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  Titles in the First to Fight Series

  FIRST TO FIGHT

  FIRST TO FIGHT II

  CRASH DIVE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used

  fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CRASH DIVE

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with Martin H. Greenberg

  c/o Tekno Books

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / July 2003

  Collection copyright © 2003 by Martin H. Greenberg and Tekno Books

  “Cat Bag Bay” copyright © 2003 by James H. Cobb

  “The Ambiguity of the Wine-Dark Sea” copyright

  © 2003 by Jim DeFelice

  “Valley of Death” copyright © 2003 by Rogelio J. Pineiro

  “Silent Company” copyright © 2003 by William H. Keith, Jr.

  “Single Combat” copyright © 2003 by John Heifers

  “Passage to Paradise: The Voyage of U-181” copyright

  © 2003 by Tony Geraghty

  “Hat for a Sail” copyright © 2003 by Jean Rabe

  “The Prize Crew” copyright © 2003 by Doug Allyn

  “Mission Failure” copyright © 2003 by Brendan DuBois

  All rights reserved.

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  address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

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  ISBN: 0-515-13575-5

  A JOVE BOOK®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE and the “J” design

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  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Cat Bag Bay

  James H. Cobb

  The Ambiguity of the Wine-Dark Sea

  Jim DeFelice

  Valley of Death

  R.J. Pineiro

  Silent Company

  William H. Keith, Jr.

  Single Combat

  John Helfers

  Passage to Paradise: The Voyage of U-1181

  Tom Geraghty

  Hat for a Sail

  Jean Rabe

  The Prize Crew

  Doug Allyn

  Mission Failure

  Brendan DuBois

  CRASH DIVE

  Cat Bag Bay

  JAMES H. COBB

  James Cobb lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he writes both the Amanda Garrett techno-thriller series and the Kevin Pulaski fifties suspense mysteries, not to mention the occasional odd bit of historical and science fiction. When not so involved, he enjoys long road trips, collecting classic military firearms, and learning the legends and lore of the great American hot rod. He may also be found frequently and shamelessly pandering to the whims of “Lisette,” his classic 1960 Ford Thunderbird.

  April 1943

  The Philippine Sea, Somewhere South

  of Parece Vela

  TO AN OBSERVER somehow transported to the wastes of the Central Pacific she would have been a sliver of moon shadow flowing effortlessly across the starlit waters.

  A bull-nosed bow, low riding and sharply raked, scissored with deliberation through the hunchbacked ocean swells, spray arcing from the cutwater. A long stretch of sea-washed hull followed, foam sifting through the latticed teak of the decking. Then came the first massive six-inch mount on its low gun platform and the great looming ax blade of a conning tower with man shapes silhouetted along its upper rim. A second six-incher aft and another trailing expanse of deck haunted by the writhing silver plumes of diesel exhaust.

  Sweeping past, the sea roiled with the beat of her propellers. Then she merged once more with the night, her wake healing itself with a fading hiss.

  At 371 feet in length and with a submerged displacement of nearly 4,000 tons, the USS Niobe was a giant of her breed, the last and best of the experimental V-class “sub cruisers” built by the United States between the two world wars.

  When her keel had been laid in the late 1920’s, she and her sisters, the Nautilus and the Narwhale, had been the largest and most powerful units of the navy’s undersea fleet. They were the largest still, but now they were worn and sea-weary mammoths. Built to match the parameters of an obsolete battle doctrine, they had been superceded on the patrol line by the stream of new and deadly Gato- and Balao-class fleet boats pouring off the wartime slipways.

  Still, America stood at arms and there was use for every seaworthy hull. Niobe and her kin had been gathered into the exotic fold of SPYRON, the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force’s Special Operations Squadron. There, tasks were found uniquely suited to the great size and range of the sub cruisers: a marine raider force to be carried deep into enemy territory, an arms shipment to be delivered to a resistance movement, an allied agent to be spirited off a hostile beach.

  Or, as on this night, a payload of aviation gasoline to be delivered to an isolated atoll.

  As continued

  Your current “patrol” fruitcake is still lasting, Amy. I’m having my one slice a day with my breakfast coffee. As usual, a lot of good thoughts of you and home come with it.

  We’ll be arriving shortly at our objective. Naturally enough I can’t put in writing where it is or what we intend to do once we get there. That’ll have to wait for when this war isn’t important anymore. I can say that things are coming along about as well as can be expected. Good Lord willing, this shouldn’t be a shooting job. Or at least that’s how it looks for now . . .

  A submarine relies heavily on the water flow over its bow and stem diving planes for depth and angle control. Submerging vertically in place like a descending elevator is not a task routinely or casually undertaken. It demands both a finicky management of the trim tanks plus a diving officer with a near supernatural ability to project what his boat was going to do even before she began to do it. Niobe’s Lieutenant Clancy was indeed that good, but the sub cruiser’s bulk mandated an even more radical methodology.

  “Crew’s Quarter’s,” Clancy’s voice roared over the 1-MC circuit. “I want six men into the forward torpedo room! On the double!”

  Through the open ’tween decks hatch those in the conning tower could hear the living ballast racing from the crews quarters amidships, through the control room below, and on toward the bow, knob-toed safety shoes clattering on the linoleum decking.

  Leaning forward, Commander Cullen Perry studied the curving glass tubes of the inclinometers, nodding with approval as the bubbles recentered, erasing the first trace of an up angle. Stocky, solid, and balding with a face sea-weathered beyond his thirty-seven years, Perry held the intercom mike cradled ready in his palm.


  “Forward torpedo room, this is the captain.”

  “Forward torpedo, aye.”

  “Verify that the sound heads are rigged in.”

  “Sound heads are inboard and secure, sir.”

  “Very good.” There was a friendly bear mildness to Perry’s baritone growl, enhanced by a South-coast Texas drawl. “Diving officer, verify all Kelson valves are closed and secured for bottoming.”

  “All ballast tank and hull valves are closed and secure, sir.” Clancy yelled his reply up through the control room hatch.

  Across the polished brass and white-painted steel confines of the conn, Lieutenant Daniel Mercurio, Niobe’s dark and youthful exec, looked up from the master depth gauge. “Dropping through seventy feet, sir,” he announced.

  “Good enough, Danny.” Perry switched the intercom to the all ship’s squawk box. “All hands, stand by to bottom the boat.”

  There was a protracted moment of silence, then coral rasped against steel. The keel thudded down and Niobe’s frames creaked softly as the big sub settled into her bed on the lagoon floor. Her decks tilted slightly and her crew noted infinitesimal change from motion to nonmotion. They had arrived at the “objective.”

  Perry turned to the forwardmost of the two silver shafts that pierced the center of the conning tower from the deck to the overhead. “Up scope,” he commanded, sinking down to his knees beside the periscope well.

  The electric hoist motor hummed and the periscope shaft shimmered as it slithered upward. Catching and snapping open the handgrips with practiced ease, Perry nestled his face into the worn rubber eyepiece as it emerged, allowing the periscope to lift him to a standing posture.

  Given the depth of the lagoon floor, the slim lens head of the attack scope just barely pierced the surface. Wavelets broke across the glass, intermittently blurring Perry’s view as he made the first instinctive fast sweep around the horizon. With no immediate threats visible, his second rotation was more deliberate, a point-by-point study of the local environment.

  Little had changed topside since they had crept through the narrow entry channel at first light. There was little to change.

  The searing sun had crawled higher in a tropic azure sky and the marching mid-Pacific rollers continued their stubborn beat against the low wind- and sea-scoured islets that made up the lagoon’s perimeter, their spray flashing white against the old bone color of the dead surface coral.

  A passing windjammer captain in the eighteenth century had discovered the atoll, naming it “January,” after the month of its sighting, and listing it on his charts only as a potential hazard to navigation.

  January was a flyspeck on the ocean, a remnant of a prehistoric undersea volcano that had pushed through to the surface at the western edge of the Great West Mariana submarine basin. Scrubbed bare by numberless typhoons, its reefs lifted only a few meager inches above the sea. It supported no human habitation, nor had it ever. There was no water uncontaminated by salt. No plant life. No animal population save for the occasional resting seabird.

  There was nothing of value on January for any passing mariner . . . save possibly for the four or five square miles of sheltered anchorage within its curving barrier reef, and that was valid only in a moderate sea.

  And yet the dictates of war had suddenly made this little patch of still water a treasure briefly beyond price.

  That was why Cullen Perry had nursed his command through the bristling Japanese defense line of the Marianas barrier and why he had brought Niobe to this dubious haven on the lagoon floor.

  Perry hesitated in his march around the horizon, catching a glint in the sky far to the north. Possibly it was only a wheeling gull or, just as possibly, it was a reflection off of a patrol plane canopy. Located between the Imperial Japanese basing complexes in the Mariana and Philippine island chains, the Philippine Sea was a risky place to loiter in the spring of 1943, at least if one were a United States Navy submarine.

  As it was, if some sharp-eyed Nip aviator picked out the symmetrical outline of Niobe’s hull as she lay in the shallows of the lagoon’s eye . . .

  He snapped the scope handles upright. There was no sense worrying about it now.

  “Down scope.”

  Perry felt every eye in the control room flicking in his direction. Elsewhere throughout the boat the rest of his crew would be staring up at the intercom loudspeakers expectantly.

  The captain under God, Perry thought wryly, or at least his spokesman. He martialed his thoughts for a moment, then caught up the conn microphone once more.

  “All hands. This is the captain again. I guess it’s time I let you in on our situation. I know you’re aware of the special training we conducted with fleet patrol aviation before our departure from Pearl. Well, here’s what it was about.

  “Tonight, shortly after moonrise, a navy PBY flying boat en route to an undisclosed location will be landing in the lagoon topside. We’ll be there waiting to refuel him. Tomorrow, on his return flight, we’ll be doing the same. In between times we’ll just be laying doggo on the bottom, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.

  “None of us need to know where this plane is coming from or where it’s is going to or why. We just have to see to it he makes it there and gets back again. Once that’s accomplished we’ll be out of here and on our way home. That is all.”

  As continued

  In the last section I mailed before we sortied, I think I told you about Chief Torpedoman Honeycutt and his wife expecting their second? Well, the boy hasn’t mentioned any problems, but he’s been talking about his wife and the new baby a lot and I’m getting the feeling that something isn’t sitting right with him.

  When she gets the chance, could the captain’s lady look into it and maybe pay a call or two on Honeycutt’s wife? ’Predate you.

  We are at “objective” and are busy playing the usual hurry up and wait game. All continues routine.

  I just took a second look at that last sentence, Amy girl, and I find myself marveling at it a little. What could conceivably be “normal” about a community of men living on the bottom of the sea?

  Yet for us, it is.

  In the control room my watch standers are sitting on the deck at their stations, shooting the bull and swapping dirty jokes. In the engine and torpedo spaces tools clink softly as the motor macs and torpedomen catch up on their maintenance. Acey-deucey dice rattle in the crew’s quarters and those hands taking their turn in the hot bunks snore softly, immune to the activity around them. The new records we picked up at Pearl are growing old on the ship’s turntable and the ventilator fans are passing the word that we’re having roast chicken for lunch.

  So bizarrely normal.

  To continue.

  One of the advantages of the big V-boats was a modicum of additional inboard space, enough so that the wardroom mess table could actually have chairs instead of benches.

  Lieutenant Danny Mercurio shoved his chair back in disgust, flipping his king on its side. “I don’t know why I even try.”

  Perry chuckled deep in his chest. “You’re getting there, Danny. You aren’t good enough yet, but you’re getting there.”

  At the far end of the wardroom table Lieutenant Sven Jorgenson, Niobe’s torpedo officer, looked up from his Zane Grey. “Don’t let the old man fool you, Danny. He says the same thing to all of the damn fools he suckers into a game.”

  Jorgenson’s use of the term “old man” was in relation purely to rank and position. “Swede” Jorgenson had spent more years in the boats than anyone else aboard Niobe, including her skipper. Lean, grizzled, and bony, Jorgenson had done five tours as an enlisted man and CPO before receiving a wartime “good of the service.”

  commission shortly after Pearl Harbor. Grumbling, he had accepted his advancement to the wardroom.

  There was literally nothing Jorgenson did not know about a V-series submarine, and once, when he had been Niobe’s Chief of the Boat, he’d had all of the skin peeled from his arms saving her from an u
gly battery fire. On all counts, he was classed as a rather privileged individual.

  Perry grinned and started to reset the chess pieces in their places. “There is a difference, Swede. Danny here at least has a chance to learn something. After I whipped you that first half dozen times back aboard the old Barracuda I knew you were a lost cause.”

  Muttering under his breath, the ex-chief returned to the Purple Sage.

  Up in the forward torpedo room “American Patrol” ran its course on the record player and faded into silence.

  And in that moment of quiet, Cullen Perry stiffened and sat erect. Sliding his chair back, he reached up and hit the switch on the wardroom fan, shutting it off. He listened intently and the two officers sharing the space with him followed suit.

  Benny Goodman began to crank up on the turntable and Jorgenson twisted and leaned into the officer’s country passageway, brushing aside the doorway curtain. “In the torpedo room! Belay that racket!”

  Goodman’s clarinet squawked and cut off.

  Gradually he and Mercurio became aware of what had keyed their captain’s attention. A sound filtering in from somewhere beyond the hull. A rhythmic shush . . . shush . . . shush, faint yet growing. The mechanical beat of a slowly turning propeller.

  “Shit,” Mercurio murmured lowly. “That sounds like he’s right here in the lagoon.”

  Perry lifted an eyebrow. “I suspect that’s because he is, Danny. With our sound heads rigged in, we never heard him coming.”

  No one questioned the identity of the intruder. There was no conceivable way it could be an Allied or neutral vessel.

  Perry reached back over his shoulder again, hitting the press to talk button for the 1-MC. “All hands,” he said quietly. “This is the captain. Close to General Quarters. Rig for silent running. No alarms.”

  Throughout the boat voices sank to whispers and light footfalls hastened down the passageways. Watertight doors were eased shut against their rubber gaskets and dogging levers squeaked. The purr of the ventilation system faded as the ducts were cranked closed.