“Including eighteen carriers, six battleships, seventeen cruisers, and more than sixty destroyers,” Captain Rivers interjected.
“Yes,” General Connelly said.
“What part does Eelfish, my ship, play in this, sir?” Brannon asked.
“It is imperative that the landing be kept secret,” the Army General said. “We are realistic, however. We assume that someone, somewhere will find out about it, will add up some of the enormous logistics that have gone into this months-long planning and inform the Japanese. They will know what is corning if that happens.
“There is a guerrilla leader in Leyte, an Army Sergeant who escaped from the Bataan March. He has been communicating with us for quite a long time by radio. He commands about ten thousand irregulars, guerrillas, some trained Filipino soldiers. His main camp, his base, is near Tacloban, a place at the top of Leyte Gulf on Leyte Island.”
“I know where it is,” Brannon said. “Is that where the General is going to land?”
“Well, yes, of course,” the General said. “We know what the enemy’s strength is in that area. We want Eelfish to go in and send a man ashore to meet with this Sergeant’s people and deliver to the Sergeant, personally deliver to him, a set of orders. Those orders will tell the Sergeant what roads to cut, what bridges to blow up so that the enemy forces in place cannot be reinforced. The landing must take place. It will take place.
“I wanted to send a trained commando team in to take these orders to the Sergeant in charge of the guerrilla force. Admiral Christie made it quite plain that you, sir, and your crew could do this job and do it right. We accept the Admiral’s assessment of your capability.”
“I’m sure that we can do whatever you want,” Mike Brannon said. “Will this Sergeant know we are coming, will he meet us on the beach?”
“Yes. All that will be arranged for by radio. You will be informed of recognition signals, time to go in, that sort of thing.” He reached in the cloth sack he had brought with him and pulled out a khaki-colored webbing belt that had a long pouch on the belt opposite the strap and buckle. The edges of the pouch were sealed with what looked to Brannon like white wax, and a red string with a red wooden knob on the end of it hung down out of the wax along the edge of the pouch.
“Your man will wear this belt. The strap goes in the back,” the Army man said. “When he makes contact with Sergeant McGillivray he will turn over the belt to him. This envelope here contains the names of the Sergeant’s mother and her maiden name, the maiden name of his wife and his service number. Your man will commit those to memory, and if the man he meets can answer those names correctly he will give him the belt.” He stopped and fingered the red knob.
“If your man is captured or about to be captured he will pull smartly on this wooden knob. A charge of thermite inside the pouch will burn its contents to ash. If he is satisfied the man he meets is indeed the right man he must caution Sergeant McGillivray not to pull the knob, but to break the wax seals and open the pouch.”
“I understand, sir,” Brannon said slowly. Captain Rivers laid a thick envelope on the table.
“These are your patrol orders, sir. Orders for the special mission and for your patrol area after the mission.” He rose. “You’ll be pleased with the patrol area. Tawi Tawi! You should be able to indulge in your ability to sink Jap warships at that place!” He walked to the door of the Wardroom and looked up and down the empty passageway.
“You will not divulge any of this to anyone, not even to your Executive Officer, until the time of the actual operation. At that time you will tell your Executive Officer and the man who will deliver the orders about the mission but you must not tell them the reason for the mission.” Rivers glanced at the General, and noting that he was not looking at him, he closed his right eye in a slow wink. “Please lock your orders and this belt in your destruct pouch.”
Mike Brannon accompanied the two officers to the deck and shook hands with them at the gangway. As soon as they were out of sight he went back to the Wardroom and looked at the sealed envelope and the canvas belt. Then he asked Pete Mahaffey to get John Olsen for him and to tell the deck watch to alert him if anyone wanted to come aboard.
Olsen listened as Brannon repeated what had been told to him by the Army General and Captain Rivers.
“Who are you going to send ashore?” he asked.
“I thought we might ask Flanagan,” Brannon said slowly. “For two reasons, really. One is that he’s damned well able to take care of himself. The other is that he has no dependents. He’s an orphan, you know.”
“Charlie Two Blankets wouldn’t be a bad choice,” Olsen said. “That man knows how to take care of himself.”
“Charlie has a big allotment going to his mother and father,” Brannon said slowly. “They depend on him for that money. I know he’s a good man in a fight. He proved that when they went in to get the ship watchers, but I don’t like sending a man who has dependents on a mission like this.”
“I’m single,” Olsen said.
“Not a chance,” Brannon answered.
The next day Brannon called Chief Flanagan in to the Wardroom and explained the mission to him.
“It’s purely a volunteer mission,” he said to the Chief of the Boat. “If you don’t want to go, no sweat.”
“I’ll go,” Flanagan said. “Shouldn’t be too hard. If this Army Sergeant has survived all this time in the Islands I shouldn’t have anything to worry about. He must know what he’s doing a whole lot better than the Japs know.” He turned the canvas belt over in his hands.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Captain. I don’t like the idea of pulling this damned knob. If there’s enough thermite in there to burn up whatever paper is inside that pouch there’s enough to burn me in two!”
“I thought of that,” Brannon said. “Maybe John LaMark can figure out something. He’s a good explosives man.”
“Maybe he could cut the belt on either side of the pouch,” Olsen said, “and then sew it back with kind of weak thread. Then if you fasten the knob to the other part of the belt the Chief could rip the pouch away and just throw it and the pouch would burn up wherever he threw it.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Brannon said. He sat back in his chair. “I hate this damned cloak and dagger stuff. I don’t like the idea of General MacArthur running our damned submarine navy, doing his errands when we should be out sinking Japanese ships.”
“Once he lands in the Islands, sir,” Flanagan said with a grin, “he’ll be so busy letting Filipinos kiss his feet that he won’t even think about us.”
On the night of October sixth Eelfish was cruising just south of Leyte Gulf, in the Surigao Strait. Jim Michaels came down from the bridge and as was his habit, stopped in the radio shack. The radioman was busy taking a coded message, and Michaels took it from him and went into the deserted Wardroom to decode it. Fifteen minutes later he climbed to the bridge and took the message back to Mike Brannon.
“Courier comes to bat at twenty-two hundred next. We need a home run.” He held the message sideways and read it again in the light of the moon.
“I take it to mean that we do the operation you told us about, sir, tomorrow night. This message has a time of transmission on it of twenty-three forty-five hours, sir.”
Brannon nodded his head. “When you go back down below will you have the watch wake up Mr. Olsen and tell him to notify me when he’s had some coffee and has his charts ready in the Wardroom?”
When Brannon went into the Wardroom ten minutes later Pete Mahaffey was pouring fresh coffee into a cup in front of his place at the table.