The U-19's Last Kill

by Jack Finney

  “Figure it out for yourself,” Moreno said, shrugging. “We can either raise the sub and get it operating again or we can’t. If we can’t, that’s that: we’ve had a little fun, we all shake hands and forget it, O.K.?” I nodded, and he said, “All right, say we get it up and operating. Once we do, you know we’ll test it—from bow to stern, over and again and darn carefully, believe me. Then we’ll trial-dive it, probably right in the dock at high tide. A stationary dive at less than conning-tower depth before we ever think of taking her under. We’ll have the motors apart; they’ll be simple enough, you know that. And we’ll see whether there’s any prayer of charging the batteries, and there better be, or darned if I know what we’ll do. We’ll surface-cruise at night a dozen times; and we’ll—— But I don’t have to tell you what we’ll do before we ever go down in her. And when and if we ever do go down for the first time, it’ll be at easy periscope depth, with the ballasts ready to blow, you can bet on that Next, we’ll each take an ordinary skin-diving outfit along, a diving lung like the one you wore today. We’ll trial-dive at a hundred feet, on a dean bottom, and if the main ballasts won’t blow under pressure, we’ll go out the escape hatch. We’ll really test the boat out.”

  “All right.” I nodded impatiently. “That part’s all right.”

  “O.K., then.” Moreno got up, walked into a bedroom that opened off the dining room and came out a moment later with a thick, folded paper. He spread it open on the dining-room table—I saw that it was a marine chart—and beckoned me over. Vic, Linc and Lauffnauer came over and sat down around the table across from Moreno.

  “Our submarine operating, do you doubt that we can reach exactly this point?” Moreno said; his thick forefinger touched the chart just under a tiny, neatly penciled cross on the blueprinted area representing a portion of the Atlantic Ocean. “There’s nothing to the navigating,” he said. “We’ll use a gyrocompass if we can install one. Or we can do it by stars and by sun; if the chronometer’s rusted out, we’ll buy our own. We’ll leave the dock at first dark and travel surfaced at just above negative buoyancy, only the lower out. And at eleven o’clock on the morning of May seventeenth”—his finger tapped the little cross several times—“there’s where I guarantee we’ll be. That O.K. with you?” he added softly, glancing at me.

  “Sure.” I said just as quietly. “If we get the sub operating, a Naval Reserve crew could do it on a weekend training cruise. Everything’s fine up to there”—I nodded toward the little penciled cross, glancing around at the others. “Because up to there”—I tapped the little cross—“we’re depending on ourselves only. The worst that can happen is a Coast Guard cutter spots us and runs us in. Then we hang our heads, scrape our feet and explain that we’ve been bad boys, and we’re sorry; they can’t hang us for that.

  “But after this point”—again I reached down to tap the penciled cross—“they can. And will. Success or failure—and maybe our lives—depends on guessing precisely how some stranger is going to behave! Now, what kind of dam-fool scheme is that?” I glanced angrily around at the others.

  Moreno said quietly, “It’s not a guess,” and Lauffnauer nodded in agreement.

  “What is a submarine?” Moreno said, glancing from one to another of us. No one said anything. “It’s a gun,” he said softly. “A submarine is nothing but a real big pistol—big enough to hold men, food, fuel and tons of machinery. And it’ll move and shoot on the surface or below it. But still—all it is is a big pistol. Loaded with blanks in this case, but still loaded. And in this case it’s pointed, actually, at only one mar—and that man a stranger, as you said, with everything depending on how he will act. You make good sense.

  “But maybe you’ll believe me when I tell you this: I’d have no part of any scheme that depended on guessing what some darn-fool stranger would do with a gun pointed at him. But this ain’t no ordinary stranger, mister.” For a moment he stared at me, then suddenly barked out, “Think about it! I don’t know who he is, what he looks like or even what his name is. But I don’t have to. All I have to know is that there aren’t any more than twenty-five people in the whole world like him. He’s one of a darned special group. And that means there’s only one possible way he can act—I don’t care what he’s like personally! In this setup there’s only one thing he can possibly let himself do. I know that. Frank knows it.” Very quietly he added, “And you ought to know it too.” For a moment, glancing around the table, he stared at us, then he grinned suddenly. “I’m going for a swim,” he said pleasantly, got up and walked toward the front door. Over his shoulder he called, “Think about it, Brittain; take your time. We’ve got all the rest of the afternoon.”

  For a while Vic and I lay on the beach, facing the ocean, chins on our folded forearms, watching Moreno swim powerfully far out in the water. Presently Rosa came out and walked to the water, pulling a white rubber cap over her hair. She waded right in, then struck out, swimming on a course that took her away from Moreno. Two or three hundred yards out she turned on her back and lay flouting on the swell.

  I stood up then, walked to the water and swam out to her; I wanted to find out about this girl. I reached her; then floating on the slow swell beside her, our feet and hands moving occasionally to keep afloat, I made a little conversation—about weather, the beach and what a nice day it was. She responded politely enough for a time; her English accented, but good and quite fluent. Then she said abruptly, “All right, now what do you want to know?”

  “About you,” I said. “Why are you in this?”

  She shrugged, lying there floating in the water. Then she gestured with her chin toward Moreno, two hundred yards away; he was swimming toward us, I saw, “He told you,” she said.

  “Yeah, your boat and the dock But why? I still want to know.”

  “What is there to explain?” She was laughing at me, mockingly, with her eyes. “Isn’t money enough reason?”

  “Maybe; maybe it is. What do you want it for?”

  “Oh”—again she shrugged—“fur coats, diamond rings, jewelry. Don’t you think I will look nice in them?”

  “Sure,” I said, nodding, and—I couldn’t help it—I glanced at her fine, full figure awash in the swell. “Though you don’t need them.”

  “No!” she said angrily, and her arms and legs thrashed as she lifted her head and shoulders from the water to glare at me. “I do not! Now or ever! Listen, you. You have never lived—and survived—in a poor country! You do not know what it is like; you don’t! You send CARE packages, and you are sorry, but you don’t know.” Her arms moving slowly, keeping afloat, she stared at me for a moment, then said quietly, “But I lived in Italy—as a child in a war and afterward. I saw small children roaming in packs like animals, hunting for food. It is better now, but still worse than anything you ever knew. So what will I do—with money? I will take it, and I will spend it. Where it will do more good than you have ever thought of. You and the greedy rest of them up there”—she nodded toward shore and the little house.

  “O.K.” I nodded. “So now I know.”

  “Maybe you do. And maybe not But it doesn’t matter, no one could keep me out of this; Moreno tried. I was to stay home and wait, knitting perhaps.” She laughed.

  I was staring at her; nothing occurred to me to say in answer. Then I heard t little splash and looked up past Rosa. Moreno was swimming toward us, no more than a dozen yards away, and Rosa smiled and turned to him. “What took you so long?” she called sweetly. “There is no telling what might have happened with Hugh and me—out here in the ocean.” And Moreno’s face flushed.

  He glanced at me, a look of pure hostility and warning, then gestured savagely at Rosa with his chin. “Come on,” he said roughly, angrily, and she nodded, her Taco blandly obedient, and began to swim with him toward the shore.

  I gave them a start of a hundred yards or so, then swam slowly to shore.

  When I got back, taking my time, Rosa was in the house, and Moreno was on the porch, dressed for the
city. It was time for him to go back, and a few moments later Rosa came out too.

  You do your important thinking, I’ve noticed—or at least I do—when you’re not consciously thinking at all. But now as Rosa and Moreno came down the porch steps, a tiny excitement rose up in me, physically felt in the pit of my stomach. For now I knew, without any conscious previous thought, that, astonishing as this fantastic scheme was, it could work. It might; it was just possible; and I called to Moreno, and he stopped and stood waiting for me on the sand, his eyes and face expressionless.

  I walked up to him and nodded shortly. “All right,” I said. “I’m in.”

  He looked me up and down, face still expressionless, then nodded. “O.K.,” he said, “see you later,” then gestured to Rosa with his chin, and they walked on, down the beach toward the ferry.

  At six-thirty, during the last hour of full daylight, Frank Lauffnauer changed to trunks in the bedroom off the living room, white I got dressed again. He finished changing, then carefully wrapped his clothes in a big striped beach towel, “Mind taking these for me, Hugh?” he said, and I took the bundle.

  “Take it easy out there,” I said. “The light won’t be so good, will it?”

  “It’ll do,” he said and grinned at me.

  We left the house, the four of us, Vic locking the door behind us, and walked down to the beached boat carrying Frank’s diving equipment, including a fresh tank of air and a good, powerful underwater light. The surf was breaking a little harder than it had been earlier, but the swell beyond it was still smooth; it was still bright daylight, too, though it wouldn’t last long.

  We rowed out toward the sub. Vic in the stern watching his particular set of landmarks to get us there. Linc was rowing, and I began sounding with the anchor presently; when it showed ninety feet, I snubbed the anchor rope, and we all began watching for the white-pine buoy Moreno had attached to the sub. Frank spotted it first, and we rowed over, and I anchored beside it. All this time no one had talked very much, and no one said anything now; Frank Lauffnauer was about to do a dangerous and frightening thing. He was going into the sub through her escape hatch if he could.

  Helping him on with his equipment—tank, lung, weight belt, flippers—none of us made the meaningless gesture of offering to take Frank’s place; Frank was the man to do this. He’d been instructed and trained in using this very hatch—though not to enter, but to leave the sub by; and in 1918, when the sub was new and he was a very young man. Now, years later, to try entering that sub, alone and far under the ocean, not knowing what he’d find even if he succeeded——I didn’t envy him, and was willing to admit that to myself.

  He stood up in the boat now, fastening the underwater light to his weight belt; then he grinned at us, nodding a good-by, and let himself fall over the side. The rest of us, kneeling at the prow of the boat, watched him sink steadily down in the water, following the anchor line, till he faded from sight.

  The escape hatch of the U-19—Frank had described it—was a simple device; a steel lube set into the topside of the submarine, just big enough to hold a man, crouched. At the top of the tube was a watertight hatch cover. Inside the submarine at the tube’s bottom end was another round watertight door. To escape from the submarine, the idea was, a man crawled into the escape tube from the bottom, inside the sub. Clinging to a riveted hand and foot hold inside it, he pulled the hatch dosed underneath his feet, or someone inside did it for him. Then he turned a valve which admitted sea water into the tiny space he was crouched in. The water came in, compressing the air into the top of the escape tube. Presently the inside and outside pressures on the hatch cover just over his head were equalized, and the man in the tube could push open the hatch and leave the submarine. Whether he ever reached the top or, if he did, whether he reached it alive, was another question; it depended on a lot of things, any or which could go wrong.

  Frank must be at that hatch right now, I knew; he was about to climb inside it, and, crouching there in the tube in the water, he would pull the lid dosed over him. The thought of it made me actually shiver, sitting up on the surface with Linc and Vic in the boat. With the upper hatch cover dosed over Frank as he dung to the brackets inside the tube, he would unfasten and shove open the round metal door at his feet, if he could. And then he would see one of two things. Frank would see and fed the water in which he crouched drop away from him, out the bottom of the tube down into the submarine. Or the water would simply stay where it was, unmoving—because the submarine, long since undoubtedly, was filled with sea water already. Frank would open the hatch just over his head then and leave the little sub behind him forever.

  If that’s what happened, if Frank reappeared climbing up our anchor rope in the next few minutes, our adventure was over before it had really begun. For with the sub full of sea water, we couldn’t possibly raise her, and there’d be no reason to do so anyway; she’d undoubtedly be ruined in that case.

  But there was hope of raising her if Frank—and it might be happening underneath us right now!—felt the water in the escape hatch drain away from him. There’d be hope then, and fearful danger for Frank. For in that case he’d climb down into the submarine. He would keep his lung on; he would not try to breathe the dead air through which he moved. All oxygen would be gone from it, we believed—used up long since in corrosion. This, together with the moisture-absorbing coating inside her, was why we hoped to find not too much corrosion throughout the submarine if we raised her; for no new air, no additional oxygen could have entered the little sub since the day she went under.

  Moving through that dead air, his light on, breathing from the tank on his back, Frank would blow the sub’s ballast tanks if he could. For that was the final if; had the valves of the air flasks held too? Was there pressure enough still to blow the water from the ballast tanks and allow the U-19 to rise to the top once again? Almost superstitiously I said yes; if one set of valves had held and the sub wasn’t flooded, then our luck would be good; the valves of the air flasks would also have held. It wasn’t true—it didn’t follow, at least—but I believed it.

  It occurred to me suddenly that the first question was already answered; we sat staring down into the water along the white slanting line of our anchor rope—and Frank hadn’t reappeared, climbing up through the water toward us! Vic said it aloud. “He’s inside the sub now!” he muttered excitedly.

  “Unless he’s trapped in the escape hatch,” Linc said. “Can’t get in or out.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” I said, and Linc shrugged.

  Several minutes passed; we heard the sound of Moreno’s diesel and looked up to see the big fishing boat slowly approaching through the last of the daylight, perhaps a quarter mile away. This was the worst moment of all; I knew, I suddenly knew that Frank was inside the submarine he’d left so many years before. Sitting there in the boat a hundred feet above him, with Moreno’s big boat chugging steadily toward us, I could see Frank.

  In my mind, moving through the pitch-blackness of that ancient little sub by the beam of his light—a strange, weird figure peering through Ins mask, flippers still on his feet, glancing around him, glancing occasionally at the watch on his wrist, waiting till it was time to blow the ballast tanks if he could.

  This was the worst time of all, for if the tanks didn’t blow, I wondered if Frank could escape. Would the escape hatch work properly? Would it fill with sea water again, as it should? I thought so. The flood valve had been left open when the sub was submerged. But what if, somehow, it would not flood again? Could Frank nevertheless force open the hatch cover just over his head against the pressure of a hundred feet of water lying on top of it? Suppose he were trapped forever in the little sub he’d left forty years before, waiting for the air in the tank on his back to be exhausted?

  We sat in the boat, smoking, watching Moreno bring the big fishing boat steadily closer, listening to the low, steady growl of his big diesel. I stared down the anchor rope again, wondering what Frank was doing at this i
nstant. Suddenly I pictured him trapped between the two metal doors of the escape hatch, shouting and screaming for help there under the water. Moreno’s boat swelled in size, growing fast, heading directly toward us, and I muttered angrily, “Be ready to jump if the darn fool runs us down.”

  He passed us close, deliberately, I knew, rocking our boat, and slowly continued on till he was perhaps a hundred yards to the west of us, and between us and the shore. He reversed his engine then, the propeller thrashing, and I heard the splash of his anchor. The engine died, and in the new silence I turned to look at the sun, low over the dunes behind us. We were timing this, or trying to, to avoid attracting any more attention than we had to—none at all with reasonable luck, for there weren’t many people on the island this time of year. We couldn’t wait for full dark, but we were cutting it as close as we could.

  The big boat in position now, anchored well dear of the sub. Linc hauled up our anchor, and we rowed dear, too, and lay drifting on the gentle swell then, a dozen yards from the side of Moreno’s boat. Moreno had turned on his running lights, and he stood watching us, leaning on the rail, his face green in the reflected rays of the light on the side. “Think I was going to run you down?” he said, grinning.

  “Sure,” I said, “give you half a chance. Lauffnauer’s down”—I nodded over my shoulder. I heard a step behind Moreno then, and turned to see Rosa appear from the little cabin, She walked to the rail, glancing casually down at us; she was wearing dark slacks and a dark, turtle-neck sweater. Then, without speaking—she wasn’t interested in us now—she turned to stare out over the water toward the floating white board under which lay the submarine.

  Now we waited in absolute silence, no one saying even a word. It was dusk now on the slow swell of the ocean, the air suddenly chill, and I was fearfully glad that I wasn’t Frank Lauffnauer.