Cold is the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  “I heard distant pinging first,” the sonarman at the console said. “So I reported that. Chief Schultz came running in, and then Mr. Norton, but by that time it was already getting louder. He was pinging all around. I think he was searching. Then he started to beam it right at us. I think he got contact right then. That’s about the time you came in, Captain. He’s pinging right on us now, on long-range scale. He’s not searching anymore.”

  “That’s right, sir,” said Palmer Schultz, serious-faced. “When I first heard it, the pinging was sort of general, all around his dial. While I was here I heard him bounce a real solid ping right off us, and that was the ball game. He’s got a solid contact now. He’s too far for us to hear any screw noises, but he’s not getting louder quite as fast as he was. So I think he’s slowed down.”

  “Does JT have any engine or screw noises?” Buck asked.

  Schultz spoke softly into a microphone. “Do you have anything besides pinging on two-two-eight?

  “Affirmative,” said the JT speaker. “I hear distant machinery noise. It just started to come in. I think he’s pinging, too. I can hear the clicks.”

  “Okay,” said Schultz. “We’ve got it here, too. Keep on it and report any changes. Get us a turn count as soon as you can hear the screws.”

  “Okay,” said the voice.

  “Did anyone get the commodore?” Buck asked, without turning his head.

  “I’m here, Buck.”

  “Put the BQR return on the speaker, Schultz. We may as well all hear it,” said Buck.

  The pings transported Richardson backward in time. They were exactly the same as they had been during the war, with but a single difference. The intention behind them was unknown. There was also another noise, a high hum, emanating from the same bearing. “I think we’re beginning to pick up his machinery,” said Schultz. “Pretty soon we may hear his screws.” He spoke into his mike. “Can you hear his propellers yet?” he asked.

  There was no answer. Schultz gently replaced the mike in its cradle.

  “Turn count, one-two-oh!” said the speaker suddenly. “It’s a single-screw ship!”

  Helplessly, the crowd around the sonar shack heard the alien submarine close in and resume its former station. “He’d never get away with that if we weren’t immobilized with a tow,” said Buck angrily. “What does he think he’s doing, anyway?”

  There was no answer. After a minute, Buck spoke again. “I don’t like this at all, Commodore. I think we should go to battle stations.”

  “I think you should, Buck,” said Rich, steadily. “Does your code have a signal for telling the Cushing to do the same?”

  “We can tell Keith that we’re doing it. We never thought of putting anything in the code for telling another skipper how to run his ship.”

  “Well, tell him we are. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Jerry,” said Buck, “are you out there?”

  “Right here, Skipper,” said Jerry Abbott’s voice behind Rich.

  “Sound battle stations. Here’s the code book.” He slipped the book out of his pocket and held it behind him. “Use the whistle at minimum gain on the after Gertrude. At least that one’s partly directional because of the baffles. Tell her we’re going to battle stations.”

  “Wilco,” said Abbott. Rich took the book from Buck’s hand, passed it behind him, felt it taken from him. In a moment the musical chimes sounded through the general announcing system. It was the first time in sixteen years that Rich had heard them except in drill, and again he felt himself driven backward in time. They ceased, and Rich could hear the whistle slowly and precisely sending the Morse code letters AS. The letters were repeated twice, but they were less audible over the bustle of the crew dashing to their stations.

  16

  “I think he’s closing us,” said Schultz from the sonar console, where he had taken over his battle station. “He sounds louder, and the decible meter is reading a little higher.”

  “Get another bearing from the Cushing, Jerry, and pass him ours when we get it. Schultz, give me a good solid center-bearing thirty seconds from now.” Buck was waiting the agreed-on interval so that his and Keith’s bearings would be at approximately the same time. “Stand by. . . . Mark!”

  “One-four-seven by grid,” said Schultz. Jeff Norton wrote the number on two scraps of paper, handed the first to Deedee Brown at the TDC and the second to Jerry Abbott when he came by for it.

  Approximately a minute afterward, Brown returned. “Thirty-two-fifty yards,” he said. “Jerry came in the wardroom while we were plotting it; so I guess he’s checking with the Cushing.”

  The darkened sonar room was dominated by the sonar console, in the center of which lay, at a convenient angle for viewing, a circular glass-faced tube dimly backlighted in red. The center of the tube was dark, but greenish-white flashes emanated regularly from the four-o’clock sector, halfway to the edge, and each flash coincided with a reverberating ping which jumped from the three pairs of earphones listening to it and bounced around the metal walls of the tiny compartment. Richardson wondered why Schultz, Norton and Buck Williams were not deafened by the piercing, high-frequency echo-ranging signals sent by the other submarine.

  He had to tap urgently on Buck’s shoulder to get his attention. “We may as well go active ourselves. He’s not being very polite, and there’s no point in our being polite either. I’ll tell Keith to do the same. Go on short scale at full gain, and aim it right into his receiver, but wait one minute before you start so Keith can go off with you. Does your code cover this?”

  “Not all that, Skipper.”

  “All right, I’ll tell him on Gertrude.” Grim-faced, inwardly seething and at the same time worried, Rich walked the few steps to the periscope station, vaulted to the elevated platform, picked up the UQC microphone. “Keith,” he said without preliminaries, “this is Rich. We’re going active, and I want you to do the same. Short scale at full gain; aim it right at him. He’s closing in on us. Maybe this will make him be a little more circumspect.”

  “Wilco, boss,” said Keith’s voice. “Do you want to start right now?”

  “In fifteen seconds. Ping for exactly one minute, then stop. We’ll do the same.”

  “Roger!”

  Back at the sonar shack, Rich was gratified to see by the sonar console that both submarines blasted forth their beams of concentrated sonar energy at nearly the same instant. The spot on the scope occupied by the stranger was bathed in a rapid succession of flashing pings, and the corresponding echoes were loud and precise. The intruder, as seen on the scope, seemed to have an unearthly, eerie glow, and Rich could have sworn that he could discern, for an instant, the actual shape of the underwater craft.

  Schultz positioned the range marker over the spot, read the range. “Thirty-two hundred yards, right on,” he said. “He’s still closing us . . . no, now I think he’s stopped closing. The range is opening slightly. It’s stabilized on thirty-two hundred.”

  Williams gave a coarse laugh. “That barrage slowed him down a little!”

  “Maybe, Buck,” said Rich, with the same grim look on his face, “but I wouldn’t bet on anything permanent. My main idea was to show him that he’s fooling around with a couple of United States men-of-war. If he’s a Soviet Navy skipper, that will mean something to him.”

  Suddenly, all echo-ranging ceased. There was nothing on the screen. “He stopped too, sir!” said Schultz in a surprised tone. Then he grunted vindictively. “I’ll just bet you there’s a couple pairs of stinging ears over on that sub. They probably had their gain way up, the same as we do when there’s nobody pinging on us. Serves the bastards bloody well right, too. I hope their eardrums are busted good!”

  Rich and Buck were again in their somewhat sequestered corner of the sonar compartment. “Skipper,” Buck said in a low tone, “have you any guess at all why he went away and then came back the way he did?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the same thing, and the only idea I’ve
come up with is that he shoved off to ask for instructions. How long was he gone? You must have it in the sonar log and the quartermaster’s notebook.”

  “I already had Jeff look it up. It was five hours forty-three minutes from when we heard him turn away until we heard his echo-ranging when he came back.”

  “Then I’d have to guess that he went somewhere within about a two-hour run, got his orders quickly and tore back looking for us. In the meantime, we covered about twenty miles, though it might not have been directly away from his base, whatever that was.”

  “True. Besides, we made a ninety-degree course change right after he left, remember. So if we were going directly away from him one time, we couldn’t have been the other.”

  “That’s right. Did we log the bearing we picked him up on?”

  “Sure. At least, the quartermaster’s supposed to. Why?”

  “Buck, could you have your plotters assemble every scrap of info they’ve got on that sub, and plot it? See if we can figure out what direction he departed in, and what direction he came back from. And see if your code lets us ask Keith the bearing and distance of the spot where he was rammed, and even the estimated location of the position those planes seemed to be operating around.”

  “Glad to. But what good will that do us now?”

  “You never know, old friend. But the more you find out about your enemies, the more you’re apt to luck into something you can use. And I don’t mind telling you one thing, very confidentially. Down deep, I’m scared. This whole situation stinks. If our friend yonder decides to play it rough, there’s damned little we can do. We’re on steady course, speed and depth, and he knows exactly what those are.”

  “Not depth, exactly.”

  “Don’t kid yourself! We’d have had it figured out by now, and you can bet he has, too!”

  “But what can he do? What could they be wanting?”

  “For one thing, they’d love a sample copy of our latest model Polaris missile submarine. They’d give a lot for that.”

  “Keith would never surrender his ship.”

  “Agreed. But what if he got into absolutely desperate straits, and only the Russians knew where he was, or could help him. They claim he shot down one of their aircraft, remember! What if the price of saving the lives of his whole crew was for Washington to order him to surrender and let the Russians cut a hole in the ice to get them out?”

  “Couldn’t Keith be the last man out and open the vents behind him?”

  “With the whole crew hostage? By that time Washington would be running the show, not him.”

  “What if a whole bunch of airborne troops landed at just the right time . . .”

  “And at just the right place, which wouldn’t be at all where we thought they were, ready for a mini-war in the snow and to sacrifice about as many men as they’d likely rescue . . . no sir, Buck, the Soviets had us over a barrel when there was only the Cushing here, and they knew it. At least, they thought so. It would have been so easy just to wait. They could even have had that sub checking the Cushing every once in a while. Keith was mighty smart to move her the way he did, even though he didn’t get far. Not many skippers would have thought of that. But they probably knew exactly where he was anyway, all the time. Maybe he’d have been smartest if he’d simply hovered at maximum submergence, letting himself drift wherever the deep currents took him. They’d have had to come looking for him by echo-ranging, then, and at least that would have warned him. With luck, they might not have been able to find him.”

  “So, the Manta . . .”

  “Exactly. We’re the fly in that ointment. They don’t need us or even want us. It’s the Cushing, a brand-new missile sub, that they want. But we’re the motive power that’s snaking the prize out from under their nose.”

  “You think we’re the target?”

  “If they decide to play real rough, we are. On two counts. One, we’re the motive power. Two, if we disappear, their hardball diplomacy is actually strengthened.”

  “Then”—Buck had lowered his voice to a whisper—“you do think the collision with the Cushing wasn’t an accident! But how could they do something that risky deliberately? Their sub could just as well have been the one sunk.”

  “She hit him from aft, and Keith thinks she was on a nearly parallel course. Also, she was running silent. Otherwise, he’d have heard her. If they’d have had any advance warning he was on his way, it might not have been too hard to fix one of their nukes with some kind of steel girderlike protection, or even some sort of projecting ram to stick up against a revolving propeller. We have a pretty tough ice suit built into the Manta, you know. At least, you were bragging to me about it. Why couldn’t the Soviets do the same thing, but skewed slightly?”

  “It still sounds farfetched to me. Even if such a sub could wreck Keith’s propeller, he couldn’t be sure of getting the emergency propulsion motor too.”

  “He did, though. Didn’t he? Did a really superb job. Got them both at once. I’m guessing that was fortuitous. Most likely the scheme was to disable the main propeller as though it were an accident, as though the Cushing had hit some hard ice. And then, while she was creeping home on the EPM, they’d have plenty of time to clip that off somehow.”

  “If all your guessing is close to right, that Russian sub skipper must be a pretty doggone experienced one. And pretty doggone tough, too. If his mission was to disable Keith by ramming him with his own sub, he still was taking a hell of a chance that he might have been the one disabled.”

  “We took a lot of chances a few years ago too, Buck. Ramming is not an unknown naval tactic, especially if your ship’s built for it.”

  “They must know an awful lot about our subs, how they’re built and all that,” said Buck pensively.

  “Don’t you think they do?”

  “I suppose so. But they couldn’t have had that sub just hanging around up here waiting for someone maybe to show up. They must have known Keith was coming. Pretty far in advance.”

  “Not possible?”

  “He didn’t even know himself until a few weeks before!”

  “Sure. I didn’t either, till a week or so before he did. But the thing had been planned a long time. They could have been watching construction of the Cushing. She’s the only missile sub built with an ice suit, you know. She’s the only one we could have sent. When did you find out her sailplanes could be elevated to ninety degrees?”

  “Quite a while ago. It was all over Electric Boat because there were so many design changes needed.” Rich said nothing, and after a short pause Buck muttered, half to himself, “I see what you mean. The Cushing was the boat for them to watch.”

  “Ship. That’s your line.”

  “Ship.”

  The sonar room was almost silent. Buck and Rich had unconsciously squeezed their heads tightly together in their darkened corner, above and to the side of the sonar console. The tiny compartment, the ship, the orderly quiet of the men at action stations, the tension of readiness for immediate emergency—all had temporarily fallen away from their consciousness. At the same time they were at the spot where the crisis would be first recognized, ready to take instant action even prior to the startled report from the sonarman.

  Schultz, wedded to his precious sonar set, was unconscious of the low-voiced conversation two feet above his head. His head half-covered with huge, sound-insulated, sponge-rubber-covered earphones, reaching from behind his eyes to the curve of his neck behind his ears, concentration upon the information conveyed to him by the electronic instrument in front of him was total. He had already decided to call attention to the slightest deviation in the Russian submarine’s movements simply by striking out with his left hand. He would not have to distract his own attention by speaking. He would hit something, someone, and bring them over to him. More, as a man at the top of his profession, wise in the down-to-earth practicality of submariners, with perhaps his own life and those of all others aboard depending upon him, he knew this was exac
tly what his superiors would have expected. His own instructions to the operator of the sonic JT set, sitting on a stool with a similar set of earphones in the forward torpedo room, were to stand on no protocol or ceremony, to report anything he heard, or thought he heard, instantly via the special speaker circuit between the two stations.

  There had been a pause in the conversation between the two officers. Both felt their senses acutely tuned to the limitless medium through which their ship was passing. Above them, not far away, was the nearly impervious ice cover; below, very far below, the rock basaltic plates of two of those slowly drifting crusts on the earth’s mantle which, in the Arctic Ocean, had by their confluence ages past created two huge basins, thousands of fathoms deep. Between the two limits, and further limited by the maximum depth to which Manta’s strong shell could descend, there was complete freedom to move in any direction her masters willed, as fast as they willed, up to the top power her nuclear reactor could deliver and her turbines receive.

  Except that Manta was not free. She was a prisoner of the towline, constricted to move only slowly, steadily, constantly, in a single direction. Slight, and only very gradual, changes could be made in speed; changes in depth and direction could be made only very slowly, with the greatest of care. Violation of any of these rules would inexorably rupture the thin, weak thread that held out hope to Keith and his crew of 126 men.

  “I think I’ll go start Jerry on that plot we want,” said Buck. “Back in a minute. We’ll have to use the UQC to get the information we need from Keith. Okay?”

  “Got to,” said Rich.

  When he returned, rather more than a minute later, for he had made a quick head call, Buck found Richardson and Schultz huddled over the sonar display. “He’s begun echo-ranging again,” said Rich. “And he’s begun to move out ahead of us. He’s up to something!”