Submarine by John Wingate

Author:John Wingate
Language: eng
Format: epub

in the captain's canvas stool and began his long vigil The life-support system was the only machinery still running: the boat had not snorted since after Vardo. The WEO had reported that the battery was down to sixty per cent: nothing to worry about yet, but a lot might happen before they could get in another charge.

Denzil Woolf-Gault shivered in the silent control-room. The clammy cold? Or was this tingling at the nape of his neck the onset of flu? The doc, Bob Tomkins, the only man in the wardroom to remain tolerably friendly, was worried by the epidemic: three men were running high temperatures, all three, Bob said, would be virus-pneumonia cases, if the drugs didn't take hold.

Without the doc's unspoken sympathy, Woolf-Gault might have been tempted to put an end to this misery -

and he thrust away that moment when he'd considered the revolver cupboard above the wardroom table.

Messy for everyone - and the act would only compound his cowardice. And how could Eve live with the shame for the rest of her life? Jeremy, their four-year old: would he inherit his father's trait? It was going to be difficult enough explaining to Eve that moment of panic which had overwhelmed him on the bridge, that split-second of derangement which had wrecked his service career. His future depended upon Eve's reaction.

She'd married a man with feet of clay, not a knight in shining armour. In the prison of his personal world, alone in the control-room with the petty officer at the panel intent on his girlie magazine, Woolf-Gault began to sense again the advent of black depression.

How could anyone begin to know what ostracism by one's peers was like? He realized how insufferable he must have been, lording his seniority and experience over Prout. But, virtually sent to Coventry, he wasn't going to crawl to them - bloody hell, no. He'd been top of his term on passing out from the college, had a successful career ahead of him. He knew he wasn't as calm, sometimes, under stress, as some of the others, but he'd managed to keep the knowledge to himself. To compensate he'd gone flat out as soon as he joined the fleet, throwing himself into any extra activity he could: the cross-channel races in the yacht; the sub-aqua clubs which led to his qualifying as a ship's diver, a skill he had conscientiously kept up to date, never missing his routine proficiency tests; and his standard A1 as a Russian interpreter. He had more to offer than most. . . and he felt again the stab of remorse as his eyes wandered round the control-room: depth 634 feet; bubble three degrees bow-down; ship's head steady on 039°. The hum of the ventilation was making him drowsy.

The hands of the clock moved imperceptibly. The reports from the 187 sonar were all that kept him awake: the initial contact, the classifying, the refining, ship after ship, but mostly in the eastern lane. When at 0105

the operator came up with a contact on 030°, it dawned in Woolf-Gault's half-consciousness that the bearing was odd.

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