Dust on the Sea (6 page)

“I'll be there too, Rich,” said Blunt. “The boss has asked a couple of others, too, so you won't have to do all the talking. We'll have read your report by then, and we'll be anxious to hear what went on between the lines.”

Richardson forced himself to show pleasure in accepting, saluted four times as the admiral and his chief of staff in turn went through the departure ritual of saluting first him and then the colors. Then they stepped from
Eel
's slotted deck to the brow and walked swiftly ashore.

Having to go to dinner was an ordeal he had expected. Richardson was grateful to be spared the preliminary of luncheon at the admiral's staff mess, where the current crop of “staffers,” most of them either ex-skippers or Johnny-come-latelys awaiting their turn at a fleet submarine command, would have had free access to him. It was thoughtful of Admiral Small to dispense with this portion of the regular routine.

It was just as well, anyway. For one thing, he would have to go through at least the form of turning over to the “relief commanding officer”—the experienced executive officer of another submarine, now waiting his own command, who in the meantime was designated to take over all responsibility for
Eel
. This would permit
Eel
's own regular crew, except for those to be rotated ashore during the next patrol, to be transported in a body for a two-week vacation at the luxurious Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.

Boxes, duffel bags, and a couple of small collapsible suitcases were already appearing on deck, and two large navy buses were parked only a short distance away.

Richardson felt alone, detached from it all. This was not the same as the returns from patrol he had experienced before, the joyous release from pressure and travail. If anything, the pressure seemed greater. He felt indecisive, unable to think or hold an idea. Keith, he noticed, had not asked him for a single instruction. Keith was doing it all. Once he thought he saw Keith cast a worried look, quickly masked, in his direction.

It was impossible to move from the spot where he stood. A group of fellow skippers, nearly a dozen in all, surrounded him. All were eager to ask questions about his battle with Bungo Pete: the sinking of the submarine, the fight with the
Akikaze
-class destroyer, the final destruction of the Q-ship with single shots from stern tubes in a small typhoon.

How had he got
Eel
into position with weather conditions as they were? Why had not the Q-ship or the destroyer been able to hit him with gunfire? How had he known it was Bungo Pete whom he was fighting? What depth had he set on his torpedoes—had he made any adjustment for the heavy seas running? Why had he not shot at the Q-ship first—how had he identified it as a Q-ship and not an ordinary freighter? How in the world had he gotten away with sinking a submerged
submarine right out from Bungo Pete's formation without alerting Bungo? What did he consider to be the optimum firing range and depth setting of the electric torpedo? Had Richardson heard of the new periscope radar—a radar made small enough to fit right into a periscope so that a radar range could be obtained submerged, thus facilitating more accurate fire control solutions? Had Richardson heard of the latest fleet submarine design, a bigger, faster boat, with even more torpedoes than the twenty-four which were standard?

The professional conversation, normally of huge interest, had nothing for him. Richardson answered the questions as briefly as he could, only with difficulty remembered the depth settings and firing ranges. He asked no questions in his turn about the radar in the periscope or the new, bigger submarines.

The silent arrival of an ambulance provided an excuse to break it up. The rescued aviators brought back from
Eel
's “lifeguard” stint would have to be tended to. None were ambulatory. All would need stretchers. “Keith,” he began—but Keith had also seen the ambulance. Several men were already striding purposefully across the brow toward it. They returned with three metal stretchers with assorted straps for holding the patients in as they were lifted vertically up through one of
Eel
's deck hatches.

Still, the operation needed supervision. Richardson must say good-bye to the Army Air Corps captain and his two men. They would be coming up from the crew's dinette, through the deck hatch just abaft the bridge and conning tower structure, this being the shortest lift. Quickly they appeared. Keith's arrangements had been well made. Richardson shook hands with the lanky pilot, who managed to extend his hand out from under the straps holding him in the basket stretcher. Richardson hoped that the treatment his corpsman had given the westerner's broken leg would prove satisfactory. A little over a year ago his own broken leg—a compound fracture, to be sure—had had to be rebroken and reset after the return to Pearl Harbor. In consequence he had insisted on hours of study of
Eel
's meager medical library by Yancy, the ship's pharmacist's mate, Keith Leone, and himself before the first move was made to set the flier's leg.

He pressed the shoulders of the other two men. More seriously injured, they had been strapped in even tighter. He nodded and smiled at their mumbled gratitude, wished them quick recoveries, and then wandered aft toward the stern, in the vicinity of the motor room, where the skin of
Eel
's ballast tanks began to curve in as the hull narrowed.

It was about here, on the port side, that Captain Tateo Nakame
had managed to place his hands on
Eel
's heaving side, had tried to climb aboard. He would no doubt have continued the unequal fight if he had succeeded in doing so, would have striven somehow to destroy
Eel
and himself with her, had he been able. It was from this spot that he had cast that last look at Rich, the look which expressed all his hatred, his dedication, his desperation at being destroyed after so many successes.

Richardson would never forget the lines on his face, the agony etched there unutterably as he confronted a fate he must have partly expected, which was now arrived. On sudden impulse, Rich remembered, he put down his binoculars, exposed his own face. It was more a symbolic act than a logical one. It was some unconscious memory, some atavistic tribal recollection of ages past, which had impelled him. Respected enemies at their final confrontation, when one was to die, stood face to face.

There was a discoloration on the smooth black ballast tank surface. Some stray streak of harbor oil, splashed up on the way in. The orange and purple hues contrasted with the black skin of
Eel
's hull, shifted shape as he approached. In the changing colors he could suddenly see the streaked outline of a clutching hand—two hands. Bungo's. It was not possible that the impression of Bungo's hands could have stayed there, persisted, under three weeks of ceaseless washing by the sea as
Eel
voyaged homeward from the coast of Japan! Yet, somehow, the kaleidoscopic image was there, oozing, slipping—the fingernails digging—grasping for purchase. Bungo had made a tremendous effort, a superhuman effort, to climb that impossibly slick curve of steel.

Rich had been the only man to see it, to appreciate it, to gaze heartlessly at him as he died.

This had been the end for Captain Tateo Nakame, of the Imperial Japanese Navy. “A mean old bastard,” Blunt had called him. He might well have been all of that; he was also a dedicated officer of the old school who had given his all for his country. At some other time, in some other context, he might have been a friend, a man to admire. He had his counterpart many times over in the U.S. Navy.

“Captain?” he did not recognize the voice. The handprints were dissolving, drifting, were no longer recognizable. “Captain?” Through the fog, it was Keith. “Captain, we've got everything set to disembark the crew and shift them over to the Royal Hawaiian. Will you be coming over with us?”

“No, Keith, I've got a few things yet to do. . . .”

“Matter of fact, I do too, sir. They've secured the galley, but I had
them lay on some sandwiches and there's some coffee left, so we can have a fair lunch. Aren't you going up to the admiral's mess?” Whatever Keith's intention, he had broken the spell. Maybe this was what he had meant to do all along. “There's only a few of us left aboard, Captain; everybody else is in the bus. Okay if I shove them off? Then I'll join you down in the wardroom.”

“Okay, Keith.” Now that he had been reminded of it, he
was
hungry. Breakfast had been early that morning. The crowd on deck had pretty well dissipated.
Eel
was now just another submarine among the many tied up at the docks in various stages of refit. Soon she would be moved over to a routine berth, to free the space in front of the ComSubPac headquarters for another submarine due to return from patrol. But this would not be his responsibility, nor Keith's. Someone else would do it—the “refit commanding officer” (who was he, anyway? He should know; the man must have been in that crowd he had tried to talk to on the forecastle, must have introduced himself). Richardson climbed down the ladder into the crew's dinette. At sea it had always been filled with an active throng of men, either reading, seeing a movie, playing some game, or eating. Now it was deserted, vacant, like the whole submarine. Already silent, devoid of life. Stagnant, the way life usually became. And smelling a little stagnant, too.

He moved forward into the wardroom. There was a pile of official mail, some newspapers, a sheaf of patrol reports of other submarines. By custom, all of it—even the official letters—would be looked at during the next patrol. Things demanding answers immediately would be brought to him by the refit skipper. No point in worrying about it now. No point in thinking about any of it. Keith would be waiting and was probably hungry.

Submarine skippers returning from war patrol generally got the use of an automobile from the ComSubPac motor pool during their stay in port. Favorite skippers always got the best cars, but of course they had to drive them themselves. None so far as he knew, Richardson reflected as he arrived in front of the admiral's house on Makalapa Hill, had ever been given the admiral's own car and driver.

“What are your instructions, driver?” he said as he stepped out of the car.

“Deliver you, sir, and return when you or the admiral send for me,” replied the sailor. He was dressed in immaculate whites. His sleeves bore several hashmarks denoting successive enlistments. He wore a silver submarine insignia.

Struck by sudden curiosity, Richardson bluntly asked the obvious
question. “How is it that an experienced submariner like you is pushing this sedan around Pearl Harbor?”

“I was on the
Nerka
, Commander,” said the man, suddenly sober. “They took me off just before Captain Kane took her out on her last run. This is my relief crew assignment, and I guess I was just lucky. In a couple of weeks I'll be getting my orders back to a new sub in the States.”

“Thanks, sailor,” said Richardson, solemn in his turn. “I'm sorry. Captain Kane was a damn good friend of mine.”

“I know it, sir.” The driver seemed to have difficulty in speaking. “Thank you for what you did for him and my buddies.”

The man wanted to say something more. There was a hint of embarrassment in his eyes, as if ashamed to be caught in a sentimentality. He avoided those of his passenger, stared through the windshield as he began to speak, then wrenched himself around to face Richardson. “We know what you done out there, sir,” he said, “and why you done it. I was with Captain Kane on the
R-12
before, and I put in to go with him on the
Nerka
. He was a great skipper. Everybody on that boat loved him. Now I'm supposed to go back to Mare Island for a new sub, but I was just wondering—my buddies are all out there with him. It's almost like I jumped ship on them. I should go out one more time, before I go back, because of that. So—I was wondering—do you have room for a spare auxiliaryman on the
Eel
?”

Richardson made note of the man's name, service number, and organization in the thin notebook he habitually carried. He had walked nearly the entire distance to Admiral Small's front door before the despairing realization struck him. “We all know what you did,” the man had said. Richardson should have expected this. Of course everyone knew. Certainly the
Nerka
's auxiliaryman did not condemn him, would even support him because of his own feeling of loss. But he knew him for what he was: the man who had killed Bungo Pete by running down the lifeboats of a torpedoed ship.

The admiral's door swung open before he reached it. A white-jacketed Filipino steward held out his hand for Richardson's cap. Was there something behind his smile? A smirk? But there was no time to think about it. The party was already going on. Admiral Small had evidently arranged for the other guests to be there before Richardson's arrival.

Among them, to his astonishment, were three women.

“Rich, you're the lion of the evening,” said Admiral Small, taking him by the arm. “Let me introduce the others—ladies first; we have to remember our manners. This is Mrs. Elliott, Lieutenant Wood, Miss Lastrada—oh, you already know each other?”

The last time Richardson had seen Joan Lastrada she had been Jim Bledsoe's date at a hectic between-patrols party just before
Walrus
had departed on her last voyage. Richardson had felt it before, but even so, when their hands met at the formal introduction, he was unprepared for the sexuality which she was able, wittingly or not, to put into a simple handshake.