become even more divorced from his body than usual.
The officer in charge waits for the noise to subside and then says, in a startlingly quiet voice, 'Is there anything in particular you'd like to inspect, sir?'
Waterhouse is still trying to get some idea of where he is by shining his flashlight beam around the place, which is kind of like peering through a soda straw. He can't get any synoptic view of his surroundings, just narrow glimpses of pipes and wires. Finally he tries holding his head still and sort of scribbling the flashlight beam around really fast. A picture emerges: they are in a narrow crawl space, obviously designed by and for engineers, intended to give access to a few thousand linear miles of pipes and wires that have been forced through some kind of bottleneck.
'We are looking for the skipper's papers,' Waterhouse says. The boat goes into free fall again; he leans against something slippery, claps his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and mouth, and exhales through his nose so that none of the soup will force its way into his body. The thing he's leaning against is really hard and cold and round. It's greasy. He shines his light on it; it's made of brass. The light-scribbling trick produces the image of a brass spaceship of some sort, nestled underneath (unless he's mistaken) a bunk. He's just on the verge of making a total ass of himself by asking what it is, when he identifies it as a torpedo.
In the next quiet interlude, he asks, 'Is there anything like a private cabin where he might have . .'
'It's forward,' the officer says. Forward is not an encouraging view.
'Fuck!' Sergeant Shaftoe says. It's the first thing he has said in about half an hour. He begins to slosh forward, and the British officer has to hurry to catch up. The deck falls out from beneath their feet again and they stop and turn around so that the wave of sewage will hit them in the backs.
They travel downhill. Every step's a pitched battle vs. prudence and sound judgment, and they take a lot of steps. What Waterhouse had pegged as a bottleneck goes on and on-all the way, apparently, to the bow. Eventually they find something that gives them an excuse to stop: a cabin, or maybe (at about four by six feet) a corner of a cabin. There's a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it's a German boat. The mean high-tide level of the sewage angles across the cabin and cuts it approximately in half. Papers and other bureaucratic detritus are floating every where, written in the occult Gothic script that Waterhouse associates with Rudy.
'Take it all,' Waterhouse says, but Shaftoe and the officer are already sweeping their arms through the brew and bringing them up wrapped in dripping papier-mache. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.
The skipper's bunk is on the aft or uphill end of the cabin. Shaftoe strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.
The fold-out table is on the totally submerged end. Waterhouse wades into it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He finds the desk with his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man would. He finds a few drawers which he is able to pull out of the desk entirely and hand off to Shaftoe, who dumps their contents into the sack. Within a short time he is pretty sure that there's nothing left in the desk.
The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes, for just a moment, something in the corner of the cabin, something attached to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.
'It's a safe!' he says. He spins the dial. It's heavy. A good safe. German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.
A British sailor appears in the open hatchway. 'Sir!' he announces. 'Another U-boat has been sighted in the area.'
'I'd love to have a stethoscope,' Waterhouse hints. 'This thing have a sickbay?'
'No,' says the British officer. 'Just a box of medical gear. Should be floating around somewhere.'
'Sir! Yes sir!' Shaftoe says, and vanishes from the room. A minute later he's back holding a German stethoscope up above his head to keep it clean. He tosses it across the cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it in the air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the sewage to the front of the safe.
He has done a little of this before, as an exercise. Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let the young Waterhouse play with his safe. He broke the combination, to the manager's great surprise, and wrote a report about the experience for school.
This safe is a lot better than that one was. Since he can't see the dial anyway, he closes his eyes.
He is vaguely conscious that the other fellows on the submarine have been shouting and carrying on about something for a while, as if some sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of the stethoscope is wrenched loose from his grasp. He opens his eyes to see Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: 'Sir, torpedoes in the water, sir.' Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.
Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking up at a disk of greyish-black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston of sewage rises up beneath him and propels him upwards, vomiting him out onto the top deck of the boat, where his comrades grab him and very considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.
The movement of the U-553 with the waves has changed. She's moving a lot more now, as if she's about to break free from the reef.
It takes Waterhouse a minute to get his bearings. He is starting to think he may have suffered some damage during all of that. Something is definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.
Powerful light sweeps over them: a searchlight from the British corvette that brought them here. The British sailors curse. Waterhouse levers himself up on his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U-boat, following the beam of the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of her hull peeled back from the wound and projecting jaggedly into the air. The foul contents of the hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.
'Fuck!' Sergeant Shaftoe says. He shrugs loose from a small but heavy-looking knapsack that he's been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden activity draws the attention of the Royal Navy men who help out by pointing their flashlights at his furious hands.
Waterhouse, who may be in some kind of delirium by this point, can't quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish-yellow cylinders, as thick as a finger and maybe six inches long. He also takes out some small items, including a coil of thick, stiff red cord. He jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.
'Jesus,' an officer says, 'he's going to do some blasting.' The officer thinks about this for a very small amount of time; the ship moves terrifyingly with the waves and makes scraping noises which might indicate it's sliding off the reef. 'Abandon ship!' he hollers.
Most of them get into the whaler. Waterhouse is bundled back onto the trolley contraption. He is about halfway across to the torpedo boat when he feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.
For the rest of the way over he can't really see diddly, and even after he's back on the torpedo boat, all is confusion, and someone named Enoch Root insists on taking him below and working on his arm and his head. Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to reason, in that your head is where you know things, and if it's damaged, how can you know it? 'You'll get at least a Purple Heart for this,' Enoch Root says. He says it with a marked lack of enthusiasm, as if he couldn't care less about Purple Hearts, but is condescending to suppose that it will be a big thrill for Waterhouse. 'And Sergeant Shaftoe probably has another major decoration coming too, damn him.'
Chapter 33 MORPHIUM
Shaftoe still sees the word every time he closes his eyes. It would be a lot better if he were paying attention to the work at hand: packing demolition charges around the gussets that join the safe to the U-boat.
MORPHIUM. It is printed thus on a yellowed paper label. The label is glued to a small glass bottle. The color of the glass is the same deep purple that you see when your eyes have been dazzled by a powerful light.
