Dust on the Sea (64 page)

“Main deck fore and aft. Number one and number two five-inch, are you still in commission?” He had not heard them firing in the last several seconds. To his relief, both gun captains answered, but his relief turned to despair when he heard their reports.

“Number one gun out of commission. Jammed in train. Several men hurt!”

“Number two gun out of ammunition. They can't seem to get it up from below!”

“How many rounds you got, number one gun?”

“Four on deck.”

“Run them back to number two gun! Use the starboard side! Number two gun, set your range at zero and aim at the enemy's waterline. Open fire as soon as you can!

“Maneuvering, are you on the line?”

“Maneuvering, aye aye!” He could imagine the avid attention with which the idle maneuvering room crew must have been following the telephone conversation which was their only link to the action topside.

“Shift your sticks into reverse. When I give the order to back emergency, put everything you can put to the screws. Give it all you've got, but watch your circuit breakers! Don't blow them!” Richardson visualized the control sticks of the electric-control cubicle being placed in the position for backing, the battery readied to be thrown on the motor buses at full voltage and maximum current. It would be virtually a dead short through the main motors, and he would have to trust the good judgment of the electrician's mates not to throw the current on so fast they burned out something.

Then Richardson had another idea. “Control, are you on the line? . . . Tell Mr. Dugan . . .”

“Al Dugan right here, Captain,” said the familiar voice in his earphones.

“Secure sending ammunition to number one gun! It's jammed. See what you can do about breaking up the problem back aft. We need ammunition to number two five-inch!”

“I've already stopped ammunition forward. We're checking on number two right now.”

“Get those wounded men on the forecastle below. As soon as everyone's clear around number one gun, secure the gun access trunk!”

And then another thought. “Foxhole, if he hits us it'll probably be up forward. Don't take any chances. Get down inside and shut that hatch tight before he hits!” The enemy captain would expect
Eel
to
try to escape by going ahead instead of astern. Astern was clearly the way to go. If there were a collision, it would be forward. Again Richardson was glad of the rigorous drill, and the careful communication setup so laboriously checked out by Keith and Buck. The enemy ship was coming in at dead slow speed, no doubt guided by some extraordinary individual still alive on the bridge, or possibly steering from an emergency steering station aft. The fifties were playing an absolute tattoo all over the large square bridge structure. No one could live under that hail of destruction. She was perceptibly lower in the water, much closer now, perhaps losing speed a trifle. Richardson could now see holes where the five-inch had entered. She was undoubtedly a shambles inside. No one could be alive in the forward part of the ship, except if well below the waterline. Only those people fortunate enough to be stationed aft of the large superstructure—which was stopping most of the automatic-weapon fire—could possibly be surviving. She must be steered from aft.

“Range two hundred yards. Speed five.” Keith's voice steady, as always. He must be looking through the periscope at the same time he was relaying radar ranges and observed angles to Buck Williams. Amazing that he could see anything through it. Somewhere Keith must have picked up a telephone headset, for it was not in the original scheme that he also should wear one. Five knots. There had been just a shade of emphasis on the range. One hundred sixty six yards a minute. Perhaps this was why Keith had specified range two hundred yards. Rich had made all his dispositions but one.
Eel
's bridge structure must not be permitted to mask her remaining five-inch gun as she backed clear.

“All back emergency!” yelled Richardson down the hatch and into the telephone mouthpiece as well. Surprisingly, he heard the click of the annunciators. There must have been a momentary hiatus in the noise level at precisely that instant. “Left full rudder!” he shouted. “Port TBT staying on target!” That would keep the gun firing on the beam, keep
Eel
's bridge from getting in the way of the gun pointers. Cornelli had not had much to do for the last several minutes. He would put his full energy into getting the rudder left as fast as it ever had been done by hand. Buck would use the TBT bearings to keep his TDC lined up—though deflection angles would be of little use and even less importance at close range.

There was a burst of white water on either quarter, burbling up alongside with extraordinary speed. He could feel the acceleration jerk of 252 volts at full amperage suddenly thrown across the main motor armatures.
Eel
's stern sagged downward slightly, then bobbed up as the racing propellers bit into the water. The wash thrown up by the straining
screws swept high along the rounded belly of her ballast tanks on both sides, even splashed up onto the main deck opposite the silent mufflers of the after engineroom.

“Number two five-inch has ammunition, Bridge. We're opening fire!” The announcement by telephone was almost blotted out by the roar of the five-inch gun, all the louder for having been awaited so long. At point-blank range the effect was tremendous. The shell struck the water just upon entry into the enemy bow a few feet on the starboard side of her stem, must have traveled nearly the entire length of the enemy ship before exploding somewhere in its after portion. Richardson could see water pouring through the neat round hole it had made in the bow shell plating. The fifty-caliber machine guns were coming into their own at the close range. The “foxhole,” particularly, maintained an enfilading crossfire that swept the enemy decks from a totally different direction. In the meantime,
Eel
's surprise movement astern was carrying her to starboard of the enemy, curving to her own port. The second shot of the five-inch gun consequently entered the tincan's side somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge, traveled on an angular course entirely through the ship, and detonated in the water beyond it. The splash of the underwater explosion threw up a column of spray behind the tortured hulk. It was clear now that the enemy ship would miss in its desperate charge, was, in fact, no longer manageable.

Richardson was suddenly conscious of Keith's presence alongside of him on the bridge as the third and then the fourth devastating blows from the five-inch were dealt.
Eel
, in her curving reverse course, had in effect maneuvered so that the enemy remained constantly on her port beam as he staggered the last hundred yards of his final, hopeless effort. Now the
Mikura-class
frigate lay on the water, tired, prostrate, visibly sinking.

“All stop!” shouted Richardson. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

The silence was unbelievable. Richardson's eardrums felt as if they had closed up in self-protection and now were having difficulty readjusting to the normal noises at sea. Gradually he became aware of a whistling sound, combined with a gurgling and a pouring of water.
Eel
's own sternward motion, diminishing, was responsible for some of it; but more, he realized, particularly the whistling noise, must come from the enemy ship. Of course she had closed all her watertight doors and hatches, but she had been riddled by so many small holes, as well as the large ones made by the five-inch guns, that there was no capability left in her shattered hull to hold an air bubble. The noise was air whistling out of the holes throughout her body.

She lay flat on the water, her deck at the water's edge, her squat bridge-deckhouse combination, splintered and shattered, standing vertically like a lighthouse in a quiet sea. Air still bubbled from within her, making a dozen ridiculous little geysers as it escaped from the now submerged hull.
Eel
, her sternway petering out, had traced a semicircle in the astern direction. He could see it all, though it was a dark night. The ruined bridge began leaning to starboard, and simultaneously the forward part of the little ship sank lower so that the square structure never fell into the sea, but instead seemingly quartered into it. As the steel hull which supported it slowly upended, bow first, its stern momentarily reappeared above the surface. Then the whole thing was gone.

Richardson waited a moment. The next move should be to pick up survivors, but if any depth charges had been made ready in anticipation of another attack, they would go off soon, probably about the time they reached the bottom of the sea. The wait, which seemed interminable, could not have been long. Once again, as had happened the previous day, the ocean erupted around the grave of the sunken ship. When all was quiet once more, there was no life left. Only a few shattered timbers tossing helplessly in a white canopy of foam on a suddenly uneasy sea, and tiny pieces of debris speckling it all, like pepper from a grinder on whipped cream.

As Richardson gave orders to secure all guns, ammunition, and personnel topside, and to proceed into the center of the wreckage to search for any possible survivors, he heard Yancy asking permission to speak to him.

“I've got bad news, Captain,” he said. Richardson waited numbly. This was bound to be the final result of his decision to fight on the surface, but there had been no other choice. The gods of war must be given their sacrifice. Doubtless all had died aboard his adversary—probably as many as a hundred men.
Eel
carried eighty—eighty-one, counting the wolfpack commander—and it was too much to hope that they would all escape scot-free.

“We have three men killed, sir. Wyatt, Quin, and Johnson; and ten wounded. Two fairly seriously—Thompson and Webber, and . . .” Yancy seemed to be in doubt as to how to phrase the next item. He hesitated a long moment. “The commodore is dead.”

“What!” The startled cry was the antithesis of Yancy's carefully studied, bold statement of fact. Blunt had not even been topside during the battle. He had spoken to him only a few hours before, just before surfacing; automatically he looked at his watch, saw to his astonishment that from surfacing until this moment had been less than fifteen minutes.

“You don't look so good yourself, Captain,” said the pharmacist's mate. “You have blood all over your face and head.”

Still overwhelmed by Yancy's surprise news, Richardson removed the telephone earphones and mouthpiece. “I'm all right,” he said, “I took these from Quin. This must be his blood that's on me.” Unaccountably, Quin's death seemed far more personal than that of Blunt, more like that of Oregon. Quin and Oregon had both followed him from the
Walrus
to the
Eel
. Quin, in fact, had been with him even before, in
S-16
.

Still, Blunt's death was the big surprise, the greatest shock, because there was no reason for it. “What happened to the commodore? What do you mean, he's dead!”

Yancy swiveled away his eyes. “We brought him to the wardroom, the way you told us, and that's where we found him. His head was down on his arms on the table as if he was asleep. Sometimes he used to catnap that way. We were bringing some of the hurt men in there, and when he didn't move, I looked at him and saw he was dead.”

“But my God, man! A man doesn't just die. . . . What happened? . . . Are you sure . . .” The sentence went uncompleted, the question lost. It made no difference. Suddenly all Richardson's exhilaration over the successful outcome of the battle evaporated. All was gall in his mouth. His eyes ached, wanted to close. He forced them open. He was so stupefied with exhaustion that he could feel nothing beyond the burning in his eyes and the overpowering need to lie down. His mind told him his body ached as much as his eyes, and would ache more after a few hours' rest. He had proved a nemesis to so many people. Jim Bledsoe and the entire crew of the
Walrus
. Bungo Pete. Oregon. Quin, Wyatt, Johnson, and now old Joe Blunt, whose own dolphins, given him so many years ago, he still wore on his best uniforms.

He looked up, saw Yancy staring at him gravely. “Where is he, Yancy?”

“I got some men laying him out in his bunk, Captain. Like I said, he looks okay. There's not a mark on him except his neck is all swelled up.”

“What do you think could have happened?”

“I haven't really had a chance to check him. Don't know. Maybe a heart attack. Maybe a stroke. Most likely he hurt himself falling down the hatch. He could have broke his neck and not know it. Then, maybe, walking around, bending over and all, he might have pinched the spinal cord.” Yancy hesitated. He wanted to say something more. “He hasn't been acting normal, sir. Not for a long time. I knew when you and Mr. Leone were reading my books, and I read them too. There was something else wrong with him, sir. I'm no doctor, and it's just a guess, but I think there was something wrong in his head. He would
blow hot and cold, like, and he could never take any pressure. Maybe there was something wrong with the blood to his brain. That and a broken neck could have finished him easy.”

“Any chance that he's just conked out and will come to a little later? . . .”

“No, sir. He's dead.” There was a note of finality in Yancy's voice which Richardson recognized he would have to accept.

But he could not go below just yet, and Al Dugan was waiting to make his report. There was the damage to be checked. The submarine to make seaworthy again. The rig for dive to be rigorously gone over once more. Numbers three and four main engines to be checked out, and the situation in the after engineroom itself to be considered. Could a plug be placed in the cooler intake line? If not, how could
Eel
submerge—or could the drain pump handle the leak so she could submerge safely to shallow depths for a short time?