War Beneath the Waves by Don Keith Page B

not doing something that required their eyes to focus downward looked up instead, as if they could determine the enemy’s intent if they stared at the hull over their heads hard enough.
    Then, suddenly, a loud, metallic clank shattered the silence! Something hard and heavy on the starboard side, somewhere near the bow.
    At first, the men thought they might have struck something, maybe even another submarine, but there had been no sonar indication of an obstruction in their path. The boat still swam smoothly forward, looking for a way out.
    No sign of a collision. No rip in the hull. No flood of water. But what was that noise?
    Again the men in the control room all looked at one another, then upward, but no one ventured a guess.
    Then the piercing, clanking noise rang out again, like a clapper striking the inside of a giant bell. The harsh, metallic noise reverberated the length of the submarine. Next, it melded into a ragged, piercing, scraping sound, running slowly down the length of the submarine from the bow toward the stern, like the shrieking of an angry banshee. It passed each man working on the starboard side of the submarine, making its way all the way down the outside of the hull.
    Then the hellish racket stopped as suddenly as it had started when it reached a point on the hull just outside the aft torpedo room, near the very back of the vessel.
    Jesus! What was that?
    Each man looked at his shipmates, wondering if maybe they had cruised past and brushed against a sunken hulk without somehow bouncing a sonar ping off it. Or maybe they had encountered a submerged mine that had—so far—miraculously failed to explode. Or had they actually snagged the chain of a mine, and were about to tow it along with them until it did blow them to kingdom come?
    The grating noise was frightening enough, but everything else seemed normal. Except for the continued absence of attack by the destroyer that still clattered away three hundred feet over their heads.
    “Captain, something’s wrong with the stern planes,” the sailor who was operating those controls reported in a remarkably calm voice. “They must have been damaged when . . .”
    The planes on a submarine act similarly to flaps on an airplane, controlling the angle of attack the boat takes through the water. Like wings, they enable the planesman to bring the stern of the ship down or up as necessary to keep the sub from diving or surfacing too abruptly and thus losing control. They also enable him to keep the boat at a steady, level angle—“maintain the trim”—when they cruise along while submerged. Losing control of a plane in these shallow waters, with angry bees buzzing around on the surface, was a very serious development.
    Suddenly they lost the influence of the planes completely. The controls would not budge. The diving officer noticed something else worrisome.
    The stern of the boat was definitely starting to rise as the bow began to point decidedly downward. The decks beneath the crew’s feet tilted more and more toward the bow and the sea bottom.
    Something powerful had hold of them. It was trying to pull them to the surface by the tail!
    It was clear then that a grapnel of some kind had them hooked like a very big fish. Their lip was the stern plane on the starboard side.
    Millican quickly deduced that the giant fishhook had snagged the now inoperative stern plane on that side of the boat after scraping all the way down their side. That was why it no longer worked.
    While on the surface, a submarine in Thresher ’s class displaced fifteen hundred tons, which made her quite heavy. However, while submerged, she was relatively light. Even a small ship, with a strong winch, chain, and grappling hook, would have a good chance of successfully dragging her to the surface.
    Millican and his crew quickly realized that this was exactly what was happening to them!
    The enemy did not intend to blow them to kingdom come after all. He was intent on capturing an