Cold is the Sea

16

“I think he’s closing us,” said Schultz from the sonar console, where he had taken over his battle station. “He sounds louder, and the decible meter is reading a little higher.”

“Get another bearing from the Cushing, Jerry, and pass him ours when we get it. Schultz, give me a good solid center-bearing thirty seconds from now.” Buck was waiting the agreed-on interval so that his and Keith’s bearings would be at approximately the same time. “Stand by… Mark!”

“One-four-seven by grid,” said Schultz. Jeff Norton wrote the number on two scraps of paper, handed the first to Deedee Brown at the TDC and the second to Jerry Abbott when he came by for it.

Approximately a minute afterward, Brown returned. “Thirty-two-fifty yards,” he said. “Jerry came in the wardroom while we were plotting it; so I guess he’s checking with the Cushing.”

The darkened sonar room was dominated by the sonar console, in the center of which lay, at a convenient angle for viewing, a circular glass-faced tube dimly backlighted in red. The center of the tube was dark, but greenish-white flashes emanated regularly from the four-o’clock sector, halfway to the edge, and each flash coincided with a reverberating ping which jumped from the three pairs of earphones listening to it and bounced around the metal walls of the tiny compartment. Richardson wondered why Schultz, Norton and Buck Williams were not deafened by the piercing, high-frequency echo-ranging signals sent by the other submarine.

He had to tap urgently on Buck’s shoulder to get his attention. “We may as well go active ourselves. He’s not being very polite, and there’s no point in our being polite either. I’ll tell Keith to do the same. Go on short scale at full gain, and aim it right into his receiver, but wait one minute before you start so Keith can go off with you. Does your code cover this?”

“Not all that, Skipper.”

“All right, I’ll tell him on Gertrude.” Grim-faced, inwardly seething and at the same time worried, Rich walked the few steps to the periscope station, vaulted to the elevated platform, picked up the UQC microphone. “Keith,” he said without preliminaries, “this is Rich. We’re going active, and I want you to do the same. Short scale at full gain; aim it right at him. He’s closing in on us. Maybe this will make him be a little more circumspect.”

“Wilco, boss,” said Keith’s voice. “Do you want to start right now?”

“In fifteen seconds. Ping for exactly one minute, then stop. We’ll do the same.”

“Roger!”

Back at the sonar shack, Rich was gratified to see by the sonar console that both submarines blasted forth their beams of concentrated sonar energy at nearly the same instant. The spot on the scope occupied by the stranger was bathed in a rapid succession of flashing pings, and the corresponding echoes were loud and precise. The intruder, as seen on the scope, seemed to have an unearthly, eerie glow, and Rich could have sworn that he could discern, for an instant, the actual shape of the underwater craft.

Schultz positioned the range marker over the spot, read the range. “Thirty-two hundred yards, right on,” he said. “He’s still closing us … no, now I think he’s stopped closing. The range is opening slightly. It’s stabilized on thirty-two hundred.”

Williams gave a coarse laugh. “That barrage slowed him down a little!”

“Maybe, Buck,” said Rich, with the same grim look on his face, “but I wouldn’t bet on anything permanent. My main idea was to show him that he’s fooling around with a couple of United States men-of-war. If he’s a Soviet Navy skipper, that will mean something to him.”

Suddenly, all echo-ranging ceased. There was nothing on the screen. “He stopped too, sir!” said Schultz in a surprised tone. Then he grunted vindictively. “I’ll just bet you there’s a couple pairs of stinging ears over on that sub. They probably had their gain way up, the same as we do when there’s nobody pinging on us. Serves the bastards bloody well right, too. I hope their eardrums are busted good!”

Rich and Buck were again in their somewhat sequestered corner of the sonar compartment. “Skipper,” Buck said in a low tone, “have you any guess at all why he went away and then came back the way he did?”

“I’ve been thinking about the same thing, and the only idea I’ve come up with is that he shoved off to ask for instructions. How long was he gone? You must have it in the sonar log and the quartermaster’s notebook.”

“I already had Jeff look it up. It was five hours forty-three minutes from when we heard him turn away until we heard his echo-ranging when he came back.”

“Then I’d have to guess that he went somewhere within about a two-hour run, got his orders quickly and tore back looking for us. In the meantime, we covered about twenty miles, though it might not have been directly away from his base, whatever that was.”

“True. Besides, we made a ninety-degree course change right after he left, remember. So if we were going directly away from him one time, we couldn’t have been the other.”

“That’s right. Did we log the bearing we picked him up on?”

“Sure. At least, the quartermaster’s supposed to. Why?”

“Buck, could you have your plotters assemble every scrap of info they’ve got on that sub, and plot it? See if we can figure out what direction he departed in, and what direction he came back from. And see if your code lets us ask Keith the bearing and distance of the spot where he was rammed, and even the estimated location of the position those planes seemed to be operating around.”

“Glad to. But what good will that do us now?”

“You never know, old friend. But the more you find out about your enemies, the more you’re apt to luck into something you can use. And I don’t mind telling you one thing, very confidentially. Down deep, I’m scared. This whole situation stinks. If our friend yonder decides to play it rough, there’s damned little we can do. We’re on steady course, speed and depth, and he knows exactly what those are.”

“Not depth, exactly.”

“Don’t kid yourself! We’d have had it figured out by now, and you can bet he has, too!”

“But what can he do? What could they be wanting?”

“For one thing, they’d love a sample copy of our latest model Polaris missile submarine. They’d give a lot for that.”

“Keith would never surrender his ship.”

“Agreed. But what if he got into absolutely desperate straits, and only the Russians knew where he was, or could help him. They claim he shot down one of their aircraft, remember! What if the price of saving the lives of his whole crew was for Washington to order him to surrender and let the Russians cut a hole in the ice to get them out?”

“Couldn’t Keith be the last man out and open the vents behind him?”

“With the whole crew hostage? By that time Washington would be running the show, not him.”

“What if a whole bunch of airborne troops landed at just the right time …”

“And at just the right place, which wouldn’t be at all where we thought they were, ready for a mini-war in the snow and to sacrifice about as many men as they’d likely rescue … no sir, Buck, the Soviets had us over a barrel when there was only the Cushing here, and they knew it. At least, they thought so. It would have been so easy just to wait. They could even have had that sub checking the Cushing every once in a while. Keith was mighty smart to move her the way he did, even though he didn’t get far. Not many skippers would have thought of that. But they probably knew exactly where he was anyway, all the time. Maybe he’d have been smartest if he’d simply hovered at maximum submergence, letting himself drift wherever the deep currents took him. They’d have had to come looking for him by echo-ranging, then, and at least that would have warned him. With luck, they might not have been able to find him.”

“So, the Manta …”

“Exactly. We’re the fly in that ointment. They don’t need us or even want us. It’s the Cushing, a brand-new missile sub, that they want. But we’re the motive power that’s snaking the prize out from under their nose.”

“You think we’re the target?”

“If they decide to play real rough, we are. On two counts. One, we’re the motive power. Two, if we disappear, their hardball diplomacy is actually strengthened.”

“Then”—Buck had lowered his voice to a whisper—“you do think the collision with the Cushing wasn’t an accident! But how could they do something that risky deliberately? Their sub could just as well have been the one sunk.”

“She hit him from aft, and Keith thinks she was on a nearly parallel course. Also, she was running silent. Otherwise, he’d have heard her. If they’d have had any advance warning he was on his way, it might not have been too hard to fix one of their nukes with some kind of steel girderlike protection, or even some sort of projecting ram to stick up against a revolving propeller. We have a pretty tough ice suit built into the Manta, you know. At least, you were bragging to me about it. Why couldn’t the Soviets do the same thing, but skewed slightly?”

“It still sounds farfetched to me. Even if such a sub could wreck Keith’s propeller, he couldn’t be sure of getting the emergency propulsion motor too.”

“He did, though. Didn’t he? Did a really superb job. Got them both at once. I’m guessing that was fortuitous. Most likely the scheme was to disable the main propeller as though it were an accident, as though the Cushing had hit some hard ice. And then, while she was creeping home on the EPM, they’d have plenty of time to clip that off somehow.”

“If all your guessing is close to right, that Russian sub skipper must be a pretty doggone experienced one. And pretty doggone tough, too. If his mission was to disable Keith by ramming him with his own sub, he still was taking a hell of a chance that he might have been the one disabled.”

“We took a lot of chances a few years ago too, Buck. Ramming is not an unknown naval tactic, especially if your ship’s built for it.”

“They must know an awful lot about our subs, how they’re built and all that,” said Buck pensively.

“Don’t you think they do?”

“I suppose so. But they couldn’t have had that sub just hanging around up here waiting for someone maybe to show up. They must have known Keith was coming. Pretty far in advance.”

“Not possible?”

“He didn’t even know himself until a few weeks before!”

“Sure. I didn’t either, till a week or so before he did. But the thing had been planned a long time. They could have been watching construction of the Cushing. She’s the only missile sub built with an ice suit, you know. She’s the only one we could have sent. When did you find out her sailplanes could be elevated to ninety degrees?”

“Quite a while ago. It was all over Electric Boat because there were so many design changes needed.” Rich said nothing, and after a short pause Buck muttered, half to himself, “I see what you mean. The Cushing was the boat for them to watch.”

“Ship. That’s your line.”

“Ship.”

The sonar room was almost silent. Buck and Rich had unconsciously squeezed their heads tightly together in their darkened corner, above and to the side of the sonar console. The tiny compartment, the ship, the orderly quiet of the men at action stations, the tension of readiness for immediate emergency — all had temporarily fallen away from their consciousness. At the same time they were at the spot where the crisis would be first recognized, ready to take instant action even prior to the startled report from the sonarman.

Schultz, wedded to his precious sonar set, was unconscious of the low-voiced conversation two feet above his head. His head half-covered with huge, sound-insulated, sponge-rubber-covered earphones, reaching from behind his eyes to the curve of his neck behind his ears, concentration upon the information conveyed to him by the electronic instrument in front of him was total. He had already decided to call attention to the slightest deviation in the Russian submarine’s movements simply by striking out with his left hand. He would not have to distract his own attention by speaking. He would hit something, someone, and bring them over to him. More, as a man at the top of his profession, wise in the down-to-earth practicality of submariners, with perhaps his own life and those of all others aboard depending upon him, he knew this was exactly what his superiors would have expected. His own instructions to the operator of the sonic JT set, sitting on a stool with a similar set of earphones in the forward torpedo room, were to stand on no protocol or ceremony, to report anything he heard, or thought he heard, instantly via the special speaker circuit between the two stations.

There had been a pause in the conversation between the two officers. Both felt their senses acutely tuned to the limitless medium through which their ship was passing. Above them, not far away, was the nearly impervious ice cover; below, very far below, the rock basaltic plates of two of those slowly drifting crusts on the earth’s mantle which, in the Arctic Ocean, had by their confluence ages past created two huge basins, thousands of fathoms deep. Between the two limits, and further limited by the maximum depth to which Manta’s strong shell could descend, there was complete freedom to move in any direction her masters willed, as fast as they willed, up to the top power her nuclear reactor could deliver and her turbines receive.

Except that Manta was not free. She was a prisoner of the towline, constricted to move only slowly, steadily, constantly, in a single direction. Slight, and only very gradual, changes could be made in speed; changes in depth and direction could be made only very slowly, with the greatest of care. Violation of any of these rules would inexorably rupture the thin, weak thread that held out hope to Keith and his crew of 126 men.

“I think I’ll go start Jerry on that plot we want,” said Buck. “Back in a minute. We’ll have to use the UQC to get the information we need from Keith. Okay?”

“Got to,” said Rich.

When he returned, rather more than a minute later, for he had made a quick head call, Buck found Richardson and Schultz huddled over the sonar display. “He’s begun echo-ranging again,” said Rich. “And he’s begun to move out ahead of us. He’s up to something!”

“If he shoots a torpedo, I’ll have to maneuver to avoid. The towline will break.”

“I know, Buck. We’ll have the other one to hook up again with, if we get the chance.” Then a thought struck Richardson. “Don’t you have a couple of decoys up forward?”

“Yes.”

“Have them get one ready for firing. Quick, man!”

Buck did not even answer. He picked up the telephone handset, spoke directly into it, gave the order. “They’ll have to haul out one of the fish and load the decoy into the tube. They’re pretty fast, especially with all the extra men up there on battle stations. Three minutes, they told me.”

“God, we should have thought of this before,” muttered Rich. “That’s one string to our bow we should have had ready!”

“I should have thought of it,” said Buck. “After all, I’m skipper of this craft.” He was silent for a long, thoughtful minute. “What kind of fish do you think he’s likely to have?”

“Some straight running, for sure. The question is whether he can set them to run this deep. Besides that, probably some kind of target-seeking torpedo. Since they’re antisubmarine, most of them can be set for any depth a sub’s likely to be, and when they detect a sub they’ll go after it, whatever the depth. If he shoots one of those, we’ve got to make it think the decoy is us.”

“That’s what the decoy’s for, all right. But where do we go after we shoot it? There’s not much maneuvering we can do.”

“If you stop your screws, put her in full dive and flood negative, the Cushing will coast overhead. You could even back a little, when you’re deep enough. If you’re lucky, you might not even break the towline.”

“We should warn Keith, shouldn’t we?”

“We should; but if that sub’s really up to something, he’s monitoring us with every resource he’s got. We’d better not take the chance. Keith will know something serious is going on, and will cope.”

The telephone gave its characteristic squeak. Buck snatched it, listened. “Four and a half knots,” he said.

“Forward room wanting to know what speed to set on the decoy, eh?”

“Yep. They’re about to shove it in the tube.”

“Good. That was quick work.”

“Thanks.” Buck picked up the telephone again, said, “Tubes forward, you got that loose fish secured for angles? Good! Good work up there!” Hanging up the phone he said to Rich, “We’re always supposed to be ready for steep angles, but that torpedo was hanging in midair while they hauled it out of the tube, so I thought I’d check to make sure it was secured. It’s secure, all right. The chief even pretended I hurt his feelings by asking.”

“His feelings weren’t hurt. He’s proud of his work, and he’s pleased with you for giving him a chance to show it.”

Buck felt an elbow in his middle. Schultz was pointing to the illuminated spot on his dial where the enemy submarine was indicated. It had drawn well ahead, and echo-ranging spokes were no longer coming from it. Simultaneously, both officers noted the unexpected lengthening of the silence since the last ping.

“What’s he doing?” said Rich. “Could he be getting ready to shoot?”

“Echo-range, Schultz! Full power and short scale!” Buck ordered. There was savagery in his voice. Grabbing the phone, he said, “Tubes forward, set the decoy for short-scale pinging. Then flood the tube and shoot it! Let me know when it’s away!”

“Good for you, Buck,” said Rich quietly. “If he shoots now, it’s likely a quiet, fairly slow torpedo, programmed to finish its run by homing on noise. That must be why he shut off his pinging. So as not to confuse it. If he plans to shoot he’ll do it now while we’re pinging, so that his fish can home on it.”

Buck still held the phone to his ear, did not answer. Suddenly he said sharply, “Secure pinging!” Schultz flipped a switch on his console as Buck thrust past Richardson, stepped into the passageway outside the sonar room. “All stop!” he called peremptorily. “Tom! Flood negative! Twenty degrees down angle! Make your depth seven hundred feet!”

There was a clank of mechanism beneath their feet, the sound of water rushing through a large orifice, a huge whoosh of air and an increase in pressure on the eardrums. Manta began to incline downward with an ever increasing angle.

Buck had run across the control room, was talking to Tom Clancy. “Start blowing negative and zeroing the bubble at seven hundred feet, Tom,” he said rapidly. “I’m going to have to back then, and you’ll have your hands full keeping control. Use a bubble in bow buoyancy or main ballast if you need to. When the Cushing’s about overhead we’ll go ahead again. You’ll have trouble with your weights aft, too.”

“Maybe you’d better let her drift down an extra hundred fifty feet, Skipper, seeing this looks like an emergency. Cushing’s got her anchor at seventy fathoms, and she’s at three hundred feet right now. So that’s four hundred twenty feet added to whatever depth she winds up at when she starts feeling that extra weight. We don’t want to bump into that big iron mushroom of hers down there!”

“Right, Tom! Make your depth eight hundred fifty!”

“Also, you know there’s going to be a hell of a lot of pressure in the boat when we vent off all that air we’ll be using in negative tank!”

“Can’t be helped, Tom. Do it slowly. When we get a chance to, we’ll pump it back down with the air compressors.”

The deck had begun to incline quite steeply. The depth gauge was already registering five hundred fifty feet as Buck struggled across the control room to the sonar room. Three hundred feet to go! And, of course, he would have to allow for the angle in calculating where Manta’s stern was.

Schultz was saying, “Looks like there’s another submarine out ahead of us! It’s pinging just like we were, and I can even hear machinery noises.”

“How about the Russian? Do we know for sure he’s fired at us?

“We think so, Buck,” said Rich. “The JT reported something in the water, some faint swishing noise, out ahead of the Russian. We can’t hear it here. It’s too bad they didn’t think of putting the JT controls in the sonar room too.”

“The later boats have them that way, you know. What’s the Russian doing now?”

“He’s just stopped. Hovering, I guess, waiting for us to catch that fish of his.”

“Would you authorize shooting one at him?”

“If he’s really fired at us, I’ll sure think about it!”

“We’ll know if our decoy gets sunk!”

“That’s what I was thinking!”

All three men in the sonar room had to brace themselves against the steep downward inclination of the submarine. Now there was the sound of air blowing, and Buck heaved his head out the doorframe. He stepped out, holding to the frame for support, stretching his hand in front of him to the stacked motor-generator sets across the passageway. He skidded forward, holding to the rail around the periscope stand, reached the diving station. “Tom,” he said, “we may not need to back. Take her on down anyway, and I’ll give you two knots in a couple of minutes. Get us a zero bubble as soon as you can.”

“Thanks, Skipper! With no speed and all this changing of weights, I’ve got all I can handle today!”

“We might be firing a torpedo or two forward, Tom, to make it a little less boring for you. He’s already shot at us!” Buck left Clancy staring at him, started back to the sonar room. The angle already had lessened and the climb took only moments. “How’s it going?” he said.

“Our decoy’s out about a thousand yards ahead now, still sounding like a great little old submarine, and JT reports he thinks that thing the Russian shot, whatever it was, is about to merge in with it.”

“Schultz, what do you think?” Buck had to lay a hand on his shoulder to attract the sonarman’s attention.

“There was something out there all right, coming closer. It was on a steady bearing with us for a while, but then when we slowed down it started to pass ahead. Maybe it had a steady bearing with our decoy.” The chief sonarman had laid back one earphone. “Now it’s mixing in with the decoy, sniffing around it, like.”

“Has it passed it, or is it about to?” Buck asked.

“It should have passed it by now, but it hasn’t. It’s still sniffing.”

The angle was rapidly returning to normal. Abruptly, Williams picked up the phone. “Maneuvering! Make turns for two knots! Control, report that to Mr. Clancy and the helmsman!” He was returning the telephone to its bulkhead cradle when suddenly Schultz ripped off his headset with an exclamation. “Ouch!” he said, massaging his right ear, but neither Buck nor Rich heard him, for the sonar room was filled with the reverberations of a sharp, distant explosion.

The surprise with which Rich and Buck stared at each other was real, even though the explosion had not been entirely unexpected. “How long do we have before he realizes he didn’t tag us after all?” asked Buck rhetorically.

“A couple of minutes, maybe. The longer we stay in Cushing’s sonar shadow, the longer it will take him to figure out what’s happened,” said Rich.

“What about Keith?”

“He’ll realize we’re close aboard, and will guess we fired the decoy.”

“I’d like to shoot one of our Mark Forties at that bastard!”

“Buck, I’m in command of this force. I order you to return the fire. See that my specific order is entered in the log!” Buck Williams stared at his superior. The look on his face, the determined fury in his eyes, were clear, and all too familiar. Richardson was glaring at him unblinkingly. “Put it in the log, Buck,” he said softly. “If you do not carry out my order, I shall relieve you from command!”

Buck was puzzled for a fraction of a second. Then his brow smoothed, and he knew what to do. He knew Richardson meant precisely what he said, and he had thought of the reason why. “Aye, aye, sir!” he said. He picked up the phone. “Tubes forward,” he said, “the commodore has ordered us to return the fire. Load the other decoy in the empty tube. Prepare one Mark Forty for firing! This is a war shot. This is not a drill!”

Backing out of the sonar room, Buck took three steps forward and to the right, where Brown and his fire controlmen were standing at their stations. “Deedee, have you been keeping the setup on your TDC?”

“Affirmative, Captain.”

“Very well.” Buck knew that some of Richardson’s suddenly icy demeanor was infecting him too. “Tubes forward have been ordered to prepare one Mark Forty war shot for firing. Set your inputs accordingly!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Brown was tall, blond, sensitive. His blue eyes were shouting the questions in his mind.

“Quartermaster!”

“Here, sir.”

“Enter in your rough log as follows: ‘The intruding submarine has opened fire upon us, and is identified as an enemy ship of war. The explosion just heard was an attempt to sink the Manta. The squadron commander has put this ship on a war footing and has directed Manta to return the fire.’ You got that?” Buck was speaking slowly and precisely, waiting for the quartermaster to scribble the words as he dictated them.

“Yes, sir!” said the man, his eyes widening.

More rapidly, Buck went on, “We’re already at general quarters. Do not sound the general alarm. Have the word passed by telephone to all compartments!” This, perhaps, was not necessary, for all hands would have the information within seconds anyway. Probably they already knew, for at battle stations all compartments automatically manned all telephones.

He turned back to Brown. “How are you doing, Deedee?” Buck could see the men industriously turning dials, making entries into the complicated instruments arrayed against the curved skin in the ship. Deedee Brown himself was busily transferring figures from a plastic card inserted in a receptacle on the face of the TDC into the input section.

“Ready in a minute! We need a good range and the depth of the target.”

“You’ll have to use three hundred feet for depth; that’s the best I can give you. When you’re ready to shoot, we’ll get you a ping range. As soon as you have that in the fish, we’ll let her go!”

Brown stepped close to Buck, whispered, “What was that explosion we heard just now? Did it have anything to do with our decoy?”

“Yes, it did, Deedee. It destroyed it. If we hadn’t slowed up and sent the decoy along our track in our place, we’d all be dead right now!” Buck felt a sardonic satisfaction in telling Brown. Someday he’d be a submarine skipper, and it might be well for him to remember this day. Suddenly Buck was recalling certain experiences of his own, and then he realized that another such experience had occurred less than a minute before.

Buck turned away, returned to the sonar room. For the moment, sonar was the center of information. He would fire the torpedo from there. Swiftly, he explained his intention to get an accurate range with a single ping just before firing. Schultz nodded his comprehension. The single-ping range was a standard prefiring procedure.

Rich, also nodding, said, “We’ve got to do it, all right. We can’t tell from the sonar what his course or speed is, or if he’s got way on at all. I hate to, though, because it will alert him that much sooner.”

“Me, too,” said Buck, “but there’s no way out of it. Deedee has the best bearing Schultz can give him, but the Mark Forty has to have a range to know where to start its search. We’re pretty close to the Cushing. Maybe he’ll have us both merged in his sonar and will think the Cushing did it.”

Brown appeared directly behind Buck in the sonar room doorway. “We’re ready,” he said. “Tube’s flooded. Outer door’s open.”

“All right, Chief; get a single-ping range. Get the best bearing, too. Feed ’em both automatically to the TDC.” A single white spoke lashed out from the center of the sonar dial, impinged directly upon the faint dot representing the enemy sub. He heard the squelched transmission signal, and the clear, solid echo which returned.

“Thirty-eight-fifty,” said Schultz. “Bearing zero-three-seven and a half, relative. TDC’s got them both, sir!”

Despite his statement to Brown, Buck could not remain in the sonar room. He leaped out the door, heard Deedee call out loudly, “Set!” Rich, he felt rather than saw, was right behind.

“Fire!” cried Buck sharply. Brown, his finger poised on the firing key, punched it hard to the left. He stepped back, waited, eyes on the indicator lights.

“Torpedo started, ran out normally,” said the telephone talker. Brown was watching his fire control panel carefully, nodding his head. “She’s away,” he said.

Back in the sonar shack, Schultz was watching the path of the torpedo. It had curved to the right, was speeding toward the spot occupied by the enemy submarine. It would run at high speed into the general area, then slow, make a circling search, finally go back to speed and home in on magnetic attraction. It was the best torpedo the U.S. Navy had, the product of years of research. Its record of successful firings was outstanding. It was fast, nearly silent, and almost 100-percent deadly.

“Good shot, Buck,” said Richardson. “I think he’s a dead man!” But as they watched the sonar scope, suddenly the spot the Russian submarine occupied became suffused with its own white light, a light which persisted. The speeding trace of the torpedo entered the enlarged spot and vanished. Disbelievingly, the three men in the sonar room watched for an appreciable time, but nothing happened. The large white spot died down, disappeared, leaving not even the original indication of the presence of another submarine.

“I think I saw him take off,” said Schultz, by way of possible explanation. “He was making knots, behind all that white, and he went right off the scope!”

“At least, you scared him silly, Buck. Maybe now he’ll leave us alone!” But the grim look on Rich’s face showed he did not believe his words, nor did he expect Buck to. “How fast do you think we can tow Keith?” he went on.

“Maybe six knots, or a fraction more,” said Buck.

“Make another radical course change, away from the direction he went, and go as fast as you can. Run up close to the ice, too, as close as you dare. That will confuse his sonar. We’ve got to take this opportunity to lose him. I’ll explain it to Keith. On our third day with the Besugo, we ran overloaded for several hours. Can you find those strain-gauge readings?”

“They were all logged. I’m sure we can.”

Despite Buck’s misgivings, resuming towing resulted in only a few bumps as the towline was again stretched. Once a steady towing condition was achieved, he gradually increased speed until both ships seemed fairly flying along, close under the ice pack. They might have been able to go even faster than the seven knots shown on the log had it not been necessary for Keith to maintain a small amount of plane angle because of the Cushing’s tendency to tow a few feet above the Manta. After three hours, Buck was contemplating ordering his crew off action stations, and slowing to conserve the strength of the towline as well as to reduce his noise level. But this was the moment sonar chose to pick up contact once more.

It was Schultz, still religiously maintaining his solitary watch, who was forced to bring the bad news. “Sonar contact,” he announced in a heavy voice over the speaker system. Rich and Buck crowded into the sonar shack. “It’s him again!” said Schultz. “No doubt about it anymore. I’d know that signature anywhere!”

“We have to break the towline, Buck! We’ll have to fight this guy on even terms! If he sinks us, Keith’s done for anyway. We’ve no hope at all if we stay tied to him!”

“I’ve been thinking the same! Shall I do it now?”

“Yes! I’ll go tell Keith!”

As Richardson picked up the UQC handset, he heard Buck order, “All ahead full!”

“Keith,” Rich said in the low tone which had become habitual, “that fellow is back again, and we’re going to have to break the towline. After we dispose of him we’ll be back to pick you up with the other tow rig.”

“I understand,” said Keith’s distorted voice, and Rich knew he did, fully. He quickly described his own already laid plans for this contingency, and then said, “If we get a chance to, we’ll try a Mark Forty on him ourselves. We still have a few strings left. And, Skipper,” Keith’s voice deepened, took on an expression of determined will, even under the poor reproductive quality of the equipment, “whatever happens, we’ll never give up this ship. Never.”

It was Richardson’s turn to say, “I understand.” He followed it with, “If we don’t make it back, wait him out at test depth or below. I doubt he can follow you down there, nor can his fish!” As he said the words he found himself wondering what good that could possibly do, for without Manta, Cushing was dead too!

And then the nylon line snapped with a shuddering flip, and Buck sent Manta sliding down into the depths. The last thing Rich heard was Keith’s quiet “Wilco!”

“It’s us he’s after; so it’s us he’ll chase, Buck. We’ve got one decoy left, and we’ve no idea how many fish he’s got, nor how many of those defenses against the Mark Forty.”

“It didn’t make any noise, at least nothing we heard. Maybe it’s not a weapon he shoots at all,” said the disconsolate Buck.

“You mean, some kind of a magic energy device? Inexhaustible, maybe?”

“All I mean is he might not have to shoot a piece of hardware. So it wouldn’t be something you could count, like our decoys. But maybe he wasn’t all that sure it was going to work either. He sure ran off in a hurry. If he’d only run a little longer, we might have shaken him!” Buck spoke morosely. His disappointment was keen.

“True, old man, but right now our problem is to kill him before he kills us. We have six Mark Fourteens and five Mark Forties left forward, is that right?”

“Plus two Mark Forties in the skids in the after torpedo room. I’ve told Deedee to unrig the after room for towing and load both of the Forties he has back there.”

“The Forty is a single-shot fish. You shoot it very carefully, one at a time. You can reload one quicker than you can fire a second shot. So if you have one of them and our remaining decoy loaded, you can also have a salvo of four Fourteens in the other tubes forward.”

“You don’t expect him to let us get within range of an old Mark Fourteen!”

Buck’s exhaustion was showing in his slowness at picking up the idea, Rich decided. “Maybe this magic energy thing you thought up can stop the electric motor in the Mark Forty, but if that’s what it does it won’t faze an old straight-running steam fish,” he finally said, and was secretly delighted when Buck’s eyes lighted and he gave the necessary orders.

The Manta had separated from the Cushing only a short distance, contrary to Rich and Buck’s first intention to go many miles away. As had become virtually a necessity during the past few encounters, they were in the darkened sonar room, awaiting developments which could only be seen, and that poorly, in the sonar equipment. And yet, there must be instantaneous response. Awareness of the enemy submarine’s whereabouts must be constant, and careful evaluation of any change or movement, immediate. She had approached to a distance of about a mile and had apparently stopped. Doubtless she had silenced herself as much as possible. Even so, she made a faint but definitely discernible note. It was this tiny noise level, which Schultz and the JT operator were so strenuously keeping in their earphones, that created the spot on the sensitive scope.

The Cushing was not visible on the tube, nor could the JT hear her. She was somewhere overhead, resting against the ice with all machinery stopped. Lighting was minimal and on the storage battery; there would be no cooking; all unneeded personnel had been ordered to their bunks. In this condition, her cavernous interior had ample air for forty-eight hours and there was stored oxygen sufficient for many more days. Her battery was her limiting factor. Keith could remain in this condition for seventy-two hours, he had said, before his battery would be too low to restart his reactor.

Buck had also stopped every piece of nonessential machinery, including his primary loop main coolant pumps, but had kept his heaters on and the reactor functional in the newly developed natural circulation mode — a low-power condition from which restoration of full power could be accomplished in minutes. Under Clancy’s skillful hand Manta, too, was stopped, hovering on a fortuitous thermal layer at the 300-foot level.

For the time being, it was a standoff. “I’ll bet he can’t see Cushing either,” said Buck. “Maybe he’s even lost us, if we’re quieter than he is. We ought to be. So he must be making up his mind whether to go active with his sonar.”

“When he does, he’ll find us both, and he’ll know the one against the ice cover must be the Cushing. Also, she’ll give the bigger echo.”

“We could try keeping our broadside to him. Unless he happens to get both of us broadside, our echo will be about as big as Keith’s.”

“If we ease up against the ice ourselves it will confuse him even more,” said Rich, thoughtfully, “but then, sound is so funny we might lose contact on him ourselves. Or, we might hear him better.”

“We can always come back down again, boss. Let’s try it!”

And so Tom Clancy blew some air into his tanks, and the Manta slowly drifted upward until she bumped gently against the solid ice, her side turned toward the intruder. True to the well-known vagaries of sound, contact remained, and ten minutes later the tiny luminescence that was the enemy lashed out with six strong rapid pings.

“He can’t hear us!” Buck chortled. “He can only see us by going active!”

“Right,” said Rich, “and unless Keith was also broadside to him, by accident, the echoes he got must have been nearly identical. So, right now, he can’t tell which is which. We ought to be able to use that, somehow.”

“Shoot our last decoy?”

Rich snapped his fingers. “Get it programmed so it simulates us trying to get away. Then get two Forties ready. Back out a Fourteen. They can reload it later. Can the wolfpack code tell Keith to get some fish ready?”

“That’s one of the things it was made for.”

Preparations were going forward when Schultz made the signal Rich and Buck had learned to anticipate, and the sound of inimical pings filled the compartment. “I think he’s getting ready to shoot,” said the sonarman.

“How do you know that?”

“Don’t know. Just feel it,” said Schultz. “There!” He pointed to a wispy, wavering discontinuity in the smooth blankness of the scope. “There again! There’s another! He’s still pinging, and he’s fired twice!”

There were two discontinuities on the sonar scope emanating from the enemy submarine, one diverging slightly across its face, the other coming in steadily and remorselessly toward its center. “He’s fired at both of us!” said Buck.

“Buck!” There was a decisive snap to Richardson’s voice. “If he can’t hear us, he must have fired on active sonar bearings and ranges. Set the decoy to run in circles under us! Maybe that will attract the fish! I’ll tell Keith to do the same. Hope he can!” Rich dashed away, returned a moment later. “He’s going to try,” he said. “These are pretty slow-running torpedoes, so there may be time. Also I told him to shoot his Forties with us. Is our decoy away?”

“Affirmative!”

“There’ll be a minute or so more before his fish gets here. Time to shoot ours!”

A quarter of a minute later, a thin streak arrowed on the scope toward the Russian, traveling much faster than the weapon he had fired, passing it close aboard on the sonar scope. As before, a brilliant white phosphorescence bloomed over the spot where he was, and there was no explosion.

“He’s still there, I think!” said Schultz. “He didn’t run this time! The Cushing’s fired too!”

A streak similar to that made by the Manta’s weapon, which could only have come from the Cushing, drew itself swiftly across the scope. Rich, Buck and Schultz were watching it with consuming interest, to the exclusion of all else. The Soviet sub’s reaction to this second shot would show whether she could remount her antitorpedo protection quickly. Then a violent explosion shook the Manta’s sturdy structure. The resounding roar, reverberating through the sea and inside the submarine hull, blocking out all sound save for itself, threw clouds of dust and paint particles into the air. On the sonar scope there was nothing to be seen; only the startled, white, almost alive reaction of the scope as it attempted to reproduce electronically what it had heard through its audio senses.

“All compartments report to control!” Buck shouted into the telephone, looking, at the same time, at the sonar scope. The whiteout was receding, the Soviet submarine reappearing, surrounded by a fading halo of phosphorescence.

“He can’t keep this up!” said Rich. “That must be a whale of a lot of energy! Shoot again! As soon as you can!”

A third swift streak raced toward the enemy submarine. Jerry Abbott appeared at the sonar room entrance. “No damage, Captain,” he said. “It was close, though. Must have gone off right under us!” A distant explosion filled their consciousness. “Get a report from Leone!” snapped Richardson. Abbott darted away.

Again the halo effect enveloped the enemy. Again the speeding Mark Forty torpedo, the U.S. Navy’s best, entered the immune area and disappeared.

“Cushing reports she’s been hit!” gasped Abbott.

“Cushing’s fired again!” said Schultz.

“Are you reloading forward, Buck?” asked Rich.

“Affirm. Two more Forties.”

“Shoot again, as soon as ready!”

In all, six Mark Forty torpedoes, from two different locations, converged in succession on the intruder. In succession they ripped into the area where the sonar scope showed her, into the halo effect which seemed almost to have developed pulsations, so fast was it going on and off — and disappeared.

There was a cry from Schultz. “He’s fired again! He’s fired at us! It’s coming this way!”

“You’ll have to try to outrun it, Buck!”

“Coolant pumps in high speed, maneuvering!” ordered Buck on the telephone. “How much speed can you give me?” He listened anxiously. “Not enough!” he said. “Use all the steam that you’ve got in the generators! Override the low-pressure alarm and the high temperature-differential scram! Keep those rods up! Get us rolling!”

He shouldered Rich aside, stuck his head outside the sonar room. “All ahead emergency,” he called to the helmsman. To Clancy, across the control room, he yelled, “Two hundred feet!” Back inside, on the telephone, he said, “Don’t wreck the reactor, Harry! We’ll still be needing it. But if you can’t give me speed, right now, it won’t make any difference! That first explosion was meant for us, the Cushing’s been torpedoed, and there’s another fish headed our way!” Turning to Rich he said, “They’ll do it! Harry Langforth’s with them, and he’ll build up faster than this old reactor’s ever gone before!” Suddenly he grinned tightly. “Wish old Brighting could see us! Where are all those reactor safeguards now, hey?” He darted out into the passageway again, called, “Left full rudder!” To Rich he said swiftly, “What’s the course dead away from that fish?”

Richardson had been anticipating the need for this information. “Three-four-five on the grid!” he answered.

“Make your course three-four-five, helm! — Jerry!” he barked. “Stay here on the control station and relay for me!” He returned to the sonar console. “Where’s the fish now?” he asked.

“I’ll lose it when we get it astern,” said Schultz anxiously, beads of sweat all over his face. “It’s about half a mile away right now!”

“Do we have any speed estimate on it?”

“It took about three minutes from the time he fired until he hit our decoy. That’s thirty knots, Buck!” The look on his superior’s face had never been grimmer.

“This old bucket’s never gone that fast in her life, but she’s sure going to try now!” Buck thought. He picked up the telephone. “Harry? The fish chasing us can make thirty knots. How bad do you guys want to live, back there?”

Hanging up, he said to Rich, “They won’t have to gag the safety valves, like in the old days of steam engines, because they’ll be using all the steam as fast as our two kettles back there can make it, and the pressure’s going to drop. But everything else, they’ll do. What we need, right now, is pounds of steam per minute. More pounds of steam through those steam generators than they ever made before!”

Richardson nodded quietly, as Jerry Abbott called in, “Steady on three-four-five. Depth two hundred. Speed twenty, increasing!” Incongruously, his mind traveled backward many years, back to a submarine-school qualification exercise in his first command, the old S-16. The old destroyer Semmes, acting as target, had nearly rammed the S-16. By swift action, in analogy not far removed from that just taken by Buck, he had managed to avoid the disaster. Through it all, Tex Hansen, submarine-school training officer, two years senior to Rich, had not said a word, even though his own life, too, hung in the balance. Once in a while, over the years, he had wondered how it felt to contain one’s self in such circumstances. Now he knew.

Strange that in the face of mortal danger, with total and terrible dissolution perhaps only moments away, he could feel so calm, so detached from it all. It was almost as though he were somewhere else, someone else, contemplating it, even enjoying the heightened sensation of it, but not affected by any of it at all. He had felt this way before. Very much this way. And he knew, without any doubt whatever, that Buck was experiencing precisely the same emotions, probably the same thoughts. His asides during the emergencies which had flowed upon him, one after the other, proved it.

“The fish is pinging!” Schultz murmured, sweating heavily, his shirt suddenly dark with moisture. How could he hear, with the tumultuous wash of Manta’s frantically whirling propellers exactly between his sonar head and the target-looking torpedo? It figured, of course, that if anyone could hear through all the turmoil, he could. He was the most expert, the most experienced, sonarman on board.

So the fish was pinging. It must be close, close enough for the last-stage target-searching cycle to have been activated. It would home in on the echoes, drive in with the full speed of its little motor, until fatal contact was made. What was Buck doing?

“Twenty-six knots! Increasing slowly!” called Jerry Abbott.

“Open vents! Blow main ballast! One-minute blow, wide open!” Buck’s orders reminded Rich of a time, under very similar circumstances indeed, when he had issued the identical command. Perhaps it would have the same effect.

The clank of the nearby vent opening. The noise of blowing. “Speed now twenty-seven!” said Jerry Abbott. “Still increasing very slowly!”

“It’s still pinging astern!” Schultz.

There was that tight grin on Buck’s face. “Here we go, Skipper. The last maneuver!” He leaned out of the sonar room door, called, “Right full rudder! Leave it on! Thirty degrees down angle! Make your depth nine hundred feet! All hands stand by for steep angles!”

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 water — her lifeblood — through 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 indef—”

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.