The survivor (11 page)

The starboard bow plane was moving now, folding back toward the hollowed-out place in the hull.

Adam was used to this sound and waited now for the water>' clunk noise the plane would make when it moved into place and was locked there by some mechanism.

Instead of the clunk the next sound Adam heard was so huge and unexpected that it was not a sound at all. It was a force.

The deafening explosion jerked the room out from under them and then shook it violently. The last thing Adam saw before the Hghts went out was the torpedo room fiUed with floating bodies. Bodies of marines, sprawled out in the air, of rifles flying around, packs and canteens floating in space.

This is a Mickey Mouse, Adam thought, as he found that he too was afloat in the air. A cartoon where one character bops another character and the whole world explodes. Lights, colors, whirHgigs

flash and spin. People go winging off into space, zooming away until they are only little dots. Vast holes appear in the ground and mountains collapse into rubble.

As he fell, the great sound around him subsided slowly, so that he could hear a multitude of other sounds, none of them familiar.

It was now black-dark in the torpedo room. Adam struck something on his way down, bounced off it, and struck again, this time the floor. He was trying to get up when someone else landed on him and smashed him back to the deck. Then other things rained down on him.

**Tum on the Hghts," Adam yelled, trying to get free of the body on top of him, but nothing happened.

Men were yelling and cursing; some of them were hurt. Adam got back on his feet and stumbled toward the emergency light switch near the door. But now the torpedo room was moving again, not as violently as before, but moving, tilting upward. The movement threw Adam down. He got up and went on, stepping on someone as he moved.

Above the sound of the men yelling for the lights, for each other, or just plain yelling, Adam could hear other sounds beyond the wall of the torpedo room but could not make them out.

The dim red emergency lights came on when he moved the switch. The torpedo room was wild. Half-naked marines were trying to get up, or stay up, their arms and legs waving around in the dim light. All their gear was moving around on the

floor, rifles skidding along, packs rolling, canteens and helmets bouncing down toward Adam.

The deck of the torpedo room was dropping out from under them and the front end, where the tubes were, was rising.

As it rose the men could no longer keep their balance, and fell or rolled back down toward the wall.

Adam, already there, watched. Because he could see nothing beyond the room the only way he knew that it was tilting upward was the pull of gravity. As the front end went on up Adam simply stepped out on the wall. Soon, from the feel of it, Adam guessed that the submarine was now hanging straight up and down in the water, the front end straight up.

A marine was yelling, **We're going down! We're going down." Nobody paid any attention to him until he started fighting his way toward the door, pushing people aside, throwing the gear around. "I'm getting outta here," he yelled. "Get out of my way! Open the doorl"

Guns caught him and pinned his arms. "Shape up or ship out," he snapped. "Don't rush the situation."

Now the torpedo room began to turn slowly around. You couldn't see it, but you could feel it —not a smooth turning; rather a twisting, slow movement.

The marines who could get up were standing with Adam on the wall. Others, hurt, were still lying in the tangle of gear.

'Where's the chief?" Adam asked. "Chiefl" he yelled.

But there was only the babble of voices. "What's happening?" "What hit us?" "We're sinking." "Do something!" And one marine kept saying in a monotonous voice, "Where's my rifle? Anybody seen my rifle?"

Adam tried to shut out the noise the marines were making, hoping to hear again the old familiar sounds—the motors whining, remote voices over the loudspeaker, the ordinary faint sounds of the boat.

Instead he heard first a wet, steady, hissing sound coming from somewhere outside and below him. This kept up while other sounds—metals grinding together, small, mufiled explosions, creaking and banging—came and went.

As the room continued to twist slowly around, Adam noticed that the telephone was off the hook and was swinging back and forth on its cord, hitting against the torpedo tube, then bouncing away, to swing and whirl around.

Maybe somebody's trying to say something, Adam thought. Maybe I ought to answer it.

He started climbing up the deck toward the torpedo tubes above him. Jason said, "Where are you going, Adam?"

"To answer the phone," Adam told him, climbing up along the torpedo racks. Leaning out from the rack he caught the phone as it swung like a pendulum toward him. "Hello," he said. "Hello? Anybody there?"

There was no answer and the phone sounded dead. Then Adam felt stupid when he noticed the push-to-talk button. He pushed it down and said, "HeUo? Hello?"

The phone still sounded dead. He shook it, listened, pushed the button. *'Hello. Conning tower. Control? Anybody! This is the forward torpedo room. Do you read me? Do you read me?" He let the button up and listened. The phone was dead.

Adam was trying to hang it back in its cradle when he was suddenly and violently jerked loose from the torpedo rack and flung down. As he fell he could see the other men staggering and falling.

The noise around him as he fell was tremendous, but not hke the first great sound. This was slow and long drawn out, the sound of metal grinding on rock or coral, or metal bending and breaking, more and louder small explosions.

Adam landed on his hands and knees on a pile of gear and some marines, and wasn't hurt.

Now the torpedo room started moving in a different direction. Slowly the front end came down. The marines who were still on their feet walked down off the wall and out onto the deck as, at last, the room stopped moving down. For a moment longer it rolled a little from side to side as though trying to find a comfortable place to rest, and then all movement stopped.

For a Httle while longer the sounds outside went on, but then they too stopped and there was, at last, silence.

Adam pulled himself to his feet by the handle

which locked the door and looked around. "I think we're on the bottom," he said. "Where's the chief?"

They didn't know. Slowly (and he wondered why he had not noticed it before) he saw that Guns was covered with blood, that Jason, hurt, was lying face down on the floor. The Rebel, also hurt, had made it over to the lower rack and was sitting down, his head in his hands, blood dripping from his elbows.

A young corporal, his eyes wild, stumbled toward Adam saying, "Let me outl Let me out of herel"

That started the rest of them. It was as though a quarterback had given the signal and the line was rushing forward.

The marines on their feet began yelling and pushing toward the door and, to Adam, they looked Hke wild animals, their eyes crazy and wild sounds coming out of their throats.

Adam backed up against the door and held his hands out as though to push them away. "Don't open this doorl" he yelled at them. "Keep the door shut!"

They hit him without seeming to know he was there, knocked him down, pushed him aside. Then all of them began tugging at the heavy steel handle which turned and locked the door into its frame.

Adam crawled away from them, hoping that Guns or the Rebel or somebody would stop them, but Guns and the Rebel and Jason were where they had been before. They were not looking; they ap-

parently didn't hear the yelHng and cursing at the door.

"Chief!" Adam yelled. "Chiefr

No one answered, and then he saw the rifle sticking up out of the tangle of gear. Adam pulled it free and got up on his feet. Holding the rifle low, he stood there and yelled, "Listen to me! Get away from that door or I'll shoot you! Come on, get away from it!"

It took them a few seconds for the words to get through to them and then they turned, one by one. They looked first at him and then at the rifle, and it seemed to him that the wildness drained out of their faces and they looked like men again-scared men, but men.

"How do you know what's beyond that door?** Adam said, still yelling.

"My buddy's back there, flyboy," one of the marines said.

"The ocean's back there, too," Adam yelled. "Nobody's told us to open that door. This is their boat. Let them open it when it's time to open it."

A Pfc said, "I'm getting out of here, airedale," and turned back toward the door.

Adam rammed the rifle into his back. "There's nothing but water beyond that door. Go ahead, you stupid jerk, open it!"

The Pfc turned slowly around and looked at him. 'Water?"

"That's right!" Adam yelled. He waved the rifle at him and said, "Come on, get away from it."

"Water?" the Pfc said, as though he could not be-

lieve it. Then, as he moved away, he looked down at the rifle. Very slowly he reached out and, delicately, with two fingers, pulled the oily rag out of the muzzle. Then, as though instructing Adam on the rifle range, he said, "Always remove any foreign material from the bore before you fire, Lieutenant."

^'Thanks,** Adam said, feeling foolish as he suddenly realized what he had done. He must have looked ridiculous standing there with a rag dripping out of the rifle while he threatened to kill these combat marines. Ridiculous. "Don't open the door,** he said mildly, and carefully put the rifle down on the gear at his feet

AS Jason wrapped a bandage around the chiefs x\head, the marines who were not hurt stood silendy around him, listening to him. Apparently the first violent explosion had knocked the chief down, and in falling he had hit his head on something, knocking him out. They had found him wedged ujider the torpedo-tube platform, bleeding from a cut in the back of his head.

"I think we hit a mine," the chief said. *1 think that noise we heard—remember?—was a mine cable. You know what they do? They anchor these mines. They drop an anchor that goes down to the bottom, but the mine doesn t come all the way to the top. The cable holds it down just far enough so you can t see it, but your ship can hit it. What I think happened is that we caught the anchor

cable in the starboard bow plane—that was the noise we heard scraping on the boat: that cable. Then, when we rigged in the plane, it pulled the mine down on top of us. Back aft somewhere. It probably blew the whole aft end off the boat. Those mines can do a lot of damage." The chief thought about that for a minute and then said, "It doesn't take much of a hole in a submarine to get it into serious trouble.''

"You think this is serious?" a marine asked.

"I think the boat's dead," the chief said.

"How about the people back there? My buddy was back there."

"There may be some people trapped in one of the other compartments like we are. Maybe in the after torpedeo room. Maybe. But there's nobody aHve amidships."

"How are we going to get out of here, chief?" Jason asked, tucking in the end of the bandage.

The chief looked up at him. "V^e aren't," he said.

The marines stood' aroimd in silence looking at the chief.

"Never?" the young Pfc said.

'That's right, sonny. Never."

The Pfc walked over to the other side of the room and sat down on the rack. "Gee," he said, "that's pretty bad."

"I wonder how deep it is?" Adam said, just for something else to say.

"What difference does it make? The only thing that makes any difference to us is, how long wiU the air in here last. That's the only thing. And it

doesn't really make much difference. How deep we are doesn't make any difference at all."

Adam wasn't arguing with the chief, but it was easier to fix his mind on something which wasn't important than to let it go on and think about what was important. "It might," Adam said. *We might be only a few feet under the water."

"No," the chief said. "The last sounding I heard was a hundred fathoms, so we're at least that far down."

"How much is a fathom? Six feet?^

"That's right, six feet equals one fathom.**

"Six hundred feet," Adam said, slowly realizing how far down that was. "That's a long way down."

"It doesn't make any difference," the chief said. "We could be a thousand feet, ten thousand feet down, it wouldn't make any difference."

A corporal said in a bitter, angry voice, "But this must have happened before. Don't they do anything? Do they just let people die?"

"It has happened before," the chief said. "Back at the submarine base in Pearl they have a big waU map of the Pacific, and they have httle submarines made out of magnets that they can move around on that map. Each little magnet has its name on it—and we're a little magnet with a name on it. And under some of the magnets they write, 'Overdue—Presumed Lost.'" The chief looked up at the marines and said, "I don't know why this is, but this seems sadder to me than other ships. When you're dead you're dead. But on surface ships, when they go down somebody usually sees them, and

some of the people in them survive and they can tell the next of kin that the ship went down at such and such a place and what happened to it. In a submarine they just write that under the magnet: 'Overdue—Presumed Lost/ "

It was the word 'lost/' Adam thought, that was so sad.

It bothered the others, too. They stood around looking at the steel walls, or wandered around looking at the walls, or sat down and looked at the walls.

And then a Pfc said, "Hey, you guys. Look at this."

The Pfc was over by the door, staring at something, and some of the marines wandered over there. As Adam started to join them, they began to back away as though a snake was on the floor, or something.

'What is it?" the Pfc asked, backing away.

**It's water," Adam said.

The marines stood far away and stared at the water. The chief got up off the bunk and came over and looked at it.

The steel door between the torpedo room and the after part of the submarine was a long oval in shape, and it was set into the wall so that it was a foot or so above the level of the floor. At intervals aU the way around it were what the Navy called "dogs." These were heavy steel latches working on an inclined plane, so that when the dogs were swung over they put great pressure on the rim of the door, closing it tighdy in its frame of steel.