That was good sense. As a fisherman, Enos knew exactly how good it was. Lieutenant Crowder pouted, for all the world like George, Jr. “Something must be wrong with the launcher,” he said, confirming George’s guess.
Sturtevant sent another pair of depth charges flying into the ocean, and another, and another. And, after that last pair, a thick stream of bubbles rose to the surface, as did a considerable quantity of thick black oil that spread over the blue, blue water of the Atlantic. “That’s a hurt boat down there, sir,” Carl Sturtevant breathed. “Hurt, or else playing games with us.” He turned to the launcher crew. “Now we hammer the son of a bitch.” Ash can after ash can splashed into the water.
More air bubbles rose. So did more oil. The boat from which they rose, however, remained submerged. “I wonder how deep the water is down there,” Crowder said musingly. “If we’ve sunk that submersible, we’re liable to never, ever know it.”
“That’s so, sir,” Sturtevant agreed. “But if we think we’ve sunk him and we’re wrong, we’ll find out like a kick in the balls.” George Enos nodded. A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.
The Ericsson held her position till sundown, lobbing occasional depth charges into the sea. “We’ll report this one as a probable sinking,” Lieutenant Crowder said. No one argued with him. No one could argue with him. He was the officer.
Commander Roger Kimball’s head pounded and ached as if with a hangover, and he hadn’t even had the fun of getting drunk. The air inside the Bonefish was foul, and getting fouler. In the dim orange glow of the electric lamps, he struck a match. It burned with a fitful blue flame for a few seconds, then went out, adding a sulfurous stink to the astonishing cacophony of stenches already inside the pressure hull.
He checked his watch: two in the morning, a few minutes past. Quietly, he asked, “How much longer can we stay submerged?”
“Three or four hours left in the batteries, sir, provided we don’t have to gun the engine,” Tom Brearley answered, also quietly, after checking the dials. He inhaled, then grimaced. “Air won’t stay good that long, though, I’m afraid.”
“And I’m afraid you’re right.” Kimball shifted his feet, which set up a faint splashing. The pounding the boat had taken had started some new leaks, none of them, fortunately, too severe. “Damnyankee destroyer was throwing around depth charges like they were growin’ their own crop on deck.”
“Yes, sir,” Brearley said. The exec looked up toward the surface. “Next interesting question is-”
“Have they stalked us?” Kimball finished for him. “I’m hoping they think they sank us. We gave ’em enough clues before we slunk away. Only way we could have been more convincing would have been to shoot a couple of dead bodies out the forward tubes, and since we didn’t have any handy-”
“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, and a couple of sailors nodded. “But if they’re anywhere close when we surface, we’re done for.”
“That’s a fact,” Kimball agreed. “But it’s also a fact that we’re done for if we don’t surface pretty damn soon.” He came to a sudden, abrupt decision. “We’ll bring her up to periscope depth and have a look around.”
Even that was risky; if the U.S. destroyer waited close by, bubbles on the surface might betray the Bonefish. The submersible rose sluggishly. Kimball had expended a lot of compressed air in feigning her untimely demise. When the periscope went up, he peered through it himself, not trusting anyone else with the job. Slowly, carefully, he went through a complete circuit of the horizon.
Nothing. No angular ship silhouette far off against the sky-nor menacingly close, either. No plume of smoke warning of a ship not very distant. Kimball went through the circuit again, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
Still nothing. “All hands prepare to surface,” he said, adding a moment later, “Bring her up, Mr. Brearley. We’ll get fresh air into the boat, we’ll fire up the diesels and cruise for a while to recharge the batteries-”
“We’ll flush the heads,” Ben Coulter said. Everyone in earshot fervently agreed with the petty officer as to the desirability of that. The pigs on the Arkansas farm where Kimball had grown up wouldn’t have lived in a sty that smelled half as bad as the Bonefish .
After the boat had surfaced, Kimball climbed up to the top of the conning tower to undog the hatch. Ben Coulter climbed up behind him to grab him around the shins and keep him from being blown out the hatch when it was undogged: the air inside the hull was under considerably higher pressure than that on the outside, and had a way of escaping with great vigor.
Out streamed the stinking air, like the spout of a whale. Somehow the stench was worse when mingled with the first fresh, pure breezes from outside. When altogether immersed in it, the nose, mercifully, grew numb. After the first taste of good air, though, the bad got worse.
Still, a few lungfuls of outside air went a long way toward clearing Kimball’s fuzzy wits. His headache vanished. From below came exclamations of delight and exclamations of disgust as fresh air began mingling with the nasty stuff inside the Bonefish.
The diesels rumbled to life. “All ahead half,” Kimball called down; Tom Brearley relayed the command to the engine crew. The wake the Bonefish kicked up glowed with a faint, pearly phosphorescence.
Brearley mounted to the top of the conning tower. He looked around and let out a long sigh that was as much a lung-clearer as a sound of relief. “We got away from them, sir,” he said.
“I didn’t want to get away from them,” Roger Kimball growled. “I wanted to sink the Yankee bastards. I would have done it, too, but they must have spotted the periscope. Soon as I saw ’em pick up speed and start that turn, I launched the fish, but the range was still long, and it missed.”
“We’re still in business,” Brearley said.
“We’re in the business of sending U.S. ships to the bottom,” Kimball answered. “We didn’t do it. Now that destroyer’s either going to go on south and try to strangle the British lifeline to South America, or else he’ll hang around here and try to keep us from going after his pals. Either way, he wouldn’t be doing it if we’d sent him to the bottom like we were supposed to.”
Kimball kept on fuming. His exec didn’t say anything more. The darkness hid Kimball’s smile, which was not altogether pleasant. He knew he alarmed Tom Brearley. It didn’t bother him. If he didn’t alarm the Tom Brearleys of the world, he wasn’t doing his job right.
When the sun rose, he halted the boat and allowed the men to come up and bathe in the warm water of the Atlantic, with lines tied round the middles of those who couldn’t swim. They put on their old, filthy uniforms again afterwards, but still enjoyed getting off some of the grime.
And then the Bonefish went hunting. Kimball had got used to patrolling inside a cage whose bars were lines of latitude and longitude. He supposed a lion would have found cage life tolerable if the keepers introduced a steady stream of bullocks on which it could leap.
Trouble was, he wasn’t a lion. Battleships were lions. He was a snake in the grass. He could kill bullocks-freighters. He could kill lions, too. He’d done it, even in their very lair. But if they saw him slithering along before he got close enough to bite, they could kill him, too, and easily. They could also kill him if he struck and missed, as he had at that nasty hunting dog of a destroyer.
So much of patrol duty was endlessly, mind-numbingly boring. More often than not, Kimball chafed under such boredom. Today, for once, he welcomed it. It gave the crew a chance to recover from the long, tense time they’d spent submerged. It gave the diesels a chance to recharge the batteries in full. If that damned destroyer had stumbled across the boat too soon, she couldn’t have gone underwater for long or traveled very far. A submarine that had to try to slug it out on the surface was a dead duck.