by Ian Slater
“That it’s a free country,” continued Georgina, taking the last of the milk for her tea.
Anne Spence pointedly left the room.
“Don’t upset her like that,” said Richard. “You know how quarrels upset her.”
“It’s not a quarrel, Daddy,” replied Georgina. “I’m merely stating a fact. Just because we’re at war doesn’t mean we can’t question whether we’re really living in a free—”
“Georgina!”
In the strained silence that followed her father’s rebuke, Georgina returned to her book and Rosemary could hear the steady, heavy ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, recalling that the last time she had been so aware of its presence was after she and Robert had made love, when— ironically — at the height of the Soviet rocket attack, she had felt so safe in his arms.
Georgina finished the bread roll and, licking her fingers, ran them around the bread-and-butter plate to gather up the remaining crumbs.
“My God, Georgina,” exclaimed Richard. “Is that what they teach you up there—?”
“It’s very proletarian, Daddy,” said Rosemary. “Didn’t you know?”
Georgina poured herself more tea as if squeezing the pot. “This is a bit weak, isn’t it?”
“We have to use the leaves over again,” said Rosemary. “Rationing. Or don’t you have that in London?”
“I don’t know why you’re so shirty, Rose,” retorted Georgina.
“She’s worried,” said her father.
“We all are,” said Georgina. “This wretched war has mucked everything up. It’s the same old story. Big capital against—”
“Not at the table,” said Richard.
“I would have thought,” put in Rosemary, “that the war suited you very nicely. Liberating women from the bourgeois apron strings. Kitchen to factory. Manpower shortage and all.”
Georgina’s cup stopped in midair and she replaced it on the saucer without having sipped the tea. “Why didn’t I think of that? Rosey — that’s quite brilliant.”
“Thank you,” said Rosemary. “I’m glad we poor country folk occasionally think of—”
“Still,” cut in Georgina, “I bet I’m right about Willie.”
“Who?” asked Richard, looking up from his newspaper. He had thought she said, “William.”
“That boy-Williams.”
“Wilkins,” Rosemary corrected her.
“He’s got the hots for you, Rosey.”
Richard Spence’s paper shot away from him. “What a vulgar expression. Insulting people, is it? Is that what you’re learning up there?”
“Oh really, Daddy. It’s just an expression—”
“Yes, and I don’t care for it.”
There was another long, strained silence.
“Well,” said Georgina finally, “and how about this Robert Brentwood? Bit sudden, Rosey, you sly fox. When do I get to meet him?”
“Excuse me,” said Rosemary, pushing her chair back from the table, brushing her lips quickly with the napkin.
“I only wanted to—” began Georgina. Richard Spence folded the newspaper neatly, ran his hand down the crease, and taking his reading glasses off, rubbed his eyes. “I thought you had grown out of it, Georgina.”
“Out of what?”
“Don’t be obtuse. Your willful aggressiveness. You’re not happy until you push people to the edge. God knows where you get it from.” He looked hard at her. “Why do you do it?”
Georgina said nothing, holding her teacup like a communicant’s chalice, staring ahead.
“Is it because,” Richard said, “you think we don’t — care for you?”
“Care?” said Georgina, her tone defensively hostile as she turned on him. “You can’t even say the word, can you?”
“Your mother and I have never made any distinction—”
“The word’s love, Daddy. Or was that just for William?”
“You astound me.”
“Really?”
“What, pray, is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve always known it, of course,” she said bitterly, putting the cup down hard.
“Known what?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Father,” she said, vigorously folding and refolding her napkin on the table. “Rosey’s always had your heart.”
“Do you think—”
“I know,” cut in Georgina. “Ever since we were children. I’m not being churlish about it. It’s merely an observation anyone could—”
“I’ve always cared for you. Your mother and—”
“If,” said Georgina slowly, a tension clearly crackling in her voice, “you say cared once more, I’ll scream!”
The phone was ringing, and as Richard Spence got up to answer it, Georgina avoided his distracted gaze, her eyes brimming with tears. She heard her father only vaguely, yet despite her hurt, could tell that something was terribly wrong.
“I’ll tell her,” she could hear him say. “Yes. Yes. Thank you for calling.” He put down the receiver slowly and, turning, called for Rosemary.
“She’s gone out,” said Georgina, holding her teacup in both hands, elbows on the table, something Richard Spence could not abide.
“Where?” he asked her.
“I’ve no idea,” said Georgina.
Richard Spence went to the hall and opened the closet, taking out his mackintosh and gum boots. “If your mother asks, tell her I’ve gone looking for her.”
“What’s wrong?”
Her father scooped the keys from the hall stand, put on his deerstalker, and was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Aboard the Roosevelt, submariner Evans had been silenced. Forever. Yet even in death he seemed to be screaming, his face an agony frozen in time, the cheek beneath his left eye swollen so that the eye was little more than a slit, the left side of his face appearing longer than his right, his mouth agape, right eye open and staring. His whole expression was one of terror, paralyzed before the second of impact. The bosun who had aided Robert Brentwood in giving the seaman the shot of Valium to quieten him down was trying to make sure the hospital corpsman had given him the correct dosage. Maybe the corpsman, unwell himself at the time, had somehow given him a larger dose than he meant to give him. But the corpsman shook his head, his tone adamant.
“No way, José. I didn’t give you an overdose. Don’t pin it on me. Here—” He turned away, trying to abort a sneeze-unsuccessfully. He took down the sick bay clipboard, tapping the day’s entry with his Vicks inhaler. “There it is, Chief. Twenty milligrams. You signed for it.”
“Then what the hell—” began the bosun, the corpsman using the inhaler to dismiss the bosun’s question.
“Who knows? Could’ve had a stroke. Heart attack. Combination of factors.”
“Skipper thinks he killed him.”
Despite his fever, the corpsman, though looking across at the bosun with rheumy eyes, still managed an air of a professional clinician. “Natural psychological reaction. Skipper’s not used to doing it.”
“Yeah, well, anybody kick off after you’ve given them a shot?”
“No.” The corpsman stared at him, then shifted his gaze to Evans, pulling back the sheet by the government-issue tag. “By the look of him — I’d say he died of fright. Pink elephants. Sure as hell didn’t die of a cold.”
“What the hell you mean?”
“Delirium tremens. Like I told you before. That’s where pink elephants come from.”
“Stop jerking me around.”
“Listen,” said the corpsman, sticking the Vicks inhaler into his nostril, one finger flattening the other nostril as he took a deep breath, “I’m telling you, Chief. Alcoholics who’re forced dry see more than pink elephants.”
The bosun remembered Evans screaming about snakes. Maybe the corpsman was right. “But I thought the Valium was supposed to calm him. Take the edge off?”
“Not enough,” said the corpsman. “Once you’ve flipped out, normal dose doesn�
�t do much for you. I could’ve told the old man that.”
“Why the hell didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“Shit, you weren’t there. Back here sittin’ on your ass.”
“Listen, man, I was pushing a one oh five.”
“What?”
“Temperature. Fever — or hadn’t you noticed?” With that, the corpsman took a thermometer from its sheath, glanced at it, shook the mercury column down before slipping it under his tongue. “ ‘Sides, I thought it best to keep away from everyone. It’s one mother of a virus.”
The corpsman, thermometer sticking out like a small cigarette from his mouth, looked down at his watch.
“Then,” said the bosun, pulling the sheet back over Evans’s face before they took him to a forward food freezer, “what the hell did kill Evans?”
The bosun has his thumb on the intercom button and asked someone to come up and help him with the corpse. Looking at Evans, still puzzled, he told the hospital corpsman, “You know, they say that flu in 1918 killed more guys than the war did.” He thought the hospital corpsman was going to bite the thermometer clean in half.
The bosun had merely meant it to take a little wind out of the corpsman’s sails, but later, when he entered the Roosevelt’s redded-out control room, which smelled like an auto showroom, unlike the disinfected sick bay, he saw the officer of the deck, First Mate Peter Zeldman, standing forward of Brentwood, directly behind the planesman’s console, and asked him if any of the crew on watch had gone off sick, reported a fever. But he didn’t get his answer, the sonar operator cutting in, “We have an unclassified surface vessel-five thousand yards. Closing.”
“Signature check?” Zeldman asked Sonar, conscious of Brentwood moving over from the periscope island, watching the “shattered ring” pulse on the pale green screen.
“No known signature,” replied Sonar, moving his head closer to the console, working the constant compromise between volume and tone needed to discriminate one noise from another in what nearly everyone but a sailor assumed to be a quiet domain. In reality the sea was a never-ending “frying pan” of energy, a night jungle of noise, countless billions of shrimp, microscopic organisms, clicking and sizzling amid the eerie haunting trumpets of the giant mammals in constant search for food.
“Could it be using baffles?” put in Brentwood.
“Signature pattern congruent with full hull, sir.” He meant that there was no sign of the kind of blistering effect on the outer ring of the echo pulse that might indicate symmetrical baffles.
“Put it on the PA,” Zeldman ordered Sonar. “Squelch button.” The next second all the crewmen in the control room could hear the muted engine sounds of the unknown surface vessel. Zeldman was ambivalent about the procedure. Sometimes he thought it only made everyone more edgy, but he’d been told by Brentwood how putting incoming noise on the PA, provided it wasn’t loud enough to send out its own pulse reverberating through the hull, could sometimes help the sonar operator. Those enlisted men who had been sailors in civilian life could not only help identify the vessel type but sometimes even luck out on its probable nationality. This could save a captain or his executive officer from ordering a preemptive launch of a torpedo or Tomahawk cruise missile, which, while it would almost certainly take out the oncoming vessel, would also end the submarine’s greatest weapon, its silence, revealing its exact location.
The UCV speed was now showing twenty knots on the digital readout — too fast for most noncombat vessels. But Brentwood knew that in trying to maintain the U.S. Navy’s “rollover” strategy — rolling over all obstacles, including Russian sub packs, in order to get vital resupply to NATO and Europe — the United States had made up for lost time with an industrial miracle that even dwarfed previous Japanese achievements. The industrial “miracle,” spurred on by uncertainty about the level of Japan’s commitment to the war effort, beyond her helping to ferry American troops across to Korea, was that the U.S. East Coast shipyards and those in San Diego were producing “prefab thirty-thousand-ton merchantmen,” called “Leggo ships” by the submarine crews, at the rate of one every seven days. It wasn’t as fast as the one Liberty ship every four days achieved by the American Kaiser Shipyards in World War II, but for a computer age, it was impressive, the Leggo ships stronger because of the laser spot welding, and faster.
Brentwood put it to Zeldman and the RO that it was quite possible the noise they were hearing was that of a Leggo. With the merchantmen rolling off the slipways at more than three a week, there was no way, he pointed out, that Roosevelt’s computer could have all Leggo noise signatures in its memory. Each time the subs returned from patrol, they were routinely issued the top secret taped signatures of the thirty-five Leggos built in the yards during the patrol. Besides, the moment the merchantmen were completed, they were pressed into service, without the normal time set aside for sea trials during which the noise signatures of ships were normally taped and refined to register any changes made by the yard-birds.
“Could be one of ours,” conceded Zeldman, watching Brentwood’s expression, trying to anticipate which course of action he would take.
“Forty-three hundred and closing,” came Sonar’s coolly modulated tone. The ship was coming right for them. In just over seven minutes it would be directly over the Roosevelt, now lying still, on listening mode only.
Brentwood ordered everything closed down except the “coffee grinder,” the reactor at the very heart of the sub that not only powered the Sea Wolf but which would take hours to fire up. Zeldman was worried that Brentwood was placing too much faith in the anechoic paint layer on the hull, which absorbed sonar pulses from another source, thus minimizing, sometimes eliminating, echo ping and so denying a hunter any “noise scent” at all.
Suddenly, with each man silent, rigid, as if welded to his post, the submarine seemed to shrink inside. It was true that for the men who had experienced life in the old diesel-electric subs and for one or two who had served, when very young, in the last boats of World War II, the Sea Wolf was infinitely more spacious. Curtained for privacy, individual bunks in nine-man dormitories, good-sized lockers beneath, rack space large enough to hang a full dress uniform, a soundproofed audio booth and video room for two movies a week, the modern Sea Wolf was a limousine compared to a standard sedan. Still, for most of the crew, who didn’t know the old pigboats, who hadn’t experienced what it was like at the end of your watch to have to roll into the sweat-soaked bunk of your replacement, and, except for the cook and the oiler, to be allowed only one three-minute shower a week, the Roosevelt was still crowded. Every now and then even a fully trained crewman would crack from what was euphemistically called DCS — developed claustrophobia syndrome.
As he listened to the heavy, gut-punching throb of the approaching vessel, it occurred to the hospital corpsman that perhaps Evans hadn’t had the DTs after all. Maybe he’d cracked under the strain of such claustrophobia. No matter how much bigger the Roosevelt was, compared to the old pigboats, it was still a submarine, with every available space jammed with equipment, including lead shot which could be jettisoned to accommodate new equipment so as not to alter the sub’s buoyancy. The corpsman knew that by any landlubber’s reckoning, the sub was still a long, steel coffin, and every man aboard knew that below her “crush” depth of three thousand feet, the enormous pressure driving her toward the bottom at over a hundred miles an hour, the sub would implode — flattened like a beer can beneath a boot.
“Two thousand and closing,” reported Sonar, his voice not so steady now, and hoarse, the sound of the UCV’s props increasing, having changed from a deep, rhythmic pulse to a churning noise that now seemed to be coming at them from every direction.
“Torpedoes ready?” asked Brentwood.
“Ready, sir,” confirmed Zeldman.
Brentwood glanced up at the fathometer. They were in shallower water. It made him more vulnerable to shock waves from any explosion.
“Set forward o
ne and two for SI. Stern five and six for SI,” ordered Brentwood, quietly and distinctly, his command heard clearly in both forward and aft torpedo rooms, the fish being set for SI, or sensor impact, the unknown surface vessel now so close that the trailing wires which normally ran back from the torpedoes to the sub need not be used — the close proximity of the oncoming ship in effect a point-blank target for the twenty-eight-mile Mark-48s.
“Fifteen hundred. Closing,” came Sonar’s voice. “Speed increasing to twenty-seven knots. Most likely a cruiser, Captain. Friendly or not, I can’t tell.”
The choice for Brentwood was clear and stark. Under the authority of chief of naval operations, he could risk attacking any UCV if the UCV had not been identified by signature. In the cruel equation of war, the risk of sinking a “friendly” did not come near to the cost of losing a Sea Wolf, with its capacity as “platform of last resort” to take out a minimum of twenty-four major Soviet cities and/or ICBM “farms” from over two and a half thousand miles away. Yet Brentwood knew that even if the ship wasn’t using a chopper-dangled sonar mike because of the vicinity of its mother ship’s noise, if he fired, the UCV’s on-board sonar would instantly have his precise position. He could then expect to be dumped on by a cluster of “screamers,” as the U.S. sailors called the Soviet RBU—Raketnaya Bombometnaya Ustanovka—antisubmarine rockets. Fired in paired sequence from twelve-barrel horseshoe-configuration launchers, the five-foot-long, forty-two-pound warheads would rip the Roosevelt apart. The later models, being fitted by the Soviets with World War II-type Stuka dive-bomb whistles, were given the name “screamers,” and their noise, traveling much faster underwater than in air, struck deep into the collective psyche of all NATO submariners.
“Thirteen hundred yards and closing.”
The signature computer was still running, maddeningly indecisive, flashing orange bars across its green screen, indicating possible “enemy” match-ups with a plus or minus ten percent error in noise signatures. But only if the orange stripes went to kit-kats, solid brown stripes, would it mean an enemy vessel for sure — light blue bars representing possible “friendlies,” solid blue for confirmed. “One thousand and closing. Still stripe orange.” Zeldman said nothing, jaw clenched, his reflection staring back at him in the computer’s screen, guessing that if Brentwood had decided to risk the Roosevelt’s silence, he would have fired already. Instead it seemed he was gambling that the surface vessel — a cruiser, by the multiple echoes coming in via Roosevelt’s towed sensor array — was now having its active sonar blanketed in the shallower water by the thrashing of its own props. If so, the cruiser might pass over them, waiting for a clearer echo.
