Authors: Edward L. Beach
“Nothing anyone can do for that eggbeater out there, but maybe they can work the rudder and planes.”
“That's what I think, too. Have Jerry ask them to work the rudder.”
“Wilco,” said the Gertrude set, and the rudder began to move.
“Nothing much wrong with that,” said Richardson with satisfaction. “At least Keith can steer! Now tell them to secure the rudder and go to the stern planes.”
Through the periscopes, both men saw the halting, painful movement of the horizontal control surfaces. “Tell him to secure that. The port plane is striking the hull, and that's the most he's ever going to be able to move it.”
They waited as Abbott transmitted the message and the movement ceased.
“Now tell him to try the propeller, building up slowly to whatever speed he wants.” The crumpled mass of bronze, once a beautifully curved, delicately balanced example of shipbuilding art, slowly began to rotate, and in the process its center could be seen describing an arc inches in diameter. “Tell him to stop!” said Rich. A moment later, speaking on the UQC himself, he said, “Keith, your propeller shaft is bent at least six inches out of line. I could see it making a foot-diameter circle as it went around.”
“I understand,” said Keith, after the barest suggestion of a delay.
“We're going to get clear now and prepare for towing. We'd like you to drop down to one hundred fifty feet and hover there. Lower your anchor to the fifty-fathom mark and set your brake, but not too tight. We want it to slip a little as we take you in tow to help ease the initial shock. Be ready to tighten the brake as the
pull begins, and secure it with everything you've got as it approaches the eighty-fathom mark.”
“Wilco,” said Keith.
“Let us know when you're ready.”
“Wilco,” said Keith again.
To Buck, Rich said, “The only difference between what we're having Keith do and what the
Besugo
did is that she had to rig her anchor from the forecastle before submerging and therefore had to set the brake tight at the beginning. This may help make up for the
Cushing
being three times as big.”
“Roger,” said Buck, looking steadily at his superior. Both of them knew the exchange was entirely for the benefit of their crew, for the procedure had been discussed in private many times.
“His anchor will be at four hundred fifty feet. We'll make our depth five hundred, so there'll be no chance of hitting it.”
“Roger, Commodore. When do you want to go to towing stations?”
“Whenever you're ready, Buck. Which side do you want to use?”
“Makes no difference. Port side.”
“Very well.”
The stilted, official conversation was necessary for one reason only: Richardson and Williams had decided to make the real thing as nearly like the drills as possible. Chances of error would thereby be lessened, and crew confidence increased. Now Buck picked up the hand microphone for the ship's general announcing system, spoke into it. “All hands,” he said, “rig ship for towing. Port side.” He hung the mike back in its bracket, turned away, then turned back and picked it up again. “This is the captain,” he said. “This time it's for real.”
The only change Richardson saw in personnel stations was the arrival of the ship's best helmsman, and separation of the wheel and annunciator controls from the bow planesman's station to which, in the cruising condition, they had been cross-connected. Doubtless there was not a person on board for whom Buck's final admonition was needed. Nevertheless, Rich was instantly aware of its effect. He himself felt like cheering.
Manta
had departed from New London with her two sets of towing gear stored in the after torpedo tubes. The inner doors of
both tubes had already been replaced by anchor billets. Getting ready to tow involved only opening the outer door of the designated tube, number eight, and ejecting the contents, a metal canister filling the entire tube, by a short jet of high-pressure air through a fitting on the anchor billet. The canister, merely a large galvanized iron can, slid out, split open and sank, releasing the paravane. This immediately began to rise toward the surface, carrying with it a short section of heavy chain on the near end of which was a large steel hook. The other end of the chain terminated in a swivel, from which extended a long length of beautiful white nylon hawser, now being dragged outward and upward from the open tube. The inboard end of the hawser also held a swivel, followed by another section of chain which entered the open torpedo tube door and was firmly attached to the anchor billet.
Several refinements had been added to the original device during the course of testing it: strain gauges had been the first; a large bolt in the billet, when unscrewed, now allowed the chain and hawser to drop clear, thus permitting the outer door to be shut and the tube to be restored to its original use. Most recently, the hook had been modified to slide easily down the anchor chain of the ship to be towed until it fetched up on her anchor, where it would snag fast, and an additional UQC had been installed on
Manta
's stern to facilitate communication abaft the propellers. Just before departure, the hooks for both devices had been checked by actually testing them with a chain and anchor identical to the
Cushing
's, intended for an identical submarine still under construction.
While the football-shaped paravane was deploying upward and to port, where its vanes kited it, Buck was maneuvering the
Manta
into position two miles astern of the
Cushing
, waiting for the ready signal from her. It came in half an hour, about when expected, and Buck set the course. As before, the TDC and sonar were used to establish the proper relationship to the
Cushing
, so that
Manta
would pass parallel to, but not directly beneath, the disabled missile submarine. Calculations and drill both had showed that at three knots the paravane streamed, as planned, about one hundred feet above and fifty yards off to the side of the towing submarine.
Manta
was programmed to pass fifty feet below and one hundred feet abeam of
Cushing
's anchor, so that her
diagonally dragged hawser could not fail to intersect the vertically hanging anchor chain of her quarry.
“We'll be abeam in five minutes, TDC,” said Deedee Brown. “Checking right in there, about thirty-five yards on her starboard beam.”
“Come left one degree,” said Buck to his helmsman. “Steer one-two-seven.”
“One-two-seven, aye aye” said the helmsman from his post a few feet forward of the raised conning station. His movement of the wheel was barely perceptible. An instant later he announced, “Steering one-two-seven, sir!” He had not taken his eyes off the gyro compass repeater in front of him.
“Mark your depth!” said Buck.
“Five hundred feet. On the nose!” This was from Tom Clancy.
Buck picked up the general announcing mike, waited, looking at the clock mounted nearby. “All hands,” he said finally, speaking deliberately into it, “we should start feeling it five minutes from now! Mark your clocks!”
Richardson glanced at his wristwatch. It was an involuntary movement, one he had made at precisely this point during each of the drill exercises. But his mind hardly registered the positions of the hands on its dial.
“One minute until abeam, TDC,” said Brown. “Thirty yards.”
“That's about what I wanted, Skipper,” Buck said quietly. “She's a fat ship and I want to be sure there's plenty of overlap across her chain.”
Rich, sitting on the stool which had automatically been his station since the beginning of the drills, nodded his agreement.
“Two minutes till we might feel the chain!” Buck announced over the mike, looking at the bulkhead-mounted clock. To Clancy he said, “Remember, Tom, the chain will begin by pulling us up by the stern. Keep a zero bubble and let her seek her own depth. But when she starts taking on the weight of
Cushing
's anchor gear back there, you're going to have to pump out a lot more water than for the
Tringa
or
Besugo
. Don't let her get an up angle, and don't let the depth increase.”
“Roger,” said Tom Clancy, wondering why it seemed necessary to repeat these already well-rehearsed matters.
“Abeam to port! Twenty-eight yards!” announced Deedee Brown. “That checks with sonar,” he added.
Buck grabbed the mike, announced immediately, “We're abeam! We'll begin to feel the chain one minute from now!” Speaking quietly to Richardson he said, “Do you suppose there's any chance Keith won't realize he'll have to flood forward trim when we take the chain, and that we want the
Cushing
to increase depth some?”
“That's all in that long dispatch we wrote for ComSubLant to send. Anyway, he'll know what to do while his ship is being towed. The
Cushing
's not going to tow quite like the
Besugo
, you know. Setting up steady-state conditions will have to wait until we've got him hooked and underway.”
There was a tight grin on Buck's face. “I know all that, and I'm damn sure Keith knows how to handle his ship. I guess I'm getting wound up a bit.”
“I know. It wouldn't be natural if you weren't.”
“One minute since abeam,” said Jerry Abbott.
“Silence throughout the ship!” ordered Buck on the speaker system. To the helmsman he said, “Stand by!”
The silence reminded Rich of a submarine during the war rigged for silent running and expecting the initial salvo of depth charges. In a way, it was an apt comparison, for the tenseness of the moment was equally great.
“Mark! A minute thirty seconds since abeam,” said Abbott, nearly whispering.
Rich knew that the first faint rubbing contact might be felt anytime after the one-minute mark, depending on the accuracy of the estimated distance to the anchor when passed, but most likely not until nearly two full minutes had passed. Indeed, the first contact, when the nylon cable would be merely rubbing against
Cushing
's chain, might not be felt at all. More pronounced, though for a very short period, would be the links of the two chains rattling against each other; most noticeable of all would be when the hook had engaged the anchor chain and was beginning to pick it up. By careful calculation and actual experience, this must happen exactly two minutes thirty-six seconds after the anchor was passed abeam, although there might be a few seconds more before it was noticed. But if the hook did
not engage the chain at that point, it would pass it, necessitating another try.
Buck, trying to look confident, was succeeding much better than his slight, taciturn exec, Rich noticed. It might not have been the height of wisdom on the part of BuPers to put two such similar nervous-energy types in the same subâbut then no one had ever accused Buck of being taciturn, and he did have a sense of humor which Rich had not yet noticed in Jerry. He wondered how well he was concealing his own nervousness.
“Two minutes!” whispered Jerry, holding up the same number of fingers.
Sitting on the stool, Rich tried to keep his emotions contained. This was, of course, the moment of truth, but as had happened occasionally, something might have gone wrong. Well, if so, they would try again, passing nearer to the anchor, and there was always the other rig, unused, in number-seven tube. Perhaps, because of the ever melting layer of ice on its surface, the Arctic Ocean salinity was less than that off New London, even if Tom Clancy hadn't noticed it, and therefore the paravane might have less than the calculated buoyancy. But Tom
would
have noticed the difference in
Manta
's own trim. In fact, come to think of it, he had reported the need to pump out several tons of water from the trimming tanks, but no one had felt it was a really significant amount. . . . Still, if the paravane floated noticeably lower, the nylon hawser could conceivably pass under the anchor. . . . But this was absurd. It could
not
be that much lower. The nylon itself floated. If anything it would bulge upward, instead of down.
“Two minutes thirty!” Jerry whispered, with a look of doom. Buck, Rich noted, was again eyeing his own stopwatch. Good man! At the thirty-six-second point he intended to stop, as planned, regardless of whether the chain had been engaged or not.
But all of Richardson's worries were forgotten at that instant, when sonar reported on the speaker, “JT hears the chains!”
“All stop!” barked Buck. The helmsman twisted his annunciators to Stop, watched the follower pointers from the engineroom match him.
“All stop, answered!” he said.
Again, the wait, but now it was for realization of, and reaction to, the next step. The hook would begin to drag the chain, in the process initially seeming to lift the
Manta
, and then at some point, having led the chain forward of the
Cushing
, the hook would begin to slip down toward the anchor. The noise of this would be very clearly heard, even though it would be happening in the sonar baffles dead astern. Somewhere in this process, perhaps not until the hook had engaged the anchor itself,
Manta
would begin to feel the weight of
Cushing
's anchor.
Cushing
, at the same time, would feel the loss of weight. Keith must, nevertheless, permit his ship to drop down to approximately
Manta
's depth, whatever that turned out to be, and
Manta
must be allowed to rise even as she picked up the added weight.