Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage Read Free Book Online

ease their own suffering. He wanted to get therm home, all of them.
It looked as though most of the wounded would make it. Save for Wright, they were showing signs of improvement. The seas were even beginning to abate a hit. Benitez kept talking to his men, encouraging them, asking them to just hang on. The CO was calling upon every moment he had spent in the war, when he had crouched silently among another crew as their sub was depth-charged. If he was showing his aristocracy now, it was the aristocracy of sheer valor, and lie was impressing even the hulking, red-headed Celt who stood at his side.
Benitez still believed he could win his battle against sub and sea when another explosion hit shortly after midnight on Friday, August 26. The boat shook violently, and the fire spread into the second engine room, moving closer to the torpedo room where Wright and the others were. There was no longer any choice. Those men had to come topside. One by one, fifteen men climbed out the back hatch and made their way forward. Still, Wright and one of the other injured men could not be moved, and Doc Eason wasn't going to leave them. He told Benitez they could hold out.
Meanwhile, the captain knew he had to try to transfer the rest of the crew over to Tusk. In the nighttime haze, Austin did not want to take a chance that Tusk's men would no longer see the signal flags. So he picked up a battle lantern and using its toggle switch spelled out in Morse code, "A-n-o-t-h-e-r e-x-p-l-o-s-i-o-n. C-I-o-s-e m-e."
That done, Benitez turned his attention back to getting those last three men topside. The sound-powered phones had finally gone out. There was no way to communicate. A volunteer offered to run back to the hatch. The seas were still washing over the deck, but there was a better chance now that the man could make it. Benitez gave the okay-he wanted those men topside. Still, from everything he'd been told about Wright's condition, he had little hope the exec would make it out of the sub.
Benitez made a silent declaration, "Okay, if lie doesn't come out, I'm going to go down into the after-torpedo room and go down with him." The sense of clarity was almost overwhelming. A deep calm washed over him. It was the same feeling he'd had during the war when he was on the submarine Dace as it was being pummeled by Japanese destroyers, when he had believed there could be no escape. He had been lucky that time.

Now he thought, "Well, I'm gonna die. This is it."
He fretted for a moment that he'd be swept off the deck on his way aft-or worse, be swept off and rescued, leaving Wright to die alone. But he shook away the thought. His calm gave way to a sense of peace, a peace that seemed to pass all understanding, reaching beyond feeling to prayer.
Meanwhile, Tusk prepared to move closer. First, her crew fired off the warshot torpedoes loaded in her bow tubes, ensuring that there would be no explosions if the two subs crashed or if Tusk was too close when there was another violent explosion on Cochino. Then Tusk maneuvered alongside. Back on Cochino, members of the crew prepared to go back aft and carry Wright out, but as they looked back, they saw him follow another man climbing out of the aftertorpedo room. He had somehow managed to claw his way off the bunk, stagger to the ladder below the hatch, and force himself to lift one foot high enough to reach the first rung. The pain was excruciating. He had to stop, and as he stood there he was aware of Doc Eason behind him, aware of the water sloshing across the compartment floor. The sub was flooding now.
Later, Wright would swear that he had no idea how he began climbing again, would swear that it felt almost as if an invisible hand-maybe it was Eason's-had grabbed him by the seat of his pants and pushed him up the ladder and onto the deck. As Benitez watched, he noticed Wright's hands in front of him, heavily bandaged. Other crewmen were watching too as Wright started moving forward. There were no cheers,