Читать книгу Run Silent, Run Deep - Edward L. Beach - Страница 16
ОглавлениеLaura Elwood entered my life at the tag end of a nerve-shattering day in mid-August, shortly after the S-16 arrived in New London from the Philadelphia Navy Yard. One of old Joe Blunt’s maxims had always been that no officer of the Navy worth his salt ever needed a drink to settle his problems—but this was one time that I did, and I didn’t care who knew it. An hour before I had supervised the final operations in tying the boat up to her usual dock in the river, and as soon as I could get rid of a few essential items of paperwork I headed for our tiny shower. Jim, from the appearance of our stateroom, had preceded me; we passed each other, draped in towels, as I headed forward. He halted, made a tremendous pretense of clicking his bare heels together, and raised his right hand in a caricature of a Nazi salute.
“Heil, Führer! I took a good look and there’s not a scratch on me, so can I have permission to go ashore?”
Jim was obviously trying a little, but the absurdity of his salutation could not help but make me chuckle. “Sure,” I said. “After today I think I’ll do the same.” He strutted down the passageway between the bunks, teetering from one side to another. When I got back he was already dressed and gone.
Along with several other boats, S-16 had gone out into Long Island Sound for the so-called “graduation approach” of a group of Ensign students then nearing the end of their accelerated three months’ course at the submarine school. Five torpedoes had been loaded aboard, each one made ready by the Ensign who was to fire it. While he was doing so, the other four members of the party would take over the supporting assignments: Assistant Approach Officer, Banjo Officer, Diving Officer, and in nominal charge at the tubes. Our own crew, of course, would be standing by at the remaining stations necessary to operate the ship, and I, as skipper, held the responsibility of “Safety Officer.”
Approximately fifty per cent of the grade the trainee would receive for the course depended upon the proper functioning of his torpedo, his conduct of the submerged approach leading up to firing it, and, most importantly, where that torpedo passed with relation to the target. It was a crucial test for each trainee and it was important to the S-16, too, since it was to be our first “shoot” for the school. Jim and Keith had labored most of the previous day and far into the night with our torpedo gang, checking our tubes and associated equipment.
As far as the first four fish were concerned, we need not have worried. Two of them passed under the target and the other two, though wide misses, were the results of poor approach technique. When our fifth and last approach began, however, it was late in the day. Considerable time had been lost with both of the bad shots, since each had to be pursued and hauled aboard the converted motor launch acting as retriever before the approach following could begin. And if one could judge by the length of time required to locate them, Roy Savage in S-48, with whom we shared the target’s services, must have had one or two bad ones himself.
Our target was the old four-stack destroyer Semmes, and her job was simple; merely run back and forth between two submarines five miles apart, and help chase the torpedoes at each end. Since Roy was senior, the odd-numbered runs were his, and, of course, he had chosen for his initial point the one nearer the entrance of the Thames River channel. When the Semmes squared away for the tenth and last run, our fifth, S-48 was already well on her way back to port and every minute she ran for us carried her double that time directly away from her own comfortable dock in the submarine base. I think we all expected the target to crank up the maximum speed permitted and to make the run as short as she could. Everyone, that is, except the tensely anxious officer student waiting to shoot his torpedo.
His approach was doctrinaire; he looked through the periscope every three minutes regardless of when the target’s zigs took place, and we ran first one way and then the other—and succeeded in remaining practically stationary near the spot at which we had originally dived. Even so, it looked as though he might attain a favorable firing position no matter what he did, for Semmes was coming right down the initial bearing line, zigzagging regularly an equal amount to either side. It would be difficult not to get in a shot, in fact, and this was doubtless what the skipper of the Semmes had in mind.
The school instructor, a Lieutenant named Hansen who had recently come from being Exec of the Barracuda in Coco Solo, looked my way and shrugged. He pointed with a grin to the sweat-streaming face of the toiling student, made as if to wipe off his own, looked at his wrist watch, shrugged again. We were all anxious to get it over with, for it was hot in the control room. All of us were perspiring freely, moving about in a fetid atmosphere which reminded me of nothing so much as the fogged interior of the glass jar in which as a child I had once sealed a half-dozen inoffensive bugs.
The periscope rose out of its well, reached the top of its travel, and stopped. Standing bolt upright before it, the Approach Officer reached for the handles, folded them down into operating position, then gingerly applied his eye to the guard.
“Bearing—Mark,” he said.
The acting Assistant Approach Officer read it for him, then turned back to fiddling with the Is-Was.
The Approach Officer jiggled the periscope back and forth with little taps with the heel of his left hand, his right hand cranking the range crank back and forth. “Range—Mark,” he finally said.
“Two-four-double-oh!” read the yes-man, breaking away from the Is-Was and searching the range dial with his finger.
The Approach Officer was named Blockman, and so far as I could tell the name suited him. Rivulets of sweat running down his face and into the open neck of his sodden uniform shirt, he put up the handles of the ’scope and turned away. The yes-man fumbled for the pickle button hanging nearby on its wire, pressed it, started the periscope back into its well. It had been up nearly a full minute.
Hansen and I exchanged glances. Nearly at the firing point, the supposed enemy hardly more than a mile way, the surface of the sea smooth and calm—and the periscope up in full view for a minute! On the other side of the control room Jim winked as I looked at him.
“Angle on the bow is zero.” The words cut across the compartment, perhaps from Blockman or his apparently equally stolid assistant. All three of them were now huddled with the Banjo operator in an oblivious group.
Even assuming a fairly large range error, there should be several minutes before he would be upon us. Fifteen knots equaled five hundred yards a minute. Divide that into the range for the time—nearly five minutes. Nevertheless I had not made an observation myself for some while, and there was just enough of uncertainty in the air, something which did not quite fall easily into place as it should have, which impelled me to do so now.
“I’ll take a look,” I said. I gave the order to the yes-man: “Up periscope!”
The ’scope whirred up. I stooped by force of habit, captured its handles as they came out of the well, folded them down—and as I did so a suddenly cold feeling gripped me in the middle of the belly. The right handle, the one governing the magnification power of the periscope’s optical system, was in low power instead of high!
This meant that the range, instead of being twenty-four hundred yards at the last observation, had been roughly one fourth of that, six hundred yards. Some time had passed since, the Semmes was running right at us, and the range might have been inaccurate at that! I flipped the handle to high power, rose with my eye to the eye-piece. Lightning thoughts flooded into my brain.
“Jim!”
Right here, Captain!” Jim’s voice was close. He might have noticed the hand motion with which I discovered the position of the control handle, had in any event come over to the periscope in case I needed him.
Perhaps Blockman had for some reason turned the handle to the low power position after his last observation, actually had accomplished the range-finding operation in high power after all. In this case everything was all right . . .
The periscope popped out of water, stopped its upward travel with a familiar jolt. And there it was. Catastrophe. I took it all in. Solid. My head nearly burst with the shock of it. Chill all over my body. Prickling sensation at the ends of my fingers. “Take her down!” I shouted. It was nearly a scream. “Take her down emergency! Series! Two thousand a side! Sound the collision alarm!” Hastily I flipped the handle to low power and back to high power again.
I was looking at the most fearsome sight any submarine commanding officer can ever be given to look at. Just such a sight must have greeted poor Jones, skipper of the S-4, years ago off Province-town. When his boat was finally raised, after all the heartbreaking failures, there was, of course, no one left alive to tell, but they found the periscope half-down, bent over at a sharp angle and stopped in mid-travel, its steel cables spewed forth by the unhalted hoist motors in strangling loops all over the control room. Jones must have given these same identical orders, in this same identical situation, fourteen years before. But the Paulding had been too close and going too fast, and the S-4 couldn’t make it.
And now we were in the same spot. In high power, equivalent to a six-power telescope, which is exactly what it is, all the periscope could show me was a huge gray-painted steel bow, oddly broad because seen from right ahead, not slender and lean as a destroyer’s bow commonly looks, but deadly. In the center stood the sharp stem to which the bow plates were riveted—the rivets stood out plainly—and some distance to either side I could see the outlines of numbers, too foreshortened to read the “189” which I knew them to be.
In low power, one and a half magnification instead of six, I could see part of the mast and all of the bridge, and the curling bone in her teeth as she sliced swiftly through the smooth waves toward us. No time to take a range. No time, nor need, to do anything! Can’t take a range this close anyway—just look at it, let your eyes bug out, this is the look of death coming at you—at least you’ll have had a privilege few people get—leave the ’scope up and pray they’ll see it . . .
There was suddenly a lot going on. I could feel the frantic hurry throughout the ship. The watertight doors slammed shut. Feet scurried into desperate action. Air whooshed out of regulator tank. There came the murmur of the diving planes suddenly jammed over into the full dive position, the heartening tilt of the deck as it inclined downward, and the sustained push of our now racing propellers. The range must be about two hundred yards now. Maybe Semmes will see the periscope and put her rudder over to avoid it—not much chance any more. They’d be looking out to the side, expecting to see the torpedo coming their way, ready to spot where it passed under their keel, and follow its track to where it surfaced . . .
Water closed over the end of the ’scope. No further purpose it could serve. No chance they might see it, nor of seeing through it—“Down periscope!” I barked. Instantly it whistled into the well.
“Depth!”
“Five-oh feet!” Tom had taken over the dive from the trainee. “Going down now, sir!” That situation was under as good control as it could be.
The periscope motors automatically stopped when the periscope bottomed, and Jim released the pickle. We could hear the destroyer coming now, a drumming-thumming, steadily-growing-louder sound. Great bronze propellers thrashing the water, shoving it astern, driving the ship ahead, dispassionately and unconsciously—nonetheless inevitably—bringing doom our way. Gigantic bright bronze choppers flailing, slashing, projecting downward a good two feet below the Semmes’ keel. One bite from a single blade would be instantly followed by dozens of others, would open our pressure hull like a sardine tin. One blade already had a nick, for we clearly heard the swish-swish-swish of it going around. We must be sure to tell the skipper of the Semmes of it, if we get back.
Strange. If we get back. It’s about time we’ll know; it’s about to pass overhead! If it’s going to hit us, now’s the time . . .
“Depth!” I snapped out the word question for the second time within a quarter of a minute. Tom was only six feet away but Jim was between us, and so were several others.
“Five-eight feet!” Tom snapped the answer back. There was a roar of cacophonic sound, a sudden dropping of pitch, a thumping-banging-clanking of all sorts of miscellaneous machinery, and then the Semmes was past. I looked around, weak from the reaction, mopped my face. She hadn’t hit us, but we had to make sure. “All compartments report!” I ordered. Jim, with white set face, moved with alacrity.
Hansen hadn’t budged from the spot where he had been standing during our silent interchange only a few seconds earlier, but his face showed the strain it must have cost him to hold himself rigidly in check while others took care of the emergency which might cost him his life.
Blockman’s round countenance was no longer stolid. It looked scared, in fact, but this was as nothing compared to the look that would be there after Hansen and the submarine-school authorities got through with him. Now the danger was past, I derived grim pleasure from the thought, and an insane urge to batter in that wet, stupid face shook my self-possession.
All the way back to our dock in New London my nerves were as tight as a violin string, and about as ready to screech if anything scratched across them. It was dark when we got alongside—luckily the tide was with us and the landing was easy—and as soon as the boat was safely snugged down for the night I went below. I needed something to sooth my jumpy nerves, to relieve the tension which had grown worse instead of relaxing. The muscles in my arms and neck were jumping spasmodically.
An hour later, in seldom-used civilian dress, I stood at the bar in the club, with my second drink as yet untasted in my hand. The first had not helped a bit, for suddenly I knew what the real trouble was. The old naval saying that an emergency properly prevented never becomes one was ringing loudly in my ears. Had we become a casualty this afternoon—joined the S-51 and the S-4—or even merely suffered superficial damage, I knew that it would have been my fault more than Blockman’s. I should never have permitted our safety to rest upon such a narrow margin. I had waited too long to take over the periscope; I had let the situation develop too far before asserting myself. My job was to help protect the trainees from their inexperience—it had been MY fault, not Blockman’s.
I hadn’t decided whether my drink was shaking because my taut nerves had not yet unwound or because of the sudden realization of my own shortcomings, when Jim’s familiar voice interrupted.
“Captain, we were hoping we’d run into you here. This is Laura Elwood.”
Jim’s arm through hers drew her gently forward. His voice ran on, receding into the general background hum around us. Laura was tall and slender, erect of carriage, and her hand felt cool as she placed it in mine. I remember looking straight into gray-green eyes, wide-spaced in a soft golden tan. Everything in the room dropped away.
Jim was still talking, but it didn’t register. The smooth line of her throat vanished in the suggestion of gently rounded fullness. Her blonde slimness was set off by a soft green jersey dress which left her arms and throat bare and gave her an elusive air of feminine innocence.
“You’re going to have a hard time living up to the buildup Jim’s been giving you, Captain,” she said.
“Call me Rich,” I said.
“That’s right, Laura.” Jim grinned in high good spirits. “Don’t pay any attention to me because I’ll still have to call him ‘Captain’—it’s that good old Navy Tradition I’ve been pumped full of.”
“That suits me fine, Rich,” Laura said. Then, turning to Jim with mock concern, “Will you look this serious when you get to be a Captain, too?”
Jim hesitated. Laura’s eyes flicked to me with sudden apprehension. “I’m sorry, Rich. Did I say something wrong?”
“Of course not,” I told her. I made room for both of them at the bar.
“We almost had a little trouble today, but it came out all right,” Jim told her. “It was just one of those things that could have happened to any sub in this training racket. It was over so fast that nobody had any time to get really scared except the skipper.”
The light from the candles above the bar wavered in the depths of Laura’s eyes. As she waited I thought quickly for the right words to get it over to her without becoming too technical.
“One of the officer students was making his graduation approach,” I said, “and he got us right in front of the target at close range. So there was just enough time to pull the plug and go deep to clear before the other ship passed overhead. It didn’t actually hit us, but I guess it passed pretty close.” As I said the words I could again see the huge white numbers on the Semmes’ bow, the geometric furrows turned on either side of the steel stem of the destroyer as it rushed directly toward us, the rows of rivets I could practically have counted, the fact that had the two ships struck, even very slightly, we might have been dragged, or knocked, upward enough to permit the old destroyer’s heavy low-slung propellers to rip into our hull.
The strain of the scare must have communicated itself to my voice in spite of all I could do, for Laura’s face filled with sympathy. But she said nothing, for which I mentally thanked her. The nerves were jumping steadily in my right arm.
“I don’t blame you for feeling a little rugged about it, skipper,” said Jim, “but, after all, we got away with it so why worry. A lot of boats have had close shaves that we never heard about.”
Laura turned to him, “Jim, can’t we take Rich in with us to dinner? He needs cheering up.”
I thought Jim seemed just a trifle taken aback, but he grinned quickly at her. “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
She had already turned back to me, slipped her arm impulsively through mine, hugged it to her. “You will, won’t you, Rich?”
Emotions submerged for four and a half years flooded to the surface. Had the events of the afternoon and then this meeting with Laura opened me up emotionally? Had they taken me back to those firmly forgotten days when I had decided that a career was more important than marriage? I had been very young and noble about it—too dumb to realize that I could have had both.
I could see now where I had been wrong. This was one of those decisions which need not have been made. Marriage or a career—you couldn’t launch them both at the same time. But other men had, and successfully, too. The day that Stocker Kane married Hurry and I was best man, I knew then I’d been a fool. But Sally had gone away with the wound I had dealt her. Later I heard she had married.
And now, here was Laura, and what was I going to do about it?
Laura, I soon learned, had come down from New Haven, where she had been working since the death of her father as combination secretary and assistant to the head of a small accounting firm. Professor Elwood, a widower of many years, had taught economics at Yale, and it was there that she had first met Jim. She wrinkled her nose impishly at him when they got on the subject—it was a straight nose, slightly aquiline, with delicately chiseled nostrils and barely the suggestion of an upturned tip.
I needed to know more about her, searched desperately for a suitable conversational gambit. “Laura,” I finally lamely asked her, “are you one of those whizzes at balancing books?”
She made a gesture of deprecation. “It’s surprising what a mess the average storekeeper will make of his accounting,” she answered, “and that’s what gives us our business. For a small fee we’ll come in and straighten things out for him. Otherwise, some of them never would know from one year to the next whether or not they’re making money.”
“You mean you’re one of those stony-hearted business women like in the movies?” I teased.
“I’m not, but my boss can be pretty hard-boiled,” she smiled, “especially when it comes to cheating, which we find now and then.”
“You don’t look tough enough for that kind of a job.”
She laughed outright. “You’d be surprised to see what an efficient little accountant Katherine Gibbs turned out. I majored in accounting and business administration—you don’t have to be a man to add two and two.” She grew a little more serious. “Of course, being a girl sometimes helps you to find out things, too.”
There was a trace of thoughtfulness in her voice and a hint of a wiry core to her character.
But she was changing the subject, asking me about life in the submarine service, and I found myself telling her all about it and about my most terrifying experience on board the Octopus—when the carrier Yorktown rammed us during a fleet problem. The Octopus’ welded hull shuddered violently under the impact of the Yorktown’s speeding bow, recoiled drunkenly into the depths. Tons of foaming sea water, backed up by rapidly increasing pressure as the boat careened downward, roared through the hold.
Laura listened with rapt attention, her face reacting to the different aspects of the crisis as I recounted them. The tips of her fingers rested on my arm as I told her about our struggle in the control room—the absolute blackness, the ship almost on her beam ends, sinking rapidly by the bow. Frantically working with the lights of battle lanterns and flashlights, we split our high-pressure air manifold so as to concentrate all the air remaining in our air bottles into the forward tanks. Thus we gained the precious air volume necessary to blow our forward tanks completely dry against the compressive force of the sea and start the ship back up to the surface before it was irrevocably too late.
“Is that why you’re so disturbed over this afternoon?” she breathed.
I was startled. I had to think this one over. “Why, yes. I guess subconsciously it is,” I responded slowly, feeling for the solid ground. It had not yet occurred to me to make the comparison, but Laura had hit it unerringly. This was undoubtedly the core of it, the background reason for my distraught nerves, the subconscious reason why our own near-disaster had hit so hard and had stayed with me. But now that it was out in the open, there was a sensation of a knot slipping at the base of my brain, the pressure in my temples that was almost a headache beginning to disappear. I could feel myself, for the first time, slowing down.
Dinner passed in a haze of delight. Not for years had I so enjoyed merely being with a girl. I had almost forgotten the completeness the right girl can bring in life. Laura’s eyes, now gay, now thoughtful, now sober, contained enough promise to drown in. I began to wonder whether I would have a chance to dance with her after dinner, when a bustle in the lounge heralded the arrival of the orchestra. Jim was on his feet in a moment. They were the first couple on the floor.
I waited a respectable time and then cut in on them. One of the arresting things about Laura was the steady straightforwardness of her personality. It was typical of her, I realized immediately, to come simply and directly into my arms from Jim’s without self-consciousness. Nor was she unaware, and in my heightened sensitivity I appreciated the compliment.
All my senses responded to hers. She moved when I moved, stayed when I stayed, and in a little while the side of her forehead rested against my cheek, and I felt the brush of an eyelash. I couldn’t tell whether we were dancing or drifting on a cloud, and I fiercely willed the music to play on and on and on—but after a while it stopped and Jim was standing there with his hand outstretched to claim her.
I have no further specific recollection of the rest of that Saturday night. I danced with Laura once more, then said good-by. Back on the S-16, I turned in to a deep, thankful slumber, punctuated by a recurring dream of having Laura for my very own for ever and ever down a long, white, slick marble stairway.
A feeling of well-being possessed me the next morning. For the first time in months, ever since leaving the Octopus, I felt completely relaxed. This was Laura’s doing.
And then the reasoning part of my brain took charge. I had seen her only once. I had met her at a moment when mental and physical tension had been high and were yet to unwind themselves. She had unwound them, true, but I should not try to infer too much from that. As far as I was concerned, she belonged to Jim. Sternly I concentrated on that salient fact.
During the following months I came to see more and more of Laura. She came to New London nearly every week end when Jim and she could be together. The hectic training schedule and the fact that the 16-boat had only three watch-standing officers did not allow them much time.
I had to admit that I welcomed every opportunity chance threw my way to see her or dance with her. Though there were no further moments of strain comparable to the one which she had banished on our first meeting, the heightened awareness remained with me, and she reciprocated with a generousness and basic good will which warmed me every time we met and I resolved that if Jim ever dated another girl that would be my chance. But he never did.
Jim and Laura made a handsome couple, and little by little, as the months drifted by, it came to be accepted that some sort of understanding had been arrived at between them. It was on December 7, a cold, rainy Sunday in New London, that I, for one, knew it must be so.
I had gone to the Club for lunch, and finding Laura and Jim there, accepted their promptly wigwagged invitation to join them. Afterward we settled on one of the deep-cushioned divans in the sitting room. It was about 2 P.M., there was a crackling fire in the fireplace, and someone at the bar had turned on a radio. We could hear music playing and occasionally the strident voice of an announcer touting something or other. And then we sensed an electric change in the program. A new voice was talking on the radio; the excitement he conveyed was real, altogether different from the synthetic sales talk of a moment before.
There was a sudden tenseness in Laura as she looked quickly from Jim to me, and a studied casualness as her hand sought his. I stood up.
“Guess I’d better go find out who robbed what bank,” I said, and marched into the next room feeling a little heroic and a little foolish.
I’ll never forget the look on Laura’s face, and the round horror in her eyes, when I came back. “I’ll have to go right back to the ship,” I said. “Jim, there’s really not much either of us can do, but you know what the regulations say. You’d better take Laura back to her hotel and help her get the next train.”
Jim nodded without speaking, but Laura interposed quickly, taking his arm in an unconsciously revealing gesture as she did so. “I’d appreciate help finding the nearest bus from the submarine base, but I can certainly catch a train in town by myself. The place for Jim is right back on the S-16 with you, Rich, and the quicker he gets there the better. Why, you might get orders to go to sea right away—and—never come back!”
For all her brave words, Laura’s chin trembled as she finished, and the last words were uttered in a sob. She hid her face on Jim’s shoulder. Awkwardly he patted her, put his arm around her, and suddenly her shoulders shook with deep, uncontrolled sobs, as she clung to him.
“Stow it, Laury,” Jim gently whispered. “It’s a bad break for a lot of people—a lot of them must have been killed this morning. It just can’t be helped what it does to us.” He pulled a handkerchief out of a pocket, handed it to her.
Controlling herself, Laura pushed herself away from Jim, sat upright. “I’m all right. I’m sorry, Jim—it’s just—just—so horrible. Everything’s so terribly mixed up—nothing will ever be right again!”
They had completely forgotten my presence, and somehow I felt myself an intruder. “Excuse me a minute,” I mumbled. “I’ll be right back.”
At the bar old Homer was talking into a telephone. “Yessir! Right away, sir!” he was saying as I arrived. Then he picked up a microphone beside it.
“There will be a bus leaving the front of the Club for New London in ten minutes,” he announced. “All visitors are requested please to leave the base, by order of the Base Commander.” Homer had a melodious Negro voice just suited to the announcing system speakers, and I could hear it resounding through the building. In a few minutes there was a small exodus taking place.
Laura was completely herself again as Jim put her on the bus. It was a sober crowd, and sober good-byes were said. I shook hands quickly so as to get out of their way, waited quietly a few feet distant. When Jim approached he said nothing, but his mouth showed a trace of lipstick, and his face was grim and downcast.
Tom was waiting for us on deck near the gangway as we approached the S-16. He wore a heavy overcoat against the frigid wind sweeping the river, had buckled a service forty-five automatic around his ample middle, and the gangway watch was similarly armed. I noticed with approval, also, that he had stationed additional men on watch, one on the bow and another on the stern, likewise wearing pistols.
“Are those guns loaded?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir!” said Tom. “A full clip in each gun but none in the chamber. I’ve instructed the sentries they have to pull the slide back before the first shot. Besides that, each man has two loaded clips in his belt.”
I nodded approval. “What instructions have you given them?”
“Remain on their feet and alert for sabotage or other unusual incidents in the river or on the beach,” he answered. “Be particularly alert for any unusual movement in the water at night. Challenge anything suspicious immediately in a loud voice. If no answer, or not satisfactory, draw gun and fire one shot in the air. If still not satisfactory, shoot to hit. By that time the rest of us will be up here.”
“Good man!” I said. “Where did you pick up all these ideas so quickly?”
Tom looked pleased. “I was in the old S-31 in China when the Japs sunk the Panay,” he said. “The place was swarming with bumboats, and we expected any minute that a whole gang of Japs would come jumping out of one of them.”
I looked up and down the river, and at the other submarines peacefully tied up to their docks. It was hard to imagine that, for all we knew, at that very moment sabotage attempts were being planned against them, perhaps actually being carried out.
My watch said two-thirty when Captain Blunt showed up. His manner was incisive and to the point. What additional security measures had we taken? What percentage of our crew was aboard? How much fuel and provisions did we have on hand, and how many warshots were there in the torpedo rooms? He made notes quickly in a battered notebook and departed as abruptly as he had come, en route to the next boat of his squadron.
I was grateful to Tom for having enabled S-16 to come through from the inquisition with credit. Some of the other submarines, I could see, were still getting men topside, and I was morally certain that some of them had few, if any, officers on board in addition to the duty officer. Not that we would have been much better off ourselves, had Jim and I not happened to sit within earshot of a radio after lunch.
I looked at my watch again. Two-forty. It had taken us just forty minutes to go to war.
But neither the Japanese nor the Germans attacked us, and after a few days, with the imposition of additional security patrols on the base and in the river, and more men on watch at a time in the submarines, life was permitted to resume much of its former habits. Except that the frenetic pace of our underway operations had virtually doubled.
So far as Jim and Laura were concerned, it had not been good-by after all. We received no orders to leave New London, continued doing exactly what we had been doing, with less time off than ever. And next week Laura resumed her weekly visits to New London.
By Christmas time, when the matter of Jim’s qualification for command came up, I should not have been surprised at learning that as a contingent plan, he and Laura would very shortly thereafter be married. Before the beginning of the war a more leisurely and considered approach, with announcements, parties, and the like, would naturally have been in order. But now all such plans had to go into the discard. Many couples were marrying with only a few weeks in prospect during which they could be together. I should have realized what the prospect of an assured year in New London would mean to two people in love.
Jim had figured it out pretty accurately. He had correctly guessed the reason behind my sudden decision to recommend him, and his analysis of its effect was equally correct. There was not much the Bureau of Naval Personnel could do except let him stay in New London, while he waited until it was willing to give him a fleet boat of his own. Lucky was the couple, during these tortured times, who had this indefinitely long prospect to look forward to!
But I couldn’t prevent a twinge of jealousy, or envy, when Jim gave me the news of his and Laura’s plans. And then when I had to destroy it all, there came the strangest feeling of nakedness, as though for an instant he had looked right into my innermost soul—had seen there things I hadn’t even admitted to myself, or suspected until that moment—which he hated me for.
