"All right, Keith. Station somebody in the bridge hatch ready to shut it if necessary."
"Roger."
"Bridget" Al Dugan, from the control room. "Ready below!"
There was no more exhaust aft. I had not heard the main induction go shut, but it no doubt had.
My little microphone went only to the conning tower. I had to press the bridge speaker button firmly and yell into it to reach Al. "Control! Open and shut the forward group vents!"
Instantly white spray whirred out from between our slotted forward deck, was blown, just as instantly, to nothingness. I counted three to myself. The spray stopped at "four." Nothing happened at first. We heaved up as before to a passing sea, rolling far over to port, losing the few degrees of turn we had managed to accumulate during the past several seconds.
Then we dropped, far down. The next sea swept across our deck as though there were no deck there, poured over the bridge side bulwarks, inundated the whole place, filled it with foam- topped green water.
Instinctively I had sought the leeward side, the port side.
And just as the roar of the approaching wave heralded its closest proximity, boiling up from beneath as well as overwhelming us from on top, I saw the hatch slam shut. Tons of water roared around me. Frantically I gripped the lookout guard rail, felt my feet swept from under me. Sick despair engulfed me. The bitter certainty filled my brain that with the lack of buoyancy forward and the heavy seas rushing at us we had driven completely under. If we did not come up soon I was done for, and Bungo Pete would have won again.
Somehow, buoyed up by the water, I managed to pull myself up a little higher on the lookout rail-my lungs felt as though they would burst if I couldn't get a breath of air, and then I was out of it. The water had rolled past and part of our bridge reappeared. The after TBT came up, mounted on its tripod legs, just abaft of the periscope shears. My mike was gone, lost, but there was a bridge speaker installed under the TBT. Floundering in the water, I struggled aft to it; standing hip-deep I put my eyes to the binoculars. It was blurred-I wiped it off with my fingers, sucking the salt from them first.
Still blurred. There was a piece of lens paper in my pocket, somehow only damp, not dripping-wiped it off with that.
"Captain! Are you all right!"
The speaker startled me, booming right into my chest. I pushed the button, twice.
I "That did it! We're coming around! I'll steady up on course zero-eight-zero and slow down-all we need is the bearings, skipper!"
The last words were engulfed in another deluge of water.
This time I relaxed, twining my arms and legs into the TBT stanchions, waited for it to pass. Twice more the ocean buried me, welling up from beneath the deck and hurtling over the side at the same time, before the welcome voice of my Exec announced that the ship had reached the desired heading.
There was now some protection from the bridge bulwarks and periscope supports behind me, as well from the fact that the seas in sweeping in from dead ahead could not pick up quite so much of solid substance through the submerged forepart of the ship.
I wiped off the TBT lenses again, squeezing water from the precious piece of lens paper to do it, sighted through. "Ready'
Keith! Single shots! Don't shoot unless I'm holding down the button!" This was to take care of the possibility that I might be temporarily unable to aim. I turned the TBT slowly from side to side, centered the cross hair in the middle of the Q-ship's wildly tossing stack.
"Range, nine hundred! Can you see our stern, Captain?
Give us a bearing of the stern light!"
I sighted on to the stern light, which Keith and I had long ago designated as the bore-sight target for the after TBT, just as the center of the bullnose was for the forward one. It was a good precaution in case the seas had done some sudden unsuspected violence to the precious instrument, took only a second.
When you get there, take your time! I pushed the button on top of the right handle twice.
"OK! Give us the target for the first fish!" Another deluge of water, not so long, this time. I hardly felt it, got the TBT on as soon as my head came out, blurred or not, held the button down.
"One's away!" I let go the button. We'd watch to see where the fish would go, we had decided. Wipe off the lenses again.
BLAM! A stunning flash of light, followed by a solid explosion! Amazingly, I heard it, and almost immediately!
"Hit, skipper!" The speaker-how could Keith have heard, with the ship battened down as it was? Then the obvious explanation: the phenomenon had been noticed before; the sound had traveled four times as fast through the water as it could through air. Occasionally one torpedo would thus produce the sound of two explosions, if fired under conditions permitting the noise to be heard through both air and water.
The hit had been forward of the stack. I put the TBT cross-hair midway between the stack and the stern, thumbed the button again.
"Two's away!" This time I was under when the explosion came in. It shocked my eardrums. They were ringing when I came out again, just in time to see the column of water sub- siding, falling on the ridiculous foreshortened stern.
One forward and one aft. Not bad. I aimed the third one at the stack once more.
"Three's away!" The wait again. This was getting to be the payoff. To be reasonably sure of the destruction of the Q-ship, we had to hit her with a lot of torpedoes-three anyway, prefer- ably all four. A quick, secret flash of orange-gunfire! He had unlimbered one of his broadside guns, was shooting in our general direction I didn't even hear the passage of the shell, wouldn't have cared if I had. This was the payoff, this the moment of revenge. This was getting even for the Walrus, and for Jim, Hugh, Dave, and the rest. And it was making it up also for Stocker Kane, who never would have any children to speak proudly of the father who gave his life for his country, and for Hurry Kane, and Laura, and the rest of the people whose lives had been shattered by this fool war. Roy Savage and Needlefish, too, gone these long years, rusting their bones, somewhere not far from where we were at this very moment…
WHRRUMP! Number Three went home, right under the stack. The explosion flash of the shallow-running torpedo momentarily obliterated him from sight. The water spout came up, I thought the motion of the stack looked a little strange, different from the crazily tossing masts of the rest of the ship, when the white water deluged down, the smokestack was leaning drunkenly, slowly toppled forward. And there was some- thing a bit different in the way he rolled, too. Slower, farther over each time a sea tossed him.
The fourth fish. Same place-where the stack had been. Hold the button down: "Four's away, skipper!"
Maybe we could have saved that one. The masts had not come back from the last roll, were still leaning toward me. thought I could see part of the deck, grayer than the black hull.
There they go-back up again, slowly, however-no, just a wave rolling past. Down came the two masts, lower than ever to- ward the black, eager water, the deck now clearly visible as a gray slash at the top of the black outline.
Our fourth torpedo smashed squarely into it, right into the black spot in the center of the gray where the stack and central deckhouse had been.
Supplicatingly, as if tired of conflict and travail, the masts lay on the water. The hull separated into two parts, and I saw the outline of the bottoms of both, intermittently, as the seas raced upon them.
"Radar shows he's sinking, skipper! We're blowing up now!"
The Eel's forward half-rose quickly; they were using high pressure air instead of the low-pressure blowers. In a moment it seemed, we were fully surfaced, and Keith and Al joined me.