LITMIR.BIZ

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      Contents

      Copyright Information 2

      Chapter 1 3

      Chapter 2 14

      Chapter 3 23

      Chapter 4 34

      Chapter 5 42

      Chapter 7 64

      Chapter 8 74

      Chapter 9 84

      Chapter 10 92

      Chapter 11 101

      Chapter 12 113

      Chapter 13 126

      Chapter 15 144

      Chapter 16 160

      Chapter 17 169

      Chapter 18 179

      Chapter 19 190

      Chapter 20 204

      Chapter 21 216

      Chapter 22 228

      Chapter 23 235

      Copyright Information

      Copyright ©1983 by Richard Deming.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      Chapter 1

      Depth charges exploded in the distance. The Jap destroyer had temporarily lost track of them and was dropping his ash cans at random. In the conning tower of the American submarine, Jack McCrary listened tensely to the muffled thuds that were transmitted through the pressure hull. Were they louder now? The boat was rigged for silent running, ghosting along at a depth of two hundred feet, every unnecessary piece of machinery turned off, but even the breathing of the others around him sounded thunderously loud. The destroyer was certain to hear them, to pinpoint their location, to drop its depth charges right down their throats. The hull would rupture, and the ever-waiting ocean would invade with such force that it would flay them before it drowned them. Another series of thuds, definitely closer this time. At any moment the Jap sonar would make contact and there would be no place left to hide.

      “Commander! Commander McCrary! Are you there, sir?”

      Jack was on his feet and his eyes were open, but his mind was still some seconds behind his body. He was not in the conning tower of the Stickleback, nor in his cabin, but where was he? Knuckles pounded again on the door, and as he groped toward it in the dark, he remembered. The Stickleback was somewhere in the Pacific under her new skipper, and he was in a room at BOQ, Atlantic Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut.

      A chief petty officer was at the door, just raising his fist to knock again when Jack opened it. His face was vaguely familiar, but in his still foggy state Jack was unable to make the connection. “Yes, Chief, what is it?” he asked.

      “Sorry to wake you, sir, but I thought you should know. We just got a call downstairs that there’s a fire at Electric Boat.”

      Jack was already pulling on his pants. “The Manta?”

      “Dunno, sir. They said near the piers, but they didn’t say how bad it was or whether any boats had been damaged.”

      “I see. Thanks, Chief. Would you get Lieutenant Hunt—no, damn it, he’s away—Lieutenant Andrews, three doors down.” He slipped a fleece-lined flier’s jacket over his khaki shirt. This was no occasion for dress blues. “Oh, and is there a jeep downstairs we can have?”

      “Yes, sir. I’ll get Mr. Andrews, sir.”

      Jack picked up his hat and looked around the room for anything that might be useful. It was as bare as a monk’s cell. As he took the stairs three at a time, he asked himself why disasters always seemed to strike at the worst possible time, then answered his own question: if they struck at some other time, they might not be disasters. His new command-to-be, the U.S.S. Manta, was already halfway through her sea trials and was performing like a champ. In less than a week she would be towed upriver from the Electric Boat Company to the sub base for her commissioning. And now she was apparently in danger, not from the enemy or the ever-waiting ocean, but from a dockside fire! Of course, the fire might itself be the work of the enemy; there was that strange affair of the liner Normandie the year before, burned and scuttled at her moorings while being converted to a troopship. The Hitler movement had attracted quite a few fervent admirers in the United States during the turbulent thirties, and some of them might still be fanatic enough to turn saboteur.

      It was a bitter cold night, crystal clear, with a northwest wind that howled all the way down from Hudson’s Bay. By the time Jack had managed to start the reluctant jeep, Charlie Andrews was running down the drive, buttoning his shirt as he came. He grabbed the windshield and swung into the passenger seat as Jack gunned the engine and swerved into the narrow roadway.

      With the open car in motion the cold was many times worse. Jack cursed himself for leaving a new pair of fur-lined gloves in his room. A year of service in the tropics had spoiled him! On the right the framework of the new highway bridge across the Thames was silhouetted against the starry sky. He had to slow down; Groton’s narrow streets had not changed much since the days of the Revolution, when the British had captured the town and massacred the defenders of Fort Griswold.

      The wind noise was smaller now. Andrews leaned over and shouted in Jack’s ear, “Is Manta in danger, skipper? All I got from the CPO was there was a fire and you wanted me pdq.”

      “No idea, Charlie, but we’ll find out soon enough.” He pointed ahead, where a yellowish glow reflected off a low-hanging cloud of smoke, seeming intolerably bright in the dimmed-out town. The Electric Boat Company was the largest submarine shipyard in the world, now running around the clock to turn out the boats the country needed so desperately for the war in the Pacific. Thousands of workers streamed through its carefully guarded gates three times a day. By the time the line of buildings that was the landward face of Electric Boat appeared on their right, Jack found himself caught in a mass of cars that moved at a crawl, then stopped altogether. He cursed loudly, swung the jeep into a side street, and sprang out, with Andrews close on his heels.

      The guards at the gate nearest the pier were jittery because of the fire and seemed inclined to keep Jack and Charlie out, but in the end they could not argue with their passes. All the officers assigned to Manta had been in and out every day for the past six weeks, keeping track of the thousands of details involved in fitting out and manning a new warship and filling out the even more numerous forms required by Washington.

      As they picked their way across one of the railroad sidings that interlaced the giant shipyard, Jack was seized by a sense of foreboding. The Manta was tied up at one of the finger piers, along with two other Gato-class submarines that were near completion. Because she was already undergoing sea trials, she was the outboard of the three new boats. And it was increasingly apparent that the fire, which still lit the night sky, was somewhere very near the Manta. Jack broke into a run and heard his third officer’s feet pounding right behind him.

      A crowd of onlookers blocked their way. Jack shouldered his way through them, muttering apologies, and stopped as the full peril of the situation struck him. The incredibly swift expansion of the shipyard after Pearl Harbor had led to a severe shortage of space. The management of Electric Boat had responded by building a series of temporary two-story wooden structures on the piers. One of these, on the very pier that Manta was moored to, was engulfed by fire. Worse, the gusty northwest winds were blowing the flames directly toward the nest of submarines. It seemed to Jack, in the fitful light, that the paint was already blistering on the boat closest to the pier and he could imagine the damage being done to the complex and delicate machinery inside its three-quarter-inch mild steel hull.

      He swung his eyes to his boat. A knot of sailors stood on the foredeck staring at the efforts of the firefighters, and Jack thought he could see the duty officer, a kid named Fuller, on the bridge. As far as he could tell, none of them was doing anything more than gawk. Strictly speaking, Jack had been out of line to station an anchor watch on Manta at all. Until she was commissioned, she was the responsibility

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