By 0940 hours the total darkness had given way to a cold, clammy twilight and the tension on the bridge slackened somewhat as a flat colorless ocean began to gain definition in a widening ring of visibility around the speeding destroyer. Close above her, the overcast pressed down like a sagging ceiling which threatened to collapse at any moment, but the space between clouds and sea was free of sleet and only partially obscured by random patches of fog. Vapor wafted from the faces of the lookouts as they drew sighs of relief and Lieutenant Harwell’s tensely alert position in the open doorway of the pilothouse relaxed slightly. But Captain Finlander did not relax or move from his position in the exposed wing; indeed, he quickly brought his men back to their former state of nerves by ordering more speed as the curtain of night drew away; it was as if he were trying to keep up with it and use it as a shield in his approach to Moby Dick. Twenty-one . . . twenty-three . . . then twenty-six knots made the ship tremble from the power of her turbines, and the wake roared as it shot out from beneath the stern in a thrashing maelstrom of foam. Down in the CIC they had to shut down the low-power echo-ranging which had been their dubious insurance against smashing into heavy ice and now, deprived of all their electronic sight and hearing, the men sat idly in the dark, suffering the agonies of the deaf and the blind.
Little by little the twilight lifted and presently the coastal icepack became visible two miles off the starboard beam as a pale white line paralleling their course. Again there were sighs of relief on the bridge, but also gasps of dismay when the improving light revealed their own ship to them. All the familiar lines were subtly distorted by the frozen sheathing deposited by last night’s sleet, all the solid battleship gray turned into a translucent and sickly pallor beneath the skin of ice. It covered every part of the Bedford above her waterline and had formed clusters of soot-stained icicles snaking like congealed tentacles from the rims of her stacks. Gnarled stalactites hung from the muzzles of the DP guns while others had fused lifelines and shrouds to the deck plates. Most startling of all were the coxcomb shapes curling off the masthead and crow’s-nest, and the spiked clusters which had been created by the centrifugal effect on the rims of the radar antennas. As Captain Finlander glanced up at these, the nightmare which had haunted his half-sleep during the night briefly came back and stung him with its reality, but then something else caught his attention. “Buck! What’s that flying from our main signal halyard?”
Commander Allison wiped some freezing moisture the wind had stung out of his eyes, peered upward and caught sight of a crazy pennant flashing a mottled conglomeration of colors against the gloomy cloud ceiling. He instantly became filled with rage and embarrassment. “Sir, that is Mr. Munceford’s jacket!” he shouted back at the captain in a deeply offended tone.
There came a very fleeting twist of amusement on Finlander’s lips before he sternly ordered: “Haul it down!”, then dismissed the matter and returned his attention to scanning the seas ahead.
Allison angrily ordered Chief Rickmers to lower the offensive garment from its lofty position above the Bedford’s bridge. What bothered him the most was that he would have to discipline Ensign Ralston, humiliating that splendid young officer instead of the horrible Munceford! Then he sickened more when Munceford suddenly appeared on the scene.
The correspondent peered around the ice-crusted bridge, then raised his eyes skyward. Inevitably he spied his jacket and followed it downward until its wild flapping was belayed by Rickmers’ gloved fists. Gritting his teeth, Allison placed himself between him and the captain.
But Munceford made no motion until Rickmers came alongside him, gingerly holding the jacket between thumb and forefinger; then he reached out and stopped him. Quickly removing the regulation navy parka he had worn to the bridge, Munceford retrieved his own and squirmed into its shreds, which hung on him with its bright, torn patches of divisional insignia like part of a clown’s costume. There was something clownish too about the way the freckles stood out on his livid face, but there was none of that quality in his voice. “Thank you, Chief,” he said, handing over the parka. “I won’t be needing this one now.”
Rickmers mumbled something entirely unintelligible, glanced unhappily toward the fuming executive officer, then fled inside the pilothouse.
“Awful raw morning!” Munceford exclaimed casually to Allison and ambled off to another part of the bridge. Tears burned against his cheek, then froze as he hunched down and fiddled with his camera.
By 1015 hours it was full daylight, although still a depressing and foreboding facsimile of the term. Visibility improved until the barren escarpments of Greenland could be seen as a hazy black wall looming beyond the wide barrier of pack ice, its top blending into the clouds and distance giving it a weird marbled effect caused by snow-clogged crevasses. The overcast clung from the wall, seemed to sag low over the Bedford’s masthead, then stretch out over the open wastes of the Denmark Strait, where it grew thin in patches, allowing ghostly halos of sunlight to illuminate parts of the horizon.
After checking their position with the INS, Allison approached Captain Finlander and announced: “We will be abeam Moby Dick’s estimated position in eighteen minutes, sir.”
“Very good, Buck. Hold this speed and heading for ten more minutes, then stop engines and coast in toward the edge of the pack. Alert CIC to have all detection gear warmed up and ready for instant use. Ask them to put Queffle on the QBH hydrophones. No echo-ranging or radar without orders.” He squinted uneasily toward the ragged sun patches bleeding through the gray of the eastern sky. “Pray our nice neutral background doesn’t break up on us!”
Ten minutes later the Bedford’s speed abruptly slackened, the white water rushing from her stem and stern fell away and gradually abated into a soft murmur. A complete, tense silence enveloped the entire ship as she turned toward the icepack, stealthily approaching it on momentum alone. The JOOD took a visual bearing on the coast through the pelorus and confirmed their position with a low voice. Nobody else on the bridge spoke as all eyes strained through binoculars, sweeping the vast expanse of ice which stretched from the black edge of the sea for four miles to the coast. The individual floes began to stand out as they drew nearer and they could be heard grinding against one another although the sea was so flat that no motion could be seen in the pack. It gave an overwhelming impression of total immobility, desolation and frozen emptiness. Ensign Bascomb could make out the promontory he had picked to mark the Russian sub’s probable location, a grim headland looming darker against the dark escarpment and looking as if no living thing had been near it since the beginning of time. Finding himself standing close to the captain, he began to edge away uncomfortably, but stopped when Finlander said either to him or all of them: “Be patient! . . . Keep looking and be patient!”
Even Ben Munceford looked hard after shooting a few feet of film of the bleak panorama, and as he looked, a childishly romantic notion crossed his mind of being the one who actually spotted Moby Dick. Wouldn’t that fracture these Annapolis snobs! They would have to give him a prize, of course — but what? Maybe a new camouflage jacket!
“All QBH readouts negative!” the CIC reported over the intercom.
Up in the icicled crow’s-nest, Squarehead loosed a stream of profanity at the windows, which were streaked by distorting frozen ripples. He pounded on the switch controlling the wipers, which were still solidly stuck. Then he threw all his weight upward against the hatch in the roof of the aluminum box, and, to his surprise, it finally flew open, throwing a shower of frozen particles to the decks below. With a satisfied grunt he heaved himself through the narrow opening and perched his buttocks on the ten-inch rim, which was pure, slick ice. Seaman Jones sprang up off the top rung in the shaft, clamped his arms around Squarehead’s legs and fearfully shouted: “For God’s sake, be careful!”
Squarehead did not even glance down at the long freefall to certain death which could be the result of a slip. He only looked up at the frame of the tactical radar antenna, ga
uging whether it would clear his head in case it started rotating. Then he said: “Pass me up them ten-by-fifties, Jonesy, and quit ruining the press of my pants!” The binoculars were handed up to him, but even as he reached for them, he suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus! We’re on fire!”
The Bedford was indeed on fire! The cold fires of billions of ice crystals suddenly energized in a long slanting ray of sunlight which had found an infinitesimal rip in the protecting overcast, shot through it and scored a bull’s-eye. For an agonized eternity of five seconds the drab warship blazed and sparkled like a diamond caught in the beam of a burglar’s flashlight, exploding out of the hiding gloom with a clarion burst of glory. No marine artist could have captured her fantastic beauty at this moment, nor could any living eye within fifteen miles around have failed to notice her! The clouds quickly swirled in and smothered the sunbeam, but the damage had been done and a chorus of groans rose from the bridge.
“We might as well shoot off some flares and do a good job of announcing ourselves,” Commander Allison bitterly exclaimed. “But I suppose turning on the radar will do for a starter.”
“No — hold it a few moments more!” Finlander ordered.
Tense silence fell over the bridge again while everybody scanned the ice, but now with less hope than before. The ship had almost stopped and was within a hundred yards of the edge of the icepack, which appeared much looser from close quarters — and the floes bigger and more individually solid. The first little growlers hit the hull with disturbingly loud clangs. It was an unpleasant noise, but had nowhere near the effect of the howl which suddenly came from high up the mast:
“Masthead to bridge! . . . I see something like a big chunk of ice out there that’s moving by itself!”
All the faces on the bridge, including the captain’s, turned upward and stared in various degrees of shock at the figure far up the mast, precariously perched on the rim of the crow’s-nest while excitedly waving one arm toward some objective in the icepack.
Commander Allison gasped, then cupped his gloved hands around his mouth and cut loose his most powerful quarterdeck bellow. “Don’t you know how to report a sighting properly, you damned fool? Get back inside there and use the telephone!”
The figure waved and screamed again in wild, oblivious excitement. “Like a piece of moving ice! . . . It’s him! . . . Going down! Going down —” He came within a fraction of falling, then suddenly vanished as if somebody had yanked him out of sight from below.
Allison was grabbing for the telephone in the external communication box, but Captain Finlander needed no clarification of the garbled sighting report. “A moving icefloe!” he exclaimed to himself. “Of course! He’s got his conning tower painted white!” Raising his binoculars and training them in the general direction indicated by the frantic lookout, he forced every last ounce of effort out of his optic nerves, trying to catch every detail of every pan, chunk and boulder-sized piece of ice among the thousands which came into his view. He tensed for a second when he thought he caught a motion in the congealed conglomeration of shapes out there, then sagged when it seemed only an illusion . . . then jumped a foot into the air when the speaker sang out:
“Bridge from CIC! We have a hard contact on the QBH! Request permission to start echo-ranging!”
“Granted!” Finlander yelled in a spontaneous flash of wild elation which electrified the men around him far more than had the lookout’s performance a moment ago. “Boys, we’ve got him! Got him cold two miles inside Greenland waters!” He shoved his fisherman’s cap to the back of his head and laughed. And suddenly all the others were laughing too. Even Allison laughed. Ensign Bascomb swelled up and let out a hoot. The OOD began to jig. The enlisted lookouts, talkers and signalmen grinned and thumped one another on the back. Ben Munceford smiled, but thinly, as he stared out over the icepack in the direction everybody else was pointing — and saw absolutely nothing. He accepted as fact that something was out there, evidently Moby Dick, and that it was somehow trapped by the Bedford, but he still could not fully understand all the uproar.
“So you’ve got him!” he exclaimed. “So what are you going to do about it?”
The captain heard the question and took fleeting notice of Munceford’s presence on the bridge for the first time this morning; both the question and the sight of the tattered camouflage jacket may have helped sober him, yet he proceeded to ignore the correspondent. The smile was still there, but turned grim, and his voice became fully businesslike as he started issuing orders. “Buck! Tell CIC to lock on and track! Have Fire Control put their ASROCs on stand-by and start feeding target data to the systems! OOD! Keep out of the ice and cone the ship to intercept any attempt to break for open sea! Yeoman! Take down this message for immediate transmission!” He began dictating it within the hearing of Ben Munceford, perhaps purposefully so as to answer his question: “Code Double-A, Most Urgent and Immediate Action to COMAD, NATONAV 1: Have flushed Soviet Russian submarine conducting military reconnaissance inside, repeat inside, Greenland-Danish territorial waters, position sixteen miles north Helvigstadt Bay, stop. Request immediate authority to challenge and interdict, stop. Signed Commanding Officer, Coldsnap.”
5.
In the Communications Center, Lieutenant P. L. M. Packer, R.N., finally snapped out of the brooding lethargy which he had been fighting all morning since being deprived of his normal duties. Radio silence left him with nothing to do and the continued GQ nowhere to go but remain at his battle station — a desk. Yes, he had ambled into the EDA room while Lieutenant Beeker sat in silent communion with his HUFF-DUFF and MESS-PLEX, patiently trying to divine any scraps of radio intelligence out of the ether. He had listened to the low chatter of the idle operators speculating about their chances of catching Moby Dick, but without himself becoming exhilarated by the chase. To the contrary, his depression had deepened and at the bottom of it there was the throbbing hurt of Shebeona. But now, when Finlander’s message was given to him for transmittal to NATONAV 1, he at last began to be caught up in the excitement which permeated the ship. It was only a matter of a few minutes to run it through the encoder and have one of the operators flash it on its way. His spirits lifted even more when a familiar voice came in over the PA circuit:
“This is the captain speaking! We sighted Moby Dick a short while ago as he submerged through the icepack and now have him securely locked in our sonar beam. He has no sounding for deep dives, no clear water for high-speed runs under the ice, and we stand between him and the open sea. I have dispatched a message to our Fleet Headquarters with this good news and asking for permission to deal with him. Shortly we shall fire a charge close enough to him that he will fully realize the fatal consequences of not meekly surfacing under our guns! This has been a long, trying stretch at battle stations, but please bear with me for a little longer. The payoff is at hand! Thank you.”
“By Jove!” Packer exclaimed. “Looks like we might get cracking, doesn’t it!” The Beek gave him a somewhat condescending smile and replaced the one cup of his earphones which he had lifted off an ear in order to hear the captain’s short speech; he casually called to Chief Benton:
“Keep tabs on the long-wave frequencies in case that sub starts attempting any underwater transmissions!”
The English officer stepped out on deck for the next few moments, took some invigorating lungfuls of cold air and noticed with satisfaction that the ASROC launcher had been elevated into firing position and trained to starboard, the yellow-green snout of the missile’s warhead pointing menacingly toward the icepack. Then Benton called out to him that a NATONAV message was coming in and he rushed back to his decoding machine. When he read the strip it fed into his hands, he gave a quite un-English whoop. The message said:
NATONAV 1 TO COMMANDING OFFICER COLDSNAP-RE YOUR TACREP 11-23-1305z ACT AT OWN DISCRETION ACCORDING IMMEDIATE TACTICAL REQUIREMENTS OF SITUATION STOP-SIGNED SORENSEN, COMAD.
Lieutenant Packer had barely put down the telephone after enjoying a deli
ghted “Very good!” from Captain Finlander when Chief Benton shouted to him: “Hold it! Here comes one from home plate, sir!” A few minutes later all of his enthusiasm was dampened as he drew the following message out of the decoder.
COMFLANT TO COMMANDING OFFICER COLDSNAP-HAVE INTERCEPTED YOUR TACREP 11-23-1305z TO COLDSNAP STOP COMMEND EXCELLENT WORK BUT REGRET MUST FORBID ANY ACTION WITHOUT CONFIRMATION THIS HEADQUARTERS DUE CRITICAL RUSSAMERICAN CRISIS BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE STOP SUGGEST PASSIVE SHADOW TACTICS UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS STOP-SIGNED BALDWIN, CINCLANT.
“What a bloody shame!” Packer sighed, reaching for the phone again. “It’s going to turn out just another bitched-up inter-Allied raspberry!”
Captain Erik Finlander turned livid and began pacing the navigation office like a caged tiger. His eyes blazed with fury, the scar on his throat pulsed crimson and looked as if it might rupture and start hemorrhaging at any moment. The messenger who had brought him copies of the conflicting messages from NATONAV 1 and COMFLANT cringed as he hurriedly fled. Allison, his face set in a less animated expression of anger, pressed himself against the chart table and braced for what he felt certain would be a blast which would demolish the captain’s own standing orders against vile language. Yet when Finlander finally found his speech, it was still controlled beneath the trembling of rage and totally devoid of profanity. It was the vehemence of the delivery which made it so chilling.
“For once we have a chance to act decisively against creeping Soviet aggression! For once we are able to nail a Russian red-handed inside NATO allies’ territorial waters and with virtual proof of his subversive intentions! Nice neutral little Sweden with her toy navy has the guts to depth-charge Commie pigboats they catch violating her shores. Even Admiral Sorensen of pipsqueak Denmark is prepared to act decisively in the interest of NATO obligations. But big, tough, armed-to-the-teeth United States of America, winner of every war it ever fought, champion of liberty and rule of law, must hesitate and talk it over! Talk, talk, talk, concede and back up and pussyfoot and procrastinate! That’s what they are doing, you know, Buck! My tacrep sent cold chills down the atrophied spines fused to the upholstery of COMFLANT and they got on the hotline to the State Department fags, who have no spines at all! So now they’re talk-talk-talking while we sit up here in the arctic on top of that Bolshevik submarine commander who’s recovering more of his wits with each second!” He stemmed the torrent for a moment to listen to a voice from the CIC, which had been reporting over the open intercom every other minute since their contact with Moby Dick:
The Bedford Incident Page 19
