W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps VII - Behind the Lines

"How are they going to know what to bring?"

"You tell me what you want in your three thousand pounds," McCoy said. "That'll be radioed from Fertig's headquarters."

"You ought to see the way they've got that fixed, Doc," Everly said.

Miller looked at him in confusion.

"Everything is on a list of numbers. Like,.45 ammo, one 600-round case, is number 606, or some shit. All they radio is four-dash-six-oh-six, and they'll load four cases of.45 ammo."

"We need your list as soon as possible," McCoy said, handing him a mimeographed list of available medical supplies.

"Christ, Doc, you wouldn't believe what they brought us," Sergeant Waldron Barron, a small, very thin, bony-featured twenty-two-year-old, said, com-ing into Ward #2. "Bags of rice, six fucking pigs!"

"Mr. McCoy also brought some gold," Everly said. "Amazing what stuff comes out of hiding when you start paying with twenty-dollar gold pieces."

"Did you bring any dressings?" Miller asked. "I mean now."

"Standard field compresses," McCoy said.

"Start in here, Barron," Miller ordered. "Take off every bandage. Sprin-kle the wound with sulfanilamide..."

"With what?" Sergeant Barron asked.

"This stuff," Miller said, taking another envelope from the package. "Watch what I do."

He demonstrated.

"Then put on fresh dressings."

"What is that stuff?"

"It kills infections, or it's supposed to."

"I'll be damned," Sergeant Barron said. "It really works?"

"It's supposed to," McCoy said.

"Christ, is that a bottle of whiskey?" Barron asked, spotting the Famous Grouse.

Miller picked it up and twisted the cap off.

"One drink," he said, handing the bottle to Barron. "And then get to work."

Barron looked at the bottle.

"The guy with the knee wound needs this more than I do, Chief."

"We also have some morphine."

"Then I will have a little taste," Sergeant Barron said, and raised the bot-tle to his mouth.

[FOUR]

United States Submarine Sunfish

161? 27" East Longitude 5? 19 West Latitude

Philippine Sea

0505 Hours 4 January 1943

First Lieutenant (Captain, USFIP) James B. Weston, USMC, put his head through the hatch in the deck of the conning tower.

"Permission to come up, Sir?" he called.

Lieutenant Commander Warren T. Houser, USN, took the binoculars from his eyes and looked down at the blond-bearded head.

"If I have told you oncet, Mr. Supercargo, I have told you thrice, you have the privilege of the bridge."

"Thank you, Sir," Weston said, and came through the hatch.

He was wearing khakis, and, aside from the beard, was indistinguishable from the other three officers on the bridge.

Nine days previously, orders had been transmitted to the Sunfish:

OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

2105 GREENWICH 25 DEC 1942

FROM CINCPAC

TO SUNFISH

PROCEED AT BEST SPEED CONSISTENT WITH FUEL EXHAUSTION TO COORDINATES SEVEN EIGHT ZERO XXX ONE FOUR NOTE. RESERVE SUFFICIENT FUEL TO SUBSEQUENTLY PROCEED AT NORMAL SPEED TO COORDINATES SEVEN FOUR FOUR XXX TEN NINE SIX.

COMMENCING 1 JAN 43 ADVISE DURING SCHEDULED CONTACT ESTIMATED TIME ARRIVAL COORDINATES SEVEN EIGHT ZERO XXX ONE FOUR NINE.

PREPARE TO TRANSFER SUPERCARGO AT COORDINATES SEVEN EIGHT ZERO XXX ONE FOUR NINE. FURTHER DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

BY DIRECTION CINCPAC

WAGAM RADM USN

When laid over the chart, coordinates 774 x 096-according to the SOI for the date of reception; they changed daily-were those of Espiritu Santo. It was reasonable to assume that the Sunfish would be refueled there.

Coordinates 780 x 149, when laid over the chart, showed an empty ex-panse of water in the South Pacific Ocean several hundred miles from Espiritu Santo.

To avoid detection by Japanese aircraft and/or surface vessels, the Sunfish had traveled submerged during the daylight hours for four days after leaving Mindanao. This permitted a submerged cruising speed, on her four battery-powered 2,085 Shaft Horse Power electric motors, of approximately eight nau-tical miles per hour. She had surfaced just after nightfall on each of the first four days-bringing very welcome fresh air into her hull-and switched to her four 4,300 SHP diesel engines. While simultaneously recharging her batteries, this had permitted a fuel-economy-be-damned speed on the surface of approxi-mately seventeen nautical miles per hour.

For the last five days, Sunfish had run on the surface, prepared to emergency-dive at the sight of anything in the sky or on the horizon. There had been noth-ing. At 1805 the previous day, she had transmitted her estimated arrival time- 0445-to CINCPAC.

Now, having reached coordinates 780 x 149 at 0440 hours, she was run-ning with just enough turns to provide steerageway over a calm and endless sea. Despite what her original orders had said about "further details to fol-low," none had followed.

The change in the pitch of her engines had brought Captain Jim Weston to the conning tower from the wardroom, where he had been reading every maga-zine Sunfish had aboard.

It was light, but the sun had not yet appeared on the horizon. Lieutenant Commander Houser had made a command decision-which did not lie lightly on his shoulders-not to man the antiaircraft weaponry, four.50 caliber Browning air-cooled machine guns, or her four-inch naval cannon. Should air-craft appear in the sky, or a warship on the horizon, he felt the greater safety for his vessel lay in crash-diving as quickly as possible. Ensuring that gun crews had made it safely inside would take time.

At the instant the tip of the sun appeared on the horizon, Chief Buchanan, unable to conceal his concern, bellowed:

"Aircraft dead ahead, estimate two miles, two thousand feet!"

Commander Houser turned to his talker, a sailor equipped with a micro-phone and a headset permitting him to relay orders to and from the conning tower.

"All ahead full, prepare to dive," Houser ordered.

"All ahead full, prepare to dive," the talker parroted, and there was a near-instant roar and billow of smoke from Sunfish's diesels.

"Get below, Mr. Weston, please," Commander Houser ordered calmly, then trained his binoculars on the rapidly approaching speck in the sky.

The aircraft was difficult to see. It was coming in out of the sun, which lay just over the horizon. But Houser could make out that it was a flying boat; he could see the fuselage, from which pontoons dropped, and a high wing.

It's probably a Catalina, he decided. It would be the ideal aircraft for a mission like this. A Catalina was a long-range reconnaissance aircraft, easily capable of making a landing in the sea, taking Weston aboard, and taking off again.

And then he felt bile in his mouth.

That sonofabitch has four engines; it's not a Catalina, it's an H8KU! The Kawanishi H8K, which borrowed many of its design features from the two-engine Catalina, was a four-engine long-range reconnaissance/bomber seaplane. It was faster and more heavily armed and armored than the Cata-lina.

And my antiaircraft isn't manned! Goddamn it, what was I thinking of when I made that decision ?

"Emergency dive!" he ordered. "Dive, dive, dive!"

The personnel on the bridge began to drop through the hatch as quickly as they could manage to do so.

The submerging process seemed to be slower than Houser remembered.

The H8K was growing larger by the second. And it was unquestionably on a bomb run. A nice, slow, sure-to-be-accurate bomb run.

And then he saw something that made the situation appear even worse.

The H8K was not alone. Other aircraft were above and behind it, two of them, on the exact same course, smaller planes, almost certainly fighters. At the speed they were moving, they would be in strafing range of the Sunfish long before the H8K could drop its bombs. Twenty-millimeter machine-cannon fire would probably sweep the hull, or certainly the conning tower. Houser didn't know how well the conning tower could resist that kind of fire; he did not think it could resist much of it.