He slides the last twenty feet at terrifying speed and is caught and held, in various places, by eight strong hands who lift him to what passes for safety: the deck of the U-boat, just aft of the conning tower, sort of nestled underneath an antiaircraft gun. Way up at the boat’s stern, there’s a big T-shaped stanchion with cables coming out of the ends of the crossbar and stretched tight all the way to the conning-tower railing, near to hand. Following the example of a Royal Navy officer who appears to be his appointed guardian, Waterhouse climbs uphill—i.e. towards the stern—using one of those cables as a sort of banister, and follows him down a hatch in the afterdeck and into the interior of the boat. Shaftoe follows a few moments later.
It is the worst place Waterhouse has ever been. Like the corvette he has just left, it rises smoothly on each roller, but unlike the corvette it comes down with a crash on the rocks, nearly throwing him to the deck. It is like being sealed up in a garbage can that is being beaten with a sledgehammer. U-553 is about half full of a rich brew of cheap wine, diesel fuel, battery acid, and raw sewage. Because of the way she is pitched, this soup quickly gets deeper as you go forward, but it rolls aft in a drenching tsunami every time her midsection slams down on the rocks. Fortunately, Waterhouse is now far beyond nausea, in some kind of transcendent state where his mind has become even more divorced from his body than usual.
The officer in charge waits for the noise to subside and then says, in a startlingly quiet voice, “Is there anything in particular you’d like to inspect, sir?”
Waterhouse is still trying to get some idea of where he is by shining his flashlight beam around the place, which is kind of like peering through a soda straw. He can’t get any synoptic view of his surroundings, just narrow glimpses of pipes and wires. Finally he tries holding his head still and sort of scribbling the flashlight beam around really fast. A picture emerges: they are in a narrow crawl space, obviously designed by and for engineers, intended to give access to a few thousand linear miles of pipes and wires that have been forced through some kind of bottleneck.
“We are looking for the skipper’s papers,” Waterhouse says. The boat goes into free fall again; he leans against something slippery, claps his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and mouth, and exhales through his nose so that none of the soup will force its way into his body. The thing he’s leaning against is really hard and cold and round. It’s greasy. He shines his light on it; it’s made of brass. The light-scribbling trick produces the image of a brass spaceship of some sort, nestled underneath (unless he’s mistaken) a bunk. He’s just on the verge of making a total ass of himself by asking what it is, when he identifies it as a torpedo.
In the next quiet interlude, he asks, “Is there anything like a private cabin where he might have…”
“It’s forward,” the officer says. Forward is not an encouraging view.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Shaftoe says. It’s the first thing he has said in about half an hour. He begins to slosh forward, and the British officer has to hurry to catch up. The deck falls out from beneath their feet again and they stop and turn around so that the wave of sewage will hit them in the backs.
They travel downhill. Every step’s a pitched battle vs. prudence and sound judgment, and they take a lot of steps. What Waterhouse had pegged as a bottleneck goes on and on—all the way, apparently, to the bow. Eventually they find something that gives them an excuse to stop: a cabin, or maybe (at about four by six feet) a corner of a cabin. There’s a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat. The mean high-tide level of the sewage angles across the cabin and cuts it approximately in half. Papers and other bureaucratic detritus are floating everywhere, written in the occult Gothic script that Waterhouse associates with Rudy.
“Take it all,” Waterhouse says, but Shaftoe and the officer are already sweeping their arms through the brew and bringing them up wrapped in dripping papier-mâché. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.
The skipper’s bunk is on the aft or uphill end of the cabin. Shaftoe strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.
The fold-out table is on the totally submerged end. Waterhouse wades into it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He finds the desk with his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man would. He finds a few drawers which he is able to pull out of the desk entirely and hand off to Shaftoe, who dumps their contents into the sack. Within a short time he is pretty sure that there’s nothing left in the desk.
The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes, for just a moment, something in the corner of the cabin, something attached to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.
“It’s a safe!” he says. He spins the dial. It’s heavy. A good safe. German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.
A British sailor appears in the open hatchway. “Sir!” he announces. “Another U-boat has been sighted in the area.”
“I’d love to have a stethoscope,” Waterhouse hints. “This thing have a sickbay?”
“No,” says the British officer. “Just a box of medical gear. Should be floating around somewhere.”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” Shaftoe says, and vanishes from the room. A minute later he’s back holding a German stethoscope up above his head to keep it clean. He tosses it across the cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it in the air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the sewage to the front of the safe.
He has done a little of this before, as an exercise. Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let the young Waterhouse play with his safe. He broke the combination, to the manager’s great surprise, and wrote a report about the experience for school.
This safe is a lot better than that one was. Since he can’t see the dial anyway, he closes his eyes.
He is vaguely conscious that the other fellows on the submarine have been shouting and carrying on about something for a while, as if some sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of the stethoscope is wrenched loose from his grasp. He opens his eyes to see Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: “Sir, torpedoes in the water, sir.” Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.
Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking up at a disk of greyish-black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston of sewage rises up beneath him and propels him upwards, vomiting him out onto the top deck of the boat, where his comrades grab him and very considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.
The movement of the U-553 with the waves has changed. She’s moving a lot more now, as if she’s about to break free from the reef.
It takes Waterhouse a minute to get his bearings. He is starting to think he may have suffered some damage during all of that. Something is definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.
Powerful light sweeps over them: a searchlight from the British corvette that brought them here. The British sailors curse. Waterhouse levers himself up on his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U-boat, following the beam of the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of her hull peeled back from the wound and projecting jaggedly into the air. The foul contents of the hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Shaftoe says. He shrugs loose from a small but heavy-looking knapsack that he’s been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden activity draws the attention of the Royal Navy men who help out
by pointing their flashlights at his furious hands.
Waterhouse, who may be in some kind of delirium by this point, can’t quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish-yellow cylinders, as thick as a finger and maybe six inches long. He also takes out some small items, including a coil of thick, stiff red cord. He jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.
“Jesus,” an officer says, “he’s going to do some blasting.” The officer thinks about this for a very small amount of time; the ship moves terrifyingly with the waves and makes scraping noises which might indicate it’s sliding off the reef. “Abandon ship!” he hollers.
Most of them get into the whaler. Waterhouse is bundled back onto the trolley contraption. He is about halfway across to the torpedo boat when he feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.
For the rest of the way over he can’t really see diddly, and even after he’s back on the torpedo boat, all is confusion, and someone named Enoch Root insists on taking him below and working on his arm and his head. Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to reason, in that your head is where you know things, and if it’s damaged, how can you know it? “You’ll get at least a Purple Heart for this,” Enoch Root says. He says it with a marked lack of enthusiasm, as if he couldn’t care less about Purple Hearts, but is condescending to suppose that it will be a big thrill for Waterhouse. “And Sergeant Shaftoe probably has another major decoration coming too, damn him.”
MORPHIUM
* * *
SHAFTOE STILL SEES THE WORD EVERY TIME HE CLOSES his eyes.
It would be a lot better if he were paying attention to the work at hand: packing demolition charges around the gussets that join the safe to the U-boat.
MORPHIUM. It is printed thus on a yellowed paper label. The label is glued to a small glass bottle. The color of the glass is the same deep purple that you see when your eyes have been dazzled by a powerful light.
Harvey, the sailor who has volunteered to help him, keeps shining his flashlight into Shaftoe’s eyes. It is unavoidable; Shaftoe is wedged into a surpassingly awkward position beneath the safe, working with the charges, trying to set the primers with slimy fingers drained of warmth and strength. This would not even be possible if the boat hadn’t been torpedoed; before, this cabin was half full of sewage and the safe was immersed in it. Now it has been conveniently drained.
Harvey is not wedged into anything; he is being flung around by the paroxysms of the U-boat, which like a beached shark, is trying stupidly but violently to thrash its way loose from the reef. The beam of his flashlight keeps sweeping across Shaftoe’s eyes. Shaftoe blinks, and sees a cosmos of purple: tiny purple bottles labeled MORPHIUM.
“God damn it!” he hollers.
“Is everything all right, Sergeant?” Harvey says.
Harvey doesn’t get it. Harvey thinks that Shaftoe is cursing at some problem with the explosives.
The explosives are just fucking great. There’s no problem with the explosives. The problem is with Bobby Shaftoe’s brain.
He was right there. Waterhouse sent him to find a stethoscope, and Shaftoe went chambering through the U-boat until he found a wooden box. He opened it up and saw right away it was full of medic stuff. He pawed through it, looking for what Waterhouse wanted, and there was the bottle, plain as day, right in front of his face. His hand brushed against it, for god’s sake. He saw the label as the beam of his flashlight swept across it:
MORPHIUM.
But he didn’t grab it. If it had said MORPHINE he would have grabbed it in a second. But it said MORPHIUM. And it wasn’t until about thirty seconds later that he realized that this was a fucking German boat and of course the words would all be different and there was about a 99 percent chance that MORPHIUM was, in fact, exactly the same stuff as MORPHINE. When he realized that he planted his feet in the passageway of the darkened U-boat and let out a deep long scream from way down in his gut. With the noise of the waves, no one heard him. Then he continued onwards and carried out his duty, handing over the stethoscope to Waterhouse. He carried out his duty because he is a Marine.
Blowing this fucking safe off the wall is not his duty. It’s just an idea that popped into his head. They’ve been training him how to use these explosives; why not put it into practice? He’s blowing this safe up, not because he is a Marine, but because he is Bobby Shaftoe. And also because it’s a great excuse to go back for that morphium.
The U-boat bucks and sends Harvey sprawling to the deck. Shaftoe waits for the motion to subside, then flails for handholds and pulls himself out from under the safe. His weight is mostly on his feet now, but it wouldn’t be correct to say he’s standing up. In this place, the best you can hope for is to scramble for balance somewhat faster than you are falling on your Keister. Harvey has just lost that race and Shaftoe is winning it for the moment.
“Fire in the hole!” Shaftoe hollers. Harvey finds his feet! Shaftoe gives him a helpful shove out into the passageway. Harvey turns left and heads uphill for the conning tower and the exit. Shaftoe turns right. He heads downhill. Towards the bow. Towards Davy Jones’s Locker. Towards the box with the MORPHIUM.
Where the fuck is that box? When he found it before, it was bobbing in the soup. Maybe—horrible thought—maybe it just drained out of the hole made by the torpedo. He passes through a couple of bulkheads. The boat’s angle is getting steeper all the time and he ends up walking backwards, like he’s descending a ladder, making handholds out of pipes, electrical cables, and the chains that suspend the submarines’ bunks. This boat is so damn long.
It seems like a strange way to kill people. Shaftoe’s not sure if he approves of everything that is implied by this U-boat. Shaftoe has killed Chinese bandits on the banks of the Yangtze by stabbing them in the chest with a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just by hitting him pretty hard in the head. On Guadalcanal he killed Nips by shooting at them with several different kinds of arms, by rolling rocks down on them, by constructing large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed up, by sneaking up on them in the jungle and cutting their throats, by firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him off a cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for a long time that this face-to-face style of killing the bad guys is kind of old-fashioned, but it’s not like he’s spent a lot of time thinking about it. The demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy did sort of get him thinking, and now here he is, inside one of the most famous killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or rather the cast-iron wheels that are used for opening and closing valves. Entire bulkheads are covered with iron wheels, ranging from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter, packed in as densely as barnacles on a rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion. They are painted either red or black, and they are polished to a gleam from the friction of men’s hands. And where it’s not valves it’s switches, huge Frankenstein-movie ones. There is one big rotary switch, half green and half red, that’s a good two feet in diameter. And it’s not like this boat has a lot of windows in it. It’s got no windows at all. Just a periscope that can only be used by one guy at a time. And so for these guys, the war comes down to being sealed up in an airtight drum full of shit and turning valve-wheels and throwing switches on command, and from time to time maybe some officer comes back and tells them that they just killed a bunch of guys.
There’s that box—it ended up on a bunk. Shaftoe yanks it closer and hauls it open. The contents are all jumbled up, and there’s more than one purple bottle in there, and he panics for a moment, thinking he’ll have to read all of the labels in their creepy Germanic script, but in a few seconds he finds the MORPHIUM, grabs it, pockets it.
He’s on his way back up towards the conning tower when a big roller slams into the outside of the boat and knocks him off balance
. He tumbles downhill for a long, long ways, doing backward somersaults straight down the middle of the boat, before he gets himself under control. Everything has gone black; he’s lost his flashlight.
He comes very close to panicking now. It’s not that he’s a panicky guy, just that it’s been a while since he had morphine, and when he gets this way, his body reacts badly to things. He’s half-blinded by a powerful flash of blue light that is gone before his eyes have time to blink. There’s a sizzling noise down below. He moves his left hand and feels a tug on his wrist: the flashlight’s lanyard, which he had the presence of mind to wrap around himself. The light scrapes and clanks against the steel grating on which Shaftoe is now spreadeagled, like a saint on the gridiron. There’s another flash of blue light, reticulated by black lines, accompanied by a sizzling noise. Shaftoe smells electricity. He raps the flashlight against the grating a couple of times and it comes on again, flickeringly.
The grid’s woven from pencil-thick rods spaced a couple of inches apart. He’s facedown on it, looking into a hold that, if this U-boat were level, would be below him. The hold is a disaster, its neatly stacked and crated contents now Osterized into a slumgullion of shattered glass, splintered wood, foodstuffs, high explosives, and strategic minerals, all mingled with seawater so that it sloshes back and forth with the rocking of the dead U-boat. A perfect, quivering globe of silver falls through the grating right near his head and descends through his flashlight beam and explodes against a piece of debris. Then another. He looks uphill and sees a rain of silver globules bouncing and rolling down the deckplates toward him: the mercury columns that they use to measure pressure must have been ruptured. There’s another blinding blue flash: an electrical spark with a lot of power behind it. Shaftoe looks down through the grid again and perceives that the hold is filled with huge metal cabinets with giant bolts sticking out of them. Every so often a piece of wet debris will bridge the gap between a couple of those bolts and a spark will light the place up: the cabinets are batteries, they are what enable the U-boat to run underwater.