“Positive target echo . . . bearing zero-three-one, steady . . . range two-two-five-zero, steady . . . depth zero-seven-five, steady . . .”
For an instant Finlander looked as though he was about to drive his fist through the speaker. Commander Allison made a half-hearted effort to soothe him: “Maybe the staff at COMFLANT only want a little time to evaluate the situation for themselves, sir.”
As he stalked past the chart table, the captain slammed the flat of his hand against it, making pencils, dividers and rulers jump high in the air. “That’s what I am here for!” he shouted. “Because I am here, I know the situation. I’m not asking them to allow me to commit a warlike act. I’m asking they permit me to expose the warlike intentions of a nation who has mesmerized half the world with its eternal blathering about peaceful coexistence! And, above all, I’m asking for this chance to show that the American navy is able and determined to put a stop to this kind of intimidation of our own country!” He slammed the table once more, paced several more turns around the navigation office, then came to an abrupt halt when he found himself face to face with Commodore Wolfgang Schrepke as he stepped in from the wheelhouse.
“Is there anything amiss, Captain?” the German inquired, unzipping his leather jacket and removing his brine-stained cap.
Without a word Finlander thrust the two crumpled messages at him. Schrepke took them, stepped over to the chart table, spread them out under the light, smoothed out their wrinkles and carefully read each in turn. Then he straightened up and said: “I would say your Fleet Headquarters have relieved you of a terrible responsibility which Admiral Sorensen was so quick to conveniently place upon your shoulders.”
This stopped Finlander short with a glint of surprise. Another fragment of last night’s nightmares flashed through his mind, the part where the sly Admiral Sorensen was dressing him down, snarling: “You ekted unwisely, Kep’n!” — but he quickly smothered this vision in his current anger. “Indeed, Commodore Schrepke? Well, unlike some of my European colleagues, I do not shrink from responsibility for my actions!” He buttoned up his white duffel and slapped the long-billed cap on his head, then moved to leave.
“Do we secure from battle stations, sir?” Allison called after him.
“No!” Finlander shouted back and swept out through the blackout curtain.
6.
The Bedford doggedly weaved along the ragged edge of the ice-pack at a slow six knots to keep prodding the submarine with relentless echo-ranging signals. Moby Dick was moving southward beneath the protective shield of ice, staying between one and two miles offshore and about the same distance from his pursuer, keeping as deep as the shallow, reef-strewn coastal waters would allow, which meant somewhat less than forty fathoms. In the destroyer’s CIC they could occasionally hear his sonar pinging in short bursts, obviously ranging ahead to detect rocks and skerries which might fatally block his course through the black deep. “That devil either has better charts than we, or he is a madman!” Lieutenant Spitzer observed with a certain grudging admiration as he checked the submarine’s progress on the combat plot.
From time to time Moby Dick would stop to listen on his passive sonar system, in which case the Bedford would do the same. Perhaps the Soviet commander was hoping to draw his opponent into the icepack as a rabbit draws a fox into an impenetrable thicket of brambles from where it would be lucky to extricate itself with a whole skin, let alone make a kill! But the sullen Finlander would not allow his turbulent feelings to trick him into any rash action. So the creeping, stalking game resumed after each one of these tense pauses.
An hour dragged by, then another. The overcast which had shown signs of breaking up earlier during the day solidified and turned a bluish leaden color, and presently a fine snow began falling. The harsh rock faces of the distant mountains became softly hazy in the thickening weather and began a play of hide-and-seek with the shifting flurries. As the destroyer moved farther south and came out of the lee of the great northeast bight of Greenland, deep ocean swells regained their power, slowly at first, with gently heaving widely separated crests, then steeper and closer. The icepack came alive in their surge and began to grind and fill the air with a horrible gnashing rumble. This sound filled the deep too and the CIC reported that echo-ranging was becoming disturbed, triggering Captain Finlander to send off another urgent, top-secret plea to both NATONAV 1 and COMFLANT:
. . . TACTICAL SITUATION DETERIORATING IN FAVOR TRANSGRESSOR STOP AGAIN URGENTLY REQUEST PERMISSION CHALLENGE AND INTERDICT BEFORE OPPORTUNITY LOST. . . .
After an interminable delay which actually only lasted for fifteen minutes, NATONAV 1 came through with an uncomforting answer:
. . . AM AMPLIFYING YOUR SITUATION TO COMFLANT WITH POSITIVE RECOMMENDATIONS STOP IF YOU NEED ASSISTANCE WILL ORDER POLAR-BEAR TO YOUR POSITION WHICH CAN MAKE IN EIGHT HOURS STOP-SIGNED SORENSEN, COMAD.
. . . ONLY ASSISTANCE REQUIRED IS AUTHORITY TO TAKE ACTION. . . .
To this came a peremptory one-word signal from COMFLANT:
WAIT
And as they waited, the early afternoon became a melancholy, snow-filled dusk, then suddenly winter night.
After his brief flurry of activity in the Communications Center occasioned by the captain’s exchanges with admirals thousands of miles removed from this dismal scene of action, Lieutenant P. L. M. Packer gradually sank back into the depression which had gripped his spirits last night and this morning. Again he was let down by an idleness which aggravated the attrition of his deep personal troubles. Leaning listlessly over his immaculate desk, he stared at the radio-telephone unit attached to the bulkhead a few feet away. As he stared, the wistful thought came to his mind that all he had to do was flip a switch, punch a channel selector, call the Marine Operator at Kirkeness, ask for London — GErrard 2075 — and forthwith bridge the horrible void between himself and Shebeona. “Hello, darling! . . . Didn’t you get my telegram?”
“Here comes a deferred personal over Code C circuit, sir!” one of the radio operators announced and started clacking away on his machine.
Packer came out of his chair and had to check himself from making an undignified rush for the decoder. The Beek was standing in the doorway to the EDA room, munching on a huge sandwich, the wires trailing from his inevitable earphones and connecting him to the MESS-PLEX like an umbilical cord. He was watching the Englishman with a kind of uncomfortable concern as he drew the printed strip through his hands.
PERSONAL SEAMAN 1 THORBJORNSEN, JOHN B., COLDSNAP VIA NATONAV MACKAY-A NEW BOOT REPORTED FOR DUTY THIS DOGWATCH WEIGHING 6 POUNDS 4 OUNCES SOAKING WET AND HOLLERING A LUSTY ALLS WELL STOP CONGRATULATIONS DAD STOP-SIGNED GRANDPOP.
Because he sensed The Beek’s eyes on him, Lieutenant Packer hid his bitter disappointment, forced a grin, read the message aloud and filled the austere Communications Center with a bright moment of cheerful laughter.
At 1620 hours Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter finally came to enter a patient in the ship’s medical log. A gunner’s mate was virtually dragged into the surgery by his section chief with both hands badly frostbitten from clearing ice off an ASROC launcher. The surgeon treated him and noticed how the hands shook from something more than pain, but there was defiance in the man’s red-rimmed eyes when he firmly declined being relieved from duty. Porter reluctantly discharged him and returned to the receiving office, where he resumed perusing through the now well-thumbed War Psychology in Primitive and Modern Man. All day long he had had little to do but sit there absorbing the text and Lieutenant Hirschfeld’s marginal notes. However, after a short while he now closed it and locked it away in his desk, then pulled on his arctics. Leaving Chief Pharmacist McKinley in charge of the sterile inactivity of sick bay, he resolutely set off for the bridge. But on the way up there his resolution wavered slightly and he digressed on a visit into the armored cavern of the CIC. “How are things going? Pretty rough?” he asked Lieutenant Krindlemeyer, who had taken over Central Control while Spitzer was wolfing down an early
dinner in the wardroom.
Krindlemeyer peered at the surgeon through his rimless glasses with a blankly owlish expression and answered: “Why, hello, Doc! All systems are go here!”
The surgeon listened to the raucous jumble of sound which was corning in over the sonar audio monitors, winced at the frantic splatters of light in the PPI scopes and watched the chief plotter record the latest tactical data on the big board, then call it up to the bridge in a low, hoarse voice. He noticed the forcibly relaxed attitudes of Lieutenant Aherne and Ensign Ralston at the glowing Fire Control console, the endlessly masticating jaws of the sonar and radar operators, and especially noticed the nervous jiggling of Merlin Queffle’s right knee as he sat at the MTS, eyes tightly shut, forehead wrinkled as he pressed the earphones to his ears. Porter took all this in for a minute or two, gained fresh resolve from what he saw, then quietly slipped out through the steel door.
Captain Finlander was seated on the edge of the bunk in his day cabin, his duffel open, cap shoved back, in his hands a bowl of steaming bean soup which he was stirring without much enthusiasm when the surgeon timidly pushed aside the blackout curtain and peered in. “How are things going, sir? Pretty rough?”
Finlander looked up with a scowl which lasted long enough for Lieutenant Commander Porter to take warning, but the following forced grin betrayed him into stepping inside the cabin.
“Hello, Doc!” the captain greeted him with a kind of bitter cordiality. “Somebody once said something about being able to take care of his enemies, but God preserve him from his friends. In this case, my friends at Fleet Headquarters!”
Porter laughed politely and dared to perch himself casually on the edge of the desk. “Oh, well — I suppose they’ve got a lot of things to consider in a situation like this. Things fraught with dangerous consequences if the wrong decisions are made, right?”
Finlander gave him a baleful stare which should have been the final warning, then took a mouthful of soup instead of answering.
The surgeon looked up at the clock on the bulkhead. “Gosh, Captain! We certainly have been at battle stations for an awful long stretch, haven’t we?”
“Eleven hours and fourteen minutes,” Finlander snapped without looking at the clock. “What about it, Commander Porter? Have there been any intolerable hardships worked on the medical department?”
“Oh, no, sir. I’ve only had one case of frostbite, but . . .” He stopped himself, suddenly fearfully aware of the captain’s dangerous mood.
“But what?” Finlander demanded and in his agitation slopped some of the soup out of the bowl. He glowered down at the greasy red stain spreading over pure white wool, then his eyes snapped back to the surgeon, blazing with a terrible light beneath the black brows.
“B-but I, ah . . . noticed an increasing strain showing in the men, sir, and . . .”
“You think this is news to me?” Finlander shouted, now playing his temper as though it were a discordant percussion instrument. “They know I will never secure from battle stations while we are closed with the enemy. Never! But, all right, Doc! So they are strained by this filthy, freezing, frustrating job. Are you giving me a medical opinion that they can’t take it anymore?”
“Maybe it’s more like they’re ready to take on too much, sir.”
“What the devil do you mean by that, Commander?”
“Well, like . . . this Moby Dick business is all very well — just as long as you don’t take the part of Ahab too seriously, sir.” He gave a nervous laugh, then froze rigid.
The bowl of soup had splattered on the deck as Captain Finlander shot to his feet. He was actually shorter and slighter of build than the bulky surgeon, but he suddenly towered over him and caused him to begin to pitifully shrivel. His voice came forth a full octave lower than before, and with twice the vehemence. “Ahab? Ahab? My name is Erik J. Finlander! I am a captain of the United States Navy and commanding officer of the U.S.S. Bedford! That’s who and what I am, sir! Nobody else! Nothing else! And you, sir, will instantly remove yourself from my presence and return to your battle station. Dismissed!!”
Lieutenant Commander Chester Porter quivered before this blast like a jelly suddenly exposed to a violent wind. He slid off the edge of the desk and with a trembling “Y-yes, sir!” slunk out through the curtain. A wet stain was left on a fold where his face had brushed against it.
7
Moby Dick made his successful break for the open sea sometime between 0150 and 0230 hours of the following morning. The exact minute remained undetermined because the CIC had been thrown into a state of confusion by a very large gam of whales which had run headlong into the scene of creeping battle. They radiated an impossible cacophony of submarine noises, aggravating the already difficult tracking conditions brought about by a now thoroughly activated icepack pounding in breaking seas. To make matters worse, the Bedford’s sonar genius, Merlin the Magician, had had to be relieved during the late evening after being on duty for sixteen hours with only a few short breaks. Lieutenant Spitzer had sent him below, secretly happy to be rid of him and wanting to trust the relieving sonarman, who, for over ten fatal minutes, even disputed the fact that it was whales obscuring the tenuous signal they were intermittently receiving off the submarine. Then one of the animals surfaced in the turbulent blackness, unseen but so close to the ship that its vaporous spout swept over the bridge, enveloping Captain Finlander where he stood in swirling snow with an unmistakable fishy halitosis. “Get Queffle back on that MTS immediately!” he yelled over the intercom.
It only took four minutes to return Queffle to the CIC and only a minute more of concentrated, aggrieved listening over the earphone and peering into the PPI scope before he came up with his cocksure diagnosis of the trouble: “Right whales! Fifty or sixty of them! They blanked our hard contact!”
Seething with impotent rage and frustration, Lieutenant Spitzer had no alternative but call to the bridge: “Contact lost! Readouts obscured and blanked by biological and hydrographic interference!”
Finlander heard the baleful voice squawking out of the speaker in the wing and immediately rushed for the wheelhouse. “Don’t they understand he’s broken out of the pack astern of us? Reverse your course! Make flank speed for ten minutes, then start a maximum-effect sweep!”
The Bedford heeled over in a sharp turn and began to pound through the huge swells. Clouds of spray mingled with the snow, and the jarring which shook her from keel to masthead broke loose the remains of yesterday’s ice, shedding it in rattling cascades along her flanks. The destroyer drove through the night and ice-clogged black ocean at a perilous thirty-two knots, and when she finally stopped at the end of this wild retracing run to listen for her lost quarry, a final ironic blow was struck at her captain. It came in the form of a message from COMFLANT:
. . . PERMISSION GRANTED TO CHALLENGE AND INTERDICT STOP EXPECT YOU ACT PROMPTLY WITH PRUDENT FORCE AGAINST ANY TRESPASS IN NATO TERRITORIAL WATERS. . . .
Finlander held the scrap of yellow paper which had been delivered to him from the Communications Center at this bitter moment, studying it in the sickly green glow from the navigational radar. Commander Allison read it over his shoulder and shrank away from him, expecting a blast — which did not come. The captain only sucked in his breath and held it for an interminable period before letting go with a prolonged wheeze. Then he stepped over to the intercom and called Spitzer: “What have you got down there now besides interesting wildlife, CIC?” he inquired with fathomless suffering in his voice.
“All readouts negative, sir.”
“All right. I’m coming down.” He turned to his executive officer. “You take the conn, Buck. I’m going to personally take over the CIC and keep them going until they fall out of their upholstered chairs and have to be carried into sick bay. I’m going to hunt that Commie pigboat until the barnacles grow so thick on this hull we can no longer move. I’m going to catch him, Buck! I’m going to catch him!”
They did catch Moby Dick nine hours l
ater where the blizzard had free reign over mountainous swells running a good twenty miles off the territorial limits of Greenland. But perhaps to use the word catch would not be entirely correct — because all that really happened was that the protagonists caught sight of each other through the thick snow and spume for about thirty seconds.
When the watch had changed at 0800 and the Bedford was still vainly searching the empty deep, Captain Finlander reluctantly secured the ship from battle stations, yet himself keeping the CIC on full combat alert. He came to regret this action when Moby Dick suddenly materialized with hardly a warning on any of the detection devices. This shocking thing happened simply because the Russian submarine was cautiously poking her snorkel up through the wild seas in order to breathe after the long submerged action and was too close to the heaving surface for the sonar beams to register a return echo. One of those seas almost broached him and for something like thirty seconds the big conning tower thrust clear out of water. A half-smothered “eyeball” lookout in the port wing of the bridge and a bleary-eyed radar operator in the CIC both sang out together. Commodore Schrepke also saw him and was able to get a quick look through his binoculars which confirmed to him it was a Chelnikoff-class submarine.
The Bedford Incident Page 20
