“We’ll get the Pharmacist Mate back here,” Grilley said. “That has to be taken care of.”
“Nah!” DeLucia said. “The Old Man ain’t gonna let anyone open and close all them water-tight doors for a scratch like this!” He wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and made a fist, closing the fingers tightly. “This will be all right for a while. That last charge musts busted the After Trim tank. You’d better tell the Old Man that it was sea pressure comin’ in through them blown grease fittings.”
Bob Edge leaned over the hatch to the Control Room, his face worried.
“The periscope is stuck, Captain. Won’t come down!”
“What do you mean, won’t come down?” Mealey snapped. “Didn’t you lower it when we started deep?”
“No, sir,” Edge said. “That is, Botts didn’t lower it, sir.”
“Try again,” Mealey said. He turned to Simms. “Allow for the drag of the periscope on your dive angle.”
“Ain’t no drag, Captain,” Dick Smalley said as he grunted and strained at the big brass wheel that controlled the bow planes. “Feels natural, just as if the ‘scope were housed, sir.”
“Try it again,” Mealey ordered. He waited, listening to the two men in the Conning Tower talking in low voices.
“Won’t budge, sir,” Edge called down.
“Get an electrician and an auxiliaryman to look at it,” Mealey said to Sirocco. “The depth charges must have jammed something. Nate, what do you hear?”
“Three sets of twin screws well aft of us, sir, milling around.” He paused as a series of rumbling explosions shook Mako slightly.
“Those are the single screw ships up ahead of us, sir. They’re dropping charges out there.”
“Let ‘em drop!” Mealey grunted.
The minutes wore on. The air in Mako’s hull grew more fetid. Men gasped for breath after the slightest exertion. Then the pinging started again, slowly.
“I think you sank his best sound man,” Cohen said to Captain Mealey. “This one doesn’t get on us nearly as quickly and he doesn’t fasten to us like they were doing early. But the gonif has got us now!” The pinging increased in rapidity and Cohen raised his voice slightly.
“Here they come again, sir!”
The explosions battered at Mako, thundering through the thin hull. Men flinched at each crashing sound. Captain Mealey stood at the gyro table, where he had stood during most of the depth charging attacks, his face set and grim, his eyes studying the chart.
“We’re going to keep on taking it!” he said to Sirocco. “It’s what, three hours to full dark? We’ve got about four hours left in the batteries so there’s nothing else to do!”
An hour went by and the tension in Mako, long since near the point of being unendurable, rose even further. In the Forward Engine Room a sweating machinist mate, his eyes blank with utter terror, reached into a tool box and grabbed a ball peen hammer and began to beat on the deck.
“Come and get us, God damn you!” he screamed. The hammer drummed on the steel deck. “Come and get us! Come and get us!”
John Barber whipped a 12-inch crescent wrench out of his hip pocket and swung it. The man went down, blood pouring out of his nose and one ear.
“Drag him up forward by the evaporators,” Barber said. “Any more you clowns want to tell those people topside to come and get us, tell me first.”
Watching the stylus on the bathythermograph scratch gently against the smoked card, Aaron saw the needle move sharply to one side.
“Layer!” be breathed and then louder, “Layer! Sir!”
Captain Mealey pushed against Sirocco in his eagerness to get to the bathythermograph. He watched the needle.
“Thank God!” he breathed. Aaron’s broad face brightened and he smiled gently.
Another hour went by with no sound from the enemy. Twice during the hour the needle of the bathythermograph began to move back toward its previous even curve and twice Captain Mealey changed course and depth to keep Mako within and beneath the layer of colder, saltier, water.
Another two hours slipped by. Cohen had long ago lost contact with the enemy ships. Captain Mealey stood at the gyro table, the sweat dripping from his chin. Mako continued to plod through the sea, her crew near physical collapse.
“What time is it?” Captain Mealey asked.
“Twenty-one hundred, Captain,” Sirocco said.
“How long since we lost contact, Nate?”
“Almost three hours sir. No, sorry, almost four hours.”
“How much have we got left in the battery?” Mealey said to Sirocco. He waited while Sirocco talked to Chief Hendershot, his eyes taking in the scene in the Control Room.
Sirocco, standing waiting for the answer to his question, looked to be physically ill. His big frame sagged and his craggy face seemed to have acquired deeply graven lines.
Lieut. Peter Simms was in a state of near collapse, hanging on to the Conning Tower ladder for support. His eyes were closed and his chest was heaving spasmodically as his lungs fought for air in the fetid heat. Under foot the deck was greasy with sweat and there were puddles of condensation that seemed to reappear magically as soon as they were wiped up. Mealey looked at the thermometer. It read 115 degrees. Alongside it the humidity indicator read 100 percent.
“The Chief in Maneuvering reports that at this speed we’ve got maybe an hour, probably less, before we run out of power,” Sirocco said slowly. Captain Mealey nodded and his right hand went up and his forefinger brushed his mustache.
“If we go, we go fighting!” he said. He nodded at Sirocco.
“Pass the word to open the water-tight doors. Open the tube outer doors at one hundred feet. Stand by for Battle Surface action! Stand by to surface!”
The telephone talkers repeated the order and Mako’s crew began to stir, to come alive, moving slowly, fighting for breath in the oxygen-depleted air. The deck gun crews crowded into the Control Room with the machine gunners. Captain Mealey climbed into the Conning Tower.
“Surface! Surface! Surface!”
The men on the bow and stern planes threw their weight against the heavy brass wheels, sobbing with their effort. In the Maneuvering Room a haggard, sweat-drenched Chief Hendershot husbanded the fading storage batteries as Mako slanted upward through the sea. The bridge broke water and Captain Mealey opened the hatch and fought his way to the bridge through a rush of water. Three lookouts followed him and climbed up into the periscope shears. They began to report almost immediately, all clear to port, starboard, astern and forward.
Captain Mealey looked around. The night was pitch black and a very light rain was falling.
“Secure Battle Surface stations,” he said. “All main engines all ahead full. Shift to hydraulic power on the helm. Executive Officer to the bridge!”
Sirocco climbed wearily up to the bridge, relishing the gush of fresh night air that was whipping down the hatch as the four big diesels roared into life and began to pull a suction through the after end of the ship.
“That’s why we couldn’t raise or lower the periscope,” Captain Mealey said. He pointed and Sirocco saw the long, slim, attack periscope bent over in an almost 180 degree angle, its lens face down near the main deck on the starboard side.
“Bridge!” The after lookout’s voice was high, excited. “Bridge, we ain’t got an after deck gun!”
Mealey edged back on to the cigaret deck and went to the rail and looked down. Where the squat 5.25 gun had stood was a gaping hole in the wooden deck. He dropped down on the deck, followed by Sirocco and the two men knelt at the edge of the hole. They could see the heavy steel bracing that had supported the gun. The braces were torn and bent.