It was a Japanese destroyer, broadside to us, and it was close, very close, nearly alongside in fact.
I snapped the handle into the high-power position, felt my- self catapulted almost into his bridge. There were white-clad figures all about his topsides. A quick glimpse of activity, several arms pointed our way-we could not have been more than two hundred yards from him, a hustle on the bridge, someone battling the wheel, someone else doing something to an instrument which could have only been annunciators; There was no time to do anything. No time to do anything at all except try to get away. We were caught, caught fair!
'FIRE!' I shouted. I banged the periscope handles up. My hair felt as though it were standing on end. The flesh crawled around my belly. 'Down periscope! Take her down! Take her down fast!'
'What is it? What's the matter?' shouted Jim. Involuntarily my voice had risen in pitch, and my fright must have been evident. So was Jim's. Keith, Rubinoffski, and Oregon, at the wheel, likewise turned their startled faces toward me.
'Take her down! Take her down fast! All ahead emergency, Left full rudder!' The urgency in my voice brought instant obedience: Oregon heaved mightily on the steering wheel, whipped both annunciators all the way to the right, banged them three times against the stops. A whoosh of released air welled up from the control room. where Tom's action in flood- ing negative tank had probably been equally instinctive.
Through it all I felt-sensed would be more accurate-three solid jerks in Walrus tough frame as three torpedoes went on their sudden way.
We could practically feel the bow and stern planes bite into the water. The increased thrust of our screws heaved us forward and downward, but the movement of two thousand tons of steel is a slow, ponderous process.
'What is it, Captain? For God's sake, tell us what's the matter!' Jim was nearly beside himself.
'Destroyer! Waiting for us! Not over two hundred yards away! He'll be on us in seconds!'
'Do you think they saw us?'
'You're God dam right they saw us.' The people on the Bridge were pointing at us!' I swore without even thinking about it or meaning to. 'There were at least fifty men all over his topsides on special lookout watch, and they looked as though they all, every one of them, had a big pair of binoculars!'
'Is he headed for us?'
'Hell yes! We were so close I could even see them put the rudder over and ring up full speed!'
Careless of how it might sound, I had almost been shout- ing. Now I recollected myself, turned to Quin. 'Rig ship for depth charge! Rig ship for silent running!' The yeoman's eyes were huge as he repeated the orders over the telephone.
They flickered to the conning-tower depth guage. It read sixty-five feet. It was hardly moving.
The sounds of slamming of watertight doors and bulkhead ventilation valves came clearly into the conning tower. No need to be careful about noise right now! Our straining propel- lers were making more than enough anyway, and besides, our torpedoes would give us away for sure, draw an arrow to our position at the apex of their wakes. No more ventilation. The conning tower again grew stifling and humid, but no one noticed. I crossed back to the sonar gear, picked up the extra set of headphones.
'Where is he?' O'Brien indicated the pointer in the sonar dial, nearly dead ahead, moving from port bow to starboard.
Our rudder was still at full left, and Walrus was now swing- ing rapidly. Turning toward had been the instinctive thing to do, and also evidently the best maneuver in the emergency.
We would let her turn a bit longer, then straighten out.
'What's our depth?' I looked at Jim. 'Passing eighty feet!'
His face worked as he spoke, and he tapped the glass face of the gauge to make sure it was not stuck. It had only been about twenty seconds since we had started down, hardly time for Walrus to have gained much depth yet. We had achieved a small down angle, however, should begin to go deep-rapidly now.
I put on the earphones, immediately became conscious of the high-speed screws of our enemy, and his rapid, steady pinging. Gone also, now, was any attempt to quietness or concealment on his part. The screws were becoming rapidly louder. The pangs were continuous, steady, practically with- out interval. He was well on our starboard bow, coming in at high speed, perhaps hoping to ram.
'Rudder amidships!' Our compass card slowed its spin, steadied. This would increase our speed across the enemy track, tend to make him shoot his depth charges astern.
Perhaps our torpedoes would prevent him from attacking immediately, possibly one might even, by great good fortune, hit him.
Forlorn hope! The whole inside of the submarine was resounding with the enemy destroyer's propeller beats. The pings of his echo-ranging apparatus were fast, short, continu- ous, implacable. I could hear the echoes rap off our bull al- most as soon as transmitted, could even hear a double echo- the return bounce off him. We had reached ninety feet when the destroyer's roar attained an excruciating, violent crescendo of sound, and coherent thinking became frozen. He could not have been more than thirty feet away from where I was standing, dead overhead, roaring like an express train. My brain throbbed in the furious convulsion of noise. There was a screaming of tortured gears, the whine of high-speed turbines, the spitting, churning, tearing fury of his propellers, the blast of water-all combined into a frenzied, desperate, sudden drive to send us forever into the black depths of the sea.
'Here we are!' I remember thinking. 'Here comes the granddaddy of all depth-chargings!' Walrus moved bodily in the water as the destroyer passed overhead. We could feel his initial pressure wave, and we also knew, by the abrupt change in the pitch Of the noise, the exact instant he passed over. Just before he did so, the bearing from which the sound had been coming in widened until it encompassed the entire three hundred sixty degrees around us. Ninety-one feet the depth gauges said. It was time, it was time, here it comes!
WHAM! A prolonged, crushing, catastrophic roar! The lights went out. I was thrown to the deck, grasped the periscope hoist wires with both hands. They were tingling, alive. The deck plates were rattling likewise. There was someone lying on the deck beneath me-as I felt for him, amid the convulsive shudders of Walrus great steel fabric, my feet were jerked out from under me and I was flung bodily on top of him. He felt wet, warm-wet, and he didn't move.
Scrambling to my feet, I realized the motion of the ship had changed. We were on the surface. The ship still had a large angle down by the bow, but our rocking and pitching could only be the result of being on the surface in the wash of the vessel that had just passed overhead. No doubt our stern was well out, high in view-a beautiful target; I was still hold- ing to the periscope wires, and to my horror I saw light at the bottom of the periscope well Then the explanation occurred: the top of the periscope, though housed, was also out of water, and light naturally streamed out of the other end. To confirm it I reached for the other 'scope, looked down into the well, saw light there also.
Still black as ink in the conning tower. On rig for depth charge the hatch between us and the control room had been dogged down, and there was no communication except by telephone, useless at the moment, of course. The whole interior of the submarine was a huge, sounding cavern, rever- berating and reflecting the uproar. If only we could see!
'Turn on the emergency lights!' I shouted. I might as well have whispered. The emergency lights should have come on.
Standard practice called for them to be turned on auto- matically by anyone, if the main lighting went out.
No need to look at the depth gauge anyway. 'All ahead emergency' I had already ordered emergency speed, sub- consciously wanted to reinforce the order after the attack.
In the shattering uproar I bellowed as loud as I could. Quin might hear me, might be able to get through to the maneuvering room, or Oregon, at the other end of the conning tower, could ring for flank speed again three times. They were probably having a pretty bad time back aft, but 'emergency ahead,' under the circumstances existing, would cause Larto to open the main motor rheostats as far as they would go, put everything the battery could give into the propellers.
The noise was subsiding a little. I had no knowledge of how many depth charges had gone off, perhaps a dozen all almost simultaneously, and there was no telling, yet, whether Walrus had survived. The conning tower, we knew, was still whole. With all hatches and ventilation valves shut tightly, there could he no telltale increase in air pressure as water came rushing into another compartment. Since our stern was on the surface, a hole there
