by Robb White
This book made available by the Internet Archive.
BOOK ONE
Death Row
Amos Wainwright had been in Death Row for almost five weeks, and he knew now that he could endure it.
The Navy's official name for Death Row was: Devices, Explosive, Disarmament of, Training in, and officially it was only one phase of the program at the Underwater Demolition School.
Unofficially it was Death Row, and it was the thing students who came for UDT thought about and dreaded from the time they got there until they either graduated or were flunked out and sent back to the fleet.
The students were all volunteers, but volunteering
was not enough. They had, in addition, to pass both mental and physical tests and a third test that they called the Drained Brain. This was an attempt by psychiatrists to find out whether the volunteers were capable of underwater demolition work.
If a volunteer passed all these preliminary examinations he was first physically conditioned and then introduced to a thing called an Aqualung, the name of which the Navy had changed to self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and the students had reduced to scuba. In classrooms the volunteer was taught the theories of underwater warfare, and aboard mine layers and mine sweepers he went through training in mine laying and mine sweeping.
Waiting for the volunteers at the end of the line was Death Row. No matter how good you were with the scuba, or what your grades were in classrooms or aboard ship, or how tough you were physically, if you couldn't get through Death Row you flunked out.
The Death Row classroom was a huge, smoky, barnlike place, permanently scarred and blackened by the explosions the teacher enjoyed making. The teacher was a chief gunner's mate named Hingman, who was, of course, nicknamed Hangman, and who really seemed to relish the moment when he walked up to a student and said, "You're too stupid to keep from blowing yourself up. Which would be all right, but since you might blow somebody else up too, pack your seabag and go back to standing in line."
Chief Hingman had a collection of every kind of
bomb, shell, torpedo, land mine and sea mine known to be used by the enemy, and he enjoyed showing his students how these things could kill you. At the far end of the barn there was a small room made entirely of armor-plate steel, where Hingman demonstrated the destructive power of his toys. He particularly liked to show a class just starting in Death Row what a little booby-trap mine no bigger than a deck of cards could do to a stuffed dummy.
As John Nash pointed out to Amos later, the dummy Hingman used with the booby trap was always dressed in the uniform of an ensign. The little mine usually blew the ensign's head off.
"Maybe the chief doesn't hate you personally, Amos," John had argued. "Maybe he just hates ensigns."
"Whatever," Amos had said. "He's sure trying to electrocute me."
Chief Hingman was convinced that rather than being a gunner's mate in the Navy he should have been a movie star. He had to be dramatic about everything he did.
When Amos' class first reported to the Row, the chief was standing there in the middle of the big, cold barn, legs apart, hands on hips, just staring at this new group of victims.
At last the chief snapped, "Attention! Step forward when I call your name."
As it had been all the way through this school, Ensign Amos Wainwright didn't fit. He was the only officer in the class, the only one who had to report
in the officers' uniform of the day: khaki trousers and shirt, cap, black tie, and black shoes. All the rest of the class, enlisted men, reported in beat-up old dungarees and boondockers.
The chief, calling the roll, hardly looked at the men until he came to the name Wainwright, A., Ens. Then he looked up at Amos. "What are you doing in here, Ensign?"
"Obeying orders," Amos said.
"Well, I'll tell you something, Ensign. The first thing we're going to do is get democratic. There aren't going to be any officers in this class . . ."
Amos couldn't take a chance with this. "I'm assigned to this class, Chief," he said, keeping it polite. "The fact that I'm an ensign hasn't got anything to do with it."
The chief looked at him coldly for a moment. "As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted by this ensign, there aren't going to be any officers in my class. And no enlisted men. You're nothing but bodies. Understand, Ensign? So get offended and report me to the brass. It won't do you any good, because I've got a reason for making everybody equal. And that reason is this: when an explosive device blows up and kills you, it doesn't make any difference to that explosive device whether you were an admiral or an apprentice seaman."
Amos almost smiled. If the chief only knew how much he wanted to be nobody and how little he wanted to go talking to any brass, the chief might be surprised.
"Now the second thing," the chief said. "I hope you've enjoyed yourselves in our little school—all that nice swimming and yachting around and all those theories of undersea warfare they've been teaching you. You'll be happy to know that in my class I don't teach any theories. In here everything is real and practical. Like this. . . ." The chief reached over to a table and picked up a small, reddish-brown brick. "This is TNT. Real, genuine TNT. Trinitrotoluene."
With no warning, the chief tossed the brick at the students.
John told Amos later that when the brick came flying through the air the man next to him rose straight up from the floor for five feet and then floated straight backward for ten feet more.
Amos didn't have time to think much past the idea that if the TNT hit the brick floor it would explode and blow them all up. He stooped and caught it just before it landed.
He didn't want it, so he tossed it back to the chief.
That seemed to irritate the chief, who held the brick in the palm of his hand and said, "Oh, a wise guy." He turned his hand over and let the brick fall to the floor.
The TNT hit the floor with a smack and bounced a couple of times.
The students stood as though paralyzed, staring at the little brick on the floor.
The chief picked it up and, as he tossed it carelessly from hand to hand, said, "Now, before we get
started I want you people to look at each other. Look at the man beside you. Because the man standing next to you isn't going to pass my class in Disarmament. He's going to flunk out and get sent back to the fleet."
Amos glanced at John Nash, a long, gangly man, about twenty-two, with big elbows and knees, skinny arms and legs, and a long neck with an Adam's apple that kept sliding up and down it. At first you thought he was stupid, or at least a little slow, because he had a dumb-looking face with little, sleepy eyes. But John Nash was not stupid, not even a little slow. He'd had two years at Georgia Tech and two years at sea as a Navy radioman, first class, and was a very savvy individual.
John was looking back at him. "Not me," he said. "You."
"Okay, let's get started." The chief walked over to one of the heavy wooden tables and tossed the TNT down on it. "Come in close so you can all see."
As he picked up a heavy ball-peen hammer, the chief said, "TNT isn't the most explosive stuff in the world, but it's good enough to sink any ship afloat or blow up any building. You could call it a very effective weapon. . . ."
The chief swung the hammer, striking the brick of TNT a blow that broke it into small pieces.
Nothing happened.
As the students began to breathe again, the chief lit a match and held it to a piece of the TNT until the stuff began to bum. The TNT didn't burn veiy
well, producing only a sluggish little flame, which slowly melted it.
The chief looked around at them. "Get the point?"
"Sure do," John said.
"What's the point?" the chief asked.
"That I'm the wrong man in t
he wrong place at the wrong time."
"I thought you Rebels were real battlers," the chief said.
"Oh, no, sir. We Rebels are cowards. The only thing we're willing to fight is Yankees."
"Then you'd better go back to swabbing decks and chipping paint." The chief looked at all of them again. "The point of my little drama is that every device designed to explode has got to have some sort of mechanism to explode it. TNT, gunpowder, dynamite are all pretty stable. They don't just go off by themselves. It takes a good wallop in a confined space to make them destructive. You have to explode the explosive.
"Those blockbuster bombs the Nazis are dropping on London now are nothing but .22-caliber bullets magnified about a million times. Just a simple little mechanism like some gunpowder wrapped in paper in a cap pistol. . . ."
The chief walked over to a big steel ball set in a cradle on the floor and patted it. "In Death Row you're going to study mostly the underwater devices. Mines. They come in all shapes and sizes and with all sorts of gadgets to make them do what the enemy wants them to do. Some mines are designed
to sink our ships, some are made to protect the enemy's beaches, some are just to keep us out of a harbor."
He patted the mine again. "Most mines look like this, just a big steel ball with the explosive inside. The object, of course, is to get the ball up against the bottom of a surface ship or landing craft, or against the side of a submarine, or under the feet of Marines wading toward a beach, and then make the thing go off. There are a lot of ways of doing this, the simplest being just to anchor a whole bunch of mines in harbors and channels with an anchor line short enough to keep the mines under the water where you can't see 'em. The trouble with that system is that it's fairly easy to go along and cut all those anchor lines so the mines float up to the surface where you can see 'em.
"To prevent that, the enemy is now using a lot of magnetic mines. All they have to do is drop 'em in the water. They sink to the bottom and stay there until the steel in a ship attracts the magnets in the mine, releasing it to go up against the hull."
The chief walked over to another mine and leaned on it. "The name of the game is to sink ships and kill people and, believe me, we're up against some pretty tricky ways of doing that. Which is why you're here. The enemy has gotten so smart that our mine sweepers can't handle the stuff he's attacking us with now. We've got to get in there, find the enemy mines, and render them harmless either by removing the gadget that makes 'em go off or by
fixing them so that they can't do what they were put there to do."
The chief glared at them. "Now I'm going to say this until you get sick of hearing it, and then I'm going to say it again. If you don't learn what I'm trying to teach you, you're going to kill yourselves. And it's not going to be like out in the fleet, where guys get killed by things flying around addressed To Whom It May Concern. You're going to kill yourself."
He let that sink in and then said, "During the next few weeks all of you are going to learn to hate me. You're going to say I'm not giving you a fair shake. You're going to accuse me of playing dirty. And, believe me, I'm going to flunk a lot of you, maybe all of you. Because if any of you pass this class and get out there and start monkeying around with real mines and you don't do it right, it's going to be noisy. The only people who are going to get passing grades from me are the ones who can do it right and not make that noise.
"There's nothing to it, really," the chief said in a more amiable voice. "You see these metal things that look like little, stubby horns sticking out all over this mine? They're the contact horns. They're what makes it go off. When a ship hits one of these horns, things happen."
He pulled at the sides of the mine, and it opened on hinges so that they could look inside. Electric wires ran from the horns to boxes inside the casing, and a mechanism like a probe extended down into
the solid mass of the explosive that filled half the ball.
"When a contact horn is struck," the chief said, "an electrical current activates this—the firing mechanism. That turns on the main battery—here—which shoots a jolt of current through this thing—the detonator. That fires the booster, down here in the body of the explosive and—away we go."
He swung the two halves closed again. "Without these contact horns the mine is useless—nothing but a big steel ball."
He stopped and looked at them. "That's your job —getting rid of these horns."
He picked up a screwdriver from the table. "Nothing to it, really," he said, unscrewing some screws in a metal plate that held the horn to the mine casing. "Any fool can do it."
With three of the screws out and the fourth loose, the chief slid the plate holding the horn clear of the last screw and pulled the horn out of the hole in the steel ball. Holding it up for them to see, he disconnected the wires from the base and said, "Now— no go off."
As the chief replaced the horn and tightened the screws he said, "I'm going to teach you people how to disarm anything. After all, every one of these exploders is just a gadget some guy put together with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. There's only one little thing I want you to remember, and that is that when the guy put it together it was loaded, ready to go: the TNT was real, the battery was charged,
the detonator hot. The fact that he got it all together without blowing himself up means that there's a way to do it. So when you start monkeying around with a live mine, remember to take it apart the way it was put together."
The chief leaned over and looked at the name tag pinned to Amos' shirt. "Wainwright, A.," he said and took out a black notebook from his pocket. He studied it for a moment. "Wainwright, A. Says here you've had two years of college. So that means you're smart."
"No, it means I went to school for two years," Amos said.
"Says here you're an ensign. How'd you get to be an ensign, Ensign?"
"I just joined up and somebody said I was an ensign," Amos told him.
"Now ain't that nice?" the chief said. "Real nice. I've been in the Navy for sixteen years, and I'm only a chief petty officer. How long you been in the Navy, Ensign?"
"Not that long," Amos said.
"Well, so you're a ninety-day wonder. Okay, smart Ensign," the chief said, handing Amos the screwdriver. "You saw me disarm this thing. You do it."
It was obvious to Amos that the chief was setting him up. He glanced over at John for moral support, but John only grinned and said, "When she blows up be sure and go by yourself, Amos. Don't take anybody with you."
"Well, then, stand back," Amos said. Trying to re-
member exactly what the chief had done when he removed the horn, Amos started taking the screws out. He recalled how neatly the chief had lined them up on the table, and he did the same.
He had three screws out and lined up and had the last one almost out, only a few threads still holding it, when a no-volt alternating current slammed up from the screw head, along the screwdriver shaft, and into his hand, curling his fingers into a fist. The current snapped his wrist stiff, slammed up his arm, and jolted down to his feet, nailing him to the floor, where he stood, rigid and helpless, until he managed to yank the screwdriver loose.
"Ka-boom. One dead ensign," the chief said.
Amos' classmates began to grin, and some laughed nervously.
"All right, smart Ensign, what'd you do wrong?"
"Nothing/' Amos said. "Was it wired up when you did it?"
"It was," the chief said, unplugging an extension cord leading to the mine. He unscrewed the last few threads of the fourth screw and put it down on the table with the rest. "If you'll look in where that screw was, you'll see a little plunger coming out of the side of the hole. See it?"
Amos looked into the hole and saw something about the size of a big needle protruding from the wall of the tapped hole.
"That plunger is connected to the firing mechanism exactly the way the horn itself is, only it can't close the circuit as long as the body of the screw is in the
hole. Your mistak
e, Wainwright, was in unscrewing it far enough to let the plunger operate/'
"Very clever," Amos said, "but how was I supposed to know that there was a plunger in there?"
"There's a way," the chief said. "But this thing killed three of my best friends before we figured it out."
He looked up at them. "We weren't smart. You see, in this metal plate there are four holes, but the side of this fourth hole has been cut away so all you have to do is loosen the screw and you can slide the plate out from under it, without letting the plunger move. You shouldVe noticed that, Wainwright.
"That's lesson number one," the chief said, "and I hope you got the message. We're up against some very smart people.
"The second thing I hope you learned is that when you start to disarm something, you look at it. And I mean look. Because everything you see has a reason. Like that cutaway screw hole. The only way you can spot that is to put your face right down on the mine. If we had done that and stopped right then and studied it until we figured out the reason for it, there would be three men alive today instead of dead.
"From now on," the chief said, "I'm going to give you things to disarm. There's going to be a trick in every one of them. Not simple tricks like that screw. Real tricks. If you figure 'em out, okay. If you don't, a hundred and ten volts are going to knock you right
on your can. You make a mistake and you're really going to know it."
The chief smiled sweetly at them. "From now on, you are I are enemies. I'm going to zap you every time I can and every way I can. I'm going to get you people so psyched out you'll be scared to pick up a bottle of beer. So fall in and pair off."
No one seemed to want to work with Amos. The chief petty officers paired off together, as did the two Master Divers, and the rest of them all seemed to know each other. At last there were only two men left, a motor machinist's mate, second, named Carl Reeder, whom no one liked, and the radioman, John Nash.