Cold is the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  Not until then would Manta be free to begin the hookup and extraction operation. Although acting as a radio relay link had initially been Rich’s suggestion, he had privately argued strenuously against requiring the additional delay the message would involve. “If the Cushing’s in the shape we think most likely, without propulsion but otherwise okay, there’ll be a good chance of getting both ship and crew out of there. If that’s true, and nothing else is changed, then the idea of abandoning ship and scuttling her will be put on standby, right? Then why waste time? If there’s any kind of skulduggery going on, as soon as whoever’s doing it realizes there may be a chance of our getting them out . . .”

  But this argument he had lost. Admiral Donaldson shook his head, interrupted him. “I know exactly what you’re saying,” he said, “but I’ve got my orders, too. This came right from the National Security Council to the Joint Chiefs. This is an affair of state, now, and they want answers just as soon as they can get them. Sorry, Rich, but that has to stay in the message, and it’s a direct order to you.”

  “Don’t they see this puts Keith and his crew in even greater jeopardy?” Rich said desperately, momentarily forgetting he was speaking with the Chief of Naval Operations, the highest officer on active duty in the Navy. He was thinking only of the possibility of the lengthy sonar or radio transmissions being overheard, of their arousing curiosity (he almost said “the enemy’s curiosity”) and then allowing time for possible inimical reaction. He recovered himself in confusion. “Sorry, Admiral, But look. Whatever happened that made Keith go off the air so suddenly came right after his long second message. Direction-finding is a fact of life in radio communications. We’ve got to figure they have the capability, whoever they are. They could have DF-ed him and homed in on him. Maybe they even homed in on our single side-band talk, but that was so short it’s less likely, especially with the frequency shifts we made. Now we’re telling him to make a long transmission on the UQC, the most easily detected sonar there is!”

  Admiral Donaldson was listening gravely, nodded slightly as Richardson spoke.

  Encouraged, Rich continued with even greater urgency. “If they pick it up, they’ll know there’s another sub there. And then the Manta has to go find a thin place in the ice cover, break through, and repeat the same thing on the air. Even if they don’t pick up the low-power UQC, there’s nothing secure about our ship-to-shore frequency. If they DF-ed him then, they’ll DF us too. We’ve got to expect they’ve got a direction-finder. Either way, they’ll know another sub has got up there, or else that the Cushing has repaired things enough to do it herself. They’ll be alerted that something’s going on. If their sub is still around, and if the collision was no accident, it will join the party for sure!” Richardson suddenly realized he had raised his voice, dropped it precipitantly. Thank God they had closeted themselves privately to compose the message!

  “I know it, Rich,” said Donaldson steadily. “Don’t apologize for telling me what you think. I was in the war too, remember, and we had to think this way all the time. If I can get the JCS to lift the requirement, I’ll get a message off to you right away, but for now this is the way it’s got to be.”

  But no message had ever come. Without doubt, Donaldson had made the effort. He must have been turned down. The information must be considered vital. Rich could not help wondering if the NSC planning-group functionary who had demanded it had any concept of the cost it might exact.

  Richardson said nothing to Buck of his misgivings, nor did he mention his private protest to Donaldson on the subject. With the slow fading of the hope that a message would arrive negating the requirement, he realized he must try to dismiss the problem from his mind. All the more so since there was nothing he could do about it. He concentrated on the pleasure of being at sea on an extended voyage, on the companionship of Buck and his officers, on the sheer joy of seeing a magnificent combination of men and machinery running faultlessly, apparently effortlessly, doing the daily drills demanded of it with precision and élan. He concentrated also on the necessity of keeping every sense alert, every possible situation analyzed in advance, every conceivable contingency prepared for, in anticipation of the trial that lay ahead. It had been difficult at first, but he had managed it.

  Then gradually, as the magic of the submarine and its extraordinary capabilities—so different from those he had been accustomed to for so many years—enfolded him, the tension evoked by the interview with Donaldson drifted away. Not entirely away, but into the recesses of consciousness. There it remained, only occasionally to be brought out and examined. Donaldson was not given to unconsidered, impulsive action. At least, not in these later years. Why, then, had he contrived to make it seem as though sending Rich along with Buck had been an afterthought, almost a whim of his own? And if, as Rich now had begun to suspect, Admiral Donaldson had intended to do this all along, there must be some important function for Rich to perform.

  But what? He had received no instructions whatever, unless those strange words the admiral had used on board the Proteus, later reinforced by his additional comment in the Navy sedan as the two rode to the airport, were to be so considered.

  Finding the Cushing proved not an easy task. She was not where she was supposed to be, not at Golf November two-nine—at least, according to the Manta’s navigation, checked and rechecked. It was necessary not to alert the Soviets, if their submarine happened still to be in the area, or if they were listening in another way. There was, too, the worry about collision with the other sub or, for that matter, with the Cushing, if somehow the notorious capriciousness of sonar expressed itself at just the wrong time and in the wrong way. One could not simply go blundering ahead at full speed.

  Keith almost certainly had not been able to move his ship. Without propeller or emergency propulsion, she must be immobile under the ice, probably resting with the top of her sail against the underside. If she was not in the position reported by Keith, it must be because of drift due to currents and ice movement. She could not be far away. A few miles at most.

  Manta began circling the datum, plotted at Cushing’s position as last reported, at slow speed, listening intently at the designated times for evidence of her presence. She made two complete circles two miles in diameter, then slowly changed the circle into an ever enlarging spiral, at maximum submergence depth.

  Richardson was beginning to curse himself for not having selected a signal frequency at least twice as rapid when, at long last, the first faint beeps on the active echo-ranging sonar were heard. “He wasn’t on for long, only about three pings,” Jeff Norton reported, breathlessly. “I was right there in the sonar shack. It was right on time, but we didn’t get a good bearing because he quit too soon.”

  “What’s the approximate direction?” Buck asked the question quietly, well aware that the primary requirement he had laid on his sonar crew had been to obtain the bearing of anything they heard. He had not directed Jeff to be in the sonar cubicle, but was not surprised that Manta’s communications officer, also sonar officer, had taken it on himself to be present at that critical instant. Buck’s astonishment was over the fact that an accurate true bearing had not been obtained.

  “Southwest. But the three beeps came in so fast and were so faint that we hardly heard them. We could barely make them out on our scope. I’m awfully sorry, Captain. They definitely were from the southwest quadrant, but that’s all I’m really sure of.” Norton was clearly abashed by his failure, and by his skipper’s disapproval.

  “Maybe he’s a lot farther away than we thought,” Rich muttered. “That would account for their faintness and missing a couple of pings.”

  “Make your course southwest by grid,” Buck said to the OOD. “Increase speed to ten knots. In half an hour we’ll be five miles closer to him.” He consulted his watch. “The next signal is air blowing. It’s due in thirty-two minutes and will last ten seconds.”

  Nothing was heard at the appointed time, nor at the next, twenty-seven minutes late
r, when the police whistle was scheduled. “We’ll continue as we are for the next period,” Buck said. “That will be another fifteen minutes, and we’ll be twelve miles nearer to him, if that was Keith we heard. Then we’ll circle again, if we don’t pick up anything.” Rich was nodding his approval. The next signal scheduled was the whistle again, but the one following that, in forty-three minutes, was to be echo-ranging at long scale, five pings at maximum gain.

  It had been assumed that the pings of the active echo-ranging sonar would most likely have the greatest range, be heard from the greatest distance. On hearing them, Manta would send her own ping simultaneously with the termination of Cushing’s fifth, beamed in the direction from which that signal had been received, and start a stopwatch the instant the transmission was cut off. Cushing would have started a stopwatch with the cutoff of her own fifth ping, would stop it with receipt of Manta’s, and transmit a single short sixth ping to stop the Manta’s watch. Sound travels 1,600 yards per second in water. Since a round trip by sound was involved, the time in seconds on their stopwatches, multiplied by 800 yards, would give each submarine the approximate distance to the other. Once bearing and distance had been determined, closer approach would be facilitated by air blowing or the whistle, until finally the Cushing would “talk” the Manta into close proximity.

  With forty-three minutes to wait, again Richardson’s impatience caused him to curse the long time delays he had built into the system, forgetting the purpose: to make their function less obvious to a chance listener. At minimum speed, Manta slowly described several complete circles in the water. She was as though suspended in space. Above, below, in all directions, nothing but water. Hundreds of feet above, a solid, impervious sheet of ice, twenty feet thick or more, but irregular, some places thinner than others. Below, thousands of feet below, the floor of the Arctic Ocean, slimy with the primordial ooze of aeons, split into two deep basins by the Lomonosov Ridge. North, east, south or west, whether on polar grid chart or any other, an area the size of Australia, or the United States. Manta: a tiny blob of life, of protoplasm, the size of a particle of dust, or sand, launched into an olympic-sized swimming pool in search of another dust-sized particle of life.

  When there were only five minutes left to wait, Buck, Rich and Jeff Norton all crowded into Manta’s cramped sonar room, leaning over the operator’s shoulder, trying not to press into his needed working space. Norton held a stopwatch in his hand; the sonarman, Rich noted, held another. Rich and Buck stared at their wristwatches. “Half a minute,” said Buck. There was a twenty-four-hour clock attached to the sonar room bulkhead. It had been synchronized with the ship’s chronometers, as had the watches worn by Rich, Buck and Jeff Norton, and carefully reset to Greenwich Mean Time. It had been necessary to hold the clock mechanism so that the second hand would also be on GMT, and now the benefit was apparent. Keith would also have done this, would probably start his pings on the second.

  Norton made a snapping motion with his forearm precisely as the twenty-four-hour clock reached sixteen hours, twenty-eight minutes and zero seconds, started his stopwatch. The second hand crawled slowly around its dial. Rich had stopped breathing. So had everyone else in the tiny compartment. The second hand was at seventeen when a spoke of light appeared on the dial of the sonar receiver. Norton stopped his watch, and simultaneously a faint but clearly recognizable ping filled the compartment.

  “Seventeen seconds and a fraction,” said Norton. “Make it seventeen and a half.”

  “Sh-h-h-h; don’t talk!” whispered Buck.

  The spoke had vanished, leaving a decaying fluorescence where it had been on the tube. Then it reappeared, along with the amplified but still faint ping, reinforcing and brightening the same spoke, went out again, came on again. Rich could see the sonarman orienting his transmitter, softly fingering his hand keying button with his right hand, holding the stopwatch in his left. Simultaneously with the cessation of the fifth ping, and its light-spoke, he punched his hand key and started his stopwatch. A brilliant white spoke in the dark red sonar scope dial overlaid and dwarfed the dimmer one from the distant station. The receiver had been automatically blanked while the signal was being sent, but its reverberations filled the room the moment the key was lifted. One could hear the sound signal beaming out, traveling 1,600 yards per second toward the source of the five sequential incoming pings.

  Jeff Norton had reset his watch, started it again at the same time as his sonarman, was figuring on a scrap of paper. “If Captain Leone had his watches zeroed on GMT the way we did,” he said, “and if he sent his first ping out exactly on the dot, he’s twenty-eight thousand yards away; fourteen miles.”

  Buck smiled at him, nodded. “Good thinking, Jeff. We’ll be able to check it when we hear his sixth beep.” Deep feelings of relief were stirring within him. There had been only five pings. The other station—other submarine, it must be, could only be, another submarine—had stopped with five. It must be the Cushing. Keith. And he must have received the message, therefore knew they were on their way, was expecting them, was therefore okay. Rich, standing there so impassively, must internally be feeling the same. How could he keep such a poker face?

  The sixth ping from the other ship would certainly identify her as the Cushing. It came. “Thirty-six seconds,” said Jeff. He consulted the watch held by his sonarman. “He’s got the same. Thirty-six seconds—they lost one second somewhere. That’s twenty-eight thousand eight hundred yards, just under fourteen and a half miles.”

  “Close enough for government work,” said Buck genially, wanting to make up somewhat for his earlier rebuke. “Maybe he sent his first ping half a second early. That would do it, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yessir.”

  Richardson was already leaving the sonar room. Buck began to follow, turned back. “Jeff, that was real good work. And Schultz”—he clapped the sonarman on the shoulder to attract his attention away from his dials and earphones. Palmer Schultz, a freckled “middle-aged” youth, anywhere from twenty to thirty-five years old, twisted the near earphone, with its covering of soft rubber and sound-absorbing fiber away from his left ear, half turned toward Buck. “Beautiful job, Schultz. We’re going to close him now. That’s the Cushing, we’ve no doubt. I want you to log everything you hear from that bearing as we go on in. But keep your regular search all around going, too. I need to know everything that happens in the water. Do you know what you’re supposed to hear from the Cushing, and when?”

  The Chief Sonarman nodded assent, his eyes straying back to the darkened, hooded instrument which was Manta’s ears and, sometimes, her only link with the whole universe outside the machinery-crammed cavern of her hull. Norton also nodded, several times, well realizing Buck’s words were meant for him as well.

  “All stop!” said the OOD. “All back one-third—all stop!” The bow planesman twisted the annunciator knobs in the console in front of him.

  “Answered all stop, sir,” the bow planesman reported, adding after a moment, “I have no control on the depth, sir. She’s not answering the bow planes.”

  “That’s as it should be,” responded Lieutenant Tom Clancy, Manta’s engineering officer, at the moment on watch as officer of the deck and diving officer. “Speed indicates zero. Stern planes, do you have control?”

  The stern planesman, seated beside the bow planesman in front of the diving console, pushed his control lever all the way forward, then brought it back into his lap. “No, sir,” he said as he returned it to the center upright position. “She’s not answering stern planes.”

  “Put your planes on zero,” ordered Clancy. “Report depth changes every foot. Chief Mac”—addressing the grave chief petty officer seated to his left before a five-foot-long array of gauges, switches, dials and machinery controls—“I want to stay at this depth, one hundred-fifty feet, zero bubble. Operate your ballast control panel to hover, reporting each one hundred pounds of ballast change.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said the chief, whose name wa
s McClosky. He flipped one of the tiny levers on the panel, waited a few seconds while he scrutinized one of his dials, flipped it back. “Flooded two hundred pounds into auxiliary,” he said. “Trim looks good. Fore and aft trim looks right on.”

  “It ought to be,” Clancy answered. “We worked on it enough.” He turned around to face Richardson and Williams, who were watching from the periscope station behind him. “All stop, Captain,” he reported. “Speed zero. I think we have a stop trim. Depth, one-five-zero feet.” There was a suggestion of professional pride in his voice. The newer attack subs, and all the missile submarines, were fitted with automatic hovering gear. With Manta, it had to be done by hand. Doing it well bespoke someone who knew his ship, and his business.

  “Good, Tom,” answered Buck. To Rich he said, “I guess that’s it, Commodore. By plot we’re within a quarter of a mile of the Cushing. The Gertrude’s turned all the way down. You should be able to talk with Keith now, but she shouldn’t carry over a mile or so. I’ll keep the ’scope up while you do, and if we drift any nearer maybe we can see her. If she’s up against the ice there’ll be plenty of clearance to pass right under her, even with the ’scope up.”

  Richardson held the UQC microphone in his hand, at the end of a short extension cord. He fingered the button on its side. So much depended on what he would find out in the next few minutes! He raised it to his mouth, pressed the button, spoke into it. “Keith, old man,” he said, unconsciously speaking softly. “This is Rich. Do you read? Over.” He let go the button, could hear the reverberations as his voice was carried by the sound waves. There was a rushing noise, as though there were something being physically dragged through the water. In a sense this was true, for the slow-moving sonar transmission left echoing reverberations throughout its passage. The UQC was omnidirectional; that is, like an ordinary radio broadcast station, whatever transmissions it made were in all directions all the time. There was no security in it, and no directivity, but under the circumstances it was the best medium for communication.