PACIFIC STANDOFF (Novel Sample)

Here are the first 3 chapters to Pacific Standoff, book 1 of the “Periscope” series (about submarines in World War II). Originally published under the pseudonym “Halsey Clark.”

PERISCOPE SERIES, BOOK 1

Chapter 1

Depth charges exploded in the distance. The Jap destroyer had temporarily lost track of them and was dropping his ash cans at random. In the conning tower of the American submarine, Jack McCrary listened tensely to the muffled thuds that were transmitted through the pressure hull. Were they louder now? The boat was rigged for silent running, ghosting along at a depth of two hundred feet, every unnecessary piece of machinery turned off, but even the breathing of the others around him sounded thunderously loud. The destroyer was certain to hear them, to pinpoint their location, to drop its depth charges right down their throats. The hull would rupture, and the ever-waiting ocean would invade with such force that it would flay them before it drowned them. Another series of thuds, definitely closer this time. At any moment the Jap sonar would make contact and there would be no place left to hide.

“Commander! Commander McCrary! Are you there, sir?”

Jack was on his feet and his eyes were open, but his mind was still some seconds behind his body. He was not in the conning tower of the Stickleback, nor in his cabin, but where was he? Knuckles pounded again on the door, and as he groped toward it in the dark, he remembered. The Stickleback was somewhere in the Pacific under her new skipper, and he was in a room at BOQ, Atlantic Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut.

A chief petty officer was at the door, just raising his fist to knock again when Jack opened it. His face was vaguely familiar, but in his still foggy state Jack was unable to make the connection. “Yes, Chief, what is it?” he asked.

“Sorry to wake you, sir, but I thought you should know. We just got a call downstairs that there’s a fire at Electric Boat.”

Jack was already pulling on his pants. “The Manta?”

“Dunno, sir. They said near the piers, but they didn’t say how bad it was or whether any boats had been damaged.”

“I see. Thanks, Chief. Would you get Lieutenant Hunt—no, damn it, he’s away—Lieutenant Andrews, three doors down.” He slipped a fleece-lined flier’s jacket over his khaki shirt. This was no occasion for dress blues. “Oh, and is there a jeep downstairs we can have?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get Mr. Andrews, sir.”

Jack picked up his hat and looked around the room for anything that might be useful. It was as bare as a monk’s cell. As he took the stairs three at a time, he asked himself why disasters always seemed to strike at the worst possible time, then answered his own question: if they struck at some other time, they might not be disasters. His new command-to-be, the U.S.S. Manta, was already halfway through her sea trials and was performing like a champ. In less than a week she would be towed upriver from the Electric Boat Company to the sub base for her commissioning. And now she was apparently in danger, not from the enemy or the ever-waiting ocean, but from a dockside fire! Of course, the fire might itself be the work of the enemy; there was that strange affair of the liner Normandie the year before, burned and scuttled at her moorings while being converted to a troopship. The Hitler movement had attracted quite a few fervent admirers in the United States during the turbulent thirties, and some of them might still be fanatic enough to turn saboteur.

It was a bitter cold night, crystal clear, with a northwest wind that howled all the way down from Hudson’s Bay. By the time Jack had managed to start the reluctant jeep, Charlie Andrews was running down the drive, buttoning his shirt as he came. He grabbed the windshield and swung into the passenger seat as Jack gunned the engine and swerved into the narrow roadway.

With the open car in motion the cold was many times worse. Jack cursed himself for leaving a new pair of fur-lined gloves in his room. A year of service in the tropics had spoiled him! On the right the framework of the new highway bridge across the Thames was silhouetted against the starry sky. He had to slow down; Groton’s narrow streets had not changed much since the days of the Revolution, when the British had captured the town and massacred the defenders of Fort Griswold.

The wind noise was smaller now. Andrews leaned over and shouted in Jack’s ear, “Is Manta in danger, skipper? All I got from the CPO was there was a fire and you wanted me pdq.”

“No idea, Charlie, but we’ll find out soon enough.” He pointed ahead, where a yellowish glow reflected off a low-hanging cloud of smoke, seeming intolerably bright in the dimmed-out town. The Electric Boat Company was the largest submarine shipyard in the world, now running around the clock to turn out the boats the country needed so desperately for the war in the Pacific. Thousands of workers streamed through its carefully guarded gates three times a day. By the time the line of buildings that was the landward face of Electric Boat appeared on their right, Jack found himself caught in a mass of cars that moved at a crawl, then stopped altogether. He cursed loudly, swung the jeep into a side street, and sprang out, with Andrews close on his heels.

The guards at the gate nearest the pier were jittery because of the fire and seemed inclined to keep Jack and Charlie out, but in the end they could not argue with their passes. All the officers assigned to Manta had been in and out every day for the past six weeks, keeping track of the thousands of details involved in fitting out and manning a new warship and filling out the even more numerous forms required by Washington.

As they picked their way across one of the railroad sidings that interlaced the giant shipyard, Jack was seized by a sense of foreboding. The Manta was tied up at one of the finger piers, along with two other Gato-class submarines that were near completion. Because she was already undergoing sea trials, she was the outboard of the three new boats. And it was increasingly apparent that the fire, which still lit the night sky, was somewhere very near the Manta. Jack broke into a run and heard his third officer’s feet pounding right behind him.

A crowd of onlookers blocked their way. Jack shouldered his way through them, muttering apologies, and stopped as the full peril of the situation struck him. The incredibly swift expansion of the shipyard after Pearl Harbor had led to a severe shortage of space. The management of Electric Boat had responded by building a series of temporary two-story wooden structures on the piers. One of these, on the very pier that Manta was moored to, was engulfed by fire. Worse, the gusty northwest winds were blowing the flames directly toward the nest of submarines. It seemed to Jack, in the fitful light, that the paint was already blistering on the boat closest to the pier and he could imagine the damage being done to the complex and delicate machinery inside its three-quarter-inch mild steel hull.

He swung his eyes to his boat. A knot of sailors stood on the foredeck staring at the efforts of the firefighters, and Jack thought he could see the duty officer, a kid named Fuller, on the bridge. As far as he could tell, none of them was doing anything more than gawk. Strictly speaking, Jack had been out of line to station an anchor watch on Manta at all. Until she was commissioned, she was the responsibility of the builders, not of the Navy. The excuse he had given for leaving a skeleton crew aboard was that it would help familiarize the men with their new berth; the truth was, he simply felt more secure knowing that the boat was manned. Now he had good reason to be glad of his caution.

He stood at the edge of the bulkhead and shouted to his men, but no one heard above the noise of wind and fire. The usual way to board, along the pier and across the decks of the other two subs, was obviously out. He scanned the edge of the bulkhead; if necessary, he would swim. That might not be necessary, though. Fifty feet along, an iron ladder led down to the river, and he thought he saw a dinghy in the deep shadows at its foot. He grabbed Charlie’s arm, pointed, and shouted in his ear. Moments later they were in the dinghy, and moments after that they were clambering up the tumble home of the submarine, helped by eager hands from the crew. Jack’s climb to the bridge was made harder by a right shoe full of river water.

“Right, Fuller, I relieve you,” he snapped. “Report.”

“Aye, aye, sir. The maneuvering watch is at its stations. The men on deck are line-handlers.” His shoulders slumped a fraction from attention, and a look of worry crossed his face. “I didn’t know what to do, skipper. I’ve never gotten a boat this size under way, but I figured if worse came to worst, I’d rather go aground on the other side somewhere than watch her burn to the waterline.”

Jack clapped him on the shoulder. The kid couldn’t be more than twenty-two, barely old enough to buy a beer, but in an emergency he would have to be ready to take responsibility for the ship and the lives of her crew. By the time Jack was through with him, he would be. “Good work, Fuller. I’ll want you on the bridge with me. Charlie, stand by in the maneuvering room.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Andrews slid quickly through the hatch and disappeared.

Jack thumbed the button on the squawk box and shouted, “Maneuvering!”

“Maneuvering, aye, aye,” came the distorted reply.

“This is the captain. Prepare to answer bells on four engines.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” The engine-room jockeys must have been hoping for that; the command was answered instantly by a whine as number-one diesel turned over and caught with a roar, followed rapidly by the other three giant engines.

He cupped his hands and leaned over the metal fairing that protected the bridge. “Line-handlers!” he shouted. “Single-up fore and aft!” The Manta was linked to her neighbor by twelve thick hawsers, three from each of the four stanchions spaced along the deck. The men leaped to the nearest stanchion and started untying two of the three hawsers, or ‘singling-up,’ in preparation for casting off. Jack watched them for a moment, then turned to study the fire. It had continued to spread through the wooden building, but more slowly, he thought. Perhaps the fire crew was beginning to get the upper hand. They would not be in time to save the sub closest to the pier, though. He thought of the sweat and treasure that had gone into the building of that boat, and of the lives that might be lost because the Pacific Fleet was short a vital warship, and made an instantaneous decision. “Belay that!” he shouted to the line-handlers. “As you were!”

Fuller was staring at him, wondering what had happened. He was not in doubt for long. “Fuller, I want you to take three volunteers across to that far sub and cut her loose from the dock. Take fire axes; you’re not going to want to waste any time around the campfire. Work from stern forward, and as soon as the bow lines are cut, hang on; this may be a bumpy ride. What’s the tide now?”

The ensign glanced at his watch. “Still ebbing, sir; half an hour to slack.”

“Very well; off you go.”

Fuller gave him a snappy salute. “Aye, aye, sir!”

As soon as he was on his way, Jack started having second thoughts. What he was proposing to do was to use the Manta to tow the entire nest of three submarines away from the burning dock and out into the river. He had no idea how such an ungainly raft would handle. The lines connecting the boats might break under the strain. The repeated collisions of one boat against another might do major structural damage, in spite of the thick rope-fenders placed between them along their lengths. He might overstrain Manta’s engines, delaying her commissioning and his formal assumption of command. No one would blame him if he saved his boat and left the others to their fate, but if he went ahead with this crazy scheme and failed, plenty of people would be ready to second-guess him and claim that the other subs would have been safer left as they were.

Fuller and his men had reached the inboard sub and were sheltering from the flames behind the conning tower, preparing their dash to the stern moorings. There was still time to call them back. Jack gnawed briefly at his knuckle. No, by God! He was not going to leave a brand-new submarine to such a doom. Better that all three should sink in the middle of the Thames River—not that he expected that to happen—than that he should desert that boat at a time like this.

Four figures ran across the deck of the distant sub, brandishing axes and reminding Jack for a moment of an old engraving of the Boston Tea Party. One of the firemen saw them and directed a spray of water at them, to cool them down and protect them from the heat of the flames. Jack hoped they wouldn’t freeze instead.

The Manta trembled slightly as the thick hawsers parted under a rain of ax blows. Jack leaned over the bridge speaker. “Conn!”

“Conn, aye, aye.”

“Who’s on the wheel?”

“White, sir; quartermaster.”

“Okay, listen up, White: we’ll be under way in a minute, and you’re going to feel like you’re steering a runaway truck by dragging your foot behind it. So stay awake, and whatever you do, do it handsomely.”

A gruff but enthusiastic “Aye, aye, sir” from the speaker. Fuller’s crew had disposed of the second bunch of lines and were starting on the third. When those let go, the three submarines would be linked to land only by the bow of one of them. Under pressure from the wind and the ebbing tide, the boats would swing at that point, crushing the bow of the Manta into the concrete bulkhead along the shore. As one of the men raised his ax for a final blow, Jack ordered, “Rudder amidships—all back one-third.” The water foamed under the stern of the Manta as the powerful electric motors drew current from the generators and turned the huge bronze propellers. The boat shuddered, and an unearthly shriek came from one of the hawsers as it slipped under the strain, but the three boats maintained their position, safe from a collision with the bulkhead.

The four men were at the bow now, chopping furiously at the last bunch of lines. What should Jack do when the boats were free? As he backed out into the river, the sterns would swing downstream. His wisest move would be to go with it, ending up in the fairway, well away from both banks, the bows facing into the wind and current, then try to hold the boats there until help came.

The last line was severed, and the linked boats started to move slowly backward. As the stems began to come out of the lee of the pier, the wind and tide caught them, just as Jack had expected, and started a lurching counterclockwise swing. Now it was the bow of the inboard sub that was in danger of colliding, with the burning pier. “Rudder left one-third! All aback full!”

Foam boiled up between Manta and her neighbor and was caught by the wind. Jack was drenched instantly. The water of the Thames tasted foul, and he resolved not to think what might be in it. The boats were backing straight into the river now, and the bows were almost clear of the pier. “Rudder amidships—port back two-thirds!” That would pull the tail around into the fairway, leaving him where he wanted to be. He spared a moment to watch Fuller and his three men leap across onto the Manta’s deck. The boy had a lot of guts; he would do well if he survived.

Time to stop this do-si-do. “Rudder left full—all ahead full!” Three submarines, at two thousand tons apiece, gather a lot of momentum once they start moving. It was not easy to stop the swing with their bows pointing upriver, then to balance the force of tide and wind with the force of the Manta’s motors, to keep the boats alongside the Electric Boat complex, but Jack and his quartermaster managed for nearly a quarter of an hour. At that point two of the shipyard tugs showed up and took the straying submarines under their wing, and half an hour after that the boats were safely tied up at another pier where a first-aid crew treated Fuller and his men for minor burns.

The eastern sky was starting to pale when Jack finally located the jeep he had abandoned less than two hours before. He had left the Manta in the hands of a dockyard crew that swarmed over her and her two sisters, assessing damage and starting to make repairs. The man in charge, a crusty retired four-striper named Birch, was careful to express no opinion about Jack’s exploit but seemed happy that the boats had not suffered greater damage.

As he steered through the narrow streets on his way back to the base, Jack started composing in his mind the report he would have to file on the night’s activities. Strong mention, of course, of Fuller and his men for their bravery under fire. Jack chuckled briefly as the double meaning of the expression struck him, but then his thoughts took on a more sober tone. He was bound to catch some flak on this; the only question was how much.

“Goddammit, McCrary! You’re a big boy now; you know your rocks and shoals!” Admiral Schick’s desk was piled high with reports, urgent requisitions, and recommendations from his staff. The admiral looked as if he had not gotten enough sleep since Pearl Harbor. To Jack, who had had more than his share of dressings-down by the brass, it sounded as though his heart wasn’t in the rebuke he was delivering. “This lone-wolf crap may go down when you’re in enemy waters, but while you’re in my command you’ll do it by the book. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Jack murmured.

Admiral Schick thumbed through a stack of papers and extracted one. “I’ve had a report from the yard on Manta’s condition. You’ll be happy to hear that there was no damage serious enough to delay her commissioning next week. I understand that your father is planning to be here for it?”

“Yes, sir.” Jack’s father, since his promotion to rear admiral, had been holding down a desk job in BuShips in Washington. This would be his first chance to see Jack aboard his own command.

“Good. I look forward to seeing him again. I haven’t seen him since the outbreak of hostilities. I hope you, your officers, and your father will join me for lunch after the ceremony.”

“Thank you, sir. We’d be honored to.” The response was obligatory, but Jack meant every word of it. The invitation was Schick’s way of telling him unofficially that, rebuke or no rebuke, his action in saving the Manta and her sister subs had won the tacit approval of the Navy.

In another part of the same building Ted Fuller, Ensign, U.S.N., was enjoying the sensation created by his bandages. The effect was particularly marked on Lois Laverdiere, a local girl who had enlisted in the WAVE’s right after high school and was now an ensign with the Office of Naval Intelligence. She had never talked about her work, of course, but Ted had an idea that she was involved in code-breaking.

“The skipper gave me the day off,” he was saying, “in recognition of my wounds suffered in the line of duty, so I came right over. Can you get the afternoon off?”

“But Ted, shouldn’t you be resting? Doesn’t it hurt?”

He laughed nonchalantly. As a matter of fact his left cheek hurt like hell, but he wasn’t going to let Lois know that.

She shook her head sadly but decisively. “I can’t, really. The work just keeps piling up on us.” His spirits sank. Even in the short time he had known her, he had learned the futility of arguing with her when she used that tone of voice. “But I’m free this evening,” she continued. “There’s not much we could do this afternoon anyway, is there?”

“I thought you might like to go on a picnic.”

“A picnic! But Ted, it’s thirty degrees out there!” For answer he hummed a few bars of “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” Lois blushed. After a year as a WAVE she was no bashful schoolgirl. She had had some good times with other young officers—New London was full of them, and a new batch arrived daily—but she sensed that Ted Fuller, in spite of the way he liked to kid her, was more serious. She was beginning to think that she was, too. In her mind she heard the words of her gran’mere when she had joined up: “Ma foi, you’ll wed one of those boys and be a widow before you’re grown.”

Ted persisted. “Can I drop by this evening, then?”

“Of course! Come for dinner; you know how my mother loves to feed you. I can’t convince her that anybody in the Navy knows how to cook.”

He wasn’t thrilled by the idea of sitting around the dinner table discussing submarine construction with Lois’s father, a skilled lathe operator at Electric Boat, while Lois, her mother, and her little brother sat listening silently. But at least Mrs. Laverdiere had the tact to clear everyone out of the living room afterwards and give him and Lois some time alone. And tonight he could thrill them all with the story of his adventures of the night before—with a suitable modesty, of course. His bandages would speak for themselves. He could already imagine the expression of open-mouthed wonder on the face of Greg, Lois’s brother. Maybe the little so-and-so would be so impressed that he would give up his usual game of trying to spy on them!

Chapter 2

Jack McCrary straightened his tie, stooping slightly to see his image in the small, awkwardly placed mirror, and shrugged on the heavy double-breasted blue dress jacket. The unaccustomed weight of it took him back to the two years of his exile in Washington following the Sebago disaster. He wouldn’t think of that now. No bad omens should be allowed to cast a shadow on his first day in command of the U.S.S. Manta.

His eye fell to the message flimsy that lay on the dresser top. One omen had marred the day already. He reread the message, though he knew it by heart:

ON SICK LIST WITH BAD COLD REGRETS

SINK EM ALL DAD.

He did not allow himself to realize how much he had wanted his father to be there today, nor how disappointed he was.

He glanced at his watch: 1015. The commissioning ceremony was set for 1100. He paced across the narrow room, checked the set of his tie in the mirror again, and felt inside his coat for the reassuring crackle of his orders. With a muttered oath he snatched up his hat, unfamiliar in its gleaming white cover, and a pair of gray leather gloves, and strode out of the room, banging the door behind him.

A yard crew from Electric Boat had sailed the Manta upriver to the submarine base the night before. As Jack neared the pier, his steps slowed to a halt and he studied, with the perspective of distance, the submarine that would be his home for the months to come. At 312 feet she was a few feet longer than his previous command, Stickleback, but internally the only difference between the two boats was the addition of a watertight bulkhead separating the two banks of engines. Like Stickleback, Manta had ten torpedo tubes, six forward and four aft, and carried a full war load of twenty-four fish. He hoped they would perform more reliably than the torpedoes he and the other men of the Sub Force had been cursed with during the opening year of the war. Jack had done a good deal more than his share to expose the faults of the Mark XIV fish, with no thanks from the bureaucrats and timeservers in the Bureau of Ordnance.

Externally Manta incorporated all the hard lessons taught by the war. Rows of free-flooding limber holes took precious seconds off her crash-dive time. The shears that supported the two periscopes and the SJ radar mast were left bare, to cut down her silhouette when surfaced. A four-inch deck gun, mounted forward of the bridge at Jack’s request, replaced the ineffectual three-inch gun of the earlier boat. Most striking to those who remembered the sleek streamlining of prewar submarines, the fairwater, the plated structure that surrounded the conning tower, had been reduced to a small area immediately around the bridge. On the small elevated decks created by its removal were mounted two twenty-millimeter Bofors antiaircraft guns. Jack had tried hard to get a forty-millimeter Oerlikon in place of one of the Bofors, but at this point in the war there simply were not enough of the bigger antiaircraft weapons to go around. As a consolation prize the shipyard had agreed to weld four mounts for fifty-caliber machine guns along the edges of the deck. Already in this war he had run into some strange combat situations, and this time he hoped to have the armament to deal with whatever came up.

The admiral’s car was coming down the road to the pier. As if on signal the white caps and blue blouses of Manta’s seventy-man crew started popping rapidly from the deck hatches and forming up aft. Jack hurried down the short slope; protocol required him to welcome the admiral aboard.

For someone who did not understand its significance, the commissioning ceremony might have seemed brief and unimpressive. Jack took his place in front of his officers and between the ranks of the crew and read his orders; everyone saluted while the colors were run up at the stern; then Jack turned to his executive officer and said, “Mr. Hunt, set the watch.” That was all, but it meant that the Manta was now the newest member of the fleet.

The lunch with the admiral was unavoidably a rather stiff occasion, but Jack used the opportunity to get to know his officers better. Art Hunt, the exec, was an Academy graduate who had been serving in the submarine force since before the war, though because of a tour of duty on SubLant staff he had not yet been on a war patrol. A full lieutenant, Hunt seemed to think that he was overdue for promotion to lieutenant commander. Jack resolved to keep an open mind on that question until he had seen his exec in combat.

Lieutenant (jg) Lou daCosta had seafaring in his blood. His grandfather had emigrated from Portugal to New Bedford, Massachusetts, fifty years before, and his father now owned a sizable fleet of fishing trawlers that were doing double duty as submarine spotters for the Coast Guard. Charlie Andrews, on the other hand, was the son of a garage mechanic in Kansas and had never seen the ocean until after he joined the Navy. Not that he would see much of it aboard the Manta; as engineering officer he spent most of his waking hours aft in the maneuvering room.

Jack still thought of the three ensigns collectively as “the kids.” They were all fresh from submarine school and green as they come. Their eagerness and their tendency to bump into things reminded him of a litter of puppies. The senior of the three, Paul Wing, had drawn the short straw and was back on the boat as duty officer, but Ted Fuller and Woodrow W. ‘Woody’ Stone sat at the end of the table talking and joking with each other, apparently not at all awed to be eating lunch with the admiral. Jack was glad to see that Fuller’s exploits of a few nights before had left no scars. The war in the Pacific would leave its marks on all of them soon enough.

After lunch Jack gave the other officers the rest of the afternoon off and returned to the boat with Art Hunt to continue drawing up the watch rosters that listed the battle station, watch station, and cleaning station of every man in the crew. The three watches had to be approximately balanced in the specialties and level of experience of their members as well. At sea the submarine was both a closed community and an industrial plant. Their ability to do their assigned task, even their chances of returning safely to port, depended on every man knowing precisely what he was expected to do under every likely set of circumstances. When the watch rosters were complete, Jack started devising the training schedule for the next three weeks. Before Manta left for the war zone, he would make sure that each watch could dive and surface the boat unassisted and that all of his officers were prepared to carry out every task from supervising the big diesels to firing a torpedo at a target.

A light snow was falling the next morning as the dark gray submarine backed into the river and glided through the two drawbridges and past the Electric Boat complex to the waters of Long Island Sound.

Beyond New London Light, in the Race, the boat ran into a short, hard chop. Like most submarines, Manta had a habit of rolling when cruising on the surface. On the bridge Jack stood, knees slightly bent, unconscious of the movements he was making to compensate for the motions of the boat. Part of his mind was monitoring the course and speed, the landmarks and buoys, the feel of the deck beneath his feet, but another part, the more active part, was locked on the memory of another morning, almost four years before, and sailing down the Thames from New London on another untried submarine. The Sebago. Was it only coincidence that had given him the same diving area today? Perhaps they had short memories at the sub base; but he didn’t. He remembered all too well.

The first time the Sebago dived, the main induction valve, a yard-wide opening that supplied air to the engines, failed to close properly. The ocean invaded at once, sending the boat plummeting to the bottom and drowning all the men in the engine room, Jack’s younger brother Edward among them. Another fatality was the skipper, Commander Dunlop, whose death of a heart attack left the young Lieutenant McCrary to rally the survivors for the long, agonizing wait for rescue. He still recalled the foul taste of the stale air and the way the slightest effort left him drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. At times, as the rescue attempt ran into one obstacle after another, he had wondered if his brother and the other men in the aft compartment weren’t the lucky ones, if a quick death by drowning wasn’t far preferable to slow suffocation.

As always he shied away from thinking about the aftermath of the tragedy. Wracked by guilt over the death of his brother, he had tried to fix the blame for the disaster on his Academy classmate, the brilliant engineer Ben Mount. When Mount was vindicated by a board of inquiry, Jack’s career was ruined. It took a combination of persistent string-pulling and blind luck to get him posted to a submarine again, just as the country was being dragged into the war. His combat record as skipper of the Stickleback had gone a long way to erase the effects of his early misstep, but he knew very well that many of his superiors still thought of him as unreliable.

DaCosta was officer of the deck. He took another set of cross-bearings and nudged Jack. “We’re entering our assigned area, skipper,” he said.

“Thanks, Lou.” Jack focused his thoughts entirely on the present. “Rig the boat for diving.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” As the command was passed to the control room, the diving planes at the bow unfolded from their recesses, ready to slice into the waves and force the bow under.

“Boat rigged for dive, sir,” daCosta reported.

“Very well; clear the bridge.”

“Clear the bridge!” The two lookouts jumped down from the crow’s nests on either side of the periscope supports and wriggled through the hatch to the conning tower. Jack was next; as officer of the watch, daCosta was the last to leave the bridge. Not waiting for him, Jack continued down the ladder to the control room. He intended to watch every detail of the Manta’s first dive under his command.

He had assigned Paul Wing to serve as diving officer. “Okay, Paul, take her down.” Jack pushed the large black button of the diving alarm, and twice the sound of a Model T klaxon echoed through the boat. A carefully choreographed series of movements and commands followed. Valves opened to allow seawater to flood the ballast tanks; the great diesels fell silent, as the motors were switched over to the banks of storage batteries that powered the boat underwater; and just before the conning tower disappeared beneath the waves, Radioman Joe Pulaski sent off a coded message giving the exact time and location of their dive. If anything happened, at least New London would know where to start their search.

The chief of the boat, “Dutch” van Meeringen, was in charge of the diving station and the “Christmas tree,” the board of red and green lights that indicated the position of every hatch, valve, and opening in the hull. “Green board, sir,” he reported, and turned a valve. High-pressure air hissed into the compartment, and he watched closely as the needle of a gauge crept upward. The theory was that, if there was any leak in the hull, the pressurized air would escape through it. “Pressure in the boat, sir.”

“Take her down to one hundred feet,” Jack ordered, “and put her in standard trim.”

“One hundred feet, aye, aye.” Ensign Wing was well trained, but now he was discovering the difference between training and a real dive. Soon he was sweating freely, constantly aware of the skipper’s presence in the control room. As the depth gauge passed sixty feet, he ordered, “Blow negative.” The negative tank, located under the control room, made the submarine heavy forward and helped to get the bow under quickly. Once the boat started down, however, the negative buoyancy supplied by the tank was not needed. The bow and stern diving planes controlled the dive more accurately.

Manta leveled off at one hundred feet, and Wing began the delicate task of pumping ballast from one tank to another, to bring the boat into exact balance with the sea. On patrol putting the boat in trim would be the first task every day. Finally the ensign was satisfied. The inclinometer, a gadget almost identical to a carpenter’s level, registered zero. “Zero bubble, sir,” Wing reported to Jack, who was standing right behind him.

“Very well; sixty feet.” Wing passed the order on to the seaman at the big stainless-steel wheel that controlled the bow planes, and the boat started to rise.

The planesman knew his job; as the needle neared sixty feet, he brought the planes from rise to zero and then slightly back to dive, to correct for the upward momentum of the boat. The needle quivered, then settled exactly on the sixty mark.

Jack nodded approvingly. Manta was lucky: over half her crew were experienced submariners, rotated back to new construction after tours of duty on other boats in the Pacific. There were even a couple of veterans of Stickleback on board. The presence of so many old hands was going to make the training phase a lot shorter and easier. “Steady as you go,” he told the helmsman, and quickly scaled the ladder to the conning tower. DaCosta was there, as was the quartermaster, waiting by the additional wheel linked to the helm in the control room.

The control for the number one periscope dangled by its cord from the overhead. Jack grabbed it and pushed the button. The two steel hoisting cables whizzed by. As the handles emerged from the well, he grasped them and clicked them down into position in a smooth, practiced motion, stooping to meet the eyepiece as it rose. He circled once, then again with the tip at greater elevation, before lowering the scope and saying, “Surface!” Manta had been assigned this operating area, but he was taking no chances. The German U-boat campaign along the Atlantic coast had made a lot of people very nervous. He would prefer not to surface suddenly under the nose of some green Air Corps bomber jockey who had been taught that the only good submarine is a dead submarine.

The conning tower was getting crowded. White stood on the ladder, ready to crack the bridge hatch, and the two lookouts were standing by. Something on the superstructure—a guy wire, maybe—hummed loudly as it sliced through the water. Jack made a mental note to have it located and corrected. A noise like that could give away their location to a Jap destroyer.

“Twenty-eight feet,” came the call from the control room.

“Okay, White, open the hatch. Lookouts to the bridge!”

Lou was right behind them as they scrambled up onto the bridge and into the crow’s nests, protecting their heavy binoculars with their forearms. When Jack reached the bridge, Lou was already scanning the horizon. “All clear, skipper,” he reported. Even as he said it, the port lookout shouted, “Aircraft on the port quarter!”

Lou leaned over the fairwater to look back in the indicated direction. It took him completely by surprise when Jack suddenly said, “Clear the bridge! Dive, dive!” The bow was already starting under by the time they had sorted out the confusion and gotten everyone down the bridge hatch.

“Rudder hard left, all ahead full. Come to heading 030.” As the helmsman acknowledged Jack’s order, he turned to Lou and grinned. “If you’re caught off base, you’re out, daCosta,” he said. “You know that. We may be in Block Island Sound, but we’re pretending it’s the Bungo-suido. Any aircraft we see is out to kill us, so we get promptly out of its way. By the end of next week we’re going to be able to clear the bridge and pass sixty feet depth in less than a minute, and by the time we hit Pearl I mean to have it under forty-five seconds.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” DaCosta reddened. “I’m sorry, sir. The first dive was so…er, so regular that I wasn’t expecting to crash like that. It won’t happen again.”

Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s forgotten, Lou. Take her up and let’s try another of those ‘regular’ dives. Before your watch is over, you’re going to think you’re running an elevator.”

Jack kept the crew practicing standard dives for the rest of the day, and it was well after dark when Manta slipped into her berth at the sub base. Each dive had been a little faster and a little smoother than the last, even though the skipper kept changing the watch and putting different officers in the control room. The men were aware that they had done pretty well, and along with their tiredness felt a touch of complacency, as if they had gotten over the worst of the training.

The next few days changed their minds. Now that he knew they could handle the boat under ordinary, non-battle, conditions, Jack started putting on the pressure. Crash dives, surprise summonses to battle stations, orders blaring from the loudspeakers to rig the boat for depth charges, to rig for silent running, to rig for battle surfacing—every evolution they were likely to need in the Pacific, they practiced in Long Island Sound. Halfway through the second day they were jumpy as cats, wondering what was coming at them next and where the skipper would turn up, stopwatch in hand, to watch them make fools of themselves. By the end of the third day they were starting to feel that the situation was under control; they knew what they had to do, and they were getting better at doing it. By the time they reached the Pacific, they would be the best damned boat in the Submarine Navy, and then the Japs had better watch out!

Chapter 3

A messenger was waiting on the pier when they docked; Admiral Schick’s compliments, and would Captain McCrary please report to his office at once? Jack hurried up the road, wondering what he was in trouble for this time. The training had been going very well, all things considered, and as far as he knew, he hadn’t stepped on any more toes since that night of the fire, so it must be some sin from the past catching up with him. He started to review the possibilities, then gave up; he would find out soon enough.

The admiral’s face was grave. His first question threw Jack into confusion. “Are you satisfied with your exec, McCrary?”

“Lieutenant Hunt, sir? Yes, sir.”

“I know he served ably on staff,” Schick continued, “but sea duty is a different matter. Do you have enough confidence in him to place him in charge of training for a few days?”

What was this? “Admiral,” Jack said levelly, “if I didn’t have confidence that he could take command of Manta, should anything happen to me, I would ask for his transfer at once.”

“Good. I thought you’d say that.” The admiral looked down at his desk, suddenly ill at ease. “There’s no easy way to say this, McCrary,” he said at last. “I’ve had word from Washington. Your father is in Bethesda Hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. The doctors are not hopeful. I’m sorry.”

“I see.” Jack searched his mind for thoughts, emotions, memories, anything, but he was trapped in a flat calm. Nothing stirred, and it seemed to him that nothing would stir again, that it had all ended and he had not noticed. It was time to be practical; detail added to detail would rebuild a sort of world. “Do—” He cleared his throat and started again. “Do they say when…”

“I’m afraid not. I’ve told you as much as I know. My yeoman has secured a berth for you on the night express, leaving New London at 2240. I expect you will want to brief Lieutenant Hunt and pack.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Jack stood up and hesitated. He wanted to say something else, but there was nothing else to say.

Like every train Jack had seen in his months Stateside, the Washington Express was jammed to overflowing. Servicemen on their way to new posts, war workers looking for a shipyard or aircraft plant more to their liking than the ones they had left, businessmen hoping for war contracts, wives and children off to stay with relatives for the duration—it seemed that every person in the country had some reason to go to some different section of the country than the one he found himself in. As a Navy brat Jack had moved around, or been moved around, a great deal as a child, and he felt none the worse for it. But he had always known that he was an oddity. Most Americans grew up, lived, worked, and raised their families in the place they were born. Now the war was giving people an excellent excuse to escape, and from the looks of this train, a great many of them were seizing it.

After wriggling through the packed aisles of four coaches and lurching precariously across the equally packed vestibules between them, Jack found his Pullman car. The berths were already made up. Coming from the crowded, noisy, and essentially cheerful coaches, he found almost spectral the long, empty aisle flanked narrowly by swaying green curtains and lit by dim antique ceiling fixtures. He was not a very imaginative man, but he would not have been terribly surprised to see a bloody dagger emerge from behind the curtains. The heavy air of secrecy created by the twin walls of baize cried out for melodrama.

The cry went unanswered. The porter showed Jack to his berth—a lower, thank goodness—and promised to wake him fifteen minutes before they arrived in Union Station. Pocketing Jack’s quarter, he added that he would bring a cup of coffee, or what they were calling coffee these days, and wished him a good night. Jack untied his shoes, buttoned the curtains closed, and changed to pajamas. Only a submariner would have thought the berth spacious, but the fact was, it was nearly as large as the captain’s stateroom on the Manta, and that had to hold a desk, cupboard, and safe as well as a bunk. Here he could really stretch out.

He propped up the pillows and raised the curtain over the window. As he watched the darkness rush by, he allowed himself, for the first time all evening, to remember the reason for this journey. His father was dying. The man who had once carried him on his shoulders, who had held him on his present course since he was in short pants, was quietly slipping away—perhaps was gone already. Jack was no stranger to death; he had seen shipmates and friends and even his own brother die, and his torpedoes had carried death to uncounted hundreds of the enemy. This was different, not the artificial hazards and chances of war, but something as basic as the revolutions of the earth or the restless to-and-fro of the tide. This—not his twenty-first birthday, or his first drink, or his first screw—was the real coming of age. He recalled buying a piece of apple pie in the Automat across from Grand Central Station, on his last trip to New York. As he opened the little glass door and removed the pie, the machinery hummed and another piece of pie, apparently identical, appeared in its place. Now Fate was taking away his father and moving him noiselessly into place. It was time he thought of having a son, to be waiting in the wings.

A jolt, and lights outside the window. He looked out. The train was in Penn Station, changing engines for the New York to Washington stage. He must have fallen asleep sitting up. He idly watched the passengers on the platform, dividing his attention impartially between men in Navy uniform and women in almost any costume. The women of the East, at least those who were likely to ride the night express to Washington, were managing to look quite elegant in spite of war-caused shortages. The girl over there, for example, saying good-bye to an Air Corps major: silk hose with carefully straight seams, a hip-length fur coat, a pert pillbox hat with jaunty veil atop recently waved shoulder-length hair. She obviously believed in giving the boys something worth fighting for; he would not mind fighting for a piece of that himself.

The girl turned to board the train, and the blood drained from his face, then rushed back. It was his sister Helen. She must be on her way to Dad’s side, too. Jack started to spring up, then stopped himself. He could not imagine pursuing her through a crowded train in his pajamas. He would catch her on the platform in the morning. Remembering the casual lust of his thoughts moments earlier, he flushed with an embarrassment that soon turned to anger. Why should he kid himself about Helen? By now he must be the only submariner around who had not had her. Still, he was convinced she was a good kid at heart, if she would just outgrow her wildness and find the right man. In any case they were past the age where he had to play big brother and lay down the law, getting nothing but defiance and resentment for his trouble. But where, he wondered as he drowsed off, had Helen got that fur coat?

The porter awakened him as promised, and he was one of the first passengers onto the platform when the train stopped moving. Even so, Helen got by him in the crowd and he had to rush after her. He caught up to her in the middle of the enormous barrel-vaulted concourse. “Helen,” he said insistently. “Helen!”

She turned, and her face lit with delight. “Jack! What on earth…” She sobered. “You’ve heard, then?”

“Yes.”

“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

He nodded grimly and took her arm. “Come along. With this mob we’ll be lucky to get a cab before lunch time.”

“That’s all right. Bunny said he’d meet me with his car. Bunny Wilkinson,” she added, noting his blank look. “I know him from Cambridge. He’s something with OWI or OPA or OSS, one of That Man’s alphabet-soup agencies.” Helen had picked up the habit of calling President Roosevelt “That Man” from some of her diehard Republican society friends. For Jack, who thought of the President (when he thought of him at all, which was not very often) as his commander-in-chief, it had a nasty jarring sound. He debated saying something about it, but decided not to; Helen already tended to think of him as a little stuffy and old-fashioned. Compared to her maybe he was.

“That’s very kind of him,” he said cautiously, “but we shouldn’t take advantage of him. He may need his gas coupons for more important purposes.”

Helen laughed. “Not Bunny! I don’t know how he did it, but he has an X card. He can get all the gasoline he wants. That’s one reason I thought of him. You can’t imagine what the war has done to this city; it’s just impossible. Come on.”

They made their way outside. A shouting crowd clustered around the taxi dispatcher, and there were long, dispirited lines at each of the streetcar stops. Jack buttoned his overcoat against the dawn chill and wished he were back on board his boat. He was willing to grant that the nation needed all these people to coordinate a war effort that stretched around the globe, but he was glad he wasn’t one of them. His own concept of war was more direct: to seek out and destroy the enemy. He should be doing that now, not standing outside Union Station waiting for a man named Bunny!

“There he is!” Helen waved wildly, and a dark-green Packard roadster pulled up and stopped beside them. The driver, a solidly built young man with hair that was too long and a tweed suit that looked out of place away from the golf course, got out and strode over, arms outstretched. “Helen! Darling!” he cried. “It’s been far too long!”

Jack’s sister accepted the embrace and replied with a cool peck on the cheek. “Hello, Bunny. This is awfully nice of you. Do you know my brother Jack?”

The two men sized each other up as they shook hands and exchanged conventional greetings. Jack could not help thinking that such an obviously fit specimen as Bunny should be in uniform, not gallivanting around Washington in a Packard. If Bunny was aware of his reaction, it didn’t seem to faze him; he ushered them into the car and pulled away from the curb just as a red-faced policeman came hurrying toward them.

“Where to?” he asked at a stoplight. “Do you want to go straight to the hospital, or stop by your house first? Did I tell you how sorry I am to hear about your father’s illness?”

Helen glanced at Jack’s face and said, “The hospital, I think. I hope we’re not keeping you from your work too long.”

“No, no, free as a bird! Really! I have to see a couple of people this afternoon, but I can leave you the keys to Hetty”—he patted the dashboard of the car—“and take the trolley. If you’re free, maybe we can link up at dinner. You can still get a decent meal in Washington—if you know where to go.”

The expensive car, the unlimited gas ration, and the freedom from regular hours suddenly added up: the fellow must be a black marketeer, one of those swine who was profiteering from wartime shortages! Jack made a noise of disgust and covered it with a cough. Controlling his voice, he said, “What is your work, Wilkinson? Helen was pretty vague. You’re with the government?”

Bunny kept his eyes on the road. “I’m arranging for the production of the front ends of horses,” he replied airily, “to be shipped to Washington for assembly. It’s very challenging. How about you, McCrary? What secrets lurk beneath that undecorated bridge coat of yours?”

“Jack’s a submariner,” Helen said, ignoring the elbow jabbed in her ribs. “He did all sorts of marvelous things in his last boat, and now he’s getting ready to sail to the Pacific.”

Bunny Wilkinson’s flippant reply to Jack’s question had caused his neck to redden in anger, and as he listened to his sister he was aghast. Hadn’t she ever heard of security? Had she never noticed the posters that said, “Loose Lips Sink Ships”? Why, for all she knew, this fellow might be an Axis agent! Jack had heard only the sketchiest account of Helen’s encounter with Nielson, the Nazi spy, in England, but whatever had really taken place, surely it should have taught her to be more discreet!

“Is that so?” Wilkinson was saying. “Well, my congratulations, Commander. Here on the East Coast we tend to keep our eyes fixed on the European Theater, but there are plenty of people who appreciate what you men are doing out there. There would be a lot more of them if your service wasn’t so stuck on avoiding publicity. You don’t find carrier admirals acting so reticent about their victories.”

Jack made some vague response, his attention concentrated on the question of how Wilkinson had known his rank. He had not had time to put shoulderboards on his overcoat, and his dress coat was completely hidden. He glanced down at the cap in his lap and found a possible answer. The visor was bare of the gold “scrambled eggs” worn by full commanders and up, and it was almost unheard of (though Jack had done it) for a mere lieutenant to command a submarine. So Wilkinson could have deduced that he was a lieutenant commander, but only if he was both very sharp and very knowledgeable. Jack doubled his resolve to watch his tongue around him.

The strict rationing of tires and gasoline had thinned out the notorious Washington traffic, and they reached their destination much sooner than Jack had expected. When Wilkinson offered either to wait or to lend them the car, Jack declined politely but firmly; under the circumstances, they could not tell how long they might be staying at the hospital. He shrugged cheerfully, gave Helen another hug, and drove off waving.

“Well!” Helen faced Jack on the sidewalk, hands on her hips and eyes flashing. “You certainly weren’t very nice to poor Bunny, were you? Did it slip your mind that he was doing us a big favor, or are you still determined to insult any man I happen to like? I’m not fifteen anymore, you know!”

“Really?” His voice was cold. “I’d never guess from the way you act sometimes. As for your friend Bunny, it bothers me that a perfectly healthy young man has nothing better to do than drive around in a fancy roadster when there’s a war on. It’s bad for morale. And I don’t like you talking so freely about my work, either. I don’t want to throw the past in your face, but didn’t it occur to you that your friend Bunny knows an awful lot and was acting awfully mysterious about it? For all you know, he may be a spy.”

“Of course he’s a spy,” Helen retorted impatiently. “I told you that before, at the station.”

“What? You did not! Helen, what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Bunny. He’s with one of those hush-hush outfits. This mustn’t go beyond us, but he just got back from Vichy, France. His father is a big wine importer, so he knows a lot of people over there.” A blush suffused her cheeks, but she continued doggedly. “The reason I knew he was in Washington is that he was one of the people who wanted to talk to me about that business with that skunk Nielson. And I don’t think it was very nice of you to bring that up again!” A hint of tears appeared in her eyes.

Jack put his arm around her. “Awe, come on, Sis, I’m sorry.” What a time for him to pick a fight with her! Still, she hadn’t told him about Bunny, whatever she thought, and he had been quite right to think there was something questionable about him. The fact that he was an American agent rather than an Axis agent didn’t alter that. Like many fighting men, Jack was slightly contemptuous toward what he thought of as cloak-and-dagger stuff, regarding it as childish, sneaky, and not quite honorable. A real man didn’t creep around back alleys, he stood up to his enemies and gave them blow for blow. “Let’s forget it,” he continued, “okay? We’ve got Dad to think about.”

The nurse who escorted them to their father’s room looked grave but told them nothing. The reason was clear the moment they walked through the door. Admiral McCrary was dying. His eyes were closed, and his cheeks had fallen in to the point that his face resembled a skull. He fought noisily for every breath, producing a dry rattle that sounded to Jack like someone dragging a bag of bones down a flight of steps. As they reached the side of the bed, his eyes opened. After a moment’s confusion he recognized them and smiled groggily. Jack shook his hand and Helen leaned over to kiss his cheek, then they started the sort of cheerful, trivial conversation they might have had with a neighbor met on the street. After a few minutes the old man’s eyes closed. Jack and Helen stopped talking and looked at each other, asking with their eyes what they should do now. Jack motioned with his head toward the door, but before they could move, the admiral opened his eyes.

“Pumpkin,” he said to Helen, “would you mind if I talked to Jack for a few minutes? They tell me there’s a lounge down the hall.” Helen blinked a couple of times, kissed him again, and left. Jack waited at attention by the bed. “Sit down, son,” he continued. “It’s hard for me to shout. I don’t have to tell you I’m going West this time.”

“Don’t be silly, sir,” Jack protested. “They’ll have you up and around in no time.”

“Crap. I’ve bought the farm, and we both know it. I don’t have time to horse around. The first thing I want to say is, when this is over and you return to your ship, I want you to take your grandfather’s sword with you. It’s past time it saw battle again.” The gold-ornamented dress sword had always hung in a place of honor when Jack was a boy, and sometimes, on very special occasions, his father would take it down and allow him to hold it, and tell him that this was the sword his own father had worn at the Battle of Manila Bay. Later, during a bout of adolescent skepticism, it occurred to Jack that officers on dreadnoughts during the Spanish-American War did not wear swords into battle. Still, it was his grandfather’s sword, and he had fought at Manila Bay, so the heart of the legend was true. Jack’s eyes smarted.

“It’s damned funny, isn’t it,” his father went on. “Forty years in the service man and boy, through one great war and into another, and I have never heard a shot fired in earnest. I think I would have measured up, but how is a man to know until the test comes?” His eyes moved to the ribbon of the Navy Cross on Jack’s breast. “You’ve met the test, son, and met it well. I never doubted that you would.”

“Dad—”

“No, let me talk. We don’t have a lot of time. I want to say something about your brother.” Jack started; his father had never mentioned Edward after the court of enquiry on the Sebago disaster. “I know you blame yourself for his death, but you’ve got to put it out of your mind. If anyone was at fault, it was I. I pushed the boy too hard. I was so determined to have my two sons holding commissions that I refused to see that he wasn’t cut out for the Navy. He wanted to resign from the Academy after his first term, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I held you up to him as an example, which wasn’t kind to either of you. And after my pressure led him to disgrace himself, I washed my hands of him. My own son, and I wouldn’t allow him in my presence! If I had been more of a father to him, he never would have enlisted like that. He would still be alive today.”

“Sir, it’s over and done. What happened to Eddie was no more your fault than if he had been hit by a train. And if he could be here, he would say the same, I know he would.”

“Well, that’s neither here nor there. What’s done is done.” He moved restlessly. “What’s to come is another matter, though. I want you to give some serious thought to your future.”

“Sir?” Jack’s voice was full of surprise.

“I know, the hazards of battle. But if you survive, as I pray you will, you should consider whether to retain your commission afterwards. I know,” he continued, weakly raising a hand to block Jack’s objection, “I know you chose a service career, and I know how much I had to do with that choice, too. But maybe I pushed you too hard, just as I did Edward. The Navy is changing. It’s being taken over by the slide-rule johnnies and paper-pushers. There’s less and less room for individual initiative, and you’ve always been a lone wolf at heart. You’d die of boredom in a staff post. Once we’ve beaten the socks off the Japs and Germans, you may find that your strong points are more valued outside the service, in politics for instance. And I don’t suppose being a dashing ex-submarine captain would hurt you, either. You will give it some thought, won’t you?”

“Sure, Dad.” Nothing was more unlikely, but Jack was responding to the pleading in his father’s eyes, not to his words.

“There’s something else.” His gnarled hands pleated the top sheet nervously. “You’ll be head of the family now. I expect you to look after your sisters. I blame myself there; I never had the time for them that they needed, and I’m afraid your mother was not able to give them the right sort of guidance. Not that there’s an ounce of harm in either of them—I don’t think that for a moment—but the knowledge that someone who cares is keeping an eye on them may help put them on a better course. Helen may act very mature and modern, but I know she still looks up to you. Don’t let her manner stop you from doing your duty to her as your sister. She has a way of getting involved with some queer ducks, but your opinion is important to her. She wants your respect, and you can use that to keep her from getting herself into any more of these messes. I know I can count on you.”

“Of course, sir.” He tried to imagine himself laying down the law to Helen about her latest man—or men; she wasn’t always exclusive in her habits—and failed. He would sooner tangle with a Jap destroyer.

“There won’t be a lot of money,” his father continued. “I’ve always lived up to my income. I’ve asked Harley to handle all that. If it meets with your approval, he’ll rent out the house and invest what capital there is. Helen and Arabella will continue to receive their usual allowances. Since you haven’t approached me, I assume you’re managing on your salary. If you have any special needs, just tell Harley and he’ll take care of it.” His voice faded away and his eyes closed. After a few moments he opened them and said, “I think you should send Helen in now. I’ll see you later?”

“Of course, Dad. I’ll be right here.”