“Go on, Chief. What happened to Mr. Simms.”
“He was talking about that like he always does back here and then he had to use the head, he said. He went in and closed the door. In about a minute, maybe, we heard him scream and he came bustin’ right out through the door. Broke the latch and put a dent in the door and tore off the bottom hinge but we can fix all that, no sweat.
“He was yelling when he came out through the door and he landed in a heap there on the deck where Mr. Sirocco is, his shorts and his skivvies down around his ankles and he was all curled up in a ball, holdin’ himself, sir. He landed on the deck on his head and face, I think, but it sure didn’t stop him from yellin’! I got two men out of the After Room to carry him up forward and I had the other man on watch call the Control Room and get the Doc for him.”
“You don’t have any idea what’s wrong with Mr. Simms, Chief?”
Hendershot’s large, dark blue eyes were as innocent as those of an Apprentice Seaman on his first day in Boot Camp.
“No, sir. He closed the door to the head. I don’t know what he was doing to himself in there, sir, he might have hurt himself. I don’t know. All I know is he screamed and busted right out through the door!”
“Very well, Chief. Have you inspected the head?”
“Yes, sir. Everything in there is normal. It’s just the head, the one we all use every day.”
Captain Mealey turned to Joe Sirocco who had been kneeling in the door to the head, examining the interior.
“How does it look to you, Joe?”
“As the Chief said, sir. Normal. Nothing out of order.” Captain Mealey nodded and the two men went forward to the Wardroom and looked in Lieutenant Simms’ small stateroom that he shared with Bob Edge. The black-haired officer was lying in the lower bunk, his eyes closed, breathing slowly and heavily. Two ice bags wrapped in towels were jammed up between his legs. Joe Sirocco gently lifted the ice bags away and Mealey’s breath went in with a gasp.
“My God!” Mealey said. “It does look like Doc said, as if he’d been kicked by a horse. The whole area is black and blue! Put the ice bags back, Joe. I’ll take his watch until he’s recovered. You’d better sit down quietly with the Chief of the Boat and find out what you can. I don’t think you’ll find out anything but you might get a clue or two as to what went wrong back there if you handle him right.”
Mako had reached that part of the Pacific where she had to submerge all day to escape detection before Lieutenant Simms was able to resume his regular duties. The crew noticed that while he walked normally, although he went through the water-tight doors with their 18-inch high combings with more care than he had in the past, he never went aft of the Forward Engine Rooms. Early one morning, two days after Lieutenant Simms had been put back on the watch list, Joe Sirocco climbed to the cigaret deck with his sextant and watch and his notebooks to go through the morning ritual of star sights so he could plot Mako’s position on the trackless reaches of the ocean.
“I’ll hold your gear, Joe,” Don Grilley said. “Skipper wants to see you on the cigaret deck.”
A strong breeze was whipping across Mako’s deck and Captain Mealey put his lips close to Sirocco’s ear.
“Have you figured out what happened and why it happened?”
“I know why it happened, sir, and I think I know how. I think we’d better talk about it in the Wardroom or your stateroom, after we dive.” Mealey nodded and Sirocco retrieved his sextant from Grilley and took his morning star sights.
“What happened?” Mealey said as he cradled a cup of coffee between his hands in the deserted Wardroom.
“First, sir, if you will, why,” Sirocco said. “Simms was in the habit of going back to the Maneuvering Room every afternoon to shoot the breeze with the electricians. Every time he went back there he used their head. I don’t think anyone back there would object to his using the head in an emergency but he did it every day, been doing it every day all through the first two patrol runs. The men who live back there, the ones who clean the head, Chief Rhodes makes all hands clean heads in turn and he takes his turn, you know, the men got angry at Mr. Simms.”
“Isn’t that unreasonable?”
“Perhaps, but understandable, Captain.”
“What did they do to him?”
“I don’t know, sir. I have no proof they did anything to him. But I’ve figured out how it could happen. All I have is a theory and I couldn’t pin it on anyone at all.”
“Let me hear it, Joe. If Hendershot was back of it there wouldn’t be any proof. I had him on an R-Boat in Panama. The best electrician in the whole submarine force and a very clever man.”
“Well, sir, the bowl of the toilet back there is bronze. It sits on a thick rubber gasket. There’s that little foot rest made of metal that is anchored to the deck in front of the bowl. The seat on the bowl is made of wood.
“If you ran electricity, a wire, to the toilet bowl and then you ran another line to the foot rest and to the ground, if you had the hot line going to the toilet bowl and the ground line going to the foot rest and if that circuit were to be completed…”
“I can see the picture,” Mealey said. “If he sat down on the toilet and began to urinate the stream of urine would complete the circuit. My God! Two hundred and twenty volts going up that stream would be like the kick of a mule!”
“That’s one way it could be done, sir. There is no evidence at all that it was done that way and there’s no way of finding out, sir. If it was done that way the wires would have been ripped out while they were carrying Pete up to the Crew’s Mess.”
Captain Mealey caressed the right side of his mustache with a finger. “If there were no amperage in the jolt it wouldn’t damage him too much, would it? I mean, would just the jolt perhaps make him sterile or impotent?”
“I wouldn’t know that, sir,” Sirocco said. “There was no sign of a burn anywhere in the area around his crotch, just the swelling and the black-and-blue color. And the bump on his head, that was a beauty! The latch on that door was designed to hold the door closed during a depth charge attack. We’ll have to run him into the hospital when we got back to port, sir. He’s told Doc that he has no trouble urinating and that he had, ah, erections in the morning when he awakened, sir.” Mealey nodded and turned as he heard a gentle- tap on the bulkhead. Lieutenant Cohen pulled the curtain to one side and stepped in and laid a message flimsy in front of Mealey.
“This came in just before we dove, sir,” Cohen said. “I just finished decoding it, sir.”
“Thank you, Nate,” Mealey said. He read the message and his lips smiled under the mustache.
“Get your charts, Joe! I want to know, right away, how far we are from Truk Atoll!”
“I can give you a rough idea now,” Sirocco said as he struggled out from behind the Wardroom table. “Truk is almost abeam to port, about four hundred miles or less.”
“Tell Grilley to turn the dive over to the Chief of the Watch and get the officers in here, please,” Mealey said. He waited until all the officers were crowded around the small Wardroom table.
“We have been diverted from our assigned patrol area,” Captain Mealey said slowly.
“The intelligence people in Washington say a Japanese battleship of the Kongo class is enroute from Japan to Truk Atoll. We are directed to intercept her and attack! The report says the battleship will enter Truk Atoll via the Northeast Entrance of that area and suggests, and Pearl Harbor concurs, that this will be the most advantageous point of intercept. Joe, how far are we from the point of intercept?”