Cold is the Sea (12 page)

The tug skipper, a heavyset warrant boatswain with a red face appropriate to the years he must have spent at his profession, extracted the quiescent
Eel
from her berth as soon as the two submarines moored outboard had been pulled clear by the assisting tug. With professional aplomb he put his bluff, heavily fendered craft on
Eel
's port quarter, made fast, and with no ceremony whatever swung the submarine's bow downstream and increased speed on his engine.

“It's amazing how simple they make it seem,” said Buck Williams, as the three officers stood on
Eel
's bridge, watching the
maneuver. “I wonder why they call this ‘towing,' though. ‘Pushing' is more like it.”

“They do call it ‘pushing' some places,” said Keith, “like the Mississippi River. You ought to see those Mississippi towboats. They can shove a couple of dozen big square-ended barges upstream, against the current, and maneuver them besides. Sometimes they handle more cargo in their barges than a big freighter could. A lot of the Mississippi is too shallow for a seagoing ship, and the big towboats are the answer.”

“Why don't they just put a towline over their stern and pull the barges? Wouldn't that be easier?”

“They do in the open ocean,” said Keith, “or anyplace where it's rough. But in smooth inland waters this gives the tug better control. Did you ever steer a ship while towing something big, like a barge, astern? This way he can handle us as though his tug and whatever he's pushing is simply one big ship.”

“That's right, Buck,” said Richardson, joining the discussion. “Why don't you visit over there before the trip's over? Even though he's pushing from alongside, you'll see he doesn't need any rudder to keep us going straight ahead. The way he's made fast, his helmsman steers for us both.”

“Then that's why he was so particular with his bow and stern lines, slacking them and heaving them in?”

“Sure. He's got his bow toed in toward us just a little, just enough to balance the turning effect of pushing from the port quarter instead of from dead aft. That's the whole secret.”

Keith grinned at Rich as Buck raised his binoculars and inspected the tug and its lines with renewed interest. “You should have been a schoolteacher,” he said. “You never could resist teaching a little whenever you got the chance.” Richardson grinned back. “You're another,” he said, raising his binoculars.

A new thought struck Keith, and a slightly more serious expression settled on his normally open countenance. “You know, I guess all three of us agree that old man Brighting must have been the source of our ‘volunteering' for this little chore. And I've got to admit I probably would have volunteered if I'd known about it. But isn't the whole thing rather peculiar? I mean, keeping us in the dark the way he did?”

“I've been thinking the same thing,” said Buck. “This is sort of a surprise bonus. All the way out here, until around an hour ago
when we found out, I've been cussing him for not letting us go right home after that sweatshop time in Idaho. Now I'm glad we're here, but mad because he made such a secret of it.”

“The way I see it,” said Rich, “he well knows we were once together on this boat. So when BuPers wanted to know if one of us could come out here, he volunteered all three of us. Not telling us what he was up to is simply his way of doing things. He's trying to do something for us. It's like that time he sent us to look over the NEPA project. It's a day off, a holiday trip, sort of.”

“Then he must be trying to make up for his bitchiness to you more than anyone,” said Buck, “and he must think you come pretty cheap. He knows doggone well it was you who kept the reactor running that day, and that it was you who saved that woman's life in Arco, whoever she is. Both of these things make him look pretty good, you know. So, he holds up your exam long enough so that you had to stay up all night to do it, and on top of this, even though it was a tougher exam than ours and you got almost a perfect mark on it, he made Dusty hand you a lower-grade nuke certificate than we got. Don't tell me what a grand old guy he is!”

“Maybe there was a little hazing going on,” said Rich, “but it didn't hurt us. Don't forget, he's the source of our nuclear submarines, and we ought to overlook about anything because of that.”

“How about that telephone call after we finally got you to turn in?” said Keith. “Dusty tried to talk him out of it, but he said you had no business sleeping in the daytime when there's work to be done. He knew our work was finished, and that you'd been up all night because of him besides! And then after he made Dusty get you to the phone, all he wanted was to say he'd decided to build the cafeteria after all! That had to be deliberate. He knew exactly what he was doing!”

“The main thing is, now all three of us have our nuclear ratings. I'm lucky he even let me join you two. He wasn't going to at first, you know.” The look on Richardson's face signaled his two juniors to leave the topic. Experience had taught them that his thought processes could not always be predicted. Something, perhaps their arguments, perhaps his own greater awareness of the political structure within the U.S. Navy, perhaps something
totally unrelated to anything they had been doing, caused him to want to close it off. They would have been astounded could they have known they had evoked the memory of Joan. Might she have caused Brighting to reverse his initial rejection of Rich? Could she, just yesterday, have had something to do with his relenting on the business of the examination? Could it have been she who had suggested this last visit to their old wartime submarine? After all, she too, had had her connection with the
Eel!

Boggs had certainly been right in his characterization of San Francisco Bay as a most pleasant place to cruise in. Smoky brown hills teeming with life surrounded it, a warm sun turned its mud-gray waters iridescent, great bridges vaulted across it, and in the distance the tall buildings of the fabled city of the hills beckoned. Nearer, like disorganized flocks of wild birds, the sails of countless pleasure boats followed their own aimless quests, some in a cohesive pattern, perhaps a race, others without discernible motivation or objective except that of simply being there.

The combined ambience of industry and pleasure could be both seen and felt. A group of cylindrical white tanks to port, marching away from the water in stubby silhouettes up a steep brown hillside, marked a refinery. Trim white sails, tiny in the distance, softened the outline of the land, disappeared against the white oil tanks and the nearby buildings, and stood out, etched in slowly moving white silhouettes against the salt-streaked hulls of two oceangoing tankers anchored in the distance. To starboard an old freighter, her broad bows pushing a bulging wave despite her slow speed, was heading for some unknown destination up one of the rivers feeding Carquinez Strait at the north end of the bay. Beyond her, another cargo ship, newer, a moving forest of masts and booms, was heading away, probably bound out the Golden Gate for a distant and foreign shore. A white-sided passenger liner, suddenly visible against the exotic spires of San Francisco, was also steaming toward the Golden Gate Bridge, and thence to Acapulco, Honolulu, Seattle—or anywhere. And the shores to starboard were pocked with the evidences of people: houses of many differing colors, glints of glass windows, shifting flashes denoting
the speeding windshields of automobiles. Great numbers of small boats, both sail and power, clustered along the benign coast.

The sight of some member of the mothballed fleet being ignominiously barged through San Francisco Bay was probably a familiar sight on its waters. The tug skipper, indeed, had boasted having made the same trip countless times, sometimes to deliver a well-scavenged hulk to the wreckers, sometimes, as now, to start a discarded lady toward a new and different life. For the three submariners, once they had assured themselves that all was proceeding normally, that
Eel
was not unexpectedly taking water into her bilges, that the tugmaster's charts of the navigation hazards agreed with theirs and the course he had laid out was to their liking, it was a pleasure trip with overtones of nostalgia.

Richardson found it was easy to stand on the bridge where he had stood so many times, shoulder hunched into one of the TBT wells (the target bearing transmitters themselves had been removed) and imagine
Eel
moving under his direction in enemy waters, responsive to his will, alert, alive, alive to the quintessence of being alive in the face of mortal danger. The pleasure boats, the friendly shores, even the distant ships on their peaceful missions, could fade out of consciousness. It could be a bright moonlit night; strange how well he used to be able to see at night, without lights of any kind to bother his eyes. More than once
Eel
had been in waters far more confined than this, had seemed to be hemmed in by the forbidding hills of the seacoast of Japan. More than once he had, somehow, summoned up the necessary—it seemed only days ago, instead of years—on this very bridge, at this very spot.

That tanker, now, about a mile ahead, crossing from starboard to port: were she an enemy he would have by now opened the torpedo tube outer doors. A small order to the rudder to reduce the angle between the torpedo course, controlled by its gyroscope, and that of the submarine (the less the gyro angle, the more accurate the old torpedoes); Keith would be giving the bearings, Buck running the TDC, the torpedo data computer, and shooting the fish at his command. The setup was so similar to one he remembered from
Eel
's third patrol: the tanker, unescorted, moving confidently in the shallow waters where no enemy submarine had ever dared to enter; the submarine, keyed up, but equally confident because of past successes. Except that
it was just before dawn, instead of broad daylight, as now. The ship, in fact, had looked almost exactly like this one. You had to hand it to her skipper. When he saw the submarine, he had instantly turned to ram. Stupid of Rich to have tried a surface attack with daylight so near! With the U.S. Fleet pressing ever closer to the mainland of Japan during those closing months of the war he must have forgotten the caution he had learned during previous patrols. A routine approach (no approach was ever “routine,” but this one had seemed simple, uncomplicated) had been suddenly converted into near catastrophe. The ships speeding toward each other, bow to bow. Too close to shoot! Get everybody below! The tanker opening fire (how had he been able to get his guns going so quickly?)—large-caliber shells whizzing overhead. Desperate maneuvers to avoid. The ships slipping past each other, the tanker swinging toward, trying to strike the submarine's side,
Eel
turning toward the tanker, swinging her stern clear. Enemy machine guns spitting, striking the bulletproof bridge bulwarks (a good thing they were made of special armorplate); Rich ducking at the last minute, just in time, as the
Eel
rocketed clear.

Looking through his binoculars at the approaching tanker, musing at the coincidental similarity of ship and situation to the one creased in his memory, Richardson saw the curved front of her bridge growing wider. The tanker should be passing ahead; soon it ought not to be possible to see the front of her bridge at all—but instead the curved surface was becoming broader. Then it hit him. Were this war, were he on the alert for changes in enemy course and speed instead of in a nostalgic reverie, he would have seen it instantly. The tanker ahead was turning toward! Her rudder must have been put hard over left! This was exactly the way it had been! The bearing must soon become steady, a collision situation! Rich drew a deep breath to begin the maneuver to avoid, order the watertight doors shut through the boat. It was so much the same, but there was no one below to shut the doors, no one steering in the conning tower to handle
Eel
's rudder and annunciators. In the binoculars the oncoming bow was tremendous. Somewhere behind—he had forgotten the tug—a series of angry blasts on an air horn.
Eel
began to vibrate as the tug's engine went into full reverse. More blasts from the
tug. Now some answering blasts from the tanker. What could they be thinking of, over there?

Swiftly, the distance narrowed.
Eel
's speed, never great in her captive condition, was decreasing. She had almost come to a complete halt, was swinging left, the wrong way. Her whole fragile side would be exposed to the collision. If the loaded tanker could not stop her forward motion she would plow into the submarine's starboard ballast tanks, surely rupture her pressure hull as well, ignominiously sink her in the middle of the ship channel.

Now it was clear the tanker had also gone into full reverse. Her bow was swinging again, away, to her own left. Her way had hardly reduced—a laden ship is very hard to stop—but her engines were thrashing water up under her counter. Her bow swung away more. No danger of a bows-on collision now, but she's going to sideswipe us.
Eel
, now dead in the water, began to gather sternway. The tug captain had slacked his stern line, was now nearly perpendicular to the submarine's side, backing frantically, as powerfully as he could, trying to drag
Eel
bodily sideways out of the sweeping path. One hundred yards—fifty yards. People staring over the tanker's side, from her bridge, her bows.

The onrushing tanker's bow was now abeam, no longer headed straight on, but close! The flare of the great profile overhung
Eel
's deck, so far below. If that huge anchor nearly directly overhead were to be let go, it would land right on deck, crash clear through and carry
Eel
on down with it. Ludicrous for
Eel
, after all the dangers she had been through, to meet her fate here, in a well-known American harbor, at the hands of a lubberly U.S. tanker skipper! That must be he up on the bridge, or maybe the pilot—if he had a pilot—peering over at the wreckage he was about to cause. The wash from the tanker's single propeller was up alongside her after deckhouse, reaching along the rusted slab-sided bulk of her gigantic hull. Her bridge was now abeam, and still she moved sideways under the impetus of her rudder. The turbulence from her screw began to reach
Eel
's side. This might help to lessen the impact. Less than twenty-five feet between the ships now. Maybe the thrust of water from the tanker's propeller would help to push
Eel
away, form a cushion between them.