“All stop!” shouted Richardson. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
The silence was unbelievable. Richardson’s eardrums felt as if they had closed up in self-protection and now were having difficulty readjusting to the normal noises at sea. Gradually he became aware of a whistling sound, combined with a gurgling and a pouring of water. Eel’s own sternward motion, diminishing, was responsible for some of it; but more, he realized, particularly the whistling noise, must come from the enemy ship. Of course she had closed all her watertight doors and hatches, but she had been riddled by so many small holes, as well as the large ones made by the five-inch guns, that there was no capability left in her shattered hull to hold an air bubble. The noise was air whistling out of the holes throughout her body.
She lay flat on the water, her deck at the water’s edge, her squat bridge-deckhouse combination, splintered and shattered, standing vertically like a lighthouse in a quiet sea. Air still bubbled from within her, making a dozen ridiculous little geysers as it escaped from the now submerged hull. Eel, her sternway petering out, had traced a semicircle in the astern direction. He could see it all, though it was a dark night. The ruined bridge began leaning to starboard, and simultaneously the forward part of the little ship sank lower so that the square structure never fell into the sea, but instead seemingly quartered into it. As the steel hull which supported it slowly upended, bow first, its stern momentarily reappeared above the surface. Then the whole thing was gone.
Richardson waited a moment. The next move should be to pick up survivors, but if any depth charges had been made ready in anticipation of another attack, they would go off soon, probably about the time they reached the bottom of the sea. The wait, which seemed interminable, could not have been long. Once again, as had happened the previous day, the ocean erupted around the grave of the sunken ship. When all was quiet once more, there was no life left. Only a few shattered timbers tossing helplessly in a white canopy of foam on a suddenly uneasy sea, and tiny pieces of debris speckling it all, like pepper from a grinder on whipped cream.
As Richardson gave orders to secure all guns, ammunition, and personnel topside, and to proceed into the center of the wreckage to search for any possible survivors, he heard Yancy asking permission to speak to him.
“I’ve got bad news, Captain,” he said. Richardson waited numbly. This was bound to be the final result of his decision to fight on the surface, but there had been no other choice. The gods of war must be given their sacrifice. Doubtless all had died aboard his adversary — probably as many as a hundred men. Eel carried eighty — eighty-one, counting the wolfpack commander — and it was too much to hope that they would all escape scot-free.
“We have three men killed, sir. Wyatt, Quin, and Johnson; and ten wounded. Two fairly seriously — Thompson and Webber, and…” Yancy seemed to be in doubt as to how to phrase the next item. He hesitated a long moment. “The commodore is dead.”
“What!” The startled cry was the antithesis of Yancy’s carefully studied, bold statement of fact. Blunt had not even been topside during the battle. He had spoken to him only a few hours before, just before surfacing; automatically he looked at his watch, saw to his astonishment that from surfacing until this moment had been less than fifteen minutes.
“You don’t look so good yourself, Captain,” said the pharmacist’s mate. “You have blood all over your face and head.”
Still overwhelmed by Yancy’s surprise news, Richardson removed the telephone earphones and mouthpiece. “I’m all right,” he said, “I took these from Quin. This must be his blood that’s on me.” Unaccountably, Quin’s death seemed far more personal than that of Blunt, more like that of Oregon. Quin and Oregon had both followed him from the Walrus to the Eel. Quin, in fact, had been with him even before, in S-16.
Still, Blunt’s death was the big surprise, the greatest shock, because there was no reason for it. “What happened to the commodore? What do you mean, he’s dead!”
Yancy swiveled away his eyes. “We brought him to the wardroom, the way you told us, and that’s where we found him. His head was down on his arms on the table as if he was asleep. Sometimes he used to catnap that way. We were bringing some of the hurt men in there, and when he didn’t move, I looked at him and saw he was dead.”
“But my God, man! A man doesn’t just die.… What happened?… Are you sure…” The sentence went uncompleted, the question lost. It made no difference. Suddenly all Richardson’s exhilaration over the successful outcome of the battle evaporated. All was gall in his mouth. His eyes ached, wanted to close. He forced them open. He was so stupefied with exhaustion that he could feel nothing beyond the burning in his eyes and the overpowering need to lie down. His mind told him his body ached as much as his eyes, and would ache more after a few hours’ rest. He had proved a nemesis to so many people. Jim Bledsoe and the entire crew of the Walrus. Bungo Pete. Oregon. Quin, Wyatt, Johnson, and now old Joe Blunt, whose own dolphins, given him so many years ago, he still wore on his best uniforms.
He looked up, saw Yancy staring at him gravely. “Where is he, Yancy?”
“I got some men laying him out in his bunk, Captain. Like I said, he looks okay. There’s not a mark on him except his neck is all swelled up.”
“What do you think could have happened?”
“I haven’t really had a chance to check him. Don’t know. Maybe a heart attack. Maybe a stroke. Most likely he hurt himself falling down the hatch. He could have broke his neck and not know it. Then, maybe, walking around, bending over and all, he might have pinched the spinal cord.” Yancy hesitated. He wanted to say something more. “He hasn’t been acting normal, sir. Not for a long time. I knew when you and Mr. Leone were reading my books, and I read them too. There was something else wrong with him, sir. I’m no doctor, and it’s just a guess, but I think there was something wrong in his head. He would blow hot and cold, like, and he could never take any pressure. Maybe there was something wrong with the blood to his brain. That and a broken neck could have finished him easy.”
“Any chance that he’s just conked out and will come to a little later?…”
“No, sir. He’s dead.” There was a note of finality in Yancy’s voice which Richardson recognized he would have to accept.
But he could not go below just yet, and Al Dugan was waiting to make his report. There was the damage to be checked. The submarine to make seaworthy again. The rig for dive to be rigorously gone over once more. Numbers three and four main engines to be checked out, and the situation in the after engineroom itself to be considered. Could a plug be placed in the cooler intake line? If not, how could Eel submerge — or could the drain pump handle the leak so she could submerge safely to shallow depths for a short time?
What about the hydraulic system and the air compressors? Al Dugan would report on those. The periscopes. They would have to be checked carefully, not only because of the depth charging but also because something, perhaps only a small-caliber projectile, had struck the periscope shears. It might have distorted the alignment of the bearings.
Those concussions when the four-inch shells hit. Was Eel’s pressure hull still sound? Number one five-inch gun, jammed in train: that was where at least one of the enemy’s large-caliber projectiles had struck. Any shell holes in the hull would have to have temporary plugs. The gun should, if possible, be trained back fore and aft before the ship dived again.