Undersea Quest

4 Man Missing

Within the first month we were actually going beneath the surface of the sea.

True enough, we were not going very far. But squad by squad, we drew diving gear—aqualungs, face-masks, pneumatic guns and frog-flippers—and set out on our first undersea expeditions.

I was in Crew Five, with twenty others, under Cadet Lieutenant Hachette. When we had drawn our gear we boarded a whaleboat and stood out to sea. We were not quite out of sight of land—Bermuda was a low line on the horizon—and when Lt.

Hachette gave the order to stop the engines. We drifted, bobbing gently on the Caribbean swell until, at the lieutenant’s command, we went over the side, one by one.

The water was shallow there—not more than twenty feet—and crystal clear. We wore regulation weighted shoes, carefully balanced to each man’s weight and body volume. With them on, we exactly balanced the weight of water we displaced. It was like hanging suspended like Mohammed’s Tomb. At the flick of a webbed foot we climbed; at the merest stroke of the arms, we sank.

We gathered in ranks on the rippled, sandy bottom and waited for orders.

Talking, of course, was out of the question. Standing there, teetering gently back and forth like a pillar of smoke on a still day, I was conscious of the absolute silence. The only whisper of sound that came to me was the ripple of bubbles from my breathing gear. I found out later that this was unusual—the bottom of the sea can be a very noisy place! Fish are not the mute beasts they seem; and, as I can testify, being within range of a battle royal between a hammerhead shark and a squid is about like being on the fringe of two fighting wildcats.

But that morning off Bermuda, I felt as remote as the spaces between the stars.

Lt. Hachette looked us over to make sure everything was in order; signaled us to check our gear for leaks or malfunctions; then ordered us on. In columns of twos, we marched off along the sea bottom. Curious march—in slow motion! We were at route step, and the uneven footing made it a struggle to keep in some sort of proper dress. Stumbling over sand mounds and broken branches of coral, dodging the wicked little sea anemones, that look like chrysanthemums and sting like hornets, we must have been a ludicrous sight to the curious little fishes that swam in schools overhead! It was more a ballet step than a march; half the time my right foot was off the ground before my left foot had touched before me, in a slow, stately grand jete that Nijinsky would have envied.

I doubted that we were making more than a mile an hour. We had air, that first dive, for only thirty minutes; we marched about a thousand yards in all, a hundred yards in one direction, then a sharp right turn and a hundred yards more. At the end of the thirty minutes we were back where we started; Lt. Hatchette gave us the signal, and we, two by two, slipped upward toward the waiting whaleboat.

It sounds rather dull, perhaps.

It was not! Every second of that first half hour was pure adventure, and unbelievable excitement. It was not dangerous excitement—we were, after all, only twenty feet down! Even though Bermuda’s waters teem with sharks, they rarely go near humans, and certainly not when the humans come in groups of twenty. But it was an enchanted land we were traveling, inhabited by long- legged starfish and slow sea-cucumbers and pulsing sponges and brilliant-colored, inch-long fish by the uncounted thousands.

We dived twice more that day, and then the whaleboat started back. It would be two weeks before our turn would come again; but already I was making plans for the next time. For I had been on the sea-bottom… it was like going home again, after a long, long time away.

Cadet Captain Sperry, from the lead whaleboat, bellowed: “Attention all boats! Stand by for diving!”

The whole class was out in whaleboats; it was our first night maneuver underwater, and it was a mass affair. Fourteen whaleboats strung out behind Sperry’s lead boat; a score of cadets was in each boat.

It was well after sunset, though the Western sky was still faintly glowing, and the air was getting cold. We put our gear on in silence, then sat at ease while Captain Sperry and his crew chiefs settled their last-minute plans.

Overhead the stars were big and clear. The Milky Way looked like a smear of luminous paint; Orion’s Belt lay almost at the horizon and Mars winked red overhead. The starlight seemed captured in the water itself; but it was not reflected light that made the waves sparkle and shine, but their own luminescence. Eskow whispered: “You think it will be as bright as that down below?” I shook my head. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed to me that I had heard the luminescence was only at the surface. I didn’t know—so many things about the sea I didn’t know!

But I was learning.

Overwater the water the call came: “Attention all boats! Check gear! By the numbers—air valves!” There was a multiple snorting from all the boats as every one of us valved a breath of air out of the aqualungs. “Lights!” A couple of hundred fireflies flickered over the water as we checked our headlamps. “Face masks!” I slipped my mask on, along with all the others; I ran my fingers over the line where the rubber made contact with my flesh.

Everything was in order. There was a moment’s pause, then Sperry’s voice came: “Boat commanders, send your crews down!”

We slipped over the side.

It was absolute blackness beneath us.

As soon as the water had closed over my head, the stars were gone; bright as their light had been, it did not penetrate the surface of the sea. I could see clearly the headlamps of the fourteen crews; it looked like a convention of fireflies. But I could not see a single human figure or object, only the lights; then my eyes grew better adjusted, and I began to make out shadowy shapes moving through the water beside me under the glowing lights.

We assembled at the bottom, as usual; but there was no marching in store for us. This was a maneuver problem, designed to familiarize us with the problems of hand-to- hand sub-sea combat if we should ever need to use it. Six crews had been designated the Invaders; the other eight, Defenders. It was our job, as Invaders, to pass through the Defending line. If we were intercepted, we were “dead”; the success or failure of each team would be judged by the number of Invaders who got through without a challenge. The Defenders were grouped a hundred yards away. At the signal, they doused their lights—and totally disappeared, as far as any of us could see. Our crew officer signaled with his light, and our crew rose from the bottom and began swimming to the attack.

We swam several yards before, according to our plan, we all doused our lights simultaneously. That had been Lt. Hachette’s idea—we would let the defenders see our line of travel; then, when the lights went out, we would strike out in a different direction.

Our crew was the last to turn off its lights. When they were gone, each one of us was utterly, completely alone.

Then the exercise began to seem more serious to me. It had appeared such a simple-minded child’s game, when the lieutenant explained it to us, in a lecture hall, back on the surface. A sort of underwater tag—nothing for grown men to play at! But in the darkness and alone, swimming through ink toward nothingness, I began to see just how difficult it was. First, there was some element of danger; the big predatory fish, the sharks and mantas and barracudas and so on, would seldom attack a human—but in this darkness, how could they tell what we were? True, the lead whaleboat was equipped with microsonar search gear; if anything the size of a shark came-within a quarter of a mile of us at any rapid rate, the underwater alarm would sound and we would abandon the exercise. But—well, just suppose the sonarman missed up?

But there were more than two hundred of us; there was safety in numbers, even if something did go wrong. What was worse than the slim chance of trouble with a shark was the blind, helpless struggle itself. It was suspended in nothingness; there was no up and no down, no way of telling if I were swimming in the proper direction or off in some crazy angle. I remembered the experiences of the daylight dives and all the long lectures I had listened to; and I tried to relax, tried to “sense” with my body and blood and the canals of my ears when I was swimming level with the bottom. It wasn’t easy; I found out later that a dozen cadets had swum straight into the bottom that night, while twice as many had, to their astonishment, found themselves breaking the surface in their first halfdozen strokes.

I tried to listen for the faint whisper of someone else’s aqualung bubbles; I thought I heard them, and then they were gone. I thought I heard them again, but I was completely unable to guess whether they came from ahead of me, behind, on top or below. I strained my ears to listen…

And a rapid brassy gong began thundering in my ear drums. For a moment I was startled almost out of my wits; then I realized what it was.

The emergency alarm! Sharks had been sighted on the microsonar—the exercise was automatically terminated and we were to get back in the whaleboats pronto!

All around me lights began flickering on, flashing up ward like bubbles in a glass of sparkling wine. I turned on my light and headed up too. At the surface, the silence was gone as though it had never existed. Voices were yelling, bellowing, growling, shouting; it was bedlam. Over the raucous shouting came Captain Sperry’s bull-like shout: “Take your time! Get into the right whaleboat! You’ve got plenty of time! Everybody get into his own whaleboat—anybody in the wrong boat gets ten tours around the Quad. Take your time! You’ll all be in the boats in two minutes, and that’s plenty of time!”

I jerked the face-mask off my head and trod water, staring around. I was in luck—the triple green lights that marked Crew Five’s whaleboat was only a few yards away. A half-dozen strokes brought me to the stern; I clambered aboard and helped the next man in after me.

The shouting and splashing began to quiet down. “At ease!” shouted Sperry from the lead boat. “Crew commanders, report when ready!”

The voices of the commanders of the individual whale- boats began to come in. “First crew all present!” “Second crew all present!” “Eighth crew all present!”

Lt. Hachette made a rapid headcount by the light of his lamp. “Nineteen,” he said worriedly. “Who’s missing? Sound off, men! Roll call!”

The voices came back to him. “Degaret!” “Dodd!” “Domowski!” “Dowling!” “Dunphy!” “Duxley!” “Dyanosky!” “Dye!” “Ealy!” “Eckstrom!” “Eden!” That was me; and I waited to hear Bob Eskow, next in order.

I didn’t hear him. I looked around, hardly believing it, though there could be no doubt.

Bob Eskow was not in the boat.

Already Lt. Hachette had made a swift check of the rest of us. Then, through his megaphone, he hailed the lead boat. “Crew Five missing one cadet! Cadet Robert Eskow out of boat!”

There was a ripple of sound from the fourteen boats. From the lead boat, Captain Sperry called: “Cadet Eskow! Report!”

There was no answer.

The giant searchlights went on and scoured the surface of the water around us, looking for a head, the stroke of an arm…There was nothing. Two hundred and sixty-eight cadets had set out; two hundred and sixty-seven were in their boats.

Bob Eskow was still under the surface of the water.