Operation Blind Spot (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 4) Read online

  “Right, Sergeant Major.”

  Patchett leaned in close and whispered so none of the others could hear. “Look, Bogater, I seen this a whole lotta times before. You was real hot shit when you was just a regular little dogface, not responsible for nothing but your own ass. But now you’ve got that third stripe on your sleeve and it’s got your head all turned around. All of a sudden, you’re in charge of a bunch of people and every swinging dick above and below you got some opinion or another about how you’re running your little show…and it’s making you fuck up. The Bogater I used to know would’ve never made a navigation error like you just did…I don’t care how damn dark it was.”

  Melvin Patchett waited in silence for Bogater’s response, knowing it would go one of two ways. He might be belligerent, denying with all the misguided certainty in the world the error was his fault. Patchett hoped this wouldn’t be the case, because it would mean Boudreau still had a long way to go to becoming an effective combat NCO.

  Or he could just accept his mistake, learn from it, and move on.

  Patchett waited a little longer, until Bogater finally said, “Yeah…my head’s so far up my ass I can’t see shit. Thanks, Sergeant Major…merci.”

  “De rien,” Patchett replied, the French drawled but unmistakable.

  Boudreau’s jaw dropped. “Vous parlez francaise, Sergeant Major?”

  “I was in France in ’18, remember? The hookers can’t take advantage of you so easy if you know a little French. But no matter now…get these men of yours moving on the double, Sergeant, before McMillen and his boys pull off this attack without y’all.”

  As Boudreau quickly reorganized his team, Melvin Patchett breathed a sigh of relief and told himself, That young man just might make it as an NCO after all.

  The radio traffic on Jock’s walkie-talkie made it clear: his two teams were nearing the peak of Hill 123. In his sand-bagged OP on the hilltop, he threw back the safety guard on the detonator box, exposing several rows of switches. It was time to give this exercise a dose of realism.

  He toggled an entire row of switches with one bump of his forearm. Before he could count to one, a ring of artillery simulators circling the peak—huge firecrackers, really—began to bang, shattering the silence of the night. Both teams came to an abrupt stop.

  Like the blink of a photographer’s flash, the momentary light from the explosions allowed Melvin Patchett to catch the three experienced infantrymen in Bogater Boudreau’s team fling themselves to the ground and then crawl on their bellies to cover behind the nearest tree. One man still stood in place, though: Corporal Hashimoto—Deuce. His head and shoulders seemed to lurch in one direction and then the other but his feet remained planted.

  That boy’s got no earthly idea what he’s supposed to do, Patchett told himself. Probably shitting his pants, too.

  Deuce nearly leaped out of his skin when Patchett snuck up behind him and said, “You better make up your mind which way you’re going, son. Darkness don’t stop no bullets.” A new round of explosions—strings of firecrackers simulating automatic weapons fire—punctuated the end of his sentence perfectly.

  His voice quivering, the Nisei corporal said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Well, for openers, try going down.”

  Before Deuce could process that guidance, a quartet of flares popped over the peak, each bathing a quadrant of the hillside with shimmering light and flickering shadows. One of those flares seemed dedicated to spotlighting Deuce, who had just figured out what the sergeant major had been trying to tell him. Down he went.

  “No! Not Now! Too late,” Patchett said. “You don’t never ever move when you’re caught in a flare, son. The enemy probably can’t see your silhouette, but I guaran-damn-tee they can see your movement.”

  Deuce began to stand back up but Patchett pushed him back down.

  “NO, NUMBNUTS! I SAID DON’T YOU MOVE WHEN THERE’S A FLARE BURNING. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU, BOY?”

  “You’re confusing me, Sergeant Major,” Deuce said.

  “You can’t be confused no more, son, ’cause you’re dead a couple times over. And that’s a real shame, because we don’t need you dying on us just yet…” He finished the sentence in his head: At least not until you do what the major wants you to. After that, I don’t give a rat’s ass.

  “I’m calling this attack successful, Sergeant Major,” Jock said as they conferred on the peak of Hill 123. “But, obviously, we’ve still got a few problems.”

  “One I can think of right off, sir,” Patchett replied. “The one called Deuce ain’t no infantryman, that’s for damn sure.” He looked to Tom Hadley and asked, “How’d the other one do?”

  “Ace did okay,” Hadley replied, “but…”

  He paused, as if trying to hedge his next words or wishing he hadn’t said the last one.

  “But what, Tom?” Jock asked.

  “Nothing, sir. He did a good job. He’ll be all right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive, sir.”

  They could hear the mutter of a deuce-and-a-half’s engine on the trail near the hill’s base—their ride back to bivouac. Gathering his gear for the downhill trek, Patchett said, “Looks like it’s a good thing you got two of them Jap fellers, sir. We just might need that li’l ol’ cushion.”

  Sprawled on the bed of the deuce-and-a-half, the men of The Squad—all except Jock Miles and Melvin Patchett, who were in the cab with the driver—tried to relax as they bumped and lurched back to camp and their bed rolls.

  “Listen up, all of you,” Tom Hadley said. “Mess Section will have a midnight snack ready for us, but Major Miles has ordered there will be no coffee. He wants all of us to get a good night’s sleep. That means no card playing, either. Tomorrow’s going to be another busy day. Any questions?”

  One voice rose above the grumbles of men resigned to compliance. It was Roy Nishimoto—Ace—who said, “I have one, First Sergeant.”

  Hadley bristled. He hadn’t expected anyone would have the balls to actually ask a question. Especially not one of the new guys.

  “This better be good, Ace,” Hadley said. “Go ahead.”

  Every man sat up, shut up, and leaned in closer. They wanted to hear this impertinent rookie get taught a lesson at the hands of First Sergeant Hadley.

  “I’m puzzled by one thing in the chain of command here,” Ace said. “We’ve got two top sergeants—you and Patchett. You both wear six stripes with a diamond. Who outranks who?”

  Hadley growled his reply. “What the hell do you care, Corporal?”

  “Well, I just need to know if one of you gives me an order and then the other gives me a conflicting order, which one do I obey?”

  “Kinda big with the hypotheticals, ain’t you?” Hadley said. “What on earth makes you think that’s ever going to happen?”

  “It seems quite possible to me, First Sergeant. I saw how confused everything got on that mountain and—”

  “That wasn’t any mountain,” Hadley interrupted. “We’ve been up on mountains. That was just a tiny little hill.”

  Polite but insistent, Ace continued, “Regardless, First Sergeant, there were more than a few times one hand didn’t know what the other was doing.”

  That made Tom Hadley laugh. “Better get used to that. That’s what combat’s like.”

  But he could see the Nisei’s point. New to the unit, Ace had no appreciation of how the men of this battalion—some of them veterans of three campaigns—gelled as a unit. To him, rank was rank and this special unit—The Squad—had two senior NCOs with an equal number of stripes.

  Hadley decided a courteous explanation would do far more good than an ass-chewing. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “There’s only one top in The Squad, and that’s Sergeant Major Patchett. He and I might wear the same number of stripes, but he was soldiering, in combat, when I was still sucking my mama’s tit. So let me make this perfectly clear to you new guys—Sergeant Major Patchett i
s second in command to Major Miles. I come in third. Maybe someday the Army will get smart enough to make sergeant major more than just a title and kick in another stripe and more pay. But for now, that’s the way it is.” He paused before asking, “Are there any more damn questions?” Once again, he expected none—and this time, that’s just what he got.

  Chapter Ten

  “At least none of my men got seasick yet,” Patchett said as the submarine’s mess steward poured him another cup of coffee. “Y’all been treating us real fine. We appreciate it, son. We surely do.”

  “No problem, Sergeant,” the steward replied. “Captain’s orders—treat you like honored guests. Breakfast is at two bells.”

  “What do you reckon that is in Army time?”

  “That’s 0500, Sergeant. Two hours from now. Make sure your guys wake up on time because they get to go to the front of the chow line.”

  The steward started to make his way down the narrow passageway and then turned back to Patchett. “Can I ask you something, Sergeant?”

  “Sure can, son.”

  “The Nips you got with you…you guys don’t mind that? The crew’s pretty pissed off over them being onboard.”

  “Don’t much matter if we minded it or not. The major says we need them for this mission, so they’re here.”

  The steward looked confused. “It just…just don’t seem right,” he said.

  “Right for who, son?”

  “I don’t know…for everyone, I guess. For you guys, first off, having to trust them. And them, having to fight their own kind…”

  “They volunteered for this duty, son, just like you and me. Lord knows why, but they did. Nobody forced ’em.”

  Alone with his coffee, Melvin Patchett had little doubt why the Navy was being so courteous to the GIs: I heard some of them swabbies talking. They think we’re on some damn suicide mission. Stupid bastards…

  Like Patchett, Jock couldn’t sleep. Between the mission plans swirling in his head and the unfamiliar thrum of the submarine, he was condemned to be wide awake. He climbed topside, joining the sub’s captain on the conning tower’s bridge as the vessel plowed through the emptiness of the sea at night. The moon offered what little light it could as it floated in a black dome of twinkling stars.

  “We cleared the Vitiaz Strait about an hour ago, Jock,” the sub’s captain said. “That puts us in the Bismarck Sea now. We’re about halfway to Manus, right on schedule. How are your guys holding up?”

  “They’ll manage this little boat trip just fine, Hank.”

  “I’m guessing you and your guys have all seen a lot of action, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jock said. “All but the Nisei.”

  “You taken many casualties?”

  Jock gazed into the darkness as Jillian’s memory stabbed him in the gut for the hundredth time that day. The words of that final message kept haunting him:

  Missing…presumed drowned.

  The most haunting word of all—presumed. So tentative—so indefinite.

  But no matter how much you mince the words, Jock, she’s still gone.

  He needed this topic of conversation to end. Hoping a terse reply would do the trick, he said, “Yeah, Hank. We took a lot of casualties. A whole lot.”

  It worked. In the awkward silence that followed, Jock took in the panorama of the conning tower at work: the cramped, exposed platform where he stood with the boat’s captain—a lieutenant commander—and his assistant officer of the deck (AOOD)—a lieutenant. Three seamen acted as lookouts, two standing in narrow, waist-high cages on either side of the periscope masts, their feet at the level of Jock’s head as they scanned ahead and laterally, and the third on the cigarette deck at the rear of the bridge, scanning aft. He wondered if these Navy men could see something in the night he couldn’t.

  The AOOD clamped the headset against his ears and announced, “RADAR REPORTS CONTACT BEARING THREE-TWO-ZERO, FOUR MILES, MOVING LEFT TO RIGHT.”

  In a few moments, the port-side lookout reported, “CONFIRM—TWO DESTROYERS…”

  Jock’s eyes strained as they searched the black emptiness but saw nothing. He cursed himself for leaving his binoculars below with the rest of his gear. Maybe if I had those binos, he told himself, I might at least see their bow waves glowing.

  The AOOD was already calling the info to the man on the torpedo data computer when the captain stopped him. Sounding dejected, the captain said, “Forget it, Mister Shafter. Come left to two-eight-zero.”

  The lieutenant looked stricken. “But sir,” he said, “we’ve…we’ve got them dead to rights.”

  “Yeah, dammit, I know. I gave you a command, Mister Shafter. Execute it.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  As soon as the sub cut its shallow arc to the new heading, the captain ordered, “All stop.”

  Jock could sense the bitterness in the AOOD’s voice as he relayed the command to the helm. The bitterness wasn’t lost on the captain, either.

  “We have no choice,” the captain said as he kept a wary eye on the two Japanese destroyers now slipping away to the northeast. “You remember what our orders said, Mister Shafter—clandestine operation, take no action to compromise the Army’s mission.”

  “But sir,” Shafter said, “we’re still a couple of hundred miles from Manus. They’ll never know—”

  “You understand what clandestine means, don’t you, Mister Shafter? Even if we got lucky and sent them both to the bottom—and that’s a big if—there’ll probably be planes looking for us come sunrise. We’re too close to Rabaul, too close to New Guinea…and we’ve got to stay on the surface as much as possible to get these guys there on time. Can’t be playing hide and seek right now. End of discussion.”

  As the easy quarry slipped away, the captain gave it a long, lingering look through his binoculars. When that look was finished, he muttered, “Shit.”

  Sergeant Botkin had a theory. Once onboard the submarine, he quickly made friends with the ship’s radio chief and set out to prove his theory correct. It had taken hours of twisting the radio direction finder’s dials and plotting on a map taped to the bulkhead of the sub’s closet-sized radio compartment, but he believed he now had his answer.

  “It’s simple, sir, really,” he told Jock. “They could never pinpoint the Manus transmitter’s location because they’ve been chasing two different signals, thinking they were the same.” He swept his hand across the plots he’d made on the chart. “We’ve actually got two distinct transmitters—I’ve been listening to the operators’ Morse and their fists are completely different. I can’t believe our SIGINT guys missed that.” He pointed to two locations on the map. “And now that we’re closer, the locations don’t plot out to some big, vague goose egg, either. The weaker one is right around Mount Dremsel, sir. Probably right on it. The stronger one—their main transmitter, I’m sure—sits over here, outside Lorengau.”

  “Could you copy any text from their transmissions?”

  “We sure could, sir. They don’t even bother to code them. All Ace and Deuce had to do was translate. The Mount Dremsel set would transmit a message and then the Lorengau set would include that exact same message along with a bunch of other ones…”

  “Like a relay?”

  “Exactly, sir,” Botkin replied. “The station on Dremsel probably isn’t strong enough to work Rabaul reliably—especially in daylight—so the station at Lorengau rebroadcasts it with a more powerful set, which I’ll bet is using a directional antenna, too. That’s why both signals sound equally weak at the monitoring stations in Papua. The main Jap antenna’s beaming the stuff the other way.”

  “It all makes sense, Sergeant,” Jock said. “This is outstanding work you’ve done.”

  “No problem, sir…but the best thing about it, I think, is it proves what you’ve been saying all along.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That there’s an OP on Mount Dremsel, sir, for sure. Just hold it for a couple of days and we’ve got this mission kn
ocked.”

  Sergeant Major Patchett appeared in the passageway. “We got a problem, sir. Something’s wrong with Private Youngblood.”

  They found Joe Youngblood lying on the catwalk of the forward torpedo room, his feet elevated by his GI pack, covered with a blanket. Deuce seemed to be completely in charge as he crouched beside him, checking his pulse. An annoyed Navy corpsman was propped against the compartment’s aft bulkhead, looking like he wanted to wash his hands of the whole affair.

  “Fucking Nip thinks the guy’s going into shock,” the corpsman mumbled loud enough for most everyone in the compartment to hear. “Don’t see how. That redskin ain’t injured.”

  “The man’s traumatized over something,” Deuce said. “It’s just a precaution.”

  “Traumatized, my ass,” the corpsman replied. “Leave it to the Army to stuff a claustrophobic ground-pounder into a submarine.”

  “All right, that’s enough,” Jock said. “Somebody want to tell me what happened here?”

  Deuce provided the explanation. “We were all sound asleep, sir, when Private Youngblood suddenly sits up and starts wailing like some crazy banshee, saying things like she’s coming for me and I’m not ready. I think he was just having a dream, sir…a real bad one, but just a dream.”

  Patchett leaned over the catatonic Joe Youngblood, took a good look at his face, and said, “I ain’t never seen no dream do this to a man before. He’s off somewhere in Section Eight-land. How’d you know what to do to calm him down, son?”

  “I worked as an orderly in a hospital,” Deuce replied, “and I was premed at Stanford before—whoa!”

  Youngblood snapped to a sitting position despite Deuce’s attempts to keep him prone. “It’s okay, Corporal Deuce,” he said, embarrassed by the attention he had garnered. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”

  The Navy corpsman was no longer annoyed. Now he was disgusted. Turning to leave, he said, “You gotta be shitting me. No fucking trouble at all. Not a damn bit.”