-  12  -

Letting down from the high excitement of personal combat was like dying. There was no bottom to the toboggan slide of consciousness, no limit to the trancelike sluggishness that gradually, but so surely, engulfed him. Despite the myriad problems which now insisted on his personal attention, each stumbling over the heels of the one preceding, despite his consciousness of the responsibility which rested upon him, for the first time in his life Richardson found himself totally unable to make even the simplest decisions. Agonizingly, viciously, he flogged himself to stay awake, stay alert, deal with them. Nothing else to do, except attend to the hundred or so details needed to make Eel seaworthy again, fit to submerge. Nothing to think about, except how to keep from sleeping. But he could feel the juices of his faculties ebbing away, draining out of him. A sluice valve had been opened. He was an empty vessel. The brownout of fatigue was turning into a blackout.

He was totally unaware of the stratagem by which Keith inveigled him to sit on his bunk, and then, without a word, lifted his feet and placed them also upon it. There was not even anything to dream about, not even the dead, who once were alive and vital and quick, and now were so quiet, so rested, so evermore sealed in their shattered bodies.

Sleep was deep, dreamless, forever, and its restorative powers worked their magic. When he began to see living, sensate beings: Laura, Admiral Small, Keith, Eel herself—though she was sensate in a different way—he managed to will himself awake. Even while asleep he somehow was normally always aware of any change in Eel’s condition, but not this time. She had been surfaced at his last recollection, and now was submerged, riding quietly.

There must have been someone watching him, for in a moment Keith came in with a cup of steaming coffee, a sandwich, and some papers. A quick glance at the clock on the bulkhead—how long had he been sleeping? It must be only a couple of hours past midnight; he could not believe the hands of the clock had not somehow become interchanged, that it was late morning, that he had been more than eight hours unconscious.

Webber, the most seriously injured of the wounded men, had died in the night without regaining consciousness, Keith reported. Yancy had told Richardson that there was nothing he could do for him except ease his suffering if he regained consciousness (none of this could Rich recall), and his death had occurred only a few hours later. His body had been placed in its zippered leatherette bunk cover like the others, and stowed in one of the two unoccupied torpedo tubes in the forward torpedo room.

It had taken nearly until dawn to make emergency repairs so that they could submerge, Keith went on to relate, but there had been no complications and no need to call him. No additional holes had been found in the pressure hull, other than those Richardson had already seen, and an air test before diving had been satisfactory. Keith exhibited the message he had sent to Whitey Everett informing him that as next senior he had succeeded to command of the wolfpack. Another of the papers was Everett’s acknowledging message directing return to base through the least frequented part of the Yellow Sea, with all daylight hours spent submerged until clear of the Ryukyus.

Then came the bad moment. Keith silently handed him the intercepted report by Whitefish to ComSubPac of her engagement with the convoy, the sinking of two of the troopships, the rupture of a vent riser gasket from a close depth charge, and the unusual actions of an unknown set of heavy merchant-type propellers about two hours later. Richardson could feel the bitterness rise up in him as he read the message. It was for this they had sacrificed Quin, Wyatt, Johnson, Webber, and—yes—Joe Blunt! And there had not even been an attempt to attack the last transport! Keith, he saw, mirrored his feelings.

“Who knows of this message?” he asked, taking a deep sip of coffee to quiet himself.

“Nobody, sir. The decode, I mean. Everyone was so busy, I just decoded it myself. I figured you would want to see it first. . . .”

Richardson thought a minute. His mind was beginning to function clearly again. “Let’s leave it that way. This won’t go down well with anybody in this ship. There’s no need to have it talked about. ComSubPac will get our log and patrol report, and he’ll have to decide what more, if anything, ought to be done about it. After all, Whitey has sunk five ships in his first command patrol.”

“I know, Skipper, but you set him up for every one of them, and there should have been six! That last troopship was a perfect sitting duck for anyone with the guts to come up to periscope depth to see what was going on! It cost us five of our shipmates for nothing, and now at least one of those two Kwantung Army divisions will be shooting at our Army and Marines on Iwo and Okinawa!” Keith’s repressed passion suddenly blazed through. “Why don’t we send our own message to ComSubPac and tell him what really went on!” Abruptly, Keith became aware that the red-rimmed eyes seemed deeper sunk, the half-buried black eye in the haggard face so close to his own more covered than before by the swollen, darkened flesh.

Richardson must have been more at odds with himself than anyone knew. More tired than anyone could have thought. He felt a surge of anger welling within him, directed not at Whitey Everett, but at the bearer of the unpleasant tidings. It was not logical. He should not blame Keith. Keith, of all people, had a right to feel this way. Barely he contained himself, trembling with the effort, tried to answer in an even tone. After all, Keith was the most loyal one aboard. He, too, had been through a lot. “No!” he barked. “Absolutely not!”

Richardson should not have sounded so peremptory. Keith was only doing his duty. The shock of hearing his own flash of anger enabled him to continue more normally: “Neither would I have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t had Joe Blunt to teach me all he knew about submarining, and you and Jim Bledsoe and some of the others to help me when I needed it. The only thing I’m sorry about is that five good men died trying to do something important, and it didn’t work.”

Keith looked abashed. The emotions of both were near the surface. Impulsively Richardson reached out, gripped him on the shoulder, squeezed with all the strength in his hand. It was the right thing to do. The gesture made it all right again. Richardson felt as though a weight had been partially lifted from him also. Later, after everyone had had a chance to pull himself together, he would arrange a memorial service in front of the torpedo tubes in the forward torpedo room.

The decision as to disposition of the dead, although he could hardly remember having made it, was the only one he had been able to concentrate on before Keith lifted his feet onto his bunk and put out the light. It must have been the trauma of having to view his destroyed shipmates which had enabled him to retain his self-control long enough to consider what to do, but even so it had required great effort to stem the dropping tide of coherent thought. Had Captain Blunt not been one of the dead, they would all have been given a sailor’s burial at sea in the time-honored tradition of a flag-covered corpse gently dropped over the side. But Yancy could give no further information as to the cause of Blunt’s death, despite a second examination. The body of Captain Blunt would have to be brought back to Pearl Harbor for autopsy. He could not bury Quin and the others at sea when the wolfpack commander would be brought home. In the end, each of the four bodies was quietly encased in its own zippered bunk cover. Then—this Richardson insisted upon supervising personally—each was loaded into one of the six torpedo tubes in Eel’s forward torpedo room, after which the tubes were placed out of commission so that they could not be fired, even accidentally. Now, with addition of Webber, there was only a single torpedo tube forward not so labeled. But that was of no consequence. There were no torpedoes left anyway.

The greatest repair problem revolved around being able to submerge. Eel had been struck six times in all by the enemy’s four-inch gun, and a dozen times or more by the smaller calibers. None of the small automatic weapons had been able to penetrate the pressure hull, but the large-size projectiles had done so twice: in the gun access trunk and the forward engineroom. Major repair effort had gone to the engineroom, for the access trunk could be sealed off from below merely by shutting the hatch connecting it to the control room. The hole in the engineroom, a slash some six inches long and four wide with jagged edges bent inside the ship, required ingenuity.

There had been some talk with Al Dugan about the best means of plugging it, though Rich could not remember any of the details they had discussed. Now it was the first thing he inspected. There were two huge bolts down through the hole, passing through heavy bars across its short dimension, each of them capped with a heavy hexagonal nut. Thick gasket material bulging down through the gash concealed what was evidently a heavy plate spanning it on the outside.

“It was easy when we found the right thing to cannibalize,” Al Dugan told him with professional pride. “One of the air compressors is out of commission anyway with a cracked foundation, so we just cut a section of the foundation, bent it to fit the curve of the hull, and slapped her on the outside. Covers the hole with a lot to spare all around. We put Glyptal all over everything, and so far she doesn’t even leak. There’s a watch on it anyhow, with a bucket, just in case. But I hope you’re not planning on any more depth charges till after Pearl Harbor gets a whack at it!”

Rich gravely assured him he would henceforth do his utmost to avoid depth charges, at least until a proper welded patch had been installed. In the after engineroom, things were also cheerful. Through a great deal of hard work, temporary repairs had been effected to the damaged seawater discharge line. A certain amount of steady leakage could not be prevented, and this would increase, of course, at the deeper depths. But unless the situation worsened considerably, the drain pump could take care of it by running fifteen minutes out of every hour. As a precautionary move, a special watch had been set on the cooler also, with a telephone, to give instant warning should the leak increase. Richardson left the engineroom convinced the repair had been handled as well as could be.

Despite Dugan’s pessimistic report during the height of the surface pursuit, the hydraulic plant had again been returned to a semblance of running condition. With everything possible switched over to hand power, it could, if carefully monitored, continue to perform the few basic operations for which there was no hand-powered alternative. The insoluble problem in the pump room was a new one. One of Eel’s pair of air compressors, as Dugan had said, was permanently out of commission with its bearings out of line and its foundations cracked right across. Even without the section removed from the base, it would need a major repair job in port. The other compressor had also been thrown out of alignment by the same depth charge, but to a lesser degree. It could run and had in fact been running, but after only three hours, long before Eel’s nearly depleted air banks had been recharged, it ceased to jam air. Inspection showed, as suspected, that the misalignment had caused failure of the just-replaced third and fourth stage discharge valves, necessitating their replacement a second time. As Al explained it, the single air compressor remaining could not be relied on for more than a few hours before the new valve disks would also break, or be scored beyond use, and only two additional spare sets were on board besides those he would remove from the other compressor. He did not need to tell Richardson what this meant. Compressed air was vital to a submarine for many small purposes, but its major functions were to start main engines, fire torpedoes, and blow tanks. The mere acts of submerging and surfacing again were now nearly prohibitively costly. Eel’s status as an operational submarine was by consequence greatly reduced. She would have had to leave station in any case, short of emergency.

In midafternoon a call from the conning tower reached Richardson during his second visit to the after engineroom. In a moment he was at the periscope.

“What is it?” he asked Larry Lasche, now promoted to standing his first “top watch” alone.

“Don’t know, Captain. Just this white thing on the horizon, on the port bow. Also, I’ve seen three patrolling aircraft on my watch.”

Through the periscope Richardson inspected the object. It seemed totally innocuous in the distance, floating quietly on the calm sea. A fifteen-degree course alteration put it more nearly dead ahead for a closer passage and a more careful inspection.

“It’s a raft,” he finally said. “There’s birds flying around and pecking at something on it.”

It was as though a vague intuition were tugging at Richardson’s memory, calling to him. The raft drew nearer. He was paying entirely too much attention to it. Nervously he spun the periscope around several times, dunked it, raised it again. There was nothing else in sight. The sky was clear in all directions, and so was the horizon. Always he returned to the raft. Always its outlines grew more clear, more familiar.

Suddenly Richardson whirled to Lasche. “Larry, do you have our position on the chart?”

“Yes, sir. Over here on the chart table.”

“And where was it we had that tangle with Moonface and that fake fishing trawler of his?”

“I don’t remember exactly, sir, but the log will have the position. . . .”

In a moment the general location of Richardson’s short imprisonment in Moonface’s patrol boat was marked off on the chart. His skipper’s next words brought a strange sensation to Larry Lasche’s scalp. Nervously he rubbed his hand across the top of his head.

“Call Keith and Buck,” Richardson said in a repressed, tight voice. “We’re not twenty miles away from our position when you fellows had that fight with Moonface’s patrol boat and got me back aboard. That’s their raft out there, and Moonface is still on it!”

Keith, Buck, and Al Dugan, who had insisted upon joining the excited group in the conning tower, all took turns looking through the periscope.

“But how can it be?” said Keith. “He wasn’t badly injured so far as we could see, and he had his whole crew with him and a good-sized boat in the water. It had a mast and sails, and plenty of water and food. They should have been able to reach land in a couple of days. If the boat could carry all the people, it probably made sense to abandon the raft, but . . .”

“When they abandoned the raft, they didn’t take their skipper with them,” said Rich in the same repressed tone.

“You mean, they deserted him?” burst out Lasche. A meaningful silence took possession of the conning tower.

It was Richardson who had the closest view when Eel passed by less than twenty-five yards away. Suddenly he lowered the periscope.

“What’s the matter, Skipper?” asked Buck, who happened to catch the fleeting look of disgust on his face.

“It’s pretty nauseating,” he replied. “Moonface has been dead a long time and lying on that raft in the sun.”

The moment of silence was the second of those uncomfortable stillnesses everyone expects someone else to break. Richardson could visualize the scene: the bellowed orders, the imprecations, the denunciations, finally the shouted pleas. The stolid silence which must have been its own answer. The pitiless sun, cold nights, and lack of water, combined with the effects of his wound, could end only one agonizing way. For a time Moonface might have hoped for a change of heart among the crewmen, and after he was alone, perhaps, he must have hoped someone else—some other ship—would happen upon him. Toward the end he must even have hoped that an American submarine, possibly the Eel herself, might turn up. All the while, until delirium began, he must have tasted in full measure the bitterness of being contemptuously cast aside, spurned, condemned not only by his fellow men but by his own crew. No degradation, no deserved retribution, could have been greater.

And now Moonface lay spread-eagled on his raft, his tremendous body burned black by the sun, bloated by the swelling of the gases within, the facial tissues of his cheeks drawn tight in a ghastly grimace showing his large, stained teeth. His eyes had been already gouged out by the birds gathered around him. The inside of his mouth, his tongue, the tender tissues of his lips, the softest skin of his neck, even his private parts, now exposed and distended, had been prey for days to an obscene flock of feathered sea-vultures.

The periscope, with its magnification of six, brought Richardson within a few feet of the horrible spectacle, and it was from this he recoiled in disgust and dismay.

“Well,” said Buck Williams, breaking the hush, “I can’t say I feel too terribly sorry for him. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow.”

“I sure agree,” simultaneously said both Dugan and Lasche. Cornelli and Scott, who had unobtrusively mounted to the conning tower, showed by the looks on their faces that they, too, shared the sentiment. Only Keith put a different shape on it.

“One thing we have to remember, though—he was sick. Considering what he said about going to school in California, and his ability to speak English, he must have lived there quite awhile. Probably Japan and the Jap Navy didn’t accept him very well because of all that, too. He must have been a tormented man. Still, he was trying to serve his country. Just as we are. The commodore gave us a lot of trouble, but that’s what he was trying to do, too.”

“And so was Bungo Pete,” observed Richardson unwarily. Again, there was silence. No one in the conning tower spoke in response. With a start, Richardson realized he had broken a taboo. There had been a conspiracy of silence on board the Eel. It was the first time, in his own hearing at least, that the name “Bungo Pete” had been voiced aloud. The looks in the eyes of the others, even of the normally impassive Scott and Cornelli, told him they had understood his inner turmoil. From the beginning they had understood. They knew he had done it for them, and for their contemporaries, living and dead, in other submarines; though he could not excuse himself, must always suffer for what he had had to do, which they also understood—yet he would have had to do it all over again. Although this continuous self-immolation must be his personal and private sacrifice, they had tried to help in the only way they could.

The circumstances in which war sometimes places men, their prior training, the decisions they have to make and the time they have to make them—all are mixed, intertwined, involved in the mammoth conflict between ideals of which war is the ultimate expression. The human being, caught in such circumstances, may find hidden elements of his character of which until then he had been unaware, which he would never know except through the eyes of others.

Mirrored in the faces of the small company in the conning tower, Richardson for the first time sensed that they had supported him not only as their titular leader, but for his own sake. The U.S. Navy had made him their commander, but the intuitive alchemy of men, their personalities interacting with his—or what they were able to see of his—created a bond far stronger than that of simple discipline. They would follow him, had followed him, not because the organization and the system demanded it, but through a higher order of loyalty, regard, appreciation of the man they thought him to be.

And then he knew that he had once felt that way about Joe Blunt. But Blunt had not measured up to the trust and confidence his junior, Richardson, had placed in him. He had failed the standard he had set for himself, the standard to which Richardson, by consequence, had held him. It was a high standard, but not unattainable; it was the one to which Richardson also aspired. Blunt had taught it to him. He must never betray it. It was for this reason, he now saw, that he had felt Blunt’s failure so personally and so deeply.

Eel’s crew had not known Blunt as the man he had been, but only as he was at the last. Vainly, Richardson had been telling them the old Blunt was the real one. But the real Blunt, to them, could only be the man they had all known. It was he, the man they had seen and felt, whom they would always remember. They had supported Richardson willingly in what he had been trying to do for Blunt, but they had done it for him, not for the wolfpack commander. The subconscious reason behind his heightened reaction to Keith’s criticism of Whitey Everett now also stood clear and tall: man must stand by man, by the higher qualities of man implicit in the meaning of humanity. Even enemies must learn to recognize their ultimate brotherhood. Most important of all, man must stand by himself, must never betray the image he has created of himself, for that image is the only reality.

He knew, then, what he must do. There was one thing he could do for the memory of Moonface, but really it was not for him at all but for Tateo Nakame, an enemy he had been forced to destroy without opportunity for thought; and for Joe Blunt, a friend and superior who had destroyed himself. It was in the nature of the expiation of a blood debt, a debt brought about by forces beyond his own control but for which, nevertheless, he must make what restitution lay in his power. It was the debt of the decent man.

Not everyone would understand, but some would. Eel would not surface, should not surface. Not only had Everett’s order forbidden it; he could not expose his crew to yet another hazardous hand power dive to avoid a fast-approaching aircraft.

He put it into as few words as he could. Someday, if the moment of truth fell on them, they would remember. It would be like that other time when he had sent everyone below, and alone on Eel’s bridge had made the dreadful decisions. He would again act alone, bearing the full responsibility. It would be a moment of religion. He allowed himself only one comment, to allay any possible fears. “We ourselves put that raft in the water,” he said. “We know there aren’t any booby traps on it.”

The others listened as he gave his instructions. “I’ll take the conn,” he said. “Cornelli, take over the helm. Al, I’ll need your fine hand on the dive. Alert the pump room that the hydraulic system is likely to be exercised a little. Also, it may cost us a little of your air.” He started to order Keith and Buck below as well, hesitated at the silent plea in Keith’s eyes. Buck, not waiting for any word, purposefully stepped to the after end of the conning tower and started up the TDC. The whine of its synchros filled the tiny cylindrical compartment.

The order to go below unfinished, Richardson turned to Keith with a brief, quizzical smile. It was a shaky smile, he instantly realized, and then one final point came home. This, after all, was exactly as it had been during that final fight with Nakame. For it had been Leone, in the conning tower, who had loyally supported his every move and had backed him up at the radar and the periscope; Scott, whose perfect steering in that crucial encounter, well knowing what he was doing, had enabled him to hit the lifeboats; Dugan, with his inspired handling of Eel’s semisubmergence in the sudden tiny typhoon which had enveloped them, who had enabled him to get the attack off perfectly. Williams, who had set up the torpedoes and fired them at his order. All of them, who had shared everything then, and had shared everything since.

Although he relived the episode in his mind many times afterward, Richardson was never able to explain to himself or anyone on board the Eel that day just how it was that he made all the unfamiliar maneuvers exactly correctly. Through some intuitive sense he made all the calculations, added all the factors, did everything exactly right.

As Eel approached the bobbing life raft on which lay the putrefying form of Moonface, the man he had once hated more than anyone else in the world, he called down to Dugan, “Stand by bow buoyancy! Stand by forward group blow!” He gave a couple of tiny course corrections to Cornelli. Eel’s speed was set at two knots, sixty-seven yards per minute. Scott, with a stopwatch, was counting the seconds aloud. Buck Williams had set up the TDC with a target speed of zero. From a range of 1,000 yards on, Rogers on the radar gave him continuous information as to precisely the distance to the life raft.

At the critical moment, when Scott called, “Mark!” he shouted the expected orders down the hatch to Al Dugan.

“Blow bow buoyancy! Blow forward group! Full rise on bow planes!”

He stood looking through the periscope at the raft and the bloated body on it, now sweeping rapidly toward him. If the raft struck the periscope, it might damage it. He must be quick to lower it in time, if he missed.

The conning tower deck tilted sharply upward under his feet. He could feel the lifting strain of the forward tanks as Dugan lavishly expended high pressure air. The periscope seemed to lean back as it rose swiftly out of the water. Suddenly he was looking down from a great height. He had to shift to low power and tilt the periscope exit pupil lens down to its bottom limit of depression to keep the raft in sight.

Rising from the depths, Eel’s bow struck the under side of the raft, splintered the timbers which held it together, knocked apart the metal drums on which it was built. Impaled on the submarine’s bow, it rose out of the water and tipped to starboard. The startled sea birds went flying. The raft slid crazily aft along the top of Eel’s steel bow buoyancy tank until some underportion of it caught against a cleat welded on the tank’s surface. There it hung momentarily. It tilted even farther, still hooked, tipped more to starboard. Finally, as the carrion sea creatures flapped and shrieked their displeasure, the decaying flesh of what had been Moonface became dislodged from its position on the slatted boards to which it had stuck, rolled over once as it slid off the raft—a stiffened arm waved thanks and farewell—and fell into the sea.

The body drifted nearer, passed within the inner circle of periscope view. He gave Dugan orders to vent the air from the tanks, return Eel to her normal submerged condition. Swiftly he spun the periscope around, saw Moonface floating aft.

It was all Richardson could do for him. The corpse might float for a few hours, but it would soon disintegrate and disappear, one at last with the sea. At least, Moonface would have a sailor’s grave. The Japanese Navy, far better served by officers of the stripe of Tateo Nakame, need never know of the disgrace Moonface had brought upon it.

Nor, for that matter (and the unbidden thought almost brought a smile to Richardson’s face), was there any longer a chance that another Japanese patrol boat, coming upon the raft, might cause embarassing questions to be asked of Moonface’s crew, wherever they might now be.