Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

3.

South Atlantic Ocean, 1942.

The British warship, pouring out a thick banner of black smoke from her single stack, rose and fell in mild summer seas.

A young U.S. naval officer and his secret, critical Huff Duff equipment by turns sailed unceremoniously through the air in a bosun’s chair from a U.S. destroyer. For a young clockmaker from New England, it was part of a breathtaking adventure that took him far from his land of quiet village greens and white-steepled churches.

Wearing a yellow oilcloth jacket and boots over his dark blue uniform, he held on to the harsh canvas straps as sailors on both sides guided him on his perilous path. More than 100 feet below were the foam-laced waters of the Atlantic. Lieutenant (j.g.) Tim Nordhall was a good swimmer, having grown up lobstering and oystering in the groins and coves of his native New Haven. He didn’t fear the water but regarded with alarm the steep black-rusty iron sides and rails of the two ships rocking in close proximity to each other on a sea that seemed to snort and buck like a nervous mustang. One hit against those steel plates, and he was as good as gone. But the ordeal was over in less than five minutes, as he was hauled aboard the British escort destroyer.

H.M.S. Sturmer was a 306-foot long River Class frigate; one of hundreds hastily riveted together at John Brown shipyard as U-boat kills reached frightful proportions. Built for escort duty, capable of making 20 knots, she carried two paired three-inch deck guns, one fore, one aft, and twin torpedo launching tubes.

The British officers welcomed Tim with grins and handshakes. Their grizzled beards and sun-reddened cheeks revealed rough humor and camaraderie. They wore tan loden overcoats and navy-gray shallow helmets, as well as binoculars and web gear. Tim’s sea bag followed, and was carried below by a sailor. The Brits were seasoned warriors, always looking for the slightest edge against their merciless U-boat adversaries, and they pumped Tim for information about the new class of Huff Duff coming across in wooden crates. Royal Navy sailors swarmed around the equipment, and several bearded warrant officers already had technical manuals in hand as they directed the crates to be moved amidships for mounting on the small deck platform.

Tim found his hosts most congenial. A bosun’s mate saw him to his small cabin near the captain’s. It was a bit of an honor to have one’s own niche in a ship this small, with 140 men jammed in every oily nook and cranny.

The ship was a coal-burner, and when cruising at full steam she laid down a long black plume of smoke that left soot and tar on every surface.

Within a day, the warrants had Tim’s new Huff Duff in its final operational shakedown phase. Tim found them to be highly competent technicians, while he himself was a two-year college man with a rudimentary engineering background that matched theirs. He longed to get back to civilian life if this war would ever end so that he could finish his teacher’s college and start building a career for himself. More than anything, he dreaded returning to decades in the clock factory.

They were a grinning, feisty lot, these Brits. There was always someone with a joke, or a harmonica, or a story about home. The working hours were endless, and sleep came in small bursts here and there, but the men were young and would just as soon stop for a game of cards. The daily grog ration lightened things a bit, though Tim wasn’t much of a drinker or smoker. He ended up telling about girls back home, particularly Sally Levesque who taught English at Hillhouse High School and lived in Hamden. In turn, he learned about Jerry Harris’s blonde Edna in Manchester, who had a cage full of finches that enjoyed sitting in the window twittering to the Sunday morning church bells on a sunny day. And Ben Meyer’s Shula who was already assistant bookkeeper in the family carpet business in Southwark. Or Harvey Kinnan’s red-haired Nuala who was a nurse at Guy’s Hospital and had lost a hand in the Blitz but was still a lovely bird in her whites. “Do you plan to go back and wed your Sally then?” Harvey would ask, his young freckled face wide with innocence and his mouth agape to reveal a missing middle tooth. Dark-bearded Jerry Harris seemed a more dour man who tended to stare, but Tim imagined Edna with her finches must keep him in line, with a sunbeam across his glowering stare. About Sally Tim did not have an honest answer, either for himself or Harv. When you got away from home, Tim was discovering, you started to change, and the ones you left behind often did not change with you. His letter exchanges with Sally had begun to wane after the first year away.

Work and war and responsibility kept Tim too busy to spend much time thinking. Many ships had the new Radars on them, but they were limited in range and often inaccurate. Huff Duff, or High Frequency/Direction Finding, was an entirely different tool with over 600 miles (1000 km) range. Using an unusual cage-shaped sender/receiver mounted on a mast, Huff Duff could intercept German radio traffic and triangulate the approximate location of U-boat packs. A round picture tube similar to a RADAR screen revealed the location of the signal being sent. Already, as these units were being refined in crash R&D projects on both sides of the Atlantic, the effect on the northern convoy routes was measurable—U-boats were beginning to run for their lives. A ship with Huff Duff could use shore-based as well as ship-based Huff Duff units, some located as far away as in the Bahamas, others in newly liberated North Africa, to zero in on wolf packs and then send aerial bombers or antisubmarine ships to kill the killers. The enemy had been sinking hundreds of Lend-Lease ships. Now the Allies were testing the latest American version in the South Atlantic, and about to tip back the balance.

Tim felt like one of the pack as he joined his hosts on the bridge, wearing his own sandy loden coat and flat helmet. The warrants were in complete technical control of their operation. Tim only had to monitor statistics on the unit’s performance. After a three-week cruise, they were due in the Bahamas for a well-earned and anticipated R&R, during which Tim would debrief U.S. and Commonwealth officers on the strong and weak points of the new technology.

Already, they had a possible kill a hundred miles away, off Cape Verde, and they steamed south at top speed. The warrants triangulated, using a sender at Tobruk and another at the Gambia, and a flight of Lancaster bombers had been sent to investigate a possible U-boat nest.

Then disaster struck.

On the first day of the second week of Tim’s cruise aboard Sturmer, just as the ship’s bell rang and the smell of tea and cakes wafted up to the bridge, a tremendous explosion rocked the tail section of the ship. Another followed immediately after, tearing off the bow.

Tim had been standing at the rail amidships, enjoying a chat with two young sailors who were telling stories of the pubs and of their families and girlfriends in Leeds, and a brisk sea breeze blew. It was a sunny day, and Tim felt as if he were on a luxury cruise, if only one could order a good cup of American coffee and maybe a handful of chocolates from home.

The next moment, Tim smashed against a bulkhead. Everything went black. He heard the truncated scream of one of the young sailors as both men disappeared in a gout of flying glass and blood and bits of flesh. By a miracle, Tim found himself intact—he’d been blown into a cavity that had once housed small collapsible life rafts but now contained only rolled-up deck canvas. Jammed awkwardly between two rolls of this sun shield, he had survived when the other two boys clearly hadn’t made it. At first Tim thought he was blind, but he realized his vision was being obscured by a mix of oil and blood smeared like porridge on his face. Stunned, he at first thought he must be missing his arms, but he found them firmly attached and was able to raise his hands to wipe the gore off his face. Already, Sturmer was listing badly, and it looked as if the sea would swallow Tim when she rolled over.

It was clear to him: the U-boat they were hunting had found them first. With two or three torpedoes, the dirty work was done.

Now he heard men screaming as he untangled himself and got on his feet. The steel deck was listing badly, and he pulled himself up a ladder to the upper decks, straddling an upended and shattered lifeboat. Events unfolded with blinding speed now, all wrapped in a white froth of thrown waves as the ship started sinking and the sea surface bubbled up closer by the minute. He caught glimpses of faces in the water, drowning men, arms reaching for ropes and hawsers and anything else to grab, mouths spitting water but taking in more water instead of the air they hoped to breathe. Wounded men, helpless, were drowning in six inches of water on the inundated decks, pinned under floating debris, and they looked up with huge imploring eyes as if it were just a shop window between themselves and the air they needed to breathe. He recognized Jerry Harris’s dour bearded face staring mutely up at him before the sea closed over his face.

Tim slipped on the blood-smeared deck as the ship shifted, and banged his ribs on a steel mooring-winch. Doubled over, he slipped down into the boiling cold water. His breath was too knocked out of him for a sound to escape his mouth, but he tried to scream. Then his mouth filled with water. He felt hands grasping at him with rubbery dying terror, cold fingers like little fish gnawing at him, trying to get under his shirt or grasp his belt.

For a minute or so, he was underwater. This was it. He was done for. He’d hold on as long as he could, in this moment between life and death, but when the pressure got too much he’d open his mouth to gasp for air and instead take in a lungful of water and black out.

He heard the clanking of the ship’s engines, still firing away on at least one boiler. He heard the grinding of her worm gear as it crunched away in a shaft full of abrasive seawater cutting through her packing grease. He heard the screams of trapped men who faced certain death from drowning just minutes away. He heard the tortured groan of tons of steel realigning itself now that the ship’s structural integrity had been destroyed. How deep was the sea here? A mile? What would it be like to sink down as the darkness quickly took him?

Then she rolled the other way, settling by what was left of the bow, so that the stern rose momentarily. He felt the weight of water crashing away, and got several great lungs full of cold air, all in a blur.

As the stern rose up, he found himself spread-eagled against the aft gun turret. In that instant, he caught sight of the U-boat. She surfaced about a quarter mile away, a fish rising from the sea, streaming foam and water, with rich twirls of magnificent bottle-green sea flying around her sail. The commander might put out some rubber rafts if he had them. The Germans sometimes stayed to rescue, but nowadays the Krauts were on the run, and it was dubious the Kraut would risk his boat and complement to save enemy sailors, particularly in sight of land.

Sky and sea whirled blender-like. Tim lost consciousness again as he fell.

The way he figured it afterward, the stern had risen up, then briefly hung in the sky with him straddling the two gun tubes. Then she’d rocked once in a swell, throwing him clear, before sliding without another sideways motion straight down, bow-first, on the long descent a mile down to whatever slimy plain would become her eternal cemetery.

Tim had on his life vest, and that saved him. He came to, minutes after falling into the water, and found himself bobbing up and down in an oil slick among debris—a large tin of tea, some wooden crates of linen and bread, waterlogged mattresses, and motionless bodies.

Then he heard shouts. A few men had gathered around a rubber life raft from the Sturmer. Tim scissor-kicked toward them. His ribs ached, and the sea was cold, but he was alive. He was intact.

Several of the men were wounded. One died as Tim arrived—just closed his eyes, sort of let go, and disappeared under the waves. Desperately, others grasped at the rope around the dinghy. Tim smelled wet wool, old tobacco, and fresh metallic blood. There was a smell these open wounds had, like gutted fish with the salt water in them. The wounded were too weak to scream as the chemicals and oils from the ship filled their gashes; they just emitted a low moan at best and hung on. One shivered violently, so that his blackened lips flapped and threw off a spray of oil; imminent death was written in his eyes, and when Tim looked away at the blinding sun, and back, the man had disappeared as if he’d never been. How much of this is a dazed illusion? Tim wondered, wishing he could clear his head.

The ship was gone. So was the U-boat.

There was some brief conversation amid gasps for air and wet sputters, and Tim calculated that Sturmer had not had a chance to get a signal off. With luck, someone would come looking for them. It was mid-day, and that meant probably a good 24 hours bobbing through the night, maybe a day or two, if searchers came at all.

Soon it was just three of them, Tim and red-haired Harvey and another sailor. All the other men were gone. Drowned. That, even though the sun was warm and the sea sparkled like gold.

They clung to the rubber dinghy until it began to deflate, becoming just another bit of debris. For some odd reason, the golden-red glow of the sea reminded Tim of quiet Sunday afternoons in New Haven, during Indian Summer when the rich trees were still green, and the air retained a lingering ripeness of summer, but weakly so; underneath it all something was changing, some powerful body chemistry signaled that autumn was roiling up, and the leaves were dying inwardly. One felt the very elements of one’s body and blood transforming themselves in a rhythm as grand as the movement of the world around its sun and the Newtonian tick-tock of machinery in a Copernican universe.

“There’s land over there,” Harvey said at some point, bringing Tim out of his reverie, and they began swimming.

“If there are sharks, we’re done for,” said the other.

“We’d be long done if it wasn’t for the oil in the sea,” said Harvey.

“Let’s stick together,” Tim ordered. Instinctively, he towed the dinghy along, and it offered just a tiny bit of buoyancy. In it, he knew, were first aid and other emergency supplies. He was most hoping for matches.

The sound of crashing water grew louder.

“The beach!” the other man said.

“Surf,” Harvey said, looking pale through his freckles.

Tim stopped and looked, feeling the water surging around him. He was tired now. They’d been shocked and in the water for a good two hours already. “Breakwater!” he shouted.

“Tired,” Harvey said with a groan, closing his eyes. Tim noticed now that his friend had a wound in his side. He took Harvey by the chin and began swimming slowly and methodically toward the sound of crashing water, which could not be too far from land. Then raging water took hold of them.

Tim watched mutely as the other sailor was ripped away, flying down and around a barnacle-crusted rock that rose like a mushroom out of the continental shelf. The tide must be in full movement, Tim thought. Best to stay back until it crested or troughed, rather than get battered to pieces here. He heard Harvey scream and felt him torn from his grasp. Helplessly, he watched as his friend was sucked away into the maelstrom. Tim let himself go limp, lying sideways and kicking weakly. He let go and just prayed to live from one moment to the next.

Again he felt that golden glow, that presence of death, and he saw again the gleaming little New England church roofs around his hometown. He saw himself again with his girlfriend, Sally Levesque. Maybe they were driving home from a football game, with autumn leaves rustling in the streets a foot deep in places, and they had between them the afterglow of heavy petting, maybe even of the occasional sex. And yet he felt so desperate to escape, to scream, to struggle to the surface like just now. Sally Levesque almost seemed to be sitting in a convertible in the ocean, sinking while he rose, and he could sense the quiet accusation radiating from her eyes. It wasn’t her fault, he realized. She was too shallow, God forgive him, too lacking in courage to escape the monotony of a life lived from birth bed to cemetery under those same brick walls, that same somber Colonial architecture. She was born and raised to be a good woman in that atmosphere, and he was the bad one, he was the one who should feel guilty, for throwing it all away. It was over between them now, anyway. She had been unable to handle his departure for Navy duty, and had taken up with a boy from West Haven who shared her tightly knitted French-Canadian Catholic universe, who had been rejected from active duty because of flat feet, and was now a cop guarding the Green from vagrants and South Street beach from enemy submarines.

Tim cried out and raised a hand into the sky, but an undertow took him down, twirled him around so that the fine sand at the bottom polished him like a jeweler’s rag on a lens. Tim gave in to his wrongs, confessed his shortcomings, and prepared to die; but it wasn’t his time yet.

He did not have long to struggle. The undertow took him out another hundred feet. Then the undertow vanished, leaving him in steadily rising and falling swells. He stood treading water and gasping for breath. He had lost his shoes and clothes by now, but shreds of his shirt still clung to his shoulders along with the life jacket, shielding him from the blazing sun. He lay back and concentrated on just keeping his face out of the water, which the design of the life jacket helped him do.

He became detached, feeling as though he were floating in air rather than water. It was a curious sort of air, soapy green, but piss-yellow when the sun shone through it, and full of kelp shadows. He floated motionlessly. He was free of Sally Levesque, free of New Haven, free of the clock factory, free of whatever it might have been. The mighty summer ocean off the southern coast of Africa had cleansed him, and then put him within sight of land almost like Jonah being belched out by his whale. Dreamlike, without being part of the scene, he watched three razor-sharp sharks tearing Harvey’s body apart, the legs one way, the arms another, the russet-gold head and the torso floating downward out of sight until another shark did a magnificent quick smooth dive and disappeared with the torso.

Tim floated motionlessly amid the kelp, knowing he would not die here. Slowly, the incoming tide brought him around so that the back of his head rested on the firm sand.