“Dravit!” I bellowed out the stateroom door.
“Yes?”
“Get Chief Puckins and Wickersham in here ASAP.”
Keiko looked up at me uncertainly. “Not their fault. They only suggested this stowaway after you left Hachijo. It was my fault for taking them up on it. They said it would be good for ‘skipper’s morale.’”
She rolled over to face the bulkhead.
Dravit, Puckins, and Wickersham came barging through the door. Dravit was smiling but quickly dropped the smile when he saw the wild look of fury in my eye.
“You two”—my index finger shook uncontrollably—“are hereby appointed head cleaners on this boat until further notice. If in the future you have any plans to buoy the spirits of ‘your skipper,’ or anyone else, you can take those plans and stick them…”
Dravit seized the seconds it took to fish for an appropriate receptacle to hustle the culprits out of the stateroom and added some choice advice of his own.
I went aft to the control room to tell the captain of his stowaway. The captain’s reaction, clearly, though not overtly, indicated he was of the opinion he had embarked ten rank amateurs.
The humor of the prank escaped me. My full concentration had to be on my men and the mission. There would be no second chances, no coming back to pick up forgotten items. Keiko would be a distraction—albeit a pleasant one—but a distraction, nonetheless. A malfunctioning radio or a shortage of food, it didn’t matter. I was responsible.
The submarine rushed headlong through the brooding waters of the Sea of Japan. After the prank, Dravit had limped out of the stateroom and berthed in the troop compartment. He had said, with ponderous sarcasm, that he could not abide officers who encouraged stowaways.
Chamonix and I worked on organizing the field packs so that they were both light and complete. We would darken the troop compartment and the group would rehearse assembling the folding kayaks and breaking down the weapons. We fitted the green Chinese uniforms and made what few alterations were required of the white camouflage overblouses and overtrousers.
I hoped to get fairly close to the Siberian coast in order to lock the raiding party out of the submarine. A lockout was a procedure in which divers exited a submerged submarine. It was a ticklish maneuver that required a rehearsal of both the frogmen and the submarine’s crew. Underwater, the submarine’s propellers generated a furious suction. Any error could suck a drifting frogman into the whirling propeller and certain death. The sub’s captain had agreed to a rehearsal and scheduled it for the next day.
The rehearsal centered around the submarine’s forward escape trunk, a compartment about the size of two telephone booths. At the top of the trunk lay a hatch that led to the outer deck of the submarine. At the bottom of the compartment was another hatch, which opened into the sub’s working spaces. When the trunk was completely flooded, a small lip around the outer edge of the top hatch trapped a donut of air several inches in depth. In an emergency, a diver could just barely thrust his head into the donut-shaped bubble for breathable air.
The lockout procedure was hazardous, yet simple in principle. By operating the controls within the trunk or the dual controls in the lower passageway, we could gradually flood the trunk with water from the sub’s reserve tanks. Once the pressure inside the trunk was slightly greater than the pressure outside the sub’s hull, the top hatch, which was already undogged and only held shut by the outside pressure, would pop open and the divers in the trunk could swim out. From there they would glide along a safety line, which stretched from the top hatch to the periscope. The line kept the divers from drifting back into the sub’s screws.
I would have preferred to use oxygen rebreathers—Draegers—which left no telltale bubbles. However, a diver breathing pure oxygen under pressure stood a good chance of blacking out at depths exceeding thirty feet. The distance between this submarine’s hatch and the surface, running at periscope depth, came uncomfortably close to that depth. Draegers were therefore out, open-circuit scuba was the rig of the week.
The lockout was one way of deploying raiders in enemy waters undetected. It placed great demands on divers, especially in waters as cold as the Okhotsk, but it allowed the submarine to stay below the surface. Submariners dreaded the detectability and vulnerability of surface running.
The next evening we assembled the men for the drill. Every man wore a bulky bubble dry suit. These suits were warmer, but more cumbersome than the old-fashioned dry suits we had worn for Kunashiri.
The first diver pair, Puckins and Lutjens, climbed up into the trunk and secured the lower hatch. As the assigned safety divers, they wore single-hose regulators with octopus extensions. Puckins operated the controls inside the trunk. Dravit, his ankle cast propped on the lower knife edge of the hatchway, stood by the series of valves and pipes that duplicated Puckins’s controls within the trunk. Puckins announced over the waterproof intercom each adjustment as he made it.
“Flooding.”
I could hear the pumps forcing water into the trunk. Dravit repeated each message back to Puckins.
I could imagine the rising water level, first knee high, then waist high, then chest high…
“Tell him to have Lutjens put his mouthpiece in and test it below water level.” It was a routine command. The divers had, of course, made a cursory regulator check when they had strapped on their tanks.
“Lutjens… is having… trouble.”
The resonance of Puckins’s words had changed as water poured into the trunk. I could hear coughing in the background over the hum of the pumps. Puckins vented the trunk.
“Try yours… he may have to buddy-breathe off your octopus rig.”
More coughing and gagging.
“Something wrong”—cough—“getting water through the”—cough—“regulator…. Water’s real high… nearly to the hatch lip.”
“Get up into the bubble. Don’t touch any of the controls.”
“Captain Dravit, take over, using your controls. Abort the lockout. Flood down the trunk. Whatever we do, we can’t lose the bubble. Chief, we are aborting the drill.”
The bubble was now their only source of air. If Dravit manipulated the controls in the wrong order, the bubble would slip out the wrong pipe and the divers would drown, trapped in a dark round coffin of steel.
“Flooding down.”
The pumps reversed flow. I realized I was in a cold sweat.
When the trunk had finally emptied, Lutjens opened the lower hatch, and the two shaken divers climbed out. Wickersham grabbed their regulators and pried them open with a screwdriver.
“Mr. Frazer, take a look at these.” Wickersham held out the two regulators.
“No mushroom valves.”
A mushroom valve was a soft, flexible rubber disk that, during the breathing cycle, kept water from entering the mouthpiece as exhaust air escaped. These disks were missing. We examined the other regulators. Their valves were missing, too. This was no manufacturer’s error. It meant deliberate sabotage—the kind a diver wouldn’t normally detect until it was too late—sabotage that killed with choking horror.
“Gurung, let the control room know we’ve called off the lockout drill.”
“Thought it might have been a Jonah back in Korea, but we’ve got a Judas with us. Don’t we?” Wickersham thought aloud.
“Yes, it appears we do. But he hasn’t stopped us… yet.”
“Break out the kayaks. It looks like this boat’s going to have to surface, after all.”
CHAPTER 19
Keiko and I shared the same stateroom but barely spoke to one another. She had become distant, or perhaps I had become distant. It didn’t matter since I was busy checking and rechecking, inspecting and reinspecting, planning and replanning. A chill had fallen on our relationship and I just could not spare the time to lift it. If that were possible.