“No more repair jobs on this dock till the strike’s over ashore, Hudson,” I warned him as I left, “only cleaning and painting. You tell the skipper of the next ship we take that if he opens up anything on his hull, he’ll have to put it together himself before we’re ready to flood down, unless he wants the sea coming in on him. I can’t count on getting any more work done ashore.”
“Aye, Commander, I’ll see to that,” Hudson assured me. After telling the dockmaster, Spanner, that he was to start flooding down as soon as both Hudson and the painters were through, I left. This was May 13, the sixth day since the dock had started operating, and we would be finishing our third ship. We were doing all right. As the Lord Grey pulled away, I looked down the length of the dock at the horde of Eritreans beneath the partly painted hull, chanting and dancing as they painted. They had not slowed down any yet; there was still all the savage madness of the jungle in their chant. I wondered if I could get half a dozen tom-toms somewhere to help the illusion.
Back on the sunken dry dock, I watched the gauges as the afternoon dragged along, and only the pounding of the compressors and the metallic ring of steel on steel, as Smith and Schott banged away at the leaks, broke the silence. No diver was dressed; no air leaks had shown up in the water yet, requiring attention.
Except for Tony and Lloyd Williams, watching the compressors, the two men working on leaks, and Hoffman, the electrician, rigging additional lights, everyone else was in what scant shade he could find, resting after two strenuous days and nights. I congratulated myself that I had pushed the job so hard the first two days while we had plenty of help. All the tasks requiring mule-hauling we had managed to get done while still we had all the laborers; now, I imagined, the little salvage crew left could handle what more troubles turned up while we pushed down compressed air and waited for results.
At 5:00 P.M., Spanner started to flood down the other dock and I went over to watch, intending to let him handle the undocking. Nothing unusual happened. The ship floated smoothly off the blocks as the dock went down. Spanner, more excitable in action than I liked to see any dockmaster, handled her out and clear with nothing going wrong, however. From there, Lieutenant Fairbairn, already on the ship’s bridge, took over and with the Hsin Rocket and the Pauline Moller as usual towing, piloted her out of the harbor to the outer roadstead from where she would sail for Alexandria in the morning. Altogether, docking was getting to be a completely routine operation now for all hands.
When I got back on the sunken dry dock, it was getting dark and supper was in progress. We had rigged up an informal galley just forward of our port side air compressors; Hoffman had wired it for electric percolators and a small grill. There was no cook; everybody was welcome to cook for himself or to use a can opener as he preferred, so far as our stock of canned goods and other provisions from on shore permitted. The menu was far inferior to what was served in the contractor’s messhall ashore for American employees, but so far as I was concerned, it beat what I usually got at the Royal Naval Officers’ Mess. And I shouldn’t wonder that Tony, who was also invited to help himself, found it considerably better than his accustomed Italian fare.
Darkness fell, our scattered lights came on, and we started our second night on the sunken dock. An unearthly silence enveloped both the harbor and the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, broken only by the throbbing of our three air compressors. The gleam of our quivering lights was the only illumination visible anywhere over the dark waters of the harbor. The heat was as oppressive as ever; now that the sun was gone, not a breath of air stirred anywhere. Gripped in the heat, the silence, and the darkness, I moved cautiously about the wrecked decks, unable to escape the eerie feeling of being part of a scene wholly out of this world.
A little later, we made another attempt to restart the stalled Fiat compressor, but it was futile, in spite of cranking by half a dozen volunteers. Rather than wear everyone out, I called off the attempt, determined to wait now till the strike was over and I could get some Italian diesel expert out from the machine shop. At any rate, I doubted we were losing much; probably the Ingersoll-Rands were pushing down practically all the air that was being compressed.
By 8:00 P.M., the pressure in our compartments had risen to over four pounds and here and there the deck plating could be seen to be bulging slightly from the air pressing up below. Reed eyed these evidences of weakness dubiously, then asked, “How much pressure do you figure you need to start her up, Commander?”
“There’s no telling exactly, Bill. I don’t know the weight of this dock, and I can’t even guess how much it will take to tear loose if she’s stuck in the mud. But I figure that around six pounds should give her buoyancy enough to start lifting. She probably won’t start with any less; how much more it may take, nobody knows.”
“Well,” said Reed, “if she’s bulging on four pounds pressure, I’m damned if I know how she’ll act with six. We ought to start shoring those weak spots down right now, but there’s nothing we can shore against up here except the sky. What are you going to do?”
“Let her bulge,” I suggested. “We can’t do anything else. I’ve looked at those spots; there are only a few of them where the stiffeners below decks are wide spaced. That flat plating can bulge quite a bit yet without anything letting go. I’m not concerned.”
We set the same compressor watches as the night before. Tony insisted he would stay up alone all night and tend the compressors, but I refused to let him. He was, however, permitted to take Jay Smith’s place on the mid-watch, since Smith, worn out from his efforts in the fierce heat at caulking leaks, looked all in.
Most of the men turned in early that night to try to catch up on lost sleep. Since I slept very little anyway, I continued on my rounds reading the air gauges till nearly 11:00 P.M., by which time the pressures had risen to about five pounds all around and everything was still holding together.
At 11:00 P.M., leaving the watch to Lloyd Williams, I crawled under my mosquito netting, to rest at least, if not to sleep, for I had lots on my mind. What progress, I wondered, had been made that day in Asmara on ending the strike? If it lasted very long, with Rommel all the while getting closer to Egypt to encourage them, we would give the Fascisti still at large among our workmen excellent ammunition for a campaign of sabotage and disaffection that could hamstring the Naval Base very effectively. Our success so far had rested in great degree on the co-operation of’ our Italian mechanics; if I lost that I was at least badly waterlogged if not wholly sunk, for I had no American mechanics at all in the naval shops.
But the throbbing of the air compressors brought my straying thoughts back to matters closer to my cot. I thought I could detect an erratic note in the pulsations of our sole remaining Fiat. Yes, it was so—that laboring semi-diesel was beginning to miss fire—it probably wouldn’t last much longer. Perhaps if it stalled, Tony might have more luck in restarting it than he’d had with its mate. I hoped so.
Once again as I tossed uneasily about in the stifling heat, I dreamily watched the stars. Being close to the Equator, practically the whole panorama of the heavens was unfolded above me as the earth slowly revolved—the southern constellations as well as the northern ones to which I was more accustomed. The southern stars, I thought, were overrated; there was more beauty in the constellations always visible in the northern hemisphere. I speculated idly on why God had seen fit to bestow most of His blessings north of the Equator—in the skies as well as on earth. But I saw no answer.
One A.M. finally rolled round, and armed again with my bottle of water and my flashlight, I rolled out to begin again my night watch. This time I was backed up by Melvin Barry, diver, and Tony when I relieved Williams, who pointed out to me the erratic firing of the last Fiat before he turned in.
“She’ll probably fold up soon,” commented Lloyd. “I guess she needs another overhaul after two days’ running.”
I indicated to Tony that he should pay special attention to that machine, but there was no need. Already he
was fiddling with the fuel injection, trying to get smoother firing.
I started my initial tour of the pressure gauges, going aft on the port side first. The gauges were cheering; the needles were hovering around the six-pound marks on the dials. We had done a fair job, evidently, on caulking leaks. I judged we must be retaining inside the dock to push out water through those vast holes in her bottom at least half the compressed air we were pushing in at the top.
When I went forward on the port side wall to check the gauges there, I was surprised to find Bill Reed huddled on deck in the darkness, intently looking over the side at the water. Reed heard me coming, and glanced up at me as I turned my flashlight on him.
“Commander,” whispered Reed, as if afraid a louder tone might upset matters, “look! See that big mussel shell just above the water line on that vertical guide roller? Half an hour ago it was just in the water; now it’s an inch out. The dock’s starting to come up!”
I looked where Reed pointed. There was an unusually large mussel clinging to the guard roller at the dock entrance which Reed evidently was using as a marker. It was undoubtedly wet, though it was now a little clear of the surface and out of water.
“It doesn’t mean anything, Bill,” I replied after sighting it. “The tide’s probably fallen a little and uncovered it; you know while there’s not much tide here, there’s still a little—maybe a foot or so rise and fall.”
“Tide, hell!” whispered Reed emphatically. “She’s coming up, I tell you! It was high tide when you undocked that last ship; then it fell till midnight when it was low. I’ve been watching here ever since you turned in. At midnight the tide turned and she was rising a little on them oysters till half an hour ago when the water quit rising on them and started to drop! She’s rising!”
I sat down on the hot deck plates alongside Reed and carefully sighted his impromptu marker, that large mussel shell dimly visible in the glow of our electric lights on the water. I swung my flashlight on it to illuminate it more sharply. Reed was right about the tide, I remembered. Such as it was, it should now be running flood, not ebbing. In a few minutes my heart began to pound. That mussel shell was slowly but without question increasing its distance from the glassy surface of the lake of water between the two dock walls. The impossible was happening before our eyes! My scheme was working; only two and a half days after we had begun operations, that “long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful” operation on which “all idea of salvage had been abandoned,” was showing success. The terribly blasted large Italian dry dock was coming up!
CHAPTER
28
BY MORNING, THE SCENERY IN THE naval harbor of Massawa had changed appreciably. Anybody looking out over the water could see (and even without looking, could smell) the difference. The Italian dry dock already protruded several feet above the water, a very prominent object, and was steadily rising fore and aft.
On board the dock, my salvage men were practically delirious with looking at their handiwork—no very beautiful object, crusted with a heavy layer of barnacles and mussels which began to stink horribly when the sun hit them—but beautiful beyond any words in the eyes of those few who had struggled to make the sight possible.
There is no need to go into the details of the intensive, salvage work necessary around the clock over the next few days to keep the dock rising; they would interest only salvage men. A few only will be mentioned.
The second Italian Fiat compressor folded up in the heat and quit on us that morning. Tony broke his arm trying to start it again when the crank suddenly snapped back and struck him. But he refused to quit; after a brief journey ashore where Captain Plummer reset the broken bones, splinted his arm, and then bandaged it up for him, Tony was back on the rising dry dock with his arm in a sling, tending the two panting Ingersoll-Rands which nobody could drive him from. They were his children; with his one good arm, he patted them affectionately. On their continued hammering down of air rested now the continued rise of the dock; Tony, sure no one else could do it as well as he, would not from then on, night or day, let anyone else service those two all-important machines. His brief periods of rest he snatched by flopping on the hot deck alongside his charges. And every time I came by him, Tony pointed out excitedly to me the new inches the dock had risen since my last round, fearful lest I should not have observed them.
The strike ashore lasted till next day, when it was ended by the contractor sending down a heavily guarded car from Asmara loaded with money, something that could as well have been done weeks before. I didn’t see it; Byrne told me there was nearly a riot trying to keep the hundreds of assorted natives and Italians lined up in some order so they might be checked off as they were paid. Most of them (not all) went back to work, once they had their money.
The ending of the strike had now a special and a new interest for me. If we on the dock were not all to be asphyxiated by the stench rising from mussels rotting beneath an incandescent sun, the foul sides of the dry dock had to be scraped continuously as it floated up. If ever those huge dock walls, high as four-storied buildings, long as two city blocks end to end, covered all over with barnacles and mussels, were exposed, unscraped, all at once to the sun, the decaying mussels would shortly drive all hands from the dock.
I had to have a big gang of natives to scrape off barnacles as the dock, day by day, rose further. With the strike over, I could get them. Soon all other noises on the dock, including the compressors, were drowned out by the cries of Eritreans, working all around the dock walls from floats, scraping away for dear life.
There would, of course, have been an end to the further rising of that dry dock after a couple of days, once the compressed air was forced so far down inside the side walls as to reach the level of the holes in the blasted floor of the dock where it could escape freely into the water still covering the whole floor—except for one thing. That one thing I knew of from the beginning and had counted on to finish the lifting for me. The eighth and last bottom compartment forming the floor of the dock at the stern was undamaged. The bomb placed there had failed to explode, so the British had reported on their survey, and so I had found in our own diving.
There were over 1200 tons of buoyancy in that one undamaged but still wholly submerged bottom compartment, fortunately for me, located at the very stern. When the buoyant side walls had lifted the dry dock off the bottom as far as they could and began to blow compressed air out in geysers through the bomb holes in the seven damaged bottom compartments, I went to work on that undamaged stern compartment. It was first isolated from all the other compartments by closing off the valves connecting it to the common piping systems of the dry dock. Then we expelled practically all the water from inside it by putting more air pressure on it than on any of its mates to force the water out through its still open sea valves.
That did the trick for us—the buoyancy in that stern compartment not only lifted the dock floor at the stern completely out of water, but pulled the two compartments forward of it up far enough for work on their floors also without diving.
From then on, everything was certain. Working in the open, where a man can do ten times as much effective work as he can in a diving rig, all hands went to town. With my salvage mechanics, with my divers, with all the Arab carpenters and Italian mechanics I could drag out of the reopened naval shops, we patched temporarily with wood and canvas the exposed hole in the floor of the dock compartment next forward of the stern so it would hold a moderate air pressure on top. Putting more air pressure in that compartment pushed out enough more water through the open hole in its bottom to lift the dock still farther, exposing more of the damaged floor forward, where the process was repeated on such compartments (not all of them) as we needed to lift the dock.
In that way, we walked ourselves forward along the dock floor, patching temporarily one huge hole after another while the bow of the dock steadily lifted further.
Meanwhile, there was the problem of the unexploded bomb in the stern compartment. On
ce we had the stern well exposed, I went back to the manhole in the floor of that compartment. Before the dock came up, the divers had found that manhole cover off, lying near the opening. We had replaced it and held it down by a few nuts to make the stern compartment watertight on top during the lifting operation. Now that manhole (too small for a diver in his bulky rig to get through) was again exposed to the air.
Cautiously I opened up our air main connections to that stern compartment to let the air pressure inside it vent down to atmospheric so we could enter it. There was a vast quantity of compressed air in that compartment; it took quite a while to whistle out. But when at last all signs of inside air pressure were gone, we unbolted the manhole cover in the floor and looked down inside.
There, some fifteen feet below, resting on the bottom plates of the dry dock, was the unexploded bomb. Jess Enos and I, neither of us very big in girth, both stripped naked and went down through the opened manhole into the hold on the dock to remove the bomb.
Once I was standing in the few inches of muddy water still covering the bottom plates of the stern compartment, without touching it I examined that unexploded bomb with great respect. It was a vertical steel cylinder several feet high, with the biggest diameter that would go through the manhole, and it was still standing on its end. In its head, masked a little by slime covering everything, I could see where the detonator charge and the primer had been screwed in, and from that primer still hung some ten or fifteen feet of waterproof detonating fuse.
What had caused that bomb, alone of all eight the Fascisti had placed in the dock, to misfire, I never knew then or ever. All Jess Enos and I were concerned about at the moment, however, was that we should do nothing to cause that armed bomb, 200 pounds of TNT, to explode right under our noses.
Under the Red Sea Sun Page 27