Cold is the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  Some portions of the U.S. Navy, aware of Manta’s rescue attempt, would assume that it had gone too far, had been too unorthodox. Ergo, it must have resulted in disaster to both submarines—a comforting thought for the mediocre mind, illogical though it might be. Poorly informed speculation, nonetheless articulate, would suggest dozens of ingenious solutions of the mystery, some of them ranging into the occult. Some would even have both submarines transported through time warps, or black holes in space. Nowhere in the West, probably, except in some secret drawer of the U.S. National Security Council, would there be an accurate appraisal of what had most likely actually occurred.

  Rich and Buck had kept their periscopes trained on the bearings given by Schultz, relayed by Jerry Abbott, and they saw the enemy submarine simultaneously.

  She was moving very slowly, with three periscopes up, passing between the Manta and the Cushing at a depth roughly halfway between them. She had a very large bulbous bow, a small bridge structure well forward, a conical stern section and a large single propeller, barely turning over. She was larger than the Manta but considerably smaller than the Cushing. As she came into view what instantly struck both Americans was the strange structure wrapped around her bridge and forward portion. It looked almost like an afterthought to her design and added greatly to the outsize bulge of her bows. Massive, heavy, askew, deformed even—and then Rich realized what it was. Great steel beams and thick protective plates, built around the sleek basic form. The askew condition was due to some strong force that had bent and twisted them out of their original shape!

  “That’s the damage he took when he hit Keith,” said Rich.

  “Right, boss! I was wondering. That’s got to be it!”

  “What depth do you figure him at?”

  “He’s looking her over through his ’scopes. So he must be at about the same depth we were when we did. Keel depth a hundred forty or so. Thank goodness we’re well below him. It’s dark below. There’s no way he could see us.” Buck spoke rapidly, in a low tone suited to the dim light in the control room and the secrecy of their effort.

  “Hear us, either, the way you’ve got this boat of yours silenced.”

  “Ship. We’ve got her pretty quiet, all right. Damn good thing!”

  “Ship. I was estimating his depth as a hundred thirty feet. We can hear him plain. Keith should, too.”

  “Yes, but he’s been tied up with those emergency repairs.”

  Rich and Buck had become growingly conscious of the noise level of the enemy submarine. Schultz and Abbott had been hearing it for a long time through the sonar equipment. So had the JT. The enemy skipper had evidently shifted to the silent mode, but he had his reactor running—heavy machinery of some kind, anyway—and there was a strong hum, a whine of high-speed gears, which was what Schultz had heard at first. Now, at close range, the sound of the gears was coming directly through the water into Manta’s hull, where it could be heard by all hands. The eerie feeling associated with the foreign noise, the noise which had done its best to destroy them, affected everyone.

  “Keith’s bound to hear him now, but the bastard’s too close to shoot. When he moves off a bit Keith may try a shot. That’s a chance the Russian knows he’s taking, but he’s still got that thing that stops electric torpedo motors, and by now he knows it works. We don’t have it, and we’d better be on the other side of the Cushing when Keith shoots!”

  “Listen!” A series of short, staccato whistles came over the Gertrude speaker. “Keith’s sending RI KE! There it is again! RI KE! He wants to know if it’s us!”

  “Well, we can’t answer him! Not yet, anyway.”

  Rich had been gradually training his periscope to the left, following the enemy submarine. So had Buck. He could feel Buck’s nearness, the smell of his sweat, the occasional foot in the way of his own. The intruder was slowly passing beyond the Cushing. Soon he would turn, probably, for another pass on her other side. “All right, Buck. I think this is our chance. You know what to do!”

  The Manta swam slowly, silently, in the opposite direction, turned. Buck was using as much speed as he dared. At the depth, her screws were silent.

  “We’re ready forward,” said Deedee Brown. “Depth set, one-two-oh feet. I need a range and bearing!”

  “He’s turning toward,” called Schultz in the stillness, shouting from the sonar room. “He’s swinging to the right! He’s broadside to us right now! Shoot him! Shoot him right now!”

  “Make haste slowly,” said Buck. “Make sure we don’t miss. Deedee, set in starboard ninety. He’ll go ahead emergency as soon as he hears us, so spread the fish forward to cover a ten-knot speed increase. Schultz”—he raised his voice to be sure the sonarman would hear—“can you separate the Cushing’s echo from the target’s?”

  Jerry Abbott jumped back into the sonar shack. Unnecessarily. “Yes, sir!” Schultz, beseeching: “I’ve got them both! He’s the far one!”

  “Very well,” said Buck. “Get me a single-ping range and bearing!”

  A wail from Schultz. A cry of pain. “He’s fired! Cushing’s fired!”

  “He’s not shooting at us!” Buck’s voice was loud in the dead silence. “Single-ping range! Now!”

  The ping went out instantaneously, so loud that everyone jumped a second time. “We’re on automatic to Deedee!” assured Abbott.

  “Set!” said Brown.

  “Fire!” said Buck Williams. The word was an expletive.

  Unlike the new torpedoes, which swam out of their tubes silently on their own power, the older ones had to be expelled, shot out by a blast of water. In the forward torpedo room the firing ram slammed back and forth four times, resounding loudly, masochistically, throughout the interior of the ship. Four massive water-hammer jolts shook her hull, ten seconds apart. Four times the compressed air returning the ram to battery snarled and snorted through its control valves and the vents at the end of the stroke. Four old Mark Fourteen torpedoes, each following ten seconds after its predecessor, evenly diverging to the right, roared out of their torpedo tubes. They headed directly for the Cushing. A few hundred yards beyond her was the enemy.

  “He’s got his halo up!” Abbott, calling from the sonar shack. No pretense of silence now. There was noise in the water. Lots of noise. Manta had suddenly transformed herself into the noisiest submarine ever in the Arctic Ocean. She would have made a huge spike in every sonar within miles. And four old steam-driven torpedoes, lovingly overhauled but roaring like banshees because that was the way they had been built, were driving madly through the sea, their single-stage turbines blaring at high, clattering pitch. “Cushing fired a Mark Forty! It’s gone into the halo! . . . And, that’s it! It’s stopped! We heard the motor stop!” Jerry was at last excited. He could be forgiven. So could Schultz, after twelve hours of steady concentration on his sonar, watching an underwater game in which his own life was one of the pawns.

  “That shot from Keith was his way of telling the Russian something,” said Rich. “Keith was hoping he wouldn’t have time, with the short range, to get up that halo defense of his.”

  “At least, now Keith knows he’s not alone around here!” said Buck.

  The enemy submarine’s captain heard the single-ping range being taken, instantly knew what it portended, instantly ordered emergency speed. The whine of her adversary’s madly cavitating propeller filled Manta’s sonar shack. Schultz later claimed he had also heard her rudder slam hard over against the stops. As it did so, the thin fan of torpedoes, now covering a spread of two ship lengths, passed under the Cushing, kept on going. . . .

  The intruder heard them coming, heard their roaring grow suddenly much louder when part of it was no longer screened by the helpless bulk of the big missile submarine. Her screw had begun to bite. Maybe she could get clear. She was moving ahead, but slowly, so slowly, and the torpedoes were so close. . . .

  The first torpedo, aimed to hit amidships in case the enemy did not move, missed astern by a large margin. The second missed
by only a few feet. The fourth and last inevitably missed ahead, for the third one struck home, and exploded.

  Whatever their shortcomings of modernity, Mark Fourteen torpedoes packed far more explosive than the newer, far more exotic, antisubmarine torpedoes. Their mission, after all, had been to sink big surface ships. For this, hundreds of pounds of the most powerful explosive were needed. If possible, the bottom of the target should be beaten in, her keel shattered, or her whole side torn off, from turn of the bilge to the main deck. By contrast, only a small hole, merely big enough to let in the sea, is needed to upset a submarine’s delicate submerged buoyancy and send it to the bottom forever.

  Assisted by the rigid incompressibility of seawater and the poised pressure ready to squeeze everything together, invade every opening, the detonation of 800 pounds of torpex was cataclysmic. The entire middle of the enemy submarine disintegrated, blown into thousands of pieces, many of them tiny shards of metal with razor-sharp edges, all of them hurled with bulletlike velocity in all directions. Steel bulkheads—or portions of them still remaining—were penetrated by them. No life could exist near them; but all life anywhere near had been obliterated already. And the grenadelike fragments themselves did not travel far, for the waiting sea, in its instantaneous rush resembling a bomb exploding inward, swallowed everything up.

  The two halves of the submarine, the propeller still spinning rapidly on the cone-shaped stern, were driven apart by the explosion. Then they upended and sank separately to the bottom of the Fletcher Abyssal Plain, 12,000 feet down.

  “Keith,” said Buck softly on the turned-down UQC, “it’s Buck. Do you read?”

  “Affirmative, old man! What a relief to hear your voice! I’ll never in my life forget that uproar when your firing ram started cycling over there behind us! I thought I’d faint! And then when we heard your fish coming right at us, well, I kept thinking it had to be you, but I had heart failure anyway, all over again!”

  “Sorry we couldn’t warn you in advance. We had to let him keep thinking he’d sunk us. But how’re you doing? The boss wants to know.”

  Keith’s exuberant voice dropped. “Not too good, Buck. That last fish of his hit in the double hull section, back aft. That was lucky because we’re not taking water very fast. But we can’t stop the leak. I’ve had to abandon the auxiliary machinery compartment. We’ve got everyone forward and the compartment’s pressurized. For now we can hold her by pumping our variable tanks, and then we’ll hold her with the main ballast tanks. But the leak’s in the overhead, and we can’t stop it with air pressure or anything! I’m afraid we’re done!” Keith had evidently placed his hand over his mouth so that his words would not be overheard.

  “What’s the time, Keith? Rich is right here. Do you read me?”

  Again the muffled voice, hand still guarding it. “I get you. We can hold out for two or three hours more, I guess. Not much more. I’m putting a down angle on her right now, to get the stern up and reduce sea pressure. But that can’t last. The ballast tank around the compartment is wrecked, too, of course. We’re running the drain pump but the water’s gaining. Finally we’ll be hanging on our forward ballast tanks with an up angle, and when she gets heavy enough she’ll drift away from the ice.”

  Richardson and Williams conferred hurriedly, then Rich picked up the mike. “Keith, how many wet suits have you?”

  “Four, I think—yes, four.”

  “We have six. Three qualified scuba divers. How many do you have?”

  “Two. Some others have done it for recreation.”

  “All right. Listen. Stand by to transfer your men to the Manta through the escape hatches! Get your scuba experts suited up, and one of the amateurs. We’ll do the same. Our boys will bring our extra suits and tanks over to you. Buck is bringing the Manta up alongside you right now. We’ll rig a line between us, as close as we can snub it. The divers can guide the men across the line and into our hatch, and then cycle the gear back to you. First thing you do is rig one of your deck cleats, and then rig your forward escape chamber so you can use the lower hatch and keep an air bubble inside. Can you handle that?”

  “Affirmative! You bet!” Keith had taken his hand away from his mouth. He was letting everyone in the control room hear. “Our heading’s two-eight-three on the grid. We’re steady, not drifting. Been like this since we stopped coasting. That was quite a ride you took us for just before the line broke, by the way. We coasted for nearly twenty minutes! I’ll start briefing our people right away. Be ready for you as soon as you can get alongside!” There was a pause, then Keith said, his voice again muffled, “You sure you can do this okay? That’s taking a big risk with another sub to bring it alongside in midocean submerged like this!”

  “We’ll worry about that, Keith! Don’t you bother! The water’s still, here under all that ice, and we’ll come up real slow and easy, until we’re floating against the ice too. It’s worth a few scratches and dents if we touch. Go and get your crew lined up. Four men at a time will take a while, and the scuba men will have to be changed off, too.”

  Tired as they were, Buck Williams’ crew showed their professionalism by the way they handled their submarine. Buck positioned her exactly where he wanted her, assisted by periscope angles, Schultz on the sonar, and even an extraordinary solution done on the torpedo date computer—which, however, came too late for use except as a check. Then Tom Clancy and his diving control group caused her to rise slowly and gently, adjusting for gradually reducing salinity of the water as he did so. The Cushing’s underwater television camera, with its lights, illuminated the entire scene and enabled Keith to help by coaching Buck.

  When it was finally necessary for Buck to house his periscopes for fear of striking the ice, the two submarines were on nearly opposite headings, bows overlapping by some fifty feet and twenty feet apart. Manta, because of her smaller size and the missile submarine’s down angle, came to rest with her deck about ten feet higher than the Cushing’s, but that was of little moment. As soon as all relative motion ceased, the hatches on the two submarines opened, and a black-rubber-suited figure with silver tanks on his back appeared on the deck of each. Each man had a line attached to his middle, which he clipped to the safety track on desk, and another on the large deck wrench he carried. Someone inside the open hatches of each ship was assisting, and after some difficulty, in both cases an extra man had to swim out to assist with the cleats. In their condition of near weightlessness it was impossible for a single person to place sufficient leverage on the wrench, a situation anticipated by the experienced divers.

  Then a heavy line was brought out from the Cushing, fine four-inch white nylon, weightless in water and strong. The eye spliced into one end was looped around the opened cleat in Manta’s forecastle, the standing part snubbed securely and then belayed to the one on Cushing’s rounded bow. Buck had maneuvered the Manta so that the two escape hatches were virtually abeam of each other. Then one of the Manta divers carried a sack of scuba equipment over to the Cushing and handed it into the open hatch.

  “Our men say two will be enough to monitor the transfers,” said Keith. “That will give us more suits, and we’ll be able to transfer more men per group.”

  “Maybe, but we still have to carry back the empties to you. The extra scubamen can stand by, over here, and we’ll shift them when they get tired. Let’s start with three monitors,” said Richardson. It was a conservative decision he was later to regret deeply.

  Slowly, seven men at a time, the transfer began. Seven men, with their tanks, filled the Manta’s escape chamber to capacity, or nearly so. Then it was necessary to close the outer door, quickly release the pressure, and open the lower door into her forward torpedo room. The procedure was speeded by permitting great quantities of water to dump into the room instead of the more tidy, but slower method of draining it through the drain valve, and aboard Manta there were many hands available to strip the newcomers of their scuba equipment, bundle it hurriedly into sacks and prepare it for
the return journey to the Cushing.

  The water was cold, several degrees below the freezing point of fresh water, but not uncomfortable with the suits on, the Cushing men said. Not, certainly, in comparison with the discomfort in store for them otherwise! The regular scubamen, trained and aware of what to expect, said only that it was “not too bad.” Enthusiasm for the work they were doing, frequent forced rest stops inside a relatively warm rescue chamber while the next transfer was being readied or suits being switched around made it easy, they said. Whenever feasible, they took another turn on the rope stretched between the two ships, to keep it taut and to prove that moderate effort, extended over a reasonable period, could actually move something as big as a submarine.

  Rich finally had to order the divers to shift their jobs after an hour in the water. This was the limiting time according to the instruction manual, and he also had them stop pulling on the line between the ships. Manta had rigged in her bow planes, so there was no danger to them from possible contact with Cushing, but there was no need to force the two ships to touch when things were going so well.

  But seven men per transfer, opening and shutting hatches, and changing equipment for each group, took time. One hundred twenty-seven men, Cushing’s actual complement counting her skipper, would take eighteen trips, with one man left over. At ten minutes per group, the fastest time achieved, eighteen transfers would take three hours. A nineteenth transfer would be necessary for the one man still aboard the Cushing. Richardson knew well who would be that last man.

  Nor would he ever be able to forget the sinking feeling in his chest when one of the resting scubamen reported the Cushing to be higher in the water, her bow now conveniently level with the Manta. This could only mean that she was no longer able to maintain the down angle Keith had programmed to reduce the water pressure, and hence the force of the leak, in the damaged compartment!