Firespill

by Ian Slater

  Walking towards the ship’s office to get the generator, O’Brien stopped short. Naim was lying unconscious on the deck, and Lambrecker was gone. O’Brien looked around as if half expecting Lambrecker to be hiding nearby. He quickly unclipped one of the white six-by-twelve-inch cylindrical generators from the rack, placed it in the stainless steel sheath welded to the deck, and struck the firing pin on top. There was a crack as the .22 blank cartridge exploded down into the chemical, and within seconds the chlorate candle started to burn, generating the vitally needed oxygen. Hissing quietly, it looked to O’Brien through his red goggles like a huge stick of dynamite.

  The first officer decided not to tell the captain about Lambrecker’s escape immediately, as it would only add to the tension in the control room just as they were entering the general rescue area and listening intently for the faintest echo. Instead he went to the petty officers’ mess. P.O. Lane and Chief P.O. Saxton were sitting lifelessly, as if in the throes of sunstroke. “You guys up for a quick lap?”

  The younger P.O., Lane, dragged himself off the bench. “What’s up, Ex?”

  “I want some help with Naim. He’s out cold. Lambrecker’s gone.” O’Brien looked at the other P.O. “Ted, I want you to round up some of the boys, find Lambrecker, and put him under guard. And this time tie the bastard up.”

  The P.O. raised his head sluggishly. “Will do.”

  All Naim could remember when he came to was that Seaman Sheen had brought Lambrecker a meal tray from the crew’s mess. The chief petty officer shook his head. “Sheen and Lambrecker! Jesus, son, didn’t you ever watch Gunsmoke?”

  Naim’s head was pounding. “I—I—beg pardon, sir?”

  “Never mind. Here, come with me. I’ll fix you up. Man, that’s some bump you’ve got there. The bastard.”

  O’Brien made his way back past the hissing oxygen cartridge to the control room. It was now 1945, forty-five minutes before the rescue deadline. Where in the hell is Lambrecker, he thought, and more important, what’s he doing?

  Nearing the control room, he noticed that the boat had fallen unusually quiet. Probably because of the heat, he reflected; no one had either the energy or the inclination to move. But the first officer was not satisfied that the heat was entirely responsible for the sense of foreboding he had experienced when he found young Naim stretched out on the deck. It wasn’t just the picture of the unconscious youngster that troubled him. He felt that there had been something else he should have seen, something even more disturbing than Nairn knocked unconscious, but what it was he could not remember. And the more he tried to remember what it was, the more it eluded him.

  The two petty officers, each with an M.P.’s riot stick, split up, the chief P.O. heading towards the forward section and Lane towards the after space and below to the generator room.

  Passing the inert bodies strewn across bunks and slumped against the weeping bulkheads, Lane felt the heavy sullenness which permeated the crew’s silence.

  By the time he’d passed the crew’s mess, the empty officers’ mess, the ship’s office, the perishable cabinet, and the two twelve-bed sleeping compartments and had reached the engine room, he felt the open hostility towards his presence. A small, bearded oiler, glistening with sweat from working in the after compartment’s one-hundred-and-ten-degree heat, glared at him from behind the blur of the oil-slicked prop shaft. Lane met his eye and turned to face him. “What’s wrong with you?”

  The sailor squirted some oil on a bearing. “Nothin’.”

  “Then what are you staring for?”

  “Wasn’t staring.”

  The P.O. was too tired to pursue it. “You seen Lambrecker?” he shouted over the noise of the shaft.

  “Who?”

  Lane had to take several deep breaths before he could speak again. “Lambrecker.”

  “Don’t know ’im,” came the reply.

  “What do you mean, don’t know him? He’s an oiler.”

  “Must be on a different shift.”

  “For Christ’s sake! The guy who was under guard?”

  “Oh yeah, I’ve seen ’im.” The oiler dropped his eyes and unscrewed the cap of the long-nosed lubricating can, as if signaling the end of the conversation. Lane drew his arm across his forehead. “Well, where’d you see him?”

  The oiler was intent on refilling the can. Too intent. Lane realized something was wrong. “Where’s the officer on duty here?” he asked quickly.

  One instant the P.O. saw a pencil-thin shadow streak across the prop’s spinning surface, and the next he lay crumpled on the deck. Three sailors including the oiler helped Lambrecker carry Lane out of the engine room down to stores, where Jock McMahon, the engineer, sat, his hands tied behind him to a cleat on the starboard bulkhead. The Scot’s face was a heavy purple, and when he saw the unconscious P.O., he exploded, “You’re mad, you bastards. You’ll not get away with this lot, I can tell you.”

  Lambrecker had been thinking about Fran and Morgan constantly. All his waking hours were devoted to fantasies of forgiveness and bloody revenge, and the long hours of troubled sleep were empty with longing for her. But he could do nothing about it, absolutely nothing, until he got back. He heard McMahon’s voice from far off. It was filled with Morgan’s infuriatingly confident tone. He could even see a resemblance to Morgan in McMahon’s soft, pudgy face.

  Lambrecker’s punch slammed into McMahon’s solar plexus, and the engineer doubled up like a rag doll, the air driven from his lungs in a great sob. While Lambrecker bound Lane, Haines, the oiler, went back up the stairs and surveyed the passageway. In a few moments he returned. “What if they heard him?” he asked Lambrecker.

  “If who heard him?” demanded Lambrecker contemptuously. “Control? They’re too far forward.”

  “I mean the others—the rest of the crew.”

  Lambrecker pulled hard on a knot. “Most of them know what’s going on. They won’t stop us.”

  “How do you know?” Haines asked nervously. Lambrecker took the stub of a cigarette from between his thin lips, threw it to the deck, and scuffed it with his heavy boot. “I know because one, they’re too tired to care; two, they know that if we don’t turn now, we’ll drown like fucking rats when our power’s gone or get roasted alive if we surface to make a run for it; and three, they want to get home same as us. They’ll let us do the dirty work. If it works, they’ll back us. If it doesn’t work, they’ll say they didn’t know anything about it. It’s called playing it safe. They won’t interfere. All right?”

  Haines still looked worried. “Okay,” he began unconvincingly, “but what if they send someone else to look for you?”

  “If we’re fast, we’ll be on them before they know what’s happened. They just think it’s me loose—they won’t know there’s five of us till we hit ’em. It’ll be too late for them to do anything then. Now get back to the keel and take a look at the off-duty officers. Make sure they’re tied up tight, then bring Sheen and the others back here—fast.”

  “How about the fourth officer and the chief engineer? And Chief P.O. Jordan? We haven’t got them yet.”

  “The fourth and Jordan are off watch up forward. The chief engineer is forward too, checking the fuel tanks. Don’t worry—we’ll get them on our way to Control.”

  Haines felt better now that he thought he understood. Good old Lambrecker. He grinned knowingly. “Right. I’ll get the others.”

  When Haines left, Lambrecker gagged McMahon and Lane and checked that the two men were bound securely. P.O. Lane’s muffled groans could be heard even under the gag as he started to regain consciousness. Lambrecker bent down, lifted the petty officer’s head, and dragged him away from where he would be in full view of anyone entering the stores room. As he propped the P.O. up against a steel cabinet near McMahon, Lambrecker noticed that the hand which had held Lane’s head was covered in warm blood. He looked at it for a moment, then quickly wiped it off on his trousers.

  Suddenly Haines, his face ashen, appeared in the d
oorway. The oiler was trembling in panic. “He—he’s coming this way!”

  Lambrecker’s hand shot out, grabbed Haines’s overall collar, and pulled him down the last two steps. The oiler’s boots skidded on the metal deck and his arms flailed at the air as he tried to right himself. Lambrecker dragged him hard up against the bulkhead. “Listen, you asshole, keep your head or you’ll screw up everything. Now slowly, who’s coming this way?”

  “A—a—Petty Officer—Saxton—a chief. I turned round and came back, soon as I saw him.”

  “Where is he?” snapped Lambrecker.

  “He’s up at crew’s mess, but he’s coming this way. He’s been searching for’ard.”

  Lambrecker shot a glance up the stairs to the open doorway leading to the passageway. He looked at his watch, then back at Haines. “All right, let him find me. We can’t waste any more time.”

  “What—I don’t—”

  Lambrecker’s grip tightened until Haines began to gag. “Go get Sheen and the others and come back here on the double. We’ve got to move now, before they realize I’m not alone. Understand?”

  Haines nodded vigorously. Lambrecker loosened his grip, and the oiler gasped for air. “What if he—the chief—”

  Lambrecker’s brain was racing, and he had already anticipated the oiler’s question. “If he finds me before you get back, I’ll hold him, but I might need some help if he tries to play hero. So step on it.”

  Haines scrambled up the stairs. “Walk, you fucker,” hissed Lambrecker. Haines stopped short, looked around, and fighting back panic, shuffled away down the corridor.

  Before Chief Petty Officer Saxton reached the door leading down to the stores room, he passed a leading seaman checking the level of the starboard fuel tank. The sailor tapped the glass on the reluctant gauge. The chief’s voice was heavy with fatigue. “Ramsey, have you seen Johnny Lane anywhere?”

  Ramsey tapped the gauge a second time from habit. “Ah, sorry, what’s that, Chief?”

  “P.O. Lane—he should have been down here looking for Lambrecker. Have you seen him?”

  The seaman seemed to be having trouble getting a reading through the humidity-fogged glass. “Yeah. Saw him in the engine room a while back—talking to Haines, I think.”

  “You sure? I’ve been looking for him everywhere.”

  “Yeah—I think…” Ramsey hesitated. “Come to think of it, I never saw him go through aft. He may have ducked down to stores.”

  The chief caught a stanchion as he temporarily lost his sense of balance, dizzy from the effort of walking and breathing in the oppressive atmosphere of the after compartment. Ramsey reached out and held him steady. A moment later he felt better. “Thanks,” he said. Relaxing his grip on his truncheon and letting it swing freely from its wrist strap, he began to descend the stores room steps, calling out, “You there, Johnny?”

  He never even saw Sheen come from behind him with the wrench. Now only the fourth officer, the chief engineer, and Jordan stood in the way of complete surprise. They would be next.

  All O’Brien could hear when he returned to the control room was the distinctive ping of the sonar. It told him that Sparks must recently have switched it from passive to active mode, and if he expected an echo it must mean that by now they were within ten miles of the fishing boat’s approximate position.

  But the captain, sensing what O’Brien was thinking, shook his head discouragingly. “We were getting too much background noise from the fire on passive. Goddamn thing’s making a hell of a row.” He stopped for another breath. “Almost impossible to pick up their engine in that. Have a listen.”

  The sonar operator switched from active back to passive as O’Brien lifted the earphone. All he could hear was a deafening, splitting crackle like the sound of a cypress forest fire. He handed back the earpiece and glanced at the chart. “We should be in the area, though.”

  The captain was leaning against the search periscope. The temperature in the control room had risen to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and all the salt pills were gone. O’Brien felt uncomfortable about not having reported the Lambrecker incident, but the captain’s shining, haggard face and labored breathing vindicated his decision. They all needed to hold together just a bit longer. Once the rescue began, if it began, everyone would be too busy to worry about his own troubles. Besides, Lambrecker would be found sooner or later.

  As the remaining minutes slipped by, and the sonar sent its ping racing out through the deep layers of ocean, Captain Kyle watched the sweep of the sonar illuminating the screen in frosty, short-lived segments.

  O’Brien was right; they should be just about within echo range of the fishing boat—if it still existed. But even if it did exist, he had no way of knowing how far the firespill had forced it away from its original position.

  He worried too about the sub’s fast-depleting battery. If electric power were to drop much further, Swordfish would be largely disabled, unable to drive quickly to the surface or to take evasive action. He thought of the old days in the Tench class subs. Running at maximum speed in these conditions then would have meant that your battery would be out in an hour. The Ranger class had extended that time, but even so, Swordfish would have no margin to spare in getting out after the rescue. He chewed at his lower lip. Maybe he should call it off now.

  He ran his eye over the chart. They were approaching the blue X which O’Brien had marked on his preplotted course as the limit of their power capability at full speed—their point of no return. If only they could have half an hour’s running on the surface, thought Kyle. It would be slower—the sub reached maximum speed only when submerged—but it would allow him to re-oxygenate and at least partially recharge the batteries.

  The clock’s minute hand jerked forward. It was almost 2000. Kyle watched one more sweep of the sonar’s arm and went back to the chart. The area of the firespill given earlier by Pacific Fleet H.Q.’s satellite pictures resembled a huge dumbbell, with two roughly circular areas joined by a narrower waist.

  O’Brien was going over the course again, trying to find the delicate balance between the highest possible speed and the longest time available. If they kept up their eighteen knots, they would have to turn back soon. But if they slowed down, not only would it put the Vice-President in jeopardy, but any power they saved would be useless if the spill had widened so much as to make escape from under it impossible. And less speed meant that they would be down longer, increasing the danger of suffocation.

  At 2003 O’Brien cursed lightly. His sweaty fingers had slipped on the dividers, smearing some of his penciled calculations, and the perspiration from his forehead continued to blur his vision as he tried to concentrate. Kyle moved back to the sonar and asked, “Rescue team ready?”

  O’Brien frowned. He had told the captain that all was ready an hour ago, when he had checked the team huddled beneath the forward hatch. “They’re all set, sir.”

  Kyle bobbed his head by way of tired acknowledgment, his eyes fixed on the screen, as if his very presence might somehow induce a blip to appear. Without looking up he asked, “What’s our power supply?”

  O’Brien had told him that too, five minutes ago. They had half an hour left before they would have to turn back and about two hours to try to outrun the firespill. “Approximately two and a half hours, sir.”

  “I want it on the nose, Number One.”

  The starboard planesman shifted slightly in his seat. “Watch what you’re doing,” snapped Hogarth. O’Brien deliberately took time to mop his neck and face before answering the captain, hoping to convey to him that it was doing nothing to reduce the strain on everybody to ask the same questions every five minutes.

  “Power supply is two and a half hours, Captain.”

  “That was ten minutes ago.”

  O’Brien murmured to himself in exasperation, then answered, “Two hours and twenty minutes power remaining, Captain.”

  “All sectors conserving?”

  “Yes, sir. Air conditioning and
lighting at minimum.”

  The captain had not taken his eyes off the sonar screen. “I want the air conditioning shut down completely—including food refrigeration unit.”

  “Sir?”

  “Shut down all air conditioning—including food refrigeration unit.”

  This time both planesmen looked straight at Hogarth. The officer said nothing. “Yes, sir,” answered O’Brien wearily. He was about to use the phone to convey the order but changed his mind; any more talking would only irritate Kyle further, glued as he was to the screen, tense for the faintest echo. Instead O’Brien spoke quietly to the gofer. “Go tell whoever’s looking after the air-conditioning generator to shut it down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Slade, a short, red-haired assistant engineer of Irish extraction who had just dragged himself from his forward torpedo room bunk to stand relief duty in the small midships generator room, couldn’t believe the order. “Are they crazy? It’s over a hundred and ten fucking degrees in here. I’m relieving a guy who just passed out.”

  The gofer shrugged. “It’s hotter’n hell in control too.”

  Slade threw a switch. “All right, all right—I’ll shut the bloody thing down. They made contact yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “We’re gonna have to turn pretty goddamn soon, you know that?”

  Again the gofer shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to be held at all responsible for anything that went on in the control room. As he stepped over the bulkhead on his way back to his post, Slade called after him, “Hey, gofer. You hear about Lambrecker?”

  The gofer looked puzzled. “Being arrested? Yeah, I heard.”

  “Arrested, bullshit—he’s out. Broke loose from the ship’s office.”

  “Jesus! Where is he?”

  “Don’t know.” Slade breathed heavily and used an old oil rag to wipe his face. “Want to know something else?”