“Jim,” I said, “the bottom drops away very gradually on the continental shelf until it reaches the hundred-fathom curve. From there on out, it drops much more rapidly into the deep ocean. Stay at this depth until the fathometer indicates a hundred and fifty feet of water under us; then follow the bottom on down until you get to our running depth.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!” said Jim, and looked up at me expectantly. I knew what was in his mind. He was thinking, “Are you going to announce where we’re going, now that we’ve dived?”
I shook my head slightly, hoping he could read the answer.
Taking a gentle inclination by the bow, Triton effortlessly descended to her assigned depth. With our tremendous speed and the shallow water, an easy angle was indicated. With practiced ease, though I knew they were watching their controls carefully, Schwartz and McKamey drove her down and leveled her off, coached occasionally by a few words from Jim. Directly behind Hay, Walsh had a number of additional duties on the Ballast Control Panel, which he carried out automatically and without command, occasionally checking with Jim or vice versa.
Carter, in the meantime, and Bruce Gaudet, the IC Electrician stationed on his far side, had a number of operations to carry out, consisting mainly of securing topside electrical connections, speaker talk-back circuits, and the like. Thamm, apparently satisfied, quietly departed.
It was considerably warmer in the control room than on the bridge, and I felt it. Jim was struggling out of his bridge gear, while he kept close attention on the diving station in front of him, and in a few minutes, when the bustle of diving had pretty well died away, Seaman Jim Smith, evidently the off lookout—he must have been hiding somewhere for I had failed to see him earlier—came forward in a light dungaree shirt and trousers and offered to relieve McKamey.
With the ship steady at one hundred fifty feet, the depth gauges no longer moving, Jim gave the permission. Smith squatted alongside McKamey, and in a low voice McKamey passed over the instructions he had received.
“OK,” said Smith in a moment, grasping the control stick. “I’ve got it.” In a long-practiced motion, with his left hand he swept up the right arm of the seat in which McKamey was seated—it had been built with a hinge at the back for precisely this purpose—and at the same moment, McKamey, releasing the control column to Smith, flipped up the arm on the far side of the seat, shifted his feet, rose, and stepped back. Effortlessly, Smith slid into his place, and as McKamey passed behind him, he pushed back both arm rests. Triton was already settled into her normal submerged routine.
I nodded to Hay. “You have the deck and the Conn, Jim,” I said. “I’m going aft now. Keep the fathometer going and maintain a careful sonar watch. Call me if you hear anything.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Jim. “Course 180, speed full, depth 150 feet, stay 75 feet above the bottom, when we reach 150 feet sounding, follow it on down to running depth. I understand, sir!”
I nodded again and left him.
McKamey was seated on a tool box in the passageway, pulling off his sou’westers.
“Nice job of diving, McKamey,” I said.
His boyish face glowed with pleasure. McKamey had very recently reported aboard from submarine school and had already showed himself to have the makings of a fine sailor. He couldn’t be long out of high school, I thought, forgetting that I had left home permanently at probably an even younger age.
A few feet farther aft, crammed into a corner among a plotting table, some air-conditioning monitoring equipment, a large stack of radar components, and some fire-control equipment, was a tiny compartment labeled “sonar room.” Here was the nerve center of Triton’s underwater listening equipment. Lieutenant Dick Harris, known as “Silent Dick,” was there, along with two of our Sonarmen, rangy “Dutch” Beckhaus, once of the Salamonie, and Kenneth Remillard, the shortest man aboard and, by dint of his size, probably the most comfortable. Dick was no doubt checking the cruising organization and laying out initial sonar watches, and none of the three saw me. A few feet farther aft I stepped through a watertight hatch, and in a few more feet entered my tiny stateroom.
William Green, our Chief Steward, for some reason known to most of the crew as “Joe,” was standing in the passageway outside my door. Gratefully, I peeled off the uncomfortable heavy garments and passed them to him.
“Dry them out well, Green, and then put them away,” I said. “I won’t be needing them for a while.”
Chief Green, a heavy-set Negro, could upon occasion assume an artless manner calculated to elicit information. It had more than once worked pretty well, but this time I was ready for him.
“It might be cold on the bridge up there in the North Sea, Captain,” he said. “Maybe I’d better just fold these up and keep them where you can get at them.”
Almost, but not quite, his face assumed the expression of solicitous concern he wanted to convey.
“Get out of here, Green,” I said with feigned severity, “and take that gear with you.”
“Aren’t we going up north, sir?” Green’s carefully contrived expression—his big round eyes and innocently questioning face—were too much to hold, and he broke into a broad, white-toothed grin. “Are we going to keep heading down into the warm water, Captain?”
“Green,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone, “I’ll tell you right where you can go in about five seconds. You’re not about to get around me this time!”
Not a whit abashed, Green exited with his arms loaded, chuckling loudly. I sat at my desk and pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward me. A rather comprehensive report of our trip was going to be required of us and we might as well start.
“Dived,” I wrote on the paper. “We shall not surface until May.”
But then, with this bit of incriminating information in black and white before me, I carefully hid the sheet for the time being among the ever-present pile in the basket marked “incoming.”
6
About 2240, traveling deep at high speed, Triton crossed the south boundary of the submarine operating area off Montauk Point. The last statutory restriction on our movements had been satisfied. But instead of changing course from south to east, which would have been in order had we intended only to clear Nantucket before heading into the North Atlantic, we changed half as much, to southeast. Some time would pass before the crew recognized the difference, I felt. It was logical to get well clear of the coast before squaring away on our run to the north. But the big secret could not keep very much longer, for submarine sailors are traditionally alert to their ships’ movements.
We had actually started the first leg of our voyage, a 3,250-mile run to a seldom-visited islet several hundred miles off the Brazilian coast and nearly on the equator.
We had plotted our course to travel the length of the Atlantic Ocean twice: first, on a southerly track; and second, on the return leg, on a northerly course. The shortest route brought us close to South America on our way to Cape Horn; and our return put us on a course for the bulge of Africa after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. From there, we could head for Spain. But following this course had a great disadvantage: though we would two times have traveled the length of the Atlantic, the earth would not be girdled until we closed the gap between our nearly parallel north-south tracks—until arrival home, in other words. Yet by a relatively slight diversion, we could intersect our original track somewhere near the equator. Completing our circumnavigation at the equator made sense, for if our radioed instructions from Washington for the ceremony off Spain called for us to surface the ship, we might be forced to break our submergence record.