Authors: Edward L. Beach
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! Twenty-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 waterâher lifebloodâthrough 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 indefâ”
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.
“B
uck, 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?”
“Maybe the air blowing was what actually did it, boss. We'll never know. I vaguely recall somebody showing me how to do that when some bad guys were after us, a long time ago, on some old sub the name of which I now forget.”
“It was your spiral dive, Buck. That was what did it. I never saw a submarine handled that way before!”
“Actually, we'd practiced it. I was saving it to pull on you sometime,” said Buck, pleased. “But we never did it with that kind of speed before, nor with this good an excuse to show it off!”
“Well, it sure saved our bacon, old man!” Richardson put his hand on Buck's shoulder. Then his smile faded. “How much farther to the
Cushing
's plotted position?”
“Three miles by the dead-reckoning tracer. Good thing we
marked the DRT and set it on automatic when all this started. You should see what it looks like!”
“I've looked at it. It's wild, all right.”
“I wish we could go faster.”
“We mustn't be detected.”
“I know. Do you really think the Russian may think we're sunk?”
“I'd bet on it, Buck. The last he saw of us was when we took off with his fish in hot pursuit. He must have heard all that noise you put in the water, and right after the fish exploded you slowed down to nothing. It's not like the two times he hit our decoys. So now he's waiting there, taking stock. If Keith's sunk too, we'll hear him start up and go away; if not, he'll be taking his time nosing around, because the
Cushing
would still be dangerous.”
“And we're sneaking in, on the battery, running silent and at deep submergence, waiting for some kind of a false move.”
“We can't leave Keith till we know for sure.”
“Agreed. I'm trying to think of what to do if we find our other playmate again.”
“The first thing is to find him before he knows we're still alive. The second thing is to kill him.” Richardson's words were said without expression, almost as if he were referring to a routine happening. But Buck knew better.
A slight reduction in the urgency of
Manta
's situation was recognized by the two mugs of black coffee they held. Schultz, who must have lost ten pounds in unevaporated perspiration, had refused relief and was still at the sonar console. A large towel, with which he repeatedly wiped his face, lay around his heavy shoulders. Neither Buck nor Rich noted the fact that they were in a nearly identical condition. Buck had tucked the end of his towel under his belt. Rich's was stuffed behind a wire cable in the corner of the sonar room.
The sonar room ventilation had been planned for only a single occupant, the man on watch. Apparently no one had considered that a skipper, accompanied by whatever superiors might be aboard, might choose to conduct vital ship control functions there also. Not that there was greater comfort anywhere else in the ship at this moment, for
Manta
had been running for several hours with all ventilation, and even the air-conditioning, shut down. The atmosphere inside the submarine was fetid, the heat
unbearable, or nearly so. It
was
unbearable in the engineroom, where the temperature had at once risen to 150 degrees, and men had passed out. That compartment was now cooling, however, for its outer skin was not insulated. In the meantime an extra supply of salt tablets had been sent to the few men required to remain inside.
All metal portions of the submarine which in any way communicated to the sea outside were alive with condensation. It dripped off everything: pipes, stanchions, instrument foundations, light-fixture brackets, bulkheads. Everyone had sweat bursting out of his pores, even those few fortunates privileged to lie down somewhere for a legal snooze, and the puddles of condensed moisture on the decks made footing hazardous on the once polished linoleum.
But there were far more important things to think about, the primary one being how to remain alive.
Neither Rich nor Buck said anything for several minutes. Schultz brought both to his side with a simple factual statement: “I'm hearing something!”
“What's it like?”
By way of response, Schultz flipped a switch, spoke into a microphone mounted on the face of his console. “JT, do you hear pounding on the port bow?”
“Affirmative! I was just going to report it!”
“Well, don't you let me beat you to it again! You're supposed to hear sonic noises before I do!” Turning to his skipper, Schultz said, “Pounding, forty port.”
Buck was already adjusting the spare set of earphones. Clamping them on his ears, he frowned with concentration and nodded his head at Rich. “Here!” He detached the left phone, handed it to Rich. Through it Rich could hear rapid intermittent blows of steel on steel, rhythmic for a short period, then spasmodic, then a flurry of hurried blows again. “Frantic” was the word that instantly came to Richardson's mind. Several more blows, then silence.
“I'd say that's someone hammering something with a hammer or mallet,” said Rich. “Fairly close aboard. He sounded in a hurry to get it done.”
“Repairing something, maybe?”
“My guess is it's Keith.”
“Why not the other?”
“Keith was damaged. Neither sub would want to alert the other one. He might have had to do it.”
“What do we do now?”
“Nothing. We wait. If it was Keith, the Soviet will come over to investigate. Maybe we'll be able to hear him.”
“Schultz,” said Buck, lifting one of the sonarman's earphones, bending to speak directly into the exposed ear, “any estimate of the distance to the pounding?”
“Close,” said Schultz. He flipped his switch to activate the microphone connecting him to the JT sonic head. “JT, how far to the pounding?”
“Close. A mile, maybe. Sounded like it was being reflected from the ice.” The JT man's answer came only into the earphones. Schultz had not activated the sonar room loudspeaker. Buck saw Richardson smiling at him.
“It could be Keith,” Rich said. “If we've ever been quiet and listening, now's the time!”
Buck spoke softly into the telephone handset. “Silence, all hands. Absolute silence!” To Schultz he said, “Chief, we'll make a slow circle to clear your baffles aft. Search all around for any other noise, and check the bearing of this one whenever you can.” Replacing the earphone, he felt, rather than saw, the short jerk of the sonarman's head which was supposed to pass for a nod of understanding.
Again, the deep silence of waiting. Slowly,
Manta
described two complete circles. She was at maximum depth, far below the authorized test depth, as deep as Buck dared take her, sweating figuratively and literally both in her own hull and in the persons of her crew. The squeeze of millions of tons of Arctic seawaterâover 300 tons on each square footâpressed upon her body. All her machinery was stilled. Her battery, which kept her sonars functioning, her planes operative and her two propellers slowly turning, was totally silent. The occasional splash of a drop of condensate, too heavy to remain on the surface where it had congealed, was loud. The silence was that of death. An apt similitude, for death would probably come out of it. For someone.
The third circle was nearly finished. “We'll steady on the
bearing where we heard the pounding, run about a mile, and circle again,” said Buck.
“Right,” said Rich, indicating by his expression that he could think of no better action.
Manta
slowly swam on the ordered course, began to circle, in the opposite direction. “For variety,” said Buck, with the familiar tight smile. For more than an hour, switching occasionally to relieve their arms and hands, Rich and Buck had held the spare set of earphones to their ears. They were beginning to think of themselves as Schultz, long since, must have subconsciously felt of himself. They were large, amorphous beings, spread-eagled in the ocean, with antennas stretching in all directions; antennas floating into the infinite reaches, gathering in all the droplets of information, of sounds modern and primeval, listening with every sense of their beings, waiting. Waiting with limitless patience. Waiting for some sign.
All three men heard the report from the JT receiver when it came. “More pounding. Quiet like. It's above us, I think.” Schultz nodded vigorously, pointed to his own earphones. He, too, had heard something, although neither Rich nor Buck had noted it.
Buck flipped the switch Schultz had been using. “What's it like, JT?”
“Sounds like a rubber hammer hitting something. Not iron. Maybe it's hitting wood.”
“Keith!” said Rich. “He's okay! They're making repairs! It's got to be him!”
And then Rich felt a blow on his hip. Schultz was pressing both earphones against his head. He was gazing at his sonar scope, but his eyes were far away, far out in the ocean, which, for him, was totally represented by this circular fluorescent tube.
“What do you hear, Chief?” But Schultz could not hear the question. They waited, agonizing, wanting him to speak, not willing to break into his concentration. Finally he put his finger on his scope, tapping it gently with the fingernail.
“I hear something,” he said. “About here!”
“Is it the Soviet sub?”
“I think so. It's getting louder, but it's still faint.”
Coached by Schultz, Rich and Buck were soon able to hear the
noise themselves, and finally there came the verdict which made all the waiting, and worry, and discomfort, of the past few hours worthwhile. “It's him. That's the same signature we've been hearing.”
“Skipper,” said Richardson, “I'd give my right arm to be able to see up!”
“So would I, boss,” returned Buck, unaccountably pleased with the unexpected salutation. “We'll raise the 'scopes as soon as the hoists can lift them against sea pressure.”