Surface!

by Surface! (retail) (epub)

  “It does begin to look like no evacuation,” admitted the Captain.

  “A blasted flop,” agreed Number One. “This whole war’s a bit of a flop, really. Nothing worth sinking anywhere.”

  The submarine was on the surface, charging her batteries and making a slow progress up and down the ever-empty patrol area.

  The Captain yawned. “Well,” he murmured, “perhaps, one day, we’ll be allowed further down the Straits. Should be some pickings, at the bottom end.”

  “What about the mines? Do we just pretend they aren’t there?”

  “They’ll have to be passed, one day, won’t they? The war can’t end here.” Chief looked up quickly.

  “They can give some other sucker that job. I prefer to go on breathing as long as possible.”

  The Navigator appeared from the direction of the Control Room, his bare feet flip-flopping on the deck. “Cipher coming through, sir,” he announced.

  “Get your books ready, Chief.”

  “Oh, Christ!” Chief heaved himself into a sitting position and fished about at the end of his bunk for the cipher books.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” volunteered the Navigator.

  “Frightfully generous of you, old boy.” The signal was brought in, and they began to unravel the code.

  “Good show!” exclaimed the Navigator, brightening up.

  “What is it?”

  “So far we’ve got, ‘Proceed – establish patrol –’”

  “Come on, Chief – where?”

  It turned out to be an area off the north-western tip of Sumatra.

  “Doesn’t sound very exciting.”

  “Who the hell wants excitement?” asked Chief. “Anyway, it can’t be worse than this bloody place, can it?”

  There was more to be deciphered, and this was more like it. A convoy of a dozen junks had left Singapore the day before, and Intelligence reported that they were heading up the outside of the island of Sumatra. Seahound’s orders were to intercept. The convoy was reported to have an escort of two anti-submarine launches.

  “Come on, Pilot!” snapped the Captain. “What course?”

  He was thinking: “About five hundred miles. To get there in time I must stay on the surface all the way. It’s a risk, but I’ll have to take it.”

  “Chief.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Maximum revs, Chief, for thirty-six hours – will your engines stand it?”

  “Doubt it, sir.”

  “Well, they’ll bloody well have to, anyway!” He pressed the buzzer for the Control Room messenger.

  “Sir?”

  “Tell the Officer of the Watch to come round to 200 degrees.”

  “Two hundred degrees, sir. Aye aye, sir.” The Sub-Lieutenant answered the voice-pipe.

  “Bridge.”

  “From the Captain, sir, come round to two-double-oh.”

  “Very good. Starboard fifteen.”

  “Starboard fifteen, sir. Fifteen of starboard wheel on, sir.”

  “Steer two-double-oh.”

  “Steer two-double-oh, sir.”

  “Bridge!”

  “Bridge.”

  “Course two-double-oh, sir.”

  “Very good. Tell the Captain.”

  Presently the Captain came on the bridge. “Four hundred revs, Sub. The charge is broken.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Control Room!”

  “Control Room.”

  “Four hundred revolutions.”

  “Four hundred revolutions, sir. Four hundred revolutions on, sir.”

  The Navigator shouted up that the course should be two-oh-three degrees, and they steered the new course.

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “Somewhere off Sabang. Junk convoy coming up, escorted.”

  “Escorted, sir?”

  “That’s what I said. Four-two-oh revs.”

  “Four-two-oh revs, sir.”

  In the Engine Room, Chief was biting his finger-nails. He was sure his engines would fall to bits before they got there.

  “God damn it!” he muttered, as he passed through the Control Room on his way back to the Ward-room.

  E. R. A. Featherstone looked at him sympathetically.

  “They’re always the bloody same, sir. Full speed, and flip the bloody engines. I dunno.”

  * * *

  “Come here, Sub.”

  The Captain had been sitting deep in thought at the Wardroom table, drawing things occasionally on a piece of signal pad. Sub took a seat beside him and waited.

  “Convoy of junks. Two escorts. The escorts probably have nothing bigger than some of pom-poms. Probably some point fives. We’ll surface on the bow of the convoy, stern towards them and draw the escorts off. Engage one over our quarter with the three-inch, keeping the range steady, and use the Oerlikon on the other if it’s in range. Both the escorts’ll have to be knocked off before we go for the junks, and we’ll have to be bloody quick, and I’ll take you from one to the other as fast as I can.”

  “There’ll be a lot of Chinese crew to look after, sir.”

  “Yes – we’ll leave the smallest junk to the last, and leave all the crews in her. You won’t have to board that one. All clear?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll brief the Gunlayer and Wilkins.”

  “May I be permitted to ask a question?” asked Chief, in a sarcastic tone of voice.

  They looked at him. “Well?”

  “Why don’t we surface bows on to the target?”

  “Because, you bloody fool, our only advantage is the range of the three-inch. If we attack bows on, we get closer, and at close range they can give us hell. Not only that: when we get to a certain point we have to turn away, and that gives them a nice big target.”

  Chief had no comment.

  * * *

  The Sub pulled a tin of Players out of his drawer, extracted a cigarette. He waved the tin towards Tommy, the Navigator.

  “Smoke?”

  “No, thanks.” The Navigator was sitting in a corner of the Wardroom, fiddling with a piece of string. He often sat like that, doing nothing, a dreamy look on his face. He’s a nice fellow, thought the Sub, and a good navigator: but he’s so damn quiet that sometimes he gives me the creeps. Anyone could see that the man was too old for his job: he should have been a First Lieutenant at least, by now.

  “Tommy: why don’t you ever talk about the time you were sunk, about the escape?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.” The Navigator spoke quickly, not looking at the Sub. “We were sunk, that’s all: I got out with eight men.”

  The submarine was on the surface, racing southwards through the night. The Captain and Number One were on the bridge: Chief was nursing his engines. Sub and the Navigator sat alone in the Wardroom.

  “H’m. I wish you’d tell me all about it. I often wonder what it’d be like in real earnest: it’s easy enough in the tank at Blockhouse, of course, but I always wonder if it’s so damn simple when you have to do it from a submarine.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about: it’s just a matter of keeping your head and carrying out the drill, that’s all. It’s easy when you come to do it.”

  Again the Navigator spoke fast, tonelessly, as though he was repeating a formula.

  “There’s nothing to worry about.” As he spoke, his mind went back as it did so often, always in the nightmare when he slept and now sometimes as a daydream, too. In every detail he relived the sinking and the escape… three years ago, yet it might have happened yesterday.

  In the for’ard compartment, between the reload torpedoes in their racks, he watched the angle increase as the submarine shot towards the bottom. The crash of the collision still rang deafeningly in his ears, he clung to one of the curved bars that held the torpedoes in their racks, and he thought to himself, This is it, it’s happened. Now I’ll know the answer. He was shut off in the compartment, a water-tight door clamped between it and the rest of the submarine. He had with him a Petty Officer Higham, and seven sea
men. They were on their way to the bottom, stern first, the after part of the submarine flooded and dragging them down. His men stood clinging to the sides, their eyes on his face, hopeless eyes in everything except their one, slight hope: himself.

  It hadn’t been difficult, being a submariner, except for the doubt that came occasionally: If this happened, could I see it through? Would I keep my head, justify my training and my existence as an officer? Well, it had come, here it was, and the thud was soft, dull, as the stern of the submarine bit into the mud. The submarine quivered, staggered, and the men’s eyes searched the bulkheads expecting to see the plates open, cracks appear, expecting the rush of pressure and the quick but not necessarily pleasant end. Slowly the angle lessened as the submarine’s bow sank: she steadied with an angle of only five degrees fore-and-aft.

  Tommy heard his voice say, “Take it easy. There’s plenty of time now to get out. We’re not in very deep water.”

  “‘Ow deep is it, sir?” asked Payne, the leading torpedoman. He might have been asking the question on the surface, wanting to know how much cable they’d have to let out when they anchored for a night between exercises.

  “Only a few fathoms.” He was the Torpedo Officer, not the Navigator, in this submarine: he hadn’t much idea of the depth of water.

  He moved along to the after bulkhead, turned the valve-wheel on the small diameter tube that connected with the next compartment. As the valve opened, a stream of water flew like a bullet past his face. He shut the valve: they could all see what that meant: they were the only ones left.

  Bertram, a young torpedo-man, muttered, “P’raps they’re better off ‘n what we are.” The Petty Officer rounded on him quickly.

  “Shut y’ mouth, y’ damn fool. No air to waste ‘ere.” He looked at Tommy. “Shall I try the salvage blow, sir?”

  “No. Waste of time.” They’d all heard and felt the collision: aft of this bulkhead, the whole side of the submarine must have been split open. The men stood looking at him, waiting for orders.

  The batch over his head, at the after end of the compartment, was not an escape hatch but the ordinary one used for coming and going when the submarine was in harbour. For a moment he thought: If I told myself this was a dream, unreal, if I climbed up the ladder and threw open the hatch, should I not find myself in the bright, chill air, hear the engines in the other submarines charging their batteries alongside, find Number One standing on the casing, shouting, “Come on! Get a move on! Are those torpedoes going to take all next week to load?”

  No, perhaps not. It looked real enough, on the men’s faces. He grinned at Higham.

  “Well, looks like we’ll have to get our feet wet. Gather round me here, all of you. Just in case you need reminding, I’ll run through the drill for escaping… you’ve all done it in the tank at Blockhouse: well, it’ll be exactly the same now. Keep your heads, don’t hurry, take it easy, stick to the drill, and we’ll be up in the fresh air in next to no time.”

  He began to talk about the escape apparatus, how easy, how foolproof it was: while he spoke, he thought how easy it would be for everything to go wrong.

  The principle was simple enough. Around the escape hatch, strung up to the deckhead, was a thing called a Twill Trunk. It was a cylinder, made of twill, that could be let down to form a tube from the hatch down into the compartment: lines attached to its bottom edge could be secured to fittings in the compartment to hold the trunk rigidly and vertically in place. A steel ladder fitted up to the hatch inside the trunk.

  Inside the compartment the pressure was atmospheric: outside, sea-pressure, forcing down on the hull, held the hatches shut.

  There was a flood valve in the compartment, a big brass wheel that you could turn to let the sea in. This was the procedure: open the flood-valve, the water rises until it can rise no more because it is met by an equal pressure from the air which it has compressed at the top of the compartment. The water covers the lower part of the twill trunk. Then one man goes under the water, up inside the trunk, and opens the vent in the escape hatch. Air rushes out and the water rises inside the trunk, right up to the hatch. The pressure is then equal on either side of the hatch: open it, climb down the ladder and rejoin the men in the compartment: send them out, one by one, to float up to the surface, breathing freely from the oxygen sets which they wear strapped on their chests.

  “How many sets have we got, Higham?”

  “One each and some to spare, sir.”

  “Pass me one over.”

  The emergency lanterns glowed faintly, throwing grotesque shadows on the curved steel walls of their prison. The compartment had for months been the home of these men: their bedroom, dining-room, sitting-room. Here they sat and wrote their letters home, drank their tots of rum, and swung comfortably asleep in their hammocks. Now they were preparing to fill it with water, flood it, open it up, leave it to the fishes. Anyway, at all costs, leave it.

  He put the set on, adjusted the straps, began to explain and demonstrate its use, the different valves, how to hold the mouthpiece, how to puncture the oxygen flask.

  “See? It’s dead easy. The only thing is, keep your heads, don’t get excited. flooding makes a hell of a row: remember it, at Blockhouse? At first you may find difficulty in breathing from your set: if you do, don’t tear it off: raise your hand like this, and I or Higham’ll fix it for you. Payne, you know all about it, don’t you?”

  Payne said that he did indeed know only too much about the flippin’ sets. He’d rather not use one, rather go up in a free ascent, holding his breath.

  “You’ll wear a set, Payne.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Well, he’d explained it all: better get a move on now. Tommy said to Higham, “Rig the twill trunk.” While Higham and Payne worked at it, Tommy told the others to start getting their sets on: he moved round, helping them to adjust the straps. Soon they were ready, the trunking lashed firmly in place, the men standing by with the yellow sets on their chests. God, how lonely it was.

  “Crack the valve.” To move the wheel that first inch took nearly ten minutes. Only very slightly open, the noise of the water forcing in was already deafening. Tommy signalled to Higham to open the flood-valve to its full extent, and the roar hit them, struck them, left them gasping as the water rose to lap over their feet: their ears began to deaden under the rising pressure. Eyes were on him, several pairs of eyes swimming in the sound, all staring at him. It was up to him to show that everything was all right, everything under control: he grinned, his face deliberately in the light of one of the lanterns: nonchalantly he studied his watch without noticing the time. The water was up around his knees: he looked across at the base of the twill trunk, thought, It won’t be long now. He looked around the compartment where the men stood motionless: each wore his oxygen set, the bag blown up with oxygen from the manifold in the corner of the compartment. Later, when he was ready and the hatch was open, he’d tell them to start breathing from their sets: then they’d put the mouthpieces in their mouths, blow all the air out of their lungs through their noses, put on the nose-clips, open the valves below the mouthpieces and start breathing oxygen. That would be later: he’d have to do it himself, first, before he ducked under the water and climbed up into the trunk to get the hatch open. They’d be able to see how he did it, before they did it themselves.

  The water was rising less fast, the noise was less. The pressure was an iron clamp around his head. He looked at the trunk and saw that its base was well covered. The water rose to chest-level: Timmins, a torpedoman whose height was not much over five feet, was standing on a box, where Higham had placed him.

  A little boy saying, “Look, Uncle, I’m as big as you!” Little boys with marbles, air-guns and catapults, bees humming in the lavender, trees moving gently in the soft breeze of an English summer’s day. The weekend dance, the pint of beer in the local, the old Baby Austin that you bought for a fiver. The only way to get back to any of it was through that blasted trunk. Some of the
se men had wives and children.

  The water had stopped, only a soft hissing came from the corner where the flood-valve was. Tommy felt giddy from the crippling pressure. He wondered if the men would stand up to it much longer as he said, “Right, now I’m leaving you for a few minutes, to get that hatch open. Higham, take charge while I’m away. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, send Payne up to see what’s wrong.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  They watched him closely as he went through the routine with his set. Just as he was about to duck under water, under the edge of the trunk, he remembered that he might need a wheel-spanner for the vent in the hatch. There was one hanging from an air-pipe behind Payne: Tommy pointed at it, held out his hand, and Payne quickly passed it across.

  He didn’t want to duck down and miss the trunking, come up into the light again in the circle of anxious faces: he stood right against the side of the trunk, grasped the bottom edge before he ducked. He wondered whether or not he should open the exhaust valve on his oxygen bag: what had the instructors said, at Blockhouse? He couldn’t remember; he decided to leave it shut. After all, he’d be in the air again when he came up inside the trunking, until he got the valve open in the hatch. That would be the time to open the exhaust, shut it again when he returned to the compartment.

  He ducked into the dark water, holding the edge of the trunk: forced himself down hard, edged forward until he felt the edge of the trunking pass over his head. Then he stood up inside the trunk, his hands on the ladder: he climbed up, his head in air not water, but still breathing oxygen. He held the side of the ladder with his right hand: his left, holding the wheel-spanner, he held up over his head to feel for the hatch. He hadn’t counted the rungs as he climbed, and now he thought, I must be nearly at the top. His hand found no ceiling in the dark, though, and he climbed another rung. His goggles had already leaked, salt water stung his eyes. Still that hatch was not in reach: he took another upward step, and the wheel-spanner clanged loudly on the inside of the hatch. He braced himself with both feet on the same rung, his back supported against the upper part of the twill trunk, and he transferred the wheel-spanner to his right hand. With his left he found the little T-bar on the vent, and he fitted the knuckles of the spanner across it, pressed anti-clockwise: his hands were almost numb from the cold water. The vent didn’t move; he rested, began again, and his stiff fingers slipped, dropped the spanner.