Irvin began to reply, but stopped when he saw Tex’s mouth drop open in stunned disbelief. He looked aft again and was too shocked by what he saw to speak himself. The distant, glowing smudge had become a black, sun-blazed mushroom of titanic proportions, roiling upward and outward with impossible speed and power.
It was almost a minute before Irvin managed to say “Jesus!” and in that time, the hideous stain on the morning sky just continued to grow.
“It looks like God just dropped a bomb!” Tex said, hushed.
“Yeah,” Irvin agreed. “A God-size bomb.” For a moment he said nothing more, then: “What happens when a bomb hits the water?”
“Well… you get a really big splash.”
“Yeah…”
After a while, the sea began to roar, loud enough to drown out the sound of the diesel.
“Oh, no,” Irvin said.
“What is it?” Tex shouted. Cries of alarm came from the hatch behind them.
“It’s the sound of the blast! Sound moves four or five times faster through the water!”
Tex’s face went pale. “I’ve heard tidal waves can move almost as fast as a sound through air!”
Irvin snatched his binoculars from his chest and focused them at the base of the distant, towering plume. In the gathering light of the sun, not yet engulfed by the expanding blackness, Irvin saw a distinct white line rising, far away, between the cloud and the deep blue sea. The horizon gave the impression of being almost slightly humped. The binoculars in his hands began to shake. Wrenching his eyes away from them, he turned and looked at Tex. “Rig for dive!” he shouted.
“ Dive? We can’t dive! We’ll never come up!” Irvin thrust the binoculars at him and Tex took a look. “God almighty. That was one hell of a splash!” he said. He spared Irvin a look that could have said, “God help us,” “It’s been nice knowing you,” or “Why’d you let me volunteer for this?” but immediately stepped to the hatch.
“Rig for dive!” he bellowed down below. “Secure all hatches this goddamn instant!”
“Clear the bridge!” Irvin yelled, and reached for the dive alarm before remembering they’d never fixed the switch on the conn tower. The suddenly terrified Lemurian lookouts plunged down the ladder, followed closely by Tex. Irvin didn’t even take another look before he dropped down after them. In the control room, he twisted the roundknobbed switch three times.
Arrgha! Arrgha! Arrgha!
“Dive! Dive! Dive!” he said into the microphone. Almost immediately, the various station phone lights lit up. Expecting panicked demands for an explanation, he continued: “Trust me on this, people, it’s dive or die! Porter and Hardee, report to the fore and aft berthing spaces to pass instructions! Stay off the phones unless there’s an emergency.” He looked at Tex, who shrugged. “Mr. Sheider and I have the dive,” he said. He hoped they did. “Secure the starboard engine, close main induction. Answer bells on batteries!”
Tex took a breath. “Open all main vents! Vent negative!”
“Flood safety, flood negative!” Irvin continued. He heard Tex bark a laugh.
“Ah, pressure in the boat, Skipper,” Tex apologized. “The board’s green!”
Feverishly, desperately, Irvin, Tex, Porter, Hardee, and Whitcomb shouted, cajoled, explained, and pleaded with their otherwise Lemurian crew to learn and execute procedures most had never remotely expected to perform. Hardee had been just a frightened child the first time he submerged with the boat, but he’d been interested and picked up a lot then-and since. There were a few “Crazy Cats” who thought it would be fun, and had actually wanted to dive the boat all along, but not many. S-19 was designed as a submarine, but no one had ever expected her to be one again. Not on this world. With aching slowness, the scratch submariners feverishly struggled to force S-19 beneath the waves they’d tried so hard, so long, to put her back upon.
The sub’s bow planes and damaged stern planes clawed at the sea, and her port screw drove with all its might. Sluggishly, the boat started down. The starboard shaft packing sprayed water at twenty feet, and more water gushed down from the number two periscope packing at thirty-five. Water seeped and dripped from her riveted, tortured seams in every compartment. At fifty feet, water exploded inward from the crew’s head, and the high-pressure pumps were already being overwhelmed. Irvin risked a look above with the number one periscope, and though it should still have been three feet above the sea, sea was all he saw-like he was looking down at it. As he’d feared, it wasn’t an ordinary tidal wave, but a bore-a “splash” wave, as Tex had described it. It wasn’t curling over them like surf breaking on the beach, but he couldn’t see the top, since S-19 wasn’t equipped with a lens adjustment to search the sky for aircraft. Irvin couldn’t even estimate how far away it was. He sounded the collision alarm.
Somehow, the old submarine had made it fifty feet beneath the sea. She was critically overstressed, but she could have even surfaced again on her own. The wave didn’t give her a chance to try. It brought the boat up. Suddenly, after all her desperate effort to escape Talaud’s death wave, the depth gauge in S-19’s control room swept backward, and in mere moments, the rusty old hull lay exposed in the depth of an immense trough, naked beneath the mountain rising against her. It pounced. In seconds, S-19 went swirling from the surface like a twig caught in an underwater vortex. Down she went, almost tumbling, shedding dive planes, superstructure, anchors-and life, as the mountain surged by above.
The vortex released her at last, drifting helpless, twitching like a storm-battered fish, bleeding air and oil at four hundred feet-twice as deep as she was ever meant to go.
CHAPTER 27
New Scotland, Sunday, December 4, 1943
T he meeting in Walker ’s wardroom consumed a lot of Juan’s coffee hoard, but didn’t produce much in the way of new insights. They’d learned precious little over the past week, not nearly enough to be sure of anything, except a possible “short list” of enemy objectives. What the conspiracy actually hoped to achieve, or how, was still a growing mystery. All they could do was try and prepare for as many contingencies as they could imagine. Jenks had come aboard once a day to “train” with Matt in swordsmanship, and he did improve, but mostly they brainstormed and discussed what Jenks had learned. It wasn’t much: a swift Dominion dispatch sloop had cleared Scapa Flow, and another later departed New Glasgow to the west the very night Walker arrived at New Scotland, but nothing flying the red flag had come or gone since. That seemed to confirm their suspicions that whatever was up, the Dominion was involved and major preparations had been underway for quite some time. Matt was impressed by how quickly the conspirators reacted, and how closely they kept their intentions. It hinted that whatever was coming, Walker ’s arrival might have advanced the schedule, lit a shorter fuse, but only minor adjustments were required to a plot that had long been in place.
“So all we know-still-is that ‘something big’ is liable to drop in the pot tomorrow, but we don’t know what it is,” Gray observed.
“Yeah,” Matt said, rubbing his eyes. It was almost 0100 and he had a big day ahead of him. Probably they all did. “Jenks still thinks it’s an attack of some kind, probably with Dominion aid for some reason, but he still doesn’t know where it’ll come from or what it might be composed of.” He sighed and swirled the lukewarm coffee in his “Captain’s” cup. “The objective might be Government House and the harbor facilities. It could be the dueling ground itself-there’ll be a lot of brass hanging around. Jenks has tried to make sure all the brass won’t be there, but he has to be careful who he talks to. No telling who’s involved.” Matt gestured at the porthole. “The objective might even be Home Fleet, God knows how. There’s six ‘ships of the line’ and ten frigates in port.” He looked at Frankie. “Mr. Steele, so far all you know you can count on, according to Jenks, are the frigates Euripides and Tacitus.”