Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 4

Bluff Carl Miller, also a Lieutenant Commander, had gone through submarine school with me several years before.

Stocker Kane, junior member of the board, and my closest friend of the three, was another hard-to-know person, though one soon learned to like and respect his careful thinking.

Jim hurriedly climbed down on deck and stood with me to welcome the three other skippers aboard. Gravely we acknowledged their salutes. "Good morning, sir," I said to Savage. "Morning, Carl. Morning, Stocker."

Roy Savage didn't believe in wasting time., "Take her on out as soon as you're ready" he said to Jim. "Rich,"-turning to me, "Bledsoe is skipper of this ship today. You and I are just passengers. You are only to take her over to avoid danger of casualty, and you know the consequences, of course, if you do."

This was customary for the under-way qualification, and Roy Savage knew I knew it. His care to spell it out for me, therefore, somehow tinkled a warning note in my mind. Savage, I had heard, had been indignant at Blunt's sudden directive to head the board on Jim. He was the senior skipper in our squadron, and had already received his official orders of detachment from the S-48, though there was as yet no sign of his relief. Perhaps he felt that his pending detachments should have absolved him from the duty. Perhaps this was an inkling of the attitude we might expect from him through- out the day.

Stocker Kane now spoke, handing me a typewritten sheet of official stationery. "This will save your Yeoman a little trouble. I've got a copy for the Quartermaster, too." He smiled faintly as I reached for it.

S-16's Yeoman, Quin, a young, eager-faced lad, stepped forward and took, the piece of paper from me, attaching it to another sheet he carried in his hand. The papers constituted our "sailing list," a list, corrected as of the last possible moment, containing the names, addresses, next-of-kin, and other pertinent information on all persons embarked, which is sent ashore whenever a submarine gets under way. This was an outgrowth of one of the early accidents wherein difficulty was encountered in determining exactly who had been aboard the ill-fated craft and how to reach their relatives.

Rubinoffski, our Quartermaster, who had been loitering-near the conning tower, also received a list of our passengers and forthwith disappeared to enter their names in the log.

Noticing the unobtrusive efficiency of these two, I felt a glow of pride at the fact that they so obviously knew exactly what they were doing.

Jim had returned to the bridge and was waiting. I could well appreciate how he must have felt, remembering how I had sweated under the eyes of my Qualification Board on Octopus' bridge. But I had never really given thought until this moment to the feeling my skipper must have experienced.

Despite the qualification gimmick, nothing relieved me of responsibility for S-16. And yet I had to stand idly on her red- lead-spotted deck, too far from the bridge to take corrective action should anything go wrong, while one of my own officers, as a result of my recommendation, held my career as well as his own in his nervous hands.

There was reason for Jim to sweat. There was a strong ebb tide, aided by a north wind, in the Thames River that morning. The signs in the river were obvious, — heavy current making around the buoys and a slight chop in the channel.

One of the ways to handle this situation is to back out rapidly, getting the whole ship in the body of the current as quickly as possible, thus allowing the vessel to drift bodily down stream while maneuvering to turn. Backing slowly would result in our stern being caught by the current first, thus getting the ship awkwardly backward in the river.

Jim surveyed the situation, then cupped his hands and bellowed to the dock: "Take in the brow!" Quin hounded over the gangway, handed an envelope to the petty officer who had appeared to superintend casting off our lines, sprang light-footedly back. Kohler, our Chief of the Boat who was in charge topside, waved to the same man, and two dungareed sailors on the dock pulled the gangway up and pushed it out of the way. Jim leaned over the hatch on the bridge.

"Stand by to answer bells on the battery," he ordered. Then to the men on deck, "take in Two and Three." Our two middle lines to the dock were lifted off their cleats by the line handlers on the docks and tossed to us. Our men quickly snaked them aboard and passed them into the stowage bins under the deck.

"Take in Four," Jim called to the stern.

As Number Four, our stern line, came in, S-16 remained moored only by Number One line from our bow to a corres- ponding cleat on the dock. We were on the downstream side of the dock, the current tending to push us away. This was a favorable effect, in a light current; one to watch in a heavy ebb on the Thames. Jim, correctly anxious to back away smartly, did not wait for the current to be felt.

"Slack One!" he shouted to the bow detail; then nearly as loudly to the helmsman on the bridge, "All back full" and a moment later, again to the bow, "Take in One!"

He might have given some additional order to the helms- man standing on the bridge as he turned around to face our direction of motion, but of this I could not be sure. In a moment S-16 commenced to gather sternway and to my horror her stern commenced to move to port, toward the dock. Jim, standing facing the stern beside the periscope standards, saw it, too.

"Left full rudder," he yelled, with urgency in his voice. If the shear to port did not stop, our port propeller would hit the pilings of the dock, probably necessitating a dry-docking to repair it or replace it. This time I heard the helmsman's reply as he raised his voice in response to Jim's, and I thought I detected an unusual note of apprehension.

"Rudder is left full, sir!"

That was enough for me.

I took the first running step toward the bridge, cursing Jim's confusion with the rudder-facing aft, he must have confused port and starboard, and the traditional requirement which had put me on deck instead of on the bridge at this moment as well. But Jim had realized the error, too. He turned around.

"All stop!" he bellowed. "Starboard ahead full." The orders came in time. The slant to port was arrested and the ship halted her sternway. In a moment, the danger past, Jim was again in command of the situation.

"All stop!" again. Then, looking over his shoulder, this time, "Rudder amidships, all back full." The S-16 backed this time straight as an arrow. As her stern cleared the dock Jim put the rudder full left once more, and she neatly. curved around, backing smartly upstream against the current and squaring away for the downstream passage. As she did so, three little black notebooks unobtrusively slid back into the hip pockets of the three alien skippers, bearing their quota of newly penciled comments.

By the time we had reached our assigned exercise area, Jim was sweating freely for a different reason. The board had made him turn the deck over to Keith and take all three members through the ship while he laboriously rigged her for dive. Normally, on rigging a submarine for dive, — which means lining up all the valves and machinery in readiness for diving as differentiated from the "Rigged for Surface" condition in which she cannot dive at all, the enlisted men in each compartment actually do the work in accordance with a very thorough check-off list, and then all officers not on watch, each taking a couple of compartments, carefully check each item. Rigging a submarine for dive, though obviously of major importance, is considered so basic that it is invariably demanded of a candidate for qualification in sub- marines, but rarely of a candidate for qualification for command. The members of the board might have been hazing Jim a little, for all I knew, but of course he had to go through with whatever they asked.

The Falcon was right behind us as we proceeded down the Thames River, a little later than usual because a full day of training submarine-school students was not before us. We passed Southwest Ledge in column and then angled slightly to starboard, heading for the area just to the south of New London Light. Having the Examining Board with us at least had given us the pick of the operating areas. With Sara's Ledge abeam to starboard we angled more to the right to head for our point to begin the exercises, while Falcon held her original course and commenced to diverge from us as she bore up for her own initial point.

Jim was back on the bridge and had resumed the conn by the time our divergent courses had separated the two vessels by the desired distance. Besides myself, there, were only the members of the regular watch, — two lookouts, on the bridge with him.

"Take it easy, old man," I said. "I think they may be hazing you a little, so don't let it throw you. Everything is okay so far."

Jim commenced to shiver, the perspiration rapidly congealing on his drawn face. The air on the exposed bridge was biting cold, whirring our antenna wires and sucking the air out of our lungs as it whistled against our unprotected faces. S-18 pitched jerkily in the gray waters of the Sound, water slap- ping heavily against her superstructure and once in a while splashing on her angular, red-splotched bow. Where it hit our superstructure a film of milky-colored ice began to form, blurring her outlines. In the distance the hazy shape of the Falcon could be distinguished, still heading away from us.

In a few moments she would turn and run toward us at an unknown speed using an unknown course and zigzag plan.

Jim's problem, after diving, would be to determine her speed and base course, get in front of her, and then outmaneuver her zigzag so as to shoot a practice torpedo beneath her keel.