The hatch dogs moved a trifle, but then they returned to the engaged position. The hatch remained closed. Livingston gave the clue. “Quin says the commodore is standing on the hatch!” But the words were no sooner out than the dogs precipitantly turned free. The hatch sprang open. He leaped up the ladder rungs.
A scuffle was going on. Blunt, Williams, and Lasche were struggling between the periscopes. Quin staring aghast. Scott — it must have been he who had kicked open the hatch — the same. Cornelli, still braced at his useless steering wheel, rigidly keeping his eyes front. Only Stafford, padded earphones covering half his face, seemed oblivious. “Stop!” roared Richardson. “Stop it! All three of you!” The three were breathing with tremendous heaves. Rich, too, had hardly recovered from his run from the after engineroom, and was panting again from his swift ascent to the conning tower.
The wolfpack commander was the first to speak. He was sputtering with rage, the querulous note in his voice never more evident. His eyes were unnaturally wide, staring. His whole face was loose. Even his words were loose, poorly pronounced. His breath came in great, fetid wheezes. “Richardson, I took command of this ship when you left your station! Somebody has to take care of things around here! I’m charging these two officers with assault on a superior in the performance of his duty, and I want them transferred as soon as we reach port!”
“He wouldn’t get off the hatch when you wanted to come up,” said Williams, “so Larry and I pulled him off. We knew you weren’t hurt. He made that up. Maybe he was thinking of Keith — is he all right? What about the flooding aft?”
Ignoring the questions, Richardson spoke rapidly. “We’ve got to surface. Get the gun crews ready!” He turned to Blunt. “Commodore,” he began, spacing his words but speaking gently, “you’re not yourself. Please go below. The pharmacist’s mate will report to you.…”
“No! You can’t make me! I’ve taken charge here!” Blunt’s voice trembled.
He would have said more, but Stafford interrupted. There was excitement in his tone, combined with dread. “I think she’s shifted to short scale and started a run! She’s dead aft in the baffles! Our screws are making so much noise I can’t tell for sure!”
Were Eel to turn to clear the sonar for better hearing, her partial broadside would return a far more definite echo than the Mikura could get by pinging up her wake, as she was at the moment forced to do. For some time Rich had been considering another idea, born of what he had read of German submarine tactics. “Control,” he called down the hatch, “Al, open the forward group vents. Get ready to blow a big bubble through forward group tanks!”
“Control, aye!” A moment later Dugan leaned his head back again. “Forward group vents are open. We’re ready to blow!”
“All stop,” ordered Richardson. Cornelli reached for his annunciator controls, but the order had been called down to the control room. Cornelli had forgotten he was disconnected. He dropped his hands, helplessly looked backward.
The follower pointers still functioned, however, and clicked over to “stop” just as Al Dugan called from below, “All stop, answered.”
“Blow forward group, Al. Full blow! Half a minute!” The noise of air blowing. A different sound in the water rushing past, because full of bubbles. Eel coasted through them as they rose from her open vents and broke up into millions of tiny, sonar-stopping granules of air. A long bubble streak would form on the surface as well, but in the rapidly growing darkness this might not immediately be noticed. When it was, the tincan skipper would very likely think he had delivered a lethal blow at last. Whatever else, for a time his sonar would never penetrate the double barrier of Eel’s wake, thrown directly into his receiver, and the cloud of diffused air immediately following. He would have to proceed through the entire mess before his sonar conditions would be back to normal, and might well assume, temporarily at least, that the air bubble marked the rupture of Eel’s pressure hull; that the now flooded submarine, dead at last, was lying on the bottom under it.
Rich was looking at his watch. Eel’s speed had only begun to drop. He ordered emergency speed a few seconds before the half-minute expired, and the needle on the pitometer log indicator again began to rise. It was hardly possible the enemy tincan would recognize the change through the reverberations in the water and the blanket of air now astern. Very deliberately, Rich put on the spare set of sonar earphones. In the depleted condition of her battery, Eel could not run long at full battery discharge, but a long run was not in his mind. Depth charges were; and after a lengthy silence, during which the roaring of water rushing past and the vibration of whatever it was that had been damaged topside seemed to grow ever louder, he suddenly relaxed.
Stafford was also grinning, for the first time that day. Through the earphones, dim in the distance and masked by the tumultuous wash of Eel’s thrashing screws, there could clearly be heard the thunder of many depth charges. The tincan was depth charging the air bubble! It would be long minutes before the enemy skipper realized he had not driven Eel to earth at last.
This would be the opportunity. Richardson had given Blunt no attention for several minutes, was on the point of forgetting him when he realized he was still in the conning tower. The wolfpack commander was still breathing hard, still slack-jawed, his eyes still glaring under the bunched, bushy brows. Obviously he was still confused, still antagonistic. He would be terribly in the way. It was not possible to stop the sharpness in Richardson’s voice. “Commodore, please! I asked you to go below! We’re going to have to do a battle surface!”
“No! You can’t make me!” The identical words as before. Unreal. Manic.
“Quin, pass the word for Yancy to come up here.” Richardson waited until the pharmacist’s mate appeared on the ladder. “Commodore, unless you go below with Yancy by yourself, we’ll have to have you carried down. I really mean it, sir!” Not until later did Richardson recall his next words, wrenched from the depths of his private grief. They were expressive of all that had happened between them, all Rich had tried to do for his onetime idol; symbolic, too, of the change in their relationship, and of the onslaught of time which casts one up and at the same moment must cast another down. “I’ve come to the end of my rope, Joe,” he said. It was the first time ever that he had used Blunt’s given name.
There was something juvenile, something pitifully childish, in the stubborn refusal, the retreat into the accustomed corner under the bridge hatch. But there was neither time nor any more emotion to waste.
Quin was trying to get Richardson’s attention. “Mr. Leone is on the phone. He says the engineroom is lined up to pump, and he’s beginning to pressurize the compartment. He says he’ll have to use a lot of air if we stay down.”
Once air pressure in the after engineroom became equal to the sea pressure at the depth, water would cease coming in. When air pressure exceeded sea pressure, water would begin flowing back through the same hole through which it had entered. This would be true, of course, only so long as the water level in the engineroom covered the hole; and anyone remaining in the compartment would be subjected to the same pressure, with consequent danger of the bends if prolonged. But there was no longer any need for that worry.