by Jack Finney
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 his 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 instant. 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 clear of the sub, Linc hauled up our anchor, and we rowed clear, 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.
Suddenly, loudly, Moreno said, "It's time, damn it, it's time! What's the matter with him!" No one answered, and we waited for I don't know how long then — it might have been a minute, a half minute, or it might have been four or five. The sun had set now, and, though it was still daylight in the sky, the first star was suddenly visible, and here on the face of the ocean it was more night than day. I must have looked away for a moment without realizing it, for it was the sound that I heard first — the sound, not loud, yet enormous and strangely prolonged, of a vast object gently breaking the surface of the water a hundred yards away; the sound, it must be, of a whale emerging on the surface. It was a sort of enormous, gentle plop, and, as I jerked my head up to stare, I was grinning, for I had already heard the familiar sound of water draining from the decks of a submarine. And then, there she lay, out on the water; her deck was nearly awash, but the fuzzed silhouette of the conning tower of the U-19 lay above the surface, black against the darkening horizon, in the center of a widening ring on the smooth surface of the ocean.
We yelled; the exultant sounds tore at the linings of our throats, and we thumped one another's backs till the boat rocked. Then Vic was at the oars, grinning wildly, heading for the sub. Moreno shouted angrily then, and Vic braked, shoving on the oars. Then he rowed toward the big boat instead; as we passed under her stern, Moreno dropped a great coil of line — new inch-and-a-half Manila hawser — into our boat. I heard a dull, metallic clank out on the water, and swung around in my seat to see Frank Lauffnauer standing in the conning tower of the sub. There was another clank as he quickly closed the hatch cover at his feet again, then he pulled off his mask and mouthpiece. He yelled at us exultantly. "Gott sei Dank!" he shouted over the smooth water, and Vic began to row then, heaving hard on the oars, through the new darkness toward the U-19.
Behind us I heard the whine of the electric anchor motor on Moreno's boat, then the big diesel rumbled to life again, and now Moreno was ready to maneuver if the sub drifted too close. His lights could be seen from shore, of course, but Rosa had made a point of mentioning to those few neighbors who were on the island that she and her "husband" — that was Moreno — had just bought a cabin cruiser. They were bringing it over tonight to take the rest of us home. Anyone seeing Moreno's lights now would figure that that's what was happening out here, I felt sure. I doubted that anyone could see the sub's dark tower from shore, and the bulk of Moreno's boat lay between it and shore anyway.
At the side of the sub Linc and I helped Frank — he was shivering, his teeth chattering, but grinning — down into the boat, clapping him gently on the back, murmuring our congratulations. Linc began helping him out of his gear then, and he gave him a pint bottle of whisky to nip at. Vic rowed to the prow of the wet, moss-coated little sub, and I slipped an end of the big hawser through her towing eye and pulled about fifty feet of the
heavy line on through it.
We rowed back to the boat then. Frank and the others climbed up on deck, and I handed up Frank's clothes. There was a moment then — I in the rowboat staring up at the others, lined up at the rail looking down at me — when we just grinned at each other, almost foolishly, like a bunch of kids. What the odds had been against us up to this point, what the chances of the U-19's valves giving way long before this point, I didn't know, and certainly I no longer cared, nor did any of us. We brought it off! l thought, grinning up at the others. Then I turned to stare out over the darkened water at the dim, almost invisible silhouette of the U-19's conning tower. And now we've got our submarine, I thought. Then I heard the chatter of Frank Lauffnauer's teeth, and when I turned to look back at him and at the others, there along the rail, I was no longer smiling at the thought.
TO BE CONTINUED
The Saturday Evening Post, August 29, 1959, 232(9):32-33, 74-75, 77-80
The U-19's Last Kill, Part Three
Frank Lauffnauer had just done the impossible. In 1918, as a young German sailor, he had abandoned a small submarine in 100 feet of water off Fire Island, New York. Now, forty years later, he found the sub and re-entered her through the escape hatch. With all the odds against him, he managed to blow her ballast tanks and bring the U-19 to the surface.
The sub was part of Lauffnauer's incredible plan to seize a fortune of $1,500,000. His confederates — Vic, Linc, Rosa, Moreno and Hugh — were standing by, ready to tow the sub to a secret dock. Here, in Hugh's words, is what happened that eventful night.
III
Someone had to ride the sub, and I'd volunteered. There was nothing I or anyone else could do if she started to founder, except to sing out; but if the towline broke, Moreno's boat would shoot ahead for no telling how many dozens of yards before he could reverse her, and the sub might be lost in the dark. In that case we needed someone aboard with a flashlight, to locate the sub again. I'd volunteered, I didn't quite know why; her deck awash, there was no place to ride except the little conning tower, and it would be slimed and wet and scaly with rust.
I stood waiting in the rowboat; forward in the fishing boat I saw Vic and Linc sprawled on the deck. Just above me, Frank Lauffnauer stood quickly dressing, staring back at the ancient German sub he'd served in more than half a lifetime before.
Rosa stood on deck, leaning against a wall of the little cabin, and I saw Moreno come out and say something to her. I couldn't hear what it was, and in the faint, reflected gleam of the running lights I saw her shrug. He murmured something again, and she replied — in Italian, I realized now — then Rosa stood up, walked to the door of the cabin and, ducking her head, stepped down inside. Moreno followed, said something else in Italian, and I heard Rosa reply angrily; a moment later she stepped out, her arms draped with a bulk I couldn't make out and walked toward me. She stopped at the rail, and I saw she was carrying oilskins, boots and a blanket. "I'm going with you," she said quietly, "if you don't mind."
"Sure," I said after a moment, surprised. "Glad to have you." Then Moreno stepped to the rail and dropped my gear, almost flinging it into the bottom of the boat, and walked away. Rosa laughed aloud at him, handed her gear down to me, then swung a leg over the rail, and I reached up to help her into the boat.
I rowed to the sub then, and, sitting in the boat, we struggled awkwardly into our boots and oilskins. Holding to the conning tower, I helped Rosa up into it, then passed her the blankets. I tied the boat to the conning-tower rail with a dozen feet of line, then climbed in beside Rosa and hailed Moreno's boat.
The diesel rumbling at low speed then, Moreno very carefully maneuvered his boat, keeping the towline slack till he lay directly ahead of the drifting sub. Then he moved forward, very cautiously and very slowly, and the arc of the heavy doubled towline slowly lifted from the water. Slowly the arc flattened, we heard the creak of the gradually tightening line, then it was taut and straight above the water. Carefully and evenly Moreno opened the throttle, and almost imperceptibly we were moving. We moved ahead then at a steady eight or nine knots, I judged.
There was no moon yet, and it would be less than a quarter moon when finally it appeared. This night had been chosen for that reason, among others — from any more than thirty or forty feet, only the boat's running lights would be visible. The danger of our sub's being seen by anyone else was almost nonexistent.
Rosa's oilskins rustled, and I glanced down to see her tugging something from her pocket; then she brought out a vacuum bottle full of coffee, and I grinned. "You're a bright girl," I said, and she unscrewed the plastic top, then poured it half full.
"There is no cream and no sugar," she said, offering me the cup. "Do you mind?"
"No, I like it that way. Go ahead, have yours, then I'll have mine."
"We will have it together," she said, shrugging. "Unless you wish not to; you Americans worry so about germs."
"Suits me," I said, and she took a sip or two, then offered me the cup, and I had some; it was good coffee, nice and hot. Then I passed the cup back to her.
"It's not too comfortable here," I said, "and it won't get any better. Why'd you come out, Rosa? O.K. if I call you Rosa?"
She smiled, shifting her position a little. "This would be a strange place to be formal; yes, call me Rosa. I will say Hugh. I came out here because I did not wish to be there" — she nodded at the vague shape of the boat ahead.
"Was Moreno annoying you?"
She laughed contemptuously. "Not as you mean. He is careful; he wants to marry me, so he speaks and looks carefully; I made him understand that he must. But he hungers after me all the time; he cannot hide it. And I am sick of it." Then she stopped laughing. "I am a widow, Hugh, of four months; I do not want men just now. In time I will again, and when I do, I will welcome attention."
"You must have been in love with him."
"Love, love. He was my husband, and I was his wife. Whether I loved him is less important than you think."
"O.K., O.K.," I said. "You're twenty-two or -three, no older, and I'm twenty-six. But you talk as though you were fifty and I were fifteen."
She just smiled — laughing at me again — and didn't say anything, and I felt my face flush angrily, then I laughed.
All night we moved through the water at a steady eight or nine knots, and not once did we see a boat or even a set of running lights. A half hour before daylight we curved in toward the shore. I couldn't see anything different about this stretch of coast line. Several hundred yards out Moreno reduced speed so slowly and expertly that, while the towline went slack, it never touched the water until we were nearly dead stopped. He shut down the diesel then, the two boats drifting, and it was the sub, all her bulk under the water, that stopped first, of course.
We waited then for dawn. Once Moreno had to start up his engine, and tow us in a wide sweeping circle back to our starting point — the two boats had drifted too close together. At the very first hint of whitening sky to the east I hauled the rowboat up to the conning tower, then Rosa and I rowed back to the big boat, and she got out. Vic climbed down into the rowboat, a thick coil of half-inch line looped around his forearm, and we rowed — fast, now — to the sub. We hailed the boat, and they pulled in the towline; then Vic knotted an end of his line to the towing eye, and I rowed for shore, Vic paying out the line as we moved.
On shore in the first faint light I could see the vague bulk of the dock I was heading for. We reached it, and I saw that it was typical of its kind. It looked like a house or perhaps a small-sized barn, set on piles in the water at the very edge of the shore. It had a steep, gabled roof, shingled with wood — old, weathered and a little green with mold. There were several large dusty windows under each of its eaves, and the entire end of the structure facing the water was big, double, wooden doors, their bottoms a foot or so under water just now. Standing in the boat, Vic unlocked the padlock and, with me backstroking the boat, he pulled the doors open. Inside, two feet above the water — the tide w
as high now — two platforms, each about four feet wide, extended the length of the building, one on each side and about a dozen feet apart. Between them lay water, and at the far end of the building the two platforms were connected by a third which extended across the back of the building.
We tied up the boat and climbed out onto the dock. Then, the line over our shoulders, we began to pull — and we didn't move. The sub a dead weight in the water, we could not overcome her inertia. Our upper bodies almost parallel with the dock planking, the rope biting into our shoulders, we heaved and strained till the sweat poured into our eyes — and didn't gain a single inch. The sky was lightening fast, and now I saw a chain hoist hanging from the center beam, about where you'd need it to work on the boat's engine. We found a fourteen-foot plank lying against a side wall, shoved an end of it over to the opposite side, and, using it as a bridge, I got under the hoist, caught the chain and lowered it enough to tie on our line. And now, the chain rattling through the pulleys, we started the little sub moving easily. Once it started, we pulled it by hand, the little conning tower moving steadily through the white dawn toward us. It had dried during the night, and now I saw that under the slime that coated it, it was red with rust.
There were a couple of fending poles lying on nails in the wall, and, while Vic stood on the platform at the far end of the building hauling in the line, I guided the little sub, shoving on her side with the pole, into the slip.
In two trips with the rowboat Vic ferried in the others, and then — with Rosa's boat anchored two hundred yards beyond low-tide line — we all stood lined up on the dock in the first full, bright daylight, staring in silence at the ancient little submarine. "Well, here she is," Linc murmured then. "Next question — will she ever operate again?"