silence, but in the sharing of them now, there was a mutual understanding and compassion that neither had felt for the other since their childhood.
“You dream of Peter very much?” Rosemary asked.
“All the time. But it’s all so terribly vague in my case. I think it might help if I could remember the details after, but I can’t. I try. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve had a dream about him until later in the day. Then something — I don’t know— something quite unrelated, it seems, will remind me of it.”
“Do you think of him being on the submarine?”
“No — at least I don’t think so. But it’s always a very confined space. I do know that. Like a cave, the entrance closing.”
Rosemary shivered. “It’s always the same island for me. And ice as far as I can see, and the closer I get, the further it recedes, the more I hear the surf crashing on a beach — a cruel, hard beach of stones.” Quite unknown to herself, Rosemary’s hands were moving protectively over her stomach as she was talking.
Georgina squeezed her hand. “I won’t be foolish and tell you you shouldn’t worry about the baby. I guess every mother does. But try not to fret too much, Rose.”
Rosemary didn’t answer. It was the first time Georgina had called her “Rose” in years.
“Oh Lord,” said Rosemary, “how can they do that — go down there for weeks at—”
“Oh, thank you,” said Rosemary in mock reproach. “You’re a great help.” It eased the tension and they began to laugh, and soon the laughter had turned to tears and they were embracing.
“What a pair of ninnies,” snuffled Rosemary. “Really— they’re probably telling obscene jokes and drinking cocoa.”
“Coffee!” corrected Georgina, wiping her eyes.
From the hallway, Richard Spence saw them, thought of going in, but instead withdrew, walking softly back to bed.
“Richard — what’s the matter?” asked Anne, her voice dopey with the sleeping pills she had found necessary since young William’s death.
“Nothing,” he said, and switched off the light, but he lay awake; the sight of his two daughters so close together filled him with a warmth he hadn’t experienced in years. Yet he felt it shot through with his own fears about his son-in-law and his doubts about the advisability of Georgina marrying young Zeldman. Anne continued to be all for it, but the war situation was so grave, and getting worse each day, that Richard wanted to spare Georgina whatever angst he could. Most people, he believed, including Anne, simply didn’t realize how bad it really was in Europe. Unable to be supplied with as much as they needed because of the Soviet sub offensive was bad enough for the NATO forces, but now it was widely reported that more and more Soviet subs, like those which continued to attack American West Coast shipping, were still getting through the SOSUS network.
As he drifted off to sleep, Richard Spence said a prayer for “the two boys” and for all those other men who went willingly, and not so willingly, down to the sea in ships, and he sought comfort in the words of the ancient Anglican prayer for “those who go down to the sea in ships: We give thee humble thanks for that thou hast been pleased to preserve through the perils of the deep…”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Sonarman Emerson was not the first aboard
The cook had been trying to cheer up the crew by telling a story about how he used to play his “date line trick”— confusing new shipmates by serving a breakfast twice a day whenever the sub crossed the date line.
But the story fell flat after
Everybody else had been too preoccupied with their individual jobs, and besides, no one had noticed because they were working in the much dimmer light of the sub’s emergency battle lanterns until the blown circuits could be fixed. The men in most trouble, he noticed, were those from the engine room, which, along with Control, had experienced the worst flooding.
By the time he’d finished serving, Leach felt ill, and breaking out into a sweat, despite the chilly fifty-five degrees of the sub, he went to crew’s quarters, slid into the six-by-three-by-two-foot slot that was his bunk, and pulled the two-foot-high curtains shut.
The man below him thought he heard a whimpering sound, and when he asked Leach whether he was all right, Leach said he was fine, but his voice was strained. Now and then he could hear the hesitant but persistent tapping throughout the ship as the various department chiefs supervised timber reinforcements against the leaks, tightening C-clamps on the joints and trying to reinforce the big flange joint in the engine room. There were already over nine hundred gallons that had poured in in just over a minute. The sound of the tapping, monitored by Emerson, wasn’t too loud and wasn’t standing out from the ice clutter. In any case, some of the men argued there was no point in worrying about making sound as they had no choice but to try to mend the damage and extrude the water as quickly as the damaged pumps would allow. Either that or let the sub fill slowly and drown like rats. But soon Leach couldn’t stand the noise any longer.
The blue curtain across his bunk space swished back and he dropped down in his underwear, teary-eyed, looking at the other six men in his section. A chief petty officer, passing through, immediately sensed something was wrong, the tension fairly crackling in the air. “What’s going on?”
Leach was zipping up his fly. “Permission to see the captain!” It wasn’t so much a question as a demand. Before the chief could say anything, Leach bellowed, “Please!” in a tone at once so pleading and threatening that the CPO knew the man was literally on the edge.
“Sure — Leach, isn’t it? Sure, I’ll take you up.”
“Wait here,” the chief told Leach, who had seemed to calm down a little on the way to Control. The chief pulled back the curtained door of Control. Inside the redded-out room, Robert Brentwood was surrounded by ship’s charts, the chief engineer, and several other technical officers. The chief knew it was the wrong time to interrupt — Brentwood’s face lined with the strain — but the chief’s expression spoke volumes, clearly conveying the message to the captain that they had a possible Section Eight on their hands. Besides which Brentwood had made a point of being “accessible” to his men’s concerns. Brentwood saw Leach wild-eyed, nodded at the chief, and invited Leach aft of Control. Closer now to Leach, Brentwood could see what he took to be the classic signs of claustrophobic panic. It was unusual but not unknown among submariners; sometimes even the toughest among them caught “coffin fever” after extreme stress.
“What can I do for you, Leach?” Brentwood asked, trying to strike the right attitude between concern and the obvious need for expediency.
“Sir, I dropped the—” He stopped, looking down, his chest heaving.
Robert Brentwood thought of his earlier days in the navy, of how it was for all young men, of how it might be for his son — if they won this war — to have to face a moment of devastating truth. “Listen, sailor, any one of us could have dropped a clanger. It was an accident. A serious one. You know that. Everyone aboard does. Can’t be undone. You look at it straight in the face, resolve to do better, and go on. But you don’t roll over and die. That’s no good to us — it’s no good to you.”
There was silence, apart from the cautious tapping throughout the sub and the oppressive smell of diesel oil, which Brentwood hated with a passion and which was seeping out from some of the severed hydraulic hoses. “Listen, son. First time I was in Bledsoe — in the tank — we had a flange ring separate. Out shot a wall of solid
