by Philip Roy
By the time I realized the sub was going to make a pass, and swam as fast as I could towards her, I was too late. She sailed wide of me by about two hundred feet. She wasn’t cutting a circle but a spiral, probably because the ocean current was pushing her wide. There was no way I could know if her movement was consistent until the next pass. I could only hope it was, and swim into what I thought was a wider lane. But it was so difficult to know in which direction to swim. There were no land features or buoys or anything to indicate direction, except the sun and the sub, both of which were moving.
I was getting tired. Three more shivers ran up my spine and shook my body. My teeth began to chatter. By the next pass, I would have been in the water for over an hour. If only I were wearing a life jacket, I could pull my arms and legs in close to my body, shut my eyes, and rest. I’d survive so much longer. I needed to rest. Treading water for so long was wasting me.
Then I thought of something. When I was calm, I could hold my breath under water for two minutes. I had trained myself to do that for free diving. So, I started taking deep breaths the way I did before diving, then filled my lungs with air, held my breath, curled up into a ball, and let myself float just beneath the surface. With my lungs full of air I knew I wouldn’t sink but would float, like a log. I took a peek at my watch before I went under. I planned to hold my breath for one full minute—slowly counting the seconds in my head, then raise my head out of the water for a few seconds, and do it again. That way I could conserve energy, and hopefully last much longer.
It worked for a while. I still shivered on and off but was able to slow down my pulse, and let my tired limbs rest. The only thing I had to do was watch for the sub coming for her second pass. But an unfortunate consequence of this exercise was that it made me dizzy after a while, and I had to take breaks from holding my breath so long. I used those breaks to search for the sub, and tried to gauge her position on the curve, which was difficult to do. In fact, I was really just guessing.
About halfway through the second loop, I had a visitor. Seaweed climbed the portal, jumped into the air, and flew over to me. It was so easy for him. He flew over my head, hovered for a few seconds, and then landed beside me. I felt emotional to see him. I cried. I couldn’t help it. We had been through so much together. I spoke to him, and told him how much I admired him. I realized as I spoke out loud, that I didn’t really believe I was going to make it. I would never give up, of course, but I knew my chances of surviving were very small. Seeing Seaweed reminded me that Hollie might also climb out, especially once he saw Seaweed leave, and that worried me tremendously.
“Go back, Seaweed! Go back and find Hollie. Go find Hollie, Seaweed!”
He wouldn’t leave, so I splashed water at him until he took off. I watched him fly away and land on the sub, which seemed awfully close now. She was coming again! I started swimming. But I was so tired, and my limbs were stiff, and I couldn’t swim very fast. There was no way I could make it.
Once again the sub passed a few hundred feet away from me, and this time I saw Hollie on the hull. He had climbed out, and was clutching the hull with his paws, searching the sea for me. When he spotted me, he jumped into the water and started to swim my way. I felt so sad. I didn’t even know if he could make it all the way. If he turned back, he would never catch the sub, couldn’t climb onto her anyway, and would drown for sure. As tired as I was, I started swimming towards him, and kept calling to him to encourage him to keep swimming towards me. Hollie was a good swimmer but he was so small, and the choppiness was hard for him. He had to hold his head high to be able to see where he was going.
Once again I cried when I was united with one of my crew. But this time it was tragic because I knew that Hollie could never go back. He had to stay with me. He could not tread water; he could only swim, and I was too tired now to hold onto him for long. I couldn’t escape the reality that the end was near for both of us.
Hollie scratched at my face with his paws. He was looking for a place to rest. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I wondered if he understood. I didn’t think he did, or perhaps he simply wasn’t accepting it. Something about that look in his eyes inspired me in an odd way. I didn’t really understand it but felt it. He simply wasn’t giving up. So I shouldn’t, either.
I pulled off the harness, tied it around Hollie, and then tied it around my neck, as tightly as I could stand it. Now, I was wearing him on the back of my neck, with his front and back paws hanging down on either side, so that they couldn’t scratch me. He could have wrestled free if he wanted to, but he seemed to understand that this was his only chance to rest. He was used to being carried on my back in the tool bag.
But how long could I hold on? Hollie didn’t weigh much, but my movement was more restricted now, and I couldn’t hold my breath and roll into a ball to rest. One advantage, however, was that Hollie was warming me up. I decided to swim slowly but steadily towards a wider lane, and just hope somehow the sub would pass close enough to us.
The next half hour passed as if it were an eternity. Every second was difficult. I was so deeply exhausted I could have just let go and sunk beneath the waves. Part of me wanted to do that, just to rest. It was Hollie who kept me going. I swam so slowly, doing the breaststroke and barely kicking my feet. Eventually we saw the sub. But the only reason we saw her was because Seaweed was standing on top of the hatch. She was so close! My heart started beating fast. I could not miss this chance.
But I was too stiff and restricted to swim. And so, as the sub drew near, I untied the harness, and set Hollie free. I had to try to catch the sub first, and then rescue him after. It was our only chance.
The sub came towards me like a shark, straight and fast. I swam as hard as I could, and tried to get right in front of her. But it was so difficult to gauge. I swam forward, then back, and then forward again. Hollie followed me. I focused on Seaweed. Suddenly, the sub was here. She struck me on the shoulder, and started pushing me under, but I reached up as she went over me, and my hand slid across the side of the hull until I felt a handle, and I squeezed it with all my strength. I shut my eyes, and let the sub pull me through the water. I couldn’t believe I had caught her. My sense of relief was overwhelming. But I had to climb up and get inside as fast as possible, come around, and find Hollie before he drowned. He must have thought I had abandoned him.
It was so hard to climb up. I had nothing left, and could barely do it without falling. All I wanted was to cling to the handles and rest, and just let the sub drag me through the water. But if I did, Hollie would drown. So I reached for the next handle, and the next, until I was on top of the hull. I was dizzy with exhaustion, but couldn’t stop there.
When I saw Seaweed, I told him to search for Hollie. “Go find Hollie, Seaweed!” I shouted desperately. I pointed behind us. “Go find Hollie!” This was something I knew he would do. He jumped into the air. Then I pulled myself onto the portal and went down inside. When I reached the wheel, I turned the sub around and went back. I found Hollie swimming in small circles, with Seaweed next to him, squawking at him to stay afloat.
Hollie swam towards the sub as soon as he saw her. He was beginning to fail. I put the sub in reverse for a few seconds to cut our drift, then shut the engine. I climbed back out, jumped into the water, and met Hollie at the bottom handle on the side. Together we clung to the hull and rested.
“I am sorry, Hollie. I am sorry.”
He looked at me with an understanding only animals have. He did not blame me for the mistake.
Chapter Three
I NEVER KNEW GRATITUDE was something you could feel in your fingertips. When I climbed into the portal with Hollie in my arms, the mere touch of the ladder filled me with such thankfulness that I wept for joy. The warmth inside, the dryness, and the familiarity of all of our things, overwhelmed me with such happiness that my eyes kept welling up. I had thought we were dead.
Hollie was exhausted. He must have swallowed sea water, too, because he threw up a couple
of times, and made a wheezing noise with his breathing for about an hour or so. He went straight to his blanket, plopped down, and began cleaning himself, which was a big job because he was soaked through and through. I wondered if he felt I had abandoned him. If he did, he didn’t show it.
Seaweed didn’t know what all the fuss was about, but happily gobbled down a handful of extra dog biscuits that I gave him for being such a great first mate. Without him, Hollie and I wouldn’t have survived.
Slowly and stiffly I dried myself off, changed my clothes, and warmed myself up. But my limbs were still shaking like a wind-up toy. It was nervousness. When you think you are going to die, your body goes on high alert, and it takes a long time to calm down afterward. I made a large pot of tea, and sweetened it with canned milk and brown sugar. My hands trembled as I drank it. I couldn’t seem to stop shaking. I put on a pot of beans, and broke hard cakes into it. While I ate, I looked around the sub with awe. My life was richer than I ever realized before. I mean, I knew I was very lucky to have what I had—my own submarine, the freedom to travel around the world, and two very special friends as my crew. It wasn’t that I had taken that for granted before. I hadn’t. But having come so close to losing it all, it felt as though I were really seeing it for the first time. It was such a strange feeling.
But as my belly filled with beans and hot tea, my limbs began to feel like lead, and my head started to droop, and I barely made it to my hanging cot before falling face down and instantly to sleep.
I slept as if I had been drugged. It was the longest sleep I ever had at sea. Had I known it would be so long I would have sealed the hatch and submerged a couple of hundred feet in case another vessel came by. I always trusted myself to wake to the sound of the radar beeping, but might not have this time, though the chances we’d get hit by a passing ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean were probably less than the chances of getting struck by lightning. Besides, I preferred to leave Seaweed free to come and go. I knew that Hollie would never climb the portal while I was inside the sub, especially when he was so exhausted.
When I went to sleep, the engine was off, and the sub was free to drift with the current, which had been flowing at about three knots in a southerly direction, towards Antarctica, when I last checked. But the current was always changing. It was 5,432 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, to Perth, Australia, along the southerly side of the Indian Ocean. Sailing as the crow flies, at eighteen knots, for fifteen hours a day, it should have taken us eighteen days. But that was kind of a joke, because the sea doesn’t lie around like the land; it keeps moving, like the wind. If we were sailing at eighteen knots, and the current was flowing against us at three, as it often was, and the wind was pushing us back at four, then we were really only making eleven knots. And if the current was swinging us north and south, and the waves were tossing us up and down like a yo-yo, then we were not sailing as the crow flies, but more the way a dog might wander through the woods, which might be only six or seven knots, and take us fifty-four days, which I sure hoped it didn’t.
When I woke, twenty hours later, I could tell from the stillness inside that there was no wind outside, and the sea was perfectly calm, which was extremely rare in the middle of an ocean. Curious, I picked up Hollie, who was wagging his tail at my feet, and we climbed the portal for a look. Boy, were we in for a surprise. Not only were there no wind or waves, the sea was brown and murky, as if a meteorite had fallen from the sky and scorched it. For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming. But I wasn’t. There was a thick film of algae floating on the surface, like a layer of mud, and the sun was flat and white. I couldn’t believe the strangeness of it. Usually the sea reflects the sky, but sometimes the sky will reflect the sea. Bewildered, I lay my head down on top of Hollie’s head, and we just stared. Everything was so quiet. The sea lay as still and brown as a bowl of chocolate milk.
Was this a dead zone? Dead zones were created when fertilizers and poisons were washed out to sea by rivers. They formed pools of water so toxic nothing could live in them. I had never seen one before. Was this one of those? It smelled like pepper and stinky sneakers. Did dead zones drift so far from land? I had no idea.
As Hollie and I stared at the strangely brown horizon, I heard the radar beep for the first time in ten days. I climbed down the ladder and went to the screen. There was a vessel ten miles east of us, but it was not moving. That seemed a bit odd. Why would a vessel be sitting still in the middle of the Indian Ocean, unless, like us, her crew was sleeping? That was certainly possible, and yet, I couldn’t help feeling a little nervous about it, perhaps because of the close call we had just had. So I decided to submerge to periscope depth, motor closer on battery power, and take a peek at her before she had a chance to see us.
But I had to fix the rudder first. And so, with the sub sitting still, I climbed onto the hull, lay down, and looked over the stern. The rope was still wedged between the rudder and the arm that supported it. If it hadn’t jammed there when I fell, the sub would not have cut such a small circle, and we would not be alive now. When I pulled the rope free, I discovered a piece of hard wire beneath it. I had no idea where it came from, or how it got there, but it must have been the reason for the slight turn to starboard. The rudder itself was undamaged.
I went back inside, flipped the dive switch, engaged the batteries, and heard the hatch shut and seal just as we slipped beneath the surface. I breathed a sigh of relief. How I loved the stealth of a submarine.
I looked again at the radar screen. Why was the vessel not moving? Was she a fishing boat? But there were no fish out here; it was too deep. Was she a research vessel studying dead zones? Maybe. Or, was she an abandoned ship, drifting around in the strangely circular currents of the Indian Ocean for years and years? I had read about such ships. They were rare but they did exist. Our sub had almost become one of them. On the other hand, she might be just a container fallen off a ship, or a sea mine, or a piece of garbage with metal, being picked up by radar. She could have been any of those things. We had seen them all.
As we drew closer, I raised the periscope, but couldn’t see anything yet. She wasn’t very big, whatever she was. Hollie lifted his head from the corner, sniffed, and listened.
“Might just be garbage, Hollie. Might be nothing.”
He wagged his tail and dropped his head onto his blanket. He was feeling much better now, and would give anything for a walk on a beach. Seaweed was in a deep slumber on the other side of the observation window. Sometimes he slept so deeply you’d think he was hibernating. But if I opened a bag of cookies, or dog biscuits, he’d be on his feet in an instant.
From five miles I spotted the mast of a small sailboat sticking out of the water. At three miles, I saw the whole boat. She was just sitting there, like an old hen, kind of sad and lonely. Why she looked sad and lonely, I wasn’t sure, except that her sail was down, and she had a defeated look about her, though not distress. I couldn’t really say what the difference was, but you could feel it. A vessel in distress is looking for help, and you can sense it. I never got the feeling that this vessel was doing that. From a mile away, I saw a hulking man at the wheel. But what a strange man he was. It was hot out, and yet he was wearing a heavy coat, hat, and beard. He was hunched over the wheel as if steering through a storm. But there wasn’t even a breath of wind. That was very odd.
On the bow, I saw another man in a dark wool sweater, rubber boots, and cap. Both men had to be melting in this heat. Maybe they were like the old fishermen of Newfoundland, who wore heavy work clothes and long underwear right through the warmest days of summer. But this wasn’t Newfoundland; this was the middle of the Indian Ocean! It looked pretty crazy to me. And there was something else strange about the sailor on the bow, in the way he was slouched over. He looked seasick. He was bent over a bucket. But how could he be seasick when there were no waves? Besides, they were both seasoned sailors from the look of them.
It looked so strange, and I stared for so long that suddenly I
didn’t have enough time to turn without creating a big fat wave, which would have come out of nowhere, slapped them on the side, and told them there was something big in the water. Instead, I hit the dive switch again, and we went right underneath them. They would have felt our wake still, though not as much, and seen our bubbles, if they had been looking over the side. At the last second, as I pulled the periscope beneath the surface, I saw a figure in a white sheet burst out of the cabin and float along the deck. Oh boy.
Chapter Four
I STEERED SHARPLY TO starboard, swung around 180 degrees, shut off the batteries, and pumped enough air into the tanks to rise back to periscope depth. We drifted to a stop about seventy-five feet from the bow of the sailboat. Up close, everything looked very different. Those weren’t sailors on deck, those were mannequins! They were made of wood, and were as stiff as stone. Their clothes hung on their bodies like towels on drying racks. And the figure in white was just an old woman with long white hair and a flowing white shirt. When she moved quickly, her shirt trailed behind her like a sheet. She went all around the deck looking over the side into the water. She knew something had passed beneath her. Her boat was tossing gently now. I waited. I wanted to know who else was on board.
After ten minutes, no one else came out of the cabin, so I pumped more air into the tanks and surfaced. We came up slowly. I didn’t want to scare her. She was still looking over the side when I opened the hatch and she turned and saw me. I couldn’t tell if she was frightened, or just really surprised. I waved. She stared harder. After a few seconds, she broke into a smile, and waved back.
“Jumpin’ Jucifer! Who the heck are you?” Her voice was dry and raspy, but I could hear her all right.