R. Cameron Cooke
Pride Runs Deep
Prologue
Blood stains never came out of cotton khakis, Russo thought, flicking at the dried blood on his sleeve. It was not his blood. The day was gray and the clouds were low, making the stains look almost black. Strangely, it was the only thing he could think about. The whole patrol had been a blur.
“Sir!” Chief Konhausen shouted from up by the bow, where several sailors stood on deck gaping over the starboard side of the ship. Two of them held a line for the diver whose bubbles broached the surface of the water near the hull.
“Captain!” Konhausen shouted again, this time from the deck just beneath the conning tower.
The cool North Pacific air whisked across the bridge and broke Russo’s trance. He leaned over the coaming and held his hand to his ear as if he had not heard Konhausen the first time.
“How’s it look?” he called.
“It’s worse than I thought, Captain. The torpedo’s fouled in the shutter mechanism. We can’t move her and I don’t want to. The exploder could be armed, sir. Anything might set it off.”
Russo nodded. There were a couple of officers on the bridge with him, but he felt very alone. Russo looked at the blood on his sleeve again. He couldn’t stop looking at it. The submarine’s rolling deck, the idling diesel engines, the dull hum of the rotating radar mast all disappeared from his senses and all he could see, hear, smell, or feel was the dried blood on his sleeve that was not his.
“Shit!” one officer muttered behind him.
“What do you want to do, Captain?” the officer next to him asked.
Russo gave no answer.
“Get Hunt out of the water, Chief, and get below,” the officer called down to Konhausen. “We’re sitting ducks up here.”
“Aye aye, XO,” Konhausen answered, looking puzzled at Russo’s behavior.
“Bridge, radar,” the bridge intercom suddenly squawked. “SD radar contact, range five thousand yards! Aircraft approaching fast, sir!”
Everyone on the bridge exchanged white-faced glances and Russo snapped out of his hypnotic gaze.
“Clear the bridge! Clear the decks!” he yelled. “Helm, bridge, all ahead flank!”
The two officers scurried down the bridge hatch, followed quickly by the lookouts who had dropped down from their high perches in the periscope shears. Within seconds Russo was the only one on the bridge, and as the resonance of the powerful diesels shifted to a higher octave, he could already feel the hull accelerating through the water.
The men on deck also scampered to get below. All of them bolted for the forward torpedo room hatch, the only open hatch on the main deck. All except for Konhausen, who remained behind to pull Hunt, the diver, up from the water.
Russo scanned the low gray clouds above the submarine, but it was no use. The Japanese plane had the jump on them.
“Bridge, radar, aircraft at three thousand yards now, sir,” the nervous voice reported over the speaker.
Konhausen finally had Hunt out of the water and climbing up the submarine’s side. The rest of the men were now below and Konhausen and Hunt were the only two left on deck.
Russo desperately wanted to dive the ship. He was putting the ship and crew in jeopardy for the sake of two men, but the blood on his shirt kept catching his eye, and he couldn’t bear the thought of losing another man on this patrol. He decided then and there that he would not dive the ship until Konhausen and Hunt were safely below.
The submarine’s screws churned the ocean behind her and she quickly surpassed fifteen knots, leaving a white wake that would make it even easier for the Japanese plane to spot her. Her bow began to crash through the waves, spraying the two men on the bow with a cold salty mist.
“Aircraft at one thousand yards, sir!” the speaker intoned.
Konhausen had pulled Hunt up to the deck now. The big chief helped the diver rip off his fins and then both began to run across the rocking deck to the open hatch only thirty feet away.
Russo saw Konhausen get to the hatch first and disappear below. As Hunt reached the hatch, Russo pulled the diving alarm lever near his right hand and shouted into the bridge call box.
“Crash dive!”
On the second blast of the diving alarm he could hear the rushing water and see the spraying mist in the air as the sub’s ballast tanks vented and rapidly filled with the sea.
He also saw the wing-like surfaces on the sub’s bow deploy from the vertical position to the horizontal.
He thought Hunt was home free and had almost turned to drop down the bridge hatch before he heard a rapid staccato sound that could only be one thing. In the blink of an eye, dozens of geysers shot up in the water around the bow. The 20-millimeter shells from the Japanese plane walked across the submarine’s bow from port to starboard and made sickening sounds as they struck metal hull and then wooden deck, blasting splinters in all directions.
Russo started to shout to Hunt, who was leaping for the protection of the open hatch cover, but before he could say anything a 20-millimeter projectile sliced Hunt’s left leg off at the thigh like it was made of putty. A shower of blood and cartilage instantly fountained up only to splatter down on the deck seconds later.
Russo instinctively ducked when the roaring engine of the low-flying Japanese fighter blared overhead. He looked up in time to see the silver-painted aircraft with the red sun on its fuselage pull up and disappear into the low clouds, obviously to prepare for another pass.
Down on the deck, Hunt was rolling around near the hatch, blood squirting from his stump and turning the wooden deck red. Several feet away his severed leg lay grotesquely twitching.
Russo stared at the grisly spectacle and froze. The horror had happened so fast, within seconds. And now he didn’t even remember that the submarine was in the middle of a crash dive. As the water reached the scuppers of the main deck, he saw Konhausen emerge from the forward hatch and with lightning speed yank Hunt below. The hatch slammed shut just as the first wave swept across the deck and immersed it completely. The swirling water carried away Hunt’s leg and it quickly disappeared beneath the foaming surface.
As the waves struck the conning tower and rose still further, Russo felt a hand on his arm. One of his officers pulled him toward the bridge hatch and forced him below without much care. He reached the safety inside the conning tower and heard someone slam the hatch shut above him. He clutched the cold metal rungs of the ladder and felt the deck tilt downward as the submarine rapidly descended to a safe depth where the circling plane would no longer be a danger.
Russo did not have the wherewithal to notice the blank and dejected faces of his officers and crew staring at him from every direction. They were looking to him for guidance. They were defeated and they needed their captain.
But Russo had trouble remembering their names. He simply fixed his eyes on the dried blood on his cotton sleeve and wondered if he would ever be able to get the stain out.
PART I
Chapter 1
The attack had taken place over a year before but much evidence of that terrible day still remained. From his second-story window Captain Ireland could just see the ill-fated “battleship row” across Pearl Harbor. Oklahoma still lay rolled on her side, exactly where the Japanese bombers had left her. The shipyard engineers were making preparations to right her someday. Nearer to Ford Island, Arizona’s great funnel poked above the water marking her shallow grave, where over a thousand of those killed that day were still entombed. Oil from Arizona’s gargantuan fuel tanks still covered the water’s surface. Her great fourteen-inch guns would be removed and used in a newly commissioned battleship, but the Arizona herself would remain where she lay as a solemn reminder of what the Japanese were capable of and what they had done.