by David Poyer
“What if he comes straight toward us?”
“Keep my bow toward him, track him in, then spin around and pick him up again as he passes underneath.”
“Sounds good,” said Packer. He passed his hand over his hair, seemed to remember his pipe, and looked into the bowl. He made as if to relight it, then said, “I’ll be in my sea cabin.”
“Aye, sir.”
* * *
AS if waiting for him to return, the submarine did nothing for the next few minutes. Dan asked for permission to relieve himself.
When he came back, he knew right away something had changed. Chief Massioni, the leading radioman, was standing beside the captain, who had come back too. Packer wasn’t watching the plot. He was putting his initials on a message board, looking grim. He handed it to Evlin with the pen.
Leaning forward as he put his phones back on, Dan couldn’t avoid seeing it over the ops officer’s shoulder.
FM: CINCLANTFLT
TO: USS REYNOLDS RYAN
INFO: JCS
CINCLANT
USAF SAC
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
COMCRUDESLANT
COMSECONDFLT
COMSUBLANT
VP–24 NAS REYKJAVIK ICELAND
NAVSEASYSCOM, SEA–62L
COMASWFORLANT
MODUK
UK SUBMARINE COMMAND
TOP SECRET
REF: USS RYAN 180534Z DEC (PASEP)
SUBJ: CONTACT REPORT (C)
1. (S) REF A ACKNOWLEDGED. NAVFAC NORWAY REPORTED TRANSIT OF SUSPECTED SOVIET NUCLEAR BALLISTIC MISSILE SUBMARINE 0230Z YESTERDAY. TRACK DESIGNATED B41.
2. (TS) OTHER NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SOURCES INDICATE SOVIET NORTHERN FLEET BEING BROUGHT TO HIGHEST READINESS CONDITION. RADIO TRAFFIC IS 3 TIMES NORMAL. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT A SURGE OF SOVIET FORCES INTO NORTH ATLANTIC IS BEING CONTEMPLATED. NATIONAL COMMAND AUTHORITY IS INQUIRING THEIR INTENTIONS.
3. (S) COMSUBLANT IS SORTIING USS BATFISH, USS BARB, USS POGY. HMS CHURCHILL BEING MADE AVAILABLE FROM FASLANE. ABOVE SUBMARINE ASSETS ETA YOUR POSITION 48 HOURS. AIR SUPPORT WILL BE PROVIDED FROM VP–24 NAVAL AIR STATION REYKJAVIK WITH FIRST AIRCRAFT REPORTING ON TOP NO LATER THAN 1320Z.
4. (TS) IN VIEW OF UNCERTAINTIES OF SITUATION EXERCISE UTMOST EFFORT TO MAINTAIN CLOSE CONTACT WITH TRACK B41. FRUSTRATE ADVANCE BY ALL POSSIBLE MEANS. REPORT HOURLY. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT TO FOLLOW.
5. (TS) DESTROY B41 IMMEDIATELY IF SONAR INDICATES IMMINENT MISSILE LAUNCH.
DO NOT DECLASSIFY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF ORIGINATOR
BT
They watched the red dots slowly materialize under the plotter’s fingers. They made a straight line now, headed south by southwest at about four knots. “He’s on his battery,” murmured the captain. “Or just barely simmering his reactors to drive some kind of backup propulsion. Yeah, that’d be smarter; he’d still have electrical power then. Did anyone log the last time we heard main machinery noise?”
Pedersen silently put his finger where it was marked on the trace.
Just then the sonarmen began cursing behind the screen. The contact light went out. Evlin straightened, pressing the phones to his ears. “What is it?” asked Packer.
“Multiple contacts. Three … four, all around the last position.”
“Shift to passive. He’ll eject decoys, then he’ll run.”
But he didn’t. Or if he did, the sonarmen couldn’t hear him. When the false contacts disappeared, the sea was as empty as if there’d never been a submarine there. Four minutes passed. Six.
With reluctant deliberation, OS3 Matt drew a red diamond at the last position, and labeled it 1116.
“Shit! He’s lost us somehow.”
“Go to all stop, sir? Shut everything down and listen?”
“We could barely hear him before. Now that we pinged him, he’ll really be buttoned up soundwise.” Packer stretched, frowning. “But he’ll have to start up again sooner or later.”
“I figure, all we have to do is wait,” said Evlin. “He can’t run long without his air conditioning, and he shut that down, too. And if he’s on battery, five hours, six, and he’ll have to start his reactors, or he won’t have enough juice left to put a bubble in them.”
Packer rubbed his chin. “I hope you’re right. Start a lost-contact search. Make that the search center, where he went sinker. Search axis, two-four-zero.”
Silver said, “How long will we be at that, sir? I need to know, set up my watches in CIC—”
The captain cut him off with a raised hand. He said, closing his eyes, “We’ll be at it until we find him, Mark. And after that, until they call us off.”
* * *
AN hour later they still had no contact. The captain was perched on a stool Pedersen had dragged over for him. Packer had attached himself to the bulkhead with the straps from a gas-mask pouch. From time to time, his head drooped, but he caught himself and dragged it up. Then it would loll again, till the next roll skidded the stool out from under him. Evlin asked him once whether he should report the lost contact. Packer grunted and shook his head.
At eleven-thirty, he stirred uneasily. He blinked at the clock, then glanced around. Dan straightened from his exhausted slump against the radar repeater, seeing Packer’s eyes on him.
“Al.”
“Yessir.”
“Why don’t you set up a watch rotation. Get Reed to spell you, get a few hours in the bag. We may be here for a while.”
“What about you, sir? Shall I get Commander—”
“No,” said Packer. He didn’t add anything, and after a moment, Evlin said, “Aye, sir. I’ll do it port and starboard, six on, six off. Chief! Send somebody down after Mr. Weaver, to relieve Mr. Silver. Ask Ensign Cummings if he can spell Mr. Lenson. Tell them to get something to eat and be up at noon.”
As Pedersen left, Dan slumped back again. Now that a relief was on the way, he suddenly felt wrung out, feeble, as though all that kept him upright was the steel behind him.
* * *
AT noon, a sullen-looking, sniffling Cummings poked him in the back. Dan explained what was going on. The sub was still lying low. They were pinging away for him, search plan RHUBARB. The disbursing officer grunted and took the headset.
When he was free, he staggered away from the plotting table. He’d been standing there for almost nine hours. And on the bridge for three hours before that. He’d be back on at 1800. He should sleep now. He should get something to eat.
Instead he went forward, into the pilothouse. Ed Talliaferro glanced at him from beside the binnacle. Rambaugh was there, and Shorty Williams. Lassard was at the wheel. Chief Yardner had the JOOD’s binoculars. He felt an obscure pleasure in their unremarking, weary glances. Clinging to the overhead cable, he lifted his eyes and looked out—over the forward mount and antenna, crusted with an unfamiliar carapace, into a waste of wind and sea.
Suddenly his mouth began to water again. He had only a second to choose. Bridge urinal, corner bucket, or the wing. Ryan rolled, making the choice for him. He slid downhill to the door, and undogged it hastily.
The air was crystal ice, and ice coated the gratings under his boots. He fetched up against the splinter shield and clung to the rough, gritty steel, staring down into the sea.
The gratings soared upward, then dropped away. He was light and then heavy. When she slammed back down spray exploded around her stem. But she kept going down, and down. With horror, he saw her ice-coated chains and tackle wavering beneath many feet of clear green water. A second later the wave crashed into the gun mount, tearing itself apart into roaring tons of tormented, creamy foam that leapt upward like a pitted leopard, trying to claw him down into it. Then the gale whipped that away, too, as if enraged that its ally had failed in the assault.
Suddenly, all at once, his guts emptied like a squeezed sack. An instant too late, he realized he was facing the wind.
When it was over, he clung to the rail, gasping and shuddering. He ducked to the pool of mixed rain and seawater that
rolled endlessly between the scuppers. He splashed his face and wiped it with his sleeve. But he couldn’t do anything about his clothes. Through the porthole, he caught Lassard’s smirk above the helm. It turned away, to Coffey, and then the other faces swung. Was that laughter? To hell with them. By the smell in there, they weren’t doing so hot, either.
Weak, chilled, empty, he clung there, watching as the rising wind gilded another layer of ivory over the forecastle and 01 level. The gun mount was sheathed with white armor. Wind-slanted icicles bent from the tampioned muzzles. The whip antenna, the blast shield, range finders, all were cased with ice, shining with a dull, smooth internal light that echoed the opalescent sky. Ryan irritated the sea, and the sea had begun coating her, as an oyster coats a grain of sand to produce a pearl.
Beyond them, the gale heaved and roared in terrifying carelessness. Terrifying uninterest, and terrible power. He remembered what Talliaferro had said about ballasting, and Evlin’s warning about the storm track.
He wanted to go below. He wanted to tie himself into his rack in the hot, stuffy compartment and sleep for a year.
But far beneath this rage, so many dark fathoms down that no motion of the storm could reach it, was something alien, something dangerous. Something they had to find again, and hold until help arrived.
Help … for the first time, it occurred to him that if U.S. and British submarines were on their way, it stood to reason that more Soviets could be headed here, too.
When he got back to CIC Pedersen was still there, slumped in front of the unlighted air plot. A mug smoked in his twitching hand. He looked asleep, but the mug leveled itself automatically as Ryan began a fresh series of crashing pitches, kicking her heels to the sea.
“Chief, you got anything that’ll tell me what I’m supposed to be doing up here? Something about ASW, about tracking subs?”
Pedersen opened his eyes. He looked surprised. Then he smiled.
“Sure, Ensign. We’ll fix you up.”
He took the stack of pubs, braced himself grimly in a corner, and began to read.
13
DAN had never understood what made his father drink. When he was sober, Victor Lenson seemed subdued, but not unhappy. Dan remembered times they’d had fun together. How they’d rebuilt the old garage, Vic and the boys, small then, “helping” their father with tack hammers and strips of broken lath.
Then one day, there’d be the bottle. And not long after the threats, the shouting, the accusations. The crash of glass, his mother’s pleading, and finally her screams. Then at the last just the broken lost voice mumbling about Charlie Company, First Battalion, Seventh Marines, and the night the Chinese came through the perimeter at Yudamn-ni.
When he was little, he’d crawled behind his bed into a recess so small, he’d thought an adult couldn’t reach him. But his father had, throwing the heavy bed aside in a terrifying display of strength, pulling him out and strapping him while he screamed and fought to escape. He never knew where he’d thought to go.
For a while after the hospital Vic seemed better. He didn’t drink anymore, and they took him on again down at the station.
Then one day, Dan had been studying when he heard the front door slam. A little later, his mother’s voice, with a catch in it, called to the boys to go upstairs.
He came out of the kitchen with his book in his hand, and saw Pat and Jimmy going up. Pat was crying silently, clutching his headless bear. Jimmy’s face was waxen-pale and expressionless. He’d started to follow them. Then he stopped on the first step, hearing the crack of a palm against skin.
He told his brothers to go to their room and lock the door. He put the book down on the steps. Then turned around, there on the stair, and went back down.
The sweet whiskey smell filled the house. His father stood over his mother by the dining room table. Her face was in her hands and her hair hung down. Though he didn’t look around, Vic must have sensed him in the doorway.
“Worthless bitch. All she ever gives me’s trouble. God knows her family never did anything for us.”
He’d said, his voice breaking, “Don’t hit her anymore, Dad.”
His father, the cop, no longer towered to the ceiling. Dan was fifteen, as tall as Vic Lenson now.
There was a sudden clap of lightning in his head. He staggered, tried to stay on his feet, and his father slapped him again. This time he fell across his mother. She was crying. “No, don’t hit him again, darling, don’t.” Shielding him with her body.
He’d always wanted to stand up for her. Sometimes he had, when he was small, and been beaten. He’d learned to stay out of it, or if he couldn’t, to fall at the first blow the way she did, to cringe, cry, and feign surrender.
But this time, without warning, his mind shut off. He saw only a reddish blaze in place of thought. He got up, and his father knocked him down again.
He looked up from the rug at his father’s revolver, hanging in its holster on the chair.
That was when the barrier came down, suddenly, like a fire curtain, cutting off the red blaze. From behind it, someone he’d never known he really was, someone as cold and remote as one of H. G. Wells’s Martians, watched his parents and himself.
For the longest moment of his life, his father stared at him. The cold metal trembled in his hands, dragging them down. Then Vic Lenson had turned, snatched the bottle off the table, and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later, the screen door banged.
Then his mother was screaming at him, hitting him with closed fists. How could he threaten his own father? He was never to do that again. From the upstairs landing, his brothers looked down on him, horrified and rapt.
Only this time, in his dream, his father didn’t leave. Instead, he came on, pulling the heavy leather belt out of its loops. And Dan had lifted the gun, to save them all.
* * *
THE bang woke him. He groped beneath the desk for the fallen copy of Allied Tactical Publication One, Volume I. Search plan ARTICHOKE, PINEAPPLE, REDWOOD. MADVECs, sonobuoy barriers, containment patterns. His brain seethed, then clicked suddenly into fatigued alertness.
He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Pedersen had left. The crashing and groaning were the same, or maybe a little more violent than when he’d nodded off. He uncoiled his legs from the chair and signed himself off on the pub log. Swinging from handhold to handhold, he headed for the exit.
As he passed the plot, all he could see was backs. They were slumped but absorbed, like weary gamblers after an all-night game. Packer, Reed, Cummings, Weaver, two enlisted he didn’t know. Their faces were gray-green in the buzzing light. The 29MC was saying, “Up doppler, bearing three-one-two, range seven thousand three hundred.” They’d regained contact, then.
He suddenly remembered what they were doing here.
DESTROY B41 IMMEDIATELY IF SONAR INDICATES IMMINENT MISSILE LAUNCH.
Steel shrieked around him as the old destroyer reeled. He reeled too, groping through the red-lighted gloom of the ladderway. Now he knew why his legs hurt. Even unconscious, his body had been fighting the sea.
Beyond the door the pilothouse was black. Then lights appeared as his pupils expanded. The tiny planets of radio remotes, the restless needle of the anemometer, the melted-butter glow of the binnacle, occulted for a moment by an invisible arm. Last, he made out the circular cutouts of the windows. A little past 1600, and he’d missed the few hours of gray half-light that was Arctic day. The sounds were so familiar now he barely registered them: the ionosphere hiss of radios, the whining frenzy of wipers. Frozen spray rattled like marbles against glass. Then an irritated voice: “Bos’n! Close that fucking door!”
Suddenly he realized he was ravenous.
The wardroom was empty. Someone had cleaned up the sugar and lashed down the chairs. The coffee light was on, but when he lifted the pot it was empty of everything but a scorched reek. He staggered to the ladder and slid down it destroyer-style, boots not touching the treads.
There were perhaps forty
men on Ryan’s mess decks. Not quite a full house. You couldn’t feed 280 in a sitting, but the white Formica-topped tables, the little swing-out bucket seats would take a fifth of them. Their faces were hollow, exhausted, nodding in nausea and fatigue.
He wondered for a moment whether he was wearing the wrong uniform. There was no money in his family; no gold braid-encrusted forebears, like Norden’s. He should be one of these men, a radioman, a sonarman, a boiler tech. His senior year in high school, he’d already talked with the recruiter when the telegram arrived from the Academy.
Instead he was one of the ones in charge. The people who were supposed to know what to do.…
The steam tables were empty, but messmen were passing trays of bread, cheese, meat, pickles. Hands grabbed at them, throats washed them down with paper cups of purple fluid. When Ryan rolled, men grabbed the servers’ belts, keeping them on their feet. Food and plastic forks slid across the dirty tile with each roll. The aroma of hot strong coffee radiated from the galley like lines of magnetic force. He saw khaki in a corner, and threaded his way over.
It was Al Evlin, alone. “Couldn’t sleep?” said the ops officer.
“Didn’t really try, sir.”
“Once we go back, we’ll be on till midnight. You can still get a couple hours in.”
Dan valved bug juice from a cooler. “Anything happen since we got off?”
“Regained contact. That’s all I know. We’ll be back in it soon enough.”
“True.” He looked at Evlin’s glasses for a moment. Then he sat down, and his voice came out guarded.
“So what did you mean, about the sea?”
“About the sea?”
“One night—before the storm—remember, we were having a kind of philosophical discussion. You told me to look out at the sea, and think about it.”
“Oh. I remember now. And did you?”
The grin felt strange on his face. He’d wanted to ask Evlin this for a long time. “I’ve done a lot of looking, but I’ve been too scared to think.”
A messman clattered down bread, peanut butter and jelly, butter in plastic tubs, sugar cookies. “Soup in the galley. Drink it out of cups, you want some.”
