First and foremost it was necessary to get Keeling close to the U-boat, within sonar range. So flank speed should be maintained at present. The point where the U-boat had dived was known; she could be proceeding outwards from that point at two knots, four knots, eight knots. In the plot down below circles would be drawn spreading out from that point like ripples round the spot where a stone drops into a pond. The U-boat would be known to be within the largest circle. In ten minutes she could travel a mile easily, and a circle with a radius of a mile would be over three square miles in area. To search three square miles thoroughly would take an hour, and in an hour the maximum circle would expand to enclose a hundred square miles.
It was most unlikely that the U-boat would linger near the point where she dived. She would head somewhere, in some direction, along one of the three hundred and sixty degrees radiating out from her center. Yet it seemed the most reasonable assumption that below the surface she would continue the course she had been following on the surface. Even a German submarine, cruising in the North Atlantic in search of prey, did not wander about entirely aimlessly. She would make a wide sweep in one direction and then a wide sweep in another. If she had dived for some trivial reason she would probably maintain her course; if she had dived to attack the convoy she would probably maintain her course, too, seeing that was the course that would bring her square into its path. If she was on any other course it would be hopeless to seek her with a single ship; hopeless, that was the right word, not difficult, or arduous, or formidable, or nearly impossible.
Then was it worthwhile to make the attempt to regain contact? It would be something over ten minutes before Keeling would cross the U-boat’s path if both ships maintained course, but as the convoy was almost following them, Keeling could conduct a search and regain station in the screen without being away much more than that time. The alternative was to head straight back and, in the regular position in the screen, to hope that the U-boat would come into contact as she crept into ambush. Defense or offense? Move or counter-move? It was the eternal military problem. The attack was worth trying; it was worth making a search; so Krause coldly decided, standing there in the crowded pilothouse with every eye on him. He that seeketh findeth.
“Give me a course to intercept if the target maintains course at six knots,” he said into the voice tube.
“Aye aye, sir.”
It would hardly be different from the present course; on the surface the U-boat must have been making about twelve. He could have produced a close approximation in his head. The tube called him.
“Course zero nine six,” it said.
A trifling variation, but it would make a difference of a full mile in ten minutes at this speed. He turned and gave the order to the quartermaster, and then turned to the tube.
“Warn me when we are within two miles,” he said.
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Steady on course zero nine six,” said McAlister.
“Very well.”
About nine minutes to go; it would be best if the ship’s company were told of the situation. He addressed himself to the loudspeaker again.
“The U-boat has dived,” he said into the unresponsive instrument. “He appears to have dived, at least. We are going on looking for him.”
A more sensitive man than Krause, a man with the telepathic perception of the orator, might have been aware of the atmosphere of disappointment that pervaded the ship as he stepped away from the instrument. He looked at the clock again and strode out onto the wing of the bridge. The wind there was tremendous, what with Keeling’s twenty-two knots practically added to the northeasterly wind. There was dense spray flying too, freezing cold. As he looked aft he could see the unfortunate men stationed at the depth charge racks cowering for shelter; it was well that the routine even of battle stations allowed them regular relief. He raised his glasses. He could just make out in the murk, very vaguely, Viktor’s peculiar foremast, a speck of more solid gray in the general grayness. With Keeling leaping and rolling as she was, and with the spray flying, it was impossible to make out more detail than that, and although he swept the rest of the horizon astern with the glasses he could see nothing else at all. Radar would tell him instantly where the convoy was, but that was not what he wanted. He wanted to see with his own eyes what would be the condition of the battlefield if battle there should be, if miraculous good fortune should lead to a U-boat’s being located between Keeling and Viktor. He turned and swept the horizon ahead; the same gray murk, the same vague junction of sky and water. But should a U-boat surface within range of the forty-millimeter guns, her bridge would be visible enough to lookouts and gun crews and gunnery officer.
He came back into the pilothouse with his eyes on the clock. The messenger sprang forward, still holding out the sheepskin coat he had sent for long before. Long before? Not so long, measured in minutes. He put his arms into it and the weight of the coat pressed his clothes against his body. His body was cold but the clothes were colder still, chilled down to freezing point by the forty-knot wind that had blown between their fibers. He shuddered uncontrollably at the contact. He could hardly bear it. Hands, limbs, and body were frozen; he found his teeth chattering. It had been folly to go out on the open bridge without being fully bundled up; he had not even put on his sweater under his uniform coat. If he had caught young Ensign Hart doing anything as foolish he would have bawled him out. Even now he was not properly clad; sweater, gloves, and scarf were all missing.
He mastered the chattering of his teeth and hugged the coat to him in the comparative warmth of the pilothouse so as to make the chilly contact as brief as possible, for warmth to creep back from his revivifying body into the thick woolen underclothing against his skin. He would send for the rest of his clothes in a moment. The voice tube summoned him.
“Two miles, sir.”
“Very well.” He swung around, too cold to use the full formula. “Standard speed.”
“Standard speed,” repeated the hand at the annunciator. “Engine room answers standard speed.”
That was self-evident at once. The churning vibration died away magically, to be replaced by a more measured beat that seemed by contrast almost gentle, and Keeling ceased to crash, shatteringly, into the waves that met her bow. She had time to lift and to incline to them, to heave herself up the long gray slopes and to corkscrew herself over them, so that again by contrast her motion seemed almost moderate.
“Get the sonar going,” ordered Krause, and the words were hardly out of his mouth before the first ping made itself heard through the ship, succeeded before it had died away by another ping, and by another after that, and another, so that the ear, already long accustomed to the monotonous sound, would soon have omitted to record it, were it not that on this occasion everyone in the pilothouse was listening to it intently, wondering if it would reveal an enemy. That monotonous ping, each ping an impulse feeling out through the dark water in search of a foe creeping along in the depths; it searched slowly to the left, and slowly to the right, searching and searching. This was the hearing ear of Proverbs XX, taking over the task of radar’s seeing eye.
Did that last ping sound different? Apparently not, for there was no report from sonar. Down below was Radioman First Class Tom Ellis. He was a graduate of the Key West Sound School and had been in the ship since the outbreak of war; presumably efficient when he came, he had spent the intervening months listening to pings, eternally listening from watch to watch during all the time Keeling had been at sea. That was not to say he was more efficient than when he left the Sound School; it might mean the reverse. At Key West he had gone through a few hurried exercises. He had listened to the echo from a friendly submarine, had noted the variations of pitch as the submarine altered course under water, had taken the bearing and estimated the range; he had been hurried through a couple of lessons on enemy countermeasures, and then he had been sent off to sea to listen to echoes. A
nd never since then had he heard one; the vibrations he had sent out had never bounced back to his listening ear from a submarine, friendly or hostile; he had had no refresher exercise, and most certainly he had never played the deadly game of hide-and-go-seek with an enemy. It was humanly possible that now he would not recognize an echo if he heard one; it was certainly likely that he would not draw the instant deductions from the nature of the echo that were necessary if an attack was to be successful. A depth charge dropped within twenty yards of its target meant a probable victory; a depth charge dropped thirty yards away meant a certain failure. The difference between twenty and thirty yards could be accounted for by the difference between the prompt reactions of a practiced operator and the tardy reactions of an unpracticed one.
And that still left out of consideration the question of nerve; there was no way of knowing as yet whether Ellis was nervous or cool, which was not the same thing as being cowardly or brave. A man could grow flustered merely at the thought of failure, without even thinking as far as the possible censure of his division officer or his captain. Fingers became thumbs, quick wits became slow in certain men merely because much depended on accurate manipulation or rapid thinking. Ellis down there could hardly fail to be aware that success or failure hinged upon his sole efforts, upon the delicacy with which he turned his dial, the deductions he had to make from a variation in the quality of the echo. That could make him stupid or clumsy or both. The fact that failure might mean a torpedo into Keeling’s side which would blow Ellis and his instruments into fragments was not so important, Krause knew. Plain cowardice was far rarer than idiocy, just as plain courage was more common than nerve. Krause thought about Ellis as he knew him, sandy-haired, a most ordinary type of young man except perhaps for the slightest hint of a cast in his right eye. He had addressed him personally a dozen times at most. Those few sentences exchanged at inspections and brief interviews could tell him nothing about the man upon whom now everything depended, the young seaman standing at attention, the young seaman indistinguishable in a line of others at quarters.
* * *
• • •
The seconds were creeping on as Keeling rolled and pitched and staggered her way forward over the waves; Krause stood balancing on the heaving deck in the silence of the pilothouse—silent despite the din of wind and water outside. It was a surprise when the talker spoke.
“Sonar reports contact, sir.”
The talker was a short stocky man with a misshapen nose; the large helmet, apparently overlarge to accommodate his earphones, gave him a gnomelike appearance.
“Very well.”
Everyone in the pilothouse was doubly tense at the news. Watson took a step forward; other men fidgeted. No need to harass Ellis with questions; on the contrary, it might fluster him. Ellis must be presumed to know what was wanted of him until the contrary should be proved.
“Contact bearing zero nine one,” said the talker. Ellis was passing the first test, then. “Range indefinite.”
“Very well.”
Krause could not bring himself to say more than those words. He shared the tenseness of the others; he could feel the beating of his heart and the sudden dryness of his throat. He looked over at Watson and jerked his thumb; he knew that hand would tremble if he allowed it to; this was buck fever, unmistakably. Watson sprang to the repeater with the order to McAlister, staring down at the compass repeater.
“Contact bearing dead ahead, sir,” said the talker. “Range still indefinite.”
“Very well.”
This talker was good at his job. Each word was uttered expressionless and distinct. It was like a schoolboy repeating a recitation learned by heart without any understanding at all. Emotion in a talker was a most undesirable quality.
“Contact bearing dead ahead, sir,” said the talker again. “Range two thousand.”
“Very well.”
They were bearing straight down at the U-boat, then. Krause had his watch in his hand; it was an effort to read the sweeping second hand.
“Range nineteen hundred yards.”
A hundred yards in fourteen seconds? With Keeling going twelve knots? There was something quite impossible about that figure. That was just her time to go a hundred yards, and the U-boat would hardly be lying still. Any other figure than that would be more promising. Those range estimates depended entirely on the accuracy of Ellis’s ear. They could be completely wrong.
“Range eighteen hundred yards.”
“Very well.”
“No contact, sir. Contact lost.”
“Very well.”
It was to be guessed that the talker was repeating exactly word for word what Ellis down below was saying into his mouthpiece. On that evidence it was to be assumed that Ellis was not flustered, at least not as yet.
“Captain to sonar. Search on the starboard bow.”
The talker released his button. “Sonar answers aye aye, sir.”
“Very well.”
What was the contact that had been made? Some will-o’-the- wisp effect of a cold layer? A pillenwerfer bubble released by a U-boat? It might have been a real contact broken off by some intervening condition. But it was important that they had made contact almost exactly at the point where contact was to be expected if the deductions he had made from the radar indication were correct. Then the U-boat had been on a course at a slight angle to Keeling’s, crossing from port to starboard. The likeliest possibility was that she was still maintaining that course after letting off a pillenwerfer; but there was also the chance that she had been moving very slowly across Keeling’s bows—slowly enough for the reported range to have remained constant for a time—and had then taken sudden evasive action, going deep and turning; turning in which direction? The sonar pinged on monotonously; minutes were passing, precious minutes. Five minutes meant that Keeling was at the last indicated position; it also meant that the U-boat was half a mile or more from it. It might mean, too, that she was aiming a torpedo for Keeling’s vitals.
“Sonar reports contact, sir. Port beam, range indefinite.”
So he had been wrong in thinking she had continued her course to his starboard side; but there were no seconds to spare to think about it.
“Left full rudder.”
“Left full rudder,” repeated McAlister.
The desire to increase speed was passionate within him; he wanted to hurl Keeling down along the bearing of the new contact, but that was inadvisable. Already at this snail’s crawl he was going as fast as the sonar would tolerate.
“Report all bearings as relative,” he ordered.
“Contact bearing port five zero, sir.”
“Very well.”
Keeling was still turning; she had not come round far enough, when the echo returned, to be pointing straight in the direction of the previous one.
“Contact starboard zero five. Range twelve hundred yards.”
Excellent. Keeling’s speed might be a snail’s crawl, but that of the submerged U-boat was slower still.
“Contact starboard one zero. Range twelve hundred yards.”
The U-boat was turning too. Her turning circle submerged would be considerably smaller than Keeling’s.
“Right full rudder.”
“Right full rudder.”
Speed above versus maneuverability below. But with the rudder hard over, Keeling would lose speed; two opponents evenly matched. Green water crashed over Keeling’s low waist as she heeled on the sharp turn.
“Contact starboard one zero. Range steady at twelve hundred yards.”
“Very well.”
Turning exactly together. This high sea was reducing Keeling’s maneuverability; a moment’s smooth would give her the chance to come round more sharply, if only one would come.
“Range eleven hundred yards.”
They were cutting down on the U-boat.
“Bearing starboard one zero.”
“Very well.”
Bearing constant, range growing less. Keeling’s greater speed was prevailing over the U-boat’s smaller turning circle. In time—in time—Keeling would cut across the U-boat’s track, would pass over her, would destroy her.
“Contact bearing starboard zero five. Range one thousand.”
Closer! More nearly ahead! Keeling must be answering her helm better. Victory was nearer than he had thought. Keeling was sheering through white water now. She was crossing her own wake, having turned in a full circle.
“Contact bearing port zero five. Range eleven hundred yards. Opening, sir.”
“Left full rudder!” roared Krause.
The U-boat had fooled him. At the moment of the previous report she had been turning in the opposite direction. Now she was off on a different track entirely, with Keeling still swinging away from her. She had regained her lost hundred yards and would regain more before Keeling could come round again. McAlister was spinning the wheel round savagely. Keeling lay far over, took in another green sea, and staggered.
Greyhound (Movie Tie-In) Page 5