“Commander Burch reports he’ll have tube one ready in about one minute. Tube four is still loaded and the unit is ready to fire. Number two’s was the one that broke loose while they were loading. Tube three’s unit is in position. Give him four minutes.”
“Captain,” Peter Simonds reported, “we’ve already got it together enough to fight the ship again.”
Steel nodded and peered down at the deck for a moment. Manchester had shot a single torpedo, her third, and turned away from Pasadena. There had been a counter fire and Pasadena probably had turned the opposite direction. Newell’s ego must have figured his strategy couldn’t fail him.
The boomer was to the north of them, hopefully making tracks. Shit, Florida wouldn’t do that if Buck Nelson thought they couldn’t outrun an attack boat. He’d go silent and wait, protect himself if he had to. And Newell would know that! That last shot, if it didn’t hit here, was to at least keep Manchester occupied while Wayne Newell went after his major target. But he won’t forget us. He’ll come back to see if anything’s still afloat here.
“XO, you take it. Come right and head for Florida’s last known position. I’m going to—”
But Steel was interrupted by Chief Moroney’s voice from sonar. “I’ve got that last unit of theirs in a search out there. It’s still too turbulent to sort everything out, but that torpedo has a bad habit of operating on its own.”
Goddamn. Persistence. That son of a bitch is persistent. “Noisemakers, XO, now. And wind it up. We’ll worry about any other problems later.”
There is a point in a melee when the environment is contact rich but not target rich. There are too many sounds — decoys, noisemakers, explosions. Man has turned the dark, silent ocean into a maelstrom of sound. It’s up to the commanding officers to select the highest-valued contact … and hope.
Wayne Newell struggled to his knees. His head swiveled. The battle lanterns had switched on automatically, cutting through the dust that had shaken down from the overhead. He remembered Dick Makin’s outline in the sonar entrance … about to say something … Pasadena was coming around to port … away from that other boat … they’d fired at her again … must have sunk her … and the boomer!
Newell rose to his knees. He recalled something being said about steering control. Yet there had been no response. Was it just from fear while Pasadena was tossed about in the turbulence of the blast? In the glare of the battle lanterns he could see others looking about them, some sprawled on the deck, others still strapped into their positions. Yet no one uttered a sound. Some were obviously injured. But those last words — something about steering control.…
“Does emergency steering work?” Newell bellowed. He was surprised at the strength of his voice. Or was it the silence in the control room?
The sailor at the helm position, the one who had taken over when Stirling snapped, slowly placed his hands on the small wheel and turned it. He looked up at the dial on the control panel and turned the wheel the other way. “The indicator seems to be functioning,” he said blandly.
Pasadena was at a moderate up angle. Newell noticed that the diving officer was sitting on the deck, his head cradled in his bloody hands. “The bow planes,” he asked patiently, “are they working?”
The control was pushed slowly forward, then pulled back. The sailor put a hand on the shoulder of the man beside him and murmured something that Newell couldn’t hear. The other sailor did the same with his own control, his eyes fixed on the panel in front of him, then nodded.
“We have control, Captain.”
“Depth?”
“Three hundred ten feet.”
They’d been heading up to evade. “Hold her there.”
The OOD — where the hell was the OOD? Newell pulled himself to his feet. The OOD lay unconscious, his body in an awkward position at the base of the periscope. Newell saw the quartermaster pull himself to his feet beside the tiny chart table. “Get damage reports for me, Clark. All I need to know is if we can shoot and if engineering can get us back to that boomer.” He turned to the sailors at the controls. “Come left to zero zero zero. We’ll feel our way at ten knots for now until sonar tells us what’s still out there.” He was talking to them calmly, logically, as if they were having a pleasant conversation in his living room. Yet the setting was bizarre — with the beams of battle lanterns arching through the dusty haze of the control room.
His executive officer was the major concern right now. He remembered Dick Makin appearing from sonar like the grim reaper, uttering words that sounded important — yet he couldn’t remember what they were.
When Newell stepped into sonar, he found Makin sitting on the deck with his legs out in front of him, his eyes half shut. One of the sonarmen was tying a handkerchief around the XO’s head. What was it Makin had said? As he looked down at his executive officer, he remembered that look on Makin’s face and the words “it’s my duty,” after some garbage about American submarines. “Get back to your station,” the captain said evenly to the sonarman. “We are still under attack. I’ll help the XO.” And when the sailor failed to move quickly enough to suit him, he snapped, “Now.”
Makin looked up at the captain. Even in the blue haze of sonar, Makin’s narrowed eyes were beacons. Was it pain? Anger? Newell couldn’t be sure. Both his OOD and his diving officer were down, and he needed the XO’s help. But he also sensed that he’d have to watch him like a hawk. He wasn’t sure why now, but something in the back of his mind cautioned that he’d have to watch everybody. Newell stuck out his hand. “Come on there. On your feet. I need you in control. We’ve got Russians to kill.”
The XO looked away. Then he rolled to one side with a grunt of pain and moaned slightly until he was balanced on one knee, his back to Newell. He rose unsteadily to his feet. Without looking at Newell as he turned around, he brushed roughly by him into the control room. He saw the OOD crumpled beside the periscope. The diving officer remained in a sitting position, face and hands buried in his knees, his uniform now drenched with his own blood.
Newell stepped up behind him. “Are you ready to help me now?” Makin had yet to speak a word. Newell was hesitant, unsure of his XO’s intentions. Watch him … watch him! The silence pervading the control room added to the eerie glare of the battle lanterns.
Makin whirled around. The handkerchief across his forehead was soaked a bright red. Blood was running down one side of his face. He opened his mouth to speak. His lips moved but there were no words. His eyes seemed to glaze slightly as he stared right through Wayne Newell.
“Dick?”
Makin’s knees buckled and he slumped forward into Newell’s arms. The captain let him slide to the deck.
I’ll do better at knocking off those Russians myself, Newell thought. Those clowns on the attack team are too scared to say anything.
Dan Mundy stood beside Buck Nelson in Florida’s control room and shook his head in wonder. “I don’t know how, but they’re both under way. I can’t imagine those torpedoes blew just noisemakers. I’m picking up a slight shaft problem on one of them, vibration. But they both seem to be headed this way, Captain”
“And you don’t know which is which.” Nelson inclined his head slightly and glanced over the top of his rimless glasses. Mundy had already explained that twice.