“Truth is, sir, I’m selfish. Mr. Lee is a hell of a good Torpedo Officer and Blake is the best damned sonarman I ever saw. I don’t want to lose either one of them.”
“I’m obliged to you, Chief,” Gold said. “I hope you don’t think I was being nosy?”
“No, sir,” Flanagan said. He grinned. “I figured the Old Man would send someone around to find out the score. Figured it would be you. So I nosed around and found out what I had to find out.” His grin broadened into a smile.
“That lady you were with a couple of nights ago, the blonde? I hear she’s got some good contacts in the black market, that she’s got twelve cases of Nescafé in her house. Chief I know in the CPO Club told me that. Don’t know if it’s true, though.”
“Ten cases,” Jerry Gold said. “See you around, Chief.”
The day before Eelfish was to leave on its fourth war patrol a working party brought a large, tightly rolled burden to the submarine’s foredeck. Flanagan looked at it and then at the Petty Officer in charge of the working party.
“What the hell is that, rubber boat?”
“Six-man boat, Chief. Sign these papers here to show you got the boat and this gear that goes with it, two sets of paddles, CO-two bottles to inflate it, two of those, and a compass with a battery-powered light.”
“You sure this is for us?” Flanagan asked.
“Look right there, says ‘U.S.S. Eelfish.’ We rolled the son of a bitch tight enough to go down your torpedo-room hatch.” Flanagan nodded and signed the papers, and told two seamen to take the boat below to the Forward Torpedo Room.
Eelfish cleared the port early the next morning and settled down for the long run to its patrol area. Captain Brannon went to the Wardroom after the sea watch had been set, sat down with John Olsen, and opened the patrol orders.
“We’re in General MacArthur’s submarine navy,” Brannon said dryly. “Before we go on patrol we have to carry out a special mission. That’s why they sent aboard that six-man rubber boat that Flanagan has been grousing about.” He reached for the telephone hanging on the bulkhead and punched the button that would enable him to talk to everyone below decks over the 1-MC loudspeaker system.
“Now hear this,” he said. “This is Captain Brannon. We have our patrol orders. A good area just at the end of Davao Gulf, south of Mindanao Island. But before we go there we have to carry out a special mission for General MacArthur. That shouldn’t take more than a day or two.” He hung up the phone and looked at the chart that Olsen had laid on the table.
“Borneo,” Brannon said. “Northeastern tip, that’s it, right there. Hell of a name, Bum-Bum.” He looked again at the patrol orders.
“There’s a big mountain near there?” Olsen nodded at Brannon. “Okay, that’s where these ship watchers have been hiding for the past two years. This paragraph here says that for the past six or seven months the reports from the ship watchers on Japanese shipping have been erroneous and that the assumption is they’re suffering from fatigue and tension.
“So we pick them up and Sea Chub will drop off four more ship watchers. Shouldn’t be too tough a thing to do.”
“All four of those dudes might be out of their minds by now, might not be such good passengers to have aboard for a whole patrol run,” Olsen said. “Hiding in those mountains and watching ships go by and reporting the ship movements and hoping the Jap doesn’t zero in on you with radio direction finders, that must be a scary business to be in.”
“We’ll have to send in at least three people,” Mike Brannon said. “One man can’t handle a six-man rubber boat, or can he?” He nodded at Pete Mahaffey and sent him in search of the Chief of the Boat.
Flanagan listened as Brannon outlined the mission. “One man can’t handle one of those things, Captain. Takes at least three men. One to steer, two to paddle. Six-man boat will carry ten people, you know. They’re heavy.”
“Any suggestions as to who would want to volunteer?” Olsen asked.
“I’ll take the thing in,” Flanagan said. “If I could have Booth and Charlie Two Blankets, they’re good men, it should be easy.”
“Would they volunteer?” Brannon asked. Flanagan nodded his head. “They’ll volunteer. No sweat, sir.”
Eelfish arrived off the point that was identified on the charts as Bum-Bum and patrolled up and down the ten-fathom curve, barely ten miles from the headland for two days and nights, watching.
“We’ll go in tonight,” Brannon said to the officers gathered in the Wardroom, as Eelfish cruised at 110 feet a dozen miles from the land. “We told them it would either be last night or tonight when we arrived on station. We leave the hundred-fathom curve about eight miles before we get in to the land area, and the chart shows deep water all the way in to near the beach. We can launch the boat a thousand yards from the beach. They told us to make the pickup at a sandy beach on the headland.” He looked at his wrist watch.
“It’s fourteen hundred. We’ll surface at nineteen hundred hours, full dark, make a radar search and move in if we’re sure we’re alone. We should be able to launch by twenty hundred and have the boat back in an hour or two.”
Booth and Charlie Two Blankets paddled the six-man boat toward the dark bulk of the shore while Flanagan steered the clumsy craft with a paddle.
“I can see that sandy beach,” the Apache said. He shifted the three rifles that lay against the seat between himself and Booth and stood up in the boat.
“Damned moon is sure bright. Yeah, that’s the beach. Looks like there’s a big tree or something laying in the water near the beach, Chief.”
“I can see it,” Flanagan said. “Probably a big palm tree. There was a big storm here a week or so ago according to Mr. Michaels.” He steered the boat toward the tree lying in the water. Booth scrambled to the forward part of the boat and grabbed the tree roots. The boat swung in behind the massive bole of the tree.
“Take a turn with the bow line around some of those roots,” Flanagan ordered. He reached over the side of the boat and probed for the bottom with his paddle.
“Water’s only about two feet deep,” he said. “I think this is as far as I want to go with the boat. Which one of you two dudes wants to go in and make the contact?”
“I’ll go,” John Wilkes Booth said. He dropped over the side of the boat and began to wade toward the beach. Flanagan and the Apache watched the yeoman as he waded up out of the water, shaking first one leg and then the other. A man left the tree line behind the beach, followed by three other men. The man in the lead suddenly turned on a flashlight. “Turn off the fucking light!” Booth’s order carried across the water to the rubber boat.
“Too right, mate,” the figure said. The light was turned off and Flanagan and Charlie Two Blankets saw the man holding the flashlight spring forward and swing the flashlight at Booth’s head.
The rifle shot caught Flanagan by surprise, hammering in his ears. He saw the second man coming down the beach from the tree line fold at the waist and fall. Charlie Two Blankets, his rifle resting on the top of the tree trunk, squeezed off another shot and the third man coming down the beach spun around and went down, his legs kicking. The fourth man turned and ran for the tree line.
“Turn that son of a bitch!” the Apache yelled at the two men struggling together in the sand. “Turn that son of a bitch, Booth, so I can see who’s who!” He was kneeling on the seat of the rubber boat, his rifle across the tree bole.