"Hit? Hah! Let me tell you." Johannsen gestured. "We dead, battery down. We have damage now, cannot run. We already evade four torpedoes, but they have us now. Sonar have us. Destroyer fire RBU at us. First three miss, but they have us. Then-Boom! Boom! Boom! Many more. Destroyer blow up. Other hit, but not sink, I think.
"We escape." Johannsen hugged McCafferty again, and both spilled their beer on the floor. The American had never seen a Norwegian display this much emotion, even around his wife. "My crew alive because of you, Chicago! I buy you drink. I buy all your men drink."
"You are sure we killed that tin can?"
"You not kill," Johannsen said. "My ship dead, my men dead, I dead. You kill." A destroyer wasn't exactly as good as sinking a nuclear-powered battle cruiser, McCafferty told himself, but it was a whole lot better than nothing, too. And a piece of another, he reminded himself. And who knows, maybe that one sank on the way home.
"Not too shabby, Dan," Simms observed.
"Some people," said the skipper of HMS Oberon, "have all the bloody luck!"
"You know, Todd," said the commanding officer of USS Chicago, "this is pretty good beer."
There were only two bodies to bury. Another fourteen men were missing and presumed dead, but for all that, Morris counted himself fortunate. Twenty sailors were injured to one extent or another. Clarke's broken forearm, a number of broken ankles from the shock of the torpedo impact, and a half-dozen bad scaldings from ruptured steam pipes. That didn't count minor cuts from flying glass.
Morris read through the ceremony in the manual, his voice emotionless as he went through the words about the sure and certain hope of how the sea will one day give up her dead... On command the seamen tilted up the mess tables. The bodies wrapped in plastic bags and weighted with steel slid out from under the flags, dropping straight into the water. It was ten thousand feet deep here, a long last trip for his executive officer and a third-class gunner's mate from Detroit. The rifle salute followed, but not taps. There was no one aboard who could play a trumpet, and the tape recorder was broken. Morris closed the book.
"Secure and carry on."
The flags were folded properly and taken to the sail locker. The mess tables were carried below and the stanchions were replaced to support the lifelines. And USS Pharris was still only half a ship, fit only to be broken up for scrap, Morris knew.
The tug Papago was pulling her backwards at just more than four knots. Three days to shore. They were heading toward Boston, the closest port, rather than a naval base. The reason was clear enough. Repairs would take over a year and the Navy didn't want to clutter up one of its own repair facilities with something that would take that long. Only those ships that could be repaired for useful war service would get rapid attention.
Even his continued command of Pharris was a joke. The tug had a reserve crew, many of them salvage experts in civilian life. Three of them were aboard to keep an eye on the towing cable and "advise" Morris on the things he had to do. Their pieces of advice were really orders, but polite ones.
There were plenty of things to keep his crew busy. The forward bulkheads required constant watching and attention. Repairs were under way to the engine plant. Only one boiler was working, providing steam to turn the turbogenerators and provide electrical power. The second boiler needed at least another day of work. His main air-search radar, they said, would be working in four hours. The satellite antenna was just back on line also. By the time they reached port-if they reached port-everything aboard that his crew could fix would be fixed. That didn't really matter, but a busy crew, the Navy has always said, is a happy crew. In practical terms it meant that the crewmen, unlike their captain, did not have time to brood on what mistakes had been made, the lives that had been lost because of them, and who had made them.
Morris went to the Combat Information Center. The tactical crew was rerunning the tape and paper record of the encounter with the Victor, trying to find what had happened.
"I don't know." The sonar operator shrugged. "Maybe it was two subs, not just one. I mean, here he is, right? This bright trail here-then a couple minutes later the active sonar picked him up over here."
"Only one sub," Morris said. "Getting from here to there is about a four-minute run at twenty-five knots."
"But we didn't hear him, sir, an' it don't show on the screen. Besides, he was heading the other way when we lost him." The sonarman rewound the tape to run it a again.
