Cold is the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  It was Richardson’s turn to say, “I understand.” He followed it with, “If we don’t make it back, wait him out at test depth or below. I doubt he can follow you down there, nor can his fish!” As he said the words he found himself wondering what good that could possibly do, for without Manta, Cushing was dead too!

  And then the nylon line snapped with a shuddering flip, and Buck sent Manta sliding down into the depths. The last thing Rich heard was Keith’s quiet “Wilco!”

  “It’s us he’s after; so it’s us he’ll chase, Buck. We’ve got one decoy left, and we’ve no idea how many fish he’s got, nor how many of those defenses against the Mark Forty.”

  “It didn’t make any noise, at least nothing we heard. Maybe it’s not a weapon he shoots at all,” said the disconsolate Buck.

  “You mean, some kind of a magic energy device? Inexhaustible, maybe?”

  “All I mean is he might not have to shoot a piece of hardware. So it wouldn’t be something you could count, like our decoys. But maybe he wasn’t all that sure it was going to work either. He sure ran off in a hurry. If he’d only run a little longer, we might have shaken him!” Buck spoke morosely. His disappointment was keen.

  “True, old man, but right now our problem is to kill him before he kills us. We have six Mark Fourteens and five Mark Forties left forward, is that right?”

  “Plus two Mark Forties in the skids in the after torpedo room. I’ve told Deedee to unrig the after room for towing and load both of the Forties he has back there.”

  “The Forty is a single-shot fish. You shoot it very carefully, one at a time. You can reload one quicker than you can fire a second shot. So if you have one of them and our remaining decoy loaded, you can also have a salvo of four Fourteens in the other tubes forward.”

  “You don’t expect him to let us get within range of an old Mark Fourteen!”

  Buck’s exhaustion was showing in his slowness at picking up the idea, Rich decided. “Maybe this magic energy thing you thought up can stop the electric motor in the Mark Forty, but if that’s what it does it won’t faze an old straight-running steam fish,” he finally said, and was secretly delighted when Buck’s eyes lighted and he gave the necessary orders.

  The Manta had separated from the Cushing only a short distance, contrary to Rich and Buck’s first intention to go many miles away. As had become virtually a necessity during the past few encounters, they were in the darkened sonar room, awaiting developments which could only be seen, and that poorly, in the sonar equipment. And yet, there must be instantaneous response. Awareness of the enemy submarine’s whereabouts must be constant, and careful evaluation of any change or movement, immediate. She had approached to a distance of about a mile and had apparently stopped. Doubtless she had silenced herself as much as possible. Even so, she made a faint but definitely discernible note. It was this tiny noise level, which Schultz and the JT operator were so strenuously keeping in their earphones, that created the spot on the sensitive scope.

  The Cushing was not visible on the tube, nor could the JT hear her. She was somewhere overhead, resting against the ice with all machinery stopped. Lighting was minimal and on the storage battery; there would be no cooking; all unneeded personnel had been ordered to their bunks. In this condition, her cavernous interior had ample air for forty-eight hours and there was stored oxygen sufficient for many more days. Her battery was her limiting factor. Keith could remain in this condition for seventy-two hours, he had said, before his battery would be too low to restart his reactor.

  Buck had also stopped every piece of nonessential machinery, including his primary loop main coolant pumps, but had kept his heaters on and the reactor functional in the newly developed natural circulation mode—a low-power condition from which restoration of full power could be accomplished in minutes. Under Clancy’s skillful hand Manta, too, was stopped, hovering on a fortuitous thermal layer at the 300-foot level.

  For the time being, it was a standoff. “I’ll bet he can’t see Cushing either,” said Buck. “Maybe he’s even lost us, if we’re quieter than he is. We ought to be. So he must be making up his mind whether to go active with his sonar.”

  “When he does, he’ll find us both, and he’ll know the one against the ice cover must be the Cushing. Also, she’ll give the bigger echo.”

  “We could try keeping our broadside to him. Unless he happens to get both of us broadside, our echo will be about as big as Keith’s.”

  “If we ease up against the ice ourselves it will confuse him even more,” said Rich, thoughtfully, “but then, sound is so funny we might lose contact on him ourselves. Or, we might hear him better.”

  “We can always come back down again, boss. Let’s try it!”

  And so Tom Clancy blew some air into his tanks, and the Manta slowly drifted upward until she bumped gently against the solid ice, her side turned toward the intruder. True to the well-known vagaries of sound, contact remained, and ten minutes later the tiny luminescence that was the enemy lashed out with six strong rapid pings.

  “He can’t hear us!” Buck chortled. “He can only see us by going active!”

  “Right,” said Rich, “and unless Keith was also broadside to him, by accident, the echoes he got must have been nearly identical. So, right now, he can’t tell which is which. We ought to be able to use that, somehow.”

  “Shoot our last decoy?”

  Rich snapped his fingers. “Get it programmed so it simulates us trying to get away. Then get two Forties ready. Back out a Fourteen. They can reload it later. Can the wolfpack code tell Keith to get some fish ready?”

  “That’s one of the things it was made for.”

  Preparations were going forward when Schultz made the signal Rich and Buck had learned to anticipate, and the sound of inimical pings filled the compartment. “I think he’s getting ready to shoot,” said the sonarman.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t know. Just feel it,” said Schultz. “There!” He pointed to a wispy, wavering discontinuity in the smooth blankness of the scope. “There again! There’s another! He’s still pinging, and he’s fired twice!”

  There were two discontinuities on the sonar scope emanating from the enemy submarine, one diverging slightly across its face, the other coming in steadily and remorselessly toward its center. “He’s fired at both of us!” said Buck.

  “Buck!” There was a decisive snap to Richardson’s voice. “If he can’t hear us, he must have fired on active sonar bearings and ranges. Set the decoy to run in circles under us! Maybe that will attract the fish! I’ll tell Keith to do the same. Hope he can!” Rich dashed away, returned a moment later. “He’s going to try,” he said. “These are pretty slow-running torpedoes, so there may be time. Also I told him to shoot his Forties with us. Is our decoy away?”

  “Affirmative!”

  “There’ll be a minute or so more before his fish gets here. Time to shoot ours!”

  A quarter of a minute later, a thin streak arrowed on the scope toward the Russian, traveling much faster than the weapon he had fired, passing it close aboard on the sonar scope. As before, a brilliant white phosphorescence bloomed over the spot where he was, and there was no explosion.

  “He’s still there, I think!” said Schultz. “He didn’t run this time! The Cushing’s fired too!”

  A streak similar to that made by the Manta’s weapon, which could only have come from the Cushing, drew itself swiftly across the scope. Rich, Buck and Schultz were watching it with consuming interest, to the exclusion of all else. The Soviet sub’s reaction to this second shot would show whether she could remount her antitorpedo protection quickly. Then a violent explosion shook the Manta’s sturdy structure. The resounding roar, reverberating through the sea and inside the submarine hull, blocking out all sound save for itself, threw clouds of dust and paint particles into the air. On the sonar scope there was nothing to be seen; only the startled, white, almost alive reaction of the scope as it attempted to reproduce elect
ronically what it had heard through its audio senses.

  “All compartments report to control!” Buck shouted into the telephone, looking, at the same time, at the sonar scope. The whiteout was receding, the Soviet submarine reappearing, surrounded by a fading halo of phosphorescence.

  “He can’t keep this up!” said Rich. “That must be a whale of a lot of energy! Shoot again! As soon as you can!”

  A third swift streak raced toward the enemy submarine. Jerry Abbott appeared at the sonar room entrance. “No damage, Captain,” he said. “It was close, though. Must have gone off right under us!” A distant explosion filled their consciousness. “Get a report from Leone!” snapped Richardson. Abbott darted away.

  Again the halo effect enveloped the enemy. Again the speeding Mark Forty torpedo, the U.S. Navy’s best, entered the immune area and disappeared.

  “Cushing reports she’s been hit!” gasped Abbott.

  “Cushing’s fired again!” said Schultz.

  “Are you reloading forward, Buck?” asked Rich.

  “Affirm. Two more Forties.”

  “Shoot again, as soon as ready!”

  In all, six Mark Forty torpedoes, from two different locations, converged in succession on the intruder. In succession they ripped into the area where the sonar scope showed her, into the halo effect which seemed almost to have developed pulsations, so fast was it going on and off—and disappeared.

  There was a cry from Schultz. “He’s fired again! He’s fired at us! It’s coming this way!”

  “You’ll have to try to outrun it, Buck!”

  “Coolant pumps in high speed, maneuvering!” ordered Buck on the telephone. “How much speed can you give me?” He listened anxiously. “Not enough!” he said. “Use all the steam that you’ve got in the generators! Override the low-pressure alarm and the high temperature-differential scram! Keep those rods up! Get us rolling!”

  He shouldered Rich aside, stuck his head outside the sonar room. “All ahead emergency,” he called to the helmsman. To Clancy, across the control room, he yelled, “Two hundred feet!” Back inside, on the telephone, he said, “Don’t wreck the reactor, Harry! We’ll still be needing it. But if you can’t give me speed, right now, it won’t make any difference! That first explosion was meant for us, the Cushing’s been torpedoed, and there’s another fish headed our way!” Turning to Rich he said, “They’ll do it! Harry Langforth’s with them, and he’ll build up faster than this old reactor’s ever gone before!” Suddenly he grinned tightly. “Wish old Brighting could see us! Where are all those reactor safeguards now, hey?” He darted out into the passageway again, called, “Left full rudder!” To Rich he said swiftly, “What’s the course dead away from that fish?”

  Richardson had been anticipating the need for this information. “Three-four-five on the grid!” he answered.

  “Make your course three-four-five, helm!—Jerry!” he barked. “Stay here on the control station and relay for me!” He returned to the sonar console. “Where’s the fish now?” he asked.

  “I’ll lose it when we get it astern,” said Schultz anxiously, beads of sweat all over his face. “It’s about half a mile away right now!”

  “Do we have any speed estimate on it?”

  “It took about three minutes from the time he fired until he hit our decoy. That’s thirty knots, Buck!” The look on his superior’s face had never been grimmer.

  “This old bucket’s never gone that fast in her life, but she’s sure going to try now!” Buck thought. He picked up the telephone. “Harry? The fish chasing us can make thirty knots. How bad do you guys want to live, back there?”

  Hanging up, he said to Rich, “They won’t have to gag the safety valves, like in the old days of steam engines, because they’ll be using all the steam as fast as our two kettles back there can make it, and the pressure’s going to drop. But everything else, they’ll do. What we need, right now, is pounds of steam per minute. More pounds of steam through those steam generators than they ever made before!”

  Richardson nodded quietly, as Jerry Abbott called in, “Steady on three-four-five. Depth two hundred. Speed twenty, increasing!” Incongruously, his mind traveled backward many years, back to a submarine-school qualification exercise in his first command, the old S-16. The old destroyer Semmes, acting as target, had nearly rammed the S-16. By swift action, in analogy not far removed from that just taken by Buck, he had managed to avoid the disaster. Through it all, Tex Hansen, submarine-school training officer, two years senior to Rich, had not said a word, even though his own life, too, hung in the balance. Once in a while, over the years, he had wondered how it felt to contain one’s self in such circumstances. Now he knew.

  Strange that in the face of mortal danger, with total and terrible dissolution perhaps only moments away, he could feel so calm, so detached from it all. It was almost as though he were somewhere else, someone else, contemplating it, even enjoying the heightened sensation of it, but not affected by any of it at all. He had felt this way before. Very much this way. And he knew, without any doubt whatever, that Buck was experiencing precisely the same emotions, probably the same thoughts. His asides during the emergencies which had flowed upon him, one after the other, proved it.

  “The fish is pinging!” Schultz murmured, sweating heavily, his shirt suddenly dark with moisture. How could he hear, with the tumultuous wash of Manta’s frantically whirling propellers exactly between his sonar head and the target-looking torpedo? It figured, of course, that if anyone could hear through all the turmoil, he could. He was the most expert, the most experienced, sonarman on board.

  So the fish was pinging. It must be close, close enough for the last-stage target-searching cycle to have been activated. It would home in on the echoes, drive in with the full speed of its little motor, until fatal contact was made. What was Buck doing?

  “Twenty-six knots! Increasing slowly!” called Jerry Abbott.

  “Open vents! Blow main ballast! One-minute blow, wide open!” Buck’s orders reminded Rich of a time, under very similar circumstances indeed, when he had issued the identical command. Perhaps it would have the same effect.

  The clank of the nearby vent opening. The noise of blowing. “Speed now twenty-seven!” said Jerry Abbott. “Still increasing very slowly!”

  “It’s still pinging astern!” Schultz.

  There was that tight grin on Buck’s face. “Here we go, Skipper. The last maneuver!” He leaned out of the sonar room door, called, “Right full rudder! Leave it on! Thirty degrees down angle! Make your depth nine hundred feet! All hands stand by for steep angles!”

  At twenty-seven knots, the Manta pitched into the curve like an aircraft doing a spiral dive. She listed twenty degrees or more into the turn, her bow swept downward, her gyrocompass repeaters began to spin like so many tops. Rich could feel the centrifugal forces on his body, and the slippery angle of the deck beneath him. Hanging on to the motor-generator stand outside the sonar room, he heard Abbott, gripping the rail a few feet above him, say with forced calm, “Speed nineteen. Passing five hundred feet. Two complete circles.” There was a roaring somewhere in the water. Rich could sense the furiously flailing screws stirring it up in a way no submarine had ever stirred it up, spraying a screaming froth of cavitation in all directions, a veritable column of violently disturbed water, a spiral, vertical column 500 feet in total height, a corkscrew of turbulent currents, upright in the sea, tight with the tiny diameter that only a high-powered nuclear submarine could achieve, impervious to sonar, filled with its own sound and its own echoing defiance.

  “Eight hundred fifty feet! Leveling off!” said Jerry.

  “Rudder amidships!”

  “Rudder is amidships!” cried the helmsman, throwing his weight into the effort, supporting himself against slipping by hanging on to his steering wheel, yet stopping the rudder exactly on center. Manta’s deck flattened out with a smooth snap roll.

  “Nine hundred feet!” called Abbott. “Speed increasing rapidly! Twen
ty-one . . . twenty-three . . . twenty-seven . . . increasing slowly now . . . twenty-eight-a-half . . .” Relieved of the slowing effect of the hard-over rudder and planes, Manta was bouncing forward almost as if shot from a bow, rocketing through the sea depths with a reckless abandon as her powerful heart rammed the superhot pressurized water—her lifeblood—through her steam generators.

  “Mark your head!” said Buck.

  “Mark your head!” shouted Jerry Abbott.

  “Three-zero-four!” said the helmsman.

  “Three-zero-four!” reported Jerry.

  “Let her go three-one-zero!” said Buck. He picked up the handset. “Maneuvering? Harry? How you doing back there?” He put it down, grinning that same tight grin. “Rich, Harry says he’s broken every operating rule old man Brighting and his engineering boys ever thought of, except one. He’s still got a working reactor. But everything’s heating up back there. Bearings and such. He can’t go on indef—”

  BLAM! A loud, somewhat muffled, strangely reverberating bang. Close, but not intimately close. “All ahead one-third!” ordered Buck. “We beat it the hard way, Skipper!” He grabbed the handset again. “Harry, you did it! Cool her down gently back there, and treat her like the queen she is! May Martin Brighting live a thousand years!”

  “Go to silent running, Buck! Shift to battery. Stop all machinery. NOW!”

  Williams gave the order, then he demanded the customary damage reports. Midway through them, the puzzled look on his face suddenly vanished.

  17

  “Buck, that was simply beautiful!” said Richardson. “That vertical corkscrew you made in the ocean must have seemed like a solid wall to the little fellow’s sonar. So it drove into it and set off the detonator. Whatever made you think up that maneuver?”