“I still don’t know why this guy would volunteer that sort of information,” Captain Rivers said. “Damn it, he’s a college graduate. Masters degree. Smart. He knows he doesn’t have to say anything like that. I think he’s trying to help his own side, not us.”
“You make a good point,” Admiral Christie said. “The only thing we can do is wait. Meanwhile you’d better get a message off to Eelfish. Tell them to come home. Route them so they’ll run into as little as possible. I don’t want that damned ship to tangle with any Jap destroyers with an outer door gone from a tube, and Mike Brannon is the type to tangle with anything and everything he sees.”
Two days later, as the Staff sat around the big table in the conference room at the Bend of the Road, a Marine sentry rapped on the door. He handed Admiral Christie an envelope marked “Urgent.” The Admiral waited until the sentry had closed the door behind him and slit the envelope open with a pocket knife. He read the message and looked down the table.
“This just came in from Cy Austin in the Redfin,” he said. “A tanker convoy, two tankers escorted by three destroyers came right down Cy’s track off the east coast of Samar. The convoy was moving north at twelve knots. Cy went in on the surface at night and got three hits in a tanker that was listing to starboard. The other tanker and the three destroyers went over the hill. North over the hill. Cy tried to chase but he was driven down by planes. He thinks the planes came out of Tacloban.” Admiral Christie looked around the table.
“That prisoner Brannon’s got was telling the truth. Brannon reported getting a hit in one tanker that got away, listing to starboard. His report said the hit he got in that tanker was a low-order explosion. This is without any doubt the same damned convoy and it sure as hell isn’t headed for Truk!” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“If we’ve been wrong about where those tankers out of Balikpapan are going we’ve got seven submarines out there on the route to Truk and the only thing they’re going to be doing is to send weather reports.” He stopped, his face grim.
“We’ll do some talking about this after dinner. Meet me here at nineteen hundred. Sam, get Austin’s contact report off to Pearl with an urgent on it for the Ultra people. Something is awfully screwy in Denmark.”
“Or in Borneo,” Sam Rivers muttered.
CHAPTER 9
The orders from Fremantle routed the Eelfish down the eastern side of Celebes Island through the Molucca and Banda Seas and then westward along the north side of the archipelago called the Lesser Sunda Islands to Lombok Strait. Mike Brannon walked into the Wardroom and sat down. He yawned hugely, and John Olsen moved his charts to one side so Mahaffey could put a cup of coffee in front of Brannon.
“How’s the route home look?” Brannon said.
“They’ve given us three different days, three times when we can enter Lombok Strait,” Olsen said. “I figure if we can run on the surface for a couple of days, and we should be able to do that, we can make the first ETA for Lombok.” He indicated the thin pencil line he had drawn on the chart.
Brannon pulled the chart around in front of him. “We should be able to run some of the way on the surface. At least down to the point where we turn west. I don’t think there’s much, if any, shipping on the east side of Celebes. No reason to be.
“That brings up the danger of sunburn. The lookouts, none of us, have seen much daylight this trip. You’d better issue an order for shirts and hats to be worn while topside. I don’t suppose that Doc Wharton has got any suntan lotion in that magic box of his.”
“I mentioned that to him before you woke up, sir. He says he’s got cocoa butter for burns and he’s got iodine and that he can make a good suntan lotion out of that stuff. I never heard of that but he says it works.”
Brannon grinned. “I guess they’d think we were crazy if we tried to draw suntan lotion as part of our supplies. Who ever heard of needing suntan lotion on a submarine?” He looked around as a very gentle rap sounded on the bulkhead beside the green curtain that served as a door.
“Permission to speak to the Captain?” Steve Petreshock’s face appeared through the curtain.
“Of course, Steve,” Brannon said. “Come in. Sit down.”
Petreshock leaned over the Wardroom table. “I’d like to keep it low, sir. Don’t want my voice to carry up forward. It’s about the prisoner, Captain.”
“What about him?”
“Well, sir, he’s getting awfully friendly. He sits with me on watch, on the four to eights, sir. I okayed that because I thought he was kind of lonely, maybe a little scared about what’s going to happen to him.
“So I encouraged him to talk a little, to tell me about going to school in the States, his wife, that sort of thing. It sort of led from one thing to another and he’s told me about how it was in Japan after he went back for his mother’s funeral, all about his old man. He really thinks a lot of his old man. About how they drafted him into the Merchant Marine and how it is there, the living and the working on the oil tankers he’s served on.
“After I’d get off watch and go back aft I’d write down everything I could remember he said.” He reached in his shirt pocket and took out a thick packet of paper and put it on the table.
“Lot of stuff in there about Balikpapan and the oil they get from there, Captain. I thought some of it might be useful to you.”
“I think it might be,” Brannon said. “Thank you. Keep listening to him. Write down whatever he says, no matter even if it’s about girls or food or anything.”
“There’s something else, Captain. He’s sort of opening up real good now with me and with the guys who live in my room. I figured if maybe we could let him eat in the Crew’s Mess, I’d be with him all the time as a sort of guard, I figured with all the guys around him he might open up even more. I didn’t push him, but this morning he started to tell me about how many times he’d been in convoys that were attacked by submarines and what their orders were when they got attacked. I figured that if all hands were tipped off to treat him good that he might really open up.”
Brannon looked at Olsen, who nodded approvingly.
“Sounds all right to me,” Brannon said. “But what sort of reason are you going to give him for changing the way he eats, for letting him go back to regular chow?”
“I thought a little about that,” Petreshock said. “He’s a sailor and he’s an officer. He’s pretty bright. I’ll just tell him that he’s the first prisoner we ever had and that we didn’t realize that he was no danger in the mess hall at chow time and that it would be easier on us, on my people, if one of them didn’t have to carry his chow tray to him. He washes his dishes in the sink in the room, sir. Says that one of us shouldn’t have to clean up after him. I think he’ll think everything’s okay.”
“Keep coaxing him to talk a little but don’t push it,” Brannon said. “John, you’d better get hold of the Chiefs and tell them what’s going on and have them coach their people to treat the prisoner nice and to talk with him but not try to interrogate him or anything like that.”
The crew, as Petreshock had anticipated, welcomed the prisoner at the mess table. His fluent command of English, his obvious pleasure at being out of the war, and his keen engineering interest in the Eelfish led him to recount funny stories about his undergraduate days at Stanford. He began to tell stories about his shipmates in Japan’s Merchant Marine, how one day a lookout on a tanker he was serving on threw an entire convoy into panic when he sighted a periscope. Later, after heavy depth charging, a dead whale came to the surface. The lookout had seen the whale spouting and had mistaken the gust of spray from the whale’s blowhole for a periscope. Scotty Rudolph got into the act, asking the prisoner for Japanese recipes and very carefully writing down what the prisoner told him. After each meal Petreshock took the prisoner back to the Forward Torpedo Room and shackled him to a torpedo skid and then went back to the Crew’s Mess to write down everything the prisoner had said, aided by Scotty Rudolph, whose ear for gossip — a faculty shared by most ship’s cooks — and whose memory spurred Petreshock’s own memory of what had been said.