If she could dive. If Eel could not dive, then what about enemy aircraft in the morning?
There was so much to consider, so many decisions to be made. He was so tired, and the night had just begun. The loss of life, the damage, might be worth it — could only be worth it — if Whitefish reported destruction of the last troopship. He must send Whitey a message, ask about the transport, announce that Everett was now in command of the wolfpack.…
“Put one and two main engines on a battery charge,” he said.
-12-
Letting down from the high excitement of personal combat was like dying. There was no bottom to the toboggan slide of consciousness, no limit to the trancelike sluggishness that gradually, but so surely, engulfed him. Despite the myriad problems which now insisted on his personal attention, each stumbling over the heels of the one preceding, despite his consciousness of the responsibility which rested upon him, for the first time in his life Richardson found himself totally unable to make even the simplest decisions. Agonizingly, viciously, he flogged himself to stay awake, stay alert, deal with them. Nothing else to do, except attend to the hundred or so details needed to make Eel seaworthy again, fit to submerge. Nothing to think about, except how to keep from sleeping. But he could feel the juices of his faculties ebbing away, draining out of him. A sluice valve had been opened. He was an empty vessel. The brownout of fatigue was turning into a blackout.
He was totally unaware of the stratagem by which Keith inveigled him to sit on his bunk, and then, without a word, lifted his feet and placed them also upon it. There was not even anything to dream about, not even the dead, who once were alive and vital and quick, and now were so quiet, so rested, so evermore sealed in their shattered bodies.
Sleep was deep, dreamless, forever, and its restorative powers worked their magic. When he began to see living, sensate beings: Laura, Admiral Small, Keith, Eel herself — though she was sensate in a different way — he managed to will himself awake. Even while asleep he somehow was normally always aware of any change in Eel’s condition, but not this time. She had been surfaced at his last recollection, and now was submerged, riding quietly.
There must have been someone watching him, for in a moment Keith came in with a cup of steaming coffee, a sandwich, and some papers. A quick glance at the clock on the bulkhead — how long had he been sleeping? It must be only a couple of hours past midnight; he could not believe the hands of the clock had not somehow become interchanged, that it was late morning, that he had been more than eight hours unconscious.
Webber, the most seriously injured of the wounded men, had died in the night without regaining consciousness, Keith reported. Yancy had told Richardson that there was nothing he could do for him except ease his suffering if he regained consciousness (none of this could Rich recall), and his death had occurred only a few hours later. His body had been placed in its zippered leatherette bunk cover like the others, and stowed in one of the two unoccupied torpedo tubes in the forward torpedo room.
It had taken nearly until dawn to make emergency repairs so that they could submerge, Keith went on to relate, but there had been no complications and no need to call him. No additional holes had been found in the pressure hull, other than those Richardson had already seen, and an air test before diving had been satisfactory. Keith exhibited the message he had sent to Whitey Everett informing him that as next senior he had succeeded to command of the wolfpack. Another of the papers was Everett’s acknowledging message directing return to base through the least frequented part of the Yellow Sea, with all daylight hours spent submerged until clear of the Ryukyus.
Then came the bad moment. Keith silently handed him the intercepted report by Whitefish to ComSubPac of her engagement with the convoy, the sinking of two of the troopships, the rupture of a vent riser gasket from a close depth charge, and the unusual actions of an unknown set of heavy merchant-type propellers about two hours later. Richardson could feel the bitterness rise up in him as he read the message. It was for this they had sacrificed Quin, Wyatt, Johnson, Webber, and — yes — Joe Blunt! And there had not even been an attempt to attack the last transport! Keith, he saw, mirrored his feelings.
“Who knows of this message?” he asked, taking a deep sip of coffee to quiet himself.
“Nobody, sir. The decode, I mean. Everyone was so busy, I just decoded it myself. I figured you would want to see it first.…”
Richardson thought a minute. His mind was beginning to function clearly again. “Let’s leave it that way. This won’t go down well with anybody in this ship. There’s no need to have it talked about. ComSubPac will get our log and patrol report, and he’ll have to decide what more, if anything, ought to be done about it. After all, Whitey has sunk five ships in his first command patrol.”
“I know, Skipper, but you set him up for every one of them, and there should have been six! That last troopship was a perfect sitting duck for anyone with the guts to come up to periscope depth to see what was going on! It cost us five of our shipmates for nothing, and now at least one of those two Kwantung Army divisions will be shooting at our Army and Marines on Iwo and Okinawa!” Keith’s repressed passion suddenly blazed through. “Why don’t we send our own message to ComSubPac and tell him what really went on!” Abruptly, Keith became aware that the red-rimmed eyes seemed deeper sunk, the half-buried black eye in the haggard face so close to his own more covered than before by the swollen, darkened flesh.
Richardson must have been more at odds with himself than anyone knew. More tired than anyone could have thought. He felt a surge of anger welling within him, directed not at Whitey Everett, but at the bearer of the unpleasant tidings. It was not logical. He should not blame Keith. Keith, of all people, had a right to feel this way. Barely he contained himself, trembling with the effort, tried to answer in an even tone. After all, Keith was the most loyal one aboard. He, too, had been through a lot. “No!” he barked. “Absolutely not!”
Richardson should not have sounded so peremptory. Keith was only doing his duty. The shock of hearing his own flash of anger enabled him to continue more normally: “Neither would I have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t had Joe Blunt to teach me all he knew about submarining, and you and Jim Bledsoe and some of the others to help me when I needed it. The only thing I’m sorry about is that five good men died trying to do something important, and it didn’t work.”
Keith looked abashed. The emotions of both were near the surface. Impulsively Richardson reached out, gripped him on the shoulder, squeezed with all the strength in his hand. It was the right thing to do. The gesture made it all right again. Richardson felt as though a weight had been partially lifted from him also. Later, after everyone had had a chance to pull himself together, he would arrange a memorial service in front of the torpedo tubes in the forward torpedo room.
The decision as to disposition of the dead, although he could hardly remember having made it, was the only one he had been able to concentrate on before Keith lifted his feet onto his bunk and put out the light. It must have been the trauma of having to view his destroyed shipmates which had enabled him to retain his self-control long enough to consider what to do, but even so it had required great effort to stem the dropping tide of coherent thought. Had Captain Blunt not been one of the dead, they would all have been given a sailor’s burial at sea in the time-honored tradition of a flag-covered corpse gently dropped over the side. But Yancy could give no further information as to the cause of Blunt’s death, despite a second examination. The body of Captain Blunt would have to be brought back to Pearl Harbor for autopsy. He could not bury Quin and the others at sea when the wolfpack commander would be brought home. In the end, each of the four bodies was quietly encased in its own zippered bunk cover. Then — this Richardson insisted upon supervising personally — each was loaded into one of the six torpedo tubes in Eel’s forward torpedo room, after which the tubes were placed out of commission so that they could not be fired, even accidentally. Now, with addition of Webber, there was only a single torpedo tube forward not so labeled. But that was of no consequence. There were no torpedoes left anyway.