Cold is the Sea

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Cold is the Sea Page 39

by Edward L. Beach


  By his presence in the torpedo room he hoped to galvanize his men into even greater effort. But in this he was disappointed, for even to his nontechnical eyes they were working as rapidly as possible. Shumikin had the good sense to desist from his exhortations as soon as this was clear to him, and finally there came the moment when both torpedoes could be fired, fortunately at a still well-defined sonar target. He congratulated himself also on having acceded to the demand of the senior torpedoman that there be a suitable wait, more than half a minute, before firing the second torpedo. Else they might interfere with each other, the man had said, rendering both of them harmless. How nearly he had come, in his impatience, to overriding the torpedoman’s obvious professional training! But now both torpedoes were on their way, and at least one of them, most likely both, would certainly home on the target. Sonar should shortly hear two muffled explosions, and he would then know he had at least protected the grave secret entrusted to his care.

  As for Grigory Ilyich Zmentsov and his ship, the heroic Novosibirsky Komsomol, it was too bad, but a painful duty now devolved on him. He would spend all day composing a fitting epitaph in the form of a message describing how they had sacrificed their lives in the service of their country. He would begin this difficult chore immediately, with the highest personal priority, as soon as sonar reported the two explosions. . . .

  Walking deliberately, Shumikin left the torpedo compartment and went down another hatchway leading to the sonar room. It would be good to be there in person, both to ensure the highest performance of its personnel, whose attainments he had had reason to doubt recently, and to be able to report that he had personally witnessed the results of the initiative he himself had been forced to take in performance of his duty.

  The depth charge meter in Manta’s control room had gone wild, but it had also indicated that all the depth charges were at some distance below. Not many in her crew had experienced depth charging. The ship’s hull vibrated resoundingly, despite its extraordinarily solid structure. The noise was tremendous. Pipelines, frames, cableways, even the very bulkheads with their great watertight doors shook spasmodically with every explosion. Buck Williams, after a quick reassuring look at the depth charge meter—the tests, months ago, had convinced him the gadget really worked—took a perverse pleasure in the initiation his crew was getting. Cushing’s crew too, for that matter. He, at least, had experienced it all before.

  So had Rich. Buck had felt actual pleasure carrying out Rich’s order to stay at periscope depth despite the shattering, smashing blows being inflicted, the dust storm raised inside the ship, even the knowledge that somehow one of the charges might be set shallow enough to do actual harm. It had been his evaluation, concurred in by Richardson and substantiated by the depth charge meter, that the Soviets would have to set the charges deep. Otherwise they would risk unacceptable damage to their own installation, in particular their precious silos. The guess had proved correct. And then, when the last of twenty explosions had died its reverberating death, he was able, with the greatest composure, to seize the temporary cessation of the attack to order depth increased and the reactor to deliver power to the waiting turbines.

  It had all been too easy. First the inspection of the missile base. Then, the depth charge attack had removed any doubt of Soviet intention to safeguard knowledge of its existence in the Arctic, even at the cost of direct, hostile, military action. Now no power on earth could prevent the Manta from making known what she had discovered. Buck heaved a deep sigh, and at that moment heard the scream from Schultz, ten feet away in his sonar room. “Torpedo!” Schultz shouted the word, shouted it with all the force and all the voice at his command.

  Buck did not wait for the sweeping motion of Richardson’s hand. “All ahead emergency! Take her down!” Instantly he could feel the tilt of the deck, the bite of the suddenly accelerated screws. Tom Clancy at the diving station and the engineers in the maneuvering room were slamming all their pent-up tension into execution of the order. But there was too little time. The range was much too short. Even as the air vented from the negative tank, adding its whistle to the now silent compartment and its quota of air pressure which he could feel on his ears, there was a vicious jolt, a violent resounding blow, and the high-pitched sound of an explosion combined with rending metal. Buck could hear something, metal fragments, rattling on the hull.

  Simultaneously, steady, fantastically heavy vibration began to be communicated to Manta’s rugged structure. Buck and Rich were both looking at the annunciators, when, unbidden, the starboard annunciator turned to Stop.

  “Starboard shaft is stopped! Maneuvering says the starboard shaft is damaged! They’ve stopped it because of heavy vibration!” The telephone talker stuttered in his panic.

  Buck snatched the nearest handset out of its cradle. “Maneuvering, Captain here. How bad is it?”

  “That explosion must have been right on the starboard propeller, Captain! She started vibrating like crazy right after! I had to stop it, sir!”

  “Are you taking water? How’s your shaft seal?”

  “The engineroom’s okay! We’re checking the stern room now!” Buck held the instrument to his head while he waited. “The seal’s been damaged, Captain! The stern room’s taking water! Request the drain pump on the stern room bilges!”

  “Tom! Take the angle off the boat! Start her back up! Stern room, open your drain-pump suction! We’ll put the pump on as soon as she’s lined up! Maneuvering, get some men back aft and tighten the gland! Where’s Mr. Langforth?”

  “He’s just run back there! So did Mr. Steele.”

  “Good! Keep me informed about the leak!” Buck turned to Abbott, who was gripping the other side of the periscope-stand guardrail, staring at him. “Jerry! Get on aft as fast as you can! We’ve got to know how bad we’re flooding!”

  To Clancy, Buck said, “Tom, how are the stern planes?”

  “They’re moving slower than before, but I think we’ve still got them, Captain! We’re taking the angle off now!”

  “Have someone check the hydraulic pressure, and get a report from the after room on how the stern planes are operating!”

  “Aye, aye, sir—passing five hundred feet! Twenty-five degrees down, decreasing!”

  Buck and Rich could feel the angle lessening as Tom Clancy followed instructions.

  There was another cry from Schultz. “Torpedo! Another one!” His scream was of pure terror.

  Manta was still in a headlong dive, her port engine still racing. Buck did not hesitate. “Right full rudder!” he ordered, his tense voice sharp with urgency. “Tom, keep the angle on!”

  Manta rolled to starboard, leaning into the turn like a rollercoaster car. Her gyrocompass repeaters began to spin. She had almost reached full speed but had slowed markedly with the loss of one engine, and now even more as the rudder drag took effect. The whirling port propeller, driven with the maximum output of the reactor and steam generators, was cavitating heavily because of the increased hull resistance. Its noise came clearly through the hull. Richardson’s face was immobile. Buck suddenly had the impression that he was not there at all.

  “This is it, Skipper,” said Buck softly. “Just like the last time, only we’ve lost half our power. It’s all we can do!” He spoke almost with resignation.

  “What’s our depth now, Buck?” asked Rich, not stirring from his position, braced against the double angle on the ship.

  “Passing six hundred feet. We’ll have to take the angle off her pretty soon, even if we can contain the leak!”

  “Buck,” said Rich, speaking somberly and slowly, “Keith did one thing for us that we didn’t appreciate at the time. It’s almost as if I could hear him all over again. Do you remember the depth the Cushing reached?”

  “Yes. He told us fourteen hundred pounds sea pressure. That’s over three thousand feet!”

  “If the Cushing could go that far below her design depth, so can we, Buck! Even with a bad leak. But that torpedo won’t! It’s our
only chance! Tell Tom to keep the angle on and level her off at fifteen hundred feet!”

  Buck nodded shortly, his eyes wide as he took it in. The memory of Keith’s last moments was strong in him as he deliberately gave the orders. There was silence in the control room, and in all the other compartments. The silence of men who realized the risk but who also understood the necessity for it. If ever they were to put their faith in the men who had designed and built their ship, who had given it a marvelous power plant and a magnificent hull to go with it, now was the time. Damaged or no, there was no other choice.

  One thousand five hundred feet was far below Manta’s designed depth, yet far short of the depth sustained by the Cushing’s stout hull before its inevitable and catastrophic collapse. The Manta was there in slightly more than a minute, and as Clancy began to level off, the immense pressure of the sea was already obvious. During the descent there had been creaks in the solid structure, as the implacable squeeze drove everything inward upon itself. Light partition bulkheads were bowed, drawers and sheet-metal doors were jammed shut. Even some of Manta’s steel interior decks were curved upward or downward, where their girders were compressed lengthwise. All depth gauges had reached their limits and had been secured, the valves communicating to the sea closed tightly. So had most of the sea pressure gauges, only a few of which could register the 670 pounds per square inch the depth produced. A special watch had quickly been set up on all sea connections, throughout the ship, with special emphasis on the periscopes and propeller shafts. Most particularly on the port shaft and its thrust bearing, now also taking increased pressure from the depth as well as the drag imposed by the dead starboard shaft. As expected, its oil temperature had immediately begun heating up.

  Everyone aboard was subconsciously aware of an unwonted rigidity in Manta’s heavy framing. Flecks of paint popped off as the squeeze minutely compressed the steel, and it seemed to settle itself, almost as though with flexed muscles and a look of defiance, at holding back the malevolently waiting sea. Steel shapes cannot be alive, and yet there was the indisputable aura of elemental struggle about them as they held fast.

  Manta’s speed on one shaft had been reduced to fifteen knots with the rudder hard over, and the overloaded propeller was thrashing loudly. Buck left the rudder on for one more full circle to render the disturbance it made in the water as nearly impenetrable as possible, then put the rudder amidships and let her steady on a course away from the polynya. Resistance eased, the furiously cavitating screw became more quiet, but not completely so, and Manta’s speed increased to nineteen knots.

  The real battle, as everyone was well aware, was taking place in the stern room, where the inrush of water must be somehow contained, where Tom Clancy’s two assistants and the entire engineering department, backed up by Jerry Abbott, were at full stretch. There were no illusions about what was going on. The water must be spurting in with maniacal force, sufficient to break an arm or rip off clothes and skin. The proper treatment for any leak is to reduce the pressure behind it—exactly opposite to what they had done. With the damaged shaft stopped, the seal where it exited from the Manta’s hull could be clamped down tightly by its huge peripheral bolts, but to do this under the best of conditions men would have to reach into nearly unreachable places, jammed, confined, with hardly the room to swing a wrench. Only now they would also be confronted with a roaring spray with the force of fifty fire hydrants issuing from behind these same bolts. But no news, in this case, must be good news. They must be coping with the leak, somehow.

  Jerry Abbott was undogging the door leading aft to the reactor compartment, was returning to the control room. He left a trail of water dripping on the deck behind him, and a large puddle began swiftly forming under him as he stopped, facing Buck. He was soaked through and breathing hard. “We can’t hold her at this depth, sir,” he said rapidly. “We’ve got the packing nuts as tight as they’ll go, but the water is coming in so hard that two of us had to hold a piece of sheet metal to deflect it so that one man could reach the gland nuts. We’ll have to pressurize the compartment!”

  “Is everybody out of there?” asked Buck.

  “Not yet. Harry Langforth and Whitey Steele and our three best men are still working on the gland, but there’s not much more they can do. The leak’s still a bad one. The drain pump’s taking a suction, but it can’t pump very fast at this depth. The water’s gaining fast, and I’m afraid the rest of the seal might blow out with the pressure!”

  “We’ve got to stay down here for a while, Jerry, until that second torpedo either runs down or collapses. Have them abandon the stern room and start putting air in it. That will help the drain pump, and also cut down the rate of the leak!”

  Abbott said, “Aye, aye, sir!” and ran aft. As he passed through the watertight door he heard Buck order, “Port ahead two-thirds!”

  “The best thing we can do is slow down, Skipper,” said Buck to Rich. “If they’ve got another fish ready we’re still making so much noise it might be able to follow us! Everything else is silenced except the propeller!”

  “Right!” It was not necessary to mention the fact that, in her present condition, Manta dared not slow to such a degree that she could not carry the increased weight. Buck would otherwise have ordered one-third speed. A glance at the diving station verified that Clancy had already begun to use angle on the stern planes to hold the stern up. More would be needed as speed dropped, as well as a large bubble of air in the after group of ballast tanks. They could hear the hiss of air as Abbott began to follow his orders at the stern room bulkhead.

  Chief Sonarman Schultz finally made the report that had been so anxiously awaited. “When we quieted down I could still hear the torpedo pinging somewhere astern and above us,” he said. “Then it sort of petered out and stopped. I think it finally ran down!”

  Clancy had been adding air for several minutes to the ballast tanks aft to compensate for the weight of the water in the stern room, and the anxious looks on his face and on those of his diving crew testified to their realization that the total cubic capacity of all of Manta’s air banks could only expand six times against sea pressure at the 1,500-foot depth—far from enough to empty the after ballast tanks. A silent cheer went through the control room when Buck gave the order to bring the ship up.

  “It’s obvious we’d not have been able to stay down much longer, Commodore,” said Buck. “Jerry says there’s five feet of water in the stern room. It’s still coming in fast, but with the shallower depth and air pressure in there, he thinks we can cope with it.” Then he went on, speaking more slowly, with a certain deliberate formality in his words. “Commodore, this illegal base has opened fire on us without cause, and it has damaged us. The submarine based here sank the Cushing and caused the loss of eleven good men, one of them our close friend. I request permission to return the fire!”

  Williams saw once again the faraway look in the face and eyes of his superior. Rich spoke quietly, almost pensively. “No, Buck. We’re not at war, and we’ll not attack in cold blood. I killed a man that way, once, during the war, and I vowed I’d never do it again. Shape your course away from here at shallow depth, and we’ll let Washington handle it when they get our message!”

  “My God, boss! What do you mean, ‘cold blood’? After what they’ve done? This ship is a man-of-war! They can’t shoot at us without getting shot back at!”

  “They can’t hurt us now, Buck. And Bungo Pete—I mean, Captain Tateo Nakame—couldn’t hurt us then, either. I drove him to shooting with his rifle when he saw what we were doing to his lifeboats!”

  Buck’s arm around his shoulder was almost like a blow. “Skipper!” he hissed, “stop it! You heard what Keith said, and I’ve been saying the same thing! Stop it! You hear me? Okay, we’ll not try to get even with these bastards, but you’ve got to promise me to stop it!” Both hands were now on Rich’s shoulders, gripping them.

  Jerry Abbott, coming on the tableau, ever afterward puzzled over the meaning
of what he saw. Nor did he have any way of realizing that it was he who at that instant changed the entire complexion of the private talk between his skipper and their admired, but unaccountably suddenly irresolute, squadron commander. “Skipper!” he said to Buck, “we’ve got to surface! We can’t stop the water! We’ll have to get the stern as high as we can and remake the seal with flax packing! The graphite seal is completely shot, and it’s getting worse fast!”

  “How long can we hold out the way we are, Jerry?” asked Buck.

  “Who knows? The seal might let go any minute! A couple of hours, no more. With air pressure in the stern room, I mean. We’ll have to let it off to go back in there, and there’s no telling what will happen then!”

  “How long will it take to make the change once you start?”

  “About an hour. It’s a big job, but we have everything we need to do it, once we can stop the water from coming in like this!”

  Richardson, listening, knew that Admiral Donaldson’s cryptic words aboard the Proteus, and in the sedan returning to the airfield in Groton, had at last achieved their full meaning, even though neither he nor anyone could have anticipated the situation. “The United States needs someone who can make the right decision at the right time, and take the responsibility for it, Rich. That’s the main reason you’re going along on this trip. You may run into a lot more up there than we expect!” Aloud, Rich said, “There’s only one place around here we can bring her to the surface, Buck!”

  “How are we—” Buck began, but Richardson interrupted him.

  Speaking loudly, so as to be overheard, Rich said, “Buck, enter in your log that because there is only one place to surface, which is occupied by a hostile force that not once but several times has endeavored to destroy this ship and all on board, and has now seriously damaged her so that the lives of all hands depend on her coming to the surface to make repairs, the commander of Task Group 83.1 has ordered destruction of the offensive power of the said base so that Manta can surface unmolested!”

 

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