As Mackerel passed two hundred feet, there was no indication of depth charges. Salisbury still had contacts on the surface all around the boat, but he heard no depth charge splashes. The destroyer that had passed overhead just continued on course and faded into the rest of the background noise.
Was it possible that Mackerel was still undetected? Tremain thought. Maybe the Japanese did not know there was an American submarine in these waters after all. Perhaps the patrol boat encounter of the previous evening had not given them away. The enemy probably didn’t expect a submarine to be this close to the Empire’s homeland. If they truly were undetected then it had to be a miracle.
Tremain had to decide. If he took the ship deep to avoid a depth charge attack, Mackerel would never get back up in time to shoot. By the time they reached periscope depth again, the Japanese task force would have already cleared the channel and made its turn for the open sea. On the other hand, if he came back to periscope depth now, he might raise the scope in time to see five or six destroyers, with depth-charge throwers primed and ready, converging on Mackerel’s position. Mackerel would not stand a chance. She would be destroyed before she could get below one hundred feet.
Tremain sighed and glanced at Cazanavette, who was leaning over the chart desk with a pencil in his mouth staring at the chart as if it contained the answer. There really was no choice, after all, Tremain thought to himself. They had come here to do a job, or die trying.
“Diving officer!” Tremain shouted down the hatch. “Make your depth six five feet!”
Everyone in the room looked at him in shock as if he were mad. Cazanavette looked up from the chart with his face contorted at first, but then he smiled with his eyes and nodded. He and Tremain both knew what had to be done.
As Olander pumped off all of the water he had previously flooded into the negative tank, Mackerel began to glide up. It took several minutes to get the water off, but she ascended more rapidly with every foot of depth due to the increased buoyancy force created by the hull’s expansion. As she passed one hundred feet, Tremain ordered all stop once again and waited for the speed log to read five knots.
“Up scope!” he ordered, and the periscope assistant pressed a button. Hydraulic pressure raised the scope out of its well and Tremain again met it at the floor.
The sound contacts still existed on all bearings. Everyone in the conning tower held their breaths and watched as Tremain spun around, checking in all directions. They let out a collective sigh when Tremain announced: “No close contacts. I don’t think they’ve detected us.”
Tremain turned the scope back up the channel. Again, a large roller doused it and he found himself looking at the underside of a wave. Several seconds passed before the scope emerged again. As the water ran off the lens, Tremain caught a glimpse of something over the next wave crest.
A dark shadow lay directly in front of the Mackerel’s bows. At first, he thought it was another destroyer. He almost gave the order to go deep again, but then the lens finally cleared and Tremain immediately recognized the dark gray camouflaged masts and superstructure of a large Japanese battleship. Tremain could just see her ominous eighteen-inch gun turrets protruding above the visible horizon. The waves hid the rest of her hull from view, but there could be no mistaking, the superstructure was the same as the one he had seen in the shipyard photographs. It was the Kurita. She was presenting her starboard bow and was headed on nearly the same southeasterly course as the destroyers.
“Kurita two thousand yards off the starboard bow, gentlemen,” he announced with a wide grin, not taking his eyes from the periscope. “Let’s do this, XO. Stand by for an observation.”
Chapter 26
Tremain did not have much time to maneuver Mackerel into a firing position. The Kurita already filled up the entire field of view of the periscope lens. He could see black clouds of smoke billowing from her two stacks, indicating that her monstrous boilers were pouring out steam to turn her engines at high speed. Kurita’s freshly painted seventy-five thousand ton hull drove on through the treacherous pass, parting the ocean waves before it, effortlessly tossing them off in shattered pieces. Even the swells did not appear to have any affect on her, unlike her smaller escorts whose structures swayed to and fro in the choppy waters. Kurita’s masts and stacks stood vertical and unbending as though she were not underway at all but rather sitting beside the pier. She was a beautiful sight, Tremain thought, the master of her new realm, and a perfect symbol of Japanese engineering, ingenuity, and production capability.
In high power magnification, Tremain could make out small clusters of men standing on the battleship’s decks.
A ship of her size would have a crew of over a thousand men, not including the shipyard personnel on board. He wondered if any of the men he was looking at now were shipyard workers. They were too far away to tell. He saw one of the men toss a cigarette butt into the water. Surely, none of them could suspect that an American submarine captain was watching them.
Tremain had to shake himself to get back to the business at hand. The Kurita was already drawing quickly to the right. He would have to act fast in order to place the shot. At her present speed she would be past them in only a few minutes.
Lining up the periscope reticle on her forward stack, Tremain depressed the mark button.
“Bearing, mark!” he shouted.
“Zero one nine, sir,” the periscope assistant called off.
“Down scope!” Tremain slapped up the handles as the scope slid back down into its well, and he quickly made his way over to Hubley. “Use a range of eighteen hundred yards. Speed, twenty knots.”
Hubley turned the dials and knobs of the torpedo data computer in a lightning quick fashion, entering all of the data from the periscope observation.
“She’s moving fast,” Tremain said to Cazanavette. “She’s heading straight down the channel. We’ll be hard pressed to get her as she goes by.”
“As long as she’s in the channel, Captain. We’ll at least have a good idea of what course she’s on. She won’t zig until she’s reached the open ocean. Can we get another observation, sir?” Cazanavette asked while scribbling the new information onto his plot.
“There’s no time, XO. We’ve got to turn the tubes to bear now or we’ll never get her.” Tremain looked over his shoulder at the helmsman. “Hard right rudder. All ahead full.”
The helmsman put the rudder over to the right as far as it would go, and rang up the new bell on the engine order telegraph. The speed would assist the rudder in turning Mackerel quickly.
Tremain watched the course indicator dial as the ship’s heading swept across north to the right. He needed to position the ship’s bows perpendicular to the Kurita’s track to minimize the gyro angle settings on his torpedoes and to expose the battleship’s full beam to Mackerel’s forward tubes. The larger the area that the target displayed, the easier it would be to hit it.
“Course zero seven five is an optimum firing course, sir,” Cazanavette reported, from his plot. “That will place us perpendicular to Kurita’s projected track.”
Tremain nodded. “Very well, XO. Helm, steady on course zero seven five.”