the war was giving people an excellent excuse to escape, and from the looks of this train, a great many of them were seizing it.
After wriggling through the packed aisles of four coaches and lurching precariously across the equally packed vestibules between them, Jack found his Pullman car. The berths were already made up. Coming from the crowded, noisy, and essentially cheerful coaches, he found almost spectral the long, empty aisle flanked narrowly by swaying green curtains and lit by dim antique ceiling fixtures. He was not a very imaginative man, but he would not have been terribly surprised to see a bloody