Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 16

I nodded my comprehension, too miserable to do more.

Captain Blunt went on. "Commander Radwanski and his friends have an appointment with the Admiral. Rich, will you wait here for about three minutes-while I show them to his office-I've got one more thing I want to talk to you about."

He indicated the chair by his desk, led the three Poles to the door, and closed it behind him.

For twice three minutes I sat there, staring at the wall.

Events, or luck, had conspired against me. In my eagerness for a new ship I had put Jim Bledsoe up for his command qualification prematurely. As a direct result his reputation had been damaged, his marriage plans spoiled, and deservedly I had lost his regard. I had made my choice between Jim and the S-16, chosen the latter's welfare as the more important, and now she, too, was gone.

My despondency deepened as Blunt's footsteps came back down the hall and the door opened. He smiled.

You've probably been wondering why I addressed you as Lieutenant Commander. "Well, here it is. Your promotion arrived by AlNav this morning." He handed me a sheet of closely printed mimeograph paper which had the words Al- Nav #12 across the top. "You're listed there. About halfway down."

Then he smiled even more broadly, — an unusual look, for him. "That's not the best of it, either. You're getting the Walrus, — she's just been launched at Electric Boat. Furthermore, the Admiral has decided that the simplest way to put a crew aboard is to transfer the whole S-16 outfit to her with you."

My jaw hung open. My heart bounded as the import of it sank home. But old Blunt wasn't quite done yet: "You don't have to take them all, just those who want to go. Of course, those who don't," His smile, for the second time in my immediate recollection, took on a sardonic glitter.

I don't know how I found my way back to the S-16. Three body blows like these, all made known to me within an hour, were a little out of the ordinary at the very least I called Jim, Tom, and Keith together in the wardroom and they were as flabbergasted as I. The four of us went together to the control room, where I broke the news to the crew.

Turning S-16 over to the Poles was an unmitigated head- ache. Few of them understood English and explaining things was not merely difficult, it was a problem of extraordinary magnitude. Had not most of the Poles already been familiar with the S-17, it would have been impossible.

We glued strips of paper with Polish writing on all our gauges and dials, and we made dive after dive with each of our men instructing his Polish relief. When we turned the boat over to them for their first dive we thought them fairly well indoctrinated, but even so they made my hair literally stand on end.

There was apparently no preparatory command, no "Clear the Bridge" or its equivalent in Polish; merely two blasts on the diving alarm. Everyone dashed below; all vents were pulled wide open and the motors put ahead full speed. Some- how the bridge hatch was shut. No one paid any attention to the Christmas Tree or bothered to bleed air into the boat to test for tightness. The bow planes were not rigged out until she was thirty feet under and no one paid any attention to the bow and stern plane controls until we passed thirty-five feet on the way down. Our bow went down at an ever-in- creasing angle, steeper than I had ever experienced, and I began to have the sensation of going into an outside loop. We could never complete a loop, of course, but we might ram her nose into the bottom of Long Island Sound with enough force to break something.

Commander Radwanski shouted in Polish. Nobody moved.

Dombrowski, in charge of the dive, had yet to utter a word.

I could see Larto standing by the main power control beside his replacement in the Polish Navy. He looked at me beseechingly, imploring me with his large, expressive Italian eyes.

I was about to shout "All back emergency" when Radwanski yelled several more Polish words. We were by this time passing ninety feet and the S-16 had assumed a fifteen-degree down angle. The little bench which was the station of the Chief of the Watch began to skid on the slick linoleum deck; a couple of wrenches located by the trim manifold slid from their accustomed location and fell on the deck with a clatter; someone had parked an empty coffee mug in an unnoticed corner and now It burst forth making its presence known with a shattering of crockery.

The two Polish sailors detailed under the silent Dombrowski's supervision now ran both planes to "full rise." The Polish Chief Electrician's Mate impassively leaned over his rheostats and, to my amazement, increased the speed. Suddenly, alarm- ingly, S-16 swooped out of her dive, reversing her down angle and reaching ten degrees rise. We had climbed back to sixty- five feet before the sweating planesmen could level her off.

More shouted commands: The Polish Electrician's Mate reduced speed and S-16 settled out into some sort of sub- merged control. Radwanski, standing in the center of the control room and maintaining balance by holding on to one of the periscope hoist wires, leaned his sweaty, whisker-stub- bled jaw toward me and hissed into my ear with a nod toward Dombrowski, who so far as I could see had still not opened his mouth.

"That-is-al-ways-his-way. Beauti-ful-sub-mer-gence, not- so?" he said.

From that moment on the S-16 under Polish hands acquired an entirely new personality. I saw her for the first time in a detached, unemotional state of mind, and was even able, with- out a twinge, to watch them paint her new name, Blyskawica, meaning Lightning-Swift, on her stern and replace our numbers on the side of the bridge with a large white B. It was not until we all stood on her deck, seeing the United States ensign hauled down for the last time, that a pang of regret suddenly registered. She had been a good ship, we had made her into one, — and now she was going to war without us. We wished her luck.

Walrus was already in the water, much nearer to completion than we had had any idea, when we reported to Electric Boat. The yard workers were knocking themselves out, had been ever since Pearl Harbor, — and she would make her first dive within two months. Twenty-four hours a day a veritable army of overalled workmen were in her, on her, and about her.

The acrid smell of welding, the din of power tools, and the clatter of workmen never ceased. Every day we went down to her and looked her over, trying ineffectually to stay out of the way and yet get some idea of what was going on, and every day something new had been added, some new piece of equipment installed, some additional step taken toward getting her ready.

In our office on the second floor of a temporary wooden building erected at the head of the dock at which Walrus lay, Jim, Keith, and Tom wrestled with the problems of preparing the ship's organization and orders and making duty assignments for the crew.

Jim was doing his usual good work, but there had been one bad moment. Shortly before the final transfer ceremony of the S-16 he had come up to me with a sheet of official ship's stationery in his hand. I had been going over the spare-parts inventory in our tiny, soon-to-be-relinquished wardroom, preparatory to having a joint inventory with the S-16's Polish skipper, Radwanski. "Captain," Jim said, it was the first time he had thus addressed me since the qualification fiasco, "I have been thinking it over for a long time. I would like a transfer." The paper was an official request from Jim ad- dressed to the Chief of the Bureau of Naval Personnel via the Commanding officer of S-16 and-the Commander, Sub- marine Squadron Two, requesting a change of duty from S-16 to "any other vessel of Squadron Two."

"What's this for, Jim?" I asked.

Some of Jim's sulky look had returned, and he fidgeted uncomfortably.

"How do you think I'd feel going on the Walrus and knowing that I can never get any place in submarines?" he asked petulantly, all in a rush, as though in a hurry to get it out.

"I've got feelings and ambitions, too. I want to make some- thing out of myself. After what you did to me, putting me up for qualification for command and then bilging me, can't you see I'm all through, shot? With another ship maybe I can qualify to be skipper."

I had expected that Jim might feel this way, and had my answer ready, or thought I did. Quixotically my mind spun sixty miles to the westward and I found myself wondering what he had told Laura. I had not seen her since that day.

"Listen, Jim, you've got this all wrong. I've no prejudice against you. I want you in Walrus because I like you and because you're a good Exec. Someday you will be skipper of your own boat.."

There was a plaintive note in Jim's voice. "That's what I want, too, but I'll never get it with you.

"That's exactly where you're wrong, Jim. There's a lot more to submarining than running a boat up and down the Thames River. The future of the submarine force is in boats like the Walrus, not in old antiquated ones like this one."

"But don't you see? I don't want to go with you. I want to stay where I can do some good. Where people respect me."

"What can you do here that you can't in a fleet sub?"

"I might be able to take over one of the school boats, if I can get with a skipper who'll recommend me."

"What about the war. Don't you propose to get in that?"

Jim looked away. His voice was strained, as though it might he a struggle for him to speak.

"I'm looking out for Number One, from here on. Nobody else will, not you! To bell with the Walrus and to hell with the war, too!"