Dust on the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  Eel rode easily on the placid sea. Weather in the Yellow Sea apparently was rarely stormy, although, like any body of water, it must have its bad moments.

  “You know, Skipper,” Keith was saying, “this darkness is deceptive. You can’t see the horizon. Taking my sights in the morning and evening I’ve almost always had to guess at it, and right now, in the middle of the night, you can’t tell sky from water. If the Japs were smart, they’d get those two-man submarines out looking for us at night. They know darned well where our patrol areas are. The way we patrol right off their main harbors, their crews could sleep all day in a barracks on shore and come out at night just looking for us. We’d look like an ocean liner to them. One torpedo from a Jap two-man submarine would finish us.”

  “Maybe that’s one reason why the commodore won’t let us go in closer. I imagine the two-man subs would have trouble patrolling this far away from harbor.”

  “Guess so, but now that the Japs know there’s submarines back in the Yellow Sea, it would seem to me they would want to send someone out looking for us. They could use the two-man subs close in to shore, and have patrol boats disguised as fishing sampans farther out.”

  “Could be, Keith. How’d you expect to handle a sampan?”

  “Well, he’d probably have a gun, so maybe doing a battle surface exercise alongside him during daylight might not be a good idea. Even a small gun could do a lot of damage if he got it going in time. At night, though, we ought to be able to take him by surprise and pretty well knock him out with our guns before he’s able to do us any damage in return—that is, provided the commodore will let us.”

  “Most sampans I’ve seen are dark in color, and so low in the water that our gun crews are liable to shoot right over them. Besides, how do you tell a fishing boat from a patrol boat? Maybe we could get them to cooperate by painting ‘His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Ship’ somewhere on their side. I don’t suppose they would be that helpful, though!” Richardson smiled wryly.

  Keith gave an amused chuckle. The two remained on the bridge a few minutes longer, but for the time being all had been said that could or needed to be said.

  It was the very next night that disaster struck. Surfacing had proceeded without incident. As was his custom, Richardson was the first one on the bridge, followed by Oregon, the quartermaster of the watch. Al Dugan, who would be Officer of the Deck, had not yet finished the routine in the control room and would be up directly. It was a dark night, even darker than the night before, overcast, hazy, neither stars nor moon to be seen. Because of the low visibility and the clear impossibility of taking star sights, surfacing had been delayed until virtually the end of the twilight period. Richardson was attentively surveying the horizon through his binoculars, as was Oregon, standing alongside of him. The view through binoculars would undoubtedly be superior to that which the periscope had just provided, and since the radar would take a few seconds to dry off and produce peak performance, it was important to assure with maximum certainty that there were no small ships lying close aboard that, in the gathering darkness, had not been noticed through the periscope.

  Neither Richardson nor Oregon was paying any attention to the submarine wallowing beneath them. The accustomed routine had become so much a part of Richardson’s senses that he could register it by hearing and by feeling. Because of the concentration of his binocular search, however, as well as the darkness that overshadowed everything, for a moment he failed to notice anything out of the ordinary.

  As he thought about it later, the first subconscious awareness that something was not right must have been when the turbo blowers, automatically started from the control room as soon as the hatch was open, seemed to have a somewhat different pitch from the noise to which he had been accustomed.

  But this was not specific, not enough really to make an impression upon him. “Open the main induction!” he ordered. Then his senses came alive with a rush, for there was no answering “thunk” under the cigarette deck. About a hundred feet farther aft, the roar of two main engines and a spatter of exhaust came clearly to his ears. Since opening of the main induction was indicated by a light in the enginerooms and was the signal to start engines, obviously the huge air valve must have opened; but it had not made the customary noise. He would wait a moment before ordering the lookouts to the bridge. He lowered his binoculars to his chest, looked about, noticed that the main deck was unusually low to the water. The engine exhaust was splashing more than normally. Its burbling and sputtering was noticeably louder than usual.

  He reached across the bridge, past Oregon, who was still using his binoculars, to press the button to speak into the bridge speaker. He was interrupted by a voice from the conning tower. “Lookouts request permission to come on the bridge.”

  “No!” he snarled. “Permission not granted! Stay below!”

  Again he reached for the microphone button, again was interrupted. “Radar contact, Bridge! Radar contact! Close aboard!”

  His hand on the button, pressed it. “Control, bridge! Blow up with high pressure air!”

  The instant he released the button—when energized, on surfacing, the bridge control overrode all other stations—there was a yell from Keith on the speaker. Evidently he was in the control room. “Captain! The hydraulic system is out! The main vents are not shut! Negative is flooded, and we’re submerging!”

  If the vents were open, the ballast tanks could not hold air. Eel had no buoyancy. Worse, flooding negative tank was part of the standard procedure as soon as the submarine reached the surface. There would be thirteen tons of negative buoyance to pull the boat under again!

  Oregon had heard too, and instantly understood. Frightened, he dropped his binoculars. At the same moment, Richardson looked up from beneath the bridge overhang where he had stooped to talk into the speaker-mike, saw Eel’s bridge alone on a quiet sea. Forward there was no bow, and aft the submarine seemed to end at the cigarette deck. Farther aft, deep white bubbles came up from below to mark where the two exhaust pipes were still faithfully delivering the exhaust from two diesel engines.

  “Oregon, get below!” he shouted.

  The quartermaster made a leap for the hatch, but at that same instant Richardson felt cold seawater around his ankles and realized he was too late. Water rose relentlessly through the slatted deck of the bridge, poured down into the gaping hole of the open conning tower hatch!

  Oregon slipped, stumbled, fell to his hands and knees. Ignoring him, Richardson gripped the hand rails, forced himself over to the hatch. It was already six inches under water. The water was rising rapidly. He took a deep breath. His head bumped the overhang of the bridge. A violent vortex was surging against the open hatch, pouring down the twenty-three-inch-diameter hole! No one could possibly reach the swinging, chattering, hatch lanyard at the far side of the maelstrom! No one could possibly pull it shut against the force of the sixteen-fold fire hydrant holding the hatch wide open! Worse, the cascade of water would strike the lower hatch, the one leading from conning tower to control room, in exactly the same way. This also would be impossible to close. The control room must be flooding too!

  Richardson wedged himself directly above the hatch, struggled to get his heels on the rim, pushed mightily. It didn’t budge. The latch must still be engaged in the open position! He was now under water. He stopped pushing, reached down. The pressure was rapidly increasing in his ears. Feeling around the top of the hatch, he found the latch with his fingers, pulled it up, felt it come free. Then, with all the strength of his back and legs, he pressed downward with his feet on the hatch rim.

  His back was against the overhead. It was the last thing he could ever do for his ship. He concentrated on only one thing: pushing. With one hand he held the latch from re-engaging. The hatch gave, slowly moved down, suddenly slammed home with a rush as water suction took charge.

  It would be latched on the underside now. He reached down to the hand wheel on top of the hatch, with a feeling of indescribable joy felt
it turning rapidly from beneath. Someone had gotten to the hatch and was desperately dogging it down!

  He must be deep under water now. His ears were hurting. There was a roaring sound in his head. He pushed himself clear. His hands struck something, the base of the periscope shears. Above was a small ledge with a row of large bolts, and then a rung upon which the lookouts climbed. He pressed downward on the ledge, reached up for the rung, found it. He gave himself a mighty heave upward.

  It was not enough, could not be. He must be too far under. If a normal human body is brought from the surface to a depth of about twenty feet, compression due to sea pressure makes it negatively buoyant. It would be different, of course, had he been breathing air at that pressure—and in such case he would have to be careful to let it out as he came up to avoid bursting his lungs as it expanded. His mind raced wildly, encompassing all the peripheral thoughts, yet a part of it stayed calm, told him what to do. Now that he was clear of the ship’s structure, he could safely inflate his belt. He reached for the toggles, squeezed them, felt the grateful pressure around his waist.

  It seemed minutes, but it could only have been a few seconds. His head broke the surface of the water. He blew out the deeply held breath which he had taken perhaps half a minute before and replaced it with a satisfying lungful of fresh oxygen. He was alone on the surface of the Yellow Sea. There was no sign of the Eel anywhere, nor of Oregon.

  From deep inside of him, something like a sob forced its way to the surface. Only about a minute ago everything had been normal! He had been standing on the bridge of his ship, supervising the normal surfacing procedure. Now he knew not what unimaginable disaster could be occurring to Eel, submerged beneath him. All depended upon whether or not it had been possible to get the main induction valve shut. This could be done by hand power, but it was a long and tedious procedure during which incalculable amounts of water would be taken into the ship. If Al Dugan had not been swept away from his station in the control room, he would have signaled the engine room to stop the engines. This would have caused the men also to shut the large air flapper valves in each engineroom on the two inboard ends of the huge air-induction line. Possibly, realizing the boat had submerged from the way the engines would be laboring, certainly when solid water came in through the overhead air line, the machinist’s mates on watch would secure their compartments of their own accord.

  Since the accident to the submarine Squalus, some five years earlier, the air-induction lines of all submarines had been redesigned so that their safety valves in the enginerooms snapped shut on a spring when the latching mechanism was triggered, instead of having to be closed by laboriously cranking, as in Squalus. In each engineroom, the releasing device for the spring was located some distance away from where the pipe debouched its air—and in case of casualty, water. At the first gout of seawater through the main induction pipe, the engineroom people on their own should yank the quick-release toggles, slam their engine throttles to “stop,” and shove the hydraulic control to shut the engine exhaust valves. Simultaneously, they would frantically crank closed the hand-powered exhaust valves which backed up the hydraulic ones.

  If they had acted quickly, as they had been trained, there was hope that Eel had not been seriously damaged or put out of action. In such case, she might indeed be able to resurface in a short period, and if so would immediately come back to look for him and Oregon.

  On the other hand, much more might have gone wrong. Eel might at this very moment be lying flooded throughout her length, or, as in Squalus’ case, half her length, on the bottom of the Yellow Sea. Certainly, her crew would have much to do before they could consider worrying about him, even assuming they were able to resurface at all. All he could do was to try to remain afloat and wait for rescue, if rescue was to come.

  Now he blessed the caution which, stemming from his New London days, had made it an inflexible requirement that people going on the bridge during the surfacing procedure, and at any time in enemy waters, should wear the standard rubber inflatable life belts with which all ships were equipped. He felt again for the toggles and squeezed them. Instantly there was additional pressure around his middle. Evidently one of the carbon-dioxide cylinders had previously not been punctured. His body immediately rose nearly chest-high out of the water. The belt pressed around him comfortably. It had slipped upward to just beneath his arms. Keeping afloat, at all events, was not a problem.

  The water somehow felt warm. The air was colder. He had not noticed it before, wondered how long he could last in these conditions. He had read that in the North Atlantic in the winter a man could live only minutes in the water before his body temperature became so far reduced that his vital forces simply came to a halt. Here it was not so bad. Maybe he could last until morning, perhaps even longer if he were lucky. Surely the Eel would come back soon!

  Paddling with his hands, he turned completely about, searched in all directions. His binoculars still hung around his neck. He shook them as dry as he could, tried to use them. They were little help. Although the sea had seemed nearly calm from the deck of the submarine, there was, in fact, a small swell which effectively prevented his seeing more than fifty or a hundred feet in any direction. He debated taking the leather thong from around his neck and allowing the binoculars to sink in the water, decided not to. He might be able to use them after dawn broke. That was, however, nearly twelve hours away.

  He thought he heard something, a distant hail, a voice shouting something. Again he turned around, paddling with his hands, tried to determine the direction from which the voice came, listened intently.

  “Ahoy!” the voice shouted. He turned toward it.

  “Ahoy!” he yelled. He could see nothing. “Ahoy!” he yelled again.

  “Here! Over here!” the voice said.

  He began torturously to swim, encumbered by his clothes and the life belt around his middle. He had not even removed his shoes, feeling that the maximum protection he could get against the ultimate cold of the seawater would be to his benefit.

  He swam several minutes, stopped, and listened. He was making progress. The voice was louder. Soon he was able to recognize it. Oregon, also floating in the sea, also supported by a life belt.

  “Jee-sus, Captain! When I saw the ship go under with you perched on top of the hatch under the bridge overhang, I never thought you’d make it out again!”

  “What happened, Oregon? What did you see?”

  “Nothing, sir. I fell in the water, and when I got up I saw you trying to get the hatch shut, so I started climbing up the periscope shears. She went down like a rock, sir. I could hear water going into the main induction. That must have made her really heavy, and when the periscope shears went under I just floated off the top. After a while I started yelling, figuring if you came up maybe you’d hear me, and anyway, the Eel should come back looking for us. They’ll be up pretty soon, don’t you think, sir?”

  “Any minute now, I think,” reassured Richardson, but he wondered if he could believe his own words. With the hydraulic system out of commission, whatever the cause, the main vents somehow open—though they could, with difficulty, be closed by hand—and with the main induction system flooded, Eel would be having many problems.

  But how could the vents have been opened in the first place? Especially without hydraulic power? The explanation, the only possible explanation, was that the last time the vents had been cycled they had not properly closed. Cycling the vents—opening and shutting them—was customary once or twice a watch while submerged, to release any air that might have leaked into the ballast tanks. If they did not close properly, the fact should have been evident on the red-and-green “Christmas Tree” light panel; but it might have escaped attention. When goggles were worn in a redded-out, darkened compartment, green lights could not be seen at all. Without goggles, they were so brilliant as to hurt the eyes, which then, somehow, could not separate the reds. Understandably, the absence of some green lights might not have been noticed!
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br />   If so, if this was what had happened, the fault for the casualty could only be one of command. He should have noticed that Eel was not floating normally, that her freeboard was decreasing as the air blown into the tanks leaked out through the partly open vent valves. It would have been so easy for Oregon and him to step quietly inside the hatch again! He could blame no one but himself. Dark shadows descended on his mind. His own incompetence, his failure to keep his mind on his job, had brought his ship and his crew to this disaster!

  Sensing Richardson’s mood, Oregon too was silent. Side by side the two men floated in the Yellow Sea. Several minutes—a quarter of an hour—passed. Rich aroused himself. He still owed a duty to the one member of his crew destined to share with him whatever the uncertain future held. “Oregon,” he said, “I shouldn’t try to kid you about what shape Eel might be in. Even if they do make it back up in a short while, there’s no telling if they’ll be able to find us with the kind of visibility we’ve been having around here. Do you have any line on you? We should lash ourselves together. We may be floating here a long time.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same, Captain,” said Oregon. “You don’t lie so good neither, sir. Maybe these lacings from our parkas would do for a light lashing.”

  Then another thought struck Richardson, dissipated the lethargy that had engulfed him. “Oregon,” he said, “there’s something else besides Eel around here.”

  “Sir?”

  “Remember that radar contact we had just before the boat slipped under? . . . Well, it must have been a ship, probably a small one, because we didn’t see it before we surfaced. We didn’t have it on the radar right away, either. It could be anything. Even another submarine. But I’m guessing, whatever it is, most likely it’s made of wood, and it’s got to be Japanese!”

  -6-