The Circle (39 page)

He looked down into the hole. Then, before he could think about it, grabbed the handhold and dropped his legs in.

Somebody else was trying to come up. For a moment they fought in the darkness, in the mind-obliterating din. Dan stamped down, felt something snap. The other didn't even slow, climbing right over him as he hugged the slick steel rungs. When the man was past, he swung back on the ladder and descended as fast as he could.

Eleven feet down his boots dropped into ice-cold water, then hit a deck he couldn't see. Instantly, he clapped his hands over his ears.

The noise was like the worst earache he'd ever had, unbroken sound so great he couldn't interpret it except as pain. The air was impenetrable with steam or smoke. He spun blindly, searching for some clue. What were they fleeing? He took a step away from the ladder, and almost fell over it.

The torpedo danced on the grating between the boiler faces, jerking and howling as its propeller chewed a white-hot torrent of sparks off the solid steel of the boiler mounting. It was dark green and huge, fifteen or twenty feet long, two feet thick. Flame and smoke and the unbelievable sound blasted out of it from a hole in the propeller hub that was rapidly brightening through dull red to cherry-hot. The tail lashed about like a dying snake's, smashing a fin against a safety rail, prop clattering against the grating. Pieces from its tail shroud whanged around the space like grenade fragments.

A figure materialized out of the smoke and steam, bent as if trekking into a blizzard. A rag masked the lower half of his face. As he advanced, Dan saw he was dragging a hose over his shoulder.

Lenson took two steps and jumped over the vibrating torpedo. It jerked upward as if to get him, and he tripped. A scream ripped his throat as he thought he was falling into the prop. But his hand got the rail and yanked him forward.

The man saw him.
WESSMAN
was stenciled on his shirt. No words, they took their positions by drill, the boilerman on the nozzle, Dan behind him, hauling more hose off the reel, until Wessman got to the weapon's tail and pulled back the bail. A blast of mist hit the howling engine. He played it there for a few seconds. The water exploded into steam, joining the whirling cloud that filled the compartment like a sauna. Then he moved the jet forward, playing it back and forth, cooling the whole weapon from the tail to the bluntly curved, dented, scarred raw metal of the warhead.

The howling dropped in pitch, became a grating, shrieking clatter. The whole huge cylinder, thicker than a man's waist, lurched sideways and slammed against the boiler. The nubs of the prop screeched like two huge, hot, hollow blocks of rough steel being rubbed together, and stopped.

In the after silence, the roar of escaping steam sounded puny. Dan looked up to see the enlisted man shouting at him. “Can't hear you,” he shouted back. Wessman stared at him, then shook his head, pointed to his ears. They both shrugged.

He suddenly noticed that water was pouring in behind him, not far from the scuttle he'd come down. A solid-looking torrent as wide as his chest. It bulged inward in a glassy stream, arched downward, and turned into white spray as it passed through the grating of the upper-level catwalk. When he pulled a battle lantern off the bulkhead and leaned over the rail, he saw water glimmering between the pumps and tanks and machinery down there. It surged sluggishly as the ship rolled. It didn't look very threatening. Just liquid blackness. But when it rolled back, it was higher, already licking over the lower-level catwalk.

He jerked his eyes up to see Wessman's teeth an inch from his face. Faintly, through the eerie chorus of the after deafness, words forced themselves. “Came through over by the checkman's flat … first thing, fuel-oil valve, killed all the fires … told the guys evacuate, I'd secure steam and join 'em. We better get out of here.”

Dan howled back, “We got to stay and plug that hole.”

“Fucking torp can go off any minute.”

“Hasn't gone off by now, it's not going to. You know we're going down anyway, this space floods.”

The boilerman gave him a look that combined disgust and reluctant agreement. “Okay, sir, you gimme a hand and we'll try to get her slowed down a little. Just lemme secure this aux steam.”

Wessman disappeared into the fog. A few seconds later, the blasting hiss slackened. The cloud cleared, leaving a sinus-stinging smell of hot alcohol and fire, but the air was still so hot it scorched his tongue as he breathed.

The torpedo kept attracting his eyes. It lay like a dead slug across the width of the ship, inert yet ominous. The scars on its nose gleamed under the beam of his lantern.

He jerked the light away and centered it on the column of water. It pulsed, strengthening when the compartment leaned to port, slackening when it leaned to starboard. He moved in, stepping gingerly over the still-smoking debris of the tail shroud.

The blunt-nosed weapon had punched through the hull like a .22 bullet through a tin can, curling the plating inward in jagged points. The closer he got, the more he realized that there was a
lot
of water coming in. Jesus, he thought. I didn't know the hull was this thin.

Wessman came back. Now all he had to do was shout and Dan could hear him fine. “That's the wall of the feed-water tank,” he howled. “It come through the hull and then through the tank and then out here onto the checkman's flat. Would have got me, I hadn't gone to the ladder to tell Bluejay, quit scratching his balls and get that spare burner broke down. Now how you gonna plug that, sir?”

But Dan was remembering another time of sweating and cursing in the dark, a steel box with men inside that sank slowly in a huge tank of dank-smelling water: the damage-control trainer at Newport. For small round holes, the best thing was a wooden cone, hammered in and stuffed with rags. For
small
round holes. For this—“Got any lumber down here?” he shouted. “Any damage-control plugs, patching material?”

“Wait a minute,” shouted the boilerman. He ran forward, leaving Dan alone with the torpedo. It didn't feel good.

When Wessman came back, he was dragging a foam-rubber bunk pad. Dan propped his light on the workbench, shining it toward the bulkhead. They rolled the pad into a tight cylinder, then grabbed it like a battering ram. He caught the BT's eye. “Let's do it.”

They got a yard from the hole before the water knocked them down and blew the pad back onto the torpedo. Dan picked himself up. He was soaked now, but the sea was so cold it didn't feel cold at all. It had numbed his flesh the instant it hit. He didn't want to have to try to swim in that. “We got to keep this bitch floating,” he shouted. “Come on, let's try it again. This time, wait till she rolls to starboard.”

The second time, he slipped on the grating as they had it halfway in. Wessman fell, too. For a moment, the black wet plastic foam covered his mouth and nose and he couldn't breathe. When he fought free,
Ryan
rolled and the light shot off the workbench and smashed into fizzing sparks.

They got up again grimly and groped about in the dark. They rolled the pad again, and lunged, feeling into the blast of icy water with their bare fingers. He felt jagged steel, sensed the incredible power of the black sea beyond, forcing its way into
Ryan
like a long-denied lover.

Suddenly his body understood that he had to accomplish this or he would die. His muscles went rigid. For one moment, he knew he could lift the ship itself if he had a place to set his boots. Wessman grunted beside him like a man at the instant of climax.

When they staggered back, the bedroll uncoiled in the gap. It seemed to expand, to bulge inward. They watched it, swaying as the old destroyer rolled. Water streamed and bubbled in around it, weeping down the bulkhead. But the plug stayed put.

“Not too bad,” said the boilerman. “That's cut it down a hell of a lot.”

Dan stepped back, panting, wiping his hands on his sodden trousers. “Get the repair party down here, a sheet of plywood over it. Then brace it; that ought to do it.”

“That's not too bad, sir,” said the boilerman again. “Better look at your hands, you cut them some.”

Suddenly he remembered he hadn't called the captain. “Where's the phone? Or have you got an intercom?”

“No intercom, but there's a growler at the checkman's station; you can get Main Control on it.”

But when he picked it up, he heard Packer instead, shouting almost incoherently. From CIC, you could tap into any circuit on the ship. He broke in: “Captain, this is Lenson, in the after fireroom—”

“Goddamn it, I told you to come right back! What the fuck's going on down there?”

“Sir, we had a hot-running torpedo come through the port side, about uh, frame one twenty. It's lying on the checkman's flat between the boilers. We got a quick patch on the entry hole, but there's still a lot of water coming in. We need a repair party down here soon as possible.”

“Is it still running?”

“No, sir, it ran for a few seconds and then sort of seized up, it sounded like.”

“But it's live?”

“Well, I don't know, sir. It doesn't seem to have gone off yet.”

Jesus, he thought, wasn't
that
a brilliant remark. But Packer only said, “Christ.… Okay, get back up here. We still got this son of a bitch to worry about. Repair Five'll be there on the double. Ed, you listening?”

“They're on their way, sir. The other BTs just got here, told us about it.”

Dan gave Wessman the phone. He started to leave, then remembered something and turned back. “Petty Officer Wessman.”

“Sir?”

“Good work on the patch. And on the hose, and securing the fires. I'll tell Mr. Talliaferro and the captain about it. Maybe we can do something for you.”

The boilerman stared at him. Finally, he said, “Well—thank you, sir.” He had that funny look back again. Dan looked back once as he went up the ladder, and saw Wessman still staring after him, holding the phone in his hand.

*   *   *

“I don't think it's a dud,” Evlin was telling Packer when Dan got back to CIC.

“You're not making sense, Al. What else can it be?”

“It's a warning shot. We heard two torpedoes coming in. One passed astern, made two circles, and then the screw noises stopped. The other hit us. But neither of them went off.”

“So what's that mean?” Bryce's voice was heavy, sarcastic. “The Nixie decoyed one, and the other did just what it was supposed to do, exceptin' it didn't go off. I say we get some of our own fish in the water.”

When they looked at him Dan became aware that he was dripping wet from head to foot. Actually, some remote part of his brain thought, it was just as well. Sometime in the last half hour, his overstrained and ignored bladder had let go. He hadn't even realized it till now.

Then he looked at the clock again. Not a half hour. Though it seemed like it. He'd been gone eight minutes.

“So what are you saying, Al? That they're, what,
deliberate
duds?”

The ops officer spoke with impassioned concentration, as if by intensity alone he could convince. “It's one of two things, sir. One, it's a warning shot. Their CO doesn't mean to kill us, he just wants us to keep clear while he makes his repairs. Or, two, it means that the crew's divided. They were ordered to fire on us. Okay, they did, but somebody—torpedomen, junior officers,
somebody
—dudded them before they left the tubes.”

“So—”

“So, either way it means there are people down there who aren't trying to kill us. Therefore, I don't think we should be trying to kill them. That's all. Sir.”

“We're coming into Mark forty-three range, sir,” said Pedersen.

A new voice in Dan's earphones. No, it was Reed's, but he hadn't been on the Weapons Control circuit before. “All stations, this is underwater battery fire control, taking control of forward torpedo mounts. Acknowledge.”

Reed was setting up to fire on the Mark 264. From the firing panel, in Sonar, he could set the search parameters into the weapons and fire all or any combination of them. The only thing he couldn't do by remote control was reload. Dan pressed the transmit button. “Weps Control, aye. Do you have the readout on what we have in the tubes, sir?”

Reed said he had it on the board in UB Plot, but to give it to him again as a double check. The torpedoman passed him the data. Six Mark 43s, three war shots to starboard, a war shot and two practice rounds to port. “Are those practice rounds or drill rounds?” Reed asked.

“Practice rounds, sir.”

When Dan focused on the plot again, Bryce was leaning over it, facing Evlin. “You're telling us to just sit here and take the next salvo, too? Till they get one to work? Hell! These were just set too shallow, or too close. Next one hits us, we're dog meat! You've got to shoot, Jimmy John, and shoot now!”

They all stared at Packer. In that endless moment, Dan understood as he never had before the merciless weight of command. Building like the crushing pressure of the sea on a submarine's hull.…

On the plot the traces were only inches apart. Pedersen said quietly, “We're in range now, sir.”

The captain said, “Mr. Evlin, give me a three-round spread of Mark forty-threes, set to as shallow a ceiling as they'll run at and a floor of four hundred feet.”

Evlin said, “No, sir.”

“What did you say?”

“He said ‘No,' Jimmy John—”

“Shut up, Ben. Al, shoot the fucking torpedoes.”

“No, sir,” said the operations officer again. He sounded scared but calm, resigned. “I can't, sir. I don't believe they're trying to kill us.”

“What kind of soft-headed—”

“Shut
up,
Bryce!” As if they were alone, instead of surrounded by men in a reeling, damaged ship, Packer and Evlin searched each other's eyes. The captain said, so softly Dan almost missed it, “Lieutenant Evlin, I respect your moral misgivings, but
I am the captain.
I accept responsibility, and you obey. For the last time, goddamn it,
shoot.
”