Crash Dive

by Martin H. Greenberg

  Seaman Tommy Barton stood in line on the rickety pier with seven other men, looking down at the strange contraption of black iron tied there. Corporal Coleman nudged him with an elbow and snickered. “Y’all know what they’re callin’ that thing over’n Charleston, don’t ya?” he said. “ ‘The Peripatetic Coffin!’ Ain’t that a hoot?”

  “That’s not exactly encouraging,” Barton replied. “From what I heard, that monster’s eaten something like thirty men already.”

  “She has a name,” Petty Officer Maury snapped. “An honorable one.”

  “A boat named for her inventor,” Corporal DeWitt said, his long face gloomy, “a man who she killed in the fust place. ’T’ain’t rightly natural, if you take m’meanin’.”

  “Quiet in the ranks, there,” Dixon called from the end of the pier. “Williams! You’re first, forrard hatch. Jenkins, you’re first down the aft hatch.”

  The Peripatetic Coffin, as Coleman had called it, was long, low in the water, and iron plated, measuring perhaps forty feet from her deadly forward spar to the large rudder aft. A pair of small towers, just sixteen inches high, with glass portholes in their sides and round hatches on top protruded from the deck fore and aft, fourteen feet apart, the hatches open wide to the night. A low box just aft of the forward hatch supported a pair of tubes that might have been narrow smokestacks, like the stack on a steam-powered David, but Barton knew better.

  He flexed his hands at his sides, thinking about the trial to come, trying not to think about failure or about DeWitt’s misgivings. The Other Side seemed so very close now. He shook that thought away as well.

  A handful of officers and civilian dignitaries watched from the dock. One was James McClintock, one of the designers of the small vessel tied to the Fort Johnson wharf. Another was Lieutenant John Payne, who’d had considerable experience with her and helped train the men who swam her.

  “Gentlemen,” a city official said with an aristocratic flourish to his voice and manner, “the hopes and prayers of the Confederacy, of the sovereign state of South Carolina, and of the proud city of Charleston, voyage with you!”

  “Thank you, sir,” Dixon replied, doffing his hat. “We will do our best, and leave the rest to Providence.”

  Lieutenant Payne raised his cap. “Gentlemen! Hurrah for the CSS Hunley and her brave crew of volunteers!”

  Three cheers echoed out across the water as, one by one, the waiting men descended from the pier, balancing themselves atop the ungainly craft’s rounded upper hull, then squeezed themselves down through the narrow hatch openings. Barton found himself staring down into the tight black circle of almost palpable darkness that was the after hatch. It looked like a tunnel plunging down into the water.

  Or the opening to a submerged tomb.

  He watched Coleman wriggle down through that opening, and then it was his turn. The strange craft had been riding fairly high alongside the pier, but as more men squeezed in through the hatches, she began to settle a bit, until the deck was awash and only the hatch towers and the pipes forward were well clear of the water. Stepping carefully down from the pier and onto the deck, Barton gingerly balanced himself upright for a final look around. The air was cool and calm, the first few stars beginning to pierce the twilight. Across the harbor, beyond the guardian island of Fort Sumter, the lights of Fort Moultrie twinkled in the gathering gloom of the evening. Less than three years ago, thunder and flame had shattered the peace of this place, the opening volleys of the War of Southern Independence. Tonight another volley in that war would be delivered . . . but stealthily, and shrouded by the night.

  Aware that he appeared to those ashore to be hesitating, perhaps fearful, he took in a final long, deep breath of cool air, savoring the taste, the salt-tinged freshness, and then he stepped into the hatch and began working his way down into the belly of the beast.

  A tight fit, a squeezing of the mind as much as of the body. Each time, Barton thought, it was tougher to steel himself to wriggle into this nightmare contraption, to deliberately cut himself off from fresh air and clean light and enter the stygian, walled-off blackness of a horizontal iron pipe just three feet wide and four and a half feet high. Manholes they called the hatch towers, and a fair name it was. The beast’s interior was very like a sewer pipe, save that the ends were pinched off ahead and behind. The Peripatetic Coffin actually had begun its career as a ship’s boiler, twenty-five feet long, with a longitudinal section cut away and the remaining halves welded together to make it snake-slender. This inner hull had then been capped on each end by an iron casement, which held the ballast tanks fore and aft and further streamlined the craft.

  Streamlining on the outside, however, translated as claustrophobic on the inside. One moved carefully within those ironbound confines, nearly doubled over in pitch darkness and always at risk of cracking head, elbow, or knee. The lumen of the pipe was further constricted by the hand crank, which ran horizontally down the length of the craft above the centerline, supported at intervals by shaft braces and all but filling the cramped interior space. The darkness stank of oil, sweat, and stale air.

  The men had entered the craft from front and back, filing in from the two hatchways toward the center. As next-to-last man in astern, Barton didn’t need to navigate through the tight space more than a couple of feet before coming to his station, squeezed in between the hand crank and the curved, starboard side bulkhead. A wooden block bolted to the base of the portside bulkhead gave him a place to brace his feet; another block partway up the starboard bulkhead gave him a narrow seat, of sorts, to perch on. Finding the blocks by feel alone, he took his place at the crank, shoulders and head hunched over beneath the low overhead, and waited.

  At least it wasn’t completely dark within the iron beast. A sky glow of twilight and moonlight spilled down through both hatches, penetrating the darkness at least for a foot or two. In addition, a single candle had been lit all the way forward at the pilot’s station. Barton had to hunch forward a bit more to see the candle past the waiting line of other crewmen filling the craft, but that golden spark was comforting when he caught sight of it, a beacon in the darkness.

  So long as the candle is lit, everything’s all right. That lesson had been drilled into all of them repeatedly during the weeks of training just passed. When the candle’s lit there’s air to breathe.

  Air . . .

  Barton felt the rising panic, an old, familiar sensation clawing at his throat, and yet again he battled the cold and desperate urge to leave his station and claw his way back up into the open air and freedom.

  Petty Officer Maury was last down the aft hatch. When he pulled it shut after himself with a boiler-factory clang, it was as though the whole rest of the world ceased to exist. Lieutenant Dixon clambered down through the forward manhole, remaining standing, his head encased in the tower so that he could see out through the open hatch. The darkness now was very nearly absolute, for the lieutenant’s body blocked the gleam of the candle forward. In darkness, then, Barton felt Petty Officer Maury taking his place at the crankshaft further aft, felt the craft’s hull rocking gently with the movement.

  “Cast off fore and aft!” Dixon called, his voice muffled. Thumps and clangs rang through the hull from outside, as soldiers on the pier untied the lines that let the iron craft drift free.

  “Ahead slow!” Dixon commanded, and the eight men began turning the crankshaft with a slow, steady beat. Metal chirped on metal. The smell of oil grew stronger. As Dixon turned the horizontally mounted wheel forward, control cables running along the overhead tightened and clattered, swinging the big rudder aft. Barton felt the screw bite the water, felt the vessel turning in clumsy response to the helm.

  The CSS Hunley was underway.

  The Silent Company continued to gather, hovering now just at the edge of the world’s walls, their thoughts softly rustling in moonlight-broken darkness. Slowly, her wake sparkling in the moon dance, the pencil-slender vessel churned away from the shore. Soldiers, waiting in s
ilence along the ramparts of Fort Johnson and within the embrasures of Marshall Battery, watched her go.

  The Hunley had been born as the brainchild of two men, Baxter Watson and James McClintock. Not long after, a third man, Horace L. Hunley, had joined the two New Orleans inventors, bringing much-needed capital to the project, as well as his flamboyant enthusiasm. Hard-pressed for the iron, cannon, and shipyard resources needed for a fleet powerful enough to challenge the ever-tightening Union blockade, the Confederate Navy had turned to southern inventors for new and creative ways of striking at the powerful Yankee foe. Ironclads, gunboats, and torpedo boats of revolutionary design all had been built and outfitted in rivers, sounds, ports, and inlets from New Orleans to the James River. One such experiment, a class of gunboat called Davids, had shown some promise; one had damaged the Yankee cruiser New Ironsides right here in Charleston Harbor just four months ago.

  But where the Davids were designed to approach a Yankee vessel with deck awash, unnoticed in the night, to drive a bow spar laden with an explosive charge, called a torpedo, into the target’s hull, the Watson-McClintock design was more ambitious, a craft with ballast tanks designed to submerge completely, operating as a true submarine war craft.

  As originally conceived, the vessel was designed to tow an explosive charge with a contact exploder astern on the end of a long cable. Submerging as she approached the target, she would pass underneath the ship’s keel and drag the torpedo into the enemy’s side.

  The first such submarine, called Pioneer, had been deliberately scuttled in New Orleans when the Yankees had captured that port. The second, Pioneer II, had gone to the bottom in Mobile Bay, taking her crew with her.

  The Pioneer III, however, had shown tremendous promise, albeit with some bad teething pains. She’d been originally intended to be steam powered, but her designers had never been able to work out the problem of how to keep a coal-fired engine burning without an air supply and without poisoning the air her crew was breathing. Experiments with an electromagnetic engine were eventually abandoned, and, in her final form, Pioneer III was run by muscle-power, with eight crewmen crouched side by side in the dark confines of her belly, steadily turning the crankshaft to drive the slender craft through the water.

  Her torpedo design had been reworked as well. Early experiments had shown that the floating torpedo could actually overtake the vessel in a strong wind, and so the trailing tether had been abandoned in favor of the more conventional torpedo spar, a fourteen-foot boom projecting from the submarine’s prow with a sixty-pound contact torpedo mounted on the end. The crew need only drive the torpedo into the enemy’s side, then back furiously and pray the explosion didn’t sink target and submarine together. Of course, a boat that could go under the water as well as on the surface . . . the thing wasn’t quite natural, as Corporal DeWitt might say. The builders had ended up with a misbegotten half-breed of a vessel comfortable in neither medium. Built in Mobile, she’d been shipped to Charleston the previous August by rail; Lieutenant Payne had taken her out soon after her arrival. The firm of John Frazer & Company of Charleston had offered a reward of a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who could sink the giant New Ironsides, and a lesser amount for the sinking of any of the other Yankee vessels blockading that port. Payne had steered the Pioneer III for the New Ironsides . . . but long before she reached her target, a passing Confederate steamer had raised a wake that had spilled in through the open hatches and flooded her, sending her to the bottom. Payne had scrambled clear of the forward hatch and escaped, but eight seamen had drowned.

  The Confederate Navy raised the Pioneer III, buried her dead with full honors, and fitted her out for another try. A few days later, Payne had taken her out once more, I and again she’d sunk, this time inexplicably. Payne and two others swam to the surface; five others were trapped and killed.

  The next time Hunley himself had taken the Pioneer III out. After several successful test dives, he’d lined up for a test dive beneath a Confederate ship and opened the forward seacock too quickly. Nose-heavy, the submarine had plunged into the soft mud at the bottom of Charleston Harbor and been unable to break free. This time every man on board, including Horace Hunley, had perished.

  Yet again she was raised, yet again she sank, killing her entire crew. General P.G.T. Beauregard, in command of the Charleston defenses, had declared the experiment over. “Leave her in the mud!” he’d declared.

  “She will kill no more!”

  Two men continued to believe in the submarine’s potential, however—Lieutenants George Dixon and William Alexander, both of the 21st Alabama infantry. They’d been brought in, together with a number of army volunteers to train crews to man the vessel, which by now was collecting grim nicknames such as Peripatetic Coffin and Widowmaker. Once again they’d raised the Pioneer HI from the harbor mud, cleaned her out, and buried her dead. This time they put her on display at Mount Pleasant on the north side of the harbor, where they established a school for submariners. Throughout the winter of 1863 to 1864, they trained volunteers and made periodic test cruises around the harbor. Perhaps to lift the shadow of an unlucky boat, they renamed her after the inventor who’d died aboard her—the CSS H.L. Hunley.

  Tom Barton had joined the crew in November, attracted by the notion of striking back at the Yankee giant . . . and in part, at least, by the promise of reward money for sinking a blockading ship. A sailor of a family of sailors, born in Norfolk and apprenticed to the steamer USS Niagara, he’d spent the first years of the war as an able-bodied seaman aboard various merchant ships running in and out of Charleston. As the Yankee blockade had tightened its grip, however, driving more and more shipping companies out of business, he’d ended up on the beach. Captivated by the sight of the exotic Hunley on display, he’d volunteered at the Mount Pleasant school for duty and had been accepted.

  For the next several months he’d trained at the school under Dixon and Alexander’s command, attending classes and exercising each morning and spending the afternoons taking the Hunley for practice excursions around the harbor. Despite being a sailor, he did not consider himself to be the superstitious type. The fact that the Hunley had killed nearly thirty men so far in her brief career bothered him not at all . . . at least, not at first. The Hunley’s problems had all been because of poor training, after all—not because of any flaw in the planning. As Barton learned at the school, the idea of the submarine had been around for a long time. Alexander the Great was supposed to have used a glass diving bell to explore the wonders of the sea bottom . . . and during the Revolutionary War, David Bushnell’s Turtle had attempted to sink HMS Eagle in New York Harbor, an attempt that had failed only because the wooden screw used to attach a bag of gunpowder to the target vessel’s hull had failed to penetrate Eagle’s copper-sheathed bottom.

  Only now had technology and human inventiveness reached the point where a true submarine was practical.

  As Barton worked more and more with the Hunley and his fellow submariners, though, he began wondering if a boat could be jinxed. It was nothing he could put his finger on, exactly. There’d been no further accidents or deaths since he’d started training. But sometimes it seemed that the Hunley was . . . was calling to him, somehow.

  Or was it the voices of her drowned or suffocated crews he heard, like a dry rattle of dead leaves at the very edge of audibility?

  He could hear them now, like rustling laughter. He gripped the crankshaft more tightly, concentrating on the chirp and rhythm of the strokes, silently willing the voices to leave him alone. It wasn’t so bad when he was stroking. The sheer muscular exertion, the grunts and puffings of the other men, the squeak of metal on metal along the crankshaft, the sound of his own breathing as he strained at the shaft all conspired to crowd his hearing and empty his thoughts. It was when they stopped that he had problems. . . .

  “All stop!” Dixon called, and the eight men sagged against the crankshaft, breathing hard. The Hunley drifted along on the surface, barely moving now in
silence.

  Oh, Jesus Christ. “Stop it!”

  “Whadja say, Tommy?” Coleman asked.

  “Nothing.” He’d not known he’d spoken aloud. How long had they been cranking? Even if he’d had a watch—he didn’t, not on the $19.83 per month paid him by the Confederate Navy—he wouldn’t have been able to read it in the darkness. He wished he could see. He wished the voices would stop. . . .

  Join us, the leaf-rustle whispered in the dark. Come. Join us. . . .

  Join us. . . .

  Unterseeboot UC-17 twisted and dodged, seeking to avoid the charge of the British destroyers bearing down overhead. The water was deep here, west of the coast of Ireland, but the UC-17, a primitive iron hull five times longer than the Hunley, could not dive much deeper than twice her own hull length. With an operational diving depth of three hundred feet and a crush depth of six hundred feet, she was rapidly running out of places to hide.

  On board, in conditions only slightly less claustrophobic than those aboard the Hunley, thirty-one officers and men waited, staring with strained and sweat-soaked faces up at the overhead . . . and through it, to the oncoming warships. They’d been submerged for some hours now, and the air was growing foul with carbon dioxide, fuel oil, and the stink of fear.

  They could hear the steadily growing throb of the enemy’s screws in the water. And, as the throb built to a pounding crescendo, many in the crew heard the muffled splash of that deadly new weapon, the wasserbomb—the depth charge—three hundred pounds of high explosives packed into a metal drum and triggered by a pressure-activated detonator.

  UC-17’s crew had been through this before. Many counted silently after the splash, picturing in their minds the descent of the wasserbomben through the darkening sea. When the charge reached the depth for which the detonator had been set, there was a sharp snick-snick, followed a second later by the hull-ringing blam of the main charge.