Yancy nodded again. “Okay, sir. I’ll try to keep him from getting up.”
“Keith,” said Rich, having moved across the narrow passageway to his own stateroom, “tell all the officers that I want their pistols locked up in their safes so that nobody can get them. Most of them are probably locked up already, but make sure. Buck is already securing all our small arms. I’ll put the commodore’s pistol here in my safe with my own gun.” He twirled the dial on the combination to the tiny safe built into his desk, pushed aside papers and various other objects, including a holstered automatic wrapped in its gun belt, squeezed Blunt’s gun in. Locking the combination, he turned back to Keith. “We’ve got twelve hours,” he said. “How long will it take us to reach the Maikotsu Suido?”
Richardson himself was standing periscope watch in the conning tower, raising and lowering the instrument for periodic 360-degree sweeps every several minutes. Two compartments below him, in the pump room, Lichtmann, Starberg, and Sargent, supervised by Al Dugan, who normally should have had the watch, were working with vigor on the hydraulic system and had reported they were making headway. A feeling of contentment possessed Rich, not even partly dampened by the pain it caused him to go through the deep knee bends associated with raising and lowering the periscope. Strictly speaking, this particular technique was called for only during an approach, to reduce the time of periscope exposure. But the Maikotsu Suido waters were no doubt heavily covered by air as well as surface patrols. The self-flagellation of going up and down with the periscope was nothing. If anything, it would speed the cure.
The Maikotsu Suido was roughly rectangular in shape, its long axis nearly north and south. The rocky west coast of the mainland of Korea formed its eastern boundary, and a chain of relatively small islands formed the western. Its southern terminus was a group of islands extending to the mainland. To the north it was open. The Korean coast bent off in a peninsula to the west, and a group of close inshore islands around the tip of the peninsula provided a sure sanctuary for coastal traffic. It had been a sensible move to enter this body of water at its southern end, for there was a heavy current setting to the north. Eel could remain relatively immobile while stemming the current, and yet evacuate any particular spot rapidly by turning around to a northerly heading. Ships making a northern passage would undoubtedly favor this area because of the strong current, which, from Richardson’s observations of the shoreline, must be averaging at least four knots.
Richardson’s plan, communicated in the name of the wolfpack commander to Whitey Everett in the Whitefish, was to proceed to the eastern side of the Maikotsu Suido in hopes of picking up a target. Any action Rich could stir up would on the one hand draw local antisubmarine activity upon Eel, and on the other direct the Japanese supply ships farther offshore, hopefully beyond the island chain where Whitefish would be patrolling.
Richardson had expected to see aircraft flying about. It was understandable that none had been seen in the Yellow Sea, for Blunt had required Eel and Whitefish to patrol submerged far offshore during daylight. At night, when they were surfaced, it had up till now been uniformly hazy. Today was bright and clear, and one would expect the Japanese antisubmarine aircraft to make the most of it. Yet he had been in the conning tower for three hours, and had seen nothing. Gradually he conned Eel closer in to shore, taking an occasional fathometer sounding after a careful periscope search to assure there was no antisubmarine vessel in the vicinity.
Another hour passed. He turned the periscope over to Keith, went down to a hasty lunch. Blunt was still sleeping soundly. Before returning to the conning tower Rich climbed down beneath the control room into the pump room. Al Dugan was temporarily exempted from the watch list, as were his three workers, to permit them to give full time to the hydraulic mechanism.
“I think we’ve found the trouble,” said Dugan. “It’s not only the bypass valves, although they were part of it. There were all sorts of things wrong with the system — they’ve even got the wrong kind of hydraulic oil in it. The worst thing is that the instruction book was wrong. So when the boys in Pearl Harbor fixed it up, they set all the clearances, pressures, and sequence switches to the book values, and didn’t realize that whoever got up this book must not have known what he was talking about. Lichtmann had a similar problem in the Nerka. Their hydraulic system was made by the same company, though it was an earlier and smaller model. We’re damn lucky you got him aboard. They had to overhaul their plant the same way, just like us, on patrol.
The grease-smeared face which grinned at Richardson was only faintly reminiscent of the natty sailor in white who had driven him to the admiral’s quarters on Makalapa Hill that memorable night. Part of the hydraulic plant was dismantled, strewn about the fantastically crowded compartment, and Lichtmann had obviously been sitting in the bilges, oblivious to the oil and water lying in the bottom, squeezing around and behind close-fitting piping, disassembling and reassembling parts of the mechanism. Starberg and Sargent were in the same condition. The dungarees of all three were fit only to be placed into a garbage sack and thrown overboard. Al Dugan, supposedly in a supervisory position, was hardly better off than his men.
Richardson climbed out of the pump room with the feeling that the hydraulic system at last was under control or on its way to being so. There would be time to take a walk aft to see for himself the progress of the clean-up work on the two engines which had been flooded. They were already back in full commission, but it would not hurt to let the engineroom crews know he appreciated their labors.
He was stepping over the sill of the watertight door on the after bulkhead of the control room when there was a sudden bustle and Keith’s loud voice from the conning tower: “Captain to the conn!” Everyone in the control room must have heard of the reputation of the Maikotsu Suido and was, by consequence, a little keyed up. At least six voices repeated the words to him simultaneously, only a second or so behind Keith.
“Smoke on the horizon, Captain,” said Keith, a dozen seconds later. “Bearing south. Looks like something coming our way!”
Through the periscope Richardson could see a tiny smudge on the horizon. He spun the periscope completely around, looking at the surface of the sea in all directions, went around a second time searching the sky. It was a clear, beautiful day topside, virtually no clouds in the sky, sea nearly calm, visibility unlimited in all directions. Eel had been stemming the current, heading south at slow speed submerged, close in to shore. Looming two miles away to port, rocky bluffs extended right to the water’s edge. To starboard there was a clear horizon, but beyond it were the tops of an irregularly spaced group of hills, the islands on the seaward side of the Maikotsu Suido. To the north there was only the smooth horizon. To the south nothing except the smudge of smoke. As he watched it, the smoke disappeared.
“Smoke’s died away, Keith,” he said, lowering the periscope. He had been using the radar periscope because of its larger optical path and consequently better light-gathering capabilities.
The conning tower depth gauge read fifty-eight feet. The thirty-six-foot radar periscope would go under at keel depth of sixty-two feet. There had been four feet of it exposed. “I’ll take a look through the attack scope,” said Rich, stepping aft to the second shiny steel cylinder bisecting the conning tower.
The attack periscope was forty feet long. At fifty-eight feet there would be eight feet of it out of water. Its much smaller head and consequently narrower optical path gave less visual acuity, but he would risk the extra height for a short exposure in order to see from a greater height.