“Could you have made a mistake in identity?” he asked the German. “Could Moby Dick be a later class with some advanced kind of oxygen regenerators aboard?”
“I do not think so, Captain.”
“Then he has to come up?”
“Yes — he has to come up.”
Finlander turned away and glanced at the battle clock. Forty-five hours and three minutes. Time was running out, but maybe he could squeeze out just a little more. Perhaps those Russians were gasping out their last minutes of endurance down there right now, the diving officer poised to blow all tanks. Or perhaps they were a hundred miles away, laughing as they approached their rendezvous with the Novo Sibirsk. But then why was the Novo Sibirsk heading this way with her powerful search radar probing the night? He had to still be down there.
“We are completely out of the magnetic field, Captain,” Lieutenant Spitzer informed him.
Finlander got up from his chair and staggered against the rolling to place himself behind Merlin Queffle and stare at the empty luminous disk of the PPI scope. It did not contain the faintest spark of activity. Well . . . as a last-ditch resort, they might as well start a maximum-effect active sonar sweep. “Mr. Spitzer! Belay the QBH and —”
His words were cut off by a piercing yell from Merlin Queffle which froze him and everybody else in the CIC: “Wait! . . . Wait!”
A couple of seconds passed in an agonized, stunned silence.
Then Queffle screamed again: “I hear him! . . . I hear him! . . . I have a contact!”
Finlander spun around and bounded back to Central Control, jumping into the chair and simultaneously yanking the talker set over his head. “Bridge! We have a contact! We will conn from CIC.” Then he was momentarily diverted by the shocking sight of Lieutenant Aherne suddenly turning away from his switches and attempting to direct a stream of vomit into a paper cup. Ensign Ralston was staring stupidly at the fire-control officer, apparently paralyzed by the strange sight.
“God damn it to hell, Ralston!” Finlander screamed. “Don’t just sit there! Relieve that man!”
Ralston let out a shocked yelp, yanked Aherne out of the chair and took his place. “All weapons arm-safe!” he called out with a trembling voice. “All systems go!”
Queffle had hunched back over his console after his initial outburst and seemed knotted into an attitude of prayer, his eyes closed as he ignored the PPI scope and pressed every last ounce of his nervous energy into the rubber cups of the phones. All eyes were upon him, all minds questioning him.
“Are you sure, Queffle?”
The Breton Kid gradually relaxed as if he were coming out of a trance and Finlander had a horrible feeling that he was about to admit to hallucinations. But the sonarman grinned and said: “Definite audio contact growing stronger.” As he said it, a faint blob blossomed on the PPI scope, and he added: “Contact now bearing zero-four-zero, range three-two-double-zero closing, depth one-eight-zero.”
Captain Finlander let out a long wheezing sigh, shedding all of his agonizing doubts and fears, and cheerfully exclaimed: “Very good! Let him come! Let him come! Stand by for the payoff! . . . Talker! Alert the engine room for maneuvering. Silence throughout ship.” He swung around to shoot a triumphant grin at Commodore Schrepke, but it froze on his lips when he saw that Ben Munceford had entered the CIC and was standing next to the German. The correspondent’s face wore a churlishly defiant half-smile as he turned his hands palm out toward the captain to show that he was armed with neither camera nor tape recorder. Commodore Schrepke was distastefully edging away from him while otherwise ignoring his presence and locking his gaze on the plotting board. For a second Finlander thought of ordering somebody to throw Munceford out, but there had been enough disruptions in the CIE, so he shrugged indifferently and turned his full attention to the board — where Moby Dick was at long last appearing again as a white X edged in black.
9.
After the initial excitement of regaining contact with the Russian submarine, there followed another period of tense waiting while they tracked his creeping movement up from the deep and along a northeasterly course which gradually put the silently drifting Bedford between it and the sheltering wreck of the Hood. Moby Dick was rigged for silent running with his screws barely turning, but he created just enough disturbance to energize the destroyer’s listening gear, which in turn registered the vibrations upon Queffle’s sensitive ears and kindled a pip on the PPI, pinpointing his position. The tension in the CIC remained highly charged, but the overtones of hysteria had gone with the corroding elements of doubt and uncertainty. It was now a cold, calculating, even businesslike tension in which all outward functions were performed with an exaggerated calm.
“Contact . . . bearing zero-five-six . . . range two-nine-five-zero, closing . . . depth, one-four-zero, rising. . . . Contact . . .”
This droned calling of target information was not really necessary because it was being automatically fed from Queffle’s MTS into the computer circuitry of the CSP room, there to be masticated and digested in a millionth-second gulp by Krindlemeyer’s and Spitzer’s martian robot, thence flashed back through a network of conduits, finally animating the cells of a deadly sort of senseless intelligence in the warheads of the poised ASROC’s. If ordered to go by a flick of Ensign Ralston’s finger, they knew where even before the plotter had finished calling out the target information.
Terrifyingly marvelous, Ben Munceford thought, without really understanding how any of it worked.
Lieutenant Spitzer was more concerned with how well the systems were working. A weak transistor, a collapsed diode, a micro-soldered filament vibrated loose — any one could throw the whole thing into a meaningless confusion. There were built-in monitors, auxiliary circuits and fail-safe devices, of course — electronic ganglions watching over electronic ganglions — but he kept a visual check on it all through the rows of winking lights and flicking needles spread out on the console before him. And then, as a final double-check, Ensign Ralston was manually feeding the target information into the weapons by punching matching numbers on a keyboard with his right hand. The left one rested on the firing switches — as yet locked by the red safety bar.
Suddenly the glowing blob on the MTS scope began to fade out. Finlander leaned forward, eyebrows arching, jaw jutting.
“Contact fading on bearing zero-six-four . . . range two-nine-three-zero, steady . . . depth one-double-zero, steady. Target has stopped. Target has stopped.”
“He’s listening for us,” Finlander whispered.
“I have audio contact,” Queffle reported. “Target engines are stopped, but I hear his auxiliaries. Sounds like a hot bearing.”
Finlander smiled thinly. “Let’s hope Commander Franklin keeps ours cool! Do you think he can hear us, Mr. Spitzer?” he asked the ECM officer.
“If they’ve got a man like Queffle, they might hear our hull break the wave patterns, sir. Otherwise we are a pretty inert target.”
“All right. Let him sweat. We’ll surprise him at the right moment. . . . Mr. Ralston! Contact Yeoman Pinelli in hedgehog local control and tell him to man his camera. Stand by the magnesium flares for a flash shot. When Moby Dick surfaces we’ll make him say cheese and I think I’ll send the chief of the Soviet Naval Staff a copy of the picture — compliments of the U.S.S. Bedford!”
Ralston grinned, called hedgehog control and transmitted the order.
But Finlander’s plan was not to be. As the next swell lifted the Bedford, passed under her hull, then sucked her into the following trough, the attendant wrenching motion broke loose a huge chunk of ice which had formed around the housing of the radar antenna motor on the mainmast. Squarehead saw it flash by within inches of his face as he peered through the windshield of the crow’s-nest, making him gasp: “Christ! What was that!” It hurtled downward through the blackness, broke into smaller pieces as it glanced off the forward stack, then crashed onto the main deck like an avalanche of rocks. A single hundred-pound piece
hit the tarpaulin cover of the whaleboat, was hurled back into the air by the trampoline effect and made a huge splash in the sea, fifty yards away. The bridge lookout gave a yell: “Man or heavy object overboard!” He had been unable to tell which and was thoroughly alarmed. Commander Allison rushed across the bridge and stared out into the darkness.
In the CIC the ice was heard hitting the deck as a muffled rumble, but the chunk which fell in the sea made all the sound gear crackle. The PPI scopes flared like frightened green eyes. Merlin Queffle jumped in his seat and yelled: “Jeeze! Something big fell off the ship!”
“That tears it!” Spitzer exclaimed. “A deaf old woman could hear that without her ear trumpet.”
“Shut up!” Finlander snarled, staring intently at the scopes, hoping they would get away with the calamity, but his ECM officer had been right. In the next instant the submarine’s active sonar waves rippled against the Bedford’s hull and set her sensors to wildly reacting. The captain ground his fist into his palm. “Switch to active echo-ranging!” he ordered Spitzer, then called through the conning circuit: “All ahead standard! Come left to one-two-five degrees!”
A shudder rippled through the hull as the engines burst into life and the propellers bit into the water. The speakers vibrated with a strong return echo and the sonar PPI’s registered such a brilliant blip of Moby Dick that it was like having a picture of him poised there, two thousand yards away and one hundred fathoms down.
Commander Allison’s voice came over the bridge intercom: “We just shed five hundred pounds of ice off the foretop. Sorry.”
“Never mind, Buck!” Finlander snapped back. “We’re still giving him one hell of a surprise. Contact is positive.”
It was so positive that even Ben Munceford could clearly make out what was happening. The Russian submarine was turning away while still pressing toward the surface and Finlander was conning the Bedford so as to catch up and place himself on top of him. If this had been real war, Moby Dick would clearly be finished — but it wasn’t real war. Munceford glanced at Commodore Schrepke, edged up to him and asked: “So we’ve got him cold! So what do we do with him now?”
Schrepke’s face was an unfathomable mask, but one drained of all color. He shook off Munceford and stepped up behind Finlander, leaning over him. “Let him surface, Captain,” he rasped with as much pleading as he was capable of using.
“He’s still acting too smart. I’m going to push that red devil’s nose into his own bilges. Helm, come five degrees left!”
“He’s more desperate than smart at this point, Captain,” Schrepke pressed him. “You are going to force him to fight. This is a careful, responsible commander you’re dealing with, but he has reached his limits. Let him surface and let him go, or he is going to fight.”
If Spitzer heard the ominous prediction, he pretended not to. Finlander looked up at the German for a moment. “You think he’s going to shoot at us, do you, Commodore?”
“I know I would in his place,” Schrepke answered. “So would you.”
Finlander turned and leaned toward Ensign Ralston. “Fire Control! Arm number-one ASROC!”
Ralston looked up from his dials with a startled expression which immediately switched to one of intense anticipation. His hand shook as it flipped the red safety bar and the warning horn cut through the CIC with its short, sibilant blast. “Number-one ASROC armed and ready, sir!”
Finlander looked back into Schrepke’s face, his expression challenging, yet icy calm. “All right, Commodore. Let him try anything he wants to.”
“Captain, you are a fool!” Schrepke hissed at him, throwing every bit of the fear and anger which he felt into the words. This time Lieutenant Spitzer glanced up from his panel with an incredulous expression.
The scar on Finlander’s throat pulsed angrily as he glowered at the German. “I’m not going to shoot first, Commodore. But if he fires a torpedo at me, then . . .” His voice rose up above the pinging of the sonar and the range-calling of the plotter. “. . . then I’ll fire one!”
“Fire one!” Ensign Ralston’s voice echoed in a high pitch of excitement.
Captain Finlander wheeled in his seat and his body was suddenly racked by a spasm which came together with a passing faint tremor through the Bedford.
The stunned silence which ensued was broken by the talker at the plotting board. “Number-one ASROC launched and clear,” he announced in a matter-of-fact voice which almost instantly turned into a weird squeal of amazement. “Jesus Christ aw’-mighty! It really is!”
His anguished exclamation was immediately followed by Commander Allison’s voice through the bridge intercom, and for once it sounded as if he were thoroughly shaken. “CIC! . . . CIC! Number-one ASROC has fired!”
“For God’s sake, Ralston!” Finlander gulped hoarsely, rising to his feet in shocked horror and tearing off his headset.
The ensign’s taut muscles began turning to jelly and he suddenly sagged down in his seat, trembling violently as he stared at the hand still gripping the firing switch. He yanked it away as if it had burned him. “B-but, sir . . . you said fire one . . . didn’t you?”
“It is done now,” Schrepke exclaimed with a clipped finality. “It is all over and done now.”
All eyes watched the PPI scope of the Master Tactical Sonar with hypnotic fascination. A second, smaller blip suddenly blossomed on it, close to the bigger one which was Moby Dick. “ASROC has separated from rocket booster and has entered the sea . . . on target . . . all systems go!” the plotter announced with a quavering voice. The small blob wavered around the bigger one, hovered around it for what became an agonized eternity . . .
“Oh God! Miss him! Miss him!”
. . . but then seemed to join it and cause a single bright flare which quickly died and faded out to nothing. Queffle pried up his earphones just as the speaker erupted in a horrible cacophony of grating, tearing, ripping sounds. It gradually diminished to a crackling patter, but then the shock wave of a tremendous underwater explosion hit the Bedford’s steel hull, making her tremble and ring with a ghostly boom, like the tolling of a huge bell. Then silence.
“I heard her break up!” Merlin Queffle screamed. “I heard them dying down there!” He tore off his earphones and collapsed over the console, his body racked by sobs.
All eyes remained on the sonarman for only a moment before slowly turning upon the captain. Everybody knew what had happened now and the shattering reality of it was beginning to penetrate home. Forty-five hours, eighteen minutes since it started, and now it had ended in forty fatal seconds. The Russian submarine they had wistfully called Moby Dick had been blown to pieces and the hundred-odd men aboard her scattered to the deep. They all knew it — except possibly Ben Munceford, who could not immediately bring himself to believe this had actually happened before his eyes and stupidly mumbled: “What’s the matter? . . . What’s going on?” until his words were choked off by the awful realization.
10.
Lieutenant Spitzer secured the CIC, giving his orders in a steady voice, but with a peculiar trance-like expression on his face. One by one the men trooped out, some staring with curious awe at the brooding figure of their captain slumped at Central Control, others clumsily avoiding a look at him as they passed. The CPO of plot helped Lieutenant Aherne, who was too sick to fully understand what had happened; two sonarmen supported Merlin Queffle between them, dragging him through the door still blubbering about hearing men die in the black deep. Finally only Commodore Schrepke and Ensign Ralston were left with Finlander in the silent room, now darker than ever since all the dials and scopes had been extinguished. The assistant fire-control officer had remained paralyzed at his console, looking down at the fatal switch with glazed, red-rimmed eyes. But now he got up and stepped over to the captain, braced himself and exclaimed with a pathetic fortitude: “Sir, it was all my fault. I am prepared to take full responsibility for what happened.”
Finlander did not appear to hear him.
“S
ir, please . . .”
Commodore Schrepke reached out and took Ralston by the arm, gently pulling him away and guiding him toward the door. “Your captain cannot talk to you now,” he said. “And no matter what you tell him, he knows where the responsibility lies. He certainly knows that your blame is but an incidental one. So do not waste his time with self-reproaches.” He did not say it harshly, perhaps even with a tinge of sympathy, but the ensign suddenly began to shake uncontrollably and tears began streaming down his cheeks. Schrepke steadied him and, reaching under his leather jacket, brought out his tarnished silver flask. “Here, my boy. You need a little medicine.”
The tears did not stop as Ralston stared at the flask, but he suddenly struck it away as if it contained poison. “You are going to crucify him for this, aren’t you?” he yelled at the German.
“I am neither Judas nor Pontius Pilate,” Schrepke answered him evenly, “but a sailor who will give up only to death many secrets as terrible as this.”
Ralston fended off his helping hand, straightened himself up and through a tremendous effort suppressed his trembling. But he could not stop crying. Fumbling for the iron door, he yanked it open and fled.
Schrepke went back to Central Control and sat down in the chair next to Finlander. He felt the engines stop and knew that the Bedford was coasting in over the spot where Moby Dick had died. Finlander seemed completely oblivious of it and sunk in deep thought, but suddenly he spoke up and asked: “What did you mean, Wolfgang, when you said you would only give up secrets like this to death?”
The German did not answer him immediately and when he did, it was to say: “I was talking to a hysterical boy.”
Finlander looked Schrepke straight in the eyes. “Were you suggesting that what I have done can be covered up in some way? Kept a deep, dark secret?”
The Bedford Incident Page 28
