Cold is the Sea

11

There had been no warning whatever of the presence of another submarine, or anything else, for that matter, until too late to avoid. It must have been a submarine, running silent, close to the underside of the ice. Nothing else could have produced the sudden, disconcerting heave of Cushing’s big hull, the metallic grinding sound as her propeller mangled its seven exotically shaped blades into twisted bronze, the shriek of tortured bearings in her engineroom as the propeller shaft bowed in the middle and then returned to normal. The initial shock had thrown the big missile submarine heavily to starboard. It was followed by a series of smaller, more scraping blows. The Cushing heaved upward from the stern, and suddenly it was over, the noise gone, leaving only reverberations in the water and slow-growing appreciation of disaster.

An inspection of the turbine mounts and the propeller-shaft steady bearing, carefully conducted later, confirmed that these massive mechanisms had been displaced as much as half an inch, and had then returned to their normal positions. The findings had been greeted with incredulity by Cushing’s engineer officer, Curt Taylor, and by all the enginemen and machinists who had made the measurements; but the proof was there, marks in the machinery foundations themselves. Only Keith, when he saw them with his own eyes, could accept the undisputable evidence. Some years previous he had viewed remote-control movies in slow motion of what actually happened when a sister ship of the old Eel had been subjected to a test depth charging. The veteran hulk had been depth charged to destruction, but the cameras, specially protected, had been brought back by divers who had carefully entered the shattered and flooded old hull after it was all over.

Keith and the other viewers of the film had had it run several times, at both fast and slow speeds, before they could believe what they saw: steel forgings stretching like rubber, snapping back to their original configurations; pieces of heavy equipment moving radically, sometimes as much as a foot or more, in relation to each other; more slender rods and pipes bending and springing like so many thin rubber bands, and then, after the shock, looking as if nothing had happened — except for a cloud of paint particles which had flaked off and, for several seconds, floated to the deck amid the dust and trash also flung there.

Any theory that vibration communicated to the camera itself could have been responsible for what the films showed was disproved by the fact that the objects in view moved in disparate directions, some one way and some another. Some of them, less securely fastened, continued to vibrate for several perceptible, rapidly diminishing, cycles. In succeeding and more powerful charges some were broken clean, or their securings sheared off. At the end, there was the horrendous flooding entry of white water as the lethal charge finally breached the stout old hull. Keith and the other wartime submariners present had sat several seconds in silence after the film was over. There had been no noise, no accompanying crash of depth charges, no terror or pain inflicted. But Keith, and the others, had needed none. The view of the tortured machinery had been enough. Each had his own memories of depth chargings, and some, like Keith, would always carry in their minds the knowledge that what they had just witnessed, in the safe confines of one of the Pentagon’s movie auditoriums, might have been the last thing seen on earth by their old friends and shipmates.

After the films Keith no longer wondered why it was that Eel’s hull had appeared to whip during depth charging, how it could be that the main engines — those huge locomotive-type diesels — had seemed to bounce convulsively on their bed plates. They had, even though no one would believe it at the time. The pictures in slow motion, taken at ten times normal film speed, demonstrated that his instantaneous impressions during the war — and those of others who had seen similar things — had not been wrong. They had not been hallucinations due to stress. These extraordinary things had actually happened.

Irrefutably it had happened to the William B. Cushing herself, even though the shock had been one of collision, not nearby explosion. It took the calm evaluation of all the evidence to reach the inescapable conclusion. This amount of damage could only have happened by collision with another steel hull — and at some speed.

Keith had been maneuvering his ship slowly, positioning her under the most promising frozen-over opening in the ice found so far. Originally it had been a long crack, or lead, in the ice floe. Instead of being closed by action of the wind and ocean currents it had remained open, perhaps even widened slightly, while the somewhat less saline water at the surface froze into a permanent bridge over the opening. The double echo trace on Cushing’s upward-beamed fathometer indicated the thickness as somewhere between three and four feet. But the crack was narrow, less than one hundred feet in width, rimmed by old ice floes twenty feet thick or more. Seen from below, it was in shape a ravine in an otherwise fairly smooth, inverted plain of ice.

In order to break through the thin ice cover it was first necessary to position the bulbous 420-foot Cushing lengthwise between the two downward-projecting, near vertical ice cliffs on either side of the lead, bring her up gently and carefully, exactly midway in the thin spot. Keith, at Cushing’s control station, knew he was not yet at a depth shallow enough to strike the ice. His first, instantaneous reaction was that there must have been an unnoticed, disastrously deep ice pinnacle — the bottom of an unseen berg embedded in the ice floe — against which Cushing’s propeller, instantly stopped but not until it had turned half a dozen revolutions against whatever it was that she had struck, had received considerable damage.

But sonar, which had continuously been reporting all clear, had suddenly announced strange propeller noises dead astern in the baffles, and close aboard. Many crew members later reported having heard them throughout the hull at the time of the collision, with or without earphones, along with a cacophony of machinery noises from some other ship. The report from sonar was simultaneous with a tremendous upward heave aft which could only have resulted from something big passing underneath. Keith had just lowered his periscope, had been watching the underside of the ice through his controllable TV camera and its paired searchlights. Hurriedly he swiveled it around to extreme horizontal train, saw bubbles and turbulent water rising around his own ship’s hull.

The foreign submarine must have been traveling recklessly fast so close to the undersurface of the ice. She must surely be nuclear-powered, and she must have been running in the silent mode (which might indicate knowledge that an American submarine was in the vicinity). Coming from astern and at a somewhat greater depth, she had struck the Cushing right aft on a slightly divergent heading and had bumped some distance along her bottom before breaking clear. Why sonar had not previously given some warning would bear investigation, both as to Cushing’s own sonar and the sonar conditions themselves, but Keith was well aware of the vagaries of underwater sound transmission under the best and most usual of conditions, particularly astern, where there was a masking effect from one’s own machinery and propeller. Here in the Arctic, under bumpy, fissured ice floating on a layer of brackish water, there was every opportunity for sound reception to be erratic.

The Cushing had not yet been quite lined up with the frozen lead when the collision took place. Keith had been maneuvering with both his main power and the auxiliary “outboard motor,” the retractable emergency electric propulsion motor, when the impact came. It shoved the huge submarine ahead and sideways and changed her heading thirty degrees, by chance positioning her almost exactly as Keith had wanted her. He seized the opportunity, brought her the rest of the way up against the frozen surface, then began blowing his main ballast tanks.

Cushing’s sail, specially reinforced to take the pressure, dug into the ice above and broke through with a great creaking and groaning of stressed steel, carrying a big chunk of ice “frosting” atop the black, rectangular-appearing structure. Her sailplanes, turned to a vertical position, sliced through the ice neatly and almost noiselessly on each side. Aft, the topside rudder, apparently undamaged, thrust through also, like a distant sentinel. Keith stopped blowing before the submarine was lightened sufficiently for her entire body to heave up the ice under which it lay. The three or four feet of undisturbed ice would conceal the big black hull from surface or air observation, while the narrow crevasse into which he had brought her would tend to protect her from detection underwater, should the other submarine find its way back to the place of the collision. It was almost like an underwater garage. Only the bottom portion of the missile submarine’s hull would project below, visible, to be sure, to any submarine coming close enough to inspect through its periscope, but surely invisible to any sonar search. Above the ice blanket, radar might possibly distinguish the sharper outline of Cushing’s sail from the many rough protuberances of the ice field, but the greatest danger of detection was visual. That black rectangle and its smaller satellite, the rudder, could be seen for miles.

Keith hesitated a moment to weigh the priorities. There was something he must do before clambering out on the submarine’s bridge and thence to the ice. There would be some delay, anyway, while a hastily organized working party hacked away with axes and crowbars at the huge, dripping ice cakes filling the bridge cavity. As soon as this was done they would move immediately to the area of the ship’s retractable antennas and clear them for hoisting. Ten or fifteen minutes, at minimum, would elapse before Cushing’s radio room could begin to transmit the message he and Jim Hanson had laboriously prepared.

Encryption had been completed only an hour or so ago, immediately after the decision that this fourth area of thin ice, frozen over as it was, was likely to be as satisfactory as any Cushing would find at this time of year. A message of some kind was overdue anyway. But the few minutes of delay before it could be sent were long enough to make a quick change to report the collision. It should be possible to do this without reencrypting the entire message. Howie Trumbull would be able to take care of it.

In only one thing were Richardson and Williams wrong in their evaluation of what had gone on aboard the Cushing. Keith was not in the radio room while his first message was being sent. He had handed the quickly revised text to Trumbull and then hurried to the bridge, donning on the run a heavy hooded parka, equally heavy wool trousers and thick boots.

The hatch trunk leading to the bridge was mercifully protected by the rounded forward portion of the sail, so that there was at least some transition from the temperature inside the submarine to that of the winter Arctic. His lungs nevertheless felt as though he had suddenly drawn in a shaft of solid ice. Two breaths later (he had become more cautious, breathed more gently) he was on the bridge, fumbling with the cords so as to draw tighter the hood of his parka. There was a mild but freezing wind. He had forgotten mittens, was torn between exposing his hands to pull on the drawstrings and thus protect his face — already beginning to feel numb — and plunging them into his parka pockets to keep his rapidly stiffening fingers from freezing. He kept his head below the oval cockpit, turned his back to the wind, drew up and knotted the drawstrings, finally shoved his hands into the grateful warmth of the pockets. There he found the pair of mittens some forward-thinking parka custodian had placed in them, drew them on, and immediately shoved his mittened hands under his armpits.

It was much easier to look to leeward, but he resolutely forced himself to survey the entire horizon. The binoculars he held to his face were some protection. The month of March was at midpassage. The vernal equinox was still a week away, and the sun had not yet broken above the horizon. Instead, it traveled unceasingly around through 360 degrees, out of sight, its location revealed by a spot of extreme brightness from which rays of sunlight, broken by unseen clouds, streamed upward. The entire Arctic was a rapidly lightening semitwilight zone. This close to the North Pole, the year was divided into only the dark period, the twilight, and the daylight. In Cushing’s location, within 200 miles of the Pole, the nearest equivalent of “night” was when the sun was directly across the Pole, thus farthest below the horizon. In navigation parlance, the sun “dipped” when it was due north, and came nearest to the horizon when it was due south. On the twenty-first day of June, when the sun was at its most northern point, to an observer exactly at the Pole it would be only about twenty-three degrees twenty-seven minutes above the horizon — and would appear to travel completely around him at that elevation during the day’s official twenty-four hours.

There had as yet been no perceptible warming of the Arctic wastes. Winter still had the area in its grip. The temperature topside, according to a thermometer which some quartermaster had thoughtfully placed in an angle-iron recess on the bridge before laying about with a crowbar, was a minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. From somewhere Keith recalled that this point, on the Centigrade scale, also read minus forty, the only place where the two coincided. Keith had lost sensation in his cheeks. Frostbite must be near. A few feet away, four men, garbed as he was, were demolishing the last of the ice on the rounded, ice-reinforced top of Cushing’s sail. They had been topside far longer than he. They must be nearly frozen. The unnatural stiffness of their features and the clumsiness of their movements showed it.

One thing he could do for them, for morale in general. It might even bring volunteers for any similar jobs. He fumbled for the button controlling the bridge speaker, pressed it with his knuckle through the thick wool-and-leather mittens, spoke into it. “Control, this is the captain. The ice-chopping crew is finished and coming below. Tell the doctor to issue them a ration of medicinal spirits first thing. Also to everyone else coming down from a topside detail. It’s cold up here. Be sure all hands coming topside wear face masks and full cold-weather gear.” He released the button, pressed it again. “I’m going out on the ice,” he said. “Send me a face mask, and keep a watch on me through the periscope.”

He released the button, waited for the face mask, then began to climb over the side of the cockpit, placing his feet carefully on the rungs welded to the outside. He would inspect quickly for whatever damage could be seen from the surface. Doubtless there would be little or nothing he could see, but it would give him solitude to consider what next to do.

Keith was grateful to the supply officer whose forethought had included white paint among the special Arctic equipment with which the Cushing had been loaded. While he was thawing out in the after part of the warm engineroom, watching Curt Taylor and his machinist’s mates as they crawled among the heavy foundations of the propeller shaft and reduction gears, another half-dozen men were eagerly earning their rations of medicinal brandy by hastily daubing a coat of white paint over all visible portions of the ship.

Damage assessment was dismaying. The other submarine had bumped and scraped some distance along Cushing’s bottom and marked its passage with a series of dents visible from inside. To withstand sea pressure at depth, the pressure hull and framing of submarines, particularly the large-diameter hulls of modern missile submarines, are far stronger than comparable structures of any other type of ship. Keith was amazed at the reports of dents between frames in the Cushing’s single hull section, had to inspect them himself before accepting what had been reported to him. He could conjecture what must have happened to the thin outside plating of the double hull section. The other submarine, having been struck in her upper works, must have suffered major damage as well.

Although the Cushing’s hull was sound, despite the dents, the shock to her propulsion machinery had been enormous. Most significantly, her huge propeller was undoubtedly badly damaged, and the propeller shaft showed measurable travel from side to side as the electric “creep motor” slowly rotated it. When a few faster revolutions ahead and astern were attempted under turbine power, the instantaneous vibration transmitted to the whole huge structure of the shaft bearings and reduction gears was frightening. It had been intended to go up to fifty or sixty rpm, the ship still being held fast in the ice, but the shaking was so strong that Keith ordered the shaft stopped when it reached twenty rpm.

“Whew!” muttered Curt Taylor, mopping sweat off his ample face. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything like that! I wonder what’s on the end of the shaft. It must be really bent out of shape!”

“It looks bad,” agreed Keith, in an equally low voice. He had been listening on a telephone handset, now hung it up. “It took more steam than usual to turn the shaft. The motor was drawing more amperage, too, I saw. Curt …” His voice became even more grave. He drew the chief engineer farther away from the others. “Curt, we’ve got to hope at least one blade of that screw can still give us some thrust, somehow. The emergency propulsion motor is completely gone!”

Curt Taylor’s eyes widened as he took it in. “It was rigged out, that’s right! I’d forgotten — we were using it to help maneuver. What do you mean, it’s gone. Is it beyond repair?”

Keith nodded. “It’s gone. Wiped clean off. There’s nothing left of it.”

Cushing, like all the big missile submarines, had been designed with a retractable electric-powered “outboard motor,” in the auxiliary machinery compartment just forward of the engineroom, which could be hydraulically extended below the keel for maneuvering in close quarters, or, if necessary, for emergency propulsion. Normally it was carried completely housed; even the opening in the ship’s bottom was closed over, so there would be no break in the smooth continuity of the underwater body. Keith had been using it to help position the ship under the frozen lead, and by consequence it had been sheared off in the collision.

Her secondary propulsion having been stripped away, Cushing would be totally dependent on her main drive for any movement. Taylor’s face showed the seriousness with which he viewed the situation. “Skipper,” he said, “we had the shaft up to twenty rpm, but I don’t think we could even keep that up for long. It looked to me she’s definitely bent out of line. That’s why it took more power to turn it. Also, there’s that vibration. Whatever it was that hit us, it ruined the propeller. Who knows what we have out there now on the end of our propeller shaft!”

“If it can drive the ship at all, Curt, we’ve got to use it. Control reports the ship didn’t even try to move in the ice while we had the shaft turning, but we didn’t keep it turning very long. We’ll have to give it another try. I don’t want to drop out of this polynya until we’re sure we can travel, or at least come back to it if we need to. Keep your boys on it. Figure out anything you can do, maybe loosen some of the foundation bolts so the shaft can turn more easily. We’re going to have to get some people in the water with diving outfits to inspect—”

The telephone buzzed. “For you again, Captain,” said the man who answered it, as he held out the instrument. Keith listened, put it back on its cradle with a terse “thanks.” He turned back to Taylor. “They need me up in control, Curt. Do everything you can. We’re in real deep trouble.”

From the after end of the engineroom to the control room was a distance of over 300 feet, the major portion devoted to the sixteen silos in the missile compartment — sixteen tremendous cylinders, set vertically, extending from the bottom of the submarine through all the decks between and through the cylindrical hull on top. Strangely, despite the formidable complexity of everything about the Cushing, here, in the place that it was all about, where her firepower was located, there was none of the profusion of equipment so characteristic of the rest of the ship. Except for a few chests of spares ranked outboard against the curved side, and the umbilical cords plugged into each silo — reaching through to the missile at their upper end, disappearing beneath the deck at the other — the compartment seemed bare, in marked contrast to the rest of the ship. And yet, were these sixteen silos fully loaded with war-ready missiles, which at the moment they were not, they would carry within them more explosive power than the total used by both sides in both world wars!

The missile compartment, from which all this destruction could be unleashed upon command, actually presented a scene of peace and serenity. The sixteen huge vertical tubes, cork-insulated around their exterior, painted a light coral tone, had never failed to impress Keith with their total lack of malevolence. Perhaps it was that the mind of man simply could not encompass the dreadful intent, the terror, for which they had been built. Nor the fear which had inspired them.

Even now, as Keith sprinted the length of the passageway alongside the ranked missile tubes, the old philosophical reverie roused itself from some dormant part of his mind. But there was no time for contemplation today. He reached the watertight door at the end, hurriedly spun the handwheel to undog it, pushed it open. The man standing in the passageway readily understood Keith’s wordless signal to dog down the door once more, and Keith continued his hurried trip past the navigation center into the cluttered open space which was the nerve center of the ship.

Jim Hanson, Keith’s tall second-in-command, sprouting the red beard which would come off before return to port, was standing on the raised periscope station, facing the lowered starboard periscope. There was a look of helpless concern on his face. “I lowered the periscope, Skipper,” he said as soon as Keith appeared. “There’s an airplane out there, and I figured we’d be a little harder to see with it down.”

“How far?” said Keith. He reached his side with a huge leap up the metal steps, aided by the handrail on either side.

“On the horizon.”

“Is it coming this way?”

“Couldn’t tell. It wasn’t coming right at us. Yet, anyway.”

“Could you see any markings?”

“Too far.”

With a decisive movement, Keith shoved the hydraulic control handle, started the periscope up. “I’ll have to take a look,” he muttered to Hanson as the shiny tube began to rise. “It can’t be one of ours, though. Do we have anyone topside?”

“Negative,” said Hanson. “We’re standing lookout watch on the periscope. All hatches are shut.”

“Good,” said Keith as the periscope handles appeared smoothly out of the periscope well. He snapped them down, hooked his right elbow over one handle, his left hand on the other, applied his face to the rubber guard around the eyepiece. “We can’t dive out of this hole we’re in until we know if we have propulsion,” he said as he began swinging the tall, thin instrument. “We’ll never get back to it, and we sure won’t be able to look around for another one. Their boat must have some problems, too. It must have taken a lot of damage, considering how hard he hit us.”

“You think they’re looking for him?” Hanson asked the question in a low voice, standing alongside Keith as he began swiftly rotating the periscope.

“Probably.” Keith answered without taking his eye from the eyepiece, leaning to his left as he let the weight of his body help spin the periscope. He stopped suddenly, straightened up slightly, began swiftly manipulating the periscope controls. Then, very rapidly, he spun the instrument around twice, stopped on the same bearing, looked for a long instant and flipped up the handles.

Jim Hanson, his hand on the control handle, pulled it toward him. “What do you see?” he asked as the periscope dropped away.

“There’s three planes out there circling around something.”

“How far?”

“On the horizon. Maybe a little beyond. Probably about where you saw the first one.”

“You think they’re looking for the boat that hit us?”

“That would be pretty fast work. Could be, I s’pose, but I’d be a little surprised if they’re out looking for him this soon. We’ve not even got an answer to our message yet.”

“Could you make out the markings?”

“No. But I’m glad we had enough white paint to cover everything that came up through the ice. I’m not too anxious for them to find us. Not yet, anyway, especially if they’re out here for some other reason.” Keith paused. “Listen,” he resumed, “I don’t want to use the periscope any more than we can help. It increases the chances they’ll spot us on their radar. But we’ve got to keep a watch on them. So there’ll have to be a topside lookout. Get a watch set up right away. He’ll need heavy-weather gear, and a heater in the bridge cockpit. Also, have him keep a white sheet or tablecloth wrapped around his head and upper body.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Hanson.

Keith was grateful for the reversion to official language. Jim Hanson’s questions had begun to be uncomfortable. Although Jim was his most trusted subordinate, he had known him only during the year or so of the ship’s precommissioning and training period. Such questions Keith might have asked of Rich, as his executive officer, because the relationship had been going on so much longer and was so much deeper. Or, they might have been required during combat, when one of an exec’s duties was to inform himself of everything his commanding officer knew and thought. Keith’s eyes followed Jim as he left the periscope platform to see about organizing the lookout watch. It was the first time he could recall having been even mildly displeased with him.

And then the idea introduced itself that, for Jim, it was the nearest thing yet to a combat situation. Jim was doing exactly what Keith had done, many times before. The difference was in the nature of the antagonist. Jim’s questions, in fact, were nearly the same ones Keith had asked of Rich. And suddenly Keith wondered why he had had such feelings in the first place. Could it, perchance, be the result of his own inadequacies? For he could already feel, growing within him, still held rigidly beneath the level of conscious recognition, the dread of what he was going to discover when at last the propeller could be inspected.

With the secondary propulsion system gone and the main propulsion out of commission, either with propeller blades crumpled or the shaft so far out of line that it could not be used, there would be no way of moving the Cushing. He and his ship and crew were trapped in the Arctic, as surely as those old wooden whaling ships! He dared not even drop out of the frozen lead in which he had surfaced, for fear of not being able to return to it!

Drafting the second message had been done with speed and urgency, yet it had taken well over an hour. And there were many discarded pieces of paper, carefully collected by Trumbull for destruction by burning. This process, too, reminded Keith of the many wartime moments when he had participated in the same thing: the drafting and redrafting; the poring over words and phrases; the painstaking distillation of every drop of meaning, accidental, possible or intended; the equally painstaking concern over how every word would — or could — be interpreted by the recipients. The effort to compress as much meaning as possible into the fewest words, knowing they would be subjected to the same process by those to whom addressed, and by many others besides.

After careful observation of the aircraft in the distance, Keith decided they were engaged in some activity centered in the vicinity where he had first seen them, not searching the area in general. There was, however, at least one plane continuously in the air, or so it seemed, for there had been only a few periods of any length during which none was visible. During the first one, a work party managed to chop a small hole in the ice behind the rudder and confirmed, from what they could see through the clear, still water, that the propeller had been badly damaged. But reappearance of a plane, albeit still on the horizon, caused Keith to countermand dispatch of the diver — the man had already gone to the bridge in his rubber suit and breathing gear — and hurriedly call back his men from the ice. Thereafter he had been more cautious. An hour later he had progressed no farther than thinking about sending out a new group when another aircraft sighting nullified the idea once more.

Timing of the second message had been exactly as Rich and Buck had surmised, planned so that it could go out while there was the best chance of reception on the east coast of the United States. The certainty that his first message must have galvanized his friends into tense attention awaiting his second had even translated into the likelihood they would try to intercept it direct, in Proteus’ radio room. And, just as Rich and Buck guessed, Keith was in his own radio room, earphones plugged into the circuit, while his second message was being sent out. There had been a perceptible thrill as he recognized the sudden, but not totally unexpected, interposition of a new station on the circuit transmitting his own wolfpack code.

Setting up the single side-band radio was swiftly done. There was a rush of sibilant reverberation as the initial transmissions were made. Chief Radioman Melson had his fingers on the fine-tuning dial, rotated it ever so slowly. Suddenly, as though it were from a ship close aboard, instead of thousands of miles away, Richardson’s voice boomed over the radio room loudspeaker. “Buck is here, too… How are you, old man?” There was a nuance of meaning in the words deeper than the mere formalities. In a guarded sort of way Richardson was asking how Keith — and his ship — really were.

Keith had not thought about security. The order to go to voice communication was sufficient, so far as he was concerned, and only now, sensing Richardson’s own reticence at speaking out plainly, did the possibility of interception by unwanted listeners cross his mind. They would need special equipment, able to monitor the entire frequency spectrum, but undeniably it could be done if the need had been anticipated.

Thinking fast, he said into his microphone, “This is Keith. I read you loud and clear. This is Keith. I read you loud and clear. How me? Over.” He said the brief message twice. It would not do to use the name of his ship over voice radio, but his own first name would be all right. Rich had done the same.

The ship’s telephone rang in the radio room. Melson picked it up, answered, held it out to Keith. “For you, sir.”

“This is the OOD on the bridge, Captain. We’ve got a plane in sight again.”

“Keep me informed,” said Keith. “Be ready to submerge if it heads this way!” Keith dropped the handset. Richardson’s voice on the speaker was saying, “Can you stay up on voice? Over.”

“Negative, Rich. There’s too much activity over the equator…” Rich and Buck would understand. Maybe he was being a little coy, but there was no point in calling the attention of a chance listener to his position.

Suddenly there were two loudspeakers going at once. Richardson’s next transmission was paralleled by the ship’s general communication system. Jim Hanson’s voice. “Captain, this is Jim. I’m on the bridge. That plane is closer than ever before. It’s on a steady bearing. I think it’s headed this way!”

Rich was saying something about maintaining a watch on the voice circuit. Keith had already begun a reply. Perhaps the plane had a direction finder, was homing in on his transmissions! Hurriedly he closed out the conversation, speaking quickly. His voice, he knew, would transmit its own sense of exigency. Rich and Buck, for the time being, would have to be satisfied with that.

The control room was but a step away, through a bulkhead. For the barest instant he debated going to the bridge himself. No. Jim’s presence was already increasing the load up there by one. If it became necessary to dive, another extra person would slow down the process of clearing the bridge and getting everyone below. Worse, encumbered as everyone was with heavy clothing, he might be caught in the hatch trunk and jam up the process inextricably. He picked up the periscope-station mike, pressed the button for the bridge. “Jim, I’m in conn. What’s it like now?” Jim would recognize his voice. No need to go through the obligatory call-up procedure.

Jim must have had his hand already on the speaker switch, automatically overrode Keith when he pushed it. His amplified voice filled the control room as Keith was uttering the last few words. “It’s out of sight now. Still steady bearing, though. Maybe it’s not heading this way.” There was relief in Hanson’s voice, and yet uncertainty, too. The plane was still some distance away, perhaps still beyond the horizon, flying low…

An old memory clicked in Keith’s mind. The pupils of his eyes dilated as the impact sank in. The plane was flying low. There was malevolent intent in that. It might be on an attack run! “Clear the bridge!” he yelled into the microphone, the fingers gripping it suddenly clenched, the blood driven out of his fingernails. “Take her down!”

With his other hand he pushed the handle controlling the hydraulic periscope hoist. As the bright metal tube slithered silently up from the periscope well he could sense the quick bustle of the control room crew standing up to their stations, their practiced hands waiting for the orders that would open vents, let air out of tanks and send the powerless Cushing deep into the icy sea.

Two blasts of the diving alarm. Jim Hanson had sounded it from the bridge after making sure the heavily bundled lookout and the OOD had gotten into the hatch trunk. He would be the next-to-last man down, would render assistance as necessary as the Officer of the Deck dogged the hatch. Already the lookout, red of face (what could be seen of it), skin puffed from the cold, bulky in the heavy clothing under his white sheet, had appeared in the control room. A quick look to the left, to the ballast control panel. Its operator was in the process of flipping the last of the switches controlling the main vent valves.

The base of the periscope appeared at the top of its well, dragging with it the big tubular radar section. Keith had chosen the radar periscope because of the superior optics its larger head-size accommodated. He grabbed the handles as they appeared, snapped them down, with a single smooth motion put his right eye to the eyepiece and swung the ’scope around to the previously noted bearing of the aircraft. The periscope height would permit him to see what the uneven ice denied to Jim Hanson on the bridge.

Just as he had thought! The plane was flying as low as it could, almost brushing the ice, lifting just enough to give clearance to occasional hummocks and piled-up drifts. It was headed directly for the Cushing. Its two whirling propellers were plainly visible. So was the fixed landing gear, with large broad skis instead of wheels. Fortunately, the bridge watch had been alert. Possibly the plane had been sighted before beginning its run in. Whatever the sequence of events, and their cause, now it was down on the deck, headed directly toward him. There was only one way to interpret this hazardous style of flying. The plane was trying to remain concealed. Only a professional military pilot would fly this way, and only if his intentions were not friendly!

Keith noticed that his periscope was lower, the ice surface nearer. He hazarded a swift look aft. Yes, the rudder had vanished, leaving a neat hole in the ice shaped to its cross section and the smaller hole his men had cut directly abaft it, which had not been visible as long as the rudder protrusion was in the way. He could not depress the periscope optics enough to see whether Cushing’s sail was still visible, and he did not try. The diving officer, or Jim Hanson, whom he could sense now standing beside him on the periscope station, would in any event report depths as the ship submerged, and he could calculate the disappearance of his sail by himself. The plane was closer, although he had been looking in another direction less than ten seconds. How long would it take to get here? How fast was it coming? How far away?

Answers to all these questions were by guess and estimation only. Cushing, with no way on, was dropping very slowly. During the war Walrus and Eel had customarily dived in seconds, often in less than half a minute, using the combined full diving capabilities of speed, sharp down-angle, and a boat deliberately ballasted heavy. Cushing was four times the displacement of Eel, and she had no power. Even if she had, she could not have used speed to leave her niche in the ice. She was going down excruciatingly slowly.

“What’s the depth?” he snapped, without taking his eye from the periscope. He would lower it as soon as the sail was under, but now that Cushing’s presence had been detected he might as well use it as long as he could.

“Forty-six feet.” Jim, answering instantly. He must have been watching the depth gauge. “Zero bubble. Forty-six-and-a-half — now it’s forty-seven feet. Four feet to go!” Good man. He knew what Keith needed to know. The Cushing went completely under at keel depth fifty-four feet. Allowing for snow buildup on top of the ice, her sail would be out of sight when her keel had reached about fifty-one. “Forty-eight feet,” said Hanson’s voice, speaking directly into Keith’s right ear.

The plane was close, now. A two-engine, propeller-driven, high-wing monoplane with fixed landing gear, rigged with skis for Arctic operations. Its presence in the Arctic could not have been spur-of-the-moment! Quickly he announced the description to Jim. “No insignia visible at this angle,” he concluded. It must be only a couple of miles away.

“Forty-nine feet,” said Jim quietly. The plane was clearly not a modern attack or combat plane. The apparently nonretractable landing gear — with skis, to boot — marked it as an aircraft configured for supply missions over icy terrain. But what had brought it and its two mates to the middle of the Arctic Ocean just at this moment? The idea that the Russians had been able to mount a rescue effort for their own submarine in the very short time since the accident simply could not wash. Perhaps it was a coincidence, some operation, already planned, now doubtless diverted. Perhaps — the idea struck suddenly home — the three aircraft and the submarine which had done the damage were part of a combined operation. Perhaps their presence, and the collision, were not accidental!

The plane was closer, perhaps a mile. “Forty-nine-a-half,” said Jim. Its underside was more clearly visible. Keith’s hand fell to the motorcycle-type elevation control, but there was no immediate necessity to elevate the periscope optics. The plane was not yet coming overhead. More of the underside was visible because it had suddenly assumed a climbing attitude. Now his angle of sight was distinctly below it. There were no insignia on the underside of the wing. A small object detached itself from the belly of the plane, between the skis, separated rapidly from it, grew swiftly in size as the plane zoomed upward.

“Sound the collision alarm!” Keith spoke rapidly. “He’s dropped something! Looks like a bomb!” He turned the handle rapidly, keeping the plane in sight as the scream of the collision alarm and the deep thuds of watertight doors slamming throughout the ship reverberated in his ears. When he reached the limiting elevation he watched the plane go out of sight overhead, then spun the periscope completely around. “Put me on the reciprocal!” Jim Hanson’s hands were over his on the periscope controls, shoved the ’scope to the right bearing. “Passing fifty feet,” Jim said. The plane had abruptly increased altitude as it dropped its bomb, but there had been no discernible course change. It would pass over the submarine in one or two seconds and he would pick it up as it again came within his field of view.

“Fifty-one feet,” said Jim as he waited. The sail must be nearly out of sight now; at least, buried in the snow and little pile of broken ice created when it pushed through. The bomb — if that was what it was — would be landing at any moment, no doubt before the plane reappeared in the periscope view. Perhaps he should have kept his eye on the bomb in its trajectory, instead of on the plane. Perhaps he should have lowered the periscope. He had consciously decided to risk leaving it up: if the bomb struck the sail, there was as much possibility of damage to the periscope whether up or down. If it missed, the ’scope was safe anyway, except for the extremely unlikely chance that the elevated portion might take a direct hit from an otherwise near miss.

BLAM! The explosion came with shocking suddenness. A cloud of white — flying snow and ice, and the smoke of the explosive charge — filled the periscope view. The rubber eyepiece vibrated against Keith’s forehead, the ridge of his nose and his cheekbone. The plane had not yet come into view. Now it would be impossible to see anything for a few moments. On releasing its bomb the plane obviously had been climbing for altitude. A bomb dropped from a low-flying aircraft was often as hazardous to the bomber as to the target, because the bomb “flew” the same course and speed as the plane while dropping away from it. Its shock wave on detonation inevitably encompassed the space directly above, where, unless there were room and time to maneuver, the plane that had dropped it would be. This was why the plane had swooped upward. It had been flying too near the ice to risk the radical course change which was the normal postrelease tactic.

“Fifty-three feet.” The reverberations of the explosion had died away, although to Keith’s hypersensitivity their vibrations, and the sympathetic tonal response of the submarine’s huge cylindrical hull, resounded in a lengthy continuum overshadowing his exec’s forced calm. Cushing was dropping faster, now. He had missed the fifty-two-foot mark. Most likely, despite his preternatural self-possession, Jim had missed announcing it as well.

Thirteen feet of periscope still out of water. Perhaps ten feet of it still projected high enough to be useful, above the blocks of ice thrown aside a few hours ago when the sail crunched up from below. But he could not allow the Arctic Ocean slowly to close over its extended tip, as if his ship were in an ice-free sea. There might be some tiny amount of current down below, a slow-moving, imponderable shifting of the water beneath the ice cover, enough to cause the helpless Cushing’s great bulk to move as she descended into it. It need not be much; just enough to bring the fragile periscope tube into contact with the solid ice rimming the hole. Even though far thinner than the regular ice floes covering the area, the three-foot thickness of ice in the frozen-over lead could bend or snap off the periscope with ease. He must lower it soon, within seconds at most.

Another thought impacted into Keith’s brain: barring the most extraordinary good luck in drifting under another lead, or polynya, once submerged there was no way he could get Cushing back to the surface again. From now on they were trapped, unable even to communicate.

“Fifty-four feet.” Still impossible to see anything, although perhaps vision was very slightly improving. He dared not wait longer. Keith snapped up the periscope handles to signal for it to be lowered but he kept his face to the eye guard, his hands to the folded handles. His knees bent slightly, preparatory to riding the ’scope down until it dropped below the floor plates. Understanding, Hanson pulled the hydraulic control handle gently, sent the periscope down at half speed. Just before he had to pull his head clear, Keith thought he saw the plane, barely visible through the thinning smoke and debris still in the air.

Afterward he could not be sure, but there was something different about it, something suddenly askew, not balanced as it should have been, something horribly wrong. On his haunches, he was forced to crane his head to the side and rear to allow the periscope yoke to pass between his legs and descend into the well, thus did not see the wounded wing spar give way, the wing collapse and fold back upon the plane’s fuselage.

Aboard the William B. Cushing, only the audio frequency sonar watch-stander heard the muffled crash as the disabled plane shattered itself on the ice a quarter of a mile away. The ice was twenty feet thick, solid with the iron rigidity of a century of existence and covered with a two-foot patina of blizzard-derived snow. The sound, transmitted first through the unyielding ice and then through water, resembled nothing the sonarman had ever heard. He listened carefully for a repetition, heard none, and gradually relaxed. It was a much less frightening noise than the explosion which had blasted into his eardrums only moments before. Nevertheless, the ship’s standing orders for sonar watch-standers required him to write a description in his log of what he had heard, immediately following his notation regarding the bomb explosion. But the bomb explosion itself, preceded by the frighteningly unexpected collision alarm and the resulting activity, had happened too recently. He had not yet even reached for the ball-point pen with which he made his entries.

There was no further underwater noise to note, and after a few minutes the sonarman took up his log book. It had all happened at the same time, 0612 according to the ship’s clock on the bulkhead. He began to compose a single laborious entry encompassing all the events of that confusing and scary instant.

Not until the next day, in the insulated quiet of the frigid Arctic under its sheet of solid ice cover, as the submarine hovered powerless, unable to move, did the sonarman call his superior’s attention to the strange crunching noise — as he had described it — which he heard just as the reverberations of the bomb explosion finally died away.