The Circle

by David Poyer

  “Combat, Bridge. We’re taking water in the pilothouse. It’s above the ports now, green water, green water.”

  He thought, Rich sounds calmer now. Good. It had worried him, the way his department head had acted last night, down on the forecastle.

  A few seconds later word came up that the forward gun mount was taking water again. He had his mouth open to report it when the 21MC light came on. “Combat, Main Control. Is the captain there? This is Mr. Talliaferro. After steering reports the tips of the screws are coming out of the water. Engine rooms report vibration in the shafts. Recommend either slow to five knots or come right or left to get us out of the swell.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Packer. He said nothing more. Evlin looked at him, waiting, then said into the intercom, “The captain heard you, Ed. We’ll be staying on this course and speed. Operational necessity.”

  “Okay, but if we shake these reduction gears loose, we aren’t riding a ship anymore. It’s going to be junk. Just twenty-two hundred tons of razor blades.”

  Evlin clicked the lever twice.

  Bryce said, “You listening, Jimmy John? She won’t take much more pounding. We could slide right on under one of these big lunkers. A bulkhead gives way down where you flooded, she’ll keep right on going. Saw it happen in Korea. DE hit a mine going flank speed, the internal bulkheads went, and it was gone, fast as it takes to say that. Thing to do’s put a spread of Mark forty-threes in the water right now.”

  “That’s not the answer, XO,” said Evlin. Dan saw the tension in his back as he leaned over the table. “This submarine has done nothing aggressive. It’s done nothing to indicate it has any hostile intent. Just track it, that’s all we need to—”

  Bryce rounded on him, cutting him off with a shout. “Don’t give me any of that peacenik talk! You know, I’m slowly coming to grips with what’s so shitty aboard this ship. You ought to relieve this—this freak, Cap’n. Calls himself a naval officer, but down in his office he’s worshiping some swami—”

  “That’s enough,” said Packer. But he said nothing more. He just stared down at the plot, sucking his pipe. It was as if, Dan thought suddenly, he was keeping his options open—listening to them all, but not yet decided.

  Or maybe he had, and only forebore to say.

  “Are you going to shoot? Damn it—you listening to me? You feel all right, Jimmy John? Hey, he don’t look that good. He’s been on his feet for four days. Maybe we should call the corpsman—”

  “That’s enough, Ben,” the captain said sharply. “Another word out of you on that subject and I’ll order you below. We are going to hold on to this contact, we are going to hold him close this time, and we’re staying on this course! Is that clear to everyone?”

  Great, Dan thought. He’s going to hold on. But how? USS Reynolds Ryan was pounding herself into scrap. Much as he hated Bryce, what the XO was urging made sense. Either give up, let the sub go, or strike first and kill her before she realized they were there.

  If they didn’t make a decision, do something, they might not live much longer.

  Packer wanted to obey orders. But there was a line between obedience and madness. Was the captain sick? Not crazy, as in howling mad, but with the steady, fixed monomania of an Ahab?

  Dan wondered for the first time how thin that line might be. So thin, one might never notice when he inched over it.

  Ryan fell out from beneath them and crashed into what sounded like a bed of rocks. It was as if the ship had been dropped forty feet onto the floor of a quarry. For a few seconds she rode mushily, as if groggy from the impact; then shivered again as a wave raged against the starboard side, hammering like a drunken, angry father at a locked bedroom door.

  Then it was pitching again. He clung to the radar repeater as Ryan reeled and wove and men stumbled across CIC. The closed, dim space soared and bounded through space like a box tied to a wheel. He’d thought his stomach sea-proof by now, but now he bent, searching with sudden desperation for the bucket. The spasm buckled him over before he found it, but though his stomach kinked on itself like a wrung dishrag nothing came up. He gagged, eyes feeling as if they were being squeezed out onto the deck. Before he could stop himself, he moaned aloud in sheer nauseated agony. Christ, he thought, drooling and spitting. How would this end? How much longer before they went down?

  Just then there was a cry from Sonar. “Submarine close!” it sounded like. Then Reed was shouting, “Come right! Come right!”

  Beneath his feet the old destroyer seemed to hesitate, just for a moment, and sway backward, as if her stern was being dragged down. She surged up again, then floated free for long seconds before slamming down even more violently.

  The lights flickered out, then on. Across the compartment, Pedersen was knocked to his knees. The lights flickered out. Packer’s pipe fell, bouncing and rolling, spraying out red-hot sparks. Men were screaming below them, through the deck itself. The great girder of the hull hummed like a huge, slow tuning fork. The lights flickered on. Confused yells above his head, the 21MC and Sonar Control intercoms coming on together in a shrill gabble, voices blasting out into the swaying, dim air.

  “What’s going on up there?”

  “No signal.”

  “Combat, Sonar! No signal from the thirty-five!”

  “Combat, Bridge: We’ve got to slow, hammering her to death—”

  “Sounding and Security reports taking water in the midships passageway, vicinity frame one thirty. Stand by—smoke in the passageway! Fire in the engine room!”

  “Combat, VDS winch station: There’s no strain on the cable back here. It’s trailing loose in the wake.”

  “Quiet down, goddamn it!” shouted Bryce above the din of the fire alarm going off.

  Reed stood in the open curtain from Sonar. His haggard horselike face was gray. He said, across the slanting air, “I think we hit it.”

  Packer said quietly, “Hit what, Lieutenant Reed?”

  “Hit the submarine, sir. With the fish. The cable’s gone slack and we show a short circuit.”

  For a moment, Dan was glad. He tried to straighten, dragging his hand across his mouth. It came away gluey with drool and acid. His legs shook. Then he heard what Packer was saying, softly, as if to himself.

  “We can’t lose that gear. Now we’ll have to track it till it surfaces. No, force it to surface. To make sure the fish isn’t tangled in its shears, or in its prop.”

  Evlin’s voice, cool yet somehow disapproving: “Stay on it, sir?”

  And he heard with a chilling heart James John Packer’s voice, tired and flat and yet hard as old hull plating, through the thunder of another sea smashing itself apart over their heads, over the bridge itself: “Stay on it? Yeah. I’m not giving up now, Al. I’m not giving up, ever.”

  17

  TALLIAFERRO was telling Packer about the flooding. “It was Nobbs, one of the messmen. They’re not cooking down there, so he didn’t have anything to do. Guy goes to his locker, gets his Instamatic, and opens one of the doors on the main deck. He’s gonna take a picture of the ocean, right? But he opens it just as we turn into the swell. That first big breaker smashes the door on him, mashes him like a bug. He’s down in sick bay with broken ribs, bitching about how he lost his camera. But now the door’s warped and won’t dog, and every time a sea hits us, a hundred more gallons spray in through it.”

  The captain was slumped against the first-aid cabinet. He muttered hoarsely, “Get to it. What’s the damage?”

  “We got a foot of water in the fore-and-aft passageway. It’s rolling up and down like one of those desk toys with the waves inside. Since we had ventilation buttoned up to keep out the spray, it gets real hot, over a hundred and forty in the hole. The guys had the engine-room scuttle open so they could breathe. The water rolls, the deck pitches, all of a sudden it dumps down through the scuttle onto the switchboard. That’s what’s on fire. McElroy hit it with a CO2 bottle, but that didn’t cut it. Repair Four’s fighting it. At the moment, we do
n’t have any power aft.”

  “The door?”

  “Jacking it shut now, but it’s a tender job to straighten it so it swings again.”

  “You said no power aft. Does that mean to the Nixie?” asked Evlin, from the plotting table.

  The engineering officer said, “That’s right, Alan. At the moment, we have no power to the towed noisemaker.”

  “I want an emergency cable rigged. Right away. If they fire a homing torpedo— Make that your first priority after the fire’s out.”

  “Yes, sir. But we’re still taking water forward, Captain. And we’re still pitching too much. Every time the props come out of the water, the tachs wind off the scale. You can hear the shaft bearings working loose; you can see the reduction gear prying up the foundation bolts.” The engineer’s pitted face was still, like barren ground waiting for rain. “I got to tell you this in front of the others, sir. You know why. You’re not gonna have the engines much longer if you treat ’em like this. How much longer are we going to hold this course?”

  “I’ll tell you how much longer,” Packer said. The mutter hardened. “Till he gives up. Or one of us goes down.”

  After a moment, Evlin said, “That’s … extreme, isn’t it, sir?”

  Packer didn’t seem to be listening. He straightened jerkily, putting his hands to his kidneys. Staring at the overhead, he spoke in an inflectionless monotone, as if it was something he’d memorized years before and said so often that it had lost all emotional content.

  “It’s a wrestling match. Between me and him. The CO down there. He’s doing the same thing I am. He’s living on the conn. If he tries to turn in, they’re waking him up four, five times every half hour, asking for decisions, asking him what to do. I’ve got to exhaust him. It’s a test of stamina. His against mine.

  “We’re even, as far as equipment goes. He’s damaged. So are we. We’ve got the storm to worry about; he’s got us to worry about.

  “How about his crew? How committed are they to whatever he’s trying to do? Has he lied to them, do they suspect? Even if they believe in him, can they go twenty-four, thirty, forty-eight hours without sleep?

  “It’s a game. A sniff here, a sniff there—a jab here, a jab there—looking for the advantage. He’s got it when he goes slow. We can’t hear him then; we’ve got to ping. We’ve got it when he speeds up. We can track him solid and cut him off.

  “What determines the winner? Unless somebody’s got a joker to play, it’s going to be whoever gives out first, gets so stressed and sleepy he screws up. Who can keep pushing longest—that’s what determines who wins.”

  He stopped for a moment but didn’t look at them. Finally he added in a whisper, “You’ve got to go till nobody can go any longer, and still have six hours in reserve.”

  “Have you got six hours, Captain?” Evlin asked him.

  Packer leaned back and closed his eyes. “That’s what we’re gonna find out, Al. Ed, you belong back aft, holding those engines together. Get moving!”

  The engineer stared at him. He seemed about to speak. Then his face closed, and he turned away.

  When he was gone, Packer opened his eyes again. Dan saw that the whiskers on his cheeks were black, but those on his chin were gray, like ashes. He put both hands flat on the plotting table. “What’s he doing now?”

  “I can’t tell, sir.”

  The captain got up and pushed his way through the curtain into Sonar. Dan could hear them talking, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. He braced his trembling knees against the repeater. He smelled smoke again. He hoped it was the switchboard, not some fresh disaster.

  He’d felt this uncertainty, this pain, this endless fatigue before. Plebe Year. Shoving out, clamping on, the Green Bench. So scared to go out of your room into the free-fire zone of the corridors that you shit in your shower and hammered it down the drain with your shoes. Upperclassmen screaming in your face, one after another, for hours on end. Sweat and blood slicking the gray-green tile decks of Bancroft Hall. Bending over and waiting after you’d bet your ass and lost.

  The upperclass said it built character. Prepared you to take stress and function. Taught you to play hurt and win.

  Maybe they and Packer were talking about the same thing.

  The sonar was active. It wasn’t a ping; it was a song, seconds long and complexly pitched. Lipson sang softly, his head cocked, mimicking the sound of the outgoing pulse, “Here-I, here-I, here-I, am.”

  Dan thought, that’s exactly what we’re telling him. All he’s got to do is squirt a couple of acoustic homers down our bearing. With the Nixie dead, even in rough seas one of them’s bound to score. Damn, he had to piss.…

  “He’s pulling the plug,” said Pedersen suddenly, lifting the earpiece of his phones. “Sonar estimates he’s at eight hundred and still going down.”

  “Very well,” said Evlin. “How deep is it here, Chief?”

  “Not sure, sir. We don’t know where we are. Yardner says he hasn’t seen the stars in a week, and loran’s crappy up here. We got a dead-reckoning position, but you know how much that’s worth.”

  A chart appeared from somewhere and was laid out over the trace. Pedersen and Evlin sprawled over it with dividers. “Could we be that far south?” the ops officer muttered.

  “There’s supposed to be a two-knot current, isn’t there? Make it two point four over four days and we could be way down here.”

  “Well, let’s get a ping off the bottom. He knows we’re here now.”

  Dan thought, No one asked who he meant by “he.” It meant the sub. Or, more specifically, the Soviet commander. Packer talked about “him,” too. As if it was personal. Maybe it was. On land, the idea of dueling generals was faintly ludicrous. But at sea, it was different. A ship, at least as long as her crew obeyed, was far more purely an extension of her commander’s will.

  As long as her crew obeyed, and she stayed afloat. But Ryan’s meeting both qualifications was getting marginal.

  He jumped when Packer spoke, right beside him. He could smell him, old sweat and sweet tobacco and the man himself. “Anything more the torpedomen need to do? Impulse air verified, spin them up, anything?”

  “Uh—I’ll find out, sir.” The old Academy response. They’d taught him something useful, anyway.

  “Do it, if there is. I want them on a hair trigger.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He waited for Packer to say something else, but he just stood there, sucking his pipe and watching Evlin and Pedersen.

  “Permission to activate the fathometer, sir,” said Evlin.

  The captain nodded and the ops officer called the bridge. A few seconds later, Yardner called back. Ryan had 638 fathoms under her keel.

  “No way,” Pedersen muttered. He smoothed the chart and bent closer.

  Dan, looking over their backs, saw only a scattering of figures on blank space. The Navy was supposed to be mapping the Arctic bottom. But there was a lot of it and not many ships. Evlin and Pedersen fell to arguing whether they were east or south of the dead-reckoning position, or possibly over a seamount. He was wishing he had some coffee when he remembered with a start that he was supposed to be checking torpedo readiness. Goddamn, he’d better get on the stick.

  The torpedoman said all they had to do to fire the Mark 43s was warm up the electronics and spin up the gyros. That would take eight minutes from the word go. After that, the tubes could be set and fired from underwater battery fire control, a panel back in Sonar.

  “Combat, Main Control: Fire’s out in after engine room. Permission to restow gear and set the reflash watch.”

  Packer smiled as he gave permission. “Okay, now what’s he doing?” the CO asked, joining Evlin and Pedersen. “You figured it out yet?”

  “Not quite, sir.”

  “He’s not throwing some wild card down on us?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  For some reason, Packer sounded more cheerful. “Let’s get Mr. Reed and Petty Officer Orris out here, get
our heads together. I have a feeling whatever this is, it’s his last gasp. We keep him pinned for another couple of hours, we could wrap this up.”

  The tension relaxed a little. The knot of khaki and denim gathered around the plot—like a bunch of high rollers facing the last hand of the night money ahead, Dan thought. The sonar whined through the hull like an off-tune violin. Orris joined them last. “He’s still going deep, sir,” he said.

  “How deep is deep?” Packer asked jovially.

  “A thousand feet’s getting there, sir.”

  “Well, what’s he doing down there? He can’t launch missiles from there. Can he?”

  “Our boomers can’t. I think they have to be pretty close to the surface.”

  “Okay, what does it do to us? Can the twenty-three still track him down there?”

  “Yes,” said Reed; at the same moment, Orris said, “Maybe.” Packer aimed his finger at the sonarman.

  “It depends on two things, sir. Aside from all this surface noise, I mean. Tracking active, as the water gets shallower, you get insonification. Reverberations. That can muddy the picture. But it’s not that shallow here, so I don’t think that’ll bother us. What I think he’ll try is to hug the bottom. If he can get way down there in the acoustic basement our gear can’t discriminate, the bottom sediment gives a kind of jelly-type blur. He’ll, like, merge into it.”

  “How close does he have to get?”

  Orris turned his palms outward. “All I can say is, depends.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “There’s some things I can do on the stack, sir. Tweak the freq up. That sharpens the picture some. I can’t think of anything smart to pull on him from up here, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay, so we just try to hold him,” Packer said to them all. “I think the fact he’s trying to hide in the basement means it’s his last card. He’s either damaged or fouled in the fish or the cable somehow. So his back’s to the wall. Like I said, we hold on for ten, twelve more hours and the cavalry’ll be here. Soon as we turn over to our attack boats, I’m coming about and heading home. So let’s get to it.”