World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  “Admiral Rutgers,” said Ray Brentwood, “under the power invested in me through the president’s executive emergency war order 1347D-5, any longshoreman refusing to load American warships at any time will be shot under the conditions which apply to all alien and/or indigenous saboteurs. And if you don’t have the ships loaded, I’ll shoot you!”

  The Wave was speechless.

  “In all my years—” began Rutgers.

  “Admiral Rutgers, if you don’t do what I tell you and get those commanders to my office right now — none of us will have any years left.”

  “Where,” thundered Rutgers, barely under control, “is your office?”

  It was the only time that Ray Brentwood had smiled since arriving in San Diego. “IX-44E.”

  “What the hell’s IX—?” Rutgers asked Sue, so incensed, he could barely speak. The Wave ran her finger quickly down the long list of auxiliary vessels. “It’s — it’s a barge, sir.”

  “A what?”

  “Barge, sir. Sludge removal.” she replied, frightened, adding timidly, “propelled.”

  “Propelled!”

  They said Rutgers sounded like a sea lion bull in the San Diego Zoo.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The chief engineer aboard the USS Roosevelt had managed, by raising more pressure in the lesser-damaged port ballast tanks, to force out more water. For a while, as the sub rose to just over two hundred feet below the ice roof of the surface, it seemed as if, with her “flaps down”—diving planes reversed in the vertical position, ready to “pick” the ice— survival was near at hand. But then she stopped rising, the damage sustained by the ballast tanks under the Alfa’s attack too great to allow further lift.

  The emotional roller coaster of depression after the near fatal miss by the Alfa’s torpedoes, the belief that they were trapped, then the mounting excitement as the ship had slowly risen a little, and then the plunge back again into depression as she lay there, was almost too much to bear. But bear it they did, without histrionics or ill temper but quietly now and bravely, as if all the world were watching when they knew the world was not, that they were alone, each submariner’s doubts and fears battened down in the watertight compartments of his soul.

  Not one whined about the contaminated atmosphere they now breathed as a result of the radioactive water that had poured into the sub. Depending on where they were in the sub at the time, they had received between 250 and 480 rads, which, in the cold, undeniable statistics of radioactivity, meant that more than 50 percent of these men would the within weeks or months, depending on their individual metabolism. Those who’d received between 100 and 200 rads were already doomed to shorter life expectancy through longer-term cancer, and any children they might have would be subject to the risk of genetic defects, even if old “Bing,” as they referred affectionately to Robert Brentwood, could perform the impossible and get them out of the sub within the next few hours. For some, given what they saw as the utter impossibility of Brentwood ever getting them out of it, it was as if the gods were merely playing with them for their sport, for while monitors showed that the steel hatch covers of the missile tubes were unaffected, the escape hatch covers remained jammed shut.

  Robert Brentwood and the chief engineer, the pile of blueprints before them, turned pale gray in the reddened-out control room light, as they pored over the sub’s intricate systems, Brentwood posing possibilities, the chief listening. But, confronted by the sheer logic of physics, the chief was forced to reject all the captain’s proposals as unworkable due to some irreparable malfunction caused by the Alfa’s attack, both acutely aware of the supreme irony, voiced disgustedly by the chief, that the only thing still in full working order was “Sherwood Forest” and its firing control system.

  “Rifle’s in fine working order, eh, Chief?” said Brentwood. “But the rifleman is down.”

  “That’s about it.” Behind them, Peter Zeldman kept moving from the red of Control to the blue light of the sonar, everyone in the ship knowing that after the explosions, both enemy air and sea vessels could be moving toward them to investigate. Zeldman stared at the fathometer, willing its recorder needle to move upward from two hundred feet. For one breathless moment he saw the needle registering 199, 198, 197, only to see it fall back to 203, the momentary rise due not to any increase in buoyancy in the sub’s ballast tanks, as he’d hoped, but rather to a cold “updraft,” or column of water rising locally because of differences in the sea’s salinity.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Zeldman told Sonar Operator Emerson, “I’d say some joker was up there trying to get us mad.”

  Emerson didn’t reply. Despite the small cross he unabashedly wore about his neck, he rarely spoke about his religious beliefs, but he believed unreservedly in the goldfish-bowl view of God: that the Creator made the world, put us in to swim, and after that, it was up to the goldfish — that divine intervention came only at the beginning, and all else was a matter of accident in which only a person’s will and courage could alter the outcome. If it was their fate to die, then they would all enter God’s other domain in which judgment would be revealed. Sonarman Link, Emerson’s colleague and backup on the shift, thought all religion “bullshit,” and the two were the best of friends, their bond mutual tolerance for each other’s “weird” beliefs, and their love, their passion, to be what they were— America’s point men in the earth’s largest domain.

  “Any change in the ice growl?” asked Zeldman.

  “Nothing, sir,” replied Link, knowing that Zeldman’s question was to verify Emerson’s evaluation that there was no “singing”—significant sound amid the cacophony of ice growl, shrimp snapping, and other ocean noises.

  In Control, the light from the reactor room lit up.

  “Con?” acknowledged Brentwood.

  “Captain, we have a minor steam leak.”

  “Can you contain it?” asked Brentwood calmly.

  “No problem at the moment, sir.”

  “Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. “You in foil?” He was referring to the bright silver heat-reflecting suit with air-breathing hose attached, which was required by regulation for any repairs in the reactor room.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Brentwood turned back to the blueprints of the sub. “Enter it in the log, Pete.”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Zeldman.

  Brentwood stood up, ran his fingers through his hair, and, arms akimbo, rotated his torso to rid himself of the stiffness of having been hunched over the blueprints for so long. “Going aft to stretch my legs, Chief. You come up with anything, call me immediately.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  What Brentwood meant beneath the mundane exchange was that it was time to “walk through”—to see how each department on the four levels of the sub was holding up. As he passed the galley, he could smell hamburgers frying. “Sliders, Cook?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Suits me,” said Brentwood easily. Farther on, he saw two stewards coming toward him from Sherwood Forest laden down with bags of onions and potatoes that had been strung up from the maze of pipes that surrounded the six missile tubes. Next, he passed a man coining up from the stern ballast area and noticed the sailor’s yellow thermoluminescent dosimeter was missing from his belt. “Where’s your TD, sailor?”

  The man looked down guiltily, “Sorry sir — loosened my belt on the off shift and—”

  “Go get it,” said Brentwood, patting him on the shoulder and passing on into the cool, clean, polished smell of Sherwood Forest, the ventilators’ fans like a running stream. It made no sense to him but, compared to the rest of the sub, in Sherwood Forest, for all its electronic wizardry, he had the same feeling of tranquillity that he had experienced as a boy in the woods of Washington State and Oregon.

  Standing close together against the missiles’ firing control panels were two technicians, the first checking the twenty-five rows of ci
rcuit indicator lights on one of the tall, blue-gray consoles, the other man checking the first man’s every move, verifying the sequence. Another pair were checking the missile tubes’ monitors, making sure the humidity and temperature in each of the six chocolate-brown missile tubes were within operational parameters.

  As Robert walked down the starboard side, the big white numbers on the chocolate tubes indicating missiles one, three, and five passed him like slow tracer as he kept moving through the “forest” that took up a full third of the sub. His sense of frustration at not being able to get his men out of harm’s way, unable to maneuver except for the two paltry five-knot-maximum props set in the after-ballast tanks, while the six multiwarhead missiles were safe, grew until he had to caution himself to calm down. If only they could get to the surface, rising fast enough to smash through sonar-identified thinner ice, they might stand some chance. But unless the sub could rise, the hope of getting the men out, airlifted off the ice to Spitzberg or south to Iceland or even west to Greenland, was just a dream. Realistically, however, Robert Brentwood knew their only prospects now were that the sub would in fact go deeper if any more leaks occurred, and each inch she fell increased the “taffy”—the effect of increased water pressure over her entire hull.

  After reaching the reactor room and satisfying himself that the steam leak was in fact minor, he passed on to the engine room, noting along the way that some of the green rubberized tile on the walkway had curled at the edges. It was down here that some of the worst leaks had occurred before the pumps had got them under control. “You boys enjoy the dip?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” answered a ginger-headed young auxiliary room mechanic who looked to Robert Brentwood as if he must be no more than nineteen or twenty — about the same age as Rosemary’s younger brother, whose bones now lay scattered somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic. Brentwood saw the man’s dosimeter had exceeded the two-hundred-rad mark, and the young man saw him notice but smiled good-naturedly before turning away, busying himself with the oil pressure gauges.

  Robert Brentwood was so moved by the young mechanic’s quiet bravery that as he headed back through Sherwood Forest, he took out a Kleenex, pretending to blow his nose, using the tissue as a cover for the overwhelming tears of pride and the sense of honor it gave him to command such men. Seeing another pair of missile technicians working the port-side monitors, he quipped lightheartedly, “Hope you boys aren’t getting bored down here.”

  “No sir, Captain,” answered one. “These D-5s are more temperamental. Humidity’s—”

  It came to him in a flash. He could have hugged the technician — name patch Sayers — except they would have labeled him as a Section-Eight. As it was, the two technicians saw Brentwood do something that no one had ever seen “Bing” do. He began running through the sub, the alternate numbers of the missiles on the port side — two, four, six, — flashing by him. Halfway along, he heard the soft gong: “Captain to Control. Captain to Control.”

  “How’d he know they were gonna call him?” asked Sayers.

  “Don’t ask me, man,” replied his checker. “Sixth sense. Sub captain’s got to have it, I hear.”

  “Bullshit! No way he could’ve—”

  “Hey, man — watch it. You missed a step. Back up in the sequence.”

  As Brentwood entered Control, he was told by Zeldman they had a contact.

  “Hostile?” asked Brentwood, catching his breath.

  “Too far away as yet,” answered Zeldman. “The estimate is fifty-five thousand yards. About thirty miles.”

  Brentwood had always made it a habit to be overly conservative when it came to estimates of contact distances, and decided to act as if the approaching submarine — as it certainly couldn’t be a surface vessel — was closer to them.

  “What’s your guesstimate, Link?” Brentwood asked the other sonarman.

  “Well, sir, it’s a bit fuzzy, but that may be because some of our sensors were ruptured during the Alfa attack. But it’s definitely coming towards—”

  “He’s gone,” said Emerson. “Shut down his active.”

  All eyes in Control were on the monitor panels. Brentwood seemed as alarmed now as he had been excited when he entered Control.

  “Very well,” he said, the phrase, and his tone, gathering them all together. He gave orders for the emergency props to be extended from the belly of the sub. If they couldn’t rise, they could at least turn Roosevelt to face the last-known bearing of the sonar contact, and try to defend head-on, rather than sitting like a sunken log, offering their flank. Next, he ordered all torpedo tubes loaded, advising the torpedo officer to be ready for “snapshot two, one,” or informing him, as they were under possible attack, they might have to get a quick return shot away within forty seconds. During this time the torpedo crew would have to flood the tubes, open their caps, and maintain tandem communication with the Mark-118 firing control system.

  “Either way, torpedo room,” Brentwood advised, “I want you to load one SA tube, one PA tube, with short-range contact fuse fish.”

  “One tube starboard abaft with contact fish, one port abaft with contact fish,” came the confirmation. “Short-range fuse.”

  “Man battle stations missile,” ordered Brentwood, standing by the raised podium of the control room’s attack center, his arms folded, the small of his back touching the brass rail that girded the search and the attack periscopes’ housing. “Set condition one SQ.” They were now on highest alert.

  “Set condition one SQ. Aye aye, sir,” repeated Zeldman, and upon seeing the various departments punching in “ready,” he confirmed, “condition one SQ all set.”

  “Very well,” answered Brentwood. “Neutral trim.”

  “In neutral trim now, sir.”

  “Very well. Prepare to spin.” Several men in Control looked across at each other in alarm. “Stand by to flood tubes two, three, and four,” ordered Brentwood, and they could hear the faint rushing of water filling the torpedo tubes. Tube one already contained the Mark-48 with contact fuse, the remaining three torpedoes now sliding forward from their rail-tracked dollies into the tubes, assuring that Roosevelt was now ready to fire at any enemy sub — if that’s what the contact had been — which might try to run interference with the missile launch.

  Inside Missile Control, the weapons officer was waiting anxiously for the order to complete “spin-up,” entering the local orientating corrections into the missiles’ computers so as to assure the best possible trajectories for the MARVed— maneuvering reentry vehicle — warheads. But as yet no targets had been given. Given their present location, there were any number Brentwood could choose under the U.S. policy of “counter force,” that is, against military targets only, and not cities. It wasn’t as if Brentwood didn’t have enough to choose from; in fact, the nearest and most worthwhile targets would be the forty high-priority military bases clustered along the Kola Peninsula, but still the designation of targets had not come, and instead Brentwood requested “missile status report.”

  “Sir, the spin-up’s not complete.”

  “Do as I say!” snapped Brentwood. “Prepare missiles for launch.”

  “Yes, sir. Preparing missiles for launch.”

  “Very well. Prepare for ripple fire.”

  “Yes, sir. Prepare for ripple fire.”

  All over the ship, men were moving to their firing positions within two seconds of the operator squeezing the yellow handle and the soft but persistent musical gong sounding, the ripple firing sequence they were readying for one that would eject missile six first, then missile one. This staggered sequence would offset starboard and port yawing when water would rush into the four-storied missile tubes after each 114,000-pound missile had passed through its blue asbestos phenolic dome. The dome would shatter first, its symmetrical destruction being achieved by small explosive charges under each dome a split second before the steam pressure expelled whichever missiles Brentwood would select.

  “Sir,” said Pet
er Zeldman, “we have no radio message to launch. Have you reason for ‘independent authority to launch’?” It was the first and, as it would turn out, the last time Peter Zeldman would ever question an order by Robert Brentwood.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Zeldman,” Brentwood said, so all of Control could hear. “The missiles I select will not have their warheads armed.”

  Zeldman exchanged a quick glance with the chief. Was Brentwood cracking up?

  Like Zeldman and others, the weapons officer looked worried, too, and it wasn’t missed by his assistant, who, with wire trailing from his headphones, was moving back and forth, head bent like a priest at prayer, along the narrow “Blood Alley,” the redded-out corridor of high computer banks, where he checked out each missile’s status, verifying for the weapons officer that each of the six Trident D-5 missiles was ready to pass through its four prelaunch modes.

  “Missiles ready,” the weapons officer confirmed to Control.

  “Very well,” said Brentwood. “Prepare for ripple fire.”

  While the weapons officer, his forehead beaded with perspiration, waited for the designation of targets, in Control, Robert Brentwood, double-checking the computer screens that all missiles were, as he’d just been told verbally, ready for launch, held his key ready to click into the Mark-98 missile firing control system, the weapons officer waiting below, his black flexihose trailing snakelike behind him from the plastic red firing grip in his hand. His thumb was now on the transparent protector cap, ready to flip it up and depress the red button— six times in rapid succession — the moment Brentwood gave him the order.

  “The ice!” It was a hoarse whisper from the blood-colored face of the assistant weapons officer. “If we fire—”

  “Weapons officer,” called Brentwood, his voice calm, resolute.