The Circle

by David Poyer

  “Passive predictions: near surface, very poor; best depth, twelve thousand yards; convergence zone one, twenty-five thousand yards.”

  Evlin reached up absently and hit the lever. “Mark, what’s range to the bird?”

  The gears ground in the air-search repeater. “Twenty-four thousand.”

  “That’s only twelve miles. According to that prediction, if he’s over the sub, we ought to be picking him up, too.”

  “With the SQS-thirty-five.”

  “Right,” said Packer, and he sounded not tired anymore, but decisive. “And we aren’t. So he’s not below the layer, where we expect him. He’s shallow. Sonar, Captain: Bring the fish up to one hundred feet. Search on one hundred and fifty—hertz band.”

  The 29MC acknowledged. Minutes dragged by. Then somebody shouted, “Bingo!” behind the black curtain.

  “Evaluator, Sonar: Passive contact against heavy background noise, bearing zero-nine-two true. No bearing drift. No doppler. Classification, Yankee-class submarine! We got her!” His jubilation was echoed around the plotting table. But the captain just snapped, “Pass it to the aircraft. Tell your weapons crews, Lenson,” and the smiles froze and an instant later vanished, like gun smoke whipped away by a gale.

  * * *

  THEY held the submarine for the next hour and twenty minutes on passive VDS. The P-3 made two more low passes, two more MAD contacts, then lost it. It had used up all its sonobuoys, so now Ryan held on alone. They began passing range and bearing data the other way, to the plane.

  The bearing remained steady. Since sonar could predict the width of the CZ band, they had a rough range, too. That also remained steady.

  Dan wondered what was going on inside the captain’s head. Since Ryan was moving generally south, albeit slowly, that meant the sub was moving south, too. But every time Orris reported, he mentioned ambient noise. The high voice sounded more worried as time dragged by. As midnight passed, he reported the noise was increasing, that they were losing the signal in it. Evlin ordered the fish winched in to fifty feet— so shallow, it started to broach. Sonar reported “lost contact.” He dropped it back to two hundred. They picked it up again, but so faint, it dropped in and out of detectability.

  “Captain,” said Evlin. He raised his voice. “Captain!”

  Packer jerked his head up from the radio desk. Evlin explained that they were losing contact.

  While he was talking, Reed came out of the sonar shack and propped his leanness against the first-aid cabinet. His eyes glowed with fatigue. Dan thought: We’ve had a few hours off between watches; no sleep, but we could move around, relax a little. He’s gone right from evaluator to sonar control and back. When Evlin finished, Reed told the captain, who had turned his face wordlessly to him, “It’s ice.”

  “Ice? What ice?”

  “Ask the bird if there’s ice out there. Floes, or small bergs.”

  But when Silver asked, the P-3 said he couldn’t see the surface at all, it was too dark. He’d had to climb to get out of icing. He said he couldn’t stay much longer, either.

  “Where the hell did my pipe…? Okay, but where’s his relief? He was supposed to be here by now.”

  “Wait one,” said the TACCO’s voice. They knew Romeo Delta’s copilot by name now: Lieutenant Wycoff. He was off the circuit for a while. When he came back on, he sounded apologetic. “Ryan, Romeo Delta.”

  “Go ahead, Romeo Delta,” said Silver, speaking slowly and distinctly into the handset. If you spoke too soon after you keyed, it broke sync, and all the listener heard was a hissing rush like a faulty toilet.

  “This is Romeo Delta. Keflavik advises they have Condition Charlie at present with fifty-knot winds.”

  “Give me the set, Mark,” said Packer. The captain rubbed his forehead as he waited for the scrambler. “This is Jim Packer, Ryan actual, Lieutenant. What’s Condition Charlie?”

  “Sir, that’s a whiteout. When the wind gets above so high, it picks up loose snow, and it sort of hovers, and after a while you can’t even see your props. They can’t take off and we can’t land. Commander Gephardt’s talking to Bodo now; we’ll probably have to divert to there or Kinloss, or maybe Machrahanish.”

  “Are you telling me he can’t take off?”

  “That’s about it, sir, not till the whiteout dies down. It’s not the wind, a P-three can take off in just about anything, but you got to be able to see.”

  “How much longer can you stay on station?” asked Packer, and his face looked like cast iron now.

  “Headed south at this time, Captain. I gave you all the time on top I can. I’ll have to shut down two engines to make Scotland. I’m sorry. Over.”

  “I understand. Thanks for your support. Ryan out.”

  He hung up the handset. No one spoke for a few seconds. Finally, Evlin looked back at Reed.

  “Icebergs,” the ASW officer said again. “He went east looking for them. I think he’s found some. The ice changes the salinity, and the grinding of the floes covers his noise. If we can’t close, we’re going to lose him, sir.”

  “I don’t want to come left,” said the captain. “I don’t know if she’ll take it, frankly.”

  “Then shoot,” said a voice behind them.

  Benjamin Bryce came into the circle of light around the plotting table. Evlin and Pedersen gave way as he leaned over the chicken tracks of hours of hide-and-seek. “You got to do it this time, Jimmy John.”

  “What are you doing up here, Ben?”

  “I came up to see how it was going. And I’m glad I did, hearing the advice you’re getting from your JOs.” Bryce put his knuckles on the glass. “Word with you?”

  “Will it take long?”

  “You need to hear it.”

  Bryce and Packer went back by the evaluator’s desk, back on the port side of CIC. It put them around the corner from the men at the plot, but only ten feet from Dan. He couldn’t hear everything. The wind howl and the slamming and the mutter of the plotters overlaid it. But he couldn’t help hearing Bryce say, “I wondered how much longer it was going to take you to figure out how this had to end.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard what Reed was saying. Only thing to do is put an Asroc out there, right now, while you still got contact. Don’t ask permission. Just do it. Otherwise, you lose him. And you can’t afford that. Can you?”

  Their voices lowered then, and he saw Evlin’s eye on him; he grabbed the mouthpiece and said, “Uh, all stations, comm check.” They answered, drawling, jaded, and he lost the rest of the exchange behind him.

  Packer came back a few minutes later. “Any better?”

  “Sonar reports still losing strength, sir. The SNR—signal-to-noise ratio—”

  “I know what SNR is, Chief.”

  “Yes, sir. Anyway, it’s still dropping.”

  Packer looked at the plot for another few seconds. “Draft a message, Al,” he said at last.

  Evlin grabbed the pad of blanks.

  “Make it Flash precedence. Top Secret. USS Ryan to CINCLANTFLT. Subject: twenty-four hundred contact status.

  “Para One. Due to weather degradation, P-three support no longer available. Sea state my posit is seven plus, wind eighty-five knots gusting to over one hundred.

  “Para Two. Due to inability to conform to eastward movement B forty-one, anticipate losing contact in next half hour or hour time frame. Request instructions.”

  The captain put his pipe in his mouth. His lips pursed around it, then flattened into a white line. “Okay, that’s all; get it out.”

  When the pneumatic tube to Radio hissed, he turned to Dan. “Lenson, tell Asroc Control to prepare a two-round salvo of Mark forty-fours. Al, give him a bearing and range. Report when ready.”

  Dan felt unreal. He stared for a moment too long, because Packer added angrily, “You hear me?”

  “Uh, aye aye, sir. Asroc Control, WLO: Prepare two Asrocs for launch.”

  “Say again, there?” a lazy voice
drawled in his ear. “Doin’ ’nother drill? We just did one last—”

  “This is no drill.” He steadied his voice and took the slip of paper Pedersen handed him. “Firing data follows. Target range is twenty-four thousand, five hundred yards. Bearing will be set from Sonar. Set Mark forty-four to circular search, five-hundred-foot floor, one-hundred-foot ceiling. Report when ready to launch.”

  “Shit fire,” the voice said, and there was a hasty scramble of shouting, orders on the far end of the line. Dan licked his lips and glanced at Evlin. The operations officer was studying the trace, face sober behind the glasses.

  “Sir, you’re not really planning to—”

  “I don’t want to, Al, but I don’t have the big picture. Keep updating the bearings and ranges. Make water entry point for the torpedoes about two thousand yards ahead of the last reported position. Dan, what are they giving you?”

  “Uh, no word back yet, sir.”

  At the same moment, an agitated voice in his headphones said, “WLO, Asroc Control.”

  He grabbed his mouthpiece. “Go ahead.”

  “Sir, we have a casualty on the launcher. The elevation motors—something about the elevation motors, Steffy says. Frozen, or something.”

  Dan felt his hands go numb in horror and dismay. “What are you telling me? We’ve been on station for ten hours now! You reported manned and ready!”

  The voice became evasive. “Yessir, we were manned, but nobody told us to train and elevate. We tried to do it just now and something’s fucked. Stefanick’s out there trying to find out what’s wrong. There’s a lot of ice all over the launcher.”

  “You let ice accumulate on the Asroc launcher?”

  “What’s going on, Lenson?” Packer’s voice, sharp as a whip crack.

  For a quarter of a second, he was tempted to lie, buy time, hope it was something they could fix quickly. Instead he made himself say, “Sir, there’s some problem with the launcher.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “They’re tring to find out, sir, but it sounds like an elevation motor.”

  “There’re four elevation motors on that mount, and eight launch rails. One better work. Find out how long it’ll be to fix it.”

  “Is Stefanick back yet? Do you have any idea how long it’ll take to repair?” he asked desperately. The voice on the other end said, hurt, “Jeez, sir, he just went outside. Give him a couple minutes, all right?”

  Evlin and Packer moved a few steps off. He heard them discussing torpedo run-out range, but his concentration was on his earphones. He wanted to tear them off and run aft, see what was going on himself. He wanted to strangle somebody. Every weapons station was supposed to check the gear when they manned up, and every hour thereafter while they were at GQ. He felt hot and ashamed. His hands shook as he pressed the button again. “Asroc Control, CIC—”

  “Wait one, here’s Stefanick now.”

  The captain came over and stood glaring at him, waiting. He couldn’t meet Packer’s eyes as he repeated what the voice told him. “Sir, there’s a glycol cooling and heating system in the launcher, that runs through a saltwater heat exchanger that also heats the hydraulic fluid. They say the heat exchanger must have ruptured. The saltwater mixed with the glycol and it’s all frozen now. They’re going to have to thaw it out and drain it, then flush it with fresh water and replace the—”

  “Can they get a weapon off? I can turn the ship in bearing if they can’t turn the mount.”

  “Wait one, sir.” Sweat ran down his back as he repeated the captain’s questions. “Sir, Petty Officer Stefanick says it won’t elevate, either, and none of the launcher doors will open. The whole hydraulic system’s fucked, and he thinks the motors burned out while he was trying to move it.”

  “Shit,” said Bryce. “That’s the kind of work Norden’s been doing for you, I don’t wonder all his people are smoking that—”

  Packer said, in a voice of only slightly controlled rage, “How about you, Ben? When’s the last time you were up there, inspecting?”

  “Now, Jimmy John, I don’t see—”

  “Al, is that Bear still around? The Soviet four-engine?”

  “Haven’t had him on the scope since yesterday, sir. My guess is, they recalled him when they realized the storm was coming through here. It’s too rough and icy for him to do MAD sweeps down here.”

  “Then we’re alone. Us and him. For another”—he glanced at the clock—“twenty-four, twenty-five hours.”

  Evlin nodded.

  There was a rumble over their heads, and a messenger tube farted itself into the padded cage. Simultaneously the 29MC lighted. “CIC, Radio; Flash incoming, rabbit’s in the hole.”

  Packer got to it first. Dan watched as he scanned the message. As his shoulders sagged. When the captain looked up his face was no longer human. It was dark lava that had cooled and hardened into the shape of human features.

  “What is it, sir?” asked Evlin.

  “Maintain contact,” said Packer. He cleared his throat. “Just that: ‘Maintain contact at all costs with B forty-one.’”

  “What did they say about preventing escape?”

  “They didn’t say anything about that.” He folded the message and buttoned it into his breast pocket.

  “It’s easy, then,” said Bryce. He lighted a cigarette with quick, nervous fingers. Sweat glittered on his scalp. “It’s there between the lines. They said it by not saying it. We just say we heard him open his tube doors. That covers our butts three ways to Sunday. I’ll talk to the sonarmen, if you want.”

  Utter quiet, broken only by the scream of the storm.

  “Okay, that’s it,” said the captain suddenly. They all looked at him. “It’s academic now; Asroc’s crapped out and we’re outside over-the-side torpedo range. I’ve got to go after him.

  “Start coming around, Al. Tell Rich to come left gradually, ten degees at a time, and steady on one-zero-zero.”

  “We’re going to roll like we’ve never rolled before, sir.”

  “Pass the word, then. All hands stand by for violent motion. Do it, Mr. Evlin! And come up to twenty knots.”

  Norden, from the bridge, acknowledged the order with misgiving in his tone. The radarmen grabbed handholds, set their feet wide, like sumo wrestlers readying themselves for an opponent’s charge. The rudder-angle indicator quivered, then moved left reluctantly. A second later the gyro began moving, too: 175, 170.

  Watching it, watching Packer’s face watching it, Dan suddenly understood why the CO had buttoned the message into his pocket. It gave him authority for nuclear release. The six-digit code was right there in his pocket.

  The key, if Captain James Packer miscalculated, to nuclear war.

  The gyrocompass steadied at 170 for a few minutes. Ryan rolled, and it was bad, but not terrifying. They clung to the table, looking silently up as it began nudging left again.

  At 160 the motion was worse. Packer’s face was taut in the dim light. No one looked at him; no one looked at each other. They just stared down at the flat paper that represented the wild sea outside. Not even the plotters spoke now. There was nothing to plot.

  One fifty.… One forty. “Halfway there,” Pedersen muttered. Dan felt a surge of hope. No pitching, and even the roll wasn’t that awful, though the gale screamed outside like a thousand gut-shot horses.

  “Hell, this ain’t so bad,” muttered Lipson.

  Ryan went over then, suddenly, with incredible force, as if the outraged sea had only now perceived the trick they were trying to play. She lurched to starboard, stopped with a crashing jolt that flickered the lights; then shifted to port bodily, and rose, pressing their weights against the deck, as if they stood watch for a moment on some more massive planet than Earth.

  She hurtled over to port and kept going. Their feet shot out from under them. The captain’s stool let go, slammed over and dumped him into Petty Officer Matt. The lights flickered again and went out. The battle lantern clicked on, projecting a
weak yellow spot onto the suddenly dark plotting table. Dan tried to fight free of the phone cord, but it was too steep to regain his feet. From outside came the terrifyingly close crash of the sea hammering against the bulkhead just outside Combat. The 21MC, the command intercom, broke out in a series of half communications, cut off as others began shouting into the line.

  “Chief. Chief—”

  “She’s not coming back!”

  “Combat, Bridge—”

  “Combat, Bridge, this is Main Control. We’re taking water down the intakes to port. Is the captain up there? Securing blowers, securing boilers—”

  “Negative!” Packer shouted. “Somebody tell him—keep them on the line. Tell the bridge, come back to one-nine-zero. Damn it, Silver, get off me!”

  Dan was first up, but only because he was on top of the heap. He got the wire off his legs, climbed over bodies to get to the intercom. He repeated the captain’s orders.

  “Bridge aye; I hear you.” Norden’s voice, more strained than Dan had ever heard before it. Behind it was shouting and the crash of breaking glass.

  Dan sniffed. Was that smoke? Probably just Bryce’s cigarettes, Packer’s pipe. Still, it smelled like paper burning, not—

  The door to the bridge slammed open. Through it, he heard Norden shouting, “Coming back to one-nine-zero. Main Control, give me emergency flank on the port shaft. Coffey! Right hard rudder!”

  Through the shrieking and crashing came a sodden rumble from above them, a clattering, sullen roar like an anchor chain running out.

  The smoke smell grew suddenly sharp. If they didn’t smell it, he did. “Fire!” he shouted. At that same moment, someone else shouted, “Fire in the pilothouse!”

  The captain’s voice was unnaturally calm in the din. “Get off me, whoever’s on my legs. Lenson, see what’s going on on the bridge.”