“Does the crew talk much about the Mako?”
Brosmer looked at his comb and pulled a long, curly red hair out of the teeth. “Damn,” he muttered, “must be gettin’ bald in the chin.” He turned toward Lee.
“Yeah, they talk about it.” His voice was flat. “It’s like, well, it’s like we got sunk, you know what I mean? Mako was the same class ship we are, damned near our spittin’ image except we got a new SJ radar.
“But the crew, well, they think about how it was when the Mako was sinking out of control into six fucking thousand fathoms of water where she went down. I do it myself. I wonder what the Quartermaster who had my job on the Mako was doing when she was sinking so fucking slow. Was he standin’ in the Conning Tower like I’m doing now, talking to an officer? Did the Conning Tower just squash in on him and kill him quick? Or did he drown? Gives me the creeps so I don’t think about it anymore. Rest of the people, the crew, most of them think about the same thing.”
“Did you lose any friends on the Mako?” Lee’s voice was soft.
“No, I didn’t know anyone aboard her,” Brosmer said. “Some of the guys knew some of the Mako crew, the Regulars, I mean. I think Petreshock in the Forward Room knew some of the crew. I’d guess that the Chief of the Boat knew a few. From what I hear she was a good ship. Two things die when what happens to the Mako happens. The ship dies and the crew dies.” He took a long, deep, slow breath.
“I know one thing, sir, and you can maybe tell this to the other Reserve officers in the Wardroom. I think maybe the Old Man and the Exec, they might know it already. The crew of this ship was just another crew before the Mako went down. Now it’s different. We’re Eelfish. It’s like it was before the war when I was in the Thirty-Seven Boat with Mr. Olsen.
“You could get in a fight in a bar in Manila or up in China and if you hollered ‘Thirty-Seven Boat!’ anybody from the ship who heard you would come runnin’, ready to fight even if the odds was twenty to one.” He pulled the comb through his beard and stared at the hairs in its teeth. “That’s the way this crew is now, sir. All for one and one for all. Used to take years before a crew felt that way about each other. This crew got that way in one night, listening to the Mako go down.”
Lee looked away from Brosmer’s intent eyes. “Does the crew feel that way about the officers? I mean, four of the six of us are Reserves.”
Brosmer grinned suddenly, his teeth flashing white in the dense red beard. “Get yourself in a fight next time we’re in Perth, Mr. Lee. Holler ‘Eelfish’ real loud and find out.”
“Would you come running?”
“I’d do my damndest to beat the Old Man and Mr. Olsen. I figure either of them would fight any time.”
Mike Brannon rolled over in his bunk and looked at his wrist watch. Almost sixteen thirty hours. He’d had almost seven hours of sleep, the longest stretch he’d enjoyed in a week. He got out of his bunk and hitched up his wrinkled khaki shorts. On a submarine on war patrol all hands usually slept in the khaki shorts that were the unofficial uniform of the day; there was no time to get dressed if the General Quarters alarm went off. Pete Mahaffey, Officers’ Cook 1/c, stuck his head through the two green curtains that served as a door to the stateroom.
“Evenin’, Captain.” Mahaffey’s hand and muscular black forearm came through the curtain with a cup of hot coffee that had been liberally laced with canned evaporated milk and sugar.
“Thank you, Pete. Come in. What’s new?”
“Same as yesterday, same as the days before that, sir. Nothing in sight topside. Mr. Olsen’s waiting on you in the Wardroom with his charts, sir.”
“Tell him I’ll be in as soon as I shower and shave,” Brannon said. He sipped at the hot coffee.
“Sunday sir. No showers today. Showers go on the line tomorrow, sir.” Brannon nodded. Submarines on war patrol observed water rationing. Making fresh water out of sea water by electrically heating the sea water to the boiling point and then collecting and cooling the steam was a hot, miserable chore that was thoroughly detested by the Engine Room people. Brannon let down the stainless steel washbowl from its clips and ran a few inches of hot water into it. As he washed his face his mind flickered back, as it so often had this past week, to the night when he and John Olsen had stood on the bridge after the torpedoes he had fired had blasted the two Japanese Fubuki destroyers that had been depth charging the Mako.
The flotsam of the second destroyer was floating off the port beam of Eelfish as Brannon and Olsen listened to Paul Blake, the young sonarman of the Eelfish, talk to the Mako by sonar, repeating each word the Mako’s sonarman sent so that Brannon could hear and the yeoman could take down the words in his notebook.
The report by Mako’s sonarman had been succinct: Mako had made a night surface attack on a small convoy. Two big Japanese destroyers had apparently been lying in wait behind the convoy. Heavy gunfire killed Captain Hinman, the Executive Officer, the Quartermaster, and the lookouts on the bridge. The Mako dove and came under heavy depth charging. The After Torpedo Room was ripped open and flooded with water and Mako had struggled to the surface just as the Eelfish arrived on the scene and sank one of the destroyers. The remaining destroyer had opened fire on the Mako with deck guns and hulled the submarine in the Forward Torpedo Room. The sonar-man signaled to the Eelfish that the Mako was sinking, slowly, inexorably, out of control.
Brannon stared at his face in the stainless steel mirror over the washbowl as he rubbed lather into his beard, reliving again the scene on the bridge of the Eelfish.
“Mako is at four hundred feet and sinking,” Paul Blake said from the Conning Tower.
“Oh, God!” Brannon said. “What in the hell can we do?”
“Not much,” John Olsen said slowly. “Not much except pray, sir.”
Mike Brannon wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Tell them,” his voice broke, “tell them we are praying for them. Tell them that.” He turned away, sobbing.
He waited, the tears streaming down his cheeks, listening to the measured sound pulses of the Mako’s response. Paul Blake in the Conning Tower called out each word to the yeoman, and on the bridge Captain Brannon and John Olsen heard Blake’s voice.
“The Lord is my shepherd… I shall not want… He maketh me to lie down in green pastures… He leadeth me beside the still waters…”
There was silence.
“Sir.” The sonarman’s voice was small, hardly audible. “Sir, transmission stopped and I heard a big crunching noise.”
Brannon looked at his Executive Officer, his eyes streaming. “My God, John, the water is six miles deep here!”
John Olsen nodded and in a soft voice finished the words of the Twenty-third Psalm.
He reached for his razor and shaved, forcing himself to stop thinking about that night. There was no joy in knowing that he had sunk Mako’s killers. Finished, he combed his hair and went into the Wardroom, smiling his thanks at Mahaffey, who had put a fresh cup of coffee and a sweet roll in front of his place at the table.