“May I have the glasses, Second?”
Farmingdale handed them over. Eddie climbed up to the flying bridge and walked all the way around the smokestack, binoculars pressed to his eyes. The moon vanished behind clouds, and the rolls of ocean were barely touched by light. Two points abaft of the port beam, he saw a straight dark edge. Eddie blinked and lowered the glasses, then raised them again. It was still there: a straightness one didn’t find in nature. It had to be a conning tower—the raised structure of a submarine—yet disbelief plucked at Eddie even as he shouted down the ladder at Roger, “Get the captain. I’ll ring for GQ.”
Captain Kittredge was on the bridge in an instant. He elbowed Farmingdale aside and held the glasses to his eyes. Then he barked at Red, the AB at the helm, “Hard right.” To Eddie, now at the engine room telegraph, he said, “Full speed. Give me all the revolutions you’ve got.”
Eddie communicated the order to the engine room and felt corresponding vibrations under his feet as the engineers opened the throttle. The AB turned the wheel hard. The general quarters alarm had brought everyone on deck, and men hurried to their gun stations in their Mae Wests, as life vests were affectionately known. Using the flying bridge’s sound-powered telephone, Lieutenant Rosen ordered the five-inch stern gun to fire at the conning tower. A blast tore through the windy dark, and the tower submerged unscathed. Still, U-boats could make only seven knots underwater. The Elizabeth Seaman would outrun it easily.
Eddie stood by, ready to operate the telegraph. Suddenly, Roger was yelling into his face. The cadet pointed, and Eddie saw a second conning tower fully exposed, three points off the starboard bow. The hard right had brought them toward it. At that same moment an explosion shook the ship. Hatches blew open, and overhead booms crashed onto the deck. The Elizabeth Seaman shuddered, and her stack disgorged a ball of flame whose orange blaze illuminated everyone on the decks and then floated, crackling like a giant dissolving sun, over the sea. There was a reek of burning oil followed by deep silence as the ship’s engines went still.
Eddie charged down ladders through the dark midship house toward the engine room. The emergency lights on the bulkheads illuminated if you gave them a quarter turn, and he twisted a few of these as he went, oil dust collecting in his mouth. He found smoke pouring from the engine room door. Ochylski, the third engineer, staggered from it, bloody and drenched in oil. “The boiler blew,” he panted.
Eddie pushed past him, sliding down hand rails, his feet hardly touching the ladders. But he couldn’t get to the engine room deck; the flames were too high. No one on watch down there would still be alive. He ran to his stateroom, threw on his Mae West, and seized his abandon-ship package and flashlight. He heard the forward three-inch cannon firing, along with the rear five-inch, and imagined the U-boats diving to evade the blasts and then being churned by the rising sea, unable to fire again. On the boat deck, he tied his bag containing clothing, sextant, cigarettes, brandy, and his How to Abandon Ship pamphlet—inside his own boat, number four. The davits were already swung out, but Eddie hesitated to unlash the boats in gale winds when there was no order yet to abandon ship. As long as the fire was contained belowdecks and the Elizabeth Seaman stable, they would be far safer riding out the storm aboard than in the lifeboats.
The second torpedo seemed to explode against Eddie’s sternum. It must have come from the first U-boat, or possibly a third they hadn’t seen, for it hit below the waterline on the port side, aft of the midship house, between the number four and five holds. It was followed by a juddering rumble deep inside the ship. Eddie had never heard this sound, but he knew it was the noise of the ocean invading the Elizabeth Seaman’s holds. Almost immediately, her after end began to list toward the sea. Captain Kittredge gave the abandon-ship order, and a dreamlike atmosphere ensued, confusion magnified by the darkness and the roll of the sea, which cuffed broadside at the dead ship like a cat trying to rouse an exhausted mouse. Pugh, the ancient third cook, was still at his twenty-millimeter-gun station on the flying bridge. Eddie took the old man’s arm and urged him to his lifeboat, number two—he’d memorized the boat lists. On the bridge deck, he looked in at Sparks, who was stuffing codebooks into the perforated metal suitcases that were supposed to sink them.
“You need to get to your boat,” Eddie said. “Number one.”
“What’s your fucking hurry, Mac?” Sparks asked with a laugh. “None of these arseholes has answered me yet; I’m going to send the SOS one more fucking time.” The radio, now on auxiliary power, looked conspicuously alive on the burnt-out ship. Eddie offered to carry the emergency radio to the captain’s boat for Sparks. The radioman kissed his cheek. “Bless your fucking heart, Third,” he said.
Eddie grabbed the bulky emergency radio from the wheelhouse. He felt as if time had fanned open sideways, allowing him to move laterally as well as forward, so that any amount of activity became possible even as the slant of the Elizabeth Seaman’s decks grew more pronounced. On the crowded boat deck, he placed the radio in lifeboat one, the captain’s. Across from it on the port side, the mate’s boat had already launched: two men rowing, the rest crouched at the bottom to stabilize it in the heavy swells, which shoved the boat back against the hull of the ship. The bosun knelt at the tiller, and even through the gale, Eddie heard his bellowed commands and knew that boat two would get away.
Where his own boat should have been, he found Ochylski, his second-in-command, standing by the falls looking down. The boat had been released empty and now bobbed uselessly on the Elizabeth Seaman’s lee side.
“What the hell happened?” Eddie screamed at the third engineer over the wind.
“She just . . . went down,” Ochylski said. His face was deathly white under a sheen of fuel oil, empty-looking without his pipe. He’d gone into shock, Eddie thought—perhaps had released the boat by accident.