“I guess it will work out,” Flanagan said slowly. “I don’t like the idea, but if they’re short of fish they’re short of fish. Nothing we can do about it. Thing that bothers me is that we’ve got to change routines back there in the After Room. With the safety interlocks on the tubes disconnected, having to dry-fire the tube to pull a fish for routining, you have a chance of a casualty. We’re going to have to work out some new routines, do a lot of drilling back there.” He sat back on the uncomfortable seat.
“What’s important, sir, is that we’ve got some damned good people in charge of those two torpedo rooms. Nelson and Petreshock gave up one of their rest days to come back to the ship to supervise loading the torpedoes. That’s a hell of a thing to do, you know.”
“I know,” Lee said.
CHAPTER 6
Admiral Christie was in a testy mood. Mike Brannon got word through the grapevine before he went to a conference about his new patrol area. The gossip had it that General MacArthur’s politicking had undercut Christie in some manner. Brannon was warned to be on his best behavior, to say as little as possible.
“Those tankers that come out of Balikpapan.” Admiral Christie walked over to a chart standing on an easel near the conference table. He pointed at the port city of Balikpapan on the east coast of Borneo. “Those tankers are supplying Admiral Koga’s fleet based at Truk. Those tankers have got to be stopped. That’s our first priority.”
Mike Brannon shifted in his chair and stared at the chart. It had been just north of Balikpapan that Mako had gone roaring in on three loaded tankers and four destroyers in a night surface attack earlier in the war. Brannon remembered the awful moment of fear he had felt as he watched the bubbling trail of the second torpedo he fired from Mako’s stern tubes at a destroyer that was coming full tilt at the Mako’s stern. Those brief seconds that had seemed like hours after the wake of the torpedo led into the side of the destroyer’s bow and then the tremendous explosion as the torpedo sheared off the entire bow of the attacking destroyer.
“Are you paying attention, Brannon?” Christie’s voice was sharp, petulant.
“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “I was Exec under Captain Hinman in Mako’s third patrol off Balikpapan.”
“I know that,” the Admiral said. He pointed at the chart again. “The oil coming out of those fields there is said to be so pure that they don’t have to refine it before using it. They just run it through a filter. The Australians have ship watchers in the hills along the coast of Borneo, the east coast. Those ship watchers report that the tankers leave Balikpapan, go north of Celebes and then toward the Pacific. We have other intelligence reports that the tankers are going to Truk, to supply Koga’s fleet.” He paused and looked at his assembled staff and Mike Brannon.
“If Koga ever decides to move that fleet out of Truk, we haven’t got anything in the area strong enough to stop him. The only thing we can figure that’s held him in port so far is that he’s short of oil for his fleet. But if he gets enough oil, if he moves out to sea, he can cut us to ribbons. And once he’s done that, well, there wouldn’t be any General MacArthur returning to the Philippines.
“It boils down to stopping the tankers. That’s our first priority. They’ll be escorted, but ignore the escorts. Get the tankers.”
“Tankers are hard to sink, as you know.” Sam Rivers, the Operations Officer, a squat, heavyset four-stripe Captain spoke up. “We’ve had reports from submarine Captains who tell us of hitting a tanker with as many as six torpedoes, hitting them in the sides of the hull. Those tankers are so compartmented that they can suck up a half-dozen torpedo hits at or below their waterlines.
“What you have to do —” the Operations Officer paused a moment, looking hard at Brannon. “What you have to do is to believe in the Mark Six exploder. If you fire one, no more than two torpedoes set to run beneath the tanker, if you make your approach properly, then you’ll have a kill. No tanker, no matter how well compartmented, can live with its keel, its back broken.”
“The tankers burn,” Brannon said. “The two we hit off Balikpapan in Mako burned like blast furnaces. Maybe that unrefined oil has something in it that makes it burn easily.”
“That’s been thought of,” Rivers said. “We’ve been trying to find a Dutch engineer who worked at the oil fields in Borneo who might know the chemical makeup of that oil, but we haven’t found him yet. Your safest bet is to rely on the Mark Six exploder. I worked with Admiral Christie developing that exploder and we know it works.” Brannon nodded, his face carefully expressionless.
“We’re putting Eelfish just north of Celebes,” the Admiral said. “You should have good targets, good hunting. You can expect the tankers to be well guarded. Ignore the escorts, go after the tankers.” He rose from the chair where he had been sitting while his Operations Officer was talking.
“I know that once you’ve hit and sunk destroyers you get a sort of fever, you want to keep going after them. Take an aspirin, do something, don’t let that fever overcome your priority, the tankers. Just bear in mind that if Koga gets enough oil at Truk he’s going to go out to sea, and if he does General MacArthur’s invasion route to the Philippines will be vulnerable.”
Mike Brannon leaned against the pom-pom gun mount on the cigaret deck, aft of the bridge, looking at the long, straight fluorescent wake the Eelfish trailed behind her as the ship walked the long sea miles up through the Indian Ocean on a course for Lombok Strait. In another ten or eleven days Eelfish would be on station, north of the northernmost tip of the oddly shaped island called Celebes. As he so often did when it was quiet on the bridge he let his thoughts run back to the night when the Mako had gone down, hearing again in the innermost parts of his mind the slow, steady pulsing of the Mako’s sonar beam spelling out the words of the Twenty-third Psalm.
The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that John Olsen’s shrewd conjecture that Mako had been ambushed was correct. Mako, without surface radar, had probably bored in to attack what the lookouts had been able to see, a line of small freighters proceeding cautiously down the east coast of the island of Samar. What the lookouts had not seen, what a surface radar would have picked up, was the presence of two enemy destroyers lurking closer to the coast, their silhouettes lost against the island’s bulk. Once committed to the surface attack, Mako had been trapped by the destroyers, riddled with gunfire, and then fatally damaged before the ship could dive deeply enough to evade the destroyer attacks.
It was strange, Brannon thought, how the odds of success veered so sharply in the problems of attacking with a submarine or being attacked while in a submarine. An attacking submarine, if it could make its approach undetected, carried the odds in its favor. If the Captain made all his observations correctly, if the torpedoes ran hot, straight, and normal, if the exploders worked properly, then the target could be hit and destroyed.
The chance of escape from the retaliatory attacks by the enemy’s destroyers were not good. If the destroyer Captains were experienced; if they were dogged and patient; if the water in which the attack was made was not deep enough to give the submarine ample room to maneuver, to go very deep; if there were no layers of heavier saltwater under which the submarine could hide the odds were with the destroyers.… He turned as he heard Lieutenant Bob Lee going through the ritual of taking over the OOD watch at midnight. The Quartermaster going off watch came back to the cigaret deck.