North Cape

CHAPTER 7

The dead, coppery sun dragged itself out of the heaving ocean and hung sullenly against the slate sky. Folsom had never seen a — sunrise that boded so ill for the day to come. The sun was merely a not overly bright ball, shrouded in layers of ice. Its light was as dull and washed out as the running seas around and gave no warmth at all, real or imagined, to the scene over which it presided. Folsom stamped his feet on the caked ice of the bridge deck and swore under his breath. The RFK was shrouded in a more substantial ice than was the sun. So much more substantial that she was riding noticeably lower in the water. The deck heaters had been running at full power all night and the interior of the hull was unbelievably hot. But even heaters that piped waste heat directly from the nuclear reactor heat exchangers had not been sufficient to cope with an Arctic storm of such magnitude.

The dry-bulb temperature showed only eight degrees below zero, not enough to freeze sea water. But the anemometer, clacking on the masthead like something possessed, gave the answer. Wind speed was averaging close to fifty-seven knots, a Force 11 wind on the Beaufort scale. And below zero, for every mile of wind speed, you add another degree below freezing to the apparent temperature to obtain the true temperature. The true temperature was -33°F. Even swathed from head to foot in his heated Arctic gear and wearing double-insulated and heated boots, Folsom was half frozen. The wind was strong enough to tear the crests off the long swells and fling them back as ice that froze solidly into place the moment it touched the ship.

Ahead of the ship, the wind-whipped swells, with their lashing crests of white water, built in slow succession to inundate the decks as the RFK crested wave after wave. Folsom periodically ducked behind the windscreen to escape the cascades of wafer that poured over the bridge deck — in spite of its being forty feet above the water line — and left the deck plates slippery with sea water and ice.

After fifteen minutes on deck, Folsom was finally driven back inside, where he stood gasping for air in the sudden 105° temperature change. He shed his foul-weather gear and climbed into his high seat. The height of the storm was still to be met in approximately four hours. By then the short Arctic day would be long over and the impenetrable blackness would have closed in. The previous night there had been a sky glow through the scudding clouds, but tonight there would be only the black of the deepest pits of hell. The ice layer had thickened above forty thousand feet and the first tinges of storm clouds bearing the blizzard that always followed a katabatic storm were beginning to appear. Folsom did not like this storm or the way it was progressing. Already it was well on the way to becoming one of the worst ever recorded. With a whole ship he would not have been concerned, but the bow section shore-up job was beginning to show signs of strain. He did not know how many more hours of pounding it would take before seams started to open. And open seams in these seas would be disastrous. With a long sigh, Folsom heaved himself out of the high seat and left the bridge. As he passed out of the hatch he picked up the flashlight racked beside the coating and stuck it into his pocket. The bow areas of the ship were deserted. The captain had ordered all but the forward missile rooms and the communication station to shift operations aft. It took Folsom several minutes to reach the forward compartments. Each hatch had to be unsealed, then resealed again. The closer he moved to the outer hull, the louder became the tympanic roar of metal flexing under great strain. The seas were running so heavily that even below the water line, as he was, the outer plates near the bow were flexing in the wind and swells each time the forefoot lifted above the waves. Folsom unsealed the last hatch into the ballast spaces between the ship’s interior and exterior hulls. The ballast water had all been pumped out forward to raise the bow under its coating of ice and force the stern down farther, where the great engines could maintain a continual purchase on the water. In these winds, even a moment with the four screws out of water could find the battle cruiser being spun wildly by the winds, broadside to the waves. Once allowed to start, even a 16,500-ton battle cruiser could be tumbled over beams end, turned turtle, and sunk.

The ballast tank was ice cold. Traces of water remaining after the pumping had frozen to a smooth glaze on bulkheads and deck. Folsom had to hang onto the metal rungs spaced in even rows along the side and bottom to cross the eight-foot space that separated the two hulls.

The outside of the ballast tanks acted as an integral part of the hull. The tank itself was crisscrossed with steel bracing bars. Folsom stood up gingerly, riding with the slow rise and fall of the ship, and flicked on the flashlight. The strong beam sprang out boldly in the wet air, striking the ice-and water-coated sides of the tank to flash back as sparkles from millions of diamonds. He played the beam along the tank wall until he found the eight-foot-long gash, high up above the water line. Carefully he examined the steel plates that had been welded over the gash, checking for signs of water seepage. He could find no major breaks, and with the ice and dampness it was impossible to spot small leaks.

Folsom stood uncertainly below the welded plates, playing the light around the sides of the tank. He would have felt much better if he dared order the tank flooded to capacity with sea water. Filling the tank would have eased the strain on the welded joints. But it might also put them far enough down into the waves so that they would never recover. Finally, after a long minute of helplessness coupled with frustration, he shrugged and turned back to the hatch, clicking off the light. Folsom carefully dogged the hatch shut and then made his way aft to the engine room, amidships.

Although the Robert F. Kennedy displaced 16,500 tons and was nearly seven hundred feet long, she carried a crew of only eighty men. With the ship standing to general quarters in the storm, most of this minimum crew was on duty or else snatching a few hours of restless sleep in the duty bunks scattered around the ship. A powered elevator took Folsom down to G deck and he walked aft another hundred feet, pushed open the engine-room hatch, and stepped into the softly lit, instrument-paneled room. The duty chief nodded to him and came over as he approached the master control panel.

“What’s she look like outside, Commander?” Lieutenant Charles Barrows grinned as Folsom slumped down into the extra command seat.

“Rough. The seas are running better than fifty feet right now. How are your engines doing?”

“Better question would be how’s the hull doing.”

Folsom grinned. “I guess-it would be at that. I was just up there. So far no sign of any separation and no seepage… but, I don’t know.”

Barrows nodded slowly. “How about if I send a couple of boys up to put in some strain gauges, wired to the control room. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.” Folsom nodded. “Good. That’s really what I came down here to see about. By the way, how is the overhaul on number three free turbine coming along?” Barrows turned and reached across the console for a check list and leafed quickly through the pages. “They are reassembling the bearings now. Should have it all back together and checked out in twelve hours.”

“Twelve hours…” Folsom made an elaborate face. “Way too long. Try and cut that in half.” Barrows turned a startled face. “In half! For God’s sake, what do you think we are, miracle men?” Nevertheless, he reached for a microphone and roared, “All right, you half-witted slackers. The Exec wants that number three engine operating in four hours. So — get off your tails and move.”

“Six hours…” he mumbled.

“It is rather important We are going to come about at 0400, and if the seas or the winds get any worse, we are going to need all the power we can get. I sure would hate to see this bucket swing into a turn and keep right on going — straight down. Which brings me to the next point. Isn’t there anything you can do about the ice on the deck? We are carrying nearly four hundred tons right now and the ship is so damn low she looks like a submarine.”

Barrows scratched his head. “I sure as hell don’t know what it would be. I am squeezing every last calorie of heat out of the reactor now. The cooling system is shut down for the lower decks and I’m saving the reactor cooling system until we do come about. If I switch it off now, the reactor is going to overheat.”

“Okay, I’ll leave the details up to you. But the computer shows that if the ice-build-up rate continues steady, we are going to have about a hundred and fourteen more tons of the stuff on the deck by 0300. And that is going to make coming about very, very touchy.”

Barrows tapped his fingers nervously on the console. “All right, let me see if we can come up with something else that will help the deck heaters out. Forty years ago — they tell me — they never worried much about ice build-up. If the deck heaters couldn’t keep up, they just gave a hundred or so sailors safety lines and buckets of ashes and told them to go to it. But what the hell can you do with eighty men, sixty of whom are on duty during general quarters at any one time, and no ashes.” He shook his head. “Progress. Sometimes it does more to work against you than for you.” Folsom grinned and left, after extracting a promise to get the number three engine back on line as soon as possible. He went directly up to the bridge and to the computing table. As he climbed into his high seat again, he switched on the navigation course plot and studied the fine red line that had marked their progress since 1900 the previous evening. The red progress line was superimposed onto the projected course and showed every little deviation from the plot. But it was running fourteen miles behind; it was clearly indicated by an angry red circle encompassing the end point of both lines. He sat at the console, unconsciously tapping a pencil while he tried to figure a way out. Increased speed would apply more pressure to the bow. If they camelate to the turnaround; point, they would be late to the rendezvous. If they stayed behind — and the computer showed that, given the same conditions, at turnaround time they would be thirty-two miles short — they would not be in the lee of the North Cape. And with the ice building up at an ever-increasing rate, it would be far too risky to attempt the turn in the open seas.

Folsom swiveled to stare out the forward ports. The heavy gray sky formed a low-hanging ceiling barely clearing the mountainous seas. It was now nearly 1100, one hour past sunrise. But the sun, filtering down through thousands of feet of ice and storm cloud, shed very little light to relieve the funeral pall. The wind, throbbing around the ship and even through thick insulation, could be heard clearly above the low-key noises of the bridge. The barometer had dropped to the lowest point that Folsom had ever seen, 28.49 inches of mercury. He knew that the worst of the storm and winds were yet to come. And they were heading directly into the teeth of it — in fact, rushing headlong to meet it. The anemometer, clacking loudly on the masthead, was still registering a fairly steady wind speed of fifty-seven knots, a Force 11 wind, strong enough to blow the crests off the waves. As waves approach shore, an entirely different set of hydrodynamic principles come into play, and the waves become the more familiar breakers, with crests of roiling white water as they break on the beach. In mid-ocean, waves are usually long swells several hundred feet long, with a rounded bosom rolling to the far-distant shore. When the wind is strong, then the water forming the swell is pushed faster toward the crest so that it overshoots and falls free in a mass of white water. Out there, Folsom could see, the wind was blowing so hard that the water that was pushed over the crest was blown free into long streamers for fifty and sixty feet downwind. He shivered involuntarily before the frozen wastes of the Arctic Ocean.

But daydreaming would not solve his navigational problem, and for the hundredth time he damned the destroyer that had ripped their bow, thereby causing all these problems. With an undamaged bow, neither he nor Larkin would have worried about the effects of the angry seas on the bow. They would have put the ship onto a long, rectangular course until rendezvous time and the hell with the pounding on the bow. His thinking was interrupted by the appearance on the bridge of Barrows’ electronics crew. They politely elbowed him aside to get at the electrical conduits over his console to run temporary lines from the strain gauges in the bow. With nothing else to do for the moment, Folsom wandered around the bridge and the various consoles as unobtrusively as possible, stymied by the mathematics of the situation.

A half hour later he thought he was beginning to see a way out of the problem. The wind speed had increased another three knots and the seas were running to swells nearly sixty feet high. The wind was blowing steadily from the north-northwest quarter, deviating little from 10° north, which was what he had been half hoping for. For the past twenty minutes he had’ observed little or no deviation either in direction or speed. When he fed the new information into the course computers, it worked out perfectly. By falling off two points from the wind direction, he could bring the RFK farther to the west in a shallow arc that would increase the distance toward the Cape lee. Feeling very much like a skipper of a sailing ship, he ordered the course change to take advantage of the wind. The RFK rolled far to starboard as the two rudders inched over in response to the instructions from the bridge. The roll went on through thirty, then forty, then fifty, to fifty-seven degrees. Folsom watched the inclinometer with apprehension, and when the needle’ began to move back toward vertical, he let out a pent-up breath. Good lord, he thought, if she would go over that far with just a minor change with the wind, how would she handle when it came time to reverse course. He glanced around the bridge and saw that the others on watch were also looking at the inclinometer and were just as apprehensive as he.

At 1200, Larkin came onto the bridge. He nodded to the officer of the watch, signed the log, and came over to Folsom’s console. He turned, before saying anything to Folsom, and said, “Mr. Peterson, please stay on the bridge for a few minutes. I would like you to relieve me while Mr. Folsom and I go below.”

The second officer nodded and sank back into his high seat and began flipping through ship’s status report forms. Folsom unbuckled his seat belt and followed Larkin off the bridge, wondering what the captain had on his mind. Neither said a word until they entered Larkin’s quarters.

“Sit down, Pete.” He indicated a comfortable chair against the bulkhead. Folsom took the seat and glanced around at the comfortably appointed room. Larkin had thrown out the regulation Navy furniture as one of his first official acts on assuming command of the RFK, in the belief that a new skipper should assume all prerogatives in setting new traditions on a new ship. Certainly, the comfortable living-room-style furniture was much more relaxing than the hard-backed steel and plastic furniture that had been furnished by the shipyard.

He accepted the coffee that Larkin ordered and sat back in the chair to watch his commanding officer pouring his own coffee. Folsom really knew little about Larkin, and he doubted that many men did. Larkin was old Navy, relaxed but steeped in tradition; he probably would have been more at home in the more easygoing Australian or Canadian navies if he were to be judged by his command style. In two years he had yet to hear the captain raise his voice to give an order. And he could not ever remember Larkin having to give an order twice.

But the man kept his own counsel. Never had there been an exchange of personal information between them. What little he knew about Larkin had been gleaned from his service record, to which Folsom, as executive officer, had access, and from talk around the various officers’ clubs. The service record had been exceedingly dry, as always, but at the same time was an intriguing document, more from what it had implied rather than described. Folsom knew, for instance, that Larkin had commanded a destroyer during the Vietnam conflict and had been decorated with the Navy Cross for bravery under fire. But it had remained a noncommittal note in a record until he ran into a chance acquaintance in San Francisco who had been communications officer on the cruise for which Larkin earned the decoration.

The story was that Larkin had taken his destroyer to within a hundred yards of fringing reefs off the South Vietnamese coast just below the Demilitarized Zone. He was to lay down pointblank covering fire for a Korean patrol driven back and pinned down on the beach by a superior and well-dug-in North Vietnamese Army unit. Larkin had moved in so close that he had come under intensive mortar fire. The destroyer took three mortar rounds, one directly through the fan tail, which had exploded against the rudder controls, blasting them out of action. In spite of the damage, Larkin had remained on the scene, in fact moving in even closer to bring antiaircraft guns into broadside position to lay down a sweeping barrage for twenty minutes while army helicopters moved in to pull the Koreans out. The service record for some reason missed noting the award of the Republic of South Korea Distinguished Service Medal.

Folsom’s friend had many other tales of Larldn’s skill and bravery, which he was more than happy to relate to Folsom during a long two-fifths-of-gin afternoon and evening. All were in a similar vein. But what stuck most deeply in Folsom’s memory was his friend’s description of Larkin as an aloof, although quite personable, and lonely man. Exactly Folsom’s own conclusion.

Even Larkin’s face bore out his manner. It was a face that was at once alive but closed to outsiders. The gray eyes stared out at you from under straight, medium thin brows with a direct stare that forbade anything except the exact truth. Larkin was a tall man, but spare, almost to the point of gauntness in some respects. His face was thin, with the skin stretched tightly across the brow and nose. But the shoulders were broader than would have been expected for a man so tall and lean. There was something about the man, something in the posture, that Folsom could not isolate, that belied the personal aesthetism that really existed. The furniture in the cabin may have been comfortable and pleasantly arranged, but it was certainly not opulent. The color scheme matched the paneled and steel walls, but that was all. The desk, set under the air vent, was clean and neat. A choice selection of books could be seen in the barred rack over the desk and the titles were intriguing, indicating a disciplined mind.

Larkin settled into a chair facing him and balanced his coffee cup on the arm. He glanced at Folsom, who sipped at his coffee and waited. It was characteristic of Larkin, he thought, to unknowingly make you wait uncomfortably until he started to speak. The gray eyes peering out from the calm face gave the impression that Larkin was measuring your character and strength, It was not intentional, he knew. It was only that Larkin was marshaling his own thoughts.

Larkin cleared his throat “I noticed that you made a course correction. Good thinking. These seas are going to get rougher.”

Folsom nodded. “I had engineering rig up strain gauges on the bow patch. If it starts to weaken, we’ll want to know about it in plenty of time.” Larkin smiled briefly. “Yes we will at that.” He sat for a moment sipping his coffee. “I just got word from Virginia that our Russian friends are onto the system.” Folsom sat up. He really knew very little about the supersecret games they had been playing lately. Between themselves they always used the name Virginia to refer to the agency that directed their actions. Although he did not know really who “Virginia” was, he could pretty well guess that it meant the forty-two-acre complex in the hills just outside Washington that was Central Intelligence

Agency Headquarters. But what was the game the Russians were onto?

Larkin pulled a sealed envelope off the desk top and handed it to Folsom. “Open it.” Folsom tore the end off and extracted the folded papers. He spread them on his lap and picked up the top sheet. DOD 630-29K. That was one he had not seen before. He looked up questioningly at Larkin, but Larkin was gazing in deep absorption at the design on his coffee cup.

The top sheet was an instruction page for the five that followed. It held one small paragraph that immediately caught Folsom’s eye. If he accepted the terms of the attached contract and signed, he would be “liable to twenty years in a federal prison or $20,000 fine or both if he revealed to any unauthorized person or persons any material or information given to him in connection with that relayed to him by Captain Henly Larkin, USN, Commanding Officer of the battle cruiser U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy, or in any way violated the provisions of the National Defense Act.” The rest of the forms were standard Department of Defense Top Secret Clearance sheets, already filled out and dated the day he had received his Top Secret clearance. Puzzled, Folsom turned the pages until he came to the last. It was a simple, green-colored sheet with a short list of questions and space for his signature and the date. It was headed “Q” Prime Clearance. He whistled softly. He had heard of the QPC, but never had expected to receive it. Usually, it was a clearance reserved for the President, cabinet officers, and the joint Chiefs of Staff, to whom there were no secrets. Not even the highest-ranking members of Congress got that one. He looked up.

“Rather surprising, isn’t it? But that’s how important this project is. Will you sign the form?”

Folsom nodded, and Larkin handed him a pen.

“Then do so,” he said quietly. Folsom scribbled his name and added the date.

“You are now cleared to receive ‘Q’ Prime information,” Larkin said. “The clearance search was run the day you came aboard, and if something had happened to me while we were on duty you would have found all of the instructions in my safe. The decision as to when to bring you into the project was left up to me. Because I believe that the fewer people who know about this project the safer it will be, I have not done so until now.” He paused to drink slowly.

“Why did you decide now that I should know about it?” Folsom asked much more calmly than he felt.

Larkin waved his hand in a manner to take in the ship and the storm raging outside. “To date there has been no emergency that has warranted it. But now there is what you might call a proper combination of circumstances. As I said, the Russians are onto our most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project. Additionally, the sea is running into one of the worst storms on record and our ship could be in very serious danger. In the next few hours you are going to have to have a full understanding as to why we are not going to be able to do anything more than complete our assigned mission at all costs. And, if we survive the storm, we may have trouble of a kind we have never encountered before except in practice” — Larkin hesitated, letting the tension build—“Soviet submarines may be out to sink us.” Folsom stared at him, wondering if the old man had not finally succumbed to the pressures of commanding a ship. As if aware of what he was thinking, Larkin grinned and shook his head. “No, I haven’t gone out of my mind.” He got up and pulled a map from the desk drawer and spread it on the table. It was a map of the northern Eastern hemisphere showing the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Arctic. On it was penciled in red a line paralleling the go° meridian to the Sinkiang border, then swinging north in a long, curving arc across the Soviet Union to their rendezvous position off the Ryabchi Peninsula of Scandinavia.

“This map shows the flight path of one of our three specially equipped reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft is capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5 and flight times of…” For a long time Folsom listened to the dry matter-of-fact voice explaining one of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. After the first few minutes he recovered quickly from the astonishment accompanying the discovery of the exact depth and extent of the surveillance missions that the United States had conducted over the past two years and the role he, or the RFK to be exact, had played. The deeper Larkin went into the explanation/briefing, the more he understood the almost fanatical secrecy that surrounded the project. Not counting the employees at Lockheed and the Air Force crew at GilIon Advanced Test Site, who never were allowed to know the full story, Larkin told him that there were less than fifty people in the United States who knew about the A-17. Fifty people and possibly the entire Soviet military establishment, Folsom thought ironically. Larkin was the only U.S. military official outside the United States territorial boundaries who knew about the A-17, with the exception of a submarine commander in charge of all relay operations for the entire southern hemisphere.

“And that, Pete, is the whole story, or at least as much as I think it is necessary to tell you at this point.” The old man looked piercingly at him. Folsom met his eyes unwaveringly.

“What are your orders then, sir?”

Larkin rubbed the back of his head and walked over to stand and stare out the porthole. His voice, when he spoke, was low, barely carrying across the ten feet that separated them, hinting all the actual loneliness of command that only the captain of a ship, or perhaps the commander of a Strategic Air Command bomber, could feel. The loneliness in knowing that you had no one to *horn you could turn to for advice. “I wish I knew…”

He let his voice trail off.

But with the next breath he swung quickly around from the porthole and said firmly, “For now, we have no choice but to continue to the turn-around point and rendezvous tonight on-station.” He walked briskly back to the desk and handed Folsom another flimsy.

“This is the last message we received after I made the status report an hour ago. It says, quite simply, “Imperative maintain station — Soviets on.”

“Why couldn’t we continue to the lee side of the Cape and wait for him there. One hundred and fifty miles shouldn’t make that much difference to the pilot,” Folsom continued.

“But it does. We have no way Of contacting the aircraft. The pilot must initiate all such contacts with us. Secondly, the radio transmitter that he uses is a VHF-FM set with a range of less than twenty miles, to reduce the chance that hostile ships or aircraft might pick up the transmission. If we aren’t where we said we will be, then he is done. He can’t contact us and we can’t give him his next set of orders. And that set of orders has his next fueling coordinates. Everything possible has been done to lessen the chance of his being discovered by electronic snooping.”

Folsom nodded. “So if we aren’t there, he’s as good as dead.” He paused and massaged his weary eyes. They felt as if large boulders of jagged rock were slowly working their way up under the lids. He had been on duty, without sleep, „for nearly twenty-four hours, and his mental faculties were beginning to match the syrupy slowness of his body. “That is one job that I certainly do not want under any circumstances.”

“How would you like the job of having to be in the right place at the right time, everytime,” Larkin asked bleakly. “You’ve got it, Pete.”