“That’s it!” Lee yelled. Flanagan came splashing forward and saw Lee’s white face in the eerie glow of the battle lanterns.
“This is what they give you that extra submarine pay for, Mr. Lee,” the Chief of the Boat said. He ducked under the stream of water and worked his body between the torpedo-tube inner door and the hull. Using his arms and legs he began to push his back against the inner door, narrowing the two-foot stream of water pouring out of the tube. He heard Nelson grunting as he scrambled under the warhead and eased his tall frame up beside Flanagan, who was straining, holding the door partially closed against the more than 200 pounds of pressure the stream of water was exerting.
“Lemme get a shoulder in next to you,” Nelson muttered. The two men pushed and the door gave a few inches. Nelson got his foot against the side of the ship’s hull, and with a loud grunt he heaved backward with all his strength. Lieutenant Lee, standing by with the door wrench, slipped it over the stud and threw every ounce of his 150 pounds downward. The bayonet ring caught and Nelson spun away from the warhead and grabbed the wrench from Lee and finished closing the bayonet ring. Lee thumbed the button on his phone set.
“Inner door on Number Seven tube is secured, Control. We’ve got about four feet of water in the room. Torpedo is now being strapped into the skid.”
Mike Brannon looked at the inclinometer bubble. The Eel-fish was sagging dangerously downward by the stern. He turned to Jerry Gold, the Battle Stations Diving Officer.
“Next time that guy up there speeds up to make a drop on us, as soon as he’s committed, start pumping the After Room through the drain lines.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Gold said. He spoke briefly into his telephone set, and in the After Room Lieutenant Lee relayed the message to Flanagan and Nelson. Nelson shrugged.
“Fucking sump stop valve to the drain line is under four foot of water. I’m so wet now it don’t make any real difference.” He ducked down under the water and emerged a half-minute later, water dripping from his hooked nose.
“Bilge sump stop valve to the drain line is open, sir,” he said to Lee. “Now all we got to do is wait until that old Slant-Eye up there drops some more of his shit-cans and maybe that stupid fuckhead on the trim manifold can pump some of this damned water outa my room.”
“You won’t have to wait long,” Lee said. “He’s on his way.
The attack was sharp and heavy. Eelfish, her bow at 450 feet and her stern sagging below 500 feet, staggered through the attack. As the continual roar of the exploding depth charges went on, the man at the trim manifold ran the drain pump at high speed. In the After Torpedo Room the water began to recede and the down angle by the stern began to ease.
“If he comes back again we’ll do it once more,” Brannon said. “I can’t afford to pump the After Room dry. Number Six main ballast is empty and I can’t flood it because the damned air bubble from the vents would give us away too damned much. Even at night that son of a bitch up there could see that air bubble.
“We’ve got a seven-degree down bubble by the stern, sir,” Jerry Gold said. “We can hold pretty good if we can get that down to about four degrees, sir.”
“Very well,” Brannon said. “Get ready to pump, I can hear that bastard coming!”
After three more runs, dawn streaked the sky, and the destroyer gave up the hunt. Paul Blake, listening with all his being, heard the sound of the destroyer’s screws fade and then disappear. In the Control Room Mike Brannon nodded his acknowledgment of the information. He turned to Jerry Gold.
“Switch to hydraulic power on the bow and stern planes and the helm. Bring me up to sixty-five feet.’ He climbed the ladder to the Conning Tower, wondering at the weariness of his legs and then realizing that for hours he had been braced against the depth-charge explosions. He swung the periscope in two complete revolutions and saw nothing. He ordered Gold to bring the ship up to forty feet and took a radar sweep. No evidence of any ships. He walked to the hatch.
“Jerry, tell the engine and maneuvering rooms to stand by. I’m going to surface after one more radar sweep, and I’m going to stay up there as long as I can. I want a battery charge started as soon as the main induction is open. Start pumping that After Room now and keep at it until it’s dry.” He waited for the radar report and then punched the surface alarm three times. Eelfish rose, sluggishly, her stern sagging. The bow broke water first, rearing toward the sky, and then the Conning Tower burst through the surface. Brannon opened the hatch and scrambled back to the cigaret deck. The afterdeck of the Eelfish was under water from the gun mount aft. He heard the drain pump straining down below, and as he watched he could see the stern beginning to rise slowly. He turned as Jerry Gold, who had the OOD watch, spoke to him.
“Charging batteries on three main engines, Captain. Chief Electrician says if you can give him an hour he’ll have enough juice crammed back in to go down until after dark tonight if we behave ourselves and don’t go chasing anything.”
“Very well,” Brannon said. “Jerry, I’m going below. I want to take a look at that torpedo room. Keep the lookouts on their toes. If you see anything larger than a sea gull dive the ship.”
He stopped in the Maneuvering Room where Chief Ed Morris was overseeing the battery charge.
“Give me an hour or so, Captain,” Morris said. “After that we can dive and make out easy for a good twelve, fourteen hours.”
“I’ll try to give you more than that,” Brannon said. He stepped through the watertight door opening into the After Torpedo Room.
“Afraid you’ll have to duck down and crawl, sir,” Lee called from the torpedo tubes. Brannon ducked under the torpedo that was blocking the room and scrambled along until he reached the clear area in front of the tubes. He stood up gasping for air.
“Whew,” he said. “Air back here is foul.”
“You should have smelled it when we had the watertight door closed and that torpedo was belching exhaust gas in here,” Lee said. “I don’t know how the Chief and Nelson could work in that air.”
Brannon looked at the two men. “You did one hell of a job,” he said slowly. “I won’t forget it.”
“Mr. Lee just didn’t stand around, sir,” Flanagan said. “He stayed back here after I ordered the room cleared. He was one hell of a lot of help, sir.” Brannon nodded.
“You have any idea of the condition of the outer door, Chief, Nelson?”
“It’s either knocked off or it’s hanging by its hinges,” Flanagan said. “Nelson tried to close it but when he put the Y-wrench on the stud it just turned. Easy. So we lost the connecting linkage between the stud and the door for sure. But I don’t know if it’s still there or not. That’s not what’s worrying me, sir.”
“What is?” Brannon said.
“The warhead is leaking, sir. Must have split when it hit the outer door. When you mix sea water with the Torpex in the warhead you get stuff called exudate. Exudate is explosive. But we can handle that.”
“What else?” Brannon asked, looking at Flanagan’s hard face.
“I think we got an armed warhead, sir. The stream of water coming out of the tube was hitting the front of the warhead square. The little propeller that arms the warhead was right in the path of that stream of water.”
Brannon looked at the dull coppery sheen of the warhead and then at Flanagan.
“Anything hits that warhead with a force of four pounds of impact,” Flanagan said slowly, “anything hits that warhead, it’s gonna explode!”
CHAPTER 8
There was a dead silence in the After Torpedo Room. Mike Brannon licked his lips and looked at the Chief of the Boat.
“You’re sure the warhead is armed?”
“I got to figure it that way,” Flanagan said. “That little propeller on the underside of the exploder, we call it an impeller, it spins when the torpedo goes through the water. It arms the exploder at about four hundred and fifty yards.
“That stream of water coming out of the tube was hitting th
e warhead full on the nose. I figure the stream of water would turn the impeller enough times to bring the fulminate of mercury cartridge up out of its safety chamber in the exploder. Once that happens, all you’ve got to do is to hit the warhead with a force of four pounds and she explodes.”
“Be fatal,” Fred Nelson chimed in, his eyes staring belligerently from either side of the big hawk nose that dominated his face. “If this baby goes off the warheads on the other fish in the room go off with a sympathetic explosion, they call it, Captain.”
“Don’t scare me,” Brannon said slowly. He looked at Flanagan. “I guess the only answer is to get the exploder out of the warhead?”
“That’s the only thing I can think of, sir,” Flanagan said. “But it ain’t gonna be easy to do, sir.”
“Why not?” Brannon said. “You’ve had enough experience taking exploders out of warheads to modify them and then to put them back the way they were if we didn’t fire them.”
“First place,” Flanagan said, “we’ll be working from the underside of the fish. Normally, we roll the fish over in the skid so the exploder is on the top side and we can work on it. When you roll a fish over it doesn’t come easy. You got to put a steel cable sling around it and use a slewing bar and sort of jolt the damned thing until it finally rolls over.
“Then we take out the studs and screw two lifting tools into the exploder base plate, there’s tapped holes for the lifting tools. And then, and this is the way it is every exploder we’ve taken out, damned near, it won’t come out of the warhead. You pull on the lifting tools and you hit the edge of the exploder with a rawhide maul and you work it out gradually.
“We can’t take a chance rolling this fish over because we might jolt it too hard. That means we got to take the exploder out from underneath and it means we can’t hit it with the maul and if the bastard sticks and won’t come out, I think I’ll put in for a transfer.”
Brannon chewed his lower lip, thinking. He shrugged his heavy shoulders.
“What’s got to be done has got to be done,” he said slowly. “I’m going to stay on the surface for a while. We’ve got to get some charge back in the battery. Once we’ve done that we’ll submerge, go down to about three hundred feet so we’ll have a nice steady platform to work with and we’ll get the exploder out.” He stooped and looked at the underside of the warhead. A steady stream of viscous drops was falling from a split in the nose of the warhead, the drops falling soundlessly into a pile of soft rags Nelson had put on the deck.
“We’ll have to do something about that warhead,” Brannon said. “If exudate is dangerous we can’t have it leaking into the room.”
“Once we get the exploder out we can roll the fish over,” Flanagan said. “Then we can seal it with something.”
“Okay,” Brannon said. “Don’t let anyone get near this torpedo, Nelson.” He turned to Bob Lee. “Let’s go up to the Wardroom, Bob. I want you to dictate everything you saw and know that happened back here to the yeoman. When he gets that typed up we can have Chief Flanagan and Nelson read it for accuracy and for additions.” He looked at Nelson and Flanagan.
“You’re damned good men,” he said slowly. He started to duck under the torpedo to go forward and then straightened up. “Chief, later I want you and Nelson to sit down with me and talk about how this happened. I don’t want to crucify anyone, I don’t think we have to do that, but I want to know everything so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. We’ve still got those Mark Fifteens in the other three tubes.” He ducked under the torpedo and went forward, followed by Bob Lee. Nelson turned to Flanagan.
“Got me a helluva mess back here, Chief. Ain’t hardly gonna be any room to live back here, let alone do our work. What do you want me to do about Dumont? He’s the dumb fuck who fired the damned fish in the tube. Said he saw a leak in a grease fitting above the gyro repeater and was going to look at it and a depth charge threw him off balance and he hit the firing key for Number Seven.”
“Don’t do anything,” Flanagan said. “I’ll handle it, I’ll do something if something has to be done. I want to talk to the Old Man about it first, and to John Olsen. Dumont’s a pretty good man.”
“Yeah, he’s a good man,” Nelson said.
“Leave it there,” Flanagan said. He scrambled under the torpedo and went into the Maneuvering Room. Chief Morris looked at him from the padded bench seat where he was sitting, his foot propped negligently against the edge of the control panel.
“How’s your ears after all that pressure, Monk?”
“Didn’t notice any pressure,” Flanagan said. “I was worried about getting my ass wet. That damned water sure came in fast through that open tube. Thought I might have drowned before we got that inner door closed.”
“Nah,” Morris said. “The air pressure in the room would have stopped the water a good three feet from the overhead. You could have breathed in that bubble.”
“You’re a cheerful fuck,” Flanagan grunted. He went forward to change clothes.
Standing on the ship’s bridge, Mike Brannon filled John Olsen and Jerry Gold in on the condition of the exploder. Olsen’s eyes widened.
“My God, if we get depth charged again the jolts from the depth charges might set it off!”
“I don’t think so,” Brannon said. “We took some hard knocks when that fish was out of the tube, and it seemed to take it. The real danger is in someone getting careless and hitting the warhead itself.” He turned to Gold.
“How’s the battery charge coming?”
“Chief Morris says he’ll have a full can in another hour, sir. We can secure any time, but when we do he’d like twenty minutes, if we can give it to him, to ventilate the battery compartments. He’s been charging at a high amperage rate, and there’s hydrogen in the battery ventilation system.”
“Something in the water, bearing zero four five, Bridge,” the starboard lookout yelled.
Brannon and Olsen raised their binoculars. In the distance the water surface had a peculiar iridescent purple sheen broken by several white objects.
“Let’s get over there, Jerry,” Brannon said. Jerry Gold nodded and spoke quietly into the bridge transmitter, and the Eelfish turned to starboard and began to close on the odd purple sheen in the water.
“That looks like oil all over the water, Bridge,” the starboard lookout reported. “I can see some two, three life rings, and there’s a guy hanging on to some sort of wooden crate or something that’s floating and he’s waving at us.”
“Control,” Brannon said into the bridge transmitter. “Give me a radar sweep, air and horizon.”
“Radar reports all clear, Bridge.”
“Very well,” Brannon said. “Chief of the Boat to the bridge with a boathook, a life line, and two seamen. Gunner’s Mate to the bridge with a submachine gun.”
“We’ve got an oil slick up ahead, Chief,” Brannon said. “There’s some life rings in the slick. I want to get one of them, two if you can. There’s a man hanging on to a crate or something a little to starboard of the life rings. I want to get him, too, but these people often would rather die than be captured. So ignore the man. Maybe if he thinks we won’t pick him up he’ll come aboard.” He turned to John LaMark.
“Gunner, if we pick this swimmer up I want you to watch him like a hawk. If he shows a knife or a gun, shoot him.” He turned back to Flanagan.
“If you have to go down on the pressure hull remember it’s got some oil on it. We’re running through some oil now. Use a safety line.”
Down on deck Flanagan tied a double bowline in the end of a coil of 21-thread manila line one of the seamen was holding. He put his legs through the two loops of the knot and pulled the line up his legs to his crotch. He took the bitter end of the line, put it around his waist, and tied it to the standing part of the line. The seaman gathered up the slack.
“Don’t worry, Chief. I won’t lose you.”
“I’m not worried,” Flanagan growled. “But you’d better worry i
f you do.” He sat down on the deck and eased his way down on to the pressure hull, holding the boathook ready. As the ship slowed and eased by a life ring stained with oil, Flanagan reached out and snared the ring and lifted it up on deck. The man holding on to the crate was a scant ten yards distant.
“Left ten degrees rudder,” Brannon yelled out in a loud voice that carried over the water. “That’s good, Chief. We’ve got what we want.”
The bow of the submarine began to swing slowly away and the man holding the crate thrashed his legs in a violent dog paddle.
“Don’t leave me!” the swimmer’s voice was high-pitched with fear. “Please don’t leave me!”
“Son of a bitch speaks English,” Flanagan said. He looked at the submarine’s bridge.
“You want me to get this sucker, sir?”
“Might as well,” Brannon said, his voice loud. “Gunner, stand by to shoot that swimmer if he makes one wrong move.” He turned to Olsen and said in a low voice, “He spoke English, so he must understand it.”
“He doesn’t have to understand,” Olsen said. “Look at LaMark!”
Brannon looked at the deck where LaMark was elaborately going through the process of pulling the cocking knob on the .45 caliber submachine gun back and letting it snap forward. He raised the machine gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the swimmer, his finger on the trigger.
In response to Jerry Gold’s delicate maneuvering the Eelfish slid through the oily water, closing on the swimmer. As the submarine eased toward the swimmer Flanagan held out the boathook and the man abandoned his wooden crate and swam desperately toward the boathook and grabbed it with both hands. Flanagan, his feet braced against the pressure hull, pulled the man to the side of the ship.
Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2) Page 11