Water still dripped from the bridge structure as a multitude of tiny pockets slowly drained away. With unaccustomed clarity of sound, because there was no engine murmur from aft to preempt the ears, the water streams could be heard dropping directly on the sea which half-covered the conning tower beneath Richardson’s feet.
The Yellow Sea is far from the coldest body of water in the world, but Richardson was beginning to feel the December chill. He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket, put on the mittens which he customarily kept ready in its pockets, checked his rubber lifebelt for the carbon dioxide cartridges which should be there to inflate it on need. What could be holding up the message, he wondered.
“Bridge!” Keith’s voice. “Chicolar has the message. We can’t raise Whitefish.”
He might have guessed. Whitey Everett was taking his own time about surfacing. No doubt he would greet the instruction to patrol submerged with pleasure, maybe relief, but in the meantime his being submerged and out of communication was keeping Eel on the surface and in a very uncomfortable cruising situation.
Rich had argued strenuously with the wolfpack commander for a normal surfacing operation, pointing out that the ship was customarily able to dive to periscope depth in about forty-five seconds, even with a start at slow speed. But Blunt, already climbing into his bunk, had refused to permit it, had finally agreed to broaching as the only compromise he would accept. Well, he, as well as the rest of them, would simply have to wait.
There was one thing which had not been discussed, however, and it could therefore be accomplished without disobeying any order. Rich pressed the bridge speaker button. “Control, this is bridge. Equalize pressure through the main induction.”
“Control aye aye,” from Buck Williams.
The quiet on the bridge was eerie. Richardson could clearly hear the remote operating gear engage the inboard induction flapper in the forward engineroom. Then came a whoosh of air under the cigarette deck, in the midst of which, barely distinguishable, was the clank of the thirty-six-inch-diameter main induction valve. There had been a lot of air inside the submarine, what with negative tank twice having been vented into the hull. The noise lasted about three seconds, was followed by the clank of the main induction shutting and the further noise when the engineroom flapper snapped shut on its spring.
After half an hour Richardson, inadequately prepared for cold weather with only his jacket, guessed that Whitey Everett must be having breakfast submerged. Nearly an hour after Eel broached, by which time he had decided Whitey had added a nap to his breakfast schedule, the welcome news came from Keith in the radio room that Whitefish had received the message.
“Clear the bridge,” he said. The lookouts went below. He took a last look around with the binoculars. This would be a good drill, he thought. “Take her down!” he shouted, a spurious alarm in his voice. He hit the diving alarm twice, jumped for the hatch. Scott slammed it shut behind him, dogged it. He could feel the bow planes reversed to full dive, digging in, the increased drive of the propellers as the motors suddenly went to full speed. The main vents were open, but there was understandably little noise of air vented and water entering, since the ballast tanks had been only partly emptied.
“Did you start a watch?” he asked Scott. Without replying, the quartermaster held out his left hand. In it, suspended from a piece of cord which he had looped around his thumb, lay a stopwatch. The hand was passing fifteen seconds. At that moment the sea, which could be heard gurgling around the outside of the conning tower, closed over it. Several more seconds passed. “Forty-seven feet,” said Rich, who had crossed to where he could watch the depth gauge.
Scott stopped the watch. “Twenty-four seconds flat, Captain,” he said, holding it out for him to see. “Not bad, sir.”
Rich nodded, pleased. He would say something congratulatory to Buck Williams also.
A quiet discussion with Keith confirmed what he had suspected. “I know darned well he was submerged,” said Keith. “Either that or his radio had broken down. When we finally heard him, he came in loud and clear.”
Nelson, the chief radioman, shook his head. “He wasn’t broken down, sir,” he said. “I could hear him loading down his wet antennas when he answered us. He had just surfaced.”
For a short time Rich worried about what he should report to Blunt when the latter asked him the reason for his long delay on the surface, until it came to him that the wolfpack commander must have slept through it all.
At the end of four days Richardson realized that he had become distinctly restive. So had Keith, and so, he could see, had Buck Williams and a number of the other members of the crew. They would quickly go stale, lose their fine edge of alertness and training, if some change in the deadly routine could not be made. Every night for four days, with the area chart spread out on the wardroom table, he had gone over the same arguments with Blunt.
“They have to come through here,” Blunt would say, banging his pipe on the chart in the approximate center of the area, scattering ashes and sometimes small glowing tobacco embers on it. Richardson would argue the Japanese had long ago learned that the shortest distance between two points at sea was not necessarily the straight line which crossed the center of a submarine patrol area.
“Look,” he would say, “the only things we’ve seen since we’ve been here are wooden sampans. Maybe some of them are on antisub patrol, as they told us about at the briefing. The big cargo ships must be going up and down the coast of China close inshore. We’ve not seen any out here. They probably enter harbor at night, anchor in the mud flats off the Chinese coast, or travel inshore of some of these small islands. The chain of islands off Korea forms almost a protective barrier against submarines.”
For four nights in a row Keith and Richardson had pored over the combined contact and patrol track chart which someone in ComSubPac headquarters had compiled from all submarine patrol reports for the area. The chart clearly showed that of all the submarines which had been assigned AREA TWELVE since the beginning of the war, most had patrolled in the center of the area. By far the majority of contacts, however, had been made on the periphery. The submarine which had turned in the best patrol to date had never been in the center of the Yellow Sea except to cross it en route from one side to the other.
The arguments had no effect on Blunt. The wolfpack commander would not permit them to patrol surfaced during daylight, nor to shift their patrol areas closer inshore. Several times he pointed out that a submarine built for a test depth of four hundred feet, like Eel, was not able to realize her entire potential in the shallow water of the Yellow Sea. Even in the deepest part of the area it was impossible to achieve maximum submergence. Richardson decided not to bring up the fact that this was known before the Yellow Sea had been selected for their combined patrol area, and that unless ComSubPac was to abandon AREA TWELVE altogether, some submarine would have to patrol it.
The fifth night, however, brought a change. Ensign Johnny Cargill had the coding watch. “It’s one for us,” he said simply, handing a decoded message to his superiors.
The message said: SPECIAL TO BLUNT’S BRUISERS 151800Z X SIX SHIPS 34 DEGREES 10.1 MINUTES NORTH 127 DEGREES 30 MINUTES EAST X COURSE WEST X SPEED TEN 151016Z X
“That’s three o’clock tomorrow morning our time,” said Leone.
“How long will it take to get there?” demanded Richardson.