“By Heaven, Dusty Rhodes as ever was, as my good Irish mother used to say.” He gripped the Lieutenant’s hand and pumped it up and down.
“This is Dusty Rhodes, gentlemen,” he said to the officers sitting around the table. “He used to be our Chief of the Boat in the Mako. Got bumped up to J.G. after the third run. How the hell are you, Dusty? How’s John Barber, your wives, children?”
“Four-oh on all sides,” Rhodes said. “Barber is in charge of all the engine room work on the boats coming in from patrol. His wife and daughter are fine. So is my wife and my sons. Your lady and daughter okay?”
“I guess they are,” Brannon said. “I haven’t seen them since forty-three, almost two years. This a friendly visit, or are you official?”
“Both,” Dusty Rhodes said. “I’d like you to come to dinner tonight at my house, if you can. Barber and his wife will be there.
“The official part is that you’re getting a few new-type torpedoes. They’re called ‘Cuties.’ Kind of small. They’ll load them this afternoon, and I’ve got a savvy Chief who can fill your people in the Torpedo Rooms in on how to service them. One of the officers who worked on the development of these new fish will be over after lunch to fill you and your officers in on how you use these things.”
“Why that?” Bob Lee asked. “What’s different about these fish?”
“Well, for one thing, they’ve got a sonar ear in the warhead,” Rhodes said. “It picks up screws and guides the torpedo in to the screws. So to be safe you fire them from a depth of one hundred fifty feet. That way, by the time the fish has planed up to its depth set in the tube it’s far enough away from you that it doesn’t turn around and come back and bite you in the ass. For another thing, they’re a lot slower than the Fourteens or even the electric Mark Eighteens.”
“Have they been used?” Brannon said.
“Captain Bennet in Sea Owl had some pretty good results with the first ones we sent to sea,” Rhodes said. “He said they weren’t much use against a fast target but they’re hell on patrol craft and picket boats, and that’s about all that’s out there right now.
“What will they think of next?” Jerry Gold said.
“Don’t wish for anything, sir,” Rhodes said with a grin. “I’ve got a five-inch rocket launcher up there in the shop and hundreds of rounds of rockets, and some lucky boat is going to have that monstrosity bolted to its foredeck.”
“What can you use a rocket launcher for?” Gold asked.
“Shore bombardment,” Rhodes said.
“Forget I spoke,” Gold said hastily. “My mother wouldn’t want me bombarding a seashore.” Rhodes grinned and turned to Brannon. “If you can make dinner tonight I’ll send a car for you about eighteen hundred.”
“I’d love to come to dinner,” Brannon said. “A car? Does a full Lieutenant rate a car?”
“This is the Pearl Harbor Navy, sir,” Rhodes said. “Nothing but the best for the fighting men.”
Eelfish slipped past the net tender at the entrance to the harbor and turned its bullnose toward the west. The destroyer that had led the submarine out of the harbor whistled in salutation and turned away to re-enter the harbor. Later, down in the Wardroom, Mike Brannon opened his patrol orders, read through them briefly, and pushed them over to Ralph Ulrich, who was sitting at the table with his charts and navigational gear.
“Doesn’t sound very exciting,” Brannon growled. “Lifeguard duty and sweep up any picket boats that might be around to give warning of the B-twenty-nine raids. Targets must be awfully scarce out there.”
“Did you hear about the Japanese attempt to smash up the invasion fleet at Okinawa, sir?” Ulrich asked.
“No,” Brannon said. “One of the things you have to learn, Ralph, is that no one tells any submarine captain anything. What happened?”
“The invasion of Okinawa took place on April first,” Ulrich said in his careful voice. “On the fifth the Japanese decided to send a task force from southern Japan down to Okinawa to smash the invasion forces. The task force was the super-battleship Yamato, a light cruiser, and seven or eight destroyers.”
“That wouldn’t be a big enough force,” Brannon said.
“The Japanese had been attacking the invasion ships at Okinawa with hundreds of kamikaze planes, sir, suicide planes that carried big bombs. The pilots crashed them into their targets. The Japanese figured that they had done a lot more damage than they did, although they did enough. They hit about forty ships with those planes. The task force was sent to mop up what was left.
“Our intelligence people say the Fleet Commanders couldn’t find any oil to fuel their ships. All they had in all of southern Japan was something like twenty-five hundred barrels of oil. Not nearly enough fuel for the one-thousand-mile round trip to Okinawa. But they went anyway.
“The intelligence experts reason that the battleship ran so low on fuel it couldn’t maneuver. It had no air cover, and our carrier planes sank the battleship, the cruiser, and some of the destroyers.” He looked at Brannon.
“The submarines were responsible for that victory. The reason Japan hasn’t got any oil or anything else it needs to fuel its war machine is the submarines.”
Brannon nodded. “Set the course for Midway. We’ll top off our fuel tanks there.”
Eelfish reached its patrol station and began to prowl the area assigned to it, staying on the surface night and day. The lookouts and the radar watch reported constant aircraft contacts, bombers going to Japan to hit its cities and returning. From time to time there were reports of planes being ditched and the reports from submarines racing to pick up the survivors.
“The trouble is,” Mike Brannon complained one evening at dinner, “we’re a little bit too much to the west of the flight line from the Marianas to Tokyo. Bungo Strait, where we are now, used to be a hot spot when Japan had warships that could put to sea. Now it’s dead.
“Ralph, you know a lot of people in Pearl. Draft a message asking we be reassigned to a more productive area. Send it with an information tag for anyone you think might argue our case for us.”
A week later Eelfish was moved to the north and east. Four times in a matter of seven days Eelfish raced at top speed toward an area where a plane reported that it was going into the water, and four times the Eelfish was just a bit too far away and lost the race to a closer submarine. Jerry Gold began muttering about fuel-oil supplies and hinting that high-speed chases that were likely to be fruitless before they began were draining his fuel-oil tanks.
The emergency signal came late in the afternoon watch. It was broadcast by a “Dumbo,” one of several communications aircraft that cruised along the flight route of the big bombers that were leveling Tokyo with fire raids. A B-29 with two engines shot away was coming down. Ralph Ulrich, efficient as always, had the plane’s reported location on his plotting board in little more than a minute.
“We’re nine thousand yards away, sir. Twenty minutes at fifteen knots. We should steer course zero four zero.”
“Come left to zero four zero. Make turns for fifteen knots,” Brannon ordered. He turned to climb up the ladder to the Conning Tower. “Assemble the rescue party in the Control Room. I want a constant radar search.”