Dust on the Sea (18 page)

“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
151800
Z X SIX SHIPS
34
DEGREES
10.1
MINUTES NORTH
127
DEGREES
30
MINUTES EAST X COURSE WEST X SPEED TEN
151016
Z X

“That's three o'clock tomorrow morning our time,” said Leone.

“How long will it take to get there?” demanded Richardson.

Using a pair of dividers Keith picked off the distances. “One hundred twenty miles for us,” he announced. “About one hundred three miles for the
Whitefish
and one hundred forty or so for the
Chicolar
.”

“It's nearly twenty hundred now. We have seven hours. Barely time,” calculated Richardson. He seized a piece of paper and Keith's thin wolfpack code book.

“
Chicolar
and
Whitefish
will have got the message too, don't you think?” said Keith.

“They're supposed to. . . . Johnny, tell the officer of the deck to
shift the battery charge to one main engine and the auxiliary diesel, and go to full power on the other three engines on course zero-two-five. Tell him we'll adjust the course later. Tell him also as soon as we can put that fourth main on propulsion, I want him to do it.” As he spoke, Richardson was busying himself with the code book, in a moment handed two separate pieces of paper, one in plain language, the other coded, to the wolfpack commander.

Through the entire rapid exchange, he suddenly realized, Blunt had said not one word. Carefully Blunt read, perhaps for the third or fourth time, the message Rich had drafted:
REFERENCE COMSUBPAC
151016
Z X PURSUE AT MAXIMUM SPEED X JOE
This was what they had trained for in Pearl Harbor. Exactly this situation had been foreseen, this message sent in drill. Time after time, under various different contingencies, they had rehearsed how they would respond to exactly the contingency now before them.

As Blunt held the two papers in his hands, Rich could hear the air discharge signaling the starting of two more main engines. The gyrocompass repeater in the overhead of the wardroom began to spin. He could feel the different motion as
Eel
changed course and began to pick up speed. There had been two main engines on battery charge, with just a trickle of electricity going to the motors. The time fully to recharge the battery would unavoidably be longer when one of the charging mains was replaced by the auxiliary, but three main engines wide open on propulsion would drive
Eel
at nearly seventeen knots. Already he began to feel the drumming of the water along
Eel
's sides. There was a low shriek of blowers from the control room area. The OOD had ordered the low pressure blowers put on to expel the remaining water in the ballast tanks. In anticipation of another night of slow cruising on station, they had not been entirely emptied.

“We should send the message as soon as we can, Commodore,” said Rich urgently. “The other boats will be expecting orders.”

Still Blunt said nothing. His face looked strained, the jowls on either side of his chin more prominent. Intuitive understanding struck Richardson. Despite all his years in submarines, Blunt had never been at sea in the war zone before. This was his first experience! He held authority, but he had never been tried. How many other wolfpacks must also have had this specific problem! Strange that no one had mentioned it. . . . Obviously, the flagship skipper must carry the load for his neophyte superior—this must be why Admiral Small had insisted
Eel
be Blunt's flagship! But it was an intolerable burden; it was not fair. . . .

Rich hesitated, his brow furrowed. He tore a third sheet off the pad,
copied the encoded message on it. “I'll be right back, Commodore,” he said, stepping swiftly out of the wardroom and walking aft.

In a moment he was at the radio room, a small compartment just off the passageway in the after portion of the control room, “Here, Nelson,” he said, handing the message to the chief radioman, “get this out right away to the other boats. Commodore's orders.”

Back in the wardroom he picked up the dividers, a pencil, and a plotting protractor. “Here's our position, sir,” he said. “And here's this convoy. It's just south of the island chain on the south coast of Korea. My guess is they're going to round the southwestern tip of Korea and head north. Anyway, where they are right now—or will be at three this morning if this dope is correct—they can't head north yet, and it would make no sense to go south. So I figure if we head for this spot, right here, we'll be in good shape to pick them off. At their speed of ten knots we ought to be able to overtake them pretty easily even if they do pass through there a little ahead of us; and if we get there quickly enough, we'll intercept them before they get to the point on the tail of Korea where they'll probably change course and head up through the Maikotsu Suido. That's why we have to go to full speed, sir.”

For the first time Blunt spoke. “I can't risk my submarines in the shallow water around those islands,” he said.

“You won't have to, Commodore. Look.” Rich pointed with the closed dividers. “These islands aren't all that close together. The water around the outlying ones is as deep as it is anywhere in the Yellow Sea. If these ships are closer inshore than the message says, we can trail them from seaward until we find a spot where there's enough room to attack.”

Blunt stared at the chart, still said nothing. Richardson wondered how he could state the clincher argument without being too obvious. “Maybe they won't be there at all,” he finally said, “and we'll have to send a message to ComSubPac that his dope was no good.”

Just possibly, Rich later concluded, Blunt realized he was really telling him their explanations of failure would also have to carry proof of adequate effort. He well remembered the sarcasm with which Blunt himself had in the past occasionally referred to certain submarines which, for one reason or another, seemed to have so much difficulty finding the enemy.

The race for position ran on through the night and into the morning. Around midnight, the rate at which
Eel
's two main storage batteries could continue to accept a charge had diminished to such a degree that the charging rate could be carried on the auxiliary engine alone.
Thenceforth, on four big ten-cylinder diesels, trailing four exhaust plumes behind her, she raced at full top speed for the designated spot on the chart.

Everyone not on watch or actively engaged had been directed to try to get some sleep. Richardson lay down at about 11 o'clock and actually dozed off, to awaken, momentarily confused, a couple of hours later. Keith, he noted, turned in the moment he knew his skipper was on his feet. Blunt remained virtually in the same place he had been, drinking cup after cup of coffee and incessantly smoking his pipe in the wardroom.

At about two in the morning, first carefully adjusting his red goggles to protect his night vision from the white lights, Richardson took one last tour through the ship. As he had expected, nearly everyone was already in the vicinity of his battle station, some dozing quietly, others intensely alert.

Immediately abaft the control room, on the after side of the dividing watertight bulkhead, was the ship's galley, with the operating mechanism for the main induction valve directly above the stove. Here he found the entire complement of ship's cooks manufacturing a mountainous pile of sandwiches. “Just figured we might be needing 'em, Skipper,” said one.

In the crew's dining space adjoining the galley were the gun crews of both five-inch guns and the ammunition resupply team. Some of them, he saw, were already wearing red goggles. There was no one in the sleeping space abaft the dinette, but in the next compartment aft, the forward engineroom, there was a double watch of engineers, most of them standing around idly. Here and there a toolbox had been opened, its contents laid out for easy access.

The after engineroom was the same. Both enginerooms were thundering with the full power of twenty huge diesel cylinders and twice that number of pistons in each. The compartments were also frigidly cold—windswept—as the frosty atmosphere of the Yellow Sea whistled in through the main induction outlet in the overhead of each, was sucked into the voracious engines, and spewed overboard through their exhausts. Beyond, in the electrical maneuvering room, steaming hot from the loaded electric motors and control systems, again there was a double complement of engineering personnel, in this case, electrician's mates. And down below, through the open hatch leading into the cramped motor room, he could see two men watching the temperature gauges.

The last compartment aft was the after torpedo room, with its four large bronze torpedo tube doors matching the six in the forward torpedo room.
Counting the four torpedoes in the tubes and the six reloads—two more than the designed load—the after torpedo room had ten torpedoes compared to the forward torpedo room's sixteen.

With approval the skipper saw, already laid out as in the forward torpedo room, the special equipment which Keith and Buck had designed to make possible a torpedo reload even with the ship pitching and rolling on the surface.

Still wearing the red goggles, Rich returned to the control room, passing forward through the broiling hot maneuvering room with its two huge motors beneath the deck, and the contrastingly cold engine rooms with their roaring diesel monsters and whirling electric generators on either side.