Crash Dive: a novel of the Pacific War Read online

  CRASH DIVE

  A novel of the Pacific War

  By Craig DiLouie

  CRASH DIVE

  A novel of the Pacific War

  ©2015 Craig DiLouie. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel

  are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Cover art by Eloise Knapp Design.

  Published by ZING Communications, Inc.

  www.CraigDiLouie.com

  Click here to sign up for Craig’s mailing list and be the first to find out about new episodes of the Crash Dive series!

  FOREWORD

  By John Dixon

  I’m a Craig DiLouie fan. Like so many others, I came for the zombies and stayed for the characters, tension, and high-quality writing. Then, in 2015, his Bram Stoker Award-nominated Suffer the Children chiseled the name Craig DiLouie onto a short list of my favorite writers.

  All this being said, I approached his WWII submarine adventures with a degree of uncertainty. As a long-time fan of both the Horatio Hornblower series and the Aubrey / Maturin books, I was dubious.

  How wrong I was to worry.

  Fans of DiLouie’s horror novels will in the Crash Dive series quickly recognize the dynamic characters, volatile relationships, and ever-burgeoning tension that made them fall in love with his horror novels. If you’ve enjoyed Craig DiLouie in the past, you are going to love these books.

  If you’re new to Craig DiLouie, I envy you. I really do. You’re in for one hell of a ride.

  DiLouie isn’t a Michener or a Clancy. Unlike these authors’ fat thrillers—which always strike me as novels trick-or-treating as creative nonfiction—DiLouie’s adventure stories are as fast and sleek and explosive as torpedoes.

  DiLouie has clearly done his research but has internalized that knowledge, bringing it forth compactly, providing verisimilitude through a strong sense of place and procedure without slowing the story… ever. The writing is as masculine and stripped down as the subs themselves. The result is a first-rate adventure as relentlessly character- and story-driven as the pulps of the early twentieth century but without their unrealistic protagonists and sometimes purple prose.

  Charlie Harrison is a great character, one part chess player, one part street fighter, a man whose greatest asset and liability are one in the same: his irrepressibly aggressive nature. He’s very human: tough and likeable and self-sacrificing, a man who makes mistakes but never freezes during a crisis, even when it means putting his own life—and the lives of those who serve alongside him—on the line.

  When we first meet Charlie, he’s a junior officer just beginning his virgin posting on a combat submarine, much like Horatio Hornblower in Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Charlie faces a daunting task to say the least: cooperate with an often antagonistic crew—banging heads with both the enlisted men and his fellow officers—to wage war against the Imperial Japanese Navy… all while trapped in a cramped and leaking submarine that sometimes feels less like a ship of a line and more like an armed coffin.

  For readers, these primitive submarines and their limitations provide part of the fun and a good portion of the terror. The submarines we see in the Crash Dive series have more in common with World War I biplanes than with the hyper-modern nuclear subs of today’s navy. The subs are ancient, battered, and fraught with potentially fatal problems.

  There are so many ways to die. Depth charges, machine guns, bombs dropped from planes; they can be boarded by the Japanese … on the surface; fires, poison gasses, disease; drown… always the threat of the malfunctioning submarine sinking to the bottom and taking them with it.

  To survive, Charlie and his crewmates must be smart and sly, resourceful and vigilant, tough and tireless, much like the men and women of the Greatest Generation upon whom they are based. Crammed together, inflamed by disagreements, they must nonetheless work together to defeat the enemy and stay alive… two goals sometimes very much at odds. Simply to attack, they must expose themselves to discovery and all that follows: deck guns, airplanes, and the dreaded depth charges. But the men forge ahead, working in close quarters under extreme pressure, with death never farther away than the thickness of the hull. The stench of their unwashed bodies blends with the smells of the ship, creating an olfactory swamp of sweat and blood and diesel, as the submariners meld with the ship itself, flesh-and-blood cogs in a terrible war machine. Uniform codes wick away, and beards spring forth as the men sweat and stink and swear… until, at last, the submarine more closely resembles a raiding pirate ship than something we might expect to find in any modern navy.

  This is adventure in the grand tradition: high stakes on the high seas, gripping stories that move at frenetic pace without sacrificing character or detail. I read both in two sittings, literally on the edge of my seat. They are short not because they’ve left something out but because they’ve included nothing extra. As a result, Crash Dive pounds relentlessly forward, locked unwaveringly on their target: excellent storytelling.

  Batten down the hatches, damn the torpedoes, and dive, dive, dive!

  —John Dixon

  Author of Phoenix Island

  CRASH DIVE

  Theater of operations. The Guadalcanal Campaign.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TO WAR

  Brisbane, Australia.

  October, 1942.

  Charlie Harrison was going to war.

  He walked onto the busy New Farm Wharf, sea bag over his shoulder and a spring in his step. He fidgeted, six feet of coiled energy. Then he shook it off, determined to appear cool in case anybody was watching.

  He’d worked hard to get here. Naval Academy, class of ’40. He’d served as a lieutenant, junior-grade on a destroyer, steaming up and down the Atlantic for two years. After the Japanese surprise attack against Pearl electrified America, he’d put in for a transfer.

  He didn’t want to spend the war playing cat and mouse with German U-boats. He didn’t want to play defense; he wanted to take the fight to the enemy.

  The Navy approved his transfer, and he attended the Submarine School at New London in Connecticut.

  Now he stood on the eastern coast of Australia, ready to report to his new command.

  He found the S-55 tied to a tender, a big repair and support ship. Men labored among an assortment of hoses, welding lines, and other gear. Welding sprayed showers of sparks into the air. They readied the submarine for sea.

  God, but she was ugly. Nothing like the USS Kennedy, his old destroyer with her clean lines, smokestacks, and guns. The S-55 was just a long black cylinder with a short metal sail jutting over her. Built by the Electric Boat Company in 1922, she was one of the last boats of the Great War era.

  He’d hoped for love at first sight, but she inspired neither affection nor admiration.

  Two hundred twenty feet long and twenty feet wide at the beam. A complement of a dozen torpedoes, which she launched from four tubes in the bow. Forty officers and crew.

  She’d seen some heavy fighting. The conning tower wore a patchwork of welded gray plates, scars of some past action.

  In that submarine, he’d live ass to elbow in a cramped, dingy, smelly machine for weeks at a time. Not surprisingly, the sailors called them “pigboats.” Charlie had trained on an even older R-class submarine at New London and had gotten a taste of it.

  He’d heard a depth charge attack felt like being in an earthquake—a quake that could break the hull and send the boat straight to the bottom.

  It was a hell of a way to fight a war.

  The S-55, his new home, could end up being his coffin. Living in a submarine demanded certain skills and temperament
. Those who didn’t cut it were put ashore and left there. He wondered if he was as able as he was willing. If he had the right stuff.

  Looking at his new home, his romantic ideas about taking the fight to the enemy became real. For the first time, he wondered if he’d made a mistake.

  Too late to back out now.

  Charlie steeled himself to report to the deck watch, who stood on the gangway with a .45 on his hip. He halted as an apparition in oilskins, gas mask, and thick rubber gloves emerged from the conning tower and descended to the deck. Carrying a metal tank and coiled Flit gun, he stomped down the gangway onto the pier.

  He spotted Charlie and lowered his gas mask, revealing the grinning face of a man about the same age. He said, “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?”

  “How many cockroaches I just put out of my misery. We’re talking millions.”

  “Did you get Hitler?”

  The sailor laughed. “No such luck, brother. You our new junior officer?”

  “That’s right.” Charlie looked up at the scarred metal sail. “When’s she going back out on patrol?”

  “Last Tuesday. We keep getting delayed with new repairs. This geriatric tub needs a lot of love.”

  “I’d like you to take me to see the captain then, if you’re able.”

  The man grinned again. “I’ll be happy to do that. You got a name, sailor?”

  “Lieutenant, j-g Charles Harrison.”

  “Welcome to the 55, Charlie. I’m Lieutenant Russell Grady, but you can call me Rusty.”

  Rusty was his senior. Charlie should have saluted. Instead, he’d ordered the man to take him to the captain. He froze, mortified.

  Rusty held out his hand. Charlie shook it, grateful for the warm welcome.

  He hadn’t expected to see an officer doing an enlisted man’s duties. His first lesson in submarines. Everybody, officers and crew alike, did their share of the dirty work. On the S-55, as the saying went, they were all in the same boat.

  Charlie realized that, despite his schooling, he still had plenty to learn. He also thought, if even half of the crew was like Rusty, he’d feel right at home on the old S-55.

  CHAPTER TWO

  GOD IS ON OUR SIDE

  Rusty whistled up a recreation car. The driver was a matronly Australian woman in a khaki dress uniform who told them her name was Kate Moore. She said her husband was fighting in North Africa, one of the Desert Rats.

  She drove them to a rest home that Lieutenant-Commander J.R. Kane, captain of the S-55, had been assigned as his quarters. Rusty explained the captain was hosting a small party.

  “What’s he like?” Charlie asked.

  Rusty stared out the window as Brisbane flashed by. “A cool customer.”

  “Standoffish, huh?” He’d expected that.

  “I mean he’s seen a lot of combat, and his hands don’t shake.”

  “The boat looks like it’s seen some action.”

  “That was at Cavite Navy Yard, in the Philippines, when the Japs bombed the Asiatic Fleet.”

  About ten months ago, the Imperial Japanese Navy staged a stunning surprise attack against the Pacific Fleet at Pearl. Launched from aircraft carriers, hundreds of planes pounded the naval base and left it a fiery ruin. They damaged or sunk sixteen ships, including all eight battleships. They bombed some 200 planes on the runway at nearby airfields. More than 2,000 died.

  The President called it a “date that will live in infamy.”

  Being on the Kennedy at the time, Charlie had missed it.

  Three days after the attack on Pearl, the Japanese bombed the naval base at Cavite, where the Asiatic Fleet was stationed, and flattened it.

  Cavite’s destruction must have been a real horror, but Charlie envied Rusty for having lived through it. He’d missed that too. He’d missed the Battle of the Coral Sea and the victory in June at Midway, where the Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser. He’d missed the invasion of Guadalcanal in August and the devastating response.

  Now he was finally getting into the war, just in time for the big win.

  “We’re on offense now,” he said, sounding tough. “We’ll have them beat in no time.”

  Rusty shook his head. “Don’t talk like that in front of the guys.”

  “Huh?” Had he said something wrong? “Why not?”

  “I got news for you, Charlie. We’re in for a long war.” When Charlie huffed at that, he explained, “Everybody back home looks at the Japs as a nation of slant-eyed heathens with buckteeth and bad eyesight, but they’re damned good at war.”

  “You don’t hate them?”

  Rusty glared. “They killed friends of mine, Charlie. Of course, I hate them. I hate their rotten guts. The point is they’ve got good skippers, and they’re tough as nails. They’ll do anything for their emperor. A good thing to know if you’re going to fight them.”

  “Roger that,” Charlie muttered.

  “Their equipment’s also better than ours. We’re playing catch up. In the meantime, we’re fighting in a leaky sewer pipe with faulty torpedoes. We fight to keep the boat going more than we fight the Japs. She’s older than most of her crew.”

  He sagged in his seat, a tired old man in his early twenties, and again Charlie envied his experience and even his weariness. What had he seen? So much had happened. He was there.

  “I hear you,” Charlie told him. “But you make it sound like we’re going to lose.”

  “We’ve got good men. As good as theirs, if not better. We’ve got that going for us.”

  “God bless you men,” Kate said from the driver’s seat. “We’re grateful you’re here.”

  After Pearl, the Japanese Empire had captured the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, French Indochina, Burma, and most of the Dutch East Indies. They began building up for an invasion of Australia. They were slowly isolating Australia and threatening the supply lanes from America. They’d already bombed Darwin and shelled Sydney.

  The Australians were terrified.

  “Amen, Mrs. Moore,” Rusty perked up, his ill humor gone. “At least we have God on our side, though he works in mysterious ways.” Then he turned to Charlie and said, “Do yourself a favor and don’t do that gung-ho thing in front of the captain.”

  “Wilco.” Charlie decided to take his advice. He wouldn’t give up his enthusiasm, but he’d keep it to himself. If the captain could be a cool customer, so could he.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CAPTAIN

  The party was in full swing. Red-faced officers and pretty Aussie girls laughed while a record played a hopping tune that Charlie recognized as “Dupree Shake Dance” by Champion Jack Dupree. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. The scene struck him as a bit unreal. On his long journey across the Pacific, he’d prepared to be thrown headfirst into hardship and combat, not drinking and flirting with leggy blondes.

  It reminded him the war was a big place with plenty of downtime and even some good times. He stowed his service cap and bag in a coat closet, ready to do as the Romans.

  Rusty introduced him to the boat’s new executive officer, a tall and brooding man named Reynolds, and the officers of the S-37, another submarine receiving repairs.

  Charlie barely registered their faces, his eyes on the captain.

  Lieutenant-Commander J.R. Kane stood by the window in service khakis, drink in his hand, cornered by three Aussie girls wearing colorful sleeveless dresses and holding tall glasses of amber-colored beer. He smiled as he told some story. They looked at him in awe.

  Rusty nudged Charlie with a smile and said, “Come on. I’ll introduce you to the Old Man.”

  “Old Man” was a nickname for ship captains. The truth was Kane was only a few years older than Charlie. Not even thirty, and he already had his own command. If for nothing else, Charlie respected him for that.

  War was hell, but it was a time of opportunity for naval officers, especially the Pacific War, which so far had mainly been a na
val conflict. New ships required crews staffed by officers adaptable to new technology and warfare doctrines.

  Kane was clean shaven and good looking in a rugged way—John Wayne playing a submarine skipper. He wore dolphins on his clean starched shirt, signifying he was qualified in submarine warfare. His hands didn’t shake, but every so often his eyes clenched in a pronounced blink. A nervous tic?

  “Pardon the interruption, ladies,” Rusty cut in. “Captain, I’d like you to meet Charles Harrison, a young man destined for great things. I ran into him at the boat and recruited him on the spot with vague promises of glory.”

  “Glad to have you aboard, Harrison,” the captain said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Charlie said.

  As they were indoors and he didn’t have his peaked cap on, Charlie didn’t offer a salute. They shook hands while the women appraised him and giggled.

  “I trust you’re rested and ready for duty,” Kane said.

  “Very much so, sir.”

  “We lost two of our officers. Drafted to new construction.”

  The pigboats were being retired. They were built in an era when submarines were thought of as coastal defense vessels. Doctrine had changed with new technology. The new fleet boats functioned as their name implied—to operate as part of a fleet. They were bigger, had a longer range at sea, and fired newer torpedoes. They also had brand new machinery, the latest instrumentation and, last but not least, air conditioning.

  The captain added, “I hope you know what you’re in for, signing up with a pigboat.”

  “I went where I was needed, sir. I wanted to get in the fight as soon as possible.”

  “You’ll change your mind after a few weeks of heat and stink and no air conditioning.”

  “If she fires torpedoes, I’ll be happy to be aboard.”