Run Silent, Run Deep. Edward L. Beach
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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