‘What’s the depth of water, Pilot?’ Hamilton asked Scott. The navigator left the torpedo director and glanced at the opened chart on the table.
‘Twenty fathoms, sir. Plenty of diving room.’
Hamilton nodded his head and waited.
‘Sixty feet, sir. Trimmed and level.’
Having made his report, Ernie Blood eased his large bottom into a more comfortable position on the narrow unpadded seat. As a veteran submariner, he was accustomed to emergencies and he sat phlegmatically behind the diving wheel, sucking his teeth thoughtfully, ready for the next order. Despite his outward calm, however, he could not help wondering about the reason for the skipper’s sudden decision to take the Rapier deeper. Probably something he had spotted on the surface. Well, he knew best. The coxswain’s confidence in Hamilton’s skill was completely unshakable. But, like every other member of the submarine’s crew, he had no idea what might be happening in the bright sunlit world above the surface of the sea. Only the captain was privy to the secrets of the periscope’s lens. And in an emergency he was too busy to explain his actions to a group of curious matelots.
Hamilton looked at his stopwatch and checked that the attack team was closed up in the correct stations◦– Mannon behind the ‘outside’ ERA watching the trim and indicator lights of the blowing panel. O’Brien ready to mark up the plot, Scott at the ‘fruit machine’ and the two electrical artificers, Blake and Sutton, ranged alongside the periscope, ready to read off the angles and make the slide-rule calculations for the navigator to feed into the torpedo director.
The expressions on the faces of the attack team reflected the tension of the sudden emergency, but they stood at their stations with the easy casualness of men who knew what they were doing. Hamilton said nothing and reached for the telephone to the fore-ends compartment.
‘Bow tubes?’
‘Fore-ends, aye aye, sir.’
‘Action stations. Blow up tubes one, two, three and four.’
The chief torpedo gunner’s mate had served with Hamilton since the first day of the Rapier’s commissioning. He knew his skipper and he knew exactly what was expected of him. Moving the lever of the telemotor controls from left to right, Newton waited for the needle of the pressure gauge to swing across the dial before glancing up at the mechanical indicators. The warning lights glowed as the tubes flooded up and Bruce, the sub lieutenant and fourth hand in charge of the bow compartment, nodded to Langton to check the test cocks. A trickle of water emerged from each end and the torpedo man passed a thumb’s-up signal back to the officer.
‘Bow caps open.’
Newton moved the lever on each tube and the sub lieutenant saw the markers of the mechanical indicators swing to the ‘open’ position. He put his mouth to the telephone.
‘Tubes flooded up, sir. Bow caps open. Standing by.’
‘All received, Number Four. Standing by for firing.’
‘Fore-ends aye aye, sir.’
‘Losing trim, sir! Bows dropping!’
Ernie Blood’s warning report was almost casual in its delivery. His voice gave no hint of alarm and Mannon, alerted by the warning, glanced at the inclometer for confirmation.
‘Blow One and Two compensating tanks.’
Venables reached forward across the panel and twisted the control valves of the bow compensating tanks. There was a sudden whine of compressed air as the water was transferred to the main ballast tanks under pressure, and Mannon saw the artificial horizon of the inclometer tilt back to equilibrium.
‘Trimmed and level, sir.’
Hamilton frowned. Rapier shouldn’t have lost trim so easily. And the fact that the heaviness in the bow coincided with the flooding of the torpedo tubes suggested something amiss with the first officer’s trim calculations. Alternatively, the by-pass valves used to transfer water ballast to balance the extra weight of the flooded tubes were malfunctioning. Either way something was wrong, and he made a mental note to check as soon as time permitted.
‘Any Asdic contacts, Glover?’
‘No, sir.’
‘HE?’
‘Negative.’
‘Take her up to periscope depth, Number One.’
‘Planes to rise◦– level at thirty. Blow Q!’
‘Thirty and level, sir.’
‘Up periscope!’
The big search ’scope rose up from the deck and Hamilton swung the column onto a north-east bearing. He focused the lens on the trading junk he had seen before their emergency dive and then, with pointedly unhurried calm, he swept the horizon through a full circle.
‘Down periscope. Attack team fall out.’ He reached for the telephone. ‘Bow ends◦– secure from Action Stations. Close bow caps and blow tubes.’ Putting the telephone back on its cradle, he lifted the microphone of the internal tannoy system. ‘This is the Captain. All hands stand down to Watch Diving routine.’
Mannon carried out a final check on the glowing warning lights of the main venting panel before turning to Hamilton. The tension of the unexpected emergency still showed in his face, but he managed to conjure up a grin.
‘Panic over, sir?’ he enquired cheerfully.
‘Just a drill, Number One. I wanted to make sure we hadn’t got stale after a few weeks enjoying the flesh-pots of Hong Kong.’ Hamilton glanced at the stopwatch hanging from a cord around his neck. ‘I suppose you didn’t do too badly◦– all things considered,’ he admitted grudgingly. Walking to the gyro-repeater, he stared at it in silence for a few moments. ‘Reduce to half speed. Steer zero-four-five.’ Finnegan brought the submarine on to its new course and centered the wheel as the gyro-repeater came on. ‘Half-ahead, sir. Course zero-four-five.’
Mannon knew that the alteration of the helm had pointed the submarine’s bows towards the Chinese mainland, and he could not help wondering what sort of plan Hamilton had in mind. Snark’s scheme had seemed wild enough when he first put it forward but, looked at afresh in the cold light of reality, it now seemed totally impossible. Boarding a destroyer◦– a submarine’s arch enemy◦– in its lair was an invitation to suicide. And Mannon did not feel very enthusiastic about dying young.
‘Bring your trim calculations to the wardroom, Number One,’ Hamilton told him sharply. ‘The bows shouldn’t have gone heavy when we flooded the tubes. There must be an error somewhere and I’d like to check your figures.’ Mannon was quite certain his calculations were correct, but Hamilton was probably wise to check, and he harbored no resentment. The answer probably lay in a malfunction of the ballast by-pass valves and, fortunately, that wasn’t his responsibility. Pulling down the file containing Rapier’s, trim figures, he ducked through the for’ard bulkhead hatch to wait for the skipper in the wardroom.
Hamilton, meanwhile, had joined Scott at the chart table. He located Hai-An Bay without too much difficulty and circled it with his pencil.
‘What time is high water?’ he asked.
Scott checked the tables printed on the right-hand side of the chart and scribbled some figures on a scrap of paper.
‘About six o’clock, sir. It’s difficult to be precise. It’s not marked on the chart and these islands to the north could affect the tidal flow.’
‘Will we have enough water under the keel?’
‘Inside the bay◦– yes. But I’d reckon only six to seven fathoms over the bar at this time of the year at high water◦– and that’s a pretty risky gamble.’
Hamilton shrugged. ‘It’s my gamble, Pilot, not yours. But I can’t see an alternative. We’ve got to get inside the bay.’ He stared down at the various symbols printed on the chart and tried to picture what the scene would look like in reality. There were times when he wished he’d been blessed with a more vivid imagination. ‘I want to be half a mile off the bar at high water. Rapier will remain submerged through the approach◦– no point in revealing our presence before we have to. Let me have a course and speed.’