The men in the aft torpedo room had been working continuously for two hours. They stood ankle deep in a muck of water and hydraulic oil and debris. Two of the battle lanterns had died and the oxygen in the room was getting low. Wright could tell because he was feeling drowsy. He also had a headache, probably because the CO2 level was reaching the lower limit. He listened to the message from the control room. He could hardly believe what he was hearing. They could not possibly want him to do that.
Tee stumbled over to him. “What did they say?”
“They want us to enter the maneuvering room and open the aft battery disconnect manually,” Wright replied, covering the phone with one hand. “They said they tried to get to it twice from the forward side, but the fire re-flashed and beat them back.”
“Are they crazy?” Tee shouted. “Holy shit!”
“Maybe. I told them we’re at our limit back here. Then the XO came on the line and told me personally to get the disconnect opened. He said to make that our priority. Even above fixing the leaks.”
Tee shook his head and rested against the bulkhead. He looked exhausted. Wright and Tee glanced at the working men around them, all breathing heavily. Together, they had been guiding the damage control efforts in the room. Wright could see the black bruise forming on Tee’s face where he had punched him earlier. Strangely, Wright found a moment to wonder what kind of thoughts had to be going through Tee’s mind. Having just decided to come clean for the sake of his honor only a few hours before, he could not be completely focused now. In the back of his mind, he had to be thinking about it.
“Break out the Momsen lungs,” Tee said suddenly. “They can help us to breathe inside maneuvering.”
Tee had obviously made the decision to carry out the XO’s order. He was the senior man in the room, and it was his call. Two of the men removed the Momsen lungs from a locker. The box-like breathing devices were supposed to be used to escape the submarine when it was disabled and lying on the bottom in shallow water. The Momsen lung gave a person only a few breaths of air for an ascent, and then doubled as a life preserver once the man reached the surface. No one objected to using them. Everyone knew that an escape from a depth of six hundred and forty feet was impossible.
Tee strapped a Momsen lung across his chest and plugged it in to an air manifold to charge it full of air. He directed two of the sailors to do the same.
“I should be the one going in,” Wright protested. “You’re the man in charge back here.”
Tee smiled as he placed the nostril clamps over his nose. “I know exactly where the disconnect is. I had to open it when we did the battery replacement a few months ago.” He paused, then added, “Besides, you’re manning the phones. I need you to keep giving the control room clear and accurate reports.”
Wright nodded. It was true that Tee knew much better than he where the battery disconnect was, but Wright could see in Tee’s face that that was not the real reason he had volunteered himself. Wright wondered if Tee was doing this brave act to somehow vindicate himself for what he had done to O’Connell and Anderson. Wright wondered if Tee would be entering the compartment at all if he had not come clean.
Tee and the two sailors moved to the door and found it to be hot from the fire, so they all quickly donned the driest pairs of gloves they could find. Wright and the rest of the men moved aft to stand by the torpedo tubes and out of the way. Tee peeked through the small sight glass on the door and called back to Wright. “I can see smoke, but no visible flame!”
That was not surprising, Wright thought. The fire had probably burned up all of the oxygen in the room. Wright nodded and passed the word to the control room. He also told them that Tee was preparing to enter the maneuvering room to open the battery disconnect.
Tee made an attempt to undog the hatch, but the latch would not budge. The fire had created a positive pressure in the maneuvering room, jamming the door shut. Wright saw Tee’s struggle with the latch and called to him. “We need to pressurize this room to get that door open!”
“No!” Tee shot back. “We’ll need every ounce of reserve air pressure to get back to the surface! We’ll have to muscle it open!”
Wright knew that Tee understood the consequences of “muscling” open an airtight door to a pressurized room. A real danger existed because there was no telling just how much of a differential pressure existed between the two compartments. It was like activating a bomb of unknown size. Tee directed the two men to help him with the lever and they all found good handholds on the door’s latching mechanism. Then, all together, they tried to move it. They grunted and groaned as they put their whole bodies into the hatch lever, but it did not budge. Then Tee asked for a crowbar and once again all three men put their full weight against the crowbar to pry the door’s latch free.
Wright thought he saw the lever move slightly. He started to call out for Tee to take it slower, but before he could, the lever moved and the door blasted open with a loud explosion, throwing Tee and his men backward through the air. The explosion was strong enough to knock the men in the back of the room against the bulkhead and it blew Wright’s headset off. Like the mouth of an angry dragon, the open door shot forth a long tongue of fire that stretched the length of the compartment and singed the eyebrows of the men by the torpedo tubes, momentarily lighting up the entire room. Wright shielded his face from the intense heat and felt the sleeves of his shirt touched by the flame. It had lasted for no more than a fraction of a second, then it was gone, leaving only a pall of black smoke pouring from the door and quickly filling the aft torpedo room. The men immediately started coughing as they got down on the deck, searching for some breathable air. Wright did the same, and found that he had to get within a foot of the deck to find slightly breathable air.
“How many more Momsen lungs do we have?” he shouted to the men by the locker.
“Plenty, sir,” Guthrie answered. “We have enough for half the crew.”
“Pass them out. Hurry. Get them charged up.”
The men put on the cumbersome breathing lungs and charged them at the nearest air manifold. It gave them some relief from the acrid smoke.
Wright donned a lung as well, but the smoke still stung his eyes as he felt his way across the smoke-shrouded deck. He found Tee, lying face up, in the middle of the room, the oily slush that covered the deck lapping at his blackened ears. The clothing had been burned off the front of his body as had much of the skin on his face, and his eyes stared blankly upward from their blackened pits.
Wright held his ear to Tee’s mouth and could hear no breathing. Tee’s large frame had taken the brunt of the blast and had shielded the two other men. They lay near him, gasping for air, their Momsen lungs ruptured and useless. Wright quickly called for some more lungs and a few moments later Guthrie appeared with them.
As Guthrie applied the new lungs to the injured men, he motioned toward Tee.
“What about Mr. Turner, sir?”
Wright shook his head. “He’s dead.”
Wright stared at Tee’s still form. Despite all the pain he had caused, despite all his questionable ethics, despite all the harm he had done, his last action had been a heroic one. For the first time in his life, he had put someone else ahead of himself. His father, the admiral, would be proud.
“What now, sir?” Guthrie said in Wright’s ear, briefly removing his mouth from the lung inhaler.