Rising Tides

by Taylor Anderson

  S-19 gradually increased speed to six knots, a reasonably gentle demand on her single shaft, abused batteries, and the generating capacity of her starboard diesel. The sea remained a little choppy, but not bad enough to button up the boat. She desperately needed airing out after the long confinement of so many filthy and admittedly nauseated ’Cats in her claustrophobic, smoky, ash-filled pressure hull. Add the fact that only the officers’ head was working (the sea valve was jammed on the other one, probably from all the time the boat spent wallowing in the sand), and the slop buckets they’d resorted to made matters even worse. S-19 was a “pig boat” again, in most essential respects.

  Sandy Whitcomb worked on the port diesel all night, with the eager assistance of his new “division’s” strikers. He knew the engine would run now; he just had to refurbish it sufficiently that it wouldn’t destroy itself if asked to run too long. Tex Sheider’s strikers had rigged what he hoped was a suitable antenna, and he thought he had the voltage requirements for his little transmitter about right. The crystal receiver had already been rigged, but even at its maximum extension, the warped number two periscope wasn’t as high as Toolbox’s shortest mast had been. So far they weren’t getting much but hash. Nothing was coming out of Paga-Daan on Mindanao, and anyone else with a transmitter was probably just too far away. They’d almost never been able to hear Manila directly.

  Irvin was on the conn tower, leaning on the rail facing aft. It was cramped there, like everywhere on the old boat, and two people wouldn’t have fit. The painfully bright sun hovered almost directly overhead, and beneath him, a ’Cat emerged, bearing a slop bucket and chittering disgustedly. She dumped it over the side of the outer hull superstructure, then waited for water to surge over the pressure hull so she could rinse the bucket out. She was still chittering when she disappeared, never looking up.

  “You okay, Skipper?” Tex asked behind him.

  Irvin nodded. “Just tired.” He yawned and smiled. “Glad to be underway, though.” He gestured to the southwest, where all that remained visible of Talaud was a pinkish-gray pall, almost fifty miles distant now, then turned to face his exec. “Put on a hell of a light show last night,” he said, chuckling a little self-consciously. “Almost like it was throwing a fit because we got away.”

  Tex nodded. “I guess we did, though.” He chuckled too. “I have to admit—now—sometimes I wondered! That damn Danny was starting to give me the creeps!”

  Irvin began to reply, but stopped when he saw Tex’s mouth drop open in stunned disbelief. He looked aft again and was too shocked by what he saw to speak himself. The distant, glowing smudge had become a black, sun-blazed mushroom of titanic proportions, roiling upward and outward with impossible speed and power.

  It was almost a minute before Irvin managed to say “Jesus!” and in that time, the hideous stain on the morning sky just continued to grow.

  “It looks like God just dropped a bomb!” Tex said, hushed.

  “Yeah,” Irvin agreed. “A God-size bomb.” For a moment he said nothing more, then: “What happens when a bomb hits the water?”

  “Well ... you get a really big splash.”

  “Yeah ...”

  After a while, the sea began to roar, loud enough to drown out the sound of the diesel.

  “Oh, no,” Irvin said.

  “What is it?” Tex shouted. Cries of alarm came from the hatch behind them.

  “It’s the sound of the blast! Sound moves four or five times faster through the water!”

  Tex’s face went pale. “I’ve heard tidal waves can move almost as fast as a sound through air!”

  Irvin snatched his binoculars from his chest and focused them at the base of the distant, towering plume. In the gathering light of the sun, not yet engulfed by the expanding blackness, Irvin saw a distinct white line rising, far away, between the cloud and the deep blue sea. The horizon gave the impression of being almost slightly humped. The binoculars in his hands began to shake. Wrenching his eyes away from them, he turned and looked at Tex. “Rig for dive!” he shouted.

  “Dive? We can’t dive! We’ll never come up!” Irvin thrust the binoculars at him and Tex took a look. “God almighty. That was one hell of a splash!” he said. He spared Irvin a look that could have said, “God help us,” “It’s been nice knowing you,” or “Why’d you let me volunteer for this?” but immediately stepped to the hatch.

  “Rig for dive!” he bellowed down below. “Secure all hatches this goddamn instant!”

  “Clear the bridge!” Irvin yelled, and reached for the dive alarm before remembering they’d never fixed the switch on the conn tower. The suddenly terrified Lemurian lookouts plunged down the ladder, followed closely by Tex. Irvin didn’t even take another look before he dropped down after them. In the control room, he twisted the roundknobbed switch three times.

  Arrgha! Arrgha! Arrgha!

  “Dive! Dive! Dive!” he said into the microphone. Almost immediately, the various station phone lights lit up. Expecting panicked demands for an explanation, he continued: “Trust me on this, people, it’s dive or die! Porter and Hardee, report to the fore and aft berthing spaces to pass instructions! Stay off the phones unless there’s an emergency.” He looked at Tex, who shrugged. “Mr. Sheider and I have the dive,” he said. He hoped they did. “Secure the starboard engine, close main induction. Answer bells on batteries!”

  Tex took a breath. “Open all main vents! Vent negative!”

  “Flood safety, flood negative!” Irvin continued. He heard Tex bark a laugh.

  “Ah, pressure in the boat, Skipper,” Tex apologized. “The board’s green!”

  Feverishly, desperately, Irvin, Tex, Porter, Hardee, and Whitcomb shouted, cajoled, explained, and pleaded with their otherwise Lemurian crew to learn and execute procedures most had never remotely expected to perform. Hardee had been just a frightened child the first time he submerged with the boat, but he’d been interested and picked up a lot then—and since. There were a few “Crazy Cats” who thought it would be fun, and had actually wanted to dive the boat all along, but not many. S-19 was designed as a submarine, but no one had ever expected her to be one again. Not on this world. With aching slowness, the scratch submariners feverishly struggled to force S-19 beneath the waves they’d tried so hard, so long, to put her back upon.

  The sub’s bow planes and damaged stern planes clawed at the sea, and her port screw drove with all its might. Sluggishly, the boat started down. The starboard shaft packing sprayed water at twenty feet, and more water gushed down from the number two periscope packing at thirty-five. Water seeped and dripped from her riveted, tortured seams in every compartment. At fifty feet, water exploded inward from the crew’s head, and the high-pressure pumps were already being overwhelmed. Irvin risked a look above with the number one periscope, and though it should still have been three feet above the sea, sea was all he saw—like he was looking down at it. As he’d feared, it wasn’t an ordinary tidal wave, but a bore—a “splash” wave, as Tex had described it. It wasn’t curling over them like surf breaking on the beach, but he couldn’t see the top, since S-19 wasn’t equipped with a lens adjustment to search the sky for aircraft. Irvin couldn’t even estimate how far away it was. He sounded the collision alarm.

  Somehow, the old submarine had made it fifty feet beneath the sea. She was critically overstressed, but she could have even surfaced again on her own. The wave didn’t give her a chance to try. It brought the boat up. Suddenly, after all her desperate effort to escape Talaud’s death wave, the depth gauge in S-19’s control room swept backward, and in mere moments, the rusty old hull lay exposed in the depth of an immense trough, naked beneath the mountain rising against her. It pounced. In seconds, S-19 went swirling from the surface like a twig caught in an underwater vortex. Down she went, almost tumbling, shedding dive planes, superstructure, anchors—and life, as the mountain surged by above.

  The vortex released her at last, drifting helpless, twitching like a storm-battered fish, bleeding a
ir and oil at four hundred feet—twice as deep as she was ever meant to go.

  CHAPTER 27

  New Scotland, Sunday, December 4, 1943

  The meeting in Walker’s wardroom consumed a lot of Juan’s coffee hoard, but didn’t produce much in the way of new insights. They’d learned precious little over the past week, not nearly enough to be sure of anything, except a possible “short list” of enemy objectives. What the conspiracy actually hoped to achieve, or how, was still a growing mystery. All they could do was try and prepare for as many contingencies as they could imagine. Jenks had come aboard once a day to “train” with Matt in swordsmanship, and he did improve, but mostly they brainstormed and discussed what Jenks had learned. It wasn’t much: a swift Dominion dispatch sloop had cleared Scapa Flow, and another later departed New Glasgow to the west the very night Walker arrived at New Scotland, but nothing flying the red flag had come or gone since. That seemed to confirm their suspicions that whatever was up, the Dominion was involved and major preparations had been underway for quite some time. Matt was impressed by how quickly the conspirators reacted, and how closely they kept their intentions. It hinted that whatever was coming, Walker’s arrival might have advanced the schedule, lit a shorter fuse, but only minor adjustments were required to a plot that had long been in place.

  “So all we know—still—is that ‘something big’ is liable to drop in the pot tomorrow, but we don’t know what it is,” Gray observed.

  “Yeah,” Matt said, rubbing his eyes. It was almost 0100 and he had a big day ahead of him. Probably they all did. “Jenks still thinks it’s an attack of some kind, probably with Dominion aid for some reason, but he still doesn’t know where it’ll come from or what it might be composed of.” He sighed and swirled the lukewarm coffee in his “Captain’s” cup. “The objective might be Government House and the harbor facilities. It could be the dueling ground itself—there’ll be a lot of brass hanging around. Jenks has tried to make sure all the brass won’t be there, but he has to be careful who he talks to. No telling who’s involved.” Matt gestured at the porthole. “The objective might even be Home Fleet, God knows how. There’s six ‘ships of the line’ and ten frigates in port.” He looked at Frankie. “Mr. Steele, so far all you know you can count on, according to Jenks, are the frigates Euripides and Tacitus.”

  Frankie nodded glumly. “What about our guys?” he asked Palmer.

  The comm officer looked troubled. “Still no news. Salaama-Na and her escorts were on their way, last we heard, but there was another big storm out there, and we haven’t heard anything since. The ‘new’ Fil-pin-built Simms and Jenks’s Achilles sailed right after we did, but there’s been nothing from them either. Aerials or wind generators probably got carried away, and Simms might’ve cracked her batteries, or shorted everything out. Achilles’ set was a piece of ... junk to start with.” O’Casey nodded and Palmer lowered his voice. “Then there’s that damn Talaud. I hear Respite okay at night, but it’s fuzzy. Everything’s fine there, but they’re worried about a surge from the west. It seems the volcano’s been going nuts, and I only get snippets from Maa-ni-la. Respite Station passes stuff along, though, and it’s getting scary back home, Skipper.”

  “So ... nada,” Steele said. Palmer shrugged.

  Matt took a deep breath. “And I guess if anybody’d seen or heard from Ajax, they would’ve said something.” Only silence answered, and he slowly exhaled.

  “Okay,” he said, “here’s the plan. In the morning”—he rubbed his face—“later This morning, at 0400, Mr. Reynolds will take off.... Everything still good with the Nancy, Lieutenant?”

  “Swell, Skipper. It’ll be a little creepy taking off in the dark, but no sweat.”

  “Good.” Matt looked at Frankie. “We’ll raise hell on the ship, blow tubes, vent steam, and generally carry on in a variety of loud, mechanical ways, to cover the sound of the Nancy’s motor. It’ll draw attention, but hopefully nobody’ll notice an airplane taking off in the dark.” He shrugged. “We goofed up telling them what the damn thing was, but most people here don’t believe it anyway. ‘It’s a proven fact that powered flight is impossible,’ ” he quoted wryly, and everyone chuckled. He looked at Reynolds. “It’ll probably be like looking for a needle in a haystack—and we don’t even know if the needle’s there—but if anything’s coming by sea, we need to know it. Keep a sharp eye off Scapa Flow, New Glasgow, and Edinburgh. I know that’s a big grid, and you’re only one plane, but you’re probably the only warning we’ll have.”

  Fred Reynolds gulped. “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  “After that ...” He paused. “Maybe it’ll look like a big send-off. Spin some platters over the shipwide comm too. Boats, Courtney, Stites, and myself will leave for the ‘dueling ground.’ ” He looked at Chack. “As soon as you hear the church bells sound the end to services, form your short company of the 2nd Marines on the dock. O’Casey? You’ll command the Imperial Marines. Lieutenant Blair’s been feeling out Marine officers, much like Jenks has been doing, to see who he can count on. He’ll meet you here with whatever he can scrounge up.”

  “We should go with you,” Chack insisted.

  “No, we have to assume they’ll be expecting that. It might even be what all this is about. You have to be ready to respond to anything. If we need you at the dueling ground, Stites’ll send up a flare. It’s about two miles, but you’ll see it well enough.” He arched an eyebrow. “It’s supposed to be a pretty day.” He laid his hands on the table, palm up. “Anything else? I think we’ve covered every base we can.... I just wish we knew we’re in the right ballpark!” He waited a moment while his crew glanced at one another. “Okay, that’s it. I’m going to try to sleep. Wake me if anybody hears anything!”

  At long last the gathering broke up. Matt started for his quarters, but Spanky blocked his way, hands on hips. Throughout the meeting, he’d done little but chew yellow tobacco and spit in a sediment-filled Coke bottle. “I oughta be with you,” he said.

  “No. I want Frankie to have three boilers all day if he needs them. You’re the only guy in the whole world who can do that ... and maybe not empty the bunkers!”

  “Well ...” Spanky stuck out his hand. “Good luck, Skipper.”

  Matt took the hand. “You too. I expect we’re both going to need it.”

  The atmosphere at the dueling ground was like a big, garish fair, and as Jenks predicted, attendance was huge, even compared to the Pre-Passage Ball. The event had been the talk of the Empire for an entire week, and people came from almost every island to view the spectacle. Not many came from New Ireland, but it was a virtual Company possession and only a few executives there had the means to hire passage. Even so, oddly, not a single ferry or Company official arrived from New Dublin. That struck many as strange, since New Dublin constituted Harrison Reed’s prime constituency. Nevertheless, the New Scotland churches bulged with pious attendees, praying for the souls of the soon to be departed, and bookmakers hawked odds through the teeming crowd.

  “Jenks is runnin’ about even,” Gray announced, reappearing with Courtney, pewter mugs in their hands streaming suds. “Thanks for the loan, Commodore,” he added.

  Jenks nodded. He was dressed simply in a white shirt with a red cravat, his white Navy knee britches, and a pair of knee-high boots. Around his waist was only a tight red sash, into which was thrust his naked sword. His long hair was clubbed at the nape of his neck, and his mustache was freshly braided. He looked very businesslike, and it was clear he’d done this before. Matt had followed his lead, wearing khaki shirt and trousers, both of Lemurian “cotton.” His loose trouser legs were bound by a pair of U.S. Navy leggings. His own naked Academy sword—carefully sharpened—was held against his side by a web belt. He took off his hat and handed it to Juan, who’d sneaked off the ship to join them as they made their way to the grounds. Juan had even shed his sling, gamely moving his arm around when confronted and claiming he didn’t think it was ever really broken at all.

&nbs
p; “What about me?” Matt asked, tying a bandanna around his neck. He needed something to sop at sweat.

  Gray winced. “Lots of sympathy, Skipper, but you’re runnin’ about twenty to one, give or take. Against.”

  “Ridiculous,” Juan scoffed, tying another bandanna around Captain Reddy’s head to keep sweat from running into his eyes. Juan’s attitude reflected that of virtually Walker’s entire crew. The “distracting” send-off they’d given him had been real, and it warmed Matt’s heart, but he’d been a little taken aback by how little concern they’d shown that he might lose his contest. Most just couldn’t understand how far out of his element he would be.

  “That bad?” asked Matt. “What makes folks so pessimistic?”

  Gray cleared his throat. “Well, ah, as we suspected, there’s been scouts down watchin’ you and the commodore prancin’ around on the ship, practicin.’ Lots of folks think you’d do well ... with a lot more practice. But the word is you’re too, ah, ‘predictable.’ Too worried about form ...” He shrugged. “Sorry, sir. Like I always say, too much calf slobber’ll spoil the pie.”

  Matt frowned. “That’s okay, Boats. I’ll give ’em a show, whatever they think.”

  “That’s the spirit, sir! You’ve been in worse scrapes before.”

  Matt nodded thoughtfully. He had. “Who’d you bet on?”

  “You, of course.” He glared at Jenks. “Penny-pinchin’ devil didn’t give me enough money to do it up right, and he demanded fifty percent of my winnings too!”

  “It was a risky wager,” Jenks reminded him. He paused. “The good thing is, your opponent will likely ‘stretch it out.’ He’s a ‘professional,’ and makes his living at this. He’ll want to make it look good; provide a ‘spectacle.’ That should give you plenty of time to practice your new, ‘predictable’ style against him.” He stopped. “Please excuse me,” he said, stepping away to meet his wife, waiting behind the rope line. They saw him cradle her chin with his hand.