Down The Hatch (15 page)

On the day
Seahorse
crossed the Tropic of Cancer it was unfortunate that the Coxswain provided Olde Englishe pudding for lunch. When Dagwood was given his portion, he held up his hand.

“Anything the matter, sir?” said the Steward.

“Hark,” said Dagwood.

Wilfred was still smarting from the previous tea-time when Dagwood had looked at the butter and said “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le beurre! “

“
Now
what’s the matter?” he said sourly.

“What’s the matter, Dagwood?” The Bodger asked. The exchanges between Dagwood and Wilfred had often lightened his day.

“I hear the Muse, sir. She’s calling to me, in accents soft and low.”

“What’s she saying?”

“The usual drivel, I expect,” said Wilfred.

“She’s saying. . . . One moment. . . . Yes, here it is. . . . It’s a poem, sir. She’s saying,

Despite the many moans you hear:
There’s one you all forget.
Though Christmas came but once last year,
The pudding’s with us yet!”

It was a bull’s-eye in one shot. Wilfred glowered, while the rest of the wardroom hooted. Nevertheless The Bodger thought it a little unfair. In spite of their difficulties in storing and cooking a variety of food in a confined space and in a hot climate, The Bodger thought that Wilfred, the Coxswain and the Chef were doing very well. In the circumstances, The Bodger was quite satisfied. The Bodger’s main concern was not what the ship’s company should eat, but what they should drink. There would soon be a shortage of fresh water on board.
Seahorse
's tanks did not contain enough water for a prolonged passage in the tropics. There was a distiller but it was fitted in the main passageway and the noise and heat it generated made the messes adjacent to it uninhabitable. The only solution was a compromise, to run the distiller for limited periods and to ration fresh water. Otherwise, the problem seemed insoluble without divine intervention.

Unknown to The Bodger, divine intervention was almost at hand. That evening, soon after tea,
Seahorse
ran into a tropical rainstorm. The Midshipman was on watch and knew exactly what to do.

“Close up radar. Tell the Captain.”

The messenger found The Bodger with Dangerous Dan in the petty officers’ mess, playing the final of the ship’s uckers tournament against the Chief Stoker and the Second Coxswain.

“From the bridge sir, he’s closing up radar, sir.”

“What for?”

“I think it’s a rain cloud, sir. . .

“Rain!”

The Midshipman pointed out the cloud to The Bodger.

“I’m closing up radar, sir, because of the likelihood of reduced visibility forrard sir. . .

“To hell with radar and to hell with the reduced vis! It’s the rain I’m after! “The cloud was only four or five miles ahead of the ship. A curtain of rain was lashing the sea over a front of several miles.
Seahorse
was heading directly for the centre of the storm. The Bodger moistened parched lips and rubbed the stubble on his chin.

“It’s like an answer to prayer,” he whispered. He bent to the voice-pipe. “Pass the message to all compartments, all ratings not on watch muster on the casing with soap for showers.”

“Say again, sir! “ yelled Ripper, who was on the wheel.

“Clear lower deck! Muster on the casing! Provide Soap!”

“Clear lower deck, muster on the casing, provide soap, aye aye, sir!” shouted Ripper. “The Captain’s gone off his rocker,” he added to the Radio Electrician, who was petty officer of the watch. The Radio Electrician nodded sombrely.

In a short time over sixty naked men, clutching soap and sponges expectantly, mustered on the casing and gazed at the approaching storm.

Wearing only his soap-bag in one hand, The Bodger conned the ship towards the centre of the storm.

“Starboard five. . . . Steady. . . . Steer that. . . . That should do it. . . .”

With a booming roar of wind the storm was upon them. The rain drummed on the casing and bounced off the sailors’ naked bodies.
Seahorse
was enveloped in a grey wall of water. The sailors pounded their chests and shouted songs as they leisurely soaped themselves for their first real wash since the ship left England.

Dangerous Dan joined the crowd on the casing and began to wash himself like a man demented. He scrubbed and rubbed himself as though every second were priceless. His energy amused the sailors who were covering themselves in lather and allowing the blessed rain to wash it off.

But there was method in Dangerous Dan’s frenzied washing. The rain storm passed away as quickly as it had come. The rain stopped abruptly. The uncovered sun began to harden the outer layers of lather. The Bodger seized the voice-pipe in a desperate, slippery hand.

”After that cloud! Hard a starboard! Foil ahead together!”

Seahorse
heeled in a tight turn towards the retreating storm. Her half-lathered officers and ship’s company watched her progress anxiously. The artificer on watch in the engine room was advised of the emergency. The engines thundered as they had never thundered before.

Directed by a wild-eyed Bodger,
Seahorse
dodged all over the ocean but the storm eddied this way and that, steadily gaining distance from the pursuing submarine. At last The Bodger was forced to abandon the chase.

Dangerous Dan was conspicuous amongst the throng on the casing. He was as sleek and shining as a seal.

“I must say I admire your soap,” he said to Dagwood, whose body and hair were still partly covered in encrusted lather. “What sort is it?”

Dangerous Dan had his own version of the Needle Game.

Dangerous Dan began his survey when
Seahorse
was sixty miles from the Equator. Dangerous Dan working was quite a different man from Dangerous Dan amusing himself with party games on passage. He was up every morning at five o’clock to calibrate his instruments and he did not finish his last calculations on the day’s data until after midnight. He had placed the black box on the chart-table but the main part of his equipment including the echo-sounder had been installed in a space between the Coxswain’s store and the oilskin locker. Dangerous Dan’s working day was spent bobbing and ducking between the control room and the store.

Seahorse
dived twice a day for Dangerous Dan’s readings, while the Black Box in the control room gave an instantaneous three-dimensional picture of the sea bottom, computed from the echo-sounder transmissions.

The Black Box was the most fascinating side-show anyone in
Seahorse
had ever seen. The ship’s company queued up to look at it.

“Roll up, roll up. What The Butler Saw Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,” Leading Seaman Gorbles said.

“Is that the bottom of the sea?” exclaimed the Chef. “Blimey, I thought it was flat!”

The Chef spoke for most of the ship's company. If anyone in
Seahorse
had ever thought about the sea bottom at all, they had imagined it sloping downwards from the continents to a flat plain until it sloped upwards again for the next continent--with the odd uncharted pinnacle regularly rammed by submarines off Londonderry. Dangerous Dan’s Black Box showed that the sea had a geography of its own.
Seahorse
swam suspended over submarine mountain ranges which would have dwarfed the Alps and over deeps which could easily have contained the Grand Canyon. The Black Box showed a panorama of drowned rivers winding through ancient courses on the sea floor, islands which had been cut off in their growth towards the light, plains as wide as the steppes and foothills which stretched like the folds of a giant’s blanket for hundreds of miles. The instrument was also sensitive enough to record objects between
Seahorse
and the sea floor. Strange vast shadows like clouds moved over the screen, marking the passage of a shoal of an unimaginable number of fish. Sometimes the screen picked up speeding images with spiked tails which looked as though sea-dragons on a titanic scale were flying over the landscape below them.

As Dangerous Dan’s experiments progressed, every man in
Seahorse
began to have an inkling of the immensity of the ocean. The sea was not a homogeneous mass of water but had currents, like veins, and layers, like muscles. It was always in a state of stress, a shifting, restless, hostile entity.
Seahorse
was an intruder, creeping about on the fringe of a colossal mystery and peering, from an impertinent distance, at the supreme wonder of the earth.

The Bodger maintained the normal sonar listening watch while
Seahorse
was dived for the experimental runs. Although
Seahorse
was so far off the main shipping routes that there was never any ships’ hydrophone effect, the sea itself provided a miscellany of sounds which descended through the whole range of human hearing. There was often a hollow resonant booming, like the pounding of mammoth breakers a thousand miles away, coupled with clicks, thumps, metallic knocking and shrill cat calls. Porpoise wailed near the surface and at every depth there came suddenly a deafening staccato chatter, like the applause of a myriad scaly claws.

“Whoever said this was the silent world needs his head examined,” said Leading Seaman Gorbles. “More like Marble Arch on a Sunday.”

One morning Leading Seaman Gorbles picked up a new sound. It was a slow eerie beat, accompanied by regular high-pitched squeals. He pointed it out to Rusty, who was officer of the watch. Rusty called The Bodger, who listened himself.

“What do you make of it, Gorbles?”

“Couldn’t say, sir. Could be transmissions, though they’re nothing like anything I’ve ever heard before. Sounds like someone having a cheap thrill, sir.”

“Put it over the control room broadcast. And don’t be facetious.”

The control room was filled with the treble squeaks, underlined by the same slow steady beat. The sound had an artificial regularity, without the haphazardness of a sound emitted by a living organism.

Dangerous Dan paused on his way down to the store to listen. Wilfred and Dagwood came out of the wardroom.

“Very slow revs, sir. Not more than twenty a minute. Sometimes not even that, sir.”

The Bodger made up his mind.

“Action Stations! Attack team close up!”

The Admiralty’s orders on the action to be taken by a captain on gaining an unidentified and possibly hostile submarine contact were contained in a Top Secret file in the Captain’s safe. But The Bodger did not need to consult them. He already knew their general gist almost by heart. Behind the veiled diplomatic language and the ambiguous official wording, they were quite explicit; they could be summed up in the traditional phrase “Engage the enemy more closely”.

Although the ship’s company had been told nothing of the position, the attack team closed up as quickly as though the Admiral himself were watching them. In
Seahorse
, as in all operational submarines, the step from peace to war was a short one. Leading Seaman Gorbles’ reports began to come over the action broadcast with a decisive snap which he had never achieved in fleet exercises.

“Target three two three . . . Moving left. . .”

The Chef stuck his head out of the galley as the rest of the attack team tumbled by to their action stations.

“Where’s the fire?”

“Haven’t you heard, Whacker,” said the Steward. “We’re at war with the whales.”

“Less noise,” said The Bodger. “Assume quiet state.”

It was as though The Bodger had given
Seahorse
the order to die. In a few minutes all inessential fans and motors had been stopped, the telegraph order bells had been muffled, Derek stopped one shaft and the submarine glided on at slow speed.
Seahorse
became as quiet as a hunting cat, ears cocked for the least sound.

Suddenly, with the violence of a thunder-clap, there was a loud clang and an oath from the direction of the engine room. The Bodger jumped in spite of himself.

“Tell that rating to come here! “

A shame-faced stoker appeared in the control room.

“What was that noise?”

“I dropped a spanner, sir.”

“You and your chums back in your ivory tower don’t seem to realize that there is someone
out there
,” The Bodger pointed dramatically at the bulkhead, “just listening for crumbs like you. Now get out! And take your shoes off!”

“.. .Target faded, sir.”

“Hah, he’s heard us. I’m not surprised. I expect they can hear us back in Pompey with all the noise we’re making. Bring all after tubes to the action state.”

The Bodger regretted his outburst almost as soon as he had finished it. He remembered that the ship’s company had not been told anything yet. He picked up the broadcast microphone and pressed the button. There was no hum from the system. Just as The Bodger was gathering breath to vent his irritation, Dagwood said: “The broadcast system is switched off for quiet state, sir.”

The Bodger let out his breath again in a long sigh. “Switch it on again while I talk to the ship’s company.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Main broadcast switched on, sir.”

“D’you hear there. This is the Captain speaking. We have a visitor. About ten minutes ago we got an unidentified contact on sonar. I don’t know what it is yet but I will let you know as soon as I do. The attack team will remain closed up in the meantime. That’s all.”

“All after tubes in the action state, sir.”

“Very good.”

“Visitor regained, sir, one five seven. . . .”

“One five seven! “ The target had gone round nearly a hundred and eighty degrees, unheard by sonar. The Bodger gritted his teeth, feeling the temper rising in him.

“One five eight, moving right, faint
ecstatic
transmissions. . . “

“What do you mean ‘
ecstatic’
?”

“Can’t describe it any other way, sir,” replied Leading Seaman Gorbles apologetically. “Sounds like someone enjoying himself, sir. Can’t get a transmission interval or nothing on him, sir.”

It was the strangest attack The Bodger had ever carried out. The Visitor appeared to track steadily right, then stop, track back, and shoot suddenly forward again.