The survivor (7 page)

Adam was feeling panicky now as the sound of the diesels grew stronger, and he thought he felt a movement through the boat.

Hurryl Hurryl Adam thought, reaching the door at last and knocking hard on it.

"Come in," a voice told him.

As Adam stepped inside the room he was amazed. This was the stateroom of the submarine's commanding officer—no doubt a commander in the Navy —and the place wasn't as big as the closet in his room in bachelor officers' quarters. It was a tiny room with a thin, narrow bunk suspended by chains from the wall, a little toy desk, a little washbasin that was now folded up into the wall. And that was about all.

A thin man, very small and wiry-looking, was studying some charts spread out on the narrow bunk. He turned as Adam came in and stood so that the charts could not be seen.

From a loudspeaker in the ceiling Adam heard a voice order, "Ahead one third, left full rudder.**

"Yes?" the thin man asked.

"Colonel Marcus? I'm Lieutenant Adam Land, attached to VB-6. There's been a mistake, sir. Please ask them to stop this boat right away so I can get off."

"Mistake?" the colonel snapped. "What sort of mistake?"

"My being here, sir. I'm a navy pilot and this is an infantry outfit. We haven't got much time, sir. The boat's under way now."

"I know that," the colonel said, his voice testy. "Now—you are Adam Land, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir ..."

The voice from the loudspeaker interrupted Adam then. "Ahead standard, rudder amidships." Now Adam could hear the water slapping hard against the boat.

"You got your orders?"

"Yes, sir. Please, Colonel, ask them to stop."

Adam was dying. The boat was moving fast now, the waves slapping with an almost metallic noise against the bows.

The colonel went on. "Then there's no mistake. Lieutenant. You are attached to my command for temporary duty. Glad to have you with us."

Adam stared at him. He couldn't believe that

this long nightmare was still going on and, now, didn't look as though it would ever stop. "I've got to stay?" Adam asked helplessly.

"Yes."

The colonel turned back to the charts on the bunk, but Adam did not take the hint and go. He stood for a long moment and then asked, "Am I going into combat, sirr^

The colonel didn't even bother to turn around. **Probably," he said.

"Colonel," Adam said, "I don't know anything about combat. I've never been in combat. I don't even know how to shoot a rifle!"

The colonel turned around then and looked at him. "You'd better learn," he said.

BOOK TWO

The Deep, Dark Sea

THE BEAK-NOSED GUNNERY Sergeant was singing, "Gloom and misery everywhere," he sang.

"You're no Caruso," a marine told him.

The beak-nosed marine stopped singing and looked at the other one. "Caruso's dead."

"So you be careful."

"Gloom and misery every\vhere," Beak-nose sang.

And he was right, Adam decided. The misery anyway. This submarine had been designed to carry exactly seventy men in the crew and there were now seventy of the crew aboard plus the twenty combat marines and two officers, plus, unfortunately, Adam Land.

During the first day at sea there had been a little awkwardness. Although he suspected that the colonel and the major (and the ship's officers) considered him a sort of inferior object, Adam was, by Act of Congress, an officer and was thus supposed

to rate oflBcer treatment. He was supposed to have "accommodations" according to his rank, to eat in the officer's wardroom, and to Hve in "officer's country." However, when Adam told them that he would rather stay with the enhsted men, Adam suspected that the other officers had been rather relieved. There was no room for him in officer's country; no bunk in any of the officer's staterooms, no extra seat at the table which almost completely filled the tiny wardroom.

There was hardly any more room for him forward in the torpedo compartment with the marines. The steel room was designed to be the business end of this boat, not a hotel. At the forward end were the six torpedo tubes—three on each side, one above the other. The heavy round doors of the tubes with their levers and dials dominated the whole place, and just being there, closed, shining with oil, they carried menace. Because of the marines, the submarine was not carrying torpedoes on this mission, so the empty torpedo racks along the walls could now be used for a place for a man to sleep if he didn't mind the sharp steel of the racks cutting through the thin pads they called mattresses.

In addition to the torpedo racks there were some fold-down pipe bunks, and there was of course the steel deck. Altogether there was room enough for about half of the marines and half of the ship's company who usually lived there to lie down at one time. The rest had to stand up or, if they could

manage it without stepping on anybody, get to the wall and lean against that.

At first the marines had been a Httle leery of Adam. In the first place, he wasn't a marine, and if you weren't a marine, you were, with these people, nothing. In the second, he was an oflBcer, and according to the book, he had to be treated as an oflScer—yes, sir, no sir, make room for the Heutenant. Adam didn't have to say much to put an end to all that. He just said, "My name's Adam Land and I'm going to live in here v^dth you guys, so let's make it easy on all hands.**

Added to the discomfort, the crowding, the heat, the bad air, and aU the rest there was, in aU the marines, a fear of the submarine itself. None of them had ever been in one before, and the idea of being under the sea was repellent to them. This fear was not helped at all by the place they were in. Walled in all around by steel there was no escape from this place, no way for a man to go. If the sea came in here . . .

For a long time after leaving Pearl Harbor they stayed on the surface, protected by the patrol planes flying out of the Islands. On the surface the boat was affected by the wave motion of the upper surface, and rolled and pitched as other boats do in a heavy sea. This violent movement, added to the fear each man had of the moment when the boat would submerge, really got to the marines. One by one they got seasick, and there was no place to get sick in except your helmet. Within an hour the torpedo room was a mess with dying

marines lying all over the place (and each other), helmets rolling around, and the few who were not sick being driven to it by the general foulup.

Adam was surprised that Jason, who had seemed to be truly afraid of going under the water, was one of the few who didn't get sick and stayed on his feet, doing what he could to help his buddies.

By the time the sub passed beyond the protection of the patrol planes, only four marines were still on their feet, and the rest of them were now absolutely sure that they were going to die. They looked forward to it, because nothing could be worse than the condition they were then in.

There were sounds in the boat—the sound of the waves beating against the outside of it, sounds of voices over the loudspeaker in the torpedo room, sounds of the big diesels panting back aft somewhere, and the smaller sounds of other motors and generators. Adam had grown used to them by now, and so the sounds had passed out of his consciousness.

Then, suddenly, there was a brand-new sound so different from all the rest that it had no place among them. It came barking over the loudspeaker, loud and raucous, and was the sound of an old-fashioned automobile horn. "Ah-oo-gah. Ah-oo-gah."

'What is this, the freeway?'' Adam asked. "Maybe we re going slow in the fast lane or something."

And then, from the loudspeaker, a voice said, quite calmly, "Rig out bow and stem planes."

*What's going on?" Jason asked and Adam could tell from his face that he suspected.

Then the voice said, "Clear the bridge."

Jason looked at Adam, his young eyes asking the question, and Adam said, "I guess so."

"Bridge clear?" the voice asked over the loudspeaker. "Everybody down?^

"Bridge clear," another voice answered.

"Secure the hatch," the first voice ordered.

"Hatch secured, sir."

"All right," the cakn voice said, "take her down."

Voices began to pour through the speaker as Jason stood, staring at the speaker's metal grill as though it were human. Adam saw the muscles in Jason's jaw beginning to jump a little, and his lips fell open as though he were awaiting the clap of doom.

"Flood negative. Flood safety."

"Close induction."

"Green board, sir. Green boardl"

''Bleed air."

"Air in the boat, sir."

"Eight degrees down bubble."

"Easy on those bow planes. Easy, this is a deep ocean."

"Blow negative."

"Well done. All ahead one third."

Jason turned to Adam. "When are we going under the water?"

"I think we are already. It's riding smoother."

There was now no sense of motion at all. The boat seemed to be standing still, neither rolling nor

pitching, nor anything else. Adam noticed now that the diesels had stopped and their sound had been replaced by the low, powerful humming of the electric motors. Everything seemed quieter, more peaceful.

"Is this all there is to it?*' Jason asked, looking around as though expecting the dark sea to come rushing at him from everywhere.

"That's all there is/' Adam said, "there ain't no more."

The Southerner rose slowly from the tangled heap of seasick bodies and said, "Suh, it ain't no 'more,* it's it ain't no 'mo'"

Now, as there was no more motion to disturb them the lean, sick marines began to recover.

The beak-nosed one sat up and looked around at the mess. "Gloom and misery everywhere," he began to sing.

As the long voyage dragged on, the marines began to become people to Adam. They didn't stop being marines, but they began to have names and individual faces, tones of voice he could recognize, character.

Apparently the beak-nosed one was not only the highest u). rank and so their leader; he was, as a man, their leader. Although he was congenial enough, even funny at times, he seemed to Adam to be a lonely man and spent most of his time by himself, his long frame stretched out somewhere, his eyes open but not apparently looking at you. His name was Gibbs, but no one ever called him that. He was "Guns" or "Gunny" to the Pfc's

and corporals; the sergeants sometimes called him "Nose," but not often and always in a friendly way. Like the rest of him, which was just long bone and muscle, Guns had a long and muscular nose which ran on a slight angle down his face, giving him a quizzical look as though his head was always cocked to one side.

Guns was the only one of them all who never forgot that Adam was an oflBcer; the others would remember it occasionally or not at all, but Guns never forgot it. There was no friction between Adam and Guns as there was between him and a tech sergeant who seemed, from the first, to resent Adam's being there. Guns even called him "Adam" and didn t say "sir" or *'the lieutenant," but Adam knew that he remembered.

The tech sergeant Adam did not Hke was a communicator, a radio and field-phone expert who let you know it. His favorite story was how, in boot camp, the personnel man had tried his best to get him to take flight training and become a pilot and an oflScer, but the tech had turned it dov^m. His favorite line was that he'd told the personnel people that he wanted to shoot some bullets, not shoot the breeze in BOQ. He wasn't openly hostile to Adam, but he was the only one of the twenty who needled Adam in a subtle way, using his status as an enlisted man to protect himself from the officer. His name was Wirtz, but they called him "Strings .**

And then there was the Rebel. Adam had known a surfer who reminded him of the Rebel. A clown. A real clown, but he was so good on a surfboard

that he could be ridiculous on it and still ride it He was so good that he made surfing look simple and easy, and some of the kelp-kickers hanging around the beach declared that, by making it look so simple (riding in backward while he read a comic book and stuff like that), other people tried to do it that way too and broke their necks.

There was something unreal about the Rebel; in fact, Adam had about decided, everything was im-real. Even his name. For a deep-dyed Southerner, Ezra Stiles was a funny name. And that southern drawl. Adam had heard a lot of Southerners talk, and he'd never heard one of them talk the way the Rebel did. Amos and Andy sounded like college profs compared to the Rebel. It was unreal.

The Rebel even looked unreal, and even the Marine Corps hadn't been able to change that. He was handsome enough to be in the movies, with good features and cool, gray eyes with straight black eyebrows and lashes long enough for a girl. He was the only marine aboard who didn't look physically dangerous, and yet Jason had told him one night on the cigarette deck that the Rebel was a holy terror in any sort of fight from an alley brawl to a fire fight in the lines. "Maybe it's because he doesn't lose his head," Jason decided. "Some guys fight as wild as the Rebel but his is sort of controlled. He just doesn't go spraying the landscape with ammo. Don't ever tangle with him," Jason advised.

''I'm stricdy a no-loud-noise type," Adam had said.

1 ve been wondering," Jason said. ''How are you in a fight?"'

"Terrific,*' Adam said.

Jason sounded skeptical. "Yeahr^

"Terrific. I've never been in a fight."

''No kind of fight?" Jason asked, surprised.

"No kind of fight." He could feel Jason looking at him in the dark.

"You didn't even fight kids when you were a Idd?" Jason asked.

'There weren't any available," Adam said, thinking about when he was a kid.

"And you're running around dressed like a marine," Jason said, amazed. "Why?"

Adam laughed. "I've been trying to find that out myself."

"Especially in a deal like this," Jason said. "Because I think this is going to turn out to be real hairy."

*Then stop the boat and 111 get off," Adam said.

Jason was the easiest of them all to understand, and yet Adam wondered sometimes if he really understood even Jason. If Adam had had a younger brother, it would have been, he decided, a kid like Jason. A good clean-cut kid trying too hard to be a man.