The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas

Author:Peter Maas [Maas, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780091879372
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2011-12-31T04:30:00+00:00

AT HER HOME in Portsmouth, Frances Naquin slept fitfully. Then she was startled wide awake by the sudden wail of sirens shattering the night silence. They were coming from police cars escorting the rest of Momsen’s experimental diving unit, twelve divers in all. After the planes transporting them had been forced down in Newport, they had been escorted northward at breakneck speed. Now the first group of them was just arriving.

13

THROUGH THE NIGHT, Naquin’s decision to husband his oxygen supply and keep the air quality slightly on the toxic side had caused many of the men to nod off. They were the fortunate ones. The cold had become increasingly severe.

Huddled under his blanket in the forward torpedo room, Charlie Yuhas stuck out his hands to flex his fingers and immediately withdrew them. Within a matter of seconds, he could feel them getting numb.

Near him, Harold Preble remembered how warm the forward battery seemed when he passed through it hours ago. He’d been so confident of a swift rescue then that when he went by Naquin’s stateroom door, he had impulsively scribbled on it with a grease pencil, “Everything as fine as can be expected.” He noted the time—0930—and signed his name with a flourish. He thought it would be a stirring reminder of the crew’s spirit once they reached the surface and the sub was salvaged. Even though things weren’t working out quite as he had hoped, Preble never entertained any other eventual outcome.

He found a mordant humor in his predicament. A fastidious man in his work and habits, he’d been annoyed by bits of pineapple stuck between his teeth after supper. To get them out, he used the only item he could find in the dim light—a sock left on the bunk he was lying in. As the night wore on, he tried to think of something to divert his mind from the cold. But it was no use. What he most yearned for he couldn’t have. Preble would have given just about anything for a cigarette.

Lieutenant Nichols never questioned that he would survive. Personally, he wouldn’t have been averse to resorting to the Momsen lung right off the bat. But it wasn’t his call. Still, despite the frigid water pressing down on them and the rigors of an ascent, he was sure that the men, at least in the beginning, had enough stamina to reach the surface using the lung. In their first hours, beside the primer he had given to Preble—the only man in the compartment who had not undergone escape training—he had reviewed aloud the key items in the lung’s use from one of the instruction manuals that every submarine carried: Once in the escape lock, be certain to hold your nose and blow hard to relieve the pressure in your eardrums. Always keep breathing normally. Never let go of the ascending line. Pause for the prescribed count at each stop on the line to avoid the bends. Once on the surface, close the mouthpiece and

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