Captain Weber turned around. “What kind of problem?”
The radioman pulled his headphones off. “I—I’m not sure what to make of this, sir. The radio is dead.”
The captain crossed the control room to the communications station and looked over the radioman’s shoulder at the equipment. “What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
“It was fully operational yesterday, sir,” the radioman said. “But now … Look, sir, it’s not even lighting up.”
He flicked a few switches but got no signal.
Jerry and the helmsman beside him exchanged a worried glance. There were a few things no sailor wanted to hear on a submarine: that the boat was approaching crush depth, that there was a leak or a fire—or that the radio was down. A dead radio on a submarine so close to Soviet waters was more than a problem; it was potentially deadly. If the Soviets spotted them, Roanoke wouldn’t be able to call for help, and at a maximum speed of 32 knots, it sure as hell wouldn’t be able to outrun airplanes or destroyers. They would be sitting ducks, stranded with no chance of help on the way.
A contagious disease incapacitating crewmen, a dead radio—Jerry wondered what else could go wrong on this underway.
“Captain,” a voice called.
Tim stood in the doorway of the sonar shack. He looked worried in a way Jerry hadn’t seen before.
“Go ahead, Spicer,” the captain replied.
“I’m picking something up on the sonar, sir. It’s another submarine.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tim knew well enough that if a Soviet boat spotted them this close, even in international waters, there would be trouble. The line that separated international waters from Soviet territory was a well-established boundary to everyone except the Soviets themselves. They patrolled the waters outside their territory like their own. Publicly they insisted that it was necessary to defend themselves against American and Western European aggression, but in truth it was their way of claiming those waters for themselves, expanding the borders of their empire one nautical mile at a time. If Roanoke was caught even close to the international boundary, it would be forced to surface, and the crew would be arrested and tried for espionage in front of the whole world. Soviet engineers would strip-search the submarine for any technology they might reverse-engineer, while their diplomats made the usual complaints to the United Nations about cynical US imperialism.
He had known from the start that their route to the Kamchatka Peninsula would take them close to the boundary, but he hadn’t expected to run into the Soviets so soon. He had assumed that Roanoke was still a few hundred miles away from territorial waters, but it occurred to him now that he didn’t know where he was, exactly.
Tim’s sonar display utilized spectrograms, which looked like waterfalls of random, colored lights if you didn’t know how to read them. They didn’t work like radar, though. They couldn’t pinpoint and identify enemy boats. Instead, the spectrograms picked up anomalies—noises in the water that could be engines, torpedoes being loaded into tubes, even someone on another boat dropping a pair of pliers on the deck. They were that sensitive. The readings came from the TB-23, the underwater ear that Roanoke was towing—a half-mile-long sonar array that trailed from the stern like the tail of a kite.
The submarine Tim’s sonar had picked up sounded like a Victor. The Soviets had been producing Victor-class subs since the mid-1960s and had been stuck with them ever since. Now they were old and obsolete. Tim could tell it was a Victor from the way it rattled like an old car. He only wished he could nail down its proximity. Passive sonar was good for detecting objects, but terrible for judging how close they were. Active sonar identified everything, practically delivering a Polaroid snapshot, but to engage active sonar now would be the equivalent of sending up a flare. It would alert the Victor to their location immediately, and there was still a chance it hadn’t spotted them yet.
The good news was that Victors didn’t have anything even half as good as Roanoke’s TB-23, although this didn’t mean they were deaf. And their torpedoes worked just as well as Roanoke’s.
“Has it picked us up yet?” Captain Weber asked, leaning into the sonar shack.
Tim said, “It’s hard to say, sir. The Victor is matching our speed and course, but it’s not taking any action to intercept us.”
“Looks to me like we’ve got ourselves a shadow,” the captain said. “Officer of the Deck, rig for ultraquiet.”
Tim held his breath for a moment, something he instinctively did when they went to silent running, even though he knew full well that the Victor’s sonar couldn’t pick up breathing. It couldn’t pick up voices, either, so long as they were kept to a reasonable volume, but other sounds, such as the propeller screw and the nuclear reactor’s active cooling system, could give them away. In ultraquiet mode, the screw would be slowed and the reactor’s cooling system would be switched off, leaving it to be cooled instead by the natural flow of water through the pipes. That was the big stuff. Smaller unnecessary noises would have to be eliminated too—in the quiet ocean, it didn’t take much for a submarine to give away its position. From now on, the galley would switch from preparing hot meals to serving cold sandwiches. The mechanics had to stop whatever they were working on—even the tap of a hammer would be like setting off fireworks. Submarines sailed blind. If a sonar tech heard something, he could track it. If it stopped making noise, he lost it. It was that simple.
Being rigged for ultraquiet made everyone tense, but as a defensive tactic, it worked. One moment, the Victor’s sonar could hear Roanoke; the next, it would hear nothing. It would look to the Soviet boat as if Roanoke had vanished. So long as they didn’t make any sudden turns or pick up speed to more than five knots, they were invisible.
Tim had seen ultraquiet from the other side too. A few underways back, while they were shadowing a Victor, the Soviet sub had dropped off his sonar like a ghost. It was disconcerting, even frightening. He had known that the sub was out there, possibly loading its torpedoes while they scrambled to find it, but it was completely invisible to him. The only way to locate the Victor would have been to use active sonar, but that would effectively have handed them a target to lock on to. It had turned into a waiting game to see who blinked first. In the end, the Victor had chosen to slip away rather than attack. Tim could only hope for a similarly peaceful outcome now.
“Diving Officer, prepare for deep submergence,” the captain said. “Make our depth seven-five-zero.”
“Seven-five-zero, aye,” Lieutenant Duncan replied. “Make our depth seven-five-zero.”
“Seven-five-zero, aye, sir,” Jerry replied. “Making our depth seven-five-zero, aye.”
With Roanoke on alert, it looked as though the animosity between Lieutenant Duncan and Jerry had been shelved for the moment. They were working together seamlessly now. Tim wished it could stay that way, but he knew Duncan well—the harping and picking would start up again at the first opportunity. A tiger didn’t change its stripes, and a bully didn’t suddenly lose the urge to shit on everyone below him.
The dive alarm didn’t sound when they were rigged for ultraquiet, but Tim braced in his seat as the deck tilted beneath him.
“We have to go deep,” Captain Weber said. “Let her follow if she dares.”
“And if that doesn’t work, sir?” the officer of the deck asked.
“Then we’ll still have the advantage. They can’t radio back to their command center about us without rising to periscope depth, and if they do that, we’ll just slip away right under them. If they stay the course at their current depth and keep following us, the thermocline will cut them off from communicating. Spicer, I want a close eye on that boat. If she so much as twitches in our direction, I want to know about it.”
“Aye, sir,” Tim said.
Roanoke descended quickly to 500 feet, then 600, and finally 750. Captain Weber ordered their speed cut to three knots, which would let them run so quietly, the Victor would have no choice but to ping them with ac
tive sonar if it wanted to find them.
“Spicer, what’s their position?” the captain called into the sonar shack.
Tim relayed the latest reading to him. “They’re moving slow and quiet, sir, just like us. They might be searching for us.”
“Are they still using passive sonar?” he asked.
“Aye, sir,” Tim said. “They think it’s keeping them undetected, but I’ve got them on the sonar. Just barely, but they are there.”
“Good,” the captain said. “Keep watching them, Spicer. I want regular updates. Helmsman, left full rudder. Steady course three-zero-zero.”
The helmsman replied, “Left full rudder, aye, sir. Making our course three-zero-zero, aye.”
Watching the cascade of colors on his display screen, Tim felt his back and shoulders tensing. He told himself the Victors were obsolete, decaying submarines with antiquated sonar equipment that couldn’t find a honking car in an empty parking lot. He told himself that even if the Victor did find them, it wouldn’t fire on Roanoke unless they had trespassed into Soviet waters. He tried hard not to think about the South Korean jetliner the Soviets had shot down earlier this year, and all the subsequent news reports that questioned whether it had actually been in Soviet airspace. Had that Soviet pilot simply been trigger happy, or had word come down from the Kremlin ordering their military to shoot first and ask questions later? Tim prayed they weren’t about to find out.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was Murphy’s Law: whatever could go wrong would go wrong, and at the worst possible time. As far as Lieutenant Commander Jefferson was concerned, this whole damn underway was Murphy’s Law in operation, with all its corollaries. One dead crewman, one sick crewman, a couple of smashed lights, a dead radio, and now there was a Soviet bear on their tail. Not even two weeks into the op, and Jefferson had already given up waiting for something to go right.
Where had the Victor come from? How had they run into one so soon? He thought back to the map on the captain’s desk, the lines he was drawing that extended into Soviet territory. Was it possible they had crossed the border without a heads-up from Captain Weber? What would make the captain keep something that important from the crew?
If this was more than reconnaissance, if this was a spy mission, the navy shouldn’t have sent a submarine. They should have taken a page from the KGB playbook and sent a spy boat disguised as a trawler. That would have served the Soviets right, considering that was what they always did. Everyone knew that the Russian trawlers were spy ships, of course, but if the US Navy so much as touched one of them, the Soviets started screaming in the UN assemblies about American imperialists encroaching on civilian fishing boats.
What a mess. Sometimes he wondered whether the Cold War would ever end, or whether the two superpowers would be stuck playing out the same scenarios until the end of time—advance and retreat, advance and retreat, like an unending global-scale game of Stratego. Except that the whole world was at stake.
Jefferson paused outside the closed hatch to the torpedo room. No longer just a makeshift morgue, the torpedo room was now quarantine too. There was nowhere else on Roanoke to keep the sick and possibly contagious Steve Bodine safely away from the rest of the crew. Matson had to be stationed there with him; it was the only way the hospital corpsman could continue to treat Bodine and respond quickly to any sudden changes in his health. Jefferson could tell Matson hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of staying in the torpedo room, but the corpsman knew what was at stake and kept his opinion to himself.
Jefferson had seen with his own eyes what bad shape Bodine was in. He was clearly sick with the same thing that had made Warren Stubic delirious enough to shut himself in the freezer. The thought of losing Bodine put a knot in his gut. He couldn’t help thinking of all the conversations they’d had, all the times Bodine had sought him out for advice. Jefferson felt like a mentor to him.
Bodine had been reluctant to open up at first. He had trouble trusting anyone after his experience at Navy Boot Camp, where several of his white classmates had treated him like a pariah, as though he didn’t belong there. Their contempt had been plain even though strictly enforced navy rules prevented them from perpetrating outright abuse or harassment. But through it all, Bodine never buckled. He pushed forward, he did the work, and he graduated to the submarine service.
Bodine had come to trust Jefferson eventually, and soon enough he began confiding all his hopes and fears for his life, his career—everything. During their off hours, Bodine often came to him to ask how he managed life on a submarine with so many men whose only knowledge of black men was gleaned from TV shows or movies—or, worse, from news reports about drug dealers and gang violence. Jefferson taught him to keep his cool when dealing with the tyranny of small minds. They both had seen their share of adversity, almost all of it aimed squarely at the color of their skin. It had brought them together, and he hoped his advice had made Bodine stronger. But now Bodine was deathly sick, and Jefferson didn’t know how to handle that.
He took a deep breath and opened the hatch. The first thing he noticed when he stepped into the torpedo room was the hammock they had set up for Bodine, where he now lay with a cold compress on his forehead. He was asleep, but the way his facial muscles and eyelids kept twitching told Jefferson he wasn’t sleeping peacefully. Jefferson’s gaze tracked to Stubic’s body bag on the floor, just a few feet from the hammock. It seemed wrong to keep the two of them together in such a small space, the dead and the still living, but he hadn’t had a choice. It would have to do until Bodine recovered.
Matson had arranged nine small ampules along the edge of an occupied torpedo tray, the glass bottles positioned against the side of the torpedo. Matson inspected each one, checking the labels that identified the injectable liquid inside. At his feet were a small cardboard box of disposable syringes, and a trashcan designated for medical waste.
“How’s he doing, Matson?” Jefferson asked. Bodine’s skin was slick with sweat despite the coolness of the room. He was breathing fast and ragged, as if he had just done a mile of wind sprints. Jefferson could tell that this was no simple cold or flu. Whatever had him in its grip was killing him.
“I’ve been giving him antibiotics in case this is bacterial in nature, sir, but that’s about all I can do for him,” Matson said. He indicated the ampules lined up along the torpedo tray. “As you can see, I brought my entire supply. I wasn’t sure how much it would take. But frankly, sir, it’s not working. He’s not getting better. I haven’t had to sedate him again; he’s just … out. He hasn’t regained consciousness at all. Sir, if we could take him to a real medical facility, somewhere they could test his blood …”
“The captain made his decision,” Jefferson said.
Matson nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ve given Bodine as thorough a physical as I can under the circumstances. His glands aren’t swollen. There’s no inflamed tissue, no extra mucus production, no rigidity in his abdomen or swelling in his liver or kidneys—at least, none that I could feel. His breathing is shallow and rapid, but there’s no sign of congestion. Physically, the only abnormality I found was a couple of welts on the side of his neck that looked like they might be bug bites. If they were, I thought they might be responsible for the fever, but there’s no redness or pus to indicate infection or envenomation.”
“Could it be food poisoning?” Jefferson asked. “Some of the food the Guidry brothers are whipping up isn’t exactly Betty Crocker.”
Matson gave a thin smile. “I may not have an MD, but even I know food poisoning when I see it, sir. That’s not what this is.”
“Sorry,” Jefferson said. “Just trying to help.”
“I know, sir. I’m as frustrated as you are that we don’t know what this is. Frankly, there’s nothing else I can do but continue to give him antibiotics and hope for improvement. But if we don’t get him to a medical facility, Bodine may die.”
Jefferson met his eye. “It’s up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“There’s only so much I can do, Lieutenant Commander,” Matson said.
“Keep trying, Matson. Don’t give up on him.”
Jefferson sighed and looked down at the patient again. He put his hand over Bodine’s, but even with the blanket between them he could feel how uncannily hot the skin was. The man was burning up.
“Come on, Bodine,” he said softly. “Fight this thing. That’s an order.”
He hadn’t expected to feel this close to Bodine, but he couldn’t deny his concern. They had shared a lot, and in some ways they had more in common with each other than with anyone else in the crew. Some of their conversations had gotten intense, and he recalled the one time that Bodine had actually called him “brother.” Hoo boy, had that bugged Jefferson. Brother—as if they were supposed to raise a fist in solidarity: black power, the revolution, and all that. He had told Bodine his name was Lieutenant Commander and reminded him that the only political entity he belonged to was the United States Navy. He had given Bodine a hard time, reminding him that he was from Oklahoma, not Philly, and his favorite music was Hall and Oates, not Marvin Gaye. He grinned at the memory. He’d been tough on Bodine, but he always tried to be fair. And when he could, he tried to be a good teacher too.
“Sir, I don’t mean to interrupt,” Matson said, “but we still don’t know how contagious he is. My advice would be not to stay down here too long, just to be on the safe side. It’s best we contain this before it spreads any further, sir.”
“What about you?”
“If this thing is airborne, I’ve already been exposed,” Matson replied. “I have to remain quarantined too—at least until we know if I’ve been infected.”
“Damn. The news just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?”
Before Jefferson turned to leave, he watched the blanket on Bodine’s chest rise and fall, moving in time with his shallow breaths.
“Hang in there,” he said, “… brother.”
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