Outlaw in India (2 page)

A THIRD DEPTH CHARGE
exploded above us. It rocked the sub
violently but sounded to me like a door slamming behind a door that was already
shut. My ears were injured. I kept Hollie’s ears covered. A dog’s hearing is so
sensitive and I just couldn’t let anything happen to him. I figured I would heal
from pretty much anything. I didn’t actually
know
that but I believed
it.

There were no more explosions. I jumped out of bed, still holding Hollie
against my stomach. I had to pull us out of our dive before we hit the bottom or
reached four hundred feet—when pressure cartridges outside the hull would burst,
releasing two nylon bags and filling them with enough air to
pull us to the surface. It was the one safety feature I didn’t want right
now. I found my way through the dark to the control panel and flipped the
emergency light switch. Soft blue light filled the sub. I glanced at the depth
gauge: three hundred and five feet . . . three hundred and ten . . . I reached
for the air switch and flipped it. Nothing happened! Oh, of course, there was no
electricity. I rushed to the manual pump and spun the wheel with one hand while
holding Hollie with the other. I listened for the sound of air but couldn’t hear
anything. I called out. “Hey!” Hollie looked up at me, but I couldn’t hear my
own voice. I rushed back to the depth gauge. Three hundred and fifteen feet . .
. three hundred and seventeen feet . . . “Please stop!” . . . three hundred and
eighteen . . . I felt the bow slightly lift. Three hundred and fifteen . . .
Yes! We were rising.

At three hundred feet I opened the tanks manually and let enough water in to
hold us steady. The sub stopped moving. At three hundred feet beneath the
surface there was no current, light or sound. And we were dead in the
water.

Since we had no electricity we had no sonar, and I couldn’t tell where we were
or even which direction we were pointing. We had about twenty-four hours of
emergency light in the interior. We had at least forty-eight hours of air,
probably more. What to do? If I could figure out what had happened to the
batteries maybe I could fix them. First, I had to decide whether or not to
surface.

The frigate wasn’t trying to sink us; they were just trying to force us to
surface. If they had wanted to sink us they could
simply have
fired a missile at us and we’d be dead now. It didn’t surprise me they had
attacked us. We were a foreign submarine following them in their own waters. It
was the dumbest thing I had ever done. They didn’t know who we were. They didn’t
know how big our sub was, or, especially, if we were carrying weapons. If I were
on that ship, I would have done exactly the same thing, only I would have shot
more than three depth charges.

But now what? I needed time to think it through. First, I figured I’d better
check for leaks. I put Hollie down and went into the stern, picked up a
flashlight, got down on my hands and knees and checked all the corners and edges
of the floor of each of the compartments. Then I examined the walls and ceiling.
There was no water coming in that I could feel. I checked the rest of the sub.
The same. That was a relief.

Should we surface and give ourselves up? I looked around. The sub was our home.
I looked at Hollie. He looked at me. I didn’t know what to do, I really didn’t.
I didn’t want to make things worse. What if they were just waiting for us to
show ourselves again so that they could fire more charges? Or what if they had
discussed it and decided that the next shot fired would be a missile? How could
I know that they wouldn’t do that? I couldn’t. Therefore, I couldn’t surface.
The risk to Hollie and me was too great. What if the next depth charge blew a
crack in the hull and we drowned before we had a chance to get out? No, as
dangerous as it might be to try and run from them, it was too dangerous to
surrender.

We had one thing going for us. I knew that they would be
listening very closely with sonar. I could imagine them standing around
their sonar screen, with earphones on, waiting for the sound of our batteries
spinning our propeller. As quiet as batteries were, they still created a faint
whirring sound that any decent sonar system would pick up in calm conditions and
clear water. And as they were sitting three hundred feet directly above us,
they’d have no problem detecting us, and they knew it. They must have been
assuming we were sitting still, which we were, or that we had sprung a leak and
sunk, which we hadn’t. In any case, they knew that the moment we started to
move, they would hear us.

But that wasn’t true because I had a stationary bicycle hooked up to the drive
shaft, and the bike could turn the propeller without any sound at all. My mind
drifted back to a day in Ziegfried’s junkyard, almost five years ago, when we
were standing around an old oil tank, which I had thought was a submarine, and
he asked me if I could pedal a bike. I said I could.

Then he told me how a submarine had to have back-up systems to back-up systems
for safety. Even then, the day after we had just met, he was already looking
ahead to situations such as the one I was in right now. That’s how cautious and
concerned with my safety he was. And I had been so impatient so often over the
two and a half years it took us to build the sub, because he insisted on taking
extra time to prepare for the unexpected. Now that the unexpected had come, I
was ready for it. Ziegfried—the greatest friend a person
could
ever have. How wise he was. How kind he was. How I missed him now.

I climbed up on the bike and started pedalling. It was very slow, just four or
five knots at the most, but I could pedal all day if I wanted to because that’s
what I did everyday for exercise. Just an hour’s pedalling would take us five or
six miles away from the frigate and they wouldn’t even know we were gone.

We weren’t much further than five miles from land but I didn’t know which way
it was. We had been pointing north when we went down. Had the explosions turned
us around? I couldn’t tell. I knew that as we approached land, the sea floor
would rise. If we went further out to sea, it would fall. Without sonar we’d
only know the sea floor was rising if we ran into it. If we went slowly, at
maybe two or three knots, hitting bottom wouldn’t be so bad. Even striking a
reef dead-on wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t be any fun but it wouldn’t be a
catastrophe.

So that’s what I decided to do. I pedalled gently and stopped every now and
then to see if I could feel anything scraping against the keel. There was no
point in trying to hear it because I couldn’t hear anything. I had a constant
ringing in my ears, which was very irritating. I tried to take my mind off it by
concentrating on the pedalling. I also tried to imagine what we looked like from
the outside, drifting silently through the dark water like a small whale towards
the land.

Forty-five minutes later I felt a bump beneath my feet. I
stopped pedalling and let us drift. How I wished I could have turned on the
floodlights outside to look down and see the bottom, if that’s what it was. It
must have been. I took the flashlight, went to the observation window in the
floor of the bow and looked down but couldn’t see anything. I climbed back on
the bike and continued pedalling very slowly. Five minutes later we brushed
against something again, and then we encountered resistance. I was guessing it
was a sandy bottom. At least we were going in the right direction.

I pumped a little air into the tanks, rose fifty feet, jumped back on the bike
and started pedalling again. Half an hour later we scraped the bottom again. I
wanted to surface to periscope depth and take a peek but couldn’t yet, just in
case they had followed us. I was pretty sure they hadn’t; otherwise they would
have depth-charged us again. I wouldn’t try surfacing until we were too close to
land for them to blow us up.

Two hours later we were sitting on the bottom at one hundred feet. That was
shallow enough. I pumped air into the tanks and we rose to just a few feet
beneath the surface. I raised the periscope. I was dying to see where we were.
It was hard to believe you were even moving anywhere when you had no means of
checking your progress. It was very unnerving.

At first I saw nothing but darkness through the periscope. When I turned it a
little I saw the lights of ships five to ten miles away. It was hard to tell
exactly. I wondered if one of them was the frigate. I bet they had called other
ships to join
them. It was not every day they got to attack a
submarine. Then I spun the periscope around one hundred and eighty degrees and
got a fright. I was staring at a wall of lights. At first I thought they were
the lights of a ship that was really close, and that they had caught us. But
there were too many of them. It was a city. We were just offshore, maybe a
quarter of a mile. I hoped it was Kochi. I didn’t recognize it because I had
never seen it at night.

There was so much sea traffic here we were going to get run over if we didn’t
get out of the way. None of the passing ships would detect us on radar because
we were under water. But we couldn’t surface and show ourselves either because
the navy might spot us. What a mess! We needed a place to hide, fast, before the
sun came up.

I had to keep pedalling until I found the harbour at Kochi. If I could find the
harbour, I could return to that old warehouse and hide in the boathouse. Maybe
it was crazy to go back there, to the very spot where we had been discovered. On
the other hand, who would ever expect us to do that? Besides, they thought we
were on the bottom of the sea.

KOCHI HARBOUR WAS FILLED
with lights, like Halloween, and people
running around in the dark with flashlights. We came in without a light. I could
have tied a flashlight to the hatch but it would have been too weak to resemble
the light of a boat and might only have drawn more attention. I had to keep
climbing the portal to look out and get my bearings; the periscope wasn’t enough
by itself for navigating in the dark. Without sonar a submarine is truly
blind.

But I did manage to find our way, because I had to. There was no other choice.
And the gamble did pay off. No one seemed to be looking for us. No one paid us
any mind as we glided into the harbour as slowly as an old wooden sailboat
dragging itself in on the power of a two-stroke motor. In fact,
I was pedalling as fast as I could and running up and down the ladder of
the portal. I found the channel of old warehouses and steered into it. I must
have climbed the ladder at least three dozen times by the time we coasted to a
stop in front of the old warehouse. It looked pretty gloomy in the dark. And now
the trickiest part: going inside the boathouse without the help of sonar.

The boardwalk of the boathouse, crooked as it was, sat about a foot above the
tide. Even in the dark I could see where the barnacles lined the posts. There
were two hanging doors that hung over the water, like barn doors, but had been
shut and sealed a very long time ago. Boards had been nailed across them. I
wondered when the last boat had come inside. Why did they keep a boathouse
anyway? Was it for barges or smaller boats that went up rivers? None of the
sailing ships could ever have come inside; their masts wouldn’t fit.

I brought the sub around to face the front and submerged until the portal was
showing only six inches above water. I didn’t shut the hatch. Running up and
down between the bicycle and portal, I pedalled us in under the hanging doors.
Once we were inside the boathouse, I carried up a flashlight and had a look. It
was like a barn inside, but a solid one that had only warped after hundreds of
years of sun and wind and rain. On the far inside wall of the boathouse there
was a door to the warehouse, but it was sealed too. I tied up the sub and
carried Hollie out. Boy, was he excited! “We have to be careful, Hollie. This
place is really old. Watch your step.”

I couldn’t hear my own words. Inside my head they sounded
like noises under water and far away. But Hollie heard me. He was a very
cautious dog, especially when he sensed my caution. I stepped onto the boardwalk
and put him down. It always felt strange to step onto ground that was not
moving. It made you feel that
you
were still moving. Hollie must have
felt it too.

There was a rusty old padlock on the door to the warehouse. I went into the sub
and brought out a hacksaw and cut it off. Then I hung it back on to look normal.
I pushed open the door. Dust burst from around the edges and I felt a brush of
air on my face as we entered. I smiled. It smelled like spices and rope.

Hollie followed me in. I aimed the flashlight and saw an empty building with a
balcony halfway up the walls and all the way around, and a stairway going up to
it on both sides. The roof was supported by wooden arches, the kind you see in
old sailing ships. That was cool. The men who built these warehouses were
probably shipbuilders. I thought I felt something thump on the floor. But I
couldn’t hear anything. I swung the flashlight down and saw that Hollie had
jumped. Had something fallen? I looked at the floor closely and saw Hollie
sniffing at a rock. I pointed the flashlight up to the roof. Could it have
fallen from there? That was weird.

We walked around and I was careful not to point the flashlight at the windows,
although they were probably thick with dust. I didn’t want anyone outside to
know we were here. A second rock landed on the floor close by. I felt it, and
Hollie
jumped again. I spun the flashlight all around but
didn’t see anyone. That was strange; rocks don’t come out of nowhere. We started
up one of the staircases. I could feel the wood creaking beneath my feet but
couldn’t hear it. A third rock landed very close. I saw the dark shadow of it in
the light of the flashlight.

Okay, I thought, somebody is here and throwing rocks at us. I picked up the
rock, hurried up the stairs and ducked behind the balcony wall. Hollie hid under
my legs and we waited. Sure enough, another rock came bouncing off the wall and
landed beside us. I picked it up. Now I had two. I stuck my head above the wall
just enough to see over it and swung the flashlight all the way around the
balcony. Suddenly I saw an arm swing into the air and another rock come thumping
beside us. Well, he didn’t have very good aim, whoever he was, and he wasn’t
very big, judging by the size of the arm I saw. I felt like calling out, but
what good would that do when I couldn’t hear anyone call back? How long was my
hearing going to be lost anyway?

Another rock came over the wall, and this time it ricocheted off the wall and
hit my foot. Enough! I was afraid Hollie was going to get hit. So, I stood up,
aimed the flashlight where I had seen the arm and I threw a rock there as hard
as I could. I waited until I saw the arm swing again, ducked, and threw another
one. Then I ran halfway around the balcony with my head down, aiming the
flashlight, and threw another rock. It must have hit something or someone
because I saw a
figure start running away. I went in the other
direction to cut him off, with a rock in my hand ready to throw.

We met in the corner. I shone the flashlight in his eyes and he squinted and
stopped. He was just a boy. He made a dash for the stairs but I caught him,
knocked him to the floor and held him down. He was as light as a feather. And he
was so afraid. I shone the light in his face and saw his mouth moving but
couldn’t hear him. I could tell that he was really upset, but I wanted to know
why he was throwing rocks at me. I held up my rock to show him. He winced and
covered his face. “I’m not going to hit you,” I said, but I couldn’t tell how
loud I was speaking. He looked at me strangely. “I can’t hear,” I said. I
pointed to my ear and shook my head. “I can’t hear. Do you speak English? Do you
understand me?”

He nodded his head.

“If I let you up, will you stop throwing rocks at me?”

He nodded again, so I let him up. I held the flashlight so that we could see
each other’s face. “My name is Alfred. I’m a sailor. This is my dog. His name is
Hollie.”

He looked down at Hollie and his expression changed a lot. He bent down and
started patting him. Hollie was a little suspicious but his tail started
wagging. The boy patted him very gently.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

He looked up at me and shrugged.

“Are you hiding here?”

He didn’t try to answer.

“Do you live here?”

He shrugged again and partly nodded his head.

“But . . . don’t you have any family?”

He looked up and frowned, as if it were a strange question, and shook his head.
I was guessing he was maybe ten years old; it was hard to tell in the dark. I
didn’t know what to do now. I didn’t want him to see the sub. There were still a
couple of hours before the sun rose so I figured I’d just sit down and wait.
When the sun came up, Hollie and I would go outside for a walk.

I moved over to the wall at the top of the stairs and sat down. Hollie curled
up beside me and the boy sat beside him and patted him. For a few hours we just
sat there and I listened to the ringing in my ears. Maybe it was less now, I
thought. I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was just getting used to it. I wondered if there
was a hospital here. There had to be a hospital in Kochi. Or maybe there was one
in Ernakulum. That was the newer city across the harbour. The boy would know.
When the sun came up and we went outside, I would ask him.

Finally, the sun squeezed in through dusty windows, with long golden fingers,
and lit up the warehouse. It looked a lot friendlier in the morning. With wooden
floor, walls and ceiling, and with iron strapping on the railings and balcony,
it looked a bit like a giant sea trunk. The balcony made it look like a small
theatre.

I was excited to get outside and see India. I would take money and find a bank
to change it into rupees, and then
find a hospital. But I
wanted to get into the sub without the boy seeing me. I didn’t know him or trust
him yet, even though he seemed harmless enough. I turned towards him. He was
just waking up. “Can you show me where you usually sleep?”

He pointed to my mouth and frowned. Then he dropped his eyes. He was extremely
shy, or nervous, or both.

“Am I talking too loud?”

He nodded with his eyes opened wide.

“Oh. Okay. Is this better?”

He nodded again, got up and started around the balcony. Hollie and I followed
him. On the other side he pulled a board away from the wall and pointed inside.
I stuck my head in and aimed the flashlight. There were pieces of cardboard, a
blanket and pillow, a few cans of food and some clothes. I saw a teddy bear. He
looked too old to be sleeping with a teddy bear. “How long have you lived
here?”

He put his finger to his mouth and frowned. Then he dropped his eyes again as
if he were apologizing. He dropped his shoulders too. It reminded me of the way
the smallest dog of a pack would cower to the bigger dogs, dropping its head and
pulling its tail between its legs. He must have been afraid of me, I figured,
though I had a sense that he was afraid of everyone. I tried to speak more
softly.

“How long have you lived here?”

He shrugged. He didn’t know?

“A year?”

He shook his head and raised three fingers.

“Three years?”

He nodded. I couldn’t believe it. “Do you have any friends?”

His mouth curled into a smile. When he smiled, his eyes sparkled.

I convinced him to wait for me by saying I had to go pee. Hollie stayed with
him as I went down the stairs and across the floor to where the door led to the
boathouse. I closed it behind me, opened the hatch and climbed into the sub. I
took my passport, two hundred dollars, and the tool bag for Hollie, for when he
needed to be carried. I let just enough water into the tanks to lower the sub so
that the top of the hatch would sit level with the surface, then climbed out and
shut it. In the darkness of the boathouse you wouldn’t even know there was a
submarine there unless you went looking for one.

The boy smiled when I returned, and I asked if he would like to come outside
with us. Nodding, he took my hand and led me downstairs. There was another set
of stairs that led into a semi-basement. We entered a small tunnel that was
probably a sewer. We had to crouch down. The tunnel went about thirty feet
towards the channel. There was a grate sealing it, but the boy swung it open
just enough for us to squeeze through. Then we climbed the bank and stood up in
the brilliant early morning sunshine. I looked around in wonder. We were in
India.