The U-19's Last Kill

by Jack Finney

  Then the air flasks were hissing, the tanks blowing, but slowly, sluggishly. And as I watched the gauge, it dropped to one-forty, then one-forty-five, and I swung to Alice. She was crawling to Rosa, who lay flat on her back, arms out flung, eyes closed, and I could see that she was dead or unconscious. Then Alice reached her, lifting her head from the deck, and I had to swing to my board, for again Moreno was shouting, “Fore and aft dive planes! Surface, surface! Forty degrees!” and he began calling for power.

  Then my needles were slowly and reluctantly lifting themselves, and I was twisting my dials with all of my being concentrated in my fingertips, nursing those motors to turn our screws through these last moments of waning power. They were turning—but slowly, slowly—and! swung to dart a glance at the depth gauge. It hung at a hundred and fifty-five feet, no further lifting capacity to be had from the ballast tanks, and we didn’t dare use power for the pumps.

  Then, very slowly, nearly imperceptibly, the screws turned just a little faster, and then we were at a hundred and fifty, a hundred forty-five, a hundred and forty feet. The pressure gripping the screws lessening, they turned steadily faster, and we continued to rise, rapidly now.

  We broke the surface like a sodden log, and the instant we did I cut power, and Moreno, crouched on the ladder under the hatch, broke open the conning-tower hatches, and I was running to the engine room Moreno shouted to me that the submarine was sinking, decks barely awash. But I had the diesels started, and, as they rumbled into life, we had forward motion, the diving planes lilting now, barely keeping us afloat.

  We got the pumps running then and, with a portion of the hull out. ending the leaks in the upper third of the ship, we kept at least even with the other leaks and moved slowly ahead toward the west, and the shore eight or ten miles ahead.

  No one spoke. In the aft compartment Rosa moaned, and I turned my head and saw her sitting up on the deck, Alice kneeling beside her and supporting her. “How is she?” I said, and Alice replied, “All right, I think. She’s conscious.”

  “I am all right,” Rosa mumbled, “Where are we?”

  “On the surface; we’re out of it.”

  Moreno raised his head to look across at me, and a corner of his mouth lilted in a little grin. “Yeah.” he said wonderingly, “we got through at that, didn’t we? And he didn’t depth-charge.”

  I nodded and stood dully thinking about it, then I knew what had happened. Passing over the boiling turbulence of the Mary’s beginning wake, the destroyer captain had dropped no charges—not directly downward, at least—because he couldn’t. Until the Mary picked up speed, distributing the turbulence of her wake over a little distance, he could not count on the action of his depth-charge pressure settings. They could have exploded instantly in the complexities of pressure just below the surface of the massive whirlpool of the Mary’s beginning motion-lifting the destroyer’s own stern from the water. And it was in those first moments—the Mary barely under way, the giant propellers thrashing almost in one spot—that we had passed under them. Nor could his sonar detect us in that incredible roaring boil of water.

  “What’s he doing now, Moreno?” I said, and he shrugged: he hardly cared just now, and neither did I, but he pushed himself forward toward me and began climbing tiredly to the deck, and I followed. The circle of sky overhead was still blue, but on the surface it was dusk; on the far-off shore ahead I saw the first pinpricks of light. Then I turned and saw the Mary, still high on the sea, her stern broad and huge still, but already a mile or more off. There was no sign of the destroyer, and I said. “What’s he doing, Moreno?”

  “Figures we’re a fast, modern sub, maybe,” he answered. “Able to keep up with the Mary for a while and hanging under her as long as we can. Probably figures we can dive six or eight hundred feet”—he grinned and shook his head at the idea—“and that we’re diving at the same time. I don’t know, but he sure wouldn’t figure us to do what we did; he’d never figure we’d pop up far to the rear. He had to guess, that’s all; he couldn’t detect us under the Mary; he just knew we were there somewhere. He had to guess where we were and what we were doing, and he guessed wrong.”

  We stood staring at the Mary then, shrinking steadily and rapidly, her hull down now on the darkening horizon. “He could still get us,” Moreno murmured. “Just turn around and come back; we’re a sitting duck.”

  He didn’t, though. Lost somewhere in the small silhouette of that great stern far to the north and east now—or perhaps ripping through the water around the huge liner, guarding the ship and hunting us with her sonar—was the destroyer; we couldn’t even see her. Undoubtedly her captain fell that his primary duty was to protect the Mary: in any case, he stayed with her.

  Steps sounded slowly on the iron rungs just below us; then Rosa’s head appeared at our feet, and Moreno stooped to help her up. Alice was just behind her, and I climbed out of the tower to make room, leaning over to help her to the deck and then out of the tower.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this, Alice,” I said then, and she moved a shoulder in a tired shrug.

  “I’m all right,” she said and glanced up at me. “What were you doing, Hugh? Why were you on the Mary?”

  I told her then—briefly, enough so that she understood—and she listened and stood thinking about it. Then she glanced at me again. “And so you didn’t get your money and freedom after all,” she said.

  “I don’t care,” I answered, and realized it was true. I didn’t care.

  “Why not?” Alice said “You risked a lot for it.” And I stood there at the bow of the U-19 in the darkness beside her, thinking about it, trying to answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly then. “All I know is that, instead of regret and a sense of loss, I have an enormous feeling of relief. As though I’d escaped something unspeakably dirty that would have spoiled and corrupted me for the rest of my life. I don’t mean the theft.” I shook my head. “I was glad to take money from a Nazi who stole it himself. And I’m glad we took it away from him. But I’m glad we haven’t got it either; I really am, because the way we took it is smeared; the big adventure turned into something rotten. Would Moreno actually have fired those torpedoes at the Mary if it came right down to it? Maybe not. Maybe he wouldn’t have, no matter what he thinks himself. I’m going to decide that he wouldn’t have.

  “But I don’t care about the money,” I said to Alice. “And for other reasons too. Maybe I’ve grown up a little, I don’t know. But the things I’ve talked and worried about—freedom, living my own life—seem a little unreal now, or at least incomplete. Rebellion, resistance, not accomplishing everything that’s set before you—they’re fine, they’re O.K, but you said it a little while ago, Alice, there ought to be more in back of it than simple selfishness.”

  She was looking up at me in the almost darkness, but I could see her lips, slightly parted, and her eyes, shining and eager and excited. I knew suddenly what she was thinking and hoping now, what she was waiting for me to say but I couldn’t.

  Alice knew it, and she turned to look straight ahead again. “I’m leaving New York, Hugh,” she said quietly then. “Right away; I won’t even go back to my job. I don’t want to be here any more.” She knew that I understood why she wanted to leave New York, but—she was a wonderful girl—she didn’t reproach me or even refer to it. Instead she said, “I don’t want you to be caught. Hugh; you harmed no one who didn’t deserve it. I don’t want you to be traced through me, so I’m going away, tonight.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but——” She didn’t finish; she didn’t say. “I love you,” not aloud, but I knew she’d said it in her mind.

  “You’ve had nothing but trouble from me,” I murmured. “I’m sorry about everything, Al.” I put my hand on hers, lying on the cable railing, and she turned her palm upward, squeezed my hand, then turned back to the tower alone.

  Watching the lights of the shore. Moreno brought us in, a mile
offshore opposite the little rented house on the beach at Fire Island. He climbed out or the tower to begin untying our raft, and I climbed down inside. “We’re here,” I said to Linc at the rudder wheel, and he nodded and stood up Lauffnauer and Vic said nothing, and I didn’t even glance at them; but as I walked aft toward the engine, I heard steps climbing the ladder. I shut down the engine then and ran back toward the control room, the pumps stopped, I was in a hurry now, and I saw that Linc and Vic were gone.

  I climbed up then and out onto the deck, Lauffnauer following. Then, once more, as he had forty years before. Lauffnauer slammed the hatch shut behind him.

  Moreno had the raft inflated and waiting, and Linc had brought up the paddles. Now we crowded into it, Moreno steering in the stern. Linc forward with the other paddle, and moved carefully away, the sides of the overloaded raft only an inch or so above surface. We didn’t bother anchoring the little sub; her engine off and her pumps stopped, she was dead and sinking, and we wanted to be well away when she went under. A good fifty feet off, we stopped and sat watching her. Already her deck was two feet under, only the tiny conning tower above the surface, I saw that a swatch of the new paint had been scraped from it when she’d nudged the underside of the Mary; and in the Taint, beginning starlight a part of the old paint underneath it was visible again. I couldn’t see all of it or even actually read it in that light, but I knew what it said—U-19. Then, the last remnant of the little ship’s diminishing buoyancy abruptly going, the Hided white letters slipped down into the sea, and we left the U-19—to rest there forever now—where her first crew had left her half a lifetime before.

  We didn’t even say good-by; not all of us, anyway. In the little house behind the beach Rosa took Alice into one of the bedrooms to lend her a dress, hat, stockings and shoes; Alice’s dress was torn and streaked with dirt, her shoes soaked and ruined. I walked directly to the bathroom, and—first trimming my beard as closely as possible with scissors—I shaved as quickly as I could, We’d meant to stay hidden here in the house for a week, only Rosa and Moreno showing themselves on the beach. Then, shaved and wearing the city clothes Moreno had brought here more than a week before, we’d have left one or two at a time—alter dark and on a crowded weekend. But I wasn’t staying now, in the bathroom I changed into my blue suit, a tic, while shirt, low shoes and a felt hat; and when I came out, Alice was waiting. I didn’t see Rosa or Moreno, but Linc was sitting on the old davenport, forearms on his knees, hands clasped before him, staring down at the floor. “So long, Linc,” I said, and he glanced up to smile wanly. “So long, Hugh,” he said, and I took Alice’s arm, and we walked out—past Vic in a chair and Lauffnauer standing at a front window staring out to sea—without a word or a glance.

  As we stepped onto the porch, Rosa stood on the sand at the fool of the front steps, Moreno on his knees at the deflated raft, rolling it up, and they looked up at us. For a moment, pausing at the head of the stairs with Alice, I looked down at them—at this handsome woman in the black slacks and sweater, whom I’d kissed, and wondered if I was in love with. Then I walked down the stairs. “Rosa,” I said, “am I going to see you again?”

  She looked at me for a moment, then turned to took down at Moreno, who was kneeling in the sand, looking up at her. “Yes,” she answered then, and smiled. “We will invite you to the wedding.”

  For a moment I stared at her, almost stupidly. “You’re in love with Moreno?”

  “Love.” She tossed her head, grinning at me. “I will love my husband.” Then suddenly she stepped close to me, lifting her arms to my neck. “You do not mind,” she called over her shoulder to Moreno, “if he kisses the bride early?”

  “Have I got any choice?” he growled in the darkness, but I knew he was grinning.

  “No,” she said, then kissed me, long and hard. I kissed her back, and once again I enjoyed it, fiercely, but now I knew; I was fond or this girl, very much, but it wasn’t love. Rosa stepped back then. “Good-by, Hugh,” she said softly.

  “Good-by, Rosa,” I said. Alice, I saw, was walking on, over the dune toward the beach ahead, I stepped over to Moreno then, and he got to his feet. “So long, Ed,” I said, and held out my hand. He glanced at it, then took my hand.

  “So long, lieutenant,” he said, but his voice was affectionate, and he grinned at me, and I grinned back. Then I hurried over the sand to catch up with Alice.

  She was waiting down at the water, and we walked along the beach then toward the ferry. For perhaps a quarter of a mile we had nothing to say, and, except for the regular slow crash of the surf on the beach and the crunch of our steps on the damp sand, we walked in silence. I looked down at the girl beside me who’d soon be leaving New York—tonight, she’d said. We’d soon be saying good-by, I thought, and then, walking along the sand beside her, I knew that I didn’t want to do that. “I think you’d better tell me where you’ll be going,” I said, and she looked up at me.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged, and grinned at her. “I need a job.” I said. “I might as well look for one in the same place, and maybe we can see each other. So, you mind if I tagalong?”

  She shook her head slowly. “No.” she said, “I don’t mind.” Then she reached for my hand as I reached for hers, and as we walked along beside the water, grinning at each other, we heard the sound. It was far off, far to the north and east, and only just barely audible—the deepchested, rumbling, foghorn growl of an enormous ship. It might not have been the Queen Mary; it could have been another ship, I suppose. But the horn of a ship like the Mary can be heard for miles at sea, and it could have been she; it just might have been I think that it was.

  THE END