Down The Hatch (16 page)

“What speed does the plot give?”

“Last speed five knots, sir, mean speed
forty
knots, sir! “

“Impossible!”

“That’s what the plot says, sir,” said the Signalman aggrievedly.

“Check that, Number One.”

Wilfred measured the Signalman’s angles and made a rough calculation.

“It certainly seems like that, sir.”

“It
can’t
be! “

“. . . Visitor faded, last bearing two one one. . .“

“Now we’ll have to wait, I suppose,” The Bodger said. “And see where he pops up again next time.”

Dangerous Dan was watching the attack from the tactful safety of the wardroom door. The science of submarine versus submarine attacking had been in its infancy when he left submarines just after the war and he was enthralled by his first privileged view of it. Dangerous Dan knew enough of submarine tactics to appreciate that the procedure he was now watching was as far removed from the normal submarine attack on a surface vessel as higher mathematics was from mental arithmetic. As a submariner himself, Dangerous Dan could guess at the ordeal The Bodger was undergoing. Engaging an unknown submarine was difficult enough; engaging one which behaved so unpredictably was like going out to catch a criminal who was not only waving a meat-axe but fighting drunk.

“... Visitor regained. Zero zero eight....”

“Gone through a hundred and eighty degrees again,” said The Bodger.

“... Visitor bearing steady. . .“

“Plot suggests target turned towards, sir!” cried Wilfred.

“Full ahead together!
Hard
a port! “

“All round H.E., sir...
Very loud
. . .“

They all felt the enemy passing very close down the starboard side. There was rushing, sluicing sound and
Seahorse
rocked crazily from side to side.

“Great God Almighty,” The Bodger whispered. “The man’s mad! Absolutely Harry starkers! “

“... Visitor lost in our own. . .“

“Slow ahead together. Midships.”

“... Visitor faded. ..”

There was a profound and thoughtful silence in the control room after the last sonar report. The Bodger became aware that the passageways on either side of the control room were crowded. He noticed the press of faces, all straining to see and hear what was happening.

The last exchange set the pattern for the next two hours. The Visitor circled
Seahorse
at a cautious distance before lunging inwards on a suicidal collision course. Again and again the ship’s company clutched at pipes and brackets as the submarine rocked under the assaults. The Bodger was more than ever convinced that he was dealing with a submarine captain who had had a touch of the sun. However, crazy or not, the Visitor possessed a staggering underwater speed and manoeuvreability.

“He’s making
rings
round us,” The Bodger said. “But that’s just about all he is doing. How long has the attack team been closed up?”

“Just under three hours, sir,” said Wilfred.

“Fall out the attack team. Keep the plot manned. The rest can fall out. Arrange the attack team in two watches.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Let me know whenever sonar picks him up again.”

As the hours passed, the Visitor’s behaviour began to appear less unpredictable. His movements followed a definite sequence. He disappeared for one hour, circled for an hour and attacked at the end of the hour, only to disappear again. Just as The Bodger was hoping that he had gone for good, he came back. The Bodger came to anticipate the attacks and stood by the officer of the watch as the Visitor hurtled past. The rest of the time The Bodger sat in the wardroom and waited, like a billiard player sweating it out while his opponent ran up a huge break.

At supper time, Dangerous Dan was sitting in the wardroom looking very thoughtful.

“I wonder if I might make a suggestion, Bodger?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been thinking about that black box of mine. I believe I can fix it to read up to about a thousand feet below us. I can cut out the response from the sea bottom by altering the scale. It won’t be very accurate but it might give you a line on him...”

“What a splendid idea, Dan! “

“It’ll only be any use while he’s below us, of course. . .”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s better than nothing. Can you start it now?”

“Surely.”

“He’s not due back for another half an hour. Will that give you time?”

“Ample. It’s all calibrated and warmed up anyway.”

“Splendid! What a brilliant idea, Dan! “

Dangerous Dan shrugged modestly. “All done by kindness,” he said.

Dangerous Dan climbed down again to his apparatus. Soon, it was clear that something was wrong with the black box. Dangerous Dan passed to and fro, a worried frown on his face.

“Something wrong, Dan?”

“I don’t know. There doesn’t
seem
to be anything wrong but I can’t get any sense out of the thing at all. Something’s jamming it. It won’t read anything beyond about fifty feet below us.”

“Perhaps it didn’t like having the scale altered?”

“No, that shouldn’t affect it. I do it every day when I’m calibrating it anyway. But it just won’t read beyond fifty feet now.”

“Perhaps...

Dangerous Dan started back towards the Coxswain’s store, stopped, and clapped a hand to his forehead.

“I’ve got it! How stupid of me! Of
course
there’s nothing the matter with it! It’s telling us what we want to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s where our friend is.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“That’s where our little Visitor is right now. He’s gliding along.... Fifty feet beneath us...”

The most profound silence of all settled over
Seahorse
. The Bodger ran his fingers through his hair. This was the end of the line. This was where the text-books stopped. The imaginations of those who compiled the Admiralty instructions on submarine tactics had never envisaged an enemy who shadowed his adversary fifty feet below him. The Bodger realized that he was now on his own.

“Let’s stir it up! Warn all compartments to expect large angles.”

Using full speed, maximum angles and full wheel, The Bodger put
Seahorse
through a series of submarine aquabatics which would have made her designers’ hair stand rigid. After each manoeuvre The Bodger slowed down and listened. Leading Seaman Gorbles reported an empty sea. The black box screen was blank.

“That’s foxed him,” The Bodger said with some satisfaction.

“... Visitor regained, one one zero, sir. . .“

“
Damnation
! What’s the battery now, Number One?”

“Last reading was thirty per cent left, sir,” said Wilfred. “Take another one.”

The electricians’ mates scrambled over the pilot cells with their hydrometers and took another reading of the density of the battery fluid.

“Twenty-five per cent, sir,” said Wilfred. “On the drop. We had to borrow the Chief Stoker’s hydrometer, sir. Ours wouldn’t read low enough!”

“It looks as though we’ll have to wrap this up very soon whether we like it or not,” The Bodger said. “We’ve tried circus tricks. Now we’ll try Grandmother’s Footsteps. Can you put on a stop trim, Derek?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Carry on then. Mid, you’d better watch this if you want to learn about trimming.”

The Midshipman stood at Derek’s shoulder while Derek approached the ultimate in trimming, the inner temple of the art. Using the classic method of putting wheel and planes amidships, Derek made a succession of minute adjustments to the trim, transferring only a few gallons at a time. Each time the hydroplanes resumed their functions, they appeared to have less and less to do, until Derek stopped the shafts and the submarine hung in the sea, motionless and level.

“Well done, Chief. Anything on sonar?”

“Negative, sir.”

“Anything on the black box, Dan?”

“Nothing Bodger.”

“
That’ll
give him something to think about,” said The Bodger.

The words had hardly left his lips when The Bodger felt
Seahorse
’s deck tilt, and slowly right itself again. Just as The Bodger had convinced himself that his sense of balance was playing tricks on him, the deck slowly tilted again. The Bodger felt the hair prickle on his scalp.

“Full astern together! Sorry about your trim, Chief. . . .”

The Bodger’s order had an immediate and dramatic effect.
Seahorse
heeled violently. Dangerous Dan’s black box blew all its fuses. Leading Seaman Gorbles gained contact at once and reeled off a string of bearings.

As the bearings were being plotted, The Bodger noticed that for the first time since the attack began the Visitor’s change of bearing suggested a steady course and speed.

“Stand by for a firing set-up! Slow ahead together. Bring all after tubes to the action state. Chop chop with the tubes! “

The Bodger’s best estimate of the Visitor’s course and speed was set up by the attack team. The firing bearing was computed. The tubes were reported in the action state. Wilfred gripped the handle which would release the first torpedo. The Bodger raised his stop watch.

“Stand by. . . . Stand . . . by. . .”

At the last moment, when The Bodger’s lips were actually framed to give the order to fire, the possible consequences of what he was about to do smote him.
Seahorse
’s action might be the crossing of the Rubicon. The torpedo they were about to fire might have the same effect upon the world as the first shot fired at Sarajevo. The Bodger hesitated, but did not dare to give the order to break off. He did not dare to make any sound whatever. The long weeks of training, the weary attack team drills, had led to this moment. At this stage of the attack there could now be no other order than that to fire. If The Bodger so much as coughed, if he did no more than clear his throat, Wilfred would fire.

The Bodger waited while the perspiration gathered in his eyebrows and trickled into his eyes, not even daring to raise his hand to wipe it away. The seconds passed, the firing bearing was reached and overshot. Still The Bodger made no movement nor sound. At last, after a minute, the attack team relaxed. It was obvious that the Captain had changed his mind.

The Bodger swallowed. “Do not fire,” he said hoarsely.

“. . Visitor surfaced, sir!”

“Are you certain?”

“Positive, sir,” said Leading Seaman Gorbles, scornfully. Think I don’t know when a bloody target’s surfaced? he said to himself.

“Right. Any other H.E.?”

“Negative, sir.”

“Sixty feet. Stand by to surface. Diving stations.”

As
Seahorse
rose to periscope depth, The Bodger ordered all the control room lighting switched on. The submarine had been dived for more than twenty hours and he had no wish to be blinded by the daylight.

At sixty feet, The Bodger swung the periscope, tensed to go deep again. When he reached a bearing on the port bow, Wilfred was interested to see a deep blush rise from The Bodger’s neck to his forehead.

“Surface.”

The Bodger followed Rusty and the Signalman up to the bridge. It was another beautiful day, with a calm sea and a bright sun.

But The Bodger was not interested in the weather. He searched the sea through his binoculars.

“There’s our Visitor,” he said, pointing.

Two miles off the port bow, a very large grey whale was disporting itself in the sea. As The Bodger watched, it sounded but, before it disappeared, The Bodger swore he saw one huge mammalian eye close in a wink.

Feeling like an old man, The Bodger pressed the button of the bridge action speaker.

“Wireless Office, this is the Captain. Make to Captain S/M: Have broken off navel engagement with amorous whale.”

The Signalman’s lip curled. “You sex mad monster,” he said bitterly.

The episode of the Amorous Whale was not mentioned in
Seahorse
again. Nobody on board wished to be reminded of a time when they had all been braced at action stations to fight off the erotic advances of an affectionate marine mammal. Even Dangerous Dan, who could have dined out for months on it, expunged the story from his conversation, realizing that true friendship often demands a true sacrifice. When Captain S/M examined
Seahorse
’s log at the end of the quarter and remarked on the day and the night during which H.M.S.
Seahorse
appeared to have been at war, The Bodger shrugged it off, saying that he thought the ship’s company had been getting stale and it seemed a good opportunity to liven them up a bit. But privately, in his own wardroom, The Bodger looked back on the episode in a mood of self-reproach.

“I was so obsessed by the idea that it was another submarine, when the damned animal was doing everything but tell us he was only trying to be friendly. He even came up and nuzzled our ship’s side. When I think that I was within an ace of firing. . . . That would have been the most jilted whale this side of the Gosport ferry! But I suppose there’s a moral to be drawn from it. We live in such suspicious times that we’re apt to fly off the handle for anything. We’re like people who’re so scared of burglars we shoot the milkman dead.”

After the Whale, Dangerous Dan’s experiments seemed an anti-climax. Even the Black Box lost its appeal and everyone was glad when the experiments were completed and
Seahorse
headed towards South America.

The nearest representative of the Royal Navy was H.M.S.
Beaufortshire
, flying the flag of the Commodore Amazon & River Plate Estuaries who was on his way to pay an official visit to the Republic of SanGuana d’Annuncion. The Bodger received a signal ordering him to proceed to Cajalcocamara, the capital of the Republic, for fuel, water and mail.

“Cajalcocamara,” said The Bodger thoughtfully, when he read the signal. “That rings a bell.”

“What’s it like, sir?”

“Bloody good run ashore. We quelled a revolution there once, when I was in the Cadet Training Cruiser.”

“SanGuana? That rings a bell with me too,” said Dangerous Dan. “If I remember rightly, they have a very big motor race there at this time of the year. Let me look in my diary.”