The GQ alarm went off, propelling two-thirds of the crew out of their bunks almost before they had had time to settle into them.
“Go after him, Buck! Force him down!” Finlander bellowed into the intercom, then started to rush for the bridge. But he quickly realized he would never make it in time and dropped back into his seat at Central Control. Moby Dick was crash-diving — but at least Queffle had a solid contact on the MTS. The hunt was on again!
The Russian submarine had plenty of sounding now that he was well out in the Denmark Strait and he used it well. Pressing down to seven hundred feet, where no trace of the surface turbulence could reach him, he cracked on close to twenty-five knots, taking violent evasive actions along a generally southeasterly course. This made it hard for the Bedford to track him accurately, having to fight the huge moving walls of water contesting her pursuit, as well as maintain a speed which made her sonar gear crackle and splatter with ambient noises. Yet she held the contact, mainly because of Merlin Queffle’s phenomenal sensitivity and Finlander’s skillful tactics of rush-stop-listen-rush. Stubbornly he hung on while more interminable hours dragged by, the horrible bone-wrenching rolls of the destroyer adding a physical pain to the mental agony.
At 1123 hours Lieutenant Packer telephoned Finlander to give him an urgent message from NATONAV 1, asking for amplification of the situation. The captain crisply ordered him to transmit the single cipher which would indicate to both NATONAV 1 and COMFLANT that a critical tactical operation was in progress necessitating radio silence.
Noon passed, cold, gray and engulfed in the swirling folds of a full-fledged blizzard. The watch changed with the ship on battle stations. Commander Allison, showing himself more and more the quiet man of iron determination and endurance, plotted their position in the navigation office and noted that they were close to where the Tiburon Bay had refueled them only four days ago. He ignored Ben Munceford, who likewise had not left the bridge since the previous morning and was still wearing his frightful shredded camouflage jacket. “I’m not going to be caught in the sack again with something going on!” he overheard him say to Lieutenant Harwell when the latter told him he was crazy to take the grind with the rest of them.
1530 hours and the grim dusk slipped into an impenetrable darkness. In the log the weather was tersely described: “Heavy snow . . . Temperature 21 F. . . . Wind N. Force 4 . . . Sea-state 5 with NNE swells.” The plot in CIC sent up the target information every other minute: “. . . Hard contact . . . bearing zero-zero-five, steady . . . range five-five-zero, steady . . . depth one hundred fifty fathoms, steady . . . target making twenty-four knots, two-four knots . . .” The captain did not make his sunset watch this afternoon; Commodore Schrepke stood it more alone than ever.
When all track of time had ceased to be something sensed by the human mind, 2215 hours came and with it a sudden fading to complete silence on all the sonar receivers in the CIC. Moby Dick had been executing some strangely erratic maneuvers during the past twenty minutes, zigzagging and nearly reversing his course in such a way that Finlander would have suspected he was about to launch a torpedo attack if he had not at the same time pressed down closer to the bottom — which suddenly seemed to swallow him up!
The Bedford coasted to a stop, heaved to and rolled sickeningly broadside to the seas while making a maximum-effect sonar sweep. Silence! Next she cut a slow, outward spiraling circle, still listening. Silence!
Merlin Queffle looked up from his MTS console with an almost comical perplexity on his pinched, haggard face. “Jeez! It’s like he went down a hole or something!” he exclaimed in an outraged falsetto.
His dismay spread through the gloomy CIC like a contagious virus. But Finlander spoke up from the Central Control in a firm, confident voice. “He’s got to be there! We’re not dealing with the Flying Dutchman, but living men working a rather old type of submarine. They’ve got only two ways to go: up or down. . . . Cut to a passive sweep on the QBH!”
They listened for five . . . ten . . . fifteen endless minutes. Silence. Then Lieutenant Krindlemeyer’s spectacles suddenly flashed over the rim of the hatch to the CSP room and his nasal voice blandly announced: “I’m getting an awfully strong magnetic disturbance down here which suggests there may be a much bigger hunk of iron below us than a submarine.”
Lieutenant Spitzer gave a funny squeal and reached across the captain to switch on the magnetometer. Its needle jumped across the scale. Finlander seemed to have caught the implication instantly, although he did nothing but casually call the bridge over the intercom: “Buck! Check our exact position, please! Give us any pertinent information on what’s on the bottom.”
A few minutes later Allison gave their exact position; then he added with a tinge of surprise: “Sir, we happen to be right over the wreck of H.M.S. Hood, the old British battle cruiser!”
For the first time in nearly two days Finlander’s face broke into a genuinely spontaneous grin. He leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms over his head, then replied: “Very good! Very good! That’s what I thought! . . . All right. Let’s thrash around the area a bit, like we were horribly confused. Then rig silent and let’s wait for him to get short of breath! . . . I think I ought to let everybody in on this development, Buck. Will you patch in this circuit through ship’s PA, please!”
In the Communications Center, Lieutenant P. L. M. Packer was at his desk, guarding this, his useless battle station on the U.S.S. Bedford. He only gradually came out of his slumped position as the captain’s cheerful voice came over the PA speaker.
“Moby Dick has given us a long, hard chase, gentlemen, but now I think I can safely tell you that he has outsmarted himself. We have lost contact, true! But we know exactly where he is hiding. Fate has it that we are directly above the wreck of a huge English warship — H.M.S. Hood — which was sunk in battle during the last war. Apparently our Commie enemy knew of its location pretty accurately and has probably used it often to shield himself with over forty thousand tons of steel to fox our detection devices. Very smart! But now we are on to that and will be waiting when he has to come up — which should be fairly soon. So hang on, men! The end of our trial is in sight! . . . Thank you.”
Packer was rigidly standing up directly under the speaker when the captain finished. He kept on staring at it for over a minute before turning away and dazedly walking past The Beek, who had at last fallen asleep, seated upright in his chair. He passed the row of idle operators, who stared curiously after him, then only shrugged because his behavior had been a bit peculiar lately. Funny ducks, these Limeys!
Lieutenant Packer went through the door leading out on deck without bothering to put on his parka and gantlets. Moving out into the night, he lifted his bare hands to shield his face from the cruel sting of the blizzard, shuffled to the railing and peered over it as if seeking something in the angry black void of the sea. He stood there until a wave bigger than the others rose up and hurled an icy blow at him, and only then did he shy back as if recoiling from the cold grip of death reaching out for him from the deep.
He was drenched to the skin, but he did not hurry down to his cabin to change. He walked slowly, and when he got there and pushed aside the curtain, he found Ben Munceford at the desk, loading tape into his portable recorder.
The correspondent looked at the Englishman with surprise. “My God, Pete, what’s happened to you? Did Communications spring a leak?”
Packer merely shook his head and absently began to peel off his sopping clothes.
Munceford resumed loading the recorder while idly drawling away. “Well, it all beats me, anyway. Now that you think you’ve got that sub pinned down under a wreck or something, what exactly is going to happen next? As far as I can see, all that Russki has to do is come up and tell us to leave him the hell alone now, or he’ll file a nasty complaint at the U.N. . . . Say, Pete! What is the matter? You not only look wet, but sick too.”
“I’m all right, thanks,” Packer said, stripping off his shirt.
“Are you still moping over your love life? Still, after two whole days? Is that what’s eating you, man?” He laughed, not cruelly but trying to kid him and with an encouraging slap on the shoulder.
“I couldn’t care less about love at this moment,” the Englishman told him with a flat, unemotional voice.
“Then show me you don’t care, Pete! And, most important of all, show yourself!” Munceford was still trying to joss him and did not at all expect the reaction he got.
“All right — I will!” Packer retorted. He stepped over to his bunk, bent down and reached up for the under part of the one above it. There was a tearing of tape. Then he was suddenly handing Shebeona’s photograph to Munceford, even forcing him to take it. “There you are, Ben! A nice pin-up for you, old man!” His body was racked by a sudden shudder and he whipped a towel around himself to run out to the hot shower.
PART THREE — THE BATTLE
1.
The time was 0400, the forty-second hour of the chase, the sixth hour since the Bedford had started circling over the wreck of the Hood like a wolf circling the lair of its trapped prey. The wind had dropped to a bare Force 2, but the snow kept falling and the sea heaved to the cadence of swells which continued marching through the night in endless columns of giants. As she alternately lay hove to or jogging against the drift, the destroyer rolled, pitched and corkscrewed with violent, unpredictable motions which added wrenching aches to the numbing cold plaguing her lookouts and gunners.
Every ten minutes Chief Gunner’s Mate Cantrell had to punch the STANDBY-HOLD switch on the panel and crawl out of his armored cubicle to climb precariously up the icy sides of the RAT launcher, clear the missile of snow and freezing slush, then back to his station and return the switch to READY-LAUNCH. In the crow’s-nest, where every wild roll of the Bedford was multiplied tenfold, Seaman Jones was whipping about through a nightmarish world of absolute darkness; he could not even see the snowflakes brushing against the windshield a few inches beyond his nose. But he kept straining his eyes, trying to judge his relative position to the sea, watching, watching for any telltale swirl of phosphorescence which might betray the fact that Moby Dick was surfacing. He still believed implicitly in his eyes, all the more so since he knew sonar contact had failed. Yet sometimes he could not help losing all sense of direction and, especially during some of the worst rolls, felt as if he was about to be hurled free of the ship. It had happened once — on the Brinkley — that the crow’s-nest had been completely wrenched from its fastenings to the mast and become the coffin of the drowning lookout. But he did not think about that horrible accident. As his captain had told him to do. he thought about the enemy and kept a smoldering anger going inside him. He thought about those Russian submariners hiding in the placid, motionless deep while he was being slowly beaten to death up here. “I hope you suffocate, you dirty Red bastards!” he snarled.
In the CIC nobody had spoken a word for nearly half an hour. The armor and insulation shut out all sounds of the sea and there was none in here beyond the endlessly repetitive minor-key ping of the sonar — which came through crisp and clear, without any fuzz and crackle of a return echo. Captain Finlander was still occupying the chair at Central Control, hunched forward with his arms folded across his chest, his body so rigidly conforming to the Bedford’s gyrations that it seemed a part of her. His eyes still watched the PPI scopes, but now they were flicking more often to the men at the consoles. He had become aware of the weariness which was slowly dulling their tense alertness, noticing the fitful contrapuntal actions of their muscles as they failed to synchronize with the rolls and pitches of the ship, perceiving a subtle bloodshot haze glazing their eyes. He studied Queffle with special concentration. The boy’s face was damp and shone with a greenish pallor as he hunched over the primary tactical sonar, his eyes too close to the scope to focus effectively, the bony fingers pressing the earphones too hard against his ears to allow perceptive hearing. Suddenly he looked back over his shoulder toward Central Control, a desperate frustrated action in violation of regulations, then visibly flinched when he met his captain’s gaze and instantly returned his attention to the fruitless vigil at his instrument. Finlander tried to flash him a reassuring nod, but Queffle had turned away too quickly. Yet not so quickly that the captain had not caught that look of despair. The extraordinary powers of the Breton Kid were failing him. In fact, all the finely tuned fighting pitch of the CIC was draining away, its subdued twilight of glowing tubes and dials turning into a deepening gloom full of frustration and foreboding.
“Number-two ASROC reports iced up and on STANDBY-HOLD,” the talker droned with a tired monotone. Ensign Ralston let out a groan.
Finlander knew it was becoming urgent that something happen to bolster the sagging spirits of his men. Nothing he could say would do it. It had to be something more stimulating than a few encouraging words — or taunting ones — from their captain. If only he could flush out Moby Dick with a stick of hedgehogs! What god-damn good was a war without something to go bang and jar one out of the deadly rote of it all? How futile this stalking, waiting game! Yet how vital that it be won by refusing to capitulate to its very futility! The Bedford or Moby Dick, one or the other, had to sneak away or come gasping to the surface with all offensive spirit so thoroughly demolished that they would be henceforth useless as a ship’s complement. It had to be the Russian. Yet it was the Bedford’s men who were wavering now.
Finlander wanted to yell “Get with it or that obsolete submarine will lick us!” but instead he leaned back in the chair, stretched his arms over his head, let out a noisy yawn and exclaimed: “The Commies must have figured out a new secret weapon, men. They’re trying to bore us to death.”
There was no reaction — not even a chuckle from Ensign Ralston.
“By God!” Finlander loudly exploded. “Under any other conditions I’d dock everybody in here two days’ shore leave for failing to react to commanding officer’s wisecracks.”
“I bet those fucking Russians are splitting their sides . . . sir.”
Finlander shot to his feet and wheeled, his body propelled by an electrifying combination of shock and anger. It was Lieutenant Spitzer who had spoken up from the dark corner where he had wedged himself in between a bulkhead and an amplifier rack. His voice had not only a strange high pitch but a belligerent tone which was entirely foreign to him. His balding pate glistened with a sickly pallor beneath the wilting blond strands of hair; his eyes showed the same beady green luminescence as the lights on the control boards. His colorless lips were parted by a leer which appeared entirely toothless in the harsh reflected half-light. As the captain glared at him, sucking in his breath for a withering rebuke, the Bedford rolled, steeply canting the deck and causing the usually self-effacing ECM officer to rise up and loom menacingly above him. The blast never came, as Finlander caught his breath in surprise. But there must have been something in his own demeanor which sobered Spitzer because he was as suddenly transformed back to his more normal personality.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” he gulped with a miserable whine. “It just slipped out of me, sir. I mean . . . well, I just wonder if the Russians are down there at all, sir.”
It took Finlander a few seconds before he got enough of a grip on himself to be nothing but sarcastic. “You confuse us, Lieutenant. Are they there or aren’t they? Please make up your mind.”
Spitzer looked as though he were trying to push himself through the bulkhead. “Well, sir . . . there’s no readout on any of the gear to suggest they are. But maybe Queffle can feel them.” There was a touch of sarcasm here too.
Out of the corner of his eye, the captain noticed Queffle cringe. He heard the talker by the plot drone out: “Number-one ASROC reports iced up and on STANDBY-HOLD.” He looked away from Spitzer to the Weapons Status Board and saw the light of No. 1 ASROC switch from green to amber. No. 2 was likewise amber, which meant that both launchers were inoperative and the Bedford was deprived of her most vital anti
-submarine weaponry at this critical time. “We certainly must have BUWEAPS develop effective de-icing gear,” Finlander growled. “If we had to make a kill we’d be in a horrible jam right now.” He turned back to Spitzer, trying to steady the man with a casual tone. “But all your detecting systems are go, aren’t they, Jeff?”
“As far as I can tell, sir.”
“So sit down at Central Control and make sure, boy!” Finlander motioned him into the chair he had vacated, then stepped over to check the recording graph of the master fathometer. The needle was just tracing another distinctive hump over the flat bottom as, from the bridge above, Commander Allison accurately conned the Bedford to pass over the Hood for the sixth time in the last hour. Above the contour of the wreck there was not the slightest shadow to suggest that anything as large as Moby Dick was hanging above it. As improbable as it was that the submarine could have sneaked away without being picked up by any of the detecting gear, the situation certainly had become doubtful. On top of all this uncertainty which Finlander knew was permeating the mind of everybody in the CIC, there had been evidence of conflict between their captain and departmental commander. Morale and efficiency were now held together by a very thin thread. Something had to be done — immediately.
Finlander moved along the row of ECM operators and stopped behind Queffle, who kept his eyes staring at his PPI scope and his hands convulsively pressing the earphones to his head. He was aware of the close presence of his captain, and Finlander felt his muscles knotting tight as he touched the boy’s shoulder, making him shy away slightly. “All right, Queffle. You’re relieved for a while.” There was no reaction, and Finlander suddenly pried the fingers open and pulled the earphones from Queffle’s head. “Come on, son! Relax!”
The Bedford Incident Page 21
