LITMIR.BIZ

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eastern sky was starting to pale when Jack finally located the jeep he had abandoned less than two hours before. He had left the Manta in the hands of a dockyard crew that swarmed over her and her two sisters, assessing damage and starting to make repairs. The man in charge, a crusty retired four-striper named Birch, was careful to express no opinion about Jack’s exploit but seemed happy that the boats had not suffered greater damage.

      As he steered through the narrow streets on his way back to the base, Jack started composing in his mind the report he would have to file on the night’s activities. Strong mention, of course, of Fuller and his men for their bravery under fire. Jack chuckled briefly as the double meaning of the expression struck him, but then his thoughts took on a more sober tone. He was bound to catch some flak on this; the only question was how much.

      “Goddammit, McCrary! You’re a big boy now; you know your rocks and shoals!” Admiral Schick’s desk was piled high with reports, urgent requisitions, and recommendations from his staff. The admiral looked as if he had not gotten enough sleep since Pearl Harbor. To Jack, who had had more than his share of dressings-down by the brass, it sounded as though his heart wasn’t in the rebuke he was delivering. “This lone-wolf crap may go down when you’re in enemy waters, but while you’re in my command you’ll do it by the book. Understood?”

      “Yes, sir,” Jack murmured.

      Admiral Schick thumbed through a stack of papers and extracted one. “I’ve had a report from the yard on Manta’s condition. You’ll be happy to hear that there was no damage serious enough to delay her commissioning next week. I understand that your father is planning to be here for it?”

      “Yes, sir.” Jack’s father, since his promotion to rear admiral, had been holding down a desk job in BuShips in Washington. This would be his first chance to see Jack aboard his own command.

      “Good. I look forward to seeing him again. I haven’t seen him since the outbreak of hostilities. I hope you, your officers, and your father will join me for lunch after the ceremony.”

      “Thank you, sir. We’d be honored to.” The response was obligatory, but Jack meant every word of it. The invitation was Schick’s way of telling him unofficially that, rebuke or no rebuke, his action in saving the Manta and her sister subs had won the tacit approval of the Navy.

      In another part of the same building Ted Fuller, Ensign, U.S.N., was enjoying the sensation created by his bandages. The effect was particularly marked on Lois Laverdiere, a local girl who had enlisted in the WAVE’s right after high school and was now an ensign with the Office of Naval Intelligence. She had never talked about her work, of course, but Ted had an idea that she was involved in code-breaking.

      “The skipper gave me the day off,” he was saying, “in recognition of my wounds suffered in the line of duty, so I came right over. Can you get the afternoon off?”

      “But Ted, shouldn’t you be resting? Doesn’t it hurt?”

      He laughed nonchalantly. As a matter of fact his left cheek hurt like hell, but he wasn’t going to let Lois know that.

      She shook her head sadly but decisively. “I can’t, really. The work just keeps piling up on us.” His spirits sank. Even in the short time he had known her, he had learned the futility of arguing with her when she used that tone of voice. “But I’m free this evening,” she continued. “There’s not much we could do this afternoon anyway, is there?”

      “I thought you might like to go on a picnic.”

      “A picnic! But Ted, it’s thirty degrees out there!” For answer he hummed a few bars of “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” Lois blushed. After a year as a WAVE she was no bashful schoolgirl. She had had some good times with other young officers—New London was full of them, and a new batch arrived daily—but she sensed that Ted Fuller, in spite of the way he liked to kid her, was more serious. She was beginning to think that she was, too. In her mind she heard the words of her gran’mere when she had joined up: “Ma foi, you’ll wed one of those boys and be a widow before you’re grown.”

      Ted persisted. “Can I drop by this evening, then?”

      “Of course! Come for dinner; you know how my mother loves to feed you. I can’t convince her that anybody in the Navy knows how to cook.”

      He wasn’t thrilled by the idea of sitting around the dinner table discussing submarine construction with Lois’s father, a skilled lathe operator at Electric Boat, while Lois, her mother, and her little brother sat listening silently. But at least Mrs. Laverdiere had the tact to clear everyone out of the living room afterwards and give him and Lois some time alone. And tonight he could thrill them all with the story of his adventures of the night before—with a suitable modesty, of course. His bandages would speak for themselves. He could already imagine the expression of open-mouthed wonder on the face of Greg, Lois’s brother. Maybe the little so-and-so would be so impressed that he would give up his usual game of trying to spy on them!

      Chapter 2

      Jack McCrary straightened his tie, stooping slightly to see his image in the small, awkwardly placed mirror, and shrugged on the heavy double-breasted blue dress jacket. The unaccustomed weight of it took him back to the two years of his exile in Washington following the Sebago disaster. He wouldn’t think of that now. No bad omens should be allowed to cast a shadow on his first day in command of the U.S.S. Manta.

      His eye fell to the message flimsy that lay on the dresser top. One omen had marred the day already. He reread the message, though he knew it by heart:

      ON SICK LIST WITH BAD COLD REGRETS

      SINK EM ALL DAD.

      He did not allow himself to realize how much he had wanted his father to be there today, nor how disappointed he was.

      He glanced at his watch: 1015. The commissioning ceremony was set for 1100. He paced across the narrow room, checked the set of his tie in the mirror again, and felt inside his coat for the reassuring crackle of his orders. With a muttered oath he snatched up his hat, unfamiliar in its gleaming white cover, and a pair of gray leather gloves, and strode out of the room, banging the door behind him.

      A 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

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