She probably has heard it, too—like I said, she’s a cool number—but it doesn’t seem to faze her a bit. Even so, I like her. Maybe I can get her to unbend a little bit while you’re away. It would be interesting.
There was a little more to the letter but Keith hardly saw it. “Stay away from Laura, Peggy,” he muttered under his breath. It was like her to say nothing to him of all these thoughts she had been having, to hold them within her and then lay them all out when he was unable to answer, unable to prevent her from doing whatever it was she had in mind to do about it. Cushing was already well at sea, deeply submerged. In emergency he could transmit a message, but not about something like this. Even if he could send Peggy a message, what would he say? He felt himself trapped, powerless, his comfort and security at home suddenly destroyed, or, at least, endangered. “Damn Peggy anyway!”
Running deep beneath the surface, her main coolant pumps at half speed, U.S.S. William B. Cushing effortlessly put 360 nautical miles behind her per day. She would make a landfall at Spitsbergen—if indeed a “landfall” was the proper terminology—for the latest report of ice reconnaissance by air had placed the edge of the late winter ice pack well to the south of that frosty land, and the confirmation of position would have to be by sonar and fathometer. Even this, while good conservative practice, was probably of little real use compared to the phenomenal accuracy and dependability of the two inertial navigation sets with which the Cushing was equipped. After Spitsbergen, at the reduced speed required by the operation order upon going under the ice, the North Pole would be some four days’ steaming away.
Normally, the ice would be only a few feet thick at the edge of the pack, gradually—but fairly rapidly—increasing to the average winter thickness of about twenty feet. An iceberg, however, could be much deeper. Granted, bergs are not very apt to be encountered in the pack ice, the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. Icebergs come from glaciers on Greenland, which break off when the glacier hits the sea. As they slowly drift southward, they can be a fantastic hazard to navigation until they have slowly melted into the sea. Generally they stay close to the shore of Greenland, but occasionally an errant one may unexpectedly be caught, like ships of bygone years, in the middle of the ice pack. There, its behavior would be controlled by the circular motion of the drifting ice in the Arctic basin rather than the southbound currents which affect most of them, and it would be carried down into the Atlantic Ocean with the ice pack.
Encountering an iceberg at sea in northern latitudes, or in the ice pack, was, Keith knew, of far greater concern than encountering another submarine. For one thing, it would make no noise, unless wind or sea conditions were heavy, causing it to grind against surrounding pack ice. It would simply lie there, a stone-hard cliff hundreds of feet in depth, hanging in the midst of watery space like a gigantic trap for an unwary submarine. Keith saw to it that several hours a day were spent studying the ice patrol reports and the reference material with which he had been provided. Although the packet was a thick one, he took the time to read it all twice, and hold wardroom seminars in addition.
Contrary to popular belief, a submarine crew underway is at least as busy as the crew of any other type of ship. In the first place, the ability to submerge makes the submarine infinitely more complicated than any surface ship; and in the second, the submarine crew is smaller, for her very nature requires the minimum practicable crew, in the most confined of quarters. While underway, everyone except the captain, executive officer, ship’s doctor and the cooks stands two four-hour watches per day. Regular drills, exercises in the many evolutions of which the ship must remain capable, come out of the off-watch time of two-thirds of the ship’s company. So do cleaning the ship, routine ship’s work, repairs to machinery or—the more usual case—regular maintenance. The idea that a submarine crew finds time hanging heavy on its hands while their ship drives her way submerged across an ocean or halfway around the world is unrealistic. A submarine does not even float without attention, like an ordinary ship, but maintains a specific depth at the will of her masters. The days pass swiftly. The pressure of day-to-day routine is inescapable. Keith made the most of the time he had.
The ice pack appeared on schedule. Keith had instructed Jim Hanson to adjust speed in order to reach it during the daylight hours. At the proper time he brought the ship to periscope depth so that those of the crew who were interested could look at it through the spare periscope while the Cushing approached at slow speed. He himself spent long minutes inspecting the thin white line which appeared on the horizon just at noontime, interspersing his own looks with letting an eager sailor have a turn. Cushing’s other periscope had been turned over to the crew entirely, but it soon was apparent that a single ’scope could not suffice for everyone to have the long look he obviously wanted. And Keith had to admit to himself that he was in truth exercising a skipper’s privilege with the other, that a major portion of his own interest was purely personal curiosity.
Seen from a distance, the ice looked like a heavily demarcated horizon, a solid white line between the gray of the sea and the leaden blue of the sky. As the Cushing drew cautiously nearer it was evident that it was not solid, for what appeared to be the edge was a mass of broken blocks, crumbled off the solid ice behind by the combined action of sea movement and the weakening effect of melting. Most of the pieces nevertheless were of quite respectable size, several tons in weight and many feet across; and when Keith decided he had approached as close as was prudent he turned to a course parallel to the putative frontal edge for a close and leisurely inspection, all the while maintaining a continuous and careful watch ahead. It would not do to damage valuable periscopes by ramming them against a miniature iceberg during a quixotic rubberneck tour for crew members!
The coloration of the ice and ice blocks was fascinating, even though he had been prepared by his reading. White on top, of course, and white on the broken-off edges, down to the waterline. But where the ice entered the water it assumed a greenish tinge. Some of the blocks were wallowing gently in the nearly motionless sea, enough that he could see a foot or more below their normal waterlines, far enough to note that the light green shaded swiftly to almost black. Some of the pamphlets he had read had explained it: This was the norm for much of the Arctic, though not for all of it. The discoloration was the combined result of normal sea growth and water action on tiny organisms frozen into the ice when it was formed. These organisms, and growth on the ice under surface, formed much of the food for the wildlife—the seals, porpoises, whales and fish—and through them for the bears and man himself. The white mass was essentially snowfall over the frozen sea ice, built up during the years it had slowly circulated around the Arctic basin.
Ice, to Keith, should be white; or at least clear, like frozen water. But he had learned it could be a number of other colors, the slimy blue-green of the undersides of these blocks being only one of several manifestations. It was also hard, both from the cold and from the compression to which it was so often subjected, and deserving of respect. Cushing had been built with an ice suit, one of the reasons she had been chosen for this mission. Her sail was specially strengthened, as were her propeller, hull and control surfaces. In addition, her sailplanes were designed so that they could be put on ninety degrees rise, straight up and down, to facilitate breaking through the ice if necessary. She could cope with the ice, if handled intelligently, but she could not ignore the facts of physics, either. For the next few weeks he and his ship would be spending all their time in intimate relation with this common, yet most unusual, substance. It behooved him to learn what he could of it at first hand.
Sunlight was waning when Keith decided that his crew and he had had enough opportunity to inspect the ice under which they would henceforth be operating. He housed the periscopes, retracted the radio antenna masts, ordered deep submergence and set the course due north. Jim Hanson had obtained several Loran fixes, and the next thing would be to detect the nearest part of Spitsbergen, Prins Karls F
orland, on sonar and Fathometer, in the place where it was supposed to be. This would confirm the practicability of avoiding unwanted shallow water should there be difficulty with other navigational equipment. From this time onward, except for occasional tests of missiles, Cushing would be divorced even from periscope view of the surface of the sea, confined—except for thinner ice in a rare winter polynya—beneath a virtually impenetrable layer of ice twenty feet thick.
In obedience to his operation order, Keith set a slower speed of advance than before, and when the upward-beamed fathometer showed that block and brash ice had given way to solid cover he doubled the sonar watch. As the Cushing drove ever northward, her echo-ranging sonar probed ahead, on a secure and varying frequency, listening for the somewhat mushy return which would spell danger. If there were a return echo, any attempt to halt Cushing’s forward progress would be useless. Like all nuclear submarines, however, especially the whale-shaped ones, she turned on a dime, far more sharply than any surface ship could possibly hope to match. Here lay her safety. Keith’s orders to his officer of the deck and helmsman were simple and direct. “If deep ice is contacted ahead, immediately put the rudder hard over away from it, and then call me.”
It was not, however, Keith’s intent to proceed directly to the North Pole. If there were time, he might do it later. Likewise, the slow counterclockwise rotation of the ice pack had long been plotted by explorers and scientists. This was a factor of interest, not of immediate concern. Cushing’s mission was to proceed to several specified geographical positions and determine if she could depend upon being able to fire her missiles within a given radius of each as the ice slowly drifted overhead. The operation order said she was to be the first of a number of submarines sent to determine whether the possibility of firing missiles in the Arctic Ocean could be guaranteed during all periods of the year.
Of all the navigation instruments with which ships have been fitted since the beginning, the most important has always been the compass. The early mariners had nothing else. But a compass in the Arctic Ocean is essentially valueless, a fact dramatically brought out when one contemplates that at the North Pole all directions are south. The rotation of the earth no longer gives any directive force, and the gyrocompass, that marvel of the industrial age, wanders at will. A magnetic compass might theoretically be able to point to the nearby north magnetic pole, which ever so slowly drifts around among the icebound islands of Canada’s northern archipelago, but at this close range the magnetic pole is very broad and very weak. Inside the steel hull of a submarine a magnetic compass, moreover, is not dependable.
This problem had presented itself with the voyage of the Nautilus across the top of the world, not quite three years before. It had been resolved by installation of the guidance system of an early missile, and by redrawing the map of the Arctic so that Nautilus’ northward course, as she headed toward the Pole, continued to be “north” after she had passed through it and was heading in a southerly direction—and remained so until normal functions of the gyrocompass could be restored. The grid system resulting made it at least possible to orient one’s location in relation to navigable water and land masses. Three years later, Cushing had a much more sophisticated system designed specifically for submarines and useful anywhere in the world. A good segment of Keith’s training and that of many of his officers and crew, before ever reporting to the Electric Boat Shipyard, had been devoted to learning the intricacies of the Submarine Inertial Navigation System, which, inevitably, became known as SINS.
Now they were using their SINS for real, in the trickiest of situations, the high northern latitudes, and applying it to the same old grid system. Even though he had been well prepared for it, both in briefings and in his studies of previous northern voyages, Keith felt a surge in his adrenaline when Cushing’s ice detector showed that the ice above was solid.
There was an underwater television transmitter mounted on the main deck several feet forward of the sail, controllable in train and elevation from a small console located near its receiver in the control room. Two strong searchlights had also been installed, synchronized in direction with the television head. It was hard to see far underwater in the best of conditions, but the water was at least clear, the lights powerful. Keith estimated that he could see for about a hundred feet in any direction. The only things visible, however, were Cushing’s rounded bow, if one trained the head down and forward, and bumpy ice overhead.
The comparison to the plastered ceiling of a room flashed into Keith’s mind. Surprisingly, despite the fact that his research into previous under-ice voyages had prepared him for it, the undersurface of the ice was far from smooth. Great rounded projections extended downward, reflecting additional thickness above. From his reading, Keith knew that such projections usually resulted from jamming together of the ice floes and the consequent rafting, or piling up, of broken segments of the once smooth surface when they did so.
One of the books had been written by survivors of a whaling ship which had been caught in the Arctic and had had to spend two horrible years there. It told how their ship had ventured into a wide lead at the edge of the ice pack, how it had unwisely gone too far between solid floes, how the lead began to close at the same time as the wind died, so that finally, in desperation, the crew had tried to tow her by getting out on the ice and pulling on hawsers.
Two or three times the lead reopened, bringing hope and causing renewed effort, but finally the ship was caught fast. Efforts to keep the ice broken up around her waterline were totally unavailing, and the squeeze began. Driven by far-distant winds and currents, the ice floes between which she was caught pushed inexorably together. Great blocks of ice popped up from the pressure, lying askew on top of those below. Many more were driven below the surface. A regular pressure ridge formed where the original lead of clear water had been, and the poor whaler was part of it, embedded in it.
The grinding pressure was slow, but irresistible. The ship’s wooden ribs bent, finally broke in a number of places. At the same time, by good fortune, she was heaved up, out of the worst of the pressure, so that her hull, though dangerously wounded, was still sound. Listing over heavily on top of the ice hummock created by the rafting together of the floes, she remained in this situation for two years, her crew suffering unbelievable privation from lack of food and the fierce cold. Ultimately this particular ship was fortunate. She had been stove in, but not excessively so. Her crew had been able to make the most critical repairs. When the ice floe released its pressure, which luckily for her it finally did, she was able to remain afloat and sail home. Most ships in her situation were not so fortunate and sank as soon as the ice opened up again.
The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had deliberately taken advantage of these circumstances when he made his exploratory voyage across the Arctic Ocean in the last years of the nineteenth century. His ship was specially built, so designed that when frozen in the ice and subjected to the squeeze of the ice floes, she would rise up on top rather than be crushed. The little Fram endured a three-year freeze in the ice during which she actually did slowly progress across the Arctic Ocean, and finally, when the ice let her down once again into the free sea, sailed home to Norway, triumphant.
All of this was history; but now Keith was seeing the same situation from underneath. Although ocean currents and slow melting gnawed at the bottom side of the rafted ice floes and blunted their initially jagged edges, the hummocks nevertheless projected far deeper into the sea than their corresponding grinding edges extended above it. And in the water, as Keith well knew, the floes he was observing were teeming with life—primarily microscopic life—so that, even under the Cushing’s pair of powerful searchlights, the undersurface was dark.
But, though rafting was frequent, particularly in the area near the edge of the ice pack, it was by no means consistent. Most of the ice was a broad, thick sheet, solidly covering the surface of the sea. This was what Keith expected, having read all the accounts of the early unde
r-ice explorations. As long as Cushing remained submerged in deep water, and barring the possibility of an iceberg frozen in the vast expanse of sea ice, he need fear no danger. In an apt analogy, one of the accounts had compared the Arctic Ocean to a huge room full of water, with a submarine the size of a matchstick suspended from the ceiling. On this basis the ice would be the thickness of the paint on the ceiling of the room, and the occasional rafting could be compared to carelessly laid or cracked plaster, bulging it downward.
Indeed, one could include polynyas in the metaphor by suggesting that the plaster had cracked open in several places—and icebergs by comparing them to occasional walnut shells, glued to it. In any case, in the deep Arctic Ocean basin, actually two basins, the only problems were those associated with its ceiling.
Next day, with the ice solid overhead, Keith ordered Cushing’s speed slowed to the minimum creeping speed and gently planed upward, raising a periscope long before there was danger of contact with the ice above. This permitted him to see the ice directly, from a much closer range, to confirm the reports he had read and the visual impressions given by the television transmitter. There was danger to the periscope, of course, should Cushing inadvertently come too close to a hummock. In one of the early explorations Nautilus had bent both of hers in such an accident.
To maneuver the ship into the shallowest portion of the ice floe, however, to find a polynya (inevitably frozen over in winter) and surface through it, or fire missiles through it, use of the periscope was imperative. It was as much for drill as for anything else, but it was nevertheless with extreme curiosity that Keith followed his periscope up from the floor. He put his eye to it as soon as the eyepiece came out of the periscope well, almost as though he were making an observation during a wartime approach on an enemy ship.
By careful calculation, the top of the ’scope was no closer than twenty-five feet from the bottom of the ice floe. Nevertheless, Keith had momentarily forgotten that even in low power it had a magnification of one and a half times, and his first reaction was alarm as the huge menacing cover filled the delicate lens. He had deliberately chosen the time of maximum daylight, and there was a moderate lighting of the nearly impervious ice. Except for color, it looked much like the frosted glass viewer upon which people spread their colored slide transparencies for comparison. Training the periscope forward he could see the powerful rays from the searchlights of the television set beaming upward through the water and reflecting upon the bottom of the ice, giving it an eerie surreal effect. To either side, with less benefit from the searchlights, the ice appeared like heavy green-tinged rain clouds, except much closer and more menacing. The best view was dead ahead, where he had the most light, and he could see, as the television had shown from farther below and with less resolution, that while it contained many small bumps and a few large ones from rafting, the undersurface of the ice was relatively free of jagged edges. He would never dare run at more than creeping speed this close to it, however. An unseen hummock of deep rafted ice, detected too late by the upward-beamed fathometer, could easily destroy a periscope and even damage the tough steel of Cushing’s sail.
Cold is the Sea Page 15