“Around the eastern point. There’s a broad lagoon, almost a tiny bay. S-19 was on the beach. There was a little protection but not much… I hope she’s still there.” He voiced his greatest fear. They knew there’d been storms since they left. A high enough surge could have carried her farther inland, making complete salvage impossible, or it might have even carried her off to sea.
“The mountain on the island smokes,” Lelaa observed. “Did it smoke this much when you were here?”
Laumer lifted his binoculars. It was a dreary, hazy, oppressive day. Still, he could see the dull, monochromatic outline of the distant volcano on the island. The smoke was blowing away to the south. “Yeah, maybe. Sometimes there’d be earthquakes-the ground would move. I don’t know. It looks like the thing’s a little taller than I remember it.”
Midshipman Hardee and Motor Machinist’s Mate Sandy Whitcomb were standing with him. Sandy said, “Nah,” but Hardee remained silent.
Irvin looked at him. “What do you think?”
“Well, sir, I’m not sure. The top was usually misty when we were here before, and down in the jungle where we spent most of our time, one couldn’t see it at all. That being said, I would have to concur with you. It does seem taller.”
“Hmm. Well, shouldn’t make a difference unless it decides to pull a Krakatoa on us.” As soon as he said the words, Irvin wished he could take them back. He’d always prided himself on his rationality, but some of the men’s superstition had rubbed off on him, he guessed. He noticed the accusing look Whitcomb gave him and smiled uncertainly. “Just kidding, Sandy.”
“If it’s all the same to ‘His Highness,’ the new commodore, I wish to hell you wouldn’t say shit like that.” Sandy gestured vaguely over his shoulder. “Me and the fellas who volunteered to come along did it because it’s a job that needs doin’ and we like you. We know you’ve got as much guts as Chief Flynn, but you had the sense to let him take the lead while you learned the ropes. You got more brains than he does, so you’re better than him for this caper. As long as you use them brains to accomplish the mission and don’t go jinxin’ us, we’ll get along fine.”
Touched and chagrined by the convoluted and somewhat backhanded compliment, Irvin nodded. “Don’t worry. Like I said, I was just kidding, but I won’t kid about stuff like that anymore. If you want me to throw salt over my shoulder, scratch a backstay, or jump up and down, spitting on myself, I’ll do it if it makes you feel better.”
Sandy and Hardee laughed. “Nah,” said Sandy, “It’ud be funny to see, but none o’ that would work anyway.”
“What is a Krakatoa?” Lelaa asked.
Sandy rolled his eyes. “A busted toe. A real bad one.”
Late that afternoon, they rounded the point. The wind had shifted out of the south and they took in everything but the staysails. The wind cooled them but their progress slowed to a crawl. Irvin wasn’t worried. The mouth of the cove he remembered so well was near, and he’d rather creep up on it than tack away and try to find it again from seaward. Better to approach it the same way S-19 had. A call came down from aloft and he knew they’d reached their destination.
“Any suggestions?” Lelaa asked.
“Ah, you’ll want to aim for the middle going in. There’s just sand, but it shifts around. The lagoon’s shaped kind of like a cursive capital E…” He looked at her blank expression and drew one on the bulwark with his finger. “We want the top of the E, the northern end. There’s rollers, usually, but it gets calmer when we’re in the point’s lee. Water there was deeper too.”
“Was?”
Irvin shrugged. “Was. Places like this can change every time a storm hits.”
“Leadsmen to the bow,” Lelaa commanded loudly, then looked back at Irvin. “You were saying?” she asked politely.
Irvin knew she’d just given him another tactful lesson in seamanship. “Ah, that’s it. We sail in and anchor as close to shore as the tide will let us. We should see the boat.”
Simms crept into the cove, her consort staying well back to avoid any hazards the flagship might encounter. Irvin and all the submariners were on the fo’c’sle staring ahead, passing the binoculars around and listening to the leadsman’s shouted depths.
“Goddamn, we should see her by now!” Tex erupted suddenly. He had the glasses.
“Maybe,” Whitcomb replied. The beach they’d left her on was still a mile or so ahead and it was hard to focus the binoculars while the ship passed through the rollers.
Hardee reached for the binoculars. “Here, let me have those a moment, please,” he said, somewhat imperiously. Tex handed them over, but then made comic gestures behind the boy’s back when he turned. He understood the concept of midshipmen just fine, but he wasn’t used to taking orders from sixteen-year-old kids. Hardee put the strap around his neck and quickly scampered up into the foretop-no simple feat with the ship pitching so-and scanned the shoreline from a higher perspective. The Lemurian lookouts probably had better vision than he did, even with binoculars, but none of them had ever seen the submarine before. They didn’t really know what to look for.
“There she is!” he suddenly cried down triumphantly.
“Where?” Irvin shouted back.
“About where she was, but… all I can really see is the conn tower! It looks like it’s leaning toward the sea!”
Irvin looked at the other submariners. When they left, the boat was almost entirely exposed and leaning hard to port-away from the sea.
“Well,” he said, “at least she’s still here. I guess we’ll know the score when we go ashore.”
Simms and her consort anchored a quarter mile from the beach, where there’d be plenty of water under their keels even when the tide was out. Irvin was anxious to get a look at the task before them, but decided not to waste a trip ashore just for sightseeing. All the ship’s barges went over the side filled with equipment; the disassembled steam engine was their “compact” model, but the parts were still heavy and bulky. The generator was one assembly, and although it wasn’t very big, it was heavy. Other tools and equipment went as well, but no camping gear or foodstuffs. They wouldn’t have time to establish their outpost that evening, and Irvin wanted to reimpress on everyone the hostile nature of some of the inhabitants of Talaud. Tomorrow they’d build a base camp, assemble the equipment they’d brought, and try to discourage the various predators he felt sure had returned to the area in their absence.
Rowing ashore, Irvin noticed few strikes at the boat. He’d gotten used to the incessant thumping of the flashies in the waters he’d crossed more recently and wondered why there weren’t as many here. There were some really big, goofy-looking sharks, he remembered. Maybe that was why. Or maybe it was the deep water all around. He shook his head. Something else for the irrepressible Courtney Bradford to figure out.
His boat nudged ashore and he hopped into the calf-deep water, shoes tied around his neck. Once on the dry sand, he sat down and pulled the battered shoes on his feet. Even while he did so, he looked at the submarine-or what he could see of her. They’d realized, the closer they came to shore, that the boat had been virtually buried in the sand. Not just buried, but sunk in the sand as well. He could easily imagine how it happened. A big storm had lashed the island, maybe even the one that was brewing when they left it. The surge rolled the sub back and forth on the wet, loosening sand, slowly displacing that beneath her, and dragging her down into it. When she was almost level with the beach, the sand collected atop her until all that remained visible was the tower and the four- inch-fifty gun. Irvin stood and approached the boat with the other men.
Lelaa stared at what little was visible in wonder.
“You went under the water in that?”
“She’s a lot bigger than she looks,” Tex said defensively.
“Jeez. She’s plumb buried!” said Danny Porter. “How the hell are we gonna get her out of that!”
Carpenter’s Mate Sid Franks laughed. He’d been talking with some of the ’Cats in his division. “Hell, this is the best thing that could have happened!”
“What do you mean?” asked Irvin.
“Well, sir, if she was still high and dry, we’d have had to dig a hole out from under her. No way we could push or pull her in the water. We could have built rollers, I guess, but we would’ve had to run them out in water deep enough for stuff to eat us. We couldn’t have made them stay where we wanted them either. This way, we just dig
