“What’s the distance to Kii Suido, XO?” Tremain asked. Cazanavette grabbed the dividers again. “Twenty miles, due north, sir.”
“Helm, right standard rudder. Steady course north.”
As the helm acknowledged the order, Tremain looked at Cazanavette.
“Well, XO, we won’t get there until sundown. The window starts tomorrow. I hope the Kurita doesn’t decide to come out a day early.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time our intelligence boys fed us some bogus data, Captain,” Cazanavette said with a smile.
Mackerel cruised along at five knots, against the stiff ocean current, slowly closing the distance to Kii Suido. Tremain ordered periodic periscope searches, but also ordered that the scope exposure be kept to an absolute minimum. With Japanese planes flying overhead, it would take only one daydreaming airman to sight the Mackerel’s periscope and radio the information back to his base.
At sunset, Mackerel came into visual range of Kii Suido. The snow-capped mountains of Honshu were just visible in the last light of the day. Kii Suido was the Japanese name for the entrance to a natural channel that ran between the Japanese mainland, Honshu, and the southern island, Shikoku. The channel itself was hundreds of miles long and ran far back into Japanese territorial waters, allowing access to several key naval ports, including Kobe. The entrance to the channel, Kii Suido, opened southward into the Pacific Ocean and was less than twenty miles across at its narrowest point. Any ship traveling to or from Kobe would have to pass through the narrow Kii Suido to reach the Pacific Ocean. Thus, Kii Suido was the chosen spot for Mackerel's ambush. And even though the twenty-mile strait was still a large area for a submerged submarine to cover, the usable width was further reduced by shoals and reefs, especially for a vessel the size of the Kurita.
It did not take a very experienced sailor to look at a chart and determine the few places through which a deep-draft battleship could pass. Earlier, Tremain and Cazanavette had speculated that Kurita’s captain would want to have at least a mile buffer between his ship and any shoal water. That left him with a space approximately ten miles wide in the center of the channel. They both agreed to position Mackerel at an optimum place between the two points of land, right in the middle of the ten-mile-wide area. And there she would wait for her quarry.
Tremain ordered the entire boat rigged for red light, and left the daunting task of piloting the ship into the strait for Cazanavette, while he ate a quiet dinner in the wardroom. Tremain allowed Stillsen to assist Cazanavette as a gesture of good will, and to bolster the bruised ego of the young lieutenant commander, but he made it clear to both of them that Cazanavette had the conn. Tremain was growing more confident that Stillsen would be a team player and honor his orders.
About the same time Tremain finished his dinner, Cazanavette called the wardroom to let him know that they had arrived at their position.
Tremain made his way back up to the conning tower and took the scope from Cazanavette. The entire seascape was pitch-black save for a few lights here and there, and he knew that most of them were on land. He could make out very little in the blackness. Only Cazanavette’s carefully plotted position on the chart gave him an indication of where Mackerel was. The chart showed that they were sitting precisely in the middle of the strait.
“Any contacts, XO?”
“Only faint sound contacts, sir,” Cazanavette answered, his face illuminated by the red light. “Sounds like fishing boats and distant merchants. That channel could be creating quite a sound duct as well. We could be hearing things that are sixty to seventy miles away.”
“Right,” Tremain said. “Well, we need to do a battery charge. We have no choice, we’ll have to risk surfacing.” “What if there are sampans fishing up there, Captain?” Stillsen asked hesitantly. “What if they see us?”
“Then we’ll have to sink them with guns.” Tremain managed a smile. “And hope that their relatives won’t notice that they’re missing until the Kurita has already come our way.”
Cazanavette nodded and grinned.
“We’ll rotate the gun crews frequently to keep them sharp,” Tremain added. “Pass the word, if it comes to a gun-fight, we’ll use the forty-millimeters first, to minimize the noise. Save the five-inch gun as a last resort.”
“Aye, sir,” Cazanavette answered and turned to the phone talker to wake Hubley, who was the gunnery officer.
“Man stations for battle surface, XO,” Tremain ordered. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
Mackerel broke through the placid dark waves and emerged bow-first from her underwater habitat. She came up surrounded by a bubbly white froth as high-pressure air purged the main ballast tanks. Her stern seemed to hesitate for a moment, then popped up level, as the water receded from her decks and superstructure.
Within seconds Tremain led an entourage of personnel out of the bridge hatch. He immediately put his night binoculars to his eyes to see if there was enough light to use them. Unfortunately, there was not. Mackerel’s lookouts would not be able to see any approaching ships until it was too late. Normally a submariner prayed for dark nights, but this was too dark. They would have to rely completely on radar.
As men filed past him with .50-caliber machine guns and twenty-millimeter and forty-millimeter ammunition, Tremain passed the word to man the main deck. Moments later, the deck hatch popped open and several sailors emerged to man the five-inch gun. Within minutes, the ammunition locker was cracked open and five-inch shells were passed to the gun crew.
Tremain looked around to see all of his helmeted sailors standing by their guns, ready for action. It was the first time Tremain had seen Mackerel fully rigged for battle surface, and he was proud of how quickly and naturally the crew filed into their stations. Mackerel's array of surface weaponry would be quite impressive to any small boat sailor. On her deck, just aft of the conning tower, she carried a five-inch gun. On the raised deck forward of the bridge, she carried a twenty-millimeter machine gun. On the cigarette deck, she had a Bofors 40-millimeter gun. She also had two portable .50-caliber machine guns mounted on either side of the bridge. It was more than enough fireworks to light up the sky. The sight actually gave Tremain quite a charge. He half-wanted to hunt down a Japanese gunboat and pick a fight.
“Bridge, radar,” the bridge box squawked. “I only have a few useful areas on my scope. The two points of land are blocking out almost everything. There appear to be some small returns hugging the shoreline. No other contacts.”
“Radar, bridge, aye,” Tremain answered. Those small returns are probably fishermen, he thought. “Watch the ranges closely. And aim your beam up the channel periodically. We don’t want to get run over by an outbound convoy.”
“Bridge, radar. Aye, sir.”
Good, Tremain thought. He expected that the Japanese would have patrol boats in the area, but they did not seem to be around this evening. Still, the thought of being close enough to the Japanese mainland that he could see lights from houses on the shore discomforted him.
“Control, bridge,” Tremain spoke into the intercom. “Mr. Olander, you may line up for a normal battery charge.”
“Control, bridge. Aye, sir,” came Olander’s drawl over the box.