Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 60

And we put aboard a full load of brand-new electric torpedoes, the wakeless kind.

When we finally shoved off, somehow it looked as though word of our mission might have leaked out. A great crowd of submariners gathered silently on the dock to see us off, and I could feel the cumulative force of their unspoken thought.

The Admiral was there, of course, and so was Captain Blunt, and as we backed clear the band struck up "Sink Em All" which, by this time, had become a sort of submarine hymn.

Under the circumstances, it had a special meaning for us.

They kept playing the same tune over and over until we had headed up beyond ten-ten dock, and the submarine piers had drifted beyond our sight.

13

The trip west made no conscious impression on my mind.

We topped off fuel at Midway, got on our way again the same day, kept on going. The only thing I could think of was Bungo Pete, or to use his proper name, Captain Tateo Nakame, Imperial Japanese Navy. He was no doubt a Jap hero because of the number of U. S. subs he claimed to have destroyed. To Keith and me he was a devil, and needed to be destroyed in his turn.

War rarely generates personal animosities between members of the opposing forces, for it is too big for that. The hate is there, but it is a larger hatred, a hatred for everything the enemy stands for, for all of his professed ideals, for his very way of life. Individuals stand for nothing in this mammoth hate, and that is why friends, even members of the same family, can at times be on opposite sides, and why, after the fighting is over, it is possible to respect and even like the man who lately wished to kill you. Bungo, however, had done us personal in- jury, really many-fold times personal injury, and had thereby lost his anonymity. We had learned to know him by his works and by his name; it didn't seem in the least strange to Keith and me that this time, this once, we should be consumed with bitter personal enmity toward a certain personality among the enemy. That this individual was only doing his duty as he saw it, as he had a right to see it, made not the slightest difference.

And it was not entirely one-sided. For Nakame knew the Walrus by name too, and was doubtless gloating in his own turn over the fact that he had at last squared accounts with the submarine which had dared to outwit him twice, even though accidentally, and had sunk one of the destroyers working under him, even if that also had been a fluke. He might know my own name, just as I knew his, it could not have been too hard to discover.

It was with this thought in mind that Keith, Quin, and I worked out one of our ideas for the campaign against Bungo.

We had previously prepared for it by bringing along stationery and other material originally belonging to the Walrus. All the way out to Kyushu, Quin worked an hour or two a day on the papers. We made certain that the name Eel would nowhere appear in our garbage sacks, but that the name Walrus would with normal frequency. And I wrote my own name in several normal places, as though on papers which had been spoiled or discarded for one reason or another and thrown away. In this way the Walrus would once again have escaped him. Keith and I were agreed that our personal revenge would take the form of robbing Bungo Pete of that satisfaction before destroying him.

And after his curiosity had been aroused by discovery that the Walrus had returned to make depredations in the home waters of Japan, after he had had plenty of evidence and would be searching for the answer to the riddle, then we would put the demolition charges in the garbage sacks.

The explosives might not get him, probably would not, for he would have subordinates dig through the sodden sacks of putrefying garbage. But they would amount to a message he could not ignore.

Eel was a new submarine, with a new crew. This would ordinarily have been a disadvantage for the fight in which she was about to engage, but not in this instance. For every man in that crew was a veteran of submarine warfare, and she had come all this distance with one single mission. We worked her guts out all the way over. When she passed through the Bonins, or the Nanpo Shoto, Eel was superbly trained, better than she had been when Captain Blunt gave her his approval, better than Walrus had ever been. And her torpedoes, of course, had the latest modifications, our new exploder. Something Walrus had never had while I knew her.

It was with a sort of defiance our first night in AREA SEVEN, that I directed the cook to bring garbage topside and dump it.

Twice before Keith and I had been here, but this time it was something special. We were beginning our mission of vengeance. Walrus had come back to haunt Bungo Pete and kill him if she could.

First it would be necessary to alert him, to cause him to come out after us. We wasted no time getting down to the southern and eastern portion of our area, near Toi Mistaki, where ships rounding Kyushu would have to make their course change to the north. Two nights and a day with nothing sighted, only the ubiquitous fishing boats, then a small tanker came by in the blackest part of the night. Our powerful radar picked him up two hours before we saw him. I held the new model TBT on his middle, thumbed the button in the handle of the built-in pressure-proof binoculars, felt two torpedoes start his way.

He was not a large ship, not worth more than two torpedoes.

Both of them hit and both exploded, and when the spray-and- water column came back down, he was no longer there. Our first calling card.

But he had had no time to radio in the warning, could not have accomplished what we wanted. We waited a few days longer, found another ship, a little larger. Freighter, also new.

Submerged periscope approach this time, two more torpedoes.

It took him about fifteen minutes to go down.

That night, having first dropped our garbage near where the freighter had been sunk and near where analysis of non- arrival of the tanker might show it, too, had gone down, we put everything on the line and headed for the other end Of AREA SEVEN, off the coast of Shikoku, between the Bungo and Kii Suidos.

Two days more, again with only fishing boats in sight, during which we were careful that trash and garbage was dumped in a specially weighted sack which sank immediately. We were sub- merged, close in to the coast, when we sighted masts. Two ships, hugging the coast. Then there was a third mast, a tincan, patrolling to seaward. Not Bungo, however. Smaller destroyer- type, probably sent out as a protective gesture now that another submarine was known to have entered the area. Eel maneuvered between the escort and his convoy. Four stern tubes at the tincan, close quarters, but there was time to get them off.

He joined his ancestors in a cloud of mingled flame, smoke, and spray. Then for the two ships. Three at the leader-just as he was turning. One hit, enough. He sagged down by the bow, water coming over his forward cargo well.

In the meantime the second ship in the convoy, an old rusty freighter, had put his rudder hard over. There was only one way for him to go, however; back where he came from. He had. to go toward the shoreline and back out again around a point of land, if he wanted to stay in shallow water. That was his mistake, one Bungo would never have let him make. He was not very fast. We didn't even have to pull much out of the battery to get across the mouth of the little bay in time.

Eel was waiting for him quietly when he came out.

That night we made sure our garbage would not sink and threw over a couple of extra bags of it for good measure.

Then we raced for the Bungo Suido.

We had left our calling cards liberally sprinkled on both sides of the entrance to the Inland Sea. Now it was time to play it slow and easy and to watch developments. The closer in we could get, the better. Bungo would no doubt expect us to stay well away.

For a day-three days and the nights between-nothing happened. Again we were making sure our garbage would sink without trace. And we allowed two old ships, proceeding alone, to enter the harbor unmolested.

"We'll let it jell for a while, Keith," I told him. "We've raised enough Cain around here. He'll come."

But he didn't. Keith put his finger on it the third day. We had the chart of the area out on the wardroom table, were studying it, as had become our habit in hope of ferreting out some clue to Bungo's operations.

"You know, skipper," he said, "this guy Nakame is no slouch.

He's a very particular operator. Have you noticed that he hardly ever shows his hand until whatever boat is in this area has been here for a while? Maybe he even waits until the boat is low on torpedoes."

"That doesn't hold for our first patrol in the Walrus," I told him.

"No, Sir, but it does for the rest of the cases. That must have been an accident. We'd only been in the area a few hours, and he couldn't have known we were there yet." — Looking back over the boats which had been lost, and the experiences of those, like Walrus on her fourth patrol, who had come through it, a certain pattern began to take shape. Stocker Kane and the Nerka had been in AREA SEVEN for three weeks before Bungo had got him. Jim likewise. So had we, on our fourth, before he came out.

Evidently he studied the tactics of his intended victim, waited methodically for them to become clear to him, then sallied forth to lay his trap for him. As Keith said, our first patrol had been an accident, in that the contact had been unexpected by Bungo as well as ourselves.

No doubt he searched the area of a contact or action, especially after he had depth-charged a submarine-for the telltale sacks of garbage, which might float around for several days, but if there were no submarine activity he would probably not bother.