“Took Betty Grable,” he mumbled to himself. “Bastards took my compass, too.” He felt for the compass and found it and with his fumbling turned on the small red light.
“Brought it back, okay?” he said to himself. He began to paddle, clumsily. Somewhere in the night he heard the snoring mutter of diesel engines.
“Come alongside, you fuckers,” he muttered and kept paddling. Then he felt hands under his arms grabbing him and the familiar deck of the Eelfish under his feet. He sighed and closed his eyes. Petreshock and Jim Rice, helped by the strong arms of Doc Wharton and Charlie Two Blankets, hoisted the unconscious form of Chief Flanagan up over the bridge rail, where Bill Brosmer grabbed him in his arms. As he steadied Flanagan’s slack body his nosed twitched under his red mustache.
“Son of a bitchin’ Chief’s pissy-assed drunk and —” His nose twitched again. “And he smells of pussy!”
CHAPTER 21
Eelfish left Leyte Gulf with all four main diesel engines pounding, heading for its patrol area off Tawi Tawi. Mike Brannon and John Olsen sat in the Wardroom, drinking coffee.
“Should be a good patrol area,” Olsen said. “If the Japanese are concentrating their naval forces at Tawi Tawi that means they’ve got to have oil, and their oil comes from Balikpapan. The tankers coming from there to Tawi Tawi will have to run right by us. Unless there are several other boats along the route to intercept them before they get to us.”
“I don’t think there will be,” Brannon said. “The reassignments of patrol areas the last couple of days from Fremantle argue against that. I’d think that Admiral Christie is throwing every submarine he can get over on the Pacific side of the invasion area. If the Japs ever get wind of what MacArthur’s planning I think they’d throw every damned ship they’ve got into battle to stop it. And one of the things they would have to smash would be the carrier fleet we’ll have steaming off the east coast of Samar. If they could smash the carriers the invasion goes down the drain. So I’d assume that Christie is setting up a scouting line of submarines to detect any Jap fleet movements. We might be the only guy on the block when we get to where we’re going. How far is it?”
“About seven hundred miles,” Olsen said. “Three, three and a half days at the most.” He grinned at Brannon. “I looked in the haversack Flanagan brought back last night. The bottle of booze was still in the sack and the canned ham. I gave the watch in the Control Room the word to have him report to me, to you, as soon as he wakes up.”
In the Crew’s Mess Bill Brosmer, the leading Quartermaster, was drinking coffee, surrounded by the off-watch crew.
“I’m tellin’ you,” Brosmer said, “I’m tellin’ you that the Chief of the Boat was drunk as a skunk and he smelled of pussy and I know pussy when I smell it!”
“I don’t know about the Chief of the Boat smellin’ like pussy,” one of the night lookouts said. “But I helped carry him down the ladder to the Control Room, and I know one thing, old Chief was passed-out drunk. Stiff as a board. I haven’t seen anyone that drunk since the first liberty I made out of boot camp.”
“Which ain’t been that long ago,” Scotty Rudolph said as he came out of his small galley. “You assholes get out of here unless you want to volunteer as mess cooks. Gettin’ to be time to set table.”
Late that afternoon a freshly showered and shaved Chief Flanagan presented himself in the Wardroom. Mike Brannon sat at his accustomed place at the head of the table, with John Olsen seated outboard of the table to his Captain’s left. Flanagan was seated at the Captain’s right.
“Please fill us in, Chief,” Brannon said.
Flanagan talked slowly, recounting the trip in to the beach, the first contact with the guerrillas, the trip up in to the mountains to the base camp, the delivery of the orders from General MacArthur.
“Very well,” Brannon said. “Before you go on, Chief, will you please tell me just what in the hell happened to you?”
Flanagan looked at Brannon and drew a deep breath. “I can’t make any excuses, sir. It was a long hard walk up that mountainside. When we got up there the Sergeant asked me how long it would be before we got back to port. I told him maybe a month, maybe longer. He said he figured something like that and that his people had laid on a feast of roast pig and other stuff. They gave me some home-brewed rum. Awful sneaky stuff. I never drink much when I’m ashore at the hotel. You know that. The stuff sneaked up on me, and this Sergeant, he said he didn’t want to make that trip down and back up the mountain again that night. They kept giving me that rum to drink, and before I knew it I was drunk.
“I woke up the next day and they told me they’d take me back down the mountain at night. They had some more chow and more of that rum.
“All I can say is that I’m sorry, sir. But I didn’t take a drink until the Army Sergeant had the orders and said that he understood them and that he’d carry them out, sir.”
“I’m not going to court-martial you, Chief, although I guess I could,” Brannon said slowly. “You did carry out the mission. But you know and I know that you didn’t set much of an example for the crew.” Flanagan sat, his head lowered.
“Let’s get the yeoman in here,” Brannon said. “I want you to dictate a complete report, Chief, but before you do, what sort of a force does this Sergeant have? They told me in Fremantle that he had ten thousand troops.”
“He said about three thousand, sir. I saw some of them. They look and act sharp. Good weapons, and every weapon I saw was clean, well cared for. Lot of his people are women. He said they make good spies and that most of them are very slick at cutting a Jap throat.
“They’re well disciplined. They don’t make noise. Even at that feast they put on for me, when some of them got passed-out drunk there was no noise. They even laugh in whispers. He and his people sleep days and work nights. He said that gives him an advantage over the Jap.”
“Did he say he could carry out his orders to cut roads or whatever he has to do?” Olsen asked.
“Yes, sir. He told me there was one main road with four bridges on it leading into Tacloban and one secondary road with three bridges. The bridges, he said, go over valleys that a tank couldn’t get through. He can blow the bridges and mine the road approaches. He said he intended to steal all the distributor caps off the Jap vehicles the night before the invasion. I got the feeling, sir, that if the Jap tries to reinforce Tacloban, sir, that this man will cut him into small slices.”
Brannon nodded and sent Pete Mahaffey for Booth, the yeoman. He came in to the wardroom with his pad and pen, and Flanagan went over the entire operation from the moment of leaving the ship to his return, carefully omitting any mention of the rum he had been given. When he had finished Brannon turned to Olsen.
“John, when Michaels wakes up have him put together a mission completed message to Admiral Christie with the addition that the Army Sergeant said he would carry out his orders without fail. We’ll get that off tonight when we surface.”
Eelfish arrived at its patrol area just before dawn and dove near the edge of the 100-fathom curve, a few miles to the east of the entrance to Sibutu Passage. As soon as Mahaffey had cleared the table of the breakfast dishes Mike Brannon called a meeting of his officers.
“We’ve got quite a bit of latitude so far as our patrol area is concerned,” he said. “We can stay out here, where we are to the east of Sibutu Passage, and wait to intercept any tankers coming up from Balikpapan. Or we can move over to the Sulu Sea and watch Tawi Tawi and hope to get something coming out of that Naval Base.