Black wind

five-inch guns. Amazingly, the destroyer’s guns continued to miss their mark. The point-blank target of the sub slowly began to diminish as the nose of the undersea craft dipped beneath the waves and a wash of seawater gradually flooded over the forward deck.
    “Fire one!” Ogawa shouted. Counting off three seconds silently, he paused, then ordered, “Fire two!”
    With a blast of compressed air, the two torpedoes burst out of the forward tubes on a deadly streak toward the advancing destroyer. Each packing an 890-pound lethal warhead, the twenty-three-foot-long, oxygen-powered torpedoes accelerated quickly, racing toward the Theodore Knight at better than 45 knots.
    An ensign standing on the bridge wing of the destroyer noticed a seam of white trails under the water’s surface burrowing toward the ship.
    “Torpedoes off the port and starboard bow!” he shouted, though his body remained frozen in rapt fascination as he watched the speeding explosives approach.
    In an instant, the torpedoes were on them. But either by miscalculation, divine intervention, or just plain luck, the two deadly fish somehow missed their target. The immobile ensign watched in amazement as the two torpedoes skimmed past both sides of the destroyer’s bow, then raced down the length of the ship no more than ten feet from either side of the hull before disappearing beyond the stern.
    “She’s diving, sir,” noted the destroyer’s helmsman as he watched the waves slosh over the bow of the sub.
    “Steer for the conning tower,” Baxter commanded. “Let’s go right down her throat.”
    Firing from the forward batteries had ceased, as the guns could no longer be trained on a target so low to the ship’s bow. The bat de became a race, the destroyer boring in like a charging ram in an attempt to batter the I-403. But the submarine was gaining depth and, for a moment, appeared like it would successfully slip beneath the stalking ship. The Theodore Knight had crossed over the bowline of the sub, its keel missing the top deck of the descending sub by a matter of feet. But the destroyer drove forward, intent on crushing the submersing vessel.
    The aircraft were the first to feel the sharp wedge of the destroyer’s prow. Partially submerged on the receding deck, the randomly aligned airplanes just caught the surging bow of the ship at mid height and were instantly dissected into large sections of mangled metal, fabric, and debris. The defiant pilot, who had climbed into the cockpit of the first airplane, received little time for impudence before realizing his wish to die with his plane in a crushing blow.
    The I-403 itself was now half submerged and had so far avoided damage from the assault. But the sub’s conning tower was too great a protrusion and could not escape the charging wrath of the ship. With a crunching shear, the bow of the destroyer tore into the vessel’s console, slicing through it like a scythe. Ogawa and his operations officers
    were killed instantly as the ship crushed into and through the control center of the sub. The entire structure was ripped away from the body of the submarine as the destroyer continued its onslaught, carving a mutilating gash along the rear spine of the I-403. Inside, the doomed crew heard the screeching grind of metal on metal before the torrents of seawater burst in and flooded the compartments. Death came quickly but painfully to the drowning men as the sub lurched, then dropped rapidly to the seafloor. A smattering of air bubbles and oil boiled to the surface to mark the gravesite, then all was silent.
    Aboard the Theodore Knight, the crew and officers cheered their destruction of the Japanese submarine as they watched the telltale slick of black oil and fuel pool on the surface like a death cloud above the sunken boat. How lucky they were to have found and destroyed an enemy vessel right on their own home shores, with not so much as a casualty on their own ship. Though the enemy had fought with valor, the victory had come easily. The crew would return to port as heroes, with a great tale to tell their grandchildren. What none of the men on the destroyer could have suspected or imagined, however, was the unspeakable horror that would have befallen their countrymen had the I-403 succeeded in its mission. Nor could they know that the horror still awaited, silently beckoning from the depths of the shattered wreckage.

Mystery trawler and NUMA
    May 22, 2007 The Aleutian Islands, Alaska
    The