I took his hand back. “No hurry for either of us. Your fingers first. Mills isn’t feeling a thing.”
“Good God!” Astonishment showed in Hansen’s face, maybe shock at my callousness. “When he recovers consciousness–”
“He’ll never recover consciousness again,” I said. “Lieutenant Mills is dead.”
“What!” Swanson’s fingers bit deeply, painfully into my arm. “‘Dead,’ did you say?”
“That column of water from number 4 tube came in like an express train,” I said tiredly. “Flung him right back against the after bulkhead and smashed in the occiput–the back of his head–like an eggshell. Death must have been instantaneous.”
“Young George Mills,” Swanson whispered. His face had gone-very pale. “Poor kid. His first trip on the Dolphin. And now, just like that–killed.”
“Murdered,” I said.
“What!” If Commander Swanson didn’t watch out with his fingers, he’d have my upper arm all black and blue. “What was that you said?”
“‘Murdered,’ I said. ‘Murdered’ I meant.”
Swanson stared at me for a long moment, his face empty of expression but his eyes strained and tired and suddenly somehow old. He wheeled, walked across to the diving officer, spoke a few words to him, and returned. “Come on,” he said abruptly. “You can fix up the lieutenant’s hand in my cabin.”
7
“You realize the seriousness of what you are saying?” Swanson asked. “You are making a grave accusation–”
“Come off it,” I said rudely. “This is not a court of law and I’m not accusing anyone. All I say is that murder has been done. Whoever left that bow-cap door open is directly responsible for the death of Lieutenant Mills.”
“What do you mean ‘left the door open’? Who says anyone left the door open? It could have been due to natural causes. And even if–I can’t see it–that door had been left open, you can’t accuse a man of murder because of carelessness or forgetfulness or because–”
“Commander Swanson,” I said. “I’ll go on record as saying that you are probably the best naval officer I have ever met. But being best at that doesn’t mean that you’re best at everything. There are noticeable gaps in your education, Commander, especially in the appreciation of the finer points of skulduggery. You require an especially low and devious type of mind for that, and I’m afraid that you just haven’t got it. Doors left open by natural causes, you say. What natural causes?”
“We’ve hit the ice a few stiff jolts,” Swanson said slowly. “That could have jarred it open. Or when we poked through the ice last night a piece of ice, a stalactite, say, could have–”
“Your tubes are recessed, aren’t they? Mighty odd-shaped stalactite that would go down and then bend in at a right angle to reach the door–and even then it would only shut it more tightly.”
“The doors are tested every time we’re in harbor,” Commander Swanson persisted quietly. “They’re also opened when we open tubes to carry out surface-trimming tests in dock. Any dockyard has pieces of waste, rope, and other rubbish floating around that could easily have jammed a door open.”
“The safety lights showed the doors shut.”
“They could have been opened just a crack, not enough to disengage the safety contact.”
“Open a crack! Why do you think Mills is dead? If you’ve ever seen the jet of water that hits the turbine blades in a hydro-electric plant, then you’ll know how that water came in. A crank? My God! How are those doors operated?”
“Two ways. Remote control, hydraulic, just press a button: then there are manually operated levers in the torpedo room itself.”
I turned to Hansen. He was sitting on the bunk beside me, his face pale as I splinted his broken fingers. I said, “Those hand-operated levers. Were they in the shut position?”
“You heard me say so in there. Of course they were. First thing we always check.”
“Somebody doesn’t like you,” I said to Swanson. “Or somebody doesn’t like the _Dolphin_. Or somebody knew that the _Dolphin_ was going searching for the Zebra survivors and they didn’t like that, either. So they sabotaged the ship. You will remember you were rather surprised you didn’t have tO correct the _Dolphin’s_ trim? It had been your intention to carry out a slow-time dive to check the underwater trim because you thought that would have been affected by the fact that you had no torpedoes in the for’ard tubes. But surprise, surprise. She didn’t need any correction.”
“I’m listening,” Swanson said quietly. He was with me noW. He was with me all the way. He cocked an eyebrow as we heard water flooding back into the tanks. The repeater gauge showed 200 feet; Swanson must have ordered his diving officer to level off at that depth. The Dolphin was still canted nose downward at an angle of about 25°.
“She didn’t need any correcting because some of her tubes were already full of water. For all I know, maybe number 3 tube. The one we tested and found okay is the only one that is _not_ full of water. Our clever little pal left the doors open, disconnected the hand-operated levers so that they appeared to be in the shut position when they were actually open, and crossed over a few wires in a junction box so that the open position showed green while the closed showed red. A man who knew what he was about could have done it in a few minutes. Two men who knew what they were about could have done it in no time at all. I’ll lay anything you like that when you’re – eventually in a position to check, you’ll find the levers disconnected, the wires crossed, and the inlets of the test cocks blocked with sealing wax, quick-drying paint or even chewing gum, so that when the test cocks were opened, nothing would show and you would assume the tubes to be empty.”
“There was a trickle from the test cock in number 4 tube,” Hansen objected. –
“Low-grade chewing gum.”
“The murderous swine,” Swanson said calmly. His restraint was far more effective than the most thunderous denunciations could ever have been. “He could have murdered us all. But for the grace of God and the Groton boatyard shipwrights, he would have murdered us all.”
“He didn’t mean to,” I said. “He didn’t mean to kill anyone. You had intended to carry out a slow-time dive to check trim in the Holy Loch before you left that evening. You told me so yourself. Did you announce it to the crew, post it up in daily orders or something like that?”
“Both.”
“So. Our pal knew. He also knew that you would carry out those checks when the boat was still awash or just under the surface. When you checked the tubes to see if they were okay, water would come in, too much water to permit the rear doors to be shut again, but not under such high pressure that you wouldn’t have time and enough to spare to close the fo’ard collision-bulkhead door and make a leisurely retreat in good order. What would have happened? Not much. At the worst you would have settled down slowly to the bottom and stayed there. Not deep enough to worry the Dolphin. In a submarine of even ten years ago it might have been fatal for all, because of the limited air supply. Not today, when your air-purifying machines can let’ you stay down for months at a time. You just float up your emergency-indicator buoy and telephone, tell your story, sit around and drink coffee till a naval diver comes down and replaces the bow cap, pump out the torpedo room and surface again. Our unknown pal–or pals–didn’t mean to kill anyone. But they did mean to delay you. And they would have delayed you. We know now that you could have got to the surface under your own steam, but, even so, your top brass would have insisted that you go into dock for a day or two to check that everything was okay.”
“Why should anyone want to delay us?” Swanson asked. I thought he had an unnecessarily speculative look in his eyes, but it was hard to be sure; Commander Swanson’s face showed exactly what Commander Swanson wanted it to show and no more.
“My God, do you think I know the answer to that one?” I said irritably.
“No. No, I don’t think so.” He could have been more emphatic about it. “Tell me, Dr. Carpenter, do you suspect some member of the _Dolphin’s_ crew to be responsible?”
“Do you really need an answer to-that one?”
“I suppose not,” he sighed. “Going to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is not a very attractive way of committing suicide, and if any member of the crew had jinxed things, he’d damn soon have unjinxed them as soon as he realized that we weren’t going to carry out trim checks in shallow water. Which leaves only the civilian dockyard workers in Scotland–and every one of them had been checked and rechecked and given a top-grade security clearance.”