Boggs had certainly been right in his characterization of San Francisco Bay as a most pleasant place to cruise in. Smoky brown hills teeming with life surrounded it, a warm sun turned its mud-gray waters iridescent, great bridges vaulted across it, and in the distance the tall buildings of the fabled city of the hills beckoned. Nearer, like disorganized flocks of wild birds, the sails of countless pleasure boats followed their own aimless quests, some in a cohesive pattern, perhaps a race, others without discernible motivation or objective except that of simply being there.
The combined ambience of industry and pleasure could be both seen and felt. A group of cylindrical white tanks to port, marching away from the water in stubby silhouettes up a steep brown hillside, marked a refinery. Trim white sails, tiny in the distance, softened the outline of the land, disappeared against the white oil tanks and the nearby buildings, and stood out, etched in slowly moving white silhouettes against the salt-streaked hulls of two oceangoing tankers anchored in the distance. To starboard an old freighter, her broad bows pushing a bulging wave despite her slow speed, was heading for some unknown destination up one of the rivers feeding Carquinez Strait at the north end of the bay. Beyond her, another cargo ship, newer, a moving forest of masts and booms, was heading away, probably bound out the Golden Gate for a distant and foreign shore. A white-sided passenger liner, suddenly visible against the exotic spires of San Francisco, was also steaming toward the Golden Gate Bridge, and thence to Acapulco, Honolulu, Seattle — or anywhere. And the shores to starboard were pocked with the evidences of people: houses of many differing colors, glints of glass windows, shifting flashes denoting the speeding windshields of automobiles. Great numbers of small boats, both sail and power, clustered along the benign coast.
The sight of some member of the mothballed fleet being ignominiously barged through San Francisco Bay was probably a familiar sight on its waters. The tug skipper, indeed, had boasted having made the same trip countless times, sometimes to deliver a well-scavenged hulk to the wreckers, sometimes, as now, to start a discarded lady toward a new and different life. For the three submariners, once they had assured themselves that all was proceeding normally, that Eel was not unexpectedly taking water into her bilges, that the tugmaster’s charts of the navigation hazards agreed with theirs and the course he had laid out was to their liking, it was a pleasure trip with overtones of nostalgia.
Richardson found it was easy to stand on the bridge where he had stood so many times, shoulder hunched into one of the TBT wells (the target bearing transmitters themselves had been removed) and imagine Eel moving under his direction in enemy waters, responsive to his will, alert, alive, alive to the quintessence of being alive in the face of mortal danger. The pleasure boats, the friendly shores, even the distant ships on their peaceful missions, could fade out of consciousness. It could be a bright moonlit night; strange how well he used to be able to see at night, without lights of any kind to bother his eyes. More than once Eel had been in waters far more confined than this, had seemed to be hemmed in by the forbidding hills of the seacoast of Japan. More than once he had, somehow, summoned up the necessary — it seemed only days ago, instead of years — on this very bridge, at this very spot.
That tanker, now, about a mile ahead, crossing from starboard to port: were she an enemy he would have by now opened the torpedo tube outer doors. A small order to the rudder to reduce the angle between the torpedo course, controlled by its gyroscope, and that of the submarine (the less the gyro angle, the more accurate the old torpedoes); Keith would be giving the bearings, Buck running the TDC, the torpedo data computer, and shooting the fish at his command. The setup was so similar to one he remembered from Eel’s third patroclass="underline" the tanker, unescorted, moving confidently in the shallow waters where no enemy submarine had ever dared to enter; the submarine, keyed up, but equally confident because of past successes. Except that it was just before dawn, instead of broad daylight, as now. The ship, in fact, had looked almost exactly like this one. You had to hand it to her skipper. When he saw the submarine, he had instantly turned to ram. Stupid of Rich to have tried a surface attack with daylight so near! With the U.S. Fleet pressing ever closer to the mainland of Japan during those closing months of the war he must have forgotten the caution he had learned during previous patrols. A routine approach (no approach was ever “routine,” but this one had seemed simple, uncomplicated) had been suddenly converted into near catastrophe. The ships speeding toward each other, bow to bow. Too close to shoot! Get everybody below! The tanker opening fire (how had he been able to get his guns going so quickly?) — large-caliber shells whizzing overhead. Desperate maneuvers to avoid. The ships slipping past each other, the tanker swinging toward, trying to strike the submarine’s side, Eel turning toward the tanker, swinging her stern clear. Enemy machine guns spitting, striking the bulletproof bridge bulwarks (a good thing they were made of special armorplate); Rich ducking at the last minute, just in time, as the Eel rocketed clear.
Looking through his binoculars at the approaching tanker, musing at the coincidental similarity of ship and situation to the one creased in his memory, Richardson saw the curved front of her bridge growing wider. The tanker should be passing ahead; soon it ought not to be possible to see the front of her bridge at all — but instead the curved surface was becoming broader. Then it hit him. Were this war, were he on the alert for changes in enemy course and speed instead of in a nostalgic reverie, he would have seen it instantly. The tanker ahead was turning toward! Her rudder must have been put hard over left! This was exactly the way it had been! The bearing must soon become steady, a collision situation! Rich drew a deep breath to begin the maneuver to avoid, order the watertight doors shut through the boat. It was so much the same, but there was no one below to shut the doors, no one steering in the conning tower to handle Eel’s rudder and annunciators. In the binoculars the oncoming bow was tremendous. Somewhere behind — he had forgotten the tug — a series of angry blasts on an air horn. Eel began to vibrate as the tug’s engine went into full reverse. More blasts from the tug. Now some answering blasts from the tanker. What could they be thinking of, over there?
Swiftly, the distance narrowed. Eel’s speed, never great in her captive condition, was decreasing. She had almost come to a complete halt, was swinging left, the wrong way. Her whole fragile side would be exposed to the collision. If the loaded tanker could not stop her forward motion she would plow into the submarine’s starboard ballast tanks, surely rupture her pressure hull as well, ignominiously sink her in the middle of the ship channel.
Now it was clear the tanker had also gone into full reverse. Her bow was swinging again, away, to her own left. Her way had hardly reduced — a laden ship is very hard to stop — but her engines were thrashing water up under her counter. Her bow swung away more. No danger of a bows-on collision now, but she’s going to sideswipe us. Eel, now dead in the water, began to gather sternway. The tug captain had slacked his stern line, was now nearly perpendicular to the submarine’s side, backing frantically, as powerfully as he could, trying to drag Eel bodily sideways out of the sweeping path. One hundred yards — fifty yards. People staring over the tanker’s side, from her bridge, her bows.