“Permission to come on the bridge?” Keith’s voice. Evidently he had followed him, having waited a decent interval first. Rich welcomed the opportunity, walked quietly to the after part of the cigarette deck, leaned against the rail, waited for him.
“Skipper,” said Keith in a low voice, “I have to talk to you about the commodore. He’s got me worried, sir.”
“How, Keith?” said Richardson wearily.
Keith was his confidant and best friend on board, but years of navy training and of ingrained respect for his former skipper were behind the deep reticence Rich now felt.
“He’s not the same as he was back in New London, sir. He was different this time in Pearl, too. Ever since we left Pearl Harbor he has been acting more and more strange. He hardly ever sleeps, and he hardly ever talked to you, or anybody, until lately. But now he’s beginning not to make sense.”
Richardson could think of nothing to say. The idea would have been startling a few days ago. Not so now.
“He’s your old skipper and all that, and I worried a lot about whether I should tell you this. He’s driving us all batty.”
“Oh, come on, Keith,” said Richardson uncomfortably. “He’s got a lot more on his mind than you know.”
“No, that’s not it.” Suddenly Keith spoke with a tone of passionate vehemence. “He doesn’t usually talk much, as I said, but for the last two days, when you’re not in the wardroom, he’s been talking a lot. All he talks about is maybe somebody is sabotaging our hydraulic plant!”
“Now, wait a minute, Keith. You don’t expect me to believe that a member of our crew is deliberately trying to wreck the hydraulic system!”
“Nobody’s trying to sabotage anything! That’s only the commodore’s idea. We’re all trying to help Al figure out what’s wrong. The best man we’ve got on the hydraulic plant is Lichtmann, but lately the commodore has decided Lichtmann must be the saboteur. Don’t ask me how he came up with this one, but it’s all he’s talked about for a day, now, and it’s giving us a fit!”
On the forward part of the bridge, the quartermaster and Officer of the Deck maintained their vigil, while behind them the four lookouts stood motionlessly, elbows on the bridge bulwarks, binoculars steadily sweeping the murky horizon, which could hardly be seen. One part of Richardson wanted badly to continue the conversation, but he could not, would not. “Keith,” he said, “I don’t want this subject to be talked about. Not anywhere, and especially not in the wardroom. It’s up to you to keep the rest of the wardroom in line when I’m not there. Blunt may be passing through a tough time — but he does have a lot on his mind, remember that. Anyway, I don’t want you or any of the others worrying about him. He’s my problem. I’ll handle him. He’s an old friend, and I’ll take care of him.”
Having made a decision, Richardson was surprised at the ease with which he was able to placate Keith. Perhaps Keith also felt he had said enough. Rich searched his mind for a new topic of conversation, found it. “Keith,” he said, “have you thought much about what types of ships those three escorts were that got the Chicolar?”
“Only what I’ve already told you. Nobody saw them. They must have been pretty small, because on the radar scope they were only half as big as the freighters. The three pips all looked exactly the same, so all three escorts could be the same type of ship. They increased speed from ten to eighteen knots, by our plot, when they closed in on Chicolar. They weren’t just patrol craft, that’s one thing sure. We counted over ninety depth charges, so that means each one carries at least thirty and probably a lot more. Anybody carrying that many depth charges—”
“Must have been designed for ASW work,” broke in Richardson. “It’s a good thing for us, sitting here charging batteries in the middle of the Yellow Sea, that they aren’t out patrolling, instead of sticking to convoy escort duty.”
“One of those new Mikura class escorts, if that’s what they were, might waste a lot of time just patrolling an area,” said Keith. “We could avoid him pretty easily. He’ll give us a big enough silhouette at night that we should see him before he sees us, and anyway, we should have him on radar long before he’s onto us.”
“Right, Keith, but the Jap Navy won’t pass up the duty to patrol. Remember the fishing boats. They’re made of wood, and wood doesn’t give as good a radar return as steel. I daresay the three escorts who got Chicolar were Mikuras, all right, but I’m beginning to wonder whether we might be seeing one of those big sampans they warned us about just before we left Pearl. Twice we’ve seen a pretty big one. Sea-going junks, I’d call both of them. Or maybe we saw the same one twice. It could easily be a patrol boat.”
“Our operation order says the big ones are. They’re on patrol to spot submarines. Their hulls are low to the water, and our radar doesn’t see them very soon, either, that’s for damn sure.”
“They aren’t worth a torpedo, but ComSubPac is worried about them. That’s one reason for the extra five-inch gun they gave us.”
Keith thoughtfully nodded his head. The musty atmosphere of the Yellow Sea, muggy, laden with salt, crowded around them, isolated them where they stood. They had moved close together, draped their arms over the forty-millimeter gun barrel. There was a hint of fog in the air, but then, there was almost always a hint of fog in the Yellow Sea at night. Richardson and Leone, standing with their heads inches apart, could see each other clearly enough in the faint illumination from occasional greenish-white phosphorescence in the water, or the gray reflection from some part of the ship’s structure. They spoke in low voices, barely loudly enough to hear each other above the muffled diesels spewing their exhaust into the sea astern.
Eel rode easily on the placid sea. Weather in the Yellow Sea apparently was rarely stormy, although, like any body of water, it must have its bad moments.
“You know, Skipper,” Keith was saying, “this darkness is deceptive. You can’t see the horizon. Taking my sights in the morning and evening I’ve almost always had to guess at it, and right now, in the middle of the night, you can’t tell sky from water. If the Japs were smart, they’d get those two-man submarines out looking for us at night. They know darned well where our patrol areas are. The way we patrol right off their main harbors, their crews could sleep all day in a barracks on shore and come out at night just looking for us. We’d look like an ocean liner to them. One torpedo from a Jap two-man submarine would finish us.”
“Maybe that’s one reason why the commodore won’t let us go in closer. I imagine the two-man subs would have trouble patrolling this far away from harbor.”
“Guess so, but now that the Japs know there’s submarines back in the Yellow Sea, it would seem to me they would want to send someone out looking for us. They could use the two-man subs close in to shore, and have patrol boats disguised as fishing sampans farther out.”
“Could be, Keith. How’d you expect to handle a sampan?”
“Well, he’d probably have a gun, so maybe doing a battle surface exercise alongside him during daylight might not be a good idea. Even a small gun could do a lot of damage if he got it going in time. At night, though, we ought to be able to take him by surprise and pretty well knock him out with our guns before he’s able to do us any damage in return — that is, provided the commodore will let us.”
“Most sampans I’ve seen are dark in color, and so low in the water that our gun crews are liable to shoot right over them. Besides, how do you tell a fishing boat from a patrol boat? Maybe we could get them to cooperate by painting ‘His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Ship’ somewhere on their side. I don’t suppose they would be that helpful, though!” Richardson smiled wryly.