The Circle

by David Poyer

  His hand caught the next beam, but his fingers wouldn’t close. He crooked his wrist around it instead, like a wooden hook, and, with another terrific and despairing lunge, pulled his chest up onto the guard.

  The sea returned and he held, grimly, knowing his grip inadequate. But he was higher now, and when it receded, he got his knees up on the beam. Then he jumped. Too quickly, and his foot slipped. His chest slammed down across the deck edge. Lights exploded in his head. But at the same instant, his hand caught the base of a stanchion.

  He pulled himself over and rolled desperately across the flat, cold steel, as far as he could get from the edge. Then he pushed himself to his feet, gasping, his lifeless hands raised, though he couldn’t make them into fists.

  He crouched there for long minutes, listening, peering into the wind and the dark. His heart was trying to fight free of his ribs.

  There was no one else on the fantail.

  When he could walk, he staggered forward and hooked his hand around the dogs of a hatchway. Shuddering, blinded by sudden light, he turned back from it to vomit into the darkness.

  II

  THE SEA

  7

  Latitude 63°–10′ North, Longitude 10°–33′ West: 116 Miles East of Iceland

  FROM thirty thousand feet—the cruising altitude of the airliners, hurtling from Scandinavia toward Labrador, which were the only other evidence of human presence in this waste of water east of Iceland—the destroyer would have been invisible. Would have been impossible for the sharpest eye to discern, lost in an immense bowl of furry ocean, its wake indistinguishable in hundreds of thousands of square miles of whitecapped sea.

  From much lower, from an altitude that would have made a pilot sweat, for forced down here there could be no rescue, he might have made her out, and seen that Ryan was making heavy weather. Her bullnose pointed doggedly northeast, into the teeth of the prevailing sea. Low and narrow, she did not so much ride as drill through, burrow under, penetrate the swells. Gray as slate, their tops frayed into spray by thirty knots of wind, they rolled inexorably in to burst with drumming booms over the forecastle. Swept aft in tattered streamers, lifted in curved veils over the forward mount, the white of spray contrasted with the dogfish gray of ocean, the sullen pewter sky. Rain mixed with blown seawater rattled in volleys against the sealed windows of the pilothouse.

  Behind them, beside Al Evlin, Dan stared out on the combat of ship and sea. He held tightly to the overhead rail, fighting the endless stagger and plunge of the overheated space. He felt sick and weak, but alert. He winced as a vicious heel brought his weight against the cuts in his hands. The cuts he’d gotten going over the side the night before.

  “It’s not too bad on this course,” said Evlin. The operations officer was wedged between the radar and the helm. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. “It’ll be worse when we start quartering. These seas take us from the beam, we’ll be doing some rolling then.”

  This pitching’s bad enough, Dan thought. Climbing a long swell, Ryan leaned backward like a runner taking a hill. The wind tore at her superstructure and whistled in her upperworks. Then, at the crest, as the spray clattered like hail on the windows and transparent sheets of water, mirroring the macrocosm in their own wind-roughened surface, surged for the scuppers, she staggered over like a drunk shoved from behind. Then down she went into the trough, leaving the men in the pilothouse staring into the sea, though their eyes were straight ahead.

  “You know much about CZ ops?” Evlin was saying in his gentle voice.

  “Ceasing what?” Dan jerked his eyes away from the belly of a comber. He’d been thinking about something else. About the moment he’d believed himself dead. He’d been imagining how Betts would take the news. It hadn’t been a warm, fuzzy thought. He ought to stop by ship’s office and look at his page two, make sure his next of kin, his GI insurance beneficiaries were up-to-date.

  “Convergence zone operations. Why we’re getting set to tow this fish all over the Arctic Ocean.”

  He forced his mind back to the bridge of Ryan. “It’s sonar, right?” he said too loudly, then lowered his voice. “We had the theory at school.”

  “Well, you probably know more about it than I do, then.”

  “No. Tell you the truth, we didn’t get into tactical applications. That stuff was all secret.”

  “Okay.” Evlin’s eyes lighted up; he was, Dan reflected, never so happy as when he was explaining something. He finished burnishing his glasses with lens paper and put them on. “You know how the conventional sonars work, like the one under our hull. Send out a pulse, detect the echo, then measure range and bearing and present it on a screen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That works okay, but only out to a few thousand yards. Maybe five miles max, in good conditions. Now, that was enough when you were dealing with diesel subs. You could detect their scopes and snorkels with radar, move in and force them down; then localize them with the active sonar and drop your depth charges.”

  “Active sonar?”

  “Active, you ping and listen; passive, you just listen.”

  “That’s right; I remember that,” he said, feeling guilty and stupid. His knees hurt. He closed his eyes briefly to fatigue and nausea, then opened them again. The wipers whipped back and forth, shrieking on the downstroke as they slapped crystalline spray from the windows. At the edges it was freezing to a white crust. The steam pipes thudded and clanked, stuffing the closed pilothouse with oppressive heat.

  “But the new Soviet subs go faster than Ryan can. Thirty knots, maybe more. And when the sea kicks up, it’s worse: A surface ship’s got to slow, but they don’t. Down deep, they can hear better than us, too. Trying to find one of them with a standard sonar’s hopeless. They hear you first, and move out of the way; or maybe just linger outside your active range, and send in a couple of torpedoes.”

  “I get you.”

  “The idea of the IVDS, independent variable depth sonar, is to get down where they hide. The winch gear astern reels out a towed body, with a specially designed sonar head inside, on a cable eight hundred feet long. That puts the transducers between two hundred and six hundred feet down, depending on the length of cable we deploy and the tow ship’s speed. Now, you said you knew about convergence zones?”

  “I think. Maybe.”

  “I’ll go over it quickly, then. Sound bends in the ocean. Usually upward, like a reverse rainbow. Depending on the temperature layers, it’ll bend up from the source, hit the surface, and bounce. Then do it again. Or it’ll scatter at the first bounce, if the surface is rough.

  “The first convergence zone is generally around thirty miles from the radiating source and is diffused across a band three to five miles wide. If there’s another bounce, it’s sixty miles away, and the band’s six miles wide. Sometimes you get a third one, ninety miles away, or even more. See how it extends the range? Once you can hear the sub—and Soviet subs are pretty noisy—you can send somebody out after it, like a helicopter, or another submarine.”

  “Or use the Asroc.”

  “Yeah. Only whatever you fire, it has to do the damage.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You tell me. On the CZ detection—or if you see a periscope pop up on the radar, say—you have a location but not a course and speed. So the area where the sub could be expands with time. The formula’s simple, pi R squared. In an hour, a sub traveling thirty knots can be anywhere in three thousand square miles. So if you want to fire on a detection and you can’t do it immediately—?”

  “Then you expend more ordnance?”

  “Or use a special weapon.”

  He’d heard that euphemism before. “We have nukes aboard?”

  “There’s a magazine back in what used to be the Dash hangar. But back to—what were we talking about?—convergence zones. You can get them sometimes with a hull-mounted sonar, but it’s clearer if you get down below the surface layers and wave noise. Also you can do bottom-bou
nce and sound-channel operations better with a towed sonar. I read in Navy Times they’re going to buy them for every destroyer in the fleet; that is, if they test out as good as they sound on paper.”

  Dan was listening, but nausea was demanding most of his attention. He bent to fit his face into the rubber hood of the radar. Its smell of old sneakers didn’t help.

  The scope was flecked with random light. Wave clutter, so dense near the center that anything less than a mile away would be wiped out. He flicked a switch, varying the pulse length; no change. It had gone out completely for three hours on the midwatch, leaving them blind in utter darkness. Silver said it was the spray, water in the waveguides. There hadn’t been any contacts since they’d refueled, so it probably hadn’t been really dangerous, but he was glad to have it back.

  “Okay, but what’s the idea on testing it here? Up above the Circle, north of Iceland and all.”

  “This is the killing ground. Half the subs in the Soviet Navy are based out of the Kola Peninsula. If the balloon goes up, they’ve got to get out into the Atlantic and cut off our resupply route to Europe. Only way out’s through the Gap—between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. We’ve got listening gear on the bottom and P-threes flying out of Iceland. The surface fleet will be up here, and so will our subs. If we stop them here, and hold the line in Germany, that might finish the war without going nuclear—assuming mankind is so stupid as to let one start.”

  Yes, Dan thought, of all the officers aboard Ryan, only Evlin would tack on that at the end. “Okay, I get it now,” he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. “Jesus Christ, it’s hot in here. Can’t we crack a hatch, sir? Just a little?”

  “Boatswain’s mate.”

  “Aye, sir.” Pettus came out of the chart room, smoothing back his hair.

  The wind hissed and clawed like a cat at the gap, blowing in white flakes that whirled in brief devils on the deck before they melted. He couldn’t make out if it was snow or frozen spray.

  The third-class stayed by the hatch, rubbing at the fogged glass and staring out. Dan watched him, feeling something corrosive and new gnaw at his heart. Had Pettus been on the fantail last night? He was the right age. So he was a petty officer. Did that make him proof against Lassard’s influence? The sailor turned from the window to meet Dan’s stare. He nodded, looking simply very young and tired and bored, then went back into the chart room. Dan stared after him. Christ, he thought. I’m starting to suspect people just because of their age. Just like Bryce.

  “Captain’s on the bridge,” drawled Coffey from behind the wheel.

  “Carry on,” said Packer, looming into the pilothouse. Both the officers had turned at the helmsman’s traditional phrase. The captain, not looking at either of them, crossed the bridge with a heavy gait and hoisted himself into his chair. Evlin went over to stand beside him.

  Dan bent to the scope again, more to hide his face than to search for nonexistent contacts. Above the rattle of spray and the sizzle of the International Distress receivers, he heard them discussing the distance to the next course on the curved Great Circle route they were steaming to the operating area.

  For some reason he had a sudden image of the submerged sensor, slipping silently through the dark sea hundreds of feet down, a metal fish, a submarine kite, an electronic ear tuned to the subtlest whispers of the deep.

  The voices ceased. Dan heard the scratch of a lighter, smelled the captain’s mixture. He lifted his eyes, examining him over the hood.

  Packer’s body was set into the chair like hardened concrete. He was staring out the window, jetting short puffs of smoke. The wiper cleared the windshield every two seconds, allowing half a second of clear sight of endless seas exploding one by one against the stem, before the spume froze again into opacity. Packer’s swarthy face—tan? Skin tone? Looked hard, peasantlike, like a Soviet tractor driver’s. The chair, elevated for a good view of the forecastle, vibrated as Ryan jarred into a trough like a harvester hitting a deep ditch.

  Through nausea and fatigue, Dan felt a trickle of envy. Motion didn’t bother the captain, nor lack of sleep. He never gave any indication of caring what his officers thought of him, or that he ever doubted himself. Part of him wanted to be like Packer. Another part wondered whether any man should be that silent, that self-assured, that … alone. Was Silver’s scuttlebutt true—his wife, his son, his career…?

  Could he endure that? Losing everything, because he’d done what he thought was right? He tried to imagine losing Betts. He couldn’t. To have love, then lose it … life wouldn’t be worth the effort to breathe and eat after that.

  “Captain,” said Evlin. Packer looked blindly at the officer of the deck, his face remote and a little astonished before it focused, like binoculars being adjusted to a closer view.

  “What is it?”

  “Noon weather, sir.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Force six in operating area Kilo right now. Poor visibility in spray and precipitation. Predict that will continue for the next three days. Possibility of storms after that.”

  “Very well.”

  The lieutenant retreated and Packer covered his eyes, propping hand-tooled western boots on a radio repeater. Dan watched him covertly as a roll leaned him against the armrest. The skipper grunted, stirred, then opened his eyes again. He drew his pouch and began the ritual of clearing and restuffing his pipe. His jaw bunched around the stem and he scowled forward, sucking blue flame into the bowl, as a squall broke on the windows and hammered on the steel just above their heads.

  Again Dan tried to imagine what he was thinking about. The squall? The upcoming operation? His son? His mind retreated from the terrifying dilemmas of another soul. Then he remembered he had something to tell him.

  “What are you smoking, Captain?” he asked before he had time to think about it.

  Packer blinked and turned his head. “Hullo, uh, Dan … what, this? Two-thirds latakia, one-third burley. Touch of cavendish for scent. You doing okay aboard?”

  “Well, in general, yes, sir.”

  “Getting enough rest?”

  “Well, no sir, I’m pretty tired,” he said, then felt his face heat. Packer spent twice as much time on the bridge as any of the watch standers. He’d been in his chair all last night, smoking wordlessly in the dark and staring out the window the entire time the radar was down. “I mean, I guess everybody is—”

  “You get used to it,” said the captain, as if he understood what Lenson was thinking. He tapped the pipe against his teeth and slid his eyes sideways to Dan’s, then beyond him. “I never did get to welcome you aboard properly, did I? Understand you slipped last night, almost went overboard.”

  “I did go overboard, sir. And it wasn’t a slip. Has Commander Bryce talked to you about it?”

  “He mentioned it briefly. What do you mean, it wasn’t a slip?”

  He lowered his voice. “I mean I was pushed, sir. That’s what I told the exec, too. Sir, should we talk about this here? Or could we—”

  The captain’s face had altered subtly. He straightened, somewhat stiffly, and swung his legs down from the chair. “Al, can you live without your JOD for a couple of minutes? I’ll bring him right back.”

  “Sure, sir. If you say so.”

  The captain’s sea cabin was just aft of the bridge. Dan followed him in, grabbing the jamb as Ryan screwed her way through a wave. “Sit down,” grunted Packer.

  The cabin was ten feet by seven, with a brown metal work desk, a round coffee table, thin green carpet with paths worn into it, and a porthole. Packer folded himself onto a leatherette settee. His legs stuck up awkwardly, showing the tops of the boots. The coffee table was covered with message traffic and three-ring binders marked BUPERS and NAVORD and JAG. An inch-high pyramid of ash smoldered in a huge cobalt glass ashtray. Dan noted several Camel butts in the pile with the used pipe tobacco. Packer pointed at the other end of the settee.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Dan,
I’m sorry if I’ve neglected a new officer. Getting under way on short notice, and I’ve had to spend a lot of time in the engineering spaces; Ed’s got real problems down there. Maybe Ginnie and—” He stopped. “Maybe I’ll have you over to the apartment when we get back, you and—Susan?”

  “Susan. Her nickname’s Betts. Yes, sir, that’d be great, sir.”

  Packer leaned forward, cupping the pipe. “Ben told me you had a close call, but he didn’t mention being pushed. He says you’re not clear what happened. That right?”

  “Not perfectly clear, sir, it was dark. But clear enough to know there were other people out there with me, and more than one of them were trying to force me over the side.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “I figure it’s part of the deck gang.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it just seems logical, sir. Rich—I mean, Lieutenant Norden thought so, too.” He explained about discovering Lassard sitting down on watch, about catching them in the whaleboat at general quarters.

  “You mean, after having a set-to with him a few minutes before, and so forth. Yeah, it’s logical, but it’s not the kind of thing you can do much with legally.” Packer shook his head angrily; arcs of smoke drifted up, then were shredded by the overhead blower. “Why would Ben leave that part out?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I knew a lieutenant was killed on the Cony. Medical officer. Guy in the air-conditioning gang picked up the clap in Turkey and made some kind of deal with him to leave it off his record so his wife wouldn’t know. Then the guy got it in his head somehow that the doctor had given it to him, that people were talking about him, so on and so forth. Nut case. But he turned himself in—or maybe they caught him with the knife, I don’t remember. Anyway, there was no question about whether it actually happened.”