yard crew from Electric Boat had sailed the Manta upriver to the submarine base the night before. As Jack neared the pier, his steps slowed to a halt and he studied, with the perspective of distance, the submarine that would be his home for the months to come. At 312 feet she was a few feet longer than his previous command, Stickleback, but internally the only difference between the two boats was the addition of a watertight bulkhead separating the two banks of engines. Like Stickleback, Manta had ten torpedo tubes, six forward and four aft, and carried a full war load of twenty-four fish. He hoped they would perform more reliably than the torpedoes he and the other men of the Sub Force had been cursed with during the opening year of the war. Jack had done a good deal more than his share to expose the faults of the Mark XIV fish, with no thanks from the bureaucrats and timeservers in the Bureau of Ordnance.
Externally Manta incorporated all the hard lessons taught by the war. Rows of free-flooding limber holes took precious seconds off her crash-dive time. The shears that supported the two periscopes and the SJ radar mast were left bare, to cut down her silhouette when surfaced. A four-inch deck gun, mounted forward of the bridge at Jack’s request, replaced the ineffectual three-inch gun of the earlier boat. Most striking to those who remembered the sleek streamlining of prewar submarines, the fairwater, the plated structure that surrounded the conning tower, had been reduced to a small area immediately around the bridge. On the small elevated decks created by its removal were mounted two twenty-millimeter Bofors antiaircraft guns. Jack had tried hard to get a forty-millimeter Oerlikon in place of one of the Bofors, but at this point in the war there simply were not enough of the bigger antiaircraft weapons to go around. As a consolation prize the shipyard had agreed to weld four mounts for fifty-caliber machine guns along the edges of the deck. Already in this war he had run into some strange combat situations, and this time he hoped to have the armament to deal with whatever came up.
The admiral’s car was coming down the road to the pier. As if on signal the white caps and blue blouses of Manta’s seventy-man crew started popping rapidly from the deck hatches and forming up aft. Jack hurried down the short slope; protocol required him to welcome the admiral aboard.
For someone who did not understand its significance, the commissioning ceremony might have seemed brief and unimpressive. Jack took his place in front of his officers and between the ranks of the crew and read his orders; everyone saluted while the colors were run up at the stern; then Jack turned to his executive officer and said, “Mr. Hunt, set the watch.” That was all, but it meant that the Manta was now the newest member of the fleet.
The lunch with the admiral was unavoidably a rather stiff occasion, but Jack used the opportunity to get to know his officers better. Art Hunt, the exec, was an Academy graduate who had been serving in the submarine force since before the war, though because of a tour of duty on SubLant staff he had not yet been on a war patrol. A full lieutenant, Hunt seemed to think that he was overdue for promotion to lieutenant commander. Jack resolved to keep an open mind on that question until he had seen his exec in combat.
Lieutenant (jg) Lou daCosta had seafaring in his blood. His grandfather had emigrated from Portugal to New Bedford, Massachusetts, fifty years before, and his father now owned a sizable fleet of fishing trawlers that were doing double duty as submarine spotters for the Coast Guard. Charlie Andrews, on the other hand, was the son of a garage mechanic in Kansas and had never seen the ocean until after he joined the Navy. Not that he would see much of it aboard the Manta; as engineering officer he spent most of his waking hours aft in the maneuvering room.
Jack still thought of the three ensigns collectively as “the kids.” They were all fresh from submarine school and green as they come. Their eagerness and their tendency to bump into things reminded him of a litter of puppies. The senior of the three, Paul Wing, had drawn the short straw and was back on the boat as duty officer, but Ted Fuller and Woodrow W. ‘Woody’ Stone sat at the end of the table talking and joking with each other, apparently not at all awed to be eating lunch with the admiral. Jack was glad to see that Fuller’s exploits of a few nights before had left no scars. The war in the Pacific would leave its marks on all of them soon enough.
After lunch Jack gave the other officers the rest of the afternoon off and returned to the boat with Art Hunt to continue drawing up the watch rosters that listed the battle station, watch station, and cleaning station of every man in the crew. The three watches had to be approximately balanced in the specialties and level of experience of their members as well. At sea the submarine was both a closed community and an industrial plant. Their ability to do their assigned task, even their chances of returning safely to port, depended on every man knowing precisely what he was expected to do under every likely set of circumstances. When the watch rosters were complete, Jack started devising the training schedule for the next three weeks. Before Manta left for the war zone, he would make sure that each watch could dive and surface the boat unassisted and that all of his officers were prepared to carry out every task from supervising the big diesels to firing a torpedo at a target.
A light snow was falling the next morning as the dark gray submarine backed into the river and glided through the two drawbridges and past the Electric Boat complex to the waters of Long Island Sound.
Beyond New London Light, in the Race, the boat ran into a short, hard chop. Like most submarines, Manta had a habit of rolling when cruising on the surface. On the bridge Jack stood, knees slightly bent, unconscious of the movements he was making to compensate for the motions of the boat. Part of his mind was monitoring the course and speed, the landmarks and buoys, the feel of the deck beneath his feet, but another part, the more active part, was locked on the memory of another morning, almost four years before, and sailing down the Thames from New London on another untried submarine. The Sebago. Was it only coincidence that had given him the same diving area today? Perhaps they had short memories at the sub base; but he didn’t. He remembered all too well.
The first time the Sebago dived, the main induction valve, a yard-wide opening that supplied air to the engines, failed to close properly. The ocean invaded at once, sending the boat plummeting to the bottom and drowning all the men in the engine room, Jack’s younger brother Edward among them. Another fatality was the skipper, Commander Dunlop, whose death of a heart attack left the young Lieutenant McCrary to rally the survivors for the long, agonizing wait for rescue. He still recalled the foul taste of the stale air and the way the slightest effort left him drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. At times, as the rescue attempt ran into one obstacle after another, he had wondered if his brother and the other men in the aft compartment weren’t the lucky ones, if a quick death by drowning wasn’t far preferable to slow suffocation.
As always he shied away from thinking about the aftermath of the tragedy. Wracked by guilt over the death of his brother, he had tried to fix the blame for the disaster on his Academy classmate, the brilliant engineer Ben Mount. When Mount was vindicated by a board of inquiry, Jack’s career was ruined. It took a combination of persistent string-pulling and blind luck to get him posted to a submarine again, just as the country was being dragged into the war. His combat record as skipper of the Stickleback had gone a long way to erase the effects of his early misstep, but he knew very well that many of his superiors still thought of him as unreliable.
DaCosta was officer of the deck. He took another set of cross-bearings and nudged Jack. “We’re entering our assigned area, skipper,” he said.
“Thanks, Lou.” Jack focused his thoughts entirely on the present. “Rig the boat for diving.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” As the command was passed to the control room, the diving planes at the bow unfolded from their recesses, ready to slice into the waves and force the bow under.
“Boat rigged for dive, sir,” daCosta reported.
“Very well; clear the bridge.”
“Clear the bridge!” The two lookouts jumped down from the crow’s nests on either side of the periscope
