Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 37

The destroyer's rush had carried him well past. I could hear his screws again-now on our port quarter. He had passed directly overhead. Our only hope' was that the depth charges had been set too deeply, that, although blown to the surface, we were not seriously damaged-but there was no time to think about damage already received. Four-inch shells would be whizzing our way within seconds. We had to get back under immediately!

There was an emergency Light switch near the ladder to the bridge. I collected myself, gropingly reached for it, fum- bled a moment, turned it. Dim lights came on at either end of the conning tower.

The conning tower looked as if a cyclone had struck it.

Hugh Adams' chart table, shaken loose from its mountings, had fallen to the floor. Hugh himself lay still on the deck.

Evidently he had been the one I had stumbled over. Keith was still at his station, frantically gripping the handles of the TDC and bracing himself with his foot on the comer of the angle solver. Jim was standing shakily beside him, while as a sheet, but apparently unhurt. But these were not the im- portant ones at the moment. Oregon was still at his steering wheel, and there seemed to be no damage in his locality.

Quin was sitting on the deck holding his left arm- 'Mere was an ugly gash in it from which blood was dripping onto his trousers. He seemed otherwise in condition to be of assistance, however.

"Quin!" I roared. "All ahead emergency!"

Painfully the yeoman reached up with his uninjured arm, gave the order into the telephone mouthpiece. Fastened to the side of the conning tower beneath the firing panel was the hand telephone for routine communication throughout the ship. I reached for it, pressed the button. "Control!" The response was immediate.

"Control, aye aye!" It was Tom Schultz himself an the other end, and I could remember the instant feeling of relief to discover that at least part of the ship was still functioning,

"We're broached, Tom. Can you get her down?"

"Trying, sir!"

"Have you got your vents open?" Possibly some of the gases from the underwater explosions could have come up into our ballast tanks and now, having broached, we would be bound to have air in some of them.

"Yes, sir " Tom replied again.

"We're going ahead emergency speed. Drive her as deep as you can. Get on over to twenty degrees angle if you have to," I told him. The order was superfluous, since Tom knew very well the seriousness of our situation, and the ship had already attained. an angle of fifteen degrees down by the bow.

The slanting deck was becoming difficult to stand on.

There was nothing farther I could do and no reason to hold up the telephone from other use by talking myself. I listened, however, and within a few seconds was rewarded by hearing, the reports of the various compartments. All had taken some damage from the knocking about, but none, apparently, was in serious trouble except the after torpedo room. The voice from there said simply, "We have a fire back here."

"Can you handle it?" I snapped.

"Yes, sir, we're handling it." I relaxed. We couldn't go to fire quarters. The men back aft had either to get the fire out by themselves or abandon the compartment. The main problem was getting Walrus into the safe haven of the deep depths.

The motion of the ship felt different, less jerky. I looked at the depth gauge. We were under again! The deck tilted down even more; I had to put my left arm around a periscope. barrel to retain my balance. The bubble inclinometer, similar to a curved carpenter's level, mounted beneath the depth gauge, showed eighteen degrees inclination down by the bow, more than Walrus had ever experienced before, or I either, even counting in S-16 and her Polish crew. I hoped we could take it, mentally resolved to drill at steeper-than-usual angles if we ever got the chance.

Quin was struggling to his feet, still clutching his, injured arm.

"Test depth, Captain?" he said through strained, bloodless lips.

This was from Tom. Our decision, made some time ago, was automatically to go to full-test submergence in situations like this. Tom would not have had to ask, unless he anticipated possibly exceeding it.

Our hull, we knew, had a large safety factor of strength.

This was, if there ever was to be, the time, we had to use some of. it. The answer I gave Quin brought a startled look to his-face before he relayed it.

Down Walrus plunged, the depth-gauge needle spinning rapidly. The conning-tower gauge went only to one hundred fifty feet. When it reached one hundred forty I reached over and closed the valve in the waterline for fear of breaking the delicate mechanism. We could hear the rushing sound of water streaming past us. The power we were putting into our propellers was beginning to take effect.

"Two hundred feet!" said Quin. Our down angle remained rock-steady.

"Two hundred fifty feet!" The angle was still steady. Tom was really carrying out instructions. Finally he began to ease her off, until, without slackening speed, the ship became nearly level. Her whole frame now shook and trembled as she tore through the water. Something carried away topside and I heard a rattling, banging noise for a moment. Then it stopped.

I bent over the sound receiver. O'Brien looked up, shook his head. He could hear nothing at this speed. I waited a few moments. We would run on like this for a couple of minutes, I thought, then slow down and try to creep away…

WHAM! Another depth charge.

Wham!… Wham!… Wham!… Three more. Compared to our initiation these were nothing to worry about, but they did disturb the water again. Maybe, added to what had gone before, they gave us the chance we needed.

"Right full rudder!" I called to Oregon. He put his full strength into turning the wheel and the ship leaned slightly to starboard, opposite to her list during a surface turn. The gyro compass card began to spin rapidly.

"All ahead one third." This would quiet our thrashing pro- pellers. With the speed we had already built up, the ship would coast a good distance. I picked up the telephone again.

"Tom," I called.

"Yes?"

"I didn't hear you blow negative. Is it blown?"

"It's blown!"

"Good! I want to slow down now, to as slow and quiet as you can run. We'll stay at this depth, and run as silently as we can. With the start we've had and the — uproar in the water back there, this may be our chance!"

A submarine's natural habitat is the deep, silent depths of the sea. The deeper she can go, the safer she is, and with the comfortable shelter of hundreds of feet of ocean overhead the submariner can relax. Deep in the sea there is no motion, no sound, save that put there by the insane humors of man. The slow, smooth stirring of the deep ocean currents, the high- frequency snapping or popping of ocean life, even the occasional snort or burble of a porpoise are all in low key, subdued, responsive to the primordial quietness of the deep.

Of life there is, of course, plenty, and of death too, for Neither are strange to the ocean. But even life and death, Though violent, make little or no noise in the deep-sea.

"So is it with the submarine, forced, for survival, to join those elemental children of nature who seek, always, for quietness. Noise means death. Quietness, in the primeval jungle of the sea, is next to slowness or stock-stillness, as a means of remaining alive. And deep in the black depths, where live only those deep-sea denizens who never see the light of the day, who never approach the surface, and for whom in reality, it does not exist, Walrus sought her succor.

Deep below the surface, at the absolute limit of her designed depth, her sturdy hull strained and bowed under the unaccustomed compression, her steel ribs standing rigid against- the fierce, implacable squeeze of millions of tons of sea water, inescapable, unyielding, Walrus struggled for her life. Her propellers were barely turning over, her sea valves and hull fittings were tightly shut against the deadly pressure, and no noise, no noise at all, could she make.

On the surface we could hear the sound of our adversary's screws moving about from one side to another as-if with a definite plan, as if trying to cover all the possible areas we might be. But there were no more depth charges, and after a while the screws themselves quieted down, and all we could hear was the same sibilant hum, the area of higher, but undistinguishable-noise level, which had presaged the destroyer's attack upon us.

But Walrus was not to be fooled a second time. We remained at silent running and maximum depth the rest of the day, and it was long into the evening before we secured from depth-charge stations. The Jap destroyer apparently became satisfied with the evidence of our destruction, for he never did resume the attack. Gradually his betraying noise faded from our sonar equipment. We did not, however trust ourselves to come back to periscope depth until long after sundown, and we did not surface until nearly midnight.

Our first day in the war zone had been long, hard, and nearly disastrous.

We took stock of our damage topside and below. Examination of the attack periscope showed the- top glass cracked and the tube flooded; no hope for it. Our SJ radar, inefficient though it had been, had been a comfort in that no surface craft could, get any closer than a couple of miles without alerting us. Now it, too, was gone. We had another periscope, slightly larger in diameter at the top than the attack periscope, but we had no other surface radar. Both losses were serious.