Dust on the Sea (59 page)

Were the water deeper, there would have been a greater range of uncertainty as to what setting to place on the depth charges. As it was,
Eel
could go no deeper than two hundred feet, and her Japanese antagonist easily remained in contact. The sound of his screws came in alternately from one side or the other, ahead or astern, but always remaining at close range. The initial flurry of charges was small in number, only six, but extremely well placed. Thereafter the tincan contented itself with dropping only one, or perhaps two, at the optimum point of each deliberate, careful approach. All were close, and all had done some damage.

Perhaps there was an unknown oil leak, or an air leak, to betray
Eel
's position to the surface. Perhaps the water was clear enough in this particular area for the submarine's outline to be hazily visible to a masthead lookout. In the Yellow Sea this hardly seemed possible. But the enemy's ability to hold contact was uncanny. Perhaps an aircraft had come out to help him. Maybe it could see through the mud-yellow water. At 200 feet, after all, the highest point of the submarine would be only 154 feet—exactly half her length—beneath the surface.

All machinery, with the exception of the main motors, had long since been secured. The humidity of the atmosphere inside the boat had instantly gone to 100 percent and remained there, with the constant addition of moisture from the bodies of
Eel
's sweating crew, as the air temperature crept steadily upward. Never again, Richardson decided, would
Eel
's linoleum decks be waxed. The moisture settled upon them, lifted the wax, and the whole was stirred into a disgusting ooze as men shuffled through it. In the meantime, an accumulation of small leaks was gradually filling the bilges of the enginerooms and the motor room.
Eel
was slowly losing trim. To pump bilges would require running the drain pump. To pump out an equivalent amount of water from one of the trimming tanks would require use of the trim pump. Both would make noise, and Richardson refused to permit them to be run. Little by little the amount of lift required on bow planes and stern planes increased, until finally they reached their limits. It was then necessary for
Eel
herself to run with an up angle so that some of the thrust of her slow-moving propellers, turning at minimum speed, could be directly
converted to an upward component. Precarious footing on a steeply sloping deck was thenceforth added to her crew's discomfort.

It was the waiting, however, that was the hardest. Waiting while Stafford reported occasionally, hopefully, “Shifted to long scale”—which might indicate uncertainty as to the exact location of the submarine—and then with something like a note of despair, “Shifted to short-scale pinging.” Most difficult of all was when Stafford would announce, “She's starting a run!” Then there would be the waiting while Richardson and Stafford, both wearing earphones at the sonar receiver console, tried to determine whether the enemy was most likely to miss ahead or astern, so that Richardson could give the order to the rudder at the best moment to increase the amount of the error. Then the escort would move off a few hundred yards and listen for betraying noises while the reverberations of her depth charges died away. Finally she would resume echo-ranging, sometimes with the successive pings in quick succession on short scale, sometimes, perhaps only for the sake of variety, more widely spaced on the long-range scale.

Late in the afternoon, following a particularly accurate attack in which a depth charge had exploded close aboard on either side, filling the interior of the submarine with dust only just settled, shaking her insides as if the various structural components were made of some flexible plastic material, Blunt climbed heavily into the conning tower.

“We can't go on like this much longer, Rich. Lichtmann has just reported to Dugan that the last depth charging has wrecked one of the air compressors. Maybe we should just stop all machinery and lie doggo on the bottom for a while.” Blunt's face was pale, covered with perspiration, smudged with dirt and oil. His khaki shirt was soaked through, with hardly a dry spot on it. His trousers were the same. He had thrown a towel around his neck, mopped his face and the top of his head ceaselessly as he talked. The towel, too, was dirty and wringing wet. Most noticeable about him, however, were his eyes. They were streaked with red, and they darted ceaselessly this way and that as he spoke. His face worked, his jaws and lips hung slack. His head wobbled on his neck as he spoke.

Removing his earphone, wiping the perspiration off his ears and both sides of his head with his own towel, Richardson turned two deep red coals instead of eyes—one set in a puffy black swelling—upon his superior. “No!” he said. “Once we set her on the bottom, we'll never get her off! As soon as they find out . . .” He let the sentence trail off. Blunt would know as well as anyone what would happen once the enemy knew the submarine had stopped moving, must therefore be lying on the bottom. “All hands not actively employed have been
ordered to their bunks to conserve oxygen, Commodore,” he said after a moment. “You should try to lie down and get some rest, too.” His own system had long since ceased crying for sleep. It was numb; but the near horizons of his view, the brittleness of his thought processes, presented their own warnings. Regardless of his will, his body—or parts of it—was sleeping anyway.

“You're the one who needs some rest,” said Blunt.

It was an unrealistic comment to be addressed to a submarine skipper in the midst of a depth charging. No doubt Blunt meant it only in the complimentary sense.

Rich waved a hand in deprecation. “Where's Keith?”

“I meant to tell you. He was in the after engineroom when the depth charges went off. He was knocked out somehow. Yancy is back with him.”

This was a blow. Keith Leone was not only his right-hand man, upon whom he had come to depend more than anyone else, he had also become his closest friend. “How bad is he hurt?”

“Don't know yet. Several others were shaken up too, and somebody in the after room must have flipped, because he began running forward shouting to surface the boat and let the married men out. They stopped him with a wrench on the head. He and Keith are laid out together in the engineroom.”

“Shifted to short scale! She's starting a run!” As Richardson swung around to the sonar receiving console and adjusted his earphones, he noticed that Stafford's hands were shaking. So, nearly, were his own. He could see the pulse jumping in his wrists. Through the earphones Rich could hear the malevolent propeller beats coming closer. The rapid pings of the Japanese sonar sounded triumphant. They were exactly like those of a U.S. destroyer. He could pay no further attention to Blunt, who was standing irresolutely on the top rung of the ladder leading to the control room. The hatch was normally closed upon rigging for depth charge. Blunt had opened it to mount to the conning tower.

“She's coming in on our port bow,” whispered Stafford tensely. The pointer indicator for the sound heads indicated the same. “No bearing drift at all! She's coming right in on top of us!”

This was going to be a good run. The pings seemed to come right through the machine, and right through
Eel
's pressure hull as well. Richardson could hear them without the earphones.

Perhaps a slight change in tactics would be in order. The tincan must be within a thousand yards. The cone of its sonar beam must have a limiting angle of depression, like American sonars. There would be
a conical space beneath it where it was deaf. “Left full rudder,” he ordered.

Cornelli, at the steering wheel where he had been for twelve hours, spelled occasionally by Scott, began cranking the large steel wheel. Like all the other hydraulically controlled mechanisms, it had been shifted to hand power and now operated as a pump by which oil could slowly be pushed through the hydraulic lines and gradually move the heavy rudder rams. Cornelli had stripped to the waist. His muscular torso gleamed with sweat under the light of the emergency battle lantern above him. The wheel was four feet in diameter, with a handle which could be snapped out against a spring on its im. With both hands on the handle, Cornelli was jackknifing himself at the waist rapidly. Drops of sweat flew off his arms and shoulders as he furiously pumped the heavy steel wheel. The rudder angle indicator moved left with agonizing slowness.

“That's well, Cornelli,” said Richardson. The rudder had not quite reached full left, but it was far enough. Cornelli was panting heavily. The oxygen content in
Eel
's atmosphere was low. He was heaving deep breaths, alternately inflating and contracting his chest and stomach muscles.

“Rudder is twenty left. Thanks, sir,” he puffed.

Through the gyro repeater built into the sonar dials Richardson could see
Eel
slowly move left, bringing the pinging escort more nearly dead ahead. “All right, Cornelli, start bringing the rudder back to zero. Scott, you help him.” The air inside the submarine had become considerably more foul than was normal for an all-day submergence. The exertions of the crew, despite the enforced inactivity of some of them, resulted in greatly increased oxygen consumption. Cornelli was still heaving great, nearly sobbing, pants. Richardson felt that he himself was ready to do the same even without physical exertion. Blunt had been panting merely from having climbed up the ladder from the control room. After a few turns of the wheel Cornelli gratefully turned it over to Scott. “Just bring it back slow and stop on zero,” said Richardson. “We've got her swinging now.”

He turned, called past Blunt to Al Dugan at the diving station, “Al, we're going to speed up. When we do, bring her up to a hundred fifty feet.”

Al Dugan also had a towel wrapped around his neck. Perspiration glinted on the ends of his close-cropped hair. He leaned back, looked up the hatch. “One-five-oh feet,” he said.

“All ahead full,” ordered Richardson. The rudder was nearing zero as he gave the command. “Commodore,” he continued, “she's about to drop again! Please go below and shut the hatch!”

“I figure we've just entered the cone,” said Stafford. “We're going to pass right under her on the opposite course.”

“I know,” said Richardson. He might have gone on to explain his reasoning, which was that once inside the cone of silence there was less chance the enemy ship would hear the sudden increase in speed of
Eel
's propellers, and also a fairly good chance that she would not be able to react quickly enough to change the settings on her depth charges. Additionally, there was the factor that with the two ships proceeding on opposite courses, once
Eel
had passed beneath her adversary her propeller wash would thrust an increased amount of water directly toward the other ship. There might be an appreciable delay before the frigate could regain contact, since her sonar would also have to contend with her own propeller wash, as well as the water turbulence from her depth charges. Richardson said nothing, however, for suddenly it would have been too great an effort. A huge yawn racked his being. Almost with a sigh, really a deep pant by which his system subconsciously strove for more oxygen to keep it going, he asked, “Scott, when is sunset?”

“Half an hour ago,” said Scott.

“How about evening twilight?”

“About an hour altogether. It will be dark in half an hour more.”

“She's dropped!” screamed Stafford in Richardson's ear. Stafford was an oldtime submariner, a sonar man from way back, with many years of experience. He had been invaluable on the patrol thus far, as on the previous one. But even good men had their limits. Perhaps this was the last patrol Stafford should have to make—that is, if this were not to be the last one for other reasons.

“How many?”

“Don't know. Two at least! Maybe more this time!”

WHAM
! A tremendous, all-encompassing explosion . . .
WHAM
! Another, equally loud. There was a sound of rushing water. WHAM! WHAM! Two more, even louder, almost simultaneous. Something struck the side of the submarine, skidded or scraped for a moment, fell clear. Richardson felt momentarily disoriented. Stafford had been knocked off his stool in front of the sonar equipment. Richardson saved himself from falling by gripping the handrail alongside the control room hatch. Blunt, however, still standing in the hatch, had been knocked backward off the ladder and had disappeared below into the control room just as the hatch itself, sprung loose from its latch, slammed shut with a resounding clap and then bounced open again.

Quin was prone on the floor, under Scott, who had fallen upon him. Unaccountably, the light in the conning tower was suddenly dim. The main lighting circuit had gone out. Only the emergency battle lights
were still burning. The cloud of dust was so great that Richardson could hardly see to the after end of the cylindrical compartment, to the TDC and plotting table, normally the battle stations of Buck Williams and Larry Lasche. In the control room, through the reopened hatch, there was a haze of dust through the likewise dimmed light. There was confusion down there too. Blunt, in falling, must have landed upon Dugan, although Richardson could not see the situation clearly enough to discern who was who in the scramble. Relief flooded through him when Dugan's bulky figure arose from the tangle, the top of his head assumed something like its normal position. There was blood smeared on it, Richardson noted. Whether Dugan's or someone else's was not clear, but at least he was back on his feet.