Crash Dive

by Martin H. Greenberg

  The first blast came close-aboard to port, rocking the submarine hard to starboard and popping chunks of cork from the bulkheads. The second was also to port and closer; lightbulbs shattered, plunging the boat into darkness save for the wan glow of battle lanterns.

  The third was closer still, this time to starboard, a snick-snick followed by a thunderous detonation that filled the foul air with high-pressure streams of water from bursting pipes and the screams of terrified seamen.

  It was early in the spring of 1918.

  Snick-snick . . . boom . . .

  Snick-snick . . . boom . . .

  Barton heard the sounds distinctly, though they were extremely muffled, as if by a great, great distance. What was he hearing . . . cannon fire? Had the Yankees spotted the little Hunley already, her deck awash in the moonlight, and opened fire with their big, eleven-inch Dahlgren rifles?

  “Hey, Coleman,” he whispered to the man on his right. “You hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I dunno. Kinda like cannon fire, way off.”

  “I don’t hear a damned thing, Tommy.”

  “You’re hearin’ things again, Barton,” Petty Officer Maury added. “Knock it off afore you spook the whole boat.”

  Come to us. . . .

  Hearing things. Yeah, that was it. He was hearing things. Things that weren’t real. Things that weren’t there.

  Squeezing his eyes closed, he tried to shut out the rustling, the ghostly voices in the darkness, as well. He was sweating hard—they all were after that exertion—but he was chilled as well, his knees trembling unless he kept them hard-locked and his feet pressed hard against the footrest.

  He thought about his grandmother. Grandmother Sadie had been a strange one, no mistake about that. There was Romany blood in her veins, or so the older members of the Barton family whispered, and it was said that she’d been able to tell the future and to know things about people, just by talking with them. “You’ve got the sight,” she’d told young Tommy more than once when he was growing up back in Norfolk. He still remembered sitting in her lap as she rocked him on the front porch, remembered her wrinkled hands and whispery voice. “You see things others don’t, don’t you?”

  Well, no. No he didn’t. At least, he’d never been aware of anything strange about his sight, and his parents had always been quick to reassure him that there was nothing to “that superstitious Gypsy nonsense.”

  Still, there was that night when he’d woken up in bed—at least, he’d thought he’d been awake—and he saw Grandmother Sadie in his room, felt the mattress sag with her weight as she sat on the edge of the bed. “You’ve got the sight, Tommy,” she’d told him in her dry, whispery voice. “You can see things, see things in the darkness. . . .”

  And it hadn’t been until the next day that he’d learned his grandmother had died hours before the . . . the dream.

  No, Barton wasn’t superstitious. His parents had been careful about that. Even so, he’d always felt a thrill of something like fear, a shiver up his spine, when confronted by darkness.

  So what the hell are you doing in here? he asked himself, a taste of bitter irony in the thought. A damned

  strange place to work if you’re afraid of the dark!

  “Half speed ahead!” rasped the voice of Lieutenant Dixon, and the eight crewmen leaned into the hand crank, making the screw bite the water. The steering cables overhead clattered a bit, and Barton felt the Hunley turning slightly to the right. The chirp and squeak of the crank pushed the whispering back.

  For years, now, ever since his grandmother’s death, in fact, Tom Barton had been simultaneously attracted and repelled by the dark, wanting never to hear the voices again, while at the same time being fascinated . . . compelled, almost, to listen for them. When he’d learned what his volunteering for duty on board the Hunley required of him, he’d very nearly backed away. Climbing down into that black hole was so very much like dying—

  And yet he wanted to face the fear, face it down and conquer it. He was twenty years old, a grown man, and grown men were not afraid of the dark.

  Besides, he was curious. Could he really see things other men could not?

  Somehow he’d stuck it out, stayed with the grueling exercises and classwork ashore, and the infinitely harder assignments of clambering down into the Hunley’s belly and taking his place at the crankshaft.

  It was always the diving that was hardest.

  “Attention to orders!” Dixon called from forward. “I can see the Housatonic up ahead, sitting fat and happy in the moonlight. We’re going to take her down. Everyone watch for leaks.”

  The Hunley had two ballast tanks, one in the forward of the crew compartment, one aft. By opening two seacocks, they could flood those tanks, making the craft heavy enough to sink. In addition, there were two devices like stubby wings on either side of the boat. Tilt the wings forward, the Hunley would dive; tilt them back, and she would rise.

  Dixon was responsible for operating the forward cock and handling the diving planes, while Maury, the petty officer, was responsible for the seacock aft. A number of lead weights along the keel could be released by pulling levers set on the deck beneath their feet, lightening the Hunley and letting her rise to the surface once more.

  At least, that was the idea. The various contrivances didn’t always work as advertised. Horace Hunley had died when the boat became stuck in the mud after the forward seacock had been opened too quickly.

  And when the Hunley was underwater, there was no more fresh air entering the boat. Under water, the darkness and the claustrophobia became overwhelming, a stifling, palpable presence threatening to rob strong men of their sanity.

  Providing fresh air for the crew had been one of the most devilishly insoluble problems in the Hunley’s design. There was something called an airbox forward, just aft of the forward hatch, with two pipes—the things like small smokestacks Barton had noticed earlier—extending up high enough to clear the water’s surface when the Hunley was running submerged, but the contraption never had worked right. The pipes admitted a little air when they were running just beneath the surface, but once they submerged completely, the men on board had only a limited amount of time before the air inside the submarine turned too foul to breathe.

  About a month before, Dixon had taken the submariner students out on a special afternoon’s excursion, one designed to find out just how long the Hunley could remain submerged. They’d closed the hatches and dived to the bottom, coming to rest at a slight cant to starboard. The lieutenant had lit the candle and explained the rules of the exercise. They would wait there on the bottom as the air became harder to breathe. All anyone needed to do to stop the test was shout “up,” and the keel weights would be released. They’d sat on the bottom, waiting . . . and waiting. After twenty minutes, the candle had flickered, then gone out, plunging them all into a darkness so complete that Barton had had trouble telling whether his eyes were open or closed. Dixon had attempted to relight the candle time and time again, but nothing he did could banish the dark.

  But the crewmen continued to wait silent save for the increasingly labored rasp of their breathing. An hour had gone past. The air, thick with the stinks of oil and sweat and fear, had grown more and more foul. The men began panting in short, hard gasps, struggling to pull in oxygen enough to keep them going. The crazy thing was that no one on board had wanted to be the first to cry “up.” It had become a test, not of the bottomed submarine, but of courage and manliness. Barton had wanted desperately to give the signal, to be the one to bring them all back to the surface and air and sunlight, but he’d been training with the others long enough that he’d felt a particular bond with them.

  Hell, if they could stick it out, he could!

  Another hour had crawled by, and Barton had learned that, yes, he could stand the darkness. He’d heard the whispering voices then, too, though distant and muffled, an almost-sound at the thin and ragged edge of hearing. The air became stiflingly
hot, and so oxygen poor that each gasping breath was torture. The men were becoming sleepy as well, yawning uncontrollably and sagging across the crankshaft.

  Unable to stand the torture any longer, Barton had croaked out “up!” at last, but his cry was mingled with the gasped echoes of the other seven crewmen as well, all shouting as if with one voice. Dixon had pulled the master lever forward, releasing the weights, and slowly, sluggishly, the Hunley had drifted off the bottom. The men had cranked with the last dwindling scraps of their strength, then, as Dixon had pulled the plane into the rising position. When the Hunley broke the surface a few minutes later and the hatches were cracked open, the inrush of fresh, salty air had been like a gift from heaven. The men had crowded around the hatches, gulping down deep, shuddering breaths.

  Dixon’s pocket watch had recorded the length of the dive: two hours and thirty-five minutes, an astonishing feat of endurance. When they’d approached the dockside, a startled sentry had informed them that they’d already been declared dead.

  The men on board the Hunley, then, knew how long they could breathe once the submarine submerged. Later tests had demonstrated that the air didn’t last as long if the men were cranking the shaft, but they all knew that the air would last long enough for them to accomplish their mission.

  Knowing that, having experienced that, helped . . . at least so far as the head was concerned. Terror still gripped Barton’s gut, though. And the voices were whispering louder now, loud enough that he could hear them even above the grunts and breathings of his crewmates, the squeak and groan of the shaft.

  Come to us, Tommy. Come to us. You are one of us. . . .

  Already, the air tasted foul and thin.

  “Full ahead, boys,” Dixon ordered. “I’m taking her up for a look-see.”

  Barton felt the deck tilt beneath his feet. Dixon was using the diving planes to angle the submarine upward. So long as the men cranked the screw, Hunley would rise high enough despite the water now filling her ballast tanks for the forward hatch tower to again clear the surface. Lieutenant Dixon, standing with his head and shoulders in the tower, could see out through the glass ports. To hold the Hunley steady at that shallow depth, though, against the drag of the ballast tanks, took every bit of strength and endurance the eight crewmen possessed. When the deck went awash, moonlight streamed down through the aft hatch tower’s portholes, blinding after the unrelieved blackness of a moment before.

  After an agony of time dragged past, Dixon at last gave the order to slow to half ahead, then to stop. The deck dipped down, the moonlight was swallowed by night, and then the deck leveled out once again. Again Hunley cruised ahead slowly through the depths beneath the moonlit surface, drifting with an almost perfect neutral buoyancy. “I could see the Housatonic, boys,” Dixon said. Barton could just make out the lieutenant’s shape, a black, bearlike form against the uncertain light of the candle, beyond the long line of crouching, waiting crewmen. “She’s just riding there at anchor, sweet as you please. She’s showing lights, and there’s no sign of an alarm. So . . . are we ready?”

  “We’re ready!” and “Yes, sir!” chorused back. Barton yelled with the others, feeling the magnetic, almost ecstatic thrill of the moment, the battle lust and excitement filling the narrow confines of the submarine.

  “Right, then!” Dixon shouted. “Let’s sink us a Yankee blockader, for glory and for money! Crank, now! Crank like the Devil himself was after you! Full ahead all!”

  Barton leaned into the crankshaft. All eight crewmen strained at the hand crank, pulling together harder than ever before. They were moving faster. . . .

  And the voices . . . they were there, too, louder, more insistent.

  “Auf Gefechtsstationen!”

  “Boot ist eingependelt, Herr Oberleutnant!”

  “Auf Seerohrtiefe!”

  Strange. Barton could hear the words, but he couldn’t understand them, and that bothered him. If what he was hearing was a product of his own fear-throttled brain, then the words should be in English, shouldn’t they? “Rohr eins fertig! Rohr zwei fertig!”

  “Ja wohl, Herr Oberleutnant! Rohr eins fertig! Rohr zwei fertig!”

  “Rohr eins! Los!”

  “Los!”

  “Torpedo läuft regular. Mein Herr!”

  “Rohr zwei! Los!”

  “Los!”

  It was a dialogue of some sort, he was certain of that much, with orders being shouted and repeated back and forth. One word he recognized: torpedo. Torpedos were kegs of gunpowder anchored in shallow water, with contact exploders to detonate them when an enemy vessel brushed it . . . or they were spar-mounted explosives like the warhead attached to Hunley’s swordfish snout, or to torpedo boats like the Davids. Was someone trying to tell him something about Hunley’s torpedo?

  And again he heard those muffled, far-off sounds: snick-snick . . . wham! Snick-snick . . . wham!

  And the Silent Company was there, within the Hunley and without, more and more of them gathering with each passing second. They were drawn to the frail and tiny craft in their teeming hundreds . . . their thousands . . .

  They watched closely as the Hunley’s crew leaned into the crankshaft, propelling the submarine through the silent water in a driving, four-knot charge. They watched as Dixon turned the wheel, adjusting the craft’s approach slightly to starboard, lining up with the center of the mighty Housatonic.

  And on board the Union vessel they saw the officer of the deck, Acting Master John Crosby, first notice a ripple on the water, a bit of moon dance sparkling on a moving wave, and the swell of some large, dark body gliding beneath the surface. The wave broke, and something that looked like a plank afloat on the water could be seen . . . a plank moving straight toward the Housatonic side.

  Crosby gave the alarm, and Lieutenant Francis Higginson ordered the drummer to beat to quarters. Men scrambled out onto the deck. Orders were shouted . . . “Slip the cable!”

  “Back the engines!” Gunners manned the aft pivot gun, but the unknown attacker, gliding forward like an alligator in the water, was already so close that the gun crew could not depress the weapon’s muzzle enough for a clear shot.

  Sailors and marines armed with rifles raced to the ship’s side, firing at the half-glimpsed monster below. In the last couple of seconds, the attacker seemed to leap forward like a striking snake, closing now with a point on the Housatonic’s starboard side just forward of the mizzenmast and almost perfectly in line with her powder magazine. . . .

  Barton cranked with the others, sweat streaming from his face and upper body now, pain searing his back and arms as he strained against the shaft. “Almost there!” Dixon yelled. “Faster, boys! Faster!”

  And then there was a shock, a splintering jolt that slammed Barton forward against Coleman’s side. An instant later, a detonation erupted off Hunley’s bow, and a giant hand slammed the vessel up and back. Her deck canted wildly, bow high, and screaming crewmen tumbled aft, some catching hold of the crankshaft, others dropping down onto men struggling below. Barton fell onto Maury, and then both men were buried in the avalanche of falling crewmen.

  The deck leveled, though the Hunley rolled heavily now from side to side. Time passed; how much, Barton couldn’t tell. The entire crew had been knocked senseless by that blast, but they came to now, groaning, groping through the darkness. Somewhere forward came the hiss of water.

  “Reverse screw!” Dixon shouted. His voice sounded shaken. He’d been dazed like the others by the savage blast. “Back us out!”

  The candle had gone out, and the submarine’s interior was in perfect darkness. Barton could feel men picking themselves up, however, and crawling forward, returning to their stations. Somewhere in the darkness, a man was sobbing with pain.

  This was one of the critical moments of the mission, he knew, one that had been discussed endlessly at the school at Mount Pleasant. So many things could go wrong. Hunley’s hull could split or her hatches spring open with the shock, flooding her. If she escaped
that, she might be sucked into the gaping hole in the Housatonic’s side, through which the ocean was pouring now in swirling torrents. The Yankee blockade vessel could easily drag the little Hunley down to her doom.

  “Join us. . . . Come to us. . . .”

  “Ja, Tommy. Kommen sie hier!”

  “Come . . .”

  “Da! Da! Voydeetie, tovarisch!”

  Somehow, somehow, several of the battered crewmen began turning the crank, reversing it this time to pull the Hunley backward through the water. Barton regained his seat purely by feel, grasped the turning crank, and managed to add his strength and weight to its movement.

  “We did it, boys!” Dixon cried from the forward hatch. “We did it, by God! The Housatonic’s been holed! She’s settling by the stem . . . rolling onto her port beam! . . . By the Lord Jesus, we did it!”

  Barton could hear other noises now besides the grunts and pants of his comrades, the groans of the wounded, the squeak of the crankshaft. He could hear a kind of rushing gurgle, punctuated by sharp snapping, clattering sounds transmitted clearly through the water. He knew what he was hearing . . . the death shriek of a ship.

  “There’s only two kinds of ships, son,” a new voice told him in the dark. “Submarines and targets. And you’ve just bagged yourself one beauty of a target.”

  “Who . . . who said that? Coleman?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Francis A. Slattery,” the voice said. “USS Scorpion.” USS Scorpion? He looked around wildly, trying to penetrate the darkness. The voice sounded as though it had come from just in front of him. But there was no room. And how could a Yankee have boarded the Hunley!

  “Congratulations, young Barton,” another voice said, this one heavily accented. “Ve velcome you to our noble company. . . .”

  “Welcome . . .” a dozen other voices echoed.

  “What . . . what is this? What’s going on?” It seemed to Barton that he was beginning to see something now, a pale, ghostly glow within which a host of figures were slowly moving toward him. There was a sharp tang of salt and seaweed in the air, and the sound of rushing water.