“Permission to come on the bridge and dump trash and garbage!” a shout from the conning tower. Part of the surfacing routine. Since the captain was on the bridge, permission for such matters had to be sought from him — an authoritarian obligation he would abdicate the moment he passed below. Buck Williams cast a quick look at his skipper, received a nod in return.
“Permission granted to dump trash and garbage,” Buck called down the hatch. In a moment two men dragging filled gunny sacks behind them appeared on the bridge. The OOD and skipper moved out of their way to permit them clear passage to the cigarette deck, where the two men in a practiced maneuver flung each sack in turn clear of the side and into the water. “One more coming up, Bridge. A juicy one.” There was someone in the conning tower boosting the sacks up to the bridge. A little more gingerly, the third sack was carried aft, thrown overboard also. Wiping their hands on their shirts, the two men stood for a minute, sucking in deep lungfuls of the salt-laden air, then in turn went below.
Richardson waited a few more minutes. Still no sign from the radar. It was now completely dark. The visibility was less than the previous night, perhaps five miles. Surely by now Whitefish and Chicolar would be surfacing.
“Going below, Buck,” he said abruptly. He reached for the rail above the hatch to the conning tower, with distaste found it covered with a slimy, sticky substance. “Buck,” he said sharply, “get this rail wiped off, and have some words with the cook. One of the garbage detail always ought to have a rag with him and wipe the rails down when they’re finished. Otherwise somebody is sure to slip and hurt himself sometime. Especially if we make a sudden dive.” He realized there had been a slight irritation in his voice, more than he wanted to show.
Rogers looked up as Richardson approached the radar console. “No contact,” he said. “Nothing at all. No pips. No sweeping radars. Just lots of grass, and land to the northeast.”
“We’re too far away to pick up any of those tincans who were depth-charging Chicolar last night,” Keith said, “unless they’ve decided to head down this way. But if conditions are right, we should be able to see one of the other boats’ radars as far as fifty miles, maybe more.”
“I know,” Rogers said. “Except you can’t figure out these atmospheric conditions. Just now we got contact on land over sixty miles away which Mr. Leone says must be Quelpart. I’ve never seen this kind of range on this radar. It’s got to be atmospherics!”
Suddenly he looked closer at the radar, crowding alongside Keith, also bent over the unhooded dial. “Mark!” he said. “Look at that!”
Richardson moved in. The sweeping wand rotated slowly clockwise, passed the 6 o’clock position, the 9 o’clock position, and then, nearly at 12 o’clock, it was broken into a series of short dashes. “There it is,” all three men said almost simultaneously.
“Steady on it, Rogers,” said Keith. “Give us a bearing!”
In obedience to Rogers’ manipulation of the control handle, the moving wand steadied, swept back and forth over the area it had been crossing, was broken again into dots as the unseen outline of another sweeping wand far off the scope to the north intersected it.
“Who is it?” asked Rich.
“Don’t know, sir,” said the radarman. “If he steadies on us maybe we can exchange calls.”
The alien wand continued its periodic sweeps for several minutes, then at last hesitated uncertainly, swept jerkily back and forth, finally beamed directly at the wand emanating from Eel.
“There he is, sir. He’s on us now,” said Rogers. “Shall I give him the recognition signal?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
The code name for each submarine was her skipper’s nickname, and its initial letter had been settled on for radar recognition purposes. A standard radio-telegraph key, shorting out the transmitter, made it possible to key the radar pulses. Deliberately Rogers pushed the key three times, holding it down for approximately one second the first time, five seconds the second, and one second the third.
On the ’scope Eel’s wand suddenly vanished, came back on, was interrupted for a longer period, came back on, vanished for a third time, and then returned to its normal intensity: a dot, a dash, a dot; the letter R in Morse code.
They waited a full minute. “Send it again, Rogers,” said Rich. Once again the radarman tapped the radio gate key. Again they watched. At last there was an answering interruption from the alien radar — a dot and two dashes.
“That’s a W for ‘Whitey,’” said Keith. “I’ll bet Whitefish has just surfaced.”
The feeling of disquiet in Rich’s mind was stronger. “Resume your normal radar search, Rogers,” he said. “See if you can pick up Chicolar. He should be to the right of Whitefish.” For several minutes the trio stood in front of the radar, inspecting it carefully whenever it swept over the northern arc, but nothing was seen.
Dinner in the wardroom was a gloomy affair. At the conclusion of the meal Keith excused himself from the wardroom, returned a moment later. He shook his head slightly as he looked, gravely and unblinkingly, at his skipper.
“Commodore,” said Rich slowly, “I’m worried about the Chicolar. We’ve been unable to raise her. We have the Whitefish okay — she’s up somewhere to the north of us — and I figure that Chicolar ought to be up there too, but she hasn’t come in yet.”
“There are lots of reasons why Les Hartly may not have been able to check in with us yet, Rich,” said Blunt. “There’s no cause to worry, at least not yet.”
“He may be in trouble, Commodore,” said Richardson.
Blunt said nothing, puffed his pipe impassively. He was sitting exactly where he had been all day, exactly where he had placed himself after the convoy action of the night before. For all Richardson knew, he might have sat in the same place all day long.
“Commodore,” he said, “anything could have happened. They were caught on the surface, remember. They might even be on the bottom and unable to surface.”
Blunt palmed the pipe bowl. “What do you want to do, Rich?” he said. His gravelly voice was smooth, too smooth.
“I still think we should have tried to do something this morning,” said Rich quietly.
“So? Well, why didn’t you?” Blunt squeezed the pipe bowl. His hand was trembling slightly. “Do you mean to say that you would have been willing to take this crippled submarine, with a bad hydraulic system, up against three alerted enemy antisubmarine ships?”
There was an unreal undercurrent in the conversation. “But Commodore, the hydraulic system trouble wasn’t reported until after.… Besides, we didn’t have to tear it down right then. It could have lasted—”
“But you had trouble all the same, didn’t you? Somebody has got to have some common sense around this submarine! I absolutely forbid your taking her into action against enemy combatant ships in the shape she’s in!” Again there was that look of strained intensity. “The subject is closed,” Blunt said. “Chicolar will probably show up in due course, and we’ll all wonder why we made such a fuss about it.”
Looking back on them later, the next several days were for Richardson probably the most uncomfortable he had ever spent. The vision of Tateo Nakame with both hands planted on the skin of Eel’s ballast tanks on the port side near the stern returned in full force. Combined with it, however, was an even more vivid vision, that of Chicolar, damaged, leaking, wracked by depth charges, her pressure hull — probably the conning tower — ruptured by shell fire. A bad leak or other damage would have driven her to the bottom. There, once her location was precisely determined, it would be marked with a buoy. The Japanese escorts would slowly and deliberately cruise back and forth across the spot, sowing depth charges with the depth setting devastatingly determined for certain.