I could feel S-16 tilting her nose down. It was still only about twenty seconds since the diving alarm had been sounded, but we had only about the same number of seconds left.
“Leone,” I snapped. “Get below and surface the boat.”
Keith gave me a scared look and bolted below.
Undecided as to my next move, I stood there, feeling far from heroic, half standing on the ladder and hanging on to the hatch wheel with both hands. I looked it over carefully. The latch, the immediate cause of the jamming, was partly home under the rim of the hatch seat. Made of a piece of steel about a quarter of an inch in thickness, it offered only a relatively sharp edge to push or hammer on. Attached by a linkage to the latch, so that it would retract when the latch engaged, was a short bolt supposed to intersect the spokes of the hatch hand wheel when the hatch was fully open to keep the hand wheel from turning. The bolt was retracted, all right, as it should be, but the hand wheel still would not turn in either direction. Three of the four hatch dogs had slipped past the inside edge of the hatch seat, but one was clearly caught on top, jammed between the seat and the hatch itself. With one dog jammed one way and three the other, the hand wheel was effectively prevented from any movement whatsoever.
The only way to clear the jam was to push back the latch, open the hatch, reverse the hand wheel so as to take up the lost motion, retract the dogs, and haul it shut again. Standing on the second rung of the ladder to reach it, bracing myself and wrapping my left arm around the rail, I pushed on the latch with all my might with my right hand. Nothing happened. I tried hammering it with my clenched fist, bruising the fleshy part of the hand in the process. Still no luck, though my hand ached.
Suddenly the noise of air blowing stopped from the control room, though air still hissed out the open ring around the hatch. In a second I heard the noise of the main vents shutting and more air blowing, a different note, as high-pressure air whistled into the main ballast tanks. Keith had gotten through and surfacing procedures had been started.
But there could be no stopping the downward momentum of a thousand tons of steel. Suddenly I heard a gurgling sound. A quick look through the nearest eye-port was rewarded with a splash of sudsy foam; then another and then suddenly there was green water and the daylight in the conning tower grew dimmer.
Air continued to hiss out above me, as the slightly increased pressure in the reservoir of S-16’s hull equalized to atmosphere. I could hear water climbing quickly up the watertight structure. Obviously the boat would not stop before the open hatch went under. There was no telling, in fact, how far she might go down, and maybe the sudden inrush of tons of water into the ship would overbalance the slight amount of positive buoyancy we were gaining by the air going into her tanks.
At this point I don’t remember any further conscious thought about it. Once the hatch went under, water would rush into the control room, sweeping people away from their stations, shorting the electrical equipment—generally making a mess of things and possibly knocking out the bow and stern planes, the main motor control, and the high-pressure air manifold on which our safety now depended. If the control room were flooded, nothing could keep the ship from sinking to the bottom of Long Island Sound. Perhaps some of the crew would be able to shut watertight doors leading forward or aft, but men trapped in the control room would certainly be drowned, while those who managed to save themselves from that fate would be faced with the prospect of slow suffocation if for any reason the rescue bell or the Momsen lung device could not be used.
It is said that a drowning man sees his whole life flash before him. Perhaps my sensation at that moment was somewhat the same. Certainly it could have taken me no more than a second to race through all these possibilities.
Water, which had been gurgling up the sides of the conning tower, now reached the hatch—there, meeting the gush of air still streaming out, it blew idiotically backward, and only a few drops fell inside.
From my position on the ladder I could see into the control room through the still-open lower hatch. I leaned toward it and roared, “Shut the hatch!” Just below it stood Tom Schultz, and I caught a glimpse of his twisted face as, without a word, he reached up, grabbed the hand wheel, and tried to pull it down. It was awkward for him and the spring resisted movement. He had the hatch almost closed when it swung partly open again. I sprang off the ladder and landed on the top of the hatch, holding it shut with my weight while Tom spun the hand wheel between my feet from below, sealing it tight.
Instantly a deluge of cold sea water hit me in the back, knocking me to my hands and knees. I struggled to my feet in a veritable Niagara of angry ocean pouring into the conning tower. I still remember a moment of wonder at the tremendous amount of water that came in despite the fact that the hatch was actually ninety per cent closed. It rose rapidly in the tiny compartment, and I could feel the pressure on my ears as the air was compressed. Ultimately, of course, a condition of equilibrium would be reached and the air would commence to bubble out through the hole at the top. Frantically I searched the overhead for some high protected corner where I might be able to find a few gulps of precious air when the compartment became entirely flooded.
S-16 now commenced to right herself, her bow slowly coming up. With the flooding confined to the conning tower, there was no doubt that she would get back to the surface all right. The question was whether I could manage to avoid drowning until someone was able to come out through another hatch and rescue me. With that weight of water in the conning tower there would be no hope of pushing open the lower hatch and draining it through there. Besides, with the difficulties they were facing below they might not even think of me for a few minutes.
I climbed up on the tiny chart desk, bumping my head against the overhead, but the water had reached my waist and was rising rapidly when it stopped coming in as though a hydrant had been shut off. I can remember the instantaneous relief. The ship was safe, and so, in a few moments, would I be.
It was several minutes in fact before anything else happened. I found out later that, unable to open the lower conning-tower hatch, Keith and Kohler had come up through the forward torpedo room, rushed over the slippery deck, and climbed up on the bridge. With a large open-end wrench which Keith had snatched up, they began battering at the latching mechanism from above. I shouted to them to stop for fear of breaking it, had them slide the wrench through the opening to me down below. Sloshing backward away from the hatch I measured the distance, swung gently and fair, and tapped the latch free on the first blow. The hatch instantly swung open under the combined heave of the two anxious men above.
After dogging the hatch properly from topside, the three of us made our way forward and below via the torpedo-room hatch. Jim was waiting at the foot of the ladder.
“You fool,” he hissed at Keith. “Do you realize what you almost did?” His face was livid with emotion and his lips quivered with the fury of his voice. I could see Keith wilt.
“That will be all for you, Leone,” Jim raged, “this will be your last day in submarines. You ought to be court-martialed!”
I was amazed at Jim’s outburst. Kohler and three or four other members of the crew who happened to be in the forward torpedo room stared their shocked surprise.
“Cut it out,” I told Jim. “It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t Keith’s fault.” Then I tried to relieve the tension a little. “So what if I did get a little soaking? I needed a bath anyway!” The joke fell flat. I motioned Keith up ahead of me through the watertight door into the forward battery compartment and followed him, dripping a trail behind.
A difficult decision confronted me, and I had to make it immediately. Roy Savage, Carl Miller, and Stocker Kane might—just possibly—still qualify Jim, particularly if I made excuses for him and pressed his case. Captain Blunt would of course take their word for it. The question which weighted me, as I sloshed my way aft to change clothes, was the same one with which I had got Jim—and myself—into the present impasse.
Except that the last four days had been an eye-opener. I knew, now, that I could never turn the S-16 over to Jim, at least not until he had amassed considerably more experience and steadiness under stress. And I also knew that the whole situation had really been my own fault. I might have been blind, might