The unnatural cadence of his ship’s motions was one of the things which kept Captain Finlander from dozing off as he lay on the bunk in the day cabin, wrapped in the folds of a regulation navy blanket over which he had pulled his white duffel. Raw drafts wafted past the blackout curtains every time somebody opened the wheelhouse doors to the open bridge — which was often as Petersen or Allison stepped out to look and listen, or the lookouts relieved one another at twenty-minute intervals. Ice falling off the halyards and shrouds occasionally rattled against the roof of the pilothouse; the gyro-repeater on the bulkhead went click-click-click every time the ship changed heading. Of these things Finlander was conscious as he lay there, and in the back of his mind the old horror of all destroyermen operating in the arctic, capsizing by sheer weight of ice, began haunting him. Back at BUSHIPS. all kinds of geniuses were figuring out how to decontaminate a ship which had been subjected to radiation, but not even the civil service deadheads in the bureau were given the assignment of figuring out how to decontaminate what this filthy night was depositing on the Bedford. Well, none too many ships had gone down under the press of ice lately, had they? . . . There was only that Danish corvette two years ago. And a supply ship the year before that. Surely the Bedford could never be overwhelmed by such an ignominious fate! Not his ship! . . . Maybe the Commie commander of Moby Dick was counting on him nurturing exactly these fears. Counting on it while he himself took advantage of his own craft’s natural superiority under such conditions, exposing nothing but the conning tower, periscopes, radar and sensory antennas to the horrible smothering, congealing sleet. If it got too bad, all a submarine had to do was to submerge into the warming bosom of the deep, thaw out for a while, then try again. . . . Finlander pressed his eyes tightly closed, feigning sleep to himself and dreaming of sticking it out until his ship became a nightmare glob of ice. . . .
“Sir! Sir! The Beek just picked up another of those fragmentary signals. Much stronger this time!”
Finlander sat up and found himself staring into the dim faces of Commander Allison and Lieutenant Petersen. “Very good!” he exclaimed with a transparently forced casualness in his voice. “Very good! I’m glad he’s so much on the ball. Any bearing?”
“No, sir. But he estimates it’s no farther than seventy miles. It pretty well has to be seventy miles north or south.”
The captain blinked, rubbed his face very hard, driving his knuckles deep into his eyes, then shook his head. “As simple as that, eh? Seventy miles north or seventy miles south. Well, let’s see. The ice is probably nearly on the bottom in Scoresby Sound and awfully thick around the entrance. Dangerous stuff for a pigboat of the old type. So let’s say seventy miles south. Anything from the Novo Sibirsk which might indicate reporting our position?”
“Nothing since last evening’s long-winded complaint about us to SOVFLOT, sir. Moby Dick probably monitored that.”
Finlander managed a smile. “Very good. Obviously they quickly lost radar contact with us in the sleet and now we are being screened by the Greenland coast. That’s perfect. Get under way and start creeping to the southward along the edge of the pack. Keep radar and sonar on low scales. And keep me informed of developments, gentlemen.” He lowered himself back into a horizontal position and pulled the blanket over his face, once again closing his eyes. As Lieutenant Petersen tiptoed out of the day cabin behind the executive officer, he whispered: “How the hell does the skipper wake up out of a sound sleep and instantly give a sound evaluation of a tactical situation?”
Allison only grunted.
Finlander’s mind was not only awake, but racing as he lay beneath the prickly warmth of the blanket. Seventy miles between him and the detested Moby Dick! The Beek had to be pretty sure of himself to voluntarily make such an optimistic estimate. A pity he could not also have provided a bearing! Seventy miles north or south along this coast could — if he had picked the wrong direction — mean a two-hundred-and-ten-mile error, which meant eleven hours’ lost steaming, which meant most certainly a total abort. Stick out your neck, Commanding Officer, and decide! Yes, the ice was very thick to the north and in Scoresby Sound a sub could get itself trapped, yet some submarines were specially built to poke up through the floes, some skippers like Moby Dick’s and the Bedford’s were unorthodox daredevils. Finlander smiled with his eyes closed, then quickly squelched any glimmer of kinship with his Soviet counterpart. He’d give him coldly professional credit, but that was all. And he was betting he would be operating below Cape Brewster, where the icepack would remain comparatively loose for another two weeks. Click-click-click-click chattered the gyro-repeater as the ship turned south; a faint tremor shook the cabin as the turbines picked up revolutions. Three bells were struck and as the melodious sound penetrated through the folds of the blanket it brought him a comforting thought about being able to doze for another hour — maybe really sleep. Instead he found himself standing before Admiral Sorensen, the grizzled little Dane who commanded NATONAV 1 and took sadistic pleasure in dressing down American officers. “You ekted unwisely in turning sou’d, Kep’n,” he said with a pronunciation which was exactly like that of a countryman of his own who was a famous comedian in the United States; but Sorensen was a man devoid of even the slightest sense of comedy. “You should heff turn nor’d, ja? You should heff antizipate de unlikely, ja? Very unwise, Kep’n . . . very unwise. . . .” His angry red face dissolved away with the rising clamor of a GQ alarm.
Captain Finlander shot out of his bunk, kicked himself free of the tangling blanket and, sweeping the duffel over his shoulders, ran for the wheelhouse. But Commander Allison was already coming for him and they met in the navigation office.
“It’s really only an air alert, sir,” the exec told the captain with a weary irritation.
“Then why the GQ, Buck? I’d like to save our energy for sub-hunting, you know.”
“The CIC has been pretty jumpy during the last hour. Spitzer claims he has a UFO on the sky sweeper. Thinks it may be a balloon, but isn’t absolutely sure. Range is sixty-two miles, altitude twelve thousand, bearing zero-one-five. I think it’s a stray RAOBs from Thule. Shall we secure battle stations, sir?”
Finlander had moved to the chart and stood looking down at it with his brows knitted together in a concentrated bristle. “Not yet, no. Sixty-two miles almost due south of us, is it? And fifteen minutes ago we picked up that mysterious signal. Maybe we are finding some pieces that will fit together, and maybe just a few more will give us a pretty clear picture.” He reached for the telephone, dialed Communications Center and asked for Lieutenant Beeker. “Any way you can check out possible Soviet airborne telemetrics?” he inquired.
“If they are close enough, maybe, sir,” The Beek’s tired voice hedged.
“Will sixty-two miles do, Mr. Beeker?”
The Beek’s voice lost its weariness. “If that’s all, Captain, there’s a fair chance. Give me five minutes.”
“I’ll give you three, then two more to get up here!” Hanging up, he turned to Allison. “I want the meteorological officer to report to me on the double with all his latest synoptics.”
Lieutenant Petersen stuck his head through the blackout curtain of the wheelhouse. “The CIC reports the UFO definitely identified as a balloon moving slowly northeast and gaining altitude. Sorry about the false alarm, sir. Shall I secure?”
“Not unless you can satisfactorily explain its presence,” Finlander retorted.
Petersen’s expression became confused, then startled. “You mean it might have been launched by Moby Dick, sir? Should I order the ADO to stand by to shoot it down?”
“Let’s not reveal our position by getting trigger happy, Mr. Petersen. Simply ask CIC to keep accurate track of it.” The telephone diverted him with an urgent buzzing. It was The Beek, reporting a little over two minutes after receiving his assignment, to inform the captain that they were recording strong telemetric signals whose range and bearing checked with the CIC’s contact. Finlander ordered him t
o hurry to the bridge, then told Allison: “Piece number one just fell in place, Buck. Now I need another from the met officer. Where is he?”
Even as he asked, Ensign Bascomb came bursting through the blackout curtain and breathlessly announced himself. His clothes looked as if he had dived into them on the fly and he was still fumbling with one hand to hitch up his pants properly; with the other he clutched a roll of weather maps. Finlander reached out and yanked him over to the chart table.
“I’ve got a fascinating little problem for you, weatherman! Using all available meteorological and target-analyses data, I want you to backtrack a balloon to give me an accurate estimate of the position from where it was launched and when. I’m going into the day cabin to get dressed and when I come back I’ll need that information ready.”
When he returned four minutes later fully clothed, Lieutenants Beeker and Krindlemeyer had joined the other officers and in a dark corner of the navigation office Finlander glimpsed a shadowy figure with the glint of black leather. The others were clustered around Ensign Bascomb, who was hunched over the chart table, his whole demeanor an agony of concentration, telephone wedged between shoulder and ear, a slide rule in his left hand, the right scribbling figures on the weather chart which he had superimposed over the navigational one.
The captain elbowed his way through the crowd and placed himself next to him. “Well, Bascomb?”
The met officer hung up the phone, made a few quick additional calculations on the margin of his chart, then said: “Assuming it is an average-sized instrument carrier filled with hydrogen, and assuming a rate of ascent of six hundred feet per minute, and assuming wind patterns have been fairly constant, and temperatures there are about what they are here, then . . . the launch should have taken place twenty-four minutes ago from this position.” He laid the parallel ruler along a course drawn from the balloon’s known position and drew a rather faint, uncertain circle off a nameless promontory of the Greenland coast. “Of course, sir, this is assuming a hell of a lot of things and, of course, I am aware that this places the launching site in thick ice.”
Finlander pulled him away from the chart, took a pair of dividers and pricked off the distance. “Seventy-four miles! It checks! Very good, Mr. Bascomb!” With a pencil he made the circle firmly black. “I have one more question to ask Mr. Beeker. Would you classify those telemetrics as standard RAOB’s stuff for weather forecasting?”
The Beek shook his head. “No, sir. More likely microwave analyses.”
Finlander nodded. “Then here’s the picture as I see it. The Commie pigboat is lying off this point with its conning tower stuck up through the ice as a launching platform for airborne microwave detectors intended to gather information on emissions from our DEW-line system. The fragmentary intercepts we’ve been picking up are most likely his command to the Novo Sibirsk to start monitoring the telemetric data, which they in turn relay on to Moscow disguised as oceanographic observations.” He looked around him at their faces and paused to give anybody the chance to add or detract from his evaluation. None spoke. He smiled and suddenly slammed a fist into the palm of his other hand. “Moby Dick has spouted for us, gentlemen! Let’s go after him! His radar is probably as fouled as ours, so here is a fine chance to sneak up on him undetected under cover of darkness. We move in blacked out, all high-frequency stuff turned off and under absolute radio silence. This is it! From here on we go all out!”
4.
While the Bedford drove purposefully but blindly through a morning as black and cold as winter midnight, her bridge lookouts doubled to compensate for the muzzling of her electronic detection gear, a clash took place in the wardroom brought about by tensions beyond those generated by the perilous action at hand. Perhaps heeding the dangers of speeding in complete darkness along the ice-clogged, uncertainly charted Greenland coast, or perhaps only wanting to keep his crew keyed to the chase he had begun, Captain Finlander did not secure his ship from battle stations. Only a few men at a time were permitted to stand down in turns for hot breakfast, and it was because of this that none but Commander Allison and Ensign Ralston were in the wardroom when Ben Munceford came up from his cabin, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. It was natural for him to ask: “What’s up? Where is everybody?” It was maybe as natural for the executive officer to contemptuously counter: “You mean you slept all through a GQ? That’s what 1 call being a live-wire reporter!”
“I turned out when the alarm sounded at five-thirty,” Munceford replied with a scowl. “But the scuttlebutt had it to be nothing but some balloon, so I went back to bed.” When Ralston glanced at the exec with a loud snicker, Munceford’s tone became sharp. “So? What’s it all about?”
Allison filled his mouth with eggs and concentrated on smearing a heap of jam on a piece of toast. Ralston savored a scalding draft of coffee, gulped it down and casually answered: “Oh, nothing much, Ben. We damned near piled into an icefield at eighteen knots, which isn’t too unusual in this kind of operation, of course. And, oh, yes — we’re on to Moby Dick and kind of getting set to pounce on him right now. That’s all, isn’t it, Commander?”
“Yes, Mr. Ralston,” Allison agreed, biting off a large chunk of toast and continuing through the mouthful. “I suppose we’ve been amiss in not providing Mr. Munceford with a printed program. It slipped my mind that these TV correspondents have to work off official handouts.”
Ben Munceford’s face turned a mottled red beneath the freckles. Yesterday afternoon they had left him oblivious in his cabin while they passed within a hundred yards of a Russian spy ship; now this! He furiously threw his jacket down on a chair and stalked over to the coffee urn on the sideboard. “You guys make a stranger feel right at home, don’t you! Christ! If I’d been on deck when we passed that Commie yesterday, I might have jumped over the side just to join the other outcasts.” He instantly realized the enormity of what he had said and regretted it, but the hurt kept seething inside him.
Ralston gave him a look of incredulous disgust which became a leer when the executive officer exclaimed: “If we had known that, we certainly would have taken the trouble to notify you, Mr. Munceford.”
Munceford burned his lips on the coffee and spluttered. “Damn it, I’m sorry! So I’ve goofed! But I’m still trying to do a job on this ship.”
“Sure you are, Ben.” Ralston shrugged with indifference.
Two other ensigns from Engineering came into the wardroom and threw everybody cheery greetings before attacking the platters of food, so Munceford clamped down on his temper and seated himself next to them. Ralston gulped the last of his breakfast, excused himself to Commander Allison and headed for the door; as he passed the chair, he deftly lifted the camouflage jacket off it and took it with him. If the executive officer noticed the action he paid no attention to it and Munceford was sulkily staring into his cup of coffee while dunking a doughnut. He had lost his appetite and it was not until he abruptly got up to escape topside and think things out that he missed his jacket. He stared at the empty chair for a moment, then spun around and faced Allison, who had also risen to leave. “All right! Who took it?” he demanded, his fury now out of control.
“Who took what?” the exec coldly inquired.
“It was your snotty ensign playing smart, right?”
The two engineering ensigns stopped eating and gaped.
“Oh, you’re talking about that infantryman’s sport coat of yours,” Allison said without a glimmer of humor.
“You know god-damned well what I’m talking about!” Munceford shouted. “I want my jacket back. If I don’t get it back, I’m going to raise hell with the captain about this childish crap!”
Commander Allison’s voice dropped to a snarling whisper. “Complaints to the captain are channeled through the executive officer. Unfortunately he is too busy right now to be worried about a missing item of your wardrobe. Is that clear, Mr. Munceford?”
“Yeah, so I guess I can settle that one for myself with Ralston! But don’t think
I’m not on to the crazy way this operation is being carried on. That’s what I’m going to get to the bottom of, with or without your almighty Captain Finlander. I may be a screwball kind of correspondent, but I’m god-damned curious and don’t get scared off from prying in dark corners.”
Even before he finished his outburst, Allison was roughly shoving his way past him. But he also had to push past Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter, who was on his way in to breakfast. The surgeon had heard the last exchange and wore an appalled look on his face which turned into consternation when the executive officer whipped back and asked him: “Say, Doc! Where was Steward’s Mate Collins this morning when the captain wanted some food shot up to his day cabin?”
“Ah . . . er . . . uh . . . Collins? Oh, well, you see, I’d organized a little litter-carrying drill during the GQ and Collins was the simulated casualty and —”
“What?” Allison exploded. “Do both of you characters foisted on us by the Tiburon Bay figure you’ve joined some kind of picnic? Some company outing? Some sea-scout cruise? Damn it all to hell, get with it!!” With a gesture of utter disgust he turned away and vanished down the passageway.
The surgeon recoiled against the bulkhead and appeared close to slumping to the deck. Uncomprehendingly he blinked at Munceford, who was suddenly strangely sobered by the executive officer’s violent outburst. “Yeah, Doc!” he sighed with a low, bitter drawl. “Let’s you and me get with it and find out what these cats put in their needles.”
A flash of sheer horror came over Lieutenant Commander Porter’s expression, but the two engineering ensigns somehow triggered nervous chuckles out of each other and one of them said: “Gosh! I guess these TV types actually do talk like that, don’t they!”
The Bedford Incident Page 18
