Captain Adams put the rubber cup of the sound-powered phone to his lips. “Helm, Bridge. Make turns for ten knots.”
“Bridge, Helm, aye.”
The captain pulled the cup back to its resting place on his chest. Speaking just loud enough for the lookouts on the bridge to hear, he explained, “Men, it’s important to get as much distance between us and Kings Bay as quickly as possible. No one knows how long it will be before our disappearance is discovered. As soon as it is, the alarm will be sounded, and a massive search for the Louisiana will begin. The longer that can be delayed, the better for us, because with each passing minute, the area that they’ll have to search grows exponentially.”
“Yes, sir,” responded Seaman Hayes. “But we’ve never gone out at ten knots before, even in daylight. Isn’t that kind of fast?”
When surfaced, the draft of the Louisiana was thirty-eight feet. The channel was dredged to a width of about six hundred feet and a depth of about forty-seven feet (more or less). However, as her speed increased, the Louisiana tended to settle lower in the water. Therefore, the depth of the channel tended to limit the speed at which they could make their escape.
“It’s possible we may scrape the bottom a little bit here and there, but in this particular instance, I’m not concerned about compacting a little mud on the bottom of the channel!”
While it would normally be a serious incident, with the captain being called to account for why he ran his submarine aground, this time it really didn’t matter. Before they could court-martial him, they had to catch him! As long as the Louisiana was not damaged or her progress impeded, George didn’t mind a little bottom bouncing.
“When we get to Saint Marys Entrance,” he continued, “we’ll increase speed further to fifteen knots. I want to be feet wet, that is, in the open Atlantic, within an hour and a half at the latest.”
The Louisiana was approaching the next waypoint, preparing to make a thirty-degree turn to the right. A line of scrub trees along the right-hand bank of the channel made it impossible to see what was around the bend. During daylight hours, it was fairly common to encounter civilian pleasure boats and sailboats in the channel. There were even stories of women on some of those boats taking off their bikini tops to entertain the topside crews of departing submarines. Unfortunately, George had never personally witnessed one of those incidents. Now he realized, he had no idea what to expect out here after dark. He had assumed the channel would be deserted, but there was no way to know for sure.
“Seaman Hayes, can you see anything around the next bend?”
“No, sir. The trees are in the way.”
The call came up from below. “Counting down the next turn. Three hundred yards to the turn.”
“Navigator, Bridge, aye,” the captain answered. “Keep looking,” he said to Seaman Hayes. “Report anything you see through the trees.”
“Aye-aye, sir. Nothing yet.”
“Two hundred yards to the turn. One hundred yards to the turn. Stand by to mark the turn… MARK the turn.”
Unlike many of the turns in the channel, this was a fairly sharp turn. “Right full rudder,” the captain spoke into the soundpowered phone. “Steady course one-niner-zero degrees.”
The helmsman responded, “Right full rudder, steady course one-niner-zero degrees, Bridge, Helm, aye.”
The huge mass of the Louisiana began to swing around the blind corner into the next section of the channel. As the submarine’s sail visually cleared the line of trees along the right bank of the channel and came into the clear, Seaman Hayes immediately called out, “CONTACT! Dead ahead!”
Captain Adams adjusted his night-vision goggles and peered down the new section of the channel. About three hundred yards ahead, directly in the center of the channel, was a fishing boat, sitting dead in the water. An eerie light seemed to envelope it from below.
Must be these weird night-vision goggles.
Seaman Hayes turned to the Captain. “Sir, can we swerve to miss them?”
“No, the channel’s too narrow. We have to stay in the center or we’ll run aground.”
“Should we stop?”
“We should, but the problem is, at ten knots we have so much momentum that even if we went ‘all back emergency’ we would still be well beyond that fishing boat by the time we came to a halt.”
“Maybe we should warn them. Maybe a flash of the spotlight or a blast of the ship’s whistle would be enough to get them to move out of the way!”
“It would be nice, but we can’t afford to reveal ourselves like that right now. Too many other people might see or hear the warning. It’s unfortunate, but these ol’ boys are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’ll maintain course and speed. Hopefully they’ll hear us and move over to the bank.”
Billy Kastle and John Evans had tried for weeks to coordinate their schedules and family commitments. They had finally found a day when they could both get off work relatively early, and when their wives could stay with the kids so Billy and John could go fishing that night in the Kings Bay Channel. They drifted along with a case of beer and food in one cooler, fish in another cooler — and (an old trick they had learned the hard way) electronic gear such as cell phones and radios in a third, watertight cooler. To help attract the fish, Billy had rigged up a car battery in the bottom of the boat with speaker wire running to a headlight duct-taped to the end of a broomstick. They clamped the broomstick to the side of the boat, with the headlight shining brightly about two or three feet under the water.
They had been fishing for a couple of hours and their luck had been good. There were a number of good-sized bass and trout on ice in the cooler. John took a break and lay back with a beer in one hand, a piece of sausage in the other hand, and the back of his head resting on the gunwale of the boat. “This is the life, Billy. It don’t get no better than this!”
“You said it, man. I caiin’t believe we waste so much of our lives just workin’ to make ends meet. You know, it just ain’t fair…”
“I know. How long did it take you just to come up with the down payment for this bass boat?”
“My whole life!”
“I know that, Billy, but how long since you really started savin’ just for this?”
“’Bout two years, I guess, of serious savin’.”
“Whoa! What’s that?” John sat up with a start and looked out into the blackness of the channel.
“What’s what? I don’t see nothin’.”
“Well, I don’t neither, but I sure heard somethin’. But now I don’t. I did when I was laying back against the side of the boat, though.”
“What’d you hear?”
“It was a low rumbling sound like — whump, whump, whump — or somethin’.”
“Maybe you’ve had too many beers. Gimme me that dang beer!” as Billy reached out in jest to take John’s beer.
John pulled it away. “Heck, I’ve only had half as many as you! Now wait a minute, lemme try this again.”
John lay back against the gunwale again. “Man, it’s still there — louder than before! Put your ear on the side of the boat over there.”
To humor John, Billy pressed his ear down on the gunwale of the fishing boat. Whump! Whump! Whump!
“What the hell!” Billy sat up and grabbed his flashlight. He shined it down the channel, but the beam disappeared into the darkness without revealing anything. Then he heard the splashing and frothing of the water behind him. He turned just as a swell of water rose under the boat and rapidly lifted them into the air and tossed the boat toward the bank. The boat capsized, and Billy and John were thrown into the waters of the channel. As they swam for the bank, they saw the black outline of a large submarine rapidly moving past on the other side of their capsized fishing boat.