Dust on the Sea Read Free Page A

buoy to the two entrance buoys and the black and red channel buoys marking both sides. A straight shot, with only a few easy bends after passing inside the shoreline. Always there was someone patrolling off the entrance, an old destroyer or one of the smaller PC-boats, and Richardson could not recall a day since the start of the war that there had not been aircraft overhead and a minesweeper chugging up and down the channel length.
    Today, however, the minesweeper was missing. As Eel approached the sea buoy—the farthest marker to seaward—it was noticeable that the heavy swells which the submarine had been feeling since the turn off Barber’s Point were considerably intensified near the shore. There was also a perceptible rise in the temperature of the air, a sultry warmth emanating from the shore. Richardson caught Keith’s eyes upon him.
    â€œKona weather,” Richardson said. He had once been familiar enough with the moist winds, sweeping from the south, which could pick up the surf and on occasion batter the low-lying parts of the island. Keith had heard of it too, though probably he had never seen a real Kona blow. Keith nodded shortly.
    Lieutenant Buckley Williams, wiry and slender, finishing his fourth patrol, was Officer of the Deck and would have the privilege of bringing the travel-stained sub in to her berth. He, Keith, and Richardson stood together at the forepart of the bridge, the two younger officers on either side pressing against the overhang of the windscreen, Richardson in the middle leaning back against the periscope support foundation. Above them, standing on two little platforms built on to the periscope shears, protected from falling by guard rails, four lookouts zealously followed the orders that prohibited them from taking their binoculars down from their eyes. Their postures showed their discomfort as they held the heavy glasses. During the patrol, lookouts had tired rapidly. Perhaps something could be done for them during the refit period. Aft on the bridge deck, on that section still known as the “cigarette deck” from oldtime submarine tradition, when it was the only place where smoking was permitted, Ensign Larry Lasche,finishing his first war patrol, and Quartermaster Jack Oregon, a veteran of Walrus , were likewise obeying the ship’s standing order which required them, when not otherwise gainfully employed, to maintain a careful, sweeping binocular watch on the sea and the horizon. The order, strictly speaking, said “air” as well, but except for that terrible day when the war began, the air over Hawaii belonged to the United States.
    Buck Williams and Keith Leone were also using their binoculars in careful sweeps of the water where an enemy submarine periscope might suddenly and disastrously appear; only Richardson could be considered a passenger, in all the meaning of the word. A feeling of lassitude, of nonparticipation, possessed him. His had been the adamant insistence on the binocular order; now his own pair hung uselessly from their strap around his neck, not once having been used, their focus as yet unchecked from the setting Oregon habitually put on them.
    The waterproof bridge speaker, protected under the wind deflector in front of Williams, suddenly blared. “Bridge, this is control. Request permission to open hatches and send line handlers on deck!”
    â€œPermission granted!” bellowed Williams, reaching a thin, muscular arm to the starboard side of the bridge, where the “press-to-talk” button of the bridge speaker was located.
    Richardson afterward was never able to explain what it was that pierced through to his consciousness at this precise moment. Perhaps it was some long-submerged recollection of his training under Joe Blunt in the Octopus , his first submarine, now, like Walrus , a casualty of the war. Perhaps it was just that things simply did not seem right, that some sixth sense was in rebellion. He jerked