Secret sea; Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  To Paulme and Howard Pease

  SEChET SEA

  Book One

  LOG OF THE ' SANTA YBEL

  Heavy Weather

  PETE /WARTIN

  JLieutenant Commander Pete Martin, USNR, commanding USS PC 237, watched his ship labor in the storm. Coming through the noise of wind and sea, he could hear the throbbing of the engines, hear the crying of metal ribs and backbone in his ship as the sea tried to take her apart. When her stern was lifted clear of the water, he could feel the beat of the screws going wild in nothing but air and he could imagine what the Black Gang was taking, trying to slow them before the brass wheels wrung themselves o£F the shafts. He watched a man open the door of the

  SECRET SEA

  deckhouse only to have a wave smash it shut again. It took the man three tries to get out the door.

  On the open bridge Pete stood against the gun shield. As the waves came rushing up over the bow he, and all hands on the bridge, would duck and then rise slowly again to peer into the gray world ahead of the ship. Pete, feeling cold water inside his foul-weather gear, scowled, for he knew that it was wetting down the brand-new lieutenant commander shoulder boards he was wearing.

  The executive officer, Lieutenant Randle, moved aft across the bridge. Sliding his hands along the top of the screen and sUding his feet so as never to have either feet or hands adrift, he got to the gun shield.

  Cupping his hand around his mouth, he shouted, "Haven't you had enough of this. Captain?"

  Pete watched the water running down Ran-dle's face and into his mouth. He had a bitter, angry expression, and, during the short time Pete had been aboard as commanding officer, he had found Randle to be a poor officer and an unpleasant shipmate.

  Pete shook his head and then pushed Randle down as a wave came roaring over the top of the screen.

  When they were standing up again, Randle said, "I'm fed up with this weather, Captain."

  HEAVY WEATHER

  The statement made Pete much angrier than it should have. But ever since he had reported aboard Randle had irritated him. Pete tried to remember that it wasn't Randle's fault if the Navy let him spend the years of the war sailing around Key West, Florida. But Pete had seen too much of the Pacific to remember things like that.

  *Tlease continue Search Plan Baker, Mr. Randle," Pete said.

  Randle shrugged. As he turned away he said, "Search plan! You couldn't find the U.S. Fleet in this weather."

  Pete watched him go to the front of the bridge and stand staring out at the grayness, ducking when the waves came over.

  What Randle had said began to worry Pete. Perhaps, he thought, this was too much weather for a green crew in a small ship. Perhaps he should give the order to turn and run for Key West. After all, Pete argued to himself, this is only training. This isn't for keeps the way it was out there. And it was certainly heavy going, with the screws thrashing in the air half the time, the bow down under green, the seas trying to carry away everything on deck that wasn't welded down.

  Then Pete remembered the typhoon he had gone through off the Philippines in the destroyer Hoel. Compared to that, this was just a breeze of wind. Pete looked down at his ship. She was taking it all right. The engines were reacting

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  nicely and the big sailor at the helm had lost his nervousness and was manhandling her through the seas, the spokes of the wheel throwing a whirl of water when he brought her up to meet the waves. It was, Pete decided, good training.

  He relaxed against the gun shield and thought about the poor Hoel, Then, almost in amazement, he thought, I'm aUve!

  He remembered the way the Pacific looked on the morning of October 24, East Longitude Time. Not like the Gulf now—the water out there was a clear purple-blue, the gentle waves were sparkling, and the foam on them was as white as a little girl's Sunday dress. When the Hoel slid at thirty knots out from under the rain squall, it was like the lights going up in a movie. The Japanese battleships stood out clear and sharp against the sky, their cluttered masts like Christmas trees. When they fired the first salvo, they completely disappeared behind the blot of ugly yellow-black smoke.

  Off to one side another destroyer, Heerman, was bucketing along, and the little destroyer escort, Roberts, was panting to keep up. Farther aft, the Johnston limped. Pete could see that she was badly hurt although he did not know then that every officer on her bridge had been killed or wounded when the battleship salvo hit her.

  Already the escort carrier Gambier Bay had been slugged and was dead in the water. Fanshaw

  HEAVY WEATHER

  Bay was a mess below decks but was still moving; Kalinin Bay's flight deck looked like Swiss cheese where the salvoes had gone clean through her. To save the rest of the jeep carriers, the three cans and the DE were going in. Four little ships against a Japanese battle fleet. Four little ships, one of them already mortally wounded.

  The Japs turned everything they had on the four little ships. The battlewagons were using dye marker for the main batteries and, when the fourteen-inch shells struck the sea, tall waterspouts leaped up colored red or green or yellow or purple. The small stuff laced the blue water and the tracers shone yellow and cold in the sun.

  The waterspouts were falling on the little ships as they settled down for the long torpedo run. Pete Martin glanced at a man crouching beside him and was surprised to find that it was his friend, Lieutenant (j.g.) Williams, for his face was streaked with red, green, and purple dye. Williams must have seen some of the stuff on .Pete, for he said, "We'd look good in Technicolor."

  "Maybe this is just a movie," Pete said. "Maybe you're Van Johnson and everything's going to be all right."

  Williams shrugged. "What happens now, Pete?"

  "We get sunk."

  They watched the bridge. When the signal

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  came down, Pete and Williams moved with the smoothness of machinery and five torpedoes slid out of the tubes, splashed down into the water. Pete watched them, waiting to see if they were going in hot and straight.

  He never found out. Something—a chimney falling, an earthquake, a stroke of lightning— threw him violently away from where he had been, smashed him against a barbette, and rolled him into the scuppers. From there, as acrid smoke cleared away, he saw that the bridge of the Hoel had been blasted off. It was just gone, with nothing but sky above the tangled steel which had held it up.

  Pete got to his feet slowly. "Wild Bill" Williams climbed over some buckled deck plates. "She's sinking," he said.

  But before she did, the Hoel swung slowly around and fired at the enemy with all the guns she had which would still fire. Then she fired again.

  She hit them and they hit her again. Pete felt the hot, harsh sucking of the air as the shells plunged into the depths of the HoeL When the yellow explosion cleared, the Hoel wasn't there.

  The destroyer escort Roberts got it next. She shuddered when the shells smacked her, but staggered on for a few seconds before she simply came apart with a blast which flattened the sea around her.

  HEAVY WEATHER

  Then the Johnston went down and only the Heerman fired her fish and got away aKve.

  Four little ships and one got away. The men who died in them gave the carriers a few seconds out of eternity and they used them well to blast the Japanese fleet with their airplanes.

  The battle off Samar moved on across the swirling water and left behind the debris of war. Bits of ships, pieces of ruined planes, oil, a crate of potatoes, and men, both living and dead, floated in the long, slow-moving waves.

  It was late in the afternoon when Pete Martin began again to think clearly. Far away the sun was setting, moving slowly down toward the blue haze of the
Philippine Islands. As the waves passed under him, they lifted him skyward with the speed and smoothness of a plane and he could look out over the empty, littered sea before they dropped him down again into a world of darkening water.

  Pete thought that his left arm had been torn off, but he couldn't be sure because he was holding Williams's head out of the water with his right arm. All the colored dye had long ago been washed off Williams's face and it was pale gray and without life. But under Pete's fingers he could still feel the irregular heartbeat.

  Pete was tired and sick and holding Williams was an ordeal which he knew he could not endure much longer. And, when the sun was almost

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  gone, Pete wondered why he kept on holding WilHams up, wondered why he didn't let him go—and go himself. The sea was empty and the night was coming. Pete knew that he could not live through the long night, and that they could not find him in the darkness.

  And then, from nowhere, a lifeboat reeled down the back of a wave and a man with a grin said, "Boy, we almost passed you up. Why didn't you wave?"

  "With what?" Pete asked. "This arm's busy and that one's gone."

  But Pete's arm wasn't entirely gone and the medics in Pearl Harbor fixed it up for him almost as good as new. And they got Williams back on his feet. . . .

  And here I am, Pete thought, commanding officer of a ship, with Wild Bill Williams down in the engine room of her.

  Pete worked his way over to the voice tubes and flipped open the one marked Engine Room. Cupping his hand over it to keep the water out, he yelled, "Mr. Williams, please."

  "WiUiams, aye, aye."

  "How you makin' down there. Bill?"

  "Picnic," Williams said. "Warm and dry."

  "Want to go home?"

  "Naw. My boys are learning a lot."

  "Did you know it was wet and miserable up here?" Pete asked.

  HEAVY WEATHER

  "What happens to you swabbies is no concern of mine."

  Pete laughed and shut the tube. When he straightened up, he found Randle at his elbow.

  "Going home, Captain?" Randle asked.

  Pete was about to answer when a hollow, flat, unhuman sound came out of another voice tube. "Lookout to bridge. Capsized boat two points off the port bow, sir."

  Pete leaned to the tube and said, "Good work," then he peered out against the wind and sea. He could just make out a floating mass a little grayer than the water.

  "Let's take a look at that," he said to Randle.

  "Nothing but junk," Randle said. "This water around Cuba is always full of it."

  "Might be somebody around it," Pete said.

  The exec laughed. "In this weather. Captain? A mermaid couldn't live out there."

  Pete glanced at his executive officer, then went across the bridge to the helmsman. "Work her up to windward of that stuff floating to port," he ordered. Then he called the engine room. "Stand by for quick changes in speed, please."

  Randle came across the bridge and stood beside him as the PC wallowed down the back of a wave. "Looks like one of those Cuban fishing sloops," Randle said. "They're always going adrift in bad weather. Nice way to stave in your bow."

  Pete said nothing as he studied the gray mass. 11

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  He could now make out the almost keelless hull of a deep-bellied boat and soon he could see the gray sail wallowing in the water.

  "Don't see anything," Randle said. "Shall I put her back on course, Captain?"

  "Circle it, please," Pete said.

  The exec glared but Pete ignored him as the PC, rolling wildly in the cross sea, circled the capsized sailboat.

  A body, half submerged, was lashed in the lee of the counter. The dark skin was wet and shiny, gray hair was plastered on the head. Near it was another body also lashed to the hulk.

  "Both dead," Randle said.

  "Get the starboard boat over, please," Pete said, trying not to let any of his irritation get into his voice. Then he asked the engine room to pump a little oil for a slick when he gave the word.

  The men in the careening boat had a very hard time getting the two bodies aboard, but at last they did and worked their way back to the ship.

  Pete turned the bridge over to the executive officer and went below to the tiny, hard-white sick bay. On one bunk there was the dead body of a Cuban of about twenty-five. His skull had been broken. On the other bunk a man, much older, lay with his arms across his chest. He was unconscious but alive.

  Pete stooped and looked at the old man's face

  HEAVY WEATHER

  and then held his wrist, feeling the faint pulsing of his blood.

  The pharmacist's mate said, "I can't find anything wrong with him, Captain. Just shock from exposure and exhaustion. He's pretty old."

  "Do what you can for him," Pete said. Then he noticed that around the man's waist was a light chain and to this was attached a flat, rectangular box which was completely covered with what looked like hardened tar.

  "Must be his money," the pharmacist's mate said.

  "Probably," Pete said. "I'll take it up to the safe." He unbuckled the chain from around the man's waist and went out carrying the box.

  On the way back to the bridge Pete put the box and chain in his cabin. On the bridge he told the exec to return to Key West and then took up his station against the gun shield.

  It was much easier going home before the wind. The movements of the ship were more violent, but she was not being beaten by the waves.

  Pete sent a messenger to Communications with a message for an ambulance to meet them at the dock and another message telling Naval Intelligence that he was bringing an injured alien into the United States.

  The messenger came back with word from sick bay that the old man was raving about his box. Pete chmbed down the ladder and went below.

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  At the door to sick bay the pharmacist's mate said, ''Captain, the old fellow*thinks we stole his box."

  "All right," Pete said. "It's up in my cabin. Get it and bring it down here, will you?"

  The old man was trying to sit up and when he saw Pete he began croaking in Spanish. Pete, who had learned Spanish when he worked a summer on a Cuban sugar plantation, explained that the box was safe and the old man subsided. When the pharmacist's mate came in, the old man grabbed the box and hugged it with both arms.

  Then he began to cry as he sat hugging the box and looking at the sheet which covered the dead man in the other bunk.

  "That is my son. My last son," he said in Spanish. "Now I am all that remains."

  "He's in pretty bad shape. Captain," the pharmacist's mate said. "He ought to lie down and take it easy."

  Pete told the old man to lie down and the pharmacist's mate gave him a sedative. Pete put the chain back around him and left him with his box.

  On his way topside Pete met Williams in the wardroom.

  "Can't take it, eh?" Wild Bill said. "Running for shelter like a fair-weather sailor."

  Pete shook his head. "Picked up two Cubans. 14

  HEAVY WEATHER

  One dead, and an old one who doesn't look too healthy."

  "Oh. So that was the reason for all the maneuvering around."

  "Yeah. The old man was about to go wild when I took away a box he had. Thing all covered with tar to keep out the water, I suppose. And not very heavy. Must be his life's savings."

  "Probably," Bill said. "Well, I'll confess. I'm about ready to go home. Half the watch below is seasick; we busted an oil line and messed the joint up for fair, and you deck hands hit every wave in the ocean."

  "Warm and dry, you said," Pete reminded him.

  "You ought to come down there in heavy weather, Pete. Man, it's worse than the crazy house at Coney Island. I hope on my next ship they put me on deck."

  "Probably will. High time you found out who really works aboard a ship."

  "Yes, sir, Captain. Aye, aye, sir. Captain. Will there be anything else, sir, Captain?"

&nbs
p; Pete laughed and went on up to the bridge.

  Beware The Tall One

  xVt 0230 in the morning the pharmacist's mate woke Pete up. "Captain, the old man isn't doing very well," he said.

  "FU be right down."

  Pete noticed on his way below that the weather had eased. The ship was riding with less violence and the wind was a low, deep moan in her rigging. Pete hated the night on ships at war because the blackout made the air inside them incredibly hot and foul.

  BEWARE THE TALL ONE

  In the little sick bay the air felt as though you could slice it and stack it up in slabs.

  The old man was lying on his bunk, the box still hugged to his chest. When Pete leaned over him, he opened his eyes slowly and whispered, ^^Capitdn. Capitdn/'

  "Sefior," Pete said.

  "My life is going away,'' the old man said in Spanish. **He has, at last, killed us all. My wife, my beloved sons—and now he has killed me also."

  "Delirious," Pete said to the pharmacist's mate. "Is there anything you can do for him?"

  "I've done everything the book says, Captain."

  The old man's voice had a tinge of anger in it. "Listen! Listen!" he ordered. "We were escaping from him, but the storm was too great for our little ship. Now everything is ended."

  The old man closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them and went on talking his voice was so low Pete could hardly hear the soft Spanish words.

  "He has won. He has killed us all. But he still has not taken from us the book. ... It is here." The old man's fingers tightened on the tar-covered box.

  "Who?" Pete asked.

  The old man did not seem to hear him. "Listen," he said. "It lies in the ocean. Near the two islands. He doesn't know where it is. No

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  one knows except the book." Suddenly the old man raised his hand and clutched Pete's arm. "He must not get it! You must keep it away from him."

  **I don't understand," Pete said. "Take your time, sleep. You can tell me in the morning."