The greatest repair problem revolved around being able to submerge. Eel had been struck six times in all by the enemy’s four-inch gun, and a dozen times or more by the smaller calibers. None of the small automatic weapons had been able to penetrate the pressure hull, but the large-size projectiles had done so twice: in the gun access trunk and the forward engineroom. Major repair effort had gone to the engineroom, for the access trunk could be sealed off from below merely by shutting the hatch connecting it to the control room. The hole in the engineroom, a slash some six inches long and four wide with jagged edges bent inside the ship, required ingenuity.
There had been some talk with Al Dugan about the best means of plugging it, though Rich could not remember any of the details they had discussed. Now it was the first thing he inspected. There were two huge bolts down through the hole, passing through heavy bars across its short dimension, each of them capped with a heavy hexagonal nut. Thick gasket material bulging down through the gash concealed what was evidently a heavy plate spanning it on the outside.
“It was easy when we found the right thing to cannibalize,” Al Dugan told him with professional pride. “One of the air compressors is out of commission anyway with a cracked foundation, so we just cut a section of the foundation, bent it to fit the curve of the hull, and slapped her on the outside. Covers the hole with a lot to spare all around. We put Glyptal all over everything, and so far she doesn’t even leak. There’s a watch on it anyhow, with a bucket, just in case. But I hope you’re not planning on any more depth charges till after Pearl Harbor gets a whack at it!”
Rich gravely assured him he would henceforth do his utmost to avoid depth charges, at least until a proper welded patch had been installed. In the after engineroom, things were also cheerful. Through a great deal of hard work, temporary repairs had been effected to the damaged seawater discharge line. A certain amount of steady leakage could not be prevented, and this would increase, of course, at the deeper depths. But unless the situation worsened considerably, the drain pump could take care of it by running fifteen minutes out of every hour. As a precautionary move, a special watch had been set on the cooler also, with a telephone, to give instant warning should the leak increase. Richardson left the engineroom convinced the repair had been handled as well as could be.
Despite Dugan’s pessimistic report during the height of the surface pursuit, the hydraulic plant had again been returned to a semblance of running condition. With everything possible switched over to hand power, it could, if carefully monitored, continue to perform the few basic operations for which there was no hand-powered alternative. The insoluble problem in the pump room was a new one. One of Eel’s pair of air compressors, as Dugan had said, was permanently out of commission with its bearings out of line and its foundations cracked right across. Even without the section removed from the base, it would need a major repair job in port. The other compressor had also been thrown out of alignment by the same depth charge, but to a lesser degree. It could run and had in fact been running, but after only three hours, long before Eel’s nearly depleted air banks had been recharged, it ceased to jam air. Inspection showed, as suspected, that the misalignment had caused failure of the just-replaced third and fourth stage discharge valves, necessitating their replacement a second time. As Al explained it, the single air compressor remaining could not be relied on for more than a few hours before the new valve disks would also break, or be scored beyond use, and only two additional spare sets were on board besides those he would remove from the other compressor. He did not need to tell Richardson what this meant. Compressed air was vital to a submarine for many small purposes, but its major functions were to start main engines, fire torpedoes, and blow tanks. The mere acts of submerging and surfacing again were now nearly prohibitively costly. Eel’s status as an operational submarine was by consequence greatly reduced. She would have had to leave station in any case, short of emergency.
In midafternoon a call from the conning tower reached Richardson during his second visit to the after engineroom. In a moment he was at the periscope.
“What is it?” he asked Larry Lasche, now promoted to standing his first “top watch” alone.
“Don’t know, Captain. Just this white thing on the horizon, on the port bow. Also, I’ve seen three patrolling aircraft on my watch.”
Through the periscope Richardson inspected the object. It seemed totally innocuous in the distance, floating quietly on the calm sea. A fifteen-degree course alteration put it more nearly dead ahead for a closer passage and a more careful inspection.
“It’s a raft,” he finally said. “There’s birds flying around and pecking at something on it.”
It was as though a vague intuition were tugging at Richardson’s memory, calling to him. The raft drew nearer. He was paying entirely too much attention to it. Nervously he spun the periscope around several times, dunked it, raised it again. There was nothing else in sight. The sky was clear in all directions, and so was the horizon. Always he returned to the raft. Always its outlines grew more clear, more familiar.
Suddenly Richardson whirled to Lasche. “Larry, do you have our position on the chart?”
“Yes, sir. Over here on the chart table.”
“And where was it we had that tangle with Moonface and that fake fishing trawler of his?”
“I don’t remember exactly, sir, but the log will have the position.…”
In a moment the general location of Richardson’s short imprisonment in Moonface’s patrol boat was marked off on the chart. His skipper’s next words brought a strange sensation to Larry Lasche’s scalp. Nervously he rubbed his hand across the top of his head.
“Call Keith and Buck,” Richardson said in a repressed, tight voice. “We’re not twenty miles away from our position when you fellows had that fight with Moonface’s patrol boat and got me back aboard. That’s their raft out there, and Moonface is still on it!”
Keith, Buck, and Al Dugan, who had insisted upon joining the excited group in the conning tower, all took turns looking through the periscope.
“But how can it be?” said Keith. “He wasn’t badly injured so far as we could see, and he had his whole crew with him and a good-sized boat in the water. It had a mast and sails, and plenty of water and food. They should have been able to reach land in a couple of days. If the boat could carry all the people, it probably made sense to abandon the raft, but…”
“When they abandoned the raft, they didn’t take their skipper with them,” said Rich in the same repressed tone.
“You mean, they deserted him?” burst out Lasche. A meaningful silence took possession of the conning tower.