Ginty was swearing softly in the Forward Room as he massaged a purpling bruise on his massive thigh, suffered when he had been thrown from his feet against the face of one of the torpedo tubes. Dusty Rhodes wore a large bump on his forehead from hitting a torpedo tube rack. Johnny Paul, his face white, managed a smile.
“God! I’m glad that’s over!”
“Shit!” Ginty rumbled. “This is on’y the beginnin’! They’s twelve fucking tin cans up there and that means they got a lotta depth charges!” He looked at the small clock near the torpedo tube doors.
“It’s only zero nine hundred, means we got about nine, ten hours of daylight up there! Them fuckers got plenty of time to throw everything they got at us and time to run more charges out from that base they got inside the reef!”
In the After Torpedo Room Mike DeLucia looked at Grilley. “It ain’t fun, sir!”
Grilley nodded and squinted at a pressure gauge on the board next to the tubes. He did the mathematics in his head; 310 pounds of sea pressure divided by 44.4 pounds for each 100 feet. He blinked his eyes in surprise: 700 feet?
“My God,” he said in a wondering tone. “We’re at seven hundred feet!” In a bunk up near the overhead on the port side a man began to sob uncontrollably. Grilley moved to the bunk and stood on tiptoe so his head was just above the bunk rail. He saw the man’s contorted face, the tears staining his cheeks.
“We’re gonna die!” the man sobbed, spittle spraying from his bitten, bloody lips.
Grilley felt suddenly helpless. He reached out hesitantly and put his hand on the man’s shoulder and felt his body shaking violently. He patted the bare shoulder.
“You’re not going to die, none of us is going to die! Look at that pressure gauge over there! We’re down at seven hundred feet! Depth charges can’t hurt us down that deep, they just make a lot of noise! The Captain knows what he’s doing. It’s going to be noisy for a few more hours but we’ll be all right!”
The man’s head turned toward him and Grilley saw the naked fear in the man’s eyes. The man’s mouth opened and then shut and Grilley saw his teeth clamp together on his lower lip and bite in and a fresh stream of blood ran down the man’s chin. He patted the shaking shoulder again.
“Now get yourself under control, fella! We’re going to need you for another reload in a little while, okay?”
He turned away, a sick feeling in his stomach. How did you deal with that kind of terrible fear? DeLucia saw the indecision on Grilley’s face and, with the wisdom of years of submarine service, spoke up.
“You heard the Lieutenant! Were under any depth charges that go off so they ain’t gonna do any harm! The Old Man knows what he’s doing! Got right under twelve Jap destroyers and punched that Jap battleship fulla holes, didn’t he? So he knows what he’s doin’! All you guys button your fucking lips and listen to me. And to the Lieutenant. All we got to do is wait it out!”
“That’s what I don’t like,” one of the reload crew said. “While we’re waitin’ the Jap is figurin’ things out. Japs are good at figurin’ things out, Mike, real good! They’ll figure what we’re doin’ and they’ll stay after us!”
“They can figure all they want but they won’t know,” Grilley said. “Now let’s knock off the talking and noise.”
In the Control Room Captain Mealey was studying Sirocco’s plotting board. He reached for an eraser hanging from the edge of the gyro table by a cord and erased a long pencil mark left by the pencil Sirocco was holding when he was thrown across the gyro table.
“We’ve got five ships on the plot, Joe. Where are the other eight destroyers?”
“I lost contact with Gamma, the single-screw ships we had earlier, Captain,” Cohen said. “All I have now is the Delta group, four fast ships with twin screws, the ones who have been attacking.” He rattled off four sets of bearings and Sirocco plotted them in on his chart.
“They’re sitting up there waiting to see what we’re going to do,” Captain Mealey said. “Aaron, what do you have on that bathythermograph?”
The bathythermograph, a crude instrument, measured the temperature of the water and the submarine’s depth in a line scrawled by a tiny stylus on a piece of smoked paper. Some years earlier oceanographers had discovered that there were random areas in the oceans that were saltier than the surrounding waters. The saltier areas were colder by a few degrees than the water around them and dense enough to cause a sonar beam to deflect, or bounce off them and continue without bouncing back to the transmitting ship’s receiver. The effect was that the searching ship would believe its sonar beam had hit nothing and therefore there was no ship in the area.
If a submarine could locate one of those saltier areas, or “layers” as they were called, and could stay under it, the chances of being detected by searching ships was very small. The hunters could not hear the submarine. Nor could the submarine hear the hunters but that drawback was acceptable to a submarine under attack.
“All isothermal, sir,” Aaron said. “No layers.”
A ringing ping! hit the ship and then another and another.
“Here they come!” Cohen said. “One, two, no, three ships coming very fast!”
The growing thunder of the destroyers moving to the attack shook Mako’s hull. Within Mako the crew could hear the sharp “crack!” of the depth charge exploder mechanisms going off and then the massive, shattering, thundering explosions began, shaking Mako like a rat in the teeth of a terrier. Lights shattered and cork insulation rained down, gauge glasses shattered, the glass shards scattering across the deck. Ginty shook his head, as a prize fighter will when he is badly hurt, his teeth clamping tightly together as he fought the terrible impulse to scream aloud. Dusty Rhodes reached for a towel on a bunk and fought his way aft, clutching at the torpedo skids, grabbing at handholds to keep his feet as Mako bucked and shook under the violent attack. He reached an after bunk and used the towel to stanch the flow of blood from the face of a vacant-eyed man who had been thrown upward out of the bunk he was lying into the springs of the bunk above him. Rhodes wiped the blood from the man’s face and slapped him lightly on the cheek, slapped him again very lightly and the man’s eyes came into focus.
“You’re not hurt, just a couple of scratches,” he said. “Trouble with you, sailor, is you haven’t got any lead in your ass! You went flying right up in the air when those charges went off!”
The man managed a wry grin. “Last time we had reload drill you told me to get the lead outa my ass, Chief! Now you’re saying I got it outa my ass and they’s why I went flyin’ up inna air!” Rhodes looked at him narrowly, knowing that the line between jocularity and a screaming loss of control was very narrow. He punched the man on the shoulder lightly.
“Won’t ever tell you that you’ve got lead in your ass again,” he said solemnly. He went back forward to where Ginty stood.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said to Ginty, “he’s near the edge.”
“Makes three I got to watch,” Ginty growled. “That kid, the seaman we took aboard last time in, up there in the top bunk. He’s passed out and he’s shit himself if you ain’t smelled it yet! And this fuck head wearin’ the telephones is like an old lady, so fuckin’ scared I don’t think he can talk!”
“I can so!” the man said, his chin chattering up and down. “I can do my fuckin’ job!”
“Do it then and stop slobberin’ spit all over the fuckin’ telephone mouthpiece!” Ginty said.
Captain Mealey studied the faces of the depth gauges in front of the bow and stern planesmen. The long black needles read 690 feet.