“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” Hubley said. “The skipper’s upset about it.”
“About what?”
“About our area assignment. I heard him complaining to the XO the other day that ComSubPac assigned us to a light traffic zone because they don’t trust us in the harder areas. He was pretty irate about it. He even told the XO to send off a message to ComSubPac demanding that they give us a new area.”
“Yeah?” O’Connell chuckled. “I guess he doesn’t want to go back to Pearl with all those torpedoes he had Chief Konhausen modify. How many was it in all?”
“Ten,” Hubley said. “And we’ve only shot four so far. They modified the six in the forward tubes and the four in the aft tubes. The XO wasn’t too happy about that either.” “You gotta admit, though,” O’Connell said. “The fish worked against the freighter. It sure got the crew motivated, too. I’ve never seen them this eager for a fight. My lookouts have even been asking to stay on the bridge after their watch and keep looking for contacts.”
“Mine too!” Hubley exclaimed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Amazing what a little pride can do to a ship.” As Wright listened to Hubley and O’Connell talk about the morale of the crew, something came to mind that he had almost forgotten.
“Pride runs deep,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “What?” O’Connell asked, rolling his eyes. “What the hell’re you talking about, Ryan? You sound like you’re selling war bonds.”
Wright smiled. “No, it’s just something one of my instructors at sub school would always say to us at the end of every class. He was some over-the-hill forgotten lieutenant stuck at sub school teaching tactics. He was medically disqualified from sea duty for some reason or another, I can’t remember what for. He was the kind of guy you felt sorry for because you could tell that he had dedicated most of his life to the service, and now he was just a wash-up stashed away at a teaching job. The navy had no use for him anywhere else. ‘Pride runs deep, gentlemen!’ He would always say that as we left class. He was proud all right. You could tell he wanted to go back to sea more than anything. Definitely more than any of us students did. He was always telling us how much he envied us because we were fleet bound.”
“Well, I’m envying him right about now,” O’Connell said. “Where do I sign up for instructor duty?”
“No kidding,” Hubley chuckled.
They continued the cribbage game, and Wright found himself thinking about his old instructor. It took a special sort of man to want submarine duty, he thought, especially after being here and seeing what it was all about. Wright felt like he was beginning to understand what his instructor had meant by pride.
Tremain leaned on the periscope handles and slowly scanned the ocean’s surface while he waited for Joe Salisbury to decode the message. Mackerel had come up to the surface just long enough to receive the VLF broadcast then settled back down to periscope depth. Tremain hoped the message contained an answer to his request to ComSub-Pac. He needed orders. Mackerel had not conducted an attack since the freighter sinking two weeks ago, and only two ships had been sighted in that entire time. Both had been fast-transiting destroyers, impossible to catch, and not worthy of Mackerel’s valuable torpedoes.
The ship was now patrolling submerged only a few miles south of the Truk Atoll. Through the periscope, Tremain could see the dense foliage of the thin boundary islets surrounding Tol Island poking up over the wave tops.
As he focused on the picturesque island with its clear blue waters, Tremain wondered why Ireland had sent him here. The place was devoid of shipping. Normally, Truk was a high traffic area, but all of the major operations were currently going on in the Solomon Islands, some eighteen hundred miles to the south. Most of the shipping would be there trying to replenish the Japanese bases in a desperate attempt to help them hold out against the American invasion forces that were rapidly accelerating their island-hopping campaign.
Mackerel had only three more weeks to patrol. Then she would have no choice but to leave the area with just enough fuel to get her back home. He knew that if they did not spot a target soon, the crew’s morale would drop right back into the gutter. They would blame him for the failure, and so would ComSubPac, regardless of the circumstances.
As he rotated the scope, a small glint in the sky over Truk caught his eye. It was a Japanese plane. While shipping had been scarce, the air activity around the Japanese Pacific bastion had been anything but. Flights and squadrons of Japanese planes flew over during every watch. Some had flown close enough that Tremain had seen the red rising sun on their gray fuselage. He had included a note in the night orders for the watch officers to ensure that the SD air-warning radar was on high alert whenever Mackerel was on the surface. The radar was sometimes the only warning they would have that aircraft were nearby.
“Excuse me, sir. The message is ready.”
Tremain took his eyes away from the scope to see Joe Salisbury holding out a sheet of paper in front of him. Salisbury took the scope and Tremain read the decoded message to himself. Within moments of reading it his face broke into a smile. Cazanavette appeared and also read the message, with a similar response. The message was exactly what Tremain had been waiting for. He grabbed the 1MC microphone off its hook on the bulkhead.
“All hands, this is the captain. I know this tooling around with our thumbs up our kazoos has had us wondering if ComSubPac has forgotten about us. Well, they haven’t. In fact, we have just received new orders. We are to relocate three hundred miles to the west and patrol the area northwest of the Carolines, off Mogami Bank. Shipping activity in that area is expected to be heavy in the next few days. It may interest you to know that this unexpected relocation will burn up a little more fuel than we had planned on, so we will probably be heading home a few days early. Stay sharp! That is all.”
A few cheers could be heard from the other compartments. Several faces beamed at the thought of going back to Pearl Harbor early. Tremain knew he had played that card right. He took one more round on the periscope before he and Cazanavette headed down to the control room to plot out the new course that would take them to their new hunting ground, off Mogami Bank.
Chapter 9
Mackerel leaped in and out of the swells as her four diesel engines propelled her along at fourteen knots. The unpredictable winter weather of the Central Pacific had changed once again. Gray clouds hung low over the seascape, wafted by a cool salt air breeze with the scent of rain. Squalls appeared here and there as smeared patches of dark gray reached down from the clouds to touch the water.
Wright adjusted his jacket and wiped the spray from his binocular lenses after a wave crashed against the base of the conning tower. It was only one of a seemingly endless set of rollers, which crashed across the fore deck spraying the bridge personnel with a salty mist. He glanced over at O’Connell, who was leaning on the bridge coaming peering through his own binoculars. O’Connell seemed unfazed by the uncomfortable weather.
“Poor visibility today,” Wright commented.
“I’ve seen a lot worse,” O’Connell said, still looking through his binoculars. “North Pac, up by the Aleutians, now that’s bad visibility for you. Fog is so thick up there sometimes you can’t even see the lookouts.”