Cold is the Sea (20 page)

          
Darling,

             
I know this trip isn't going to be as long as most of the trips you will probably be making on the
Cushing
and I know how busy you've been getting ready for it. So I didn't want to bother you with this before you left, and would like you to think about it so that we can talk it over when you get back. I know it's not supposed to be the code of the Navy wife to lay a problem on her husband just before he gets underway for a long cruise, but I'm sure it has happened before. The fact is, I
wanted your last days in port to be as pleasant as possible, and I want to confide in you too. But I want to give you the whole story so that you can think about it, and then we need to have a long talk after you come home.

             
I love you very much, Keith, and when we are together everything is just swell. But you have been away for so many long absences. You couldn't even be with me when Ruthie was born, because the Navy had you out on some sort of a long deployment or exercise or something. I'm afraid this is going to be the way our whole life together will be. We have never really been able to establish a home. We've bounced from one place to another. Even Ruthie, at age five, is beginning to notice something. “Where do we live, Mommy?” she said the other day, and I almost broke down because I couldn't answer her.

             
I'm worried about the future, Keith. I know how much the Navy means to you, but remember, it's really the only thing you have ever known. You got in it right at the start of the war when you were very young and have been in it ever since. But there is a lot more to living than just being in the Navy. This year you'll reach twenty years' service (why doesn't the war count double? It should—) and become eligible to retire. This is what I want you to think about. We could move anywhere in the country, have our own little place, and live a normal life. You could easily get a good job, and with your retirement pension we'd never have to worry.

Keith turned the paper over. Although Peggy had digressed into a discussion of the idyllic joys of a permanent home, the flower and vegetable garden she proposed to start (she could have done that anywhere!) and the general peace and contentment long-term permanence seemed to spell for her, his brow remained furrowed. The letter was four pages long, closely written on two sheets of paper. Midway through page three his frown deepened.

             
It's different with someone like Laura Richardson, Nancy Dulany or Cindy Williams, you know. All three of their husbands are graduates of the Naval Academy, and that means that the Navy will look out after them. You're not. Someday the Navy is just going to drop you when you least expect it. I've
been seeing quite a bit of Laura lately, as I told you. Sometimes I even make up excuses to go by, even if she sometimes seems so smug because of her husband. Sometimes I think he's the one talking to me instead of her. I know he was your former skipper and all that, and you think the sun rises and sets in him. So does she, even though she was married once before and she must have heard of that Joan person he had the wartime fling with.

             
She never has said much about the war, but I'll just bet she knows about Joan. One time it nearly came up but somehow she sidestepped it, and I didn't have the nerve to come back to it. Laura is a pretty cool number, not like Cindy Williams. Cindy is just a sweet kid. I wonder if Laura's heard that story going the rounds about how maybe the Commodore's old friend, Joe Blunt, didn't die of a tumor on board the
Eel
after all. We've talked about this, and I know you don't believe it, but a lot more people are talking about it now than before. The way I hear it now is that somebody got to him in the middle of that depth charging when you all must have been half crazy anyway, and the Navy just covered it up with that business about his dying from a brain tumor.

Keith clenched his fist, slammed the opened desk top in front of him with it as he turned to the last page of the letter.

             
She probably has heard it, too—like I said, she's a cool number—but it doesn't seem to faze her a bit. Even so, I like her. Maybe I can get her to unbend a little bit while you're away. It would be interesting.

There was a little more to the letter but Keith hardly saw it. “Stay away from Laura, Peggy,” he muttered under his breath. It was like her to say nothing to him of all these thoughts she had been having, to hold them within her and then lay them all out when he was unable to answer, unable to prevent her from doing whatever it was she had in mind to do about it.
Cushing
was already well at sea, deeply submerged. In emergency he could transmit a message, but not about something like this. Even if he could send Peggy a message, what would he say? He felt himself
trapped, powerless, his comfort and security at home suddenly destroyed, or, at least, endangered. “Damn Peggy anyway!”

Running deep beneath the surface, her main coolant pumps at half speed, U.S.S.
William B. Cushing
effortlessly put 360 nautical miles behind her per day. She would make a landfall at Spitsbergen—if indeed a “landfall” was the proper terminology—for the latest report of ice reconnaissance by air had placed the edge of the late winter ice pack well to the south of that frosty land, and the confirmation of position would have to be by sonar and fathometer. Even this, while good conservative practice, was probably of little real use compared to the phenomenal accuracy and dependability of the two inertial navigation sets with which the
Cushing
was equipped. After Spitsbergen, at the reduced speed required by the operation order upon going under the ice, the North Pole would be some four days' steaming away.

Normally, the ice would be only a few feet thick at the edge of the pack, gradually—but fairly rapidly—increasing to the average winter thickness of about twenty feet. An iceberg, however, could be much deeper. Granted, bergs are not very apt to be encountered in the pack ice, the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. Icebergs come from glaciers on Greenland, which break off when the glacier hits the sea. As they slowly drift southward, they can be a fantastic hazard to navigation until they have slowly melted into the sea. Generally they stay close to the shore of Greenland, but occasionally an errant one may unexpectedly be caught, like ships of bygone years, in the middle of the ice pack. There, its behavior would be controlled by the circular motion of the drifting ice in the Arctic basin rather than the southbound currents which affect most of them, and it would be carried down into the Atlantic Ocean with the ice pack.

Encountering an iceberg at sea in northern latitudes, or in the ice pack, was, Keith knew, of far greater concern than encountering another submarine. For one thing, it would make no noise, unless wind or sea conditions were heavy, causing it to grind against surrounding pack ice. It would simply lie there, a stone-hard cliff hundreds of feet in depth, hanging in the midst of watery space like a gigantic trap for an unwary submarine. Keith saw to it that several hours a day were spent studying the ice patrol reports and the reference material with which he had been
provided. Although the packet was a thick one, he took the time to read it all twice, and hold wardroom seminars in addition.

Contrary to popular belief, a submarine crew underway is at least as busy as the crew of any other type of ship. In the first place, the ability to submerge makes the submarine infinitely more complicated than any surface ship; and in the second, the submarine crew is smaller, for her very nature requires the minimum practicable crew, in the most confined of quarters. While underway, everyone except the captain, executive officer, ship's doctor and the cooks stands two four-hour watches per day. Regular drills, exercises in the many evolutions of which the ship must remain capable, come out of the off-watch time of two-thirds of the ship's company. So do cleaning the ship, routine ship's work, repairs to machinery or—the more usual case—regular maintenance. The idea that a submarine crew finds time hanging heavy on its hands while their ship drives her way submerged across an ocean or halfway around the world is unrealistic. A submarine does not even float without attention, like an ordinary ship, but maintains a specific depth at the will of her masters. The days pass swiftly. The pressure of day-to-day routine is inescapable. Keith made the most of the time he had.

The ice pack appeared on schedule. Keith had instructed Jim Hanson to adjust speed in order to reach it during the daylight hours. At the proper time he brought the ship to periscope depth so that those of the crew who were interested could look at it through the spare periscope while the
Cushing
approached at slow speed. He himself spent long minutes inspecting the thin white line which appeared on the horizon just at noontime, interspersing his own looks with letting an eager sailor have a turn.
Cushing
's other periscope had been turned over to the crew entirely, but it soon was apparent that a single 'scope could not suffice for everyone to have the long look he obviously wanted. And Keith had to admit to himself that he was in truth exercising a skipper's privilege with the other, that a major portion of his own interest was purely personal curiosity.

Seen from a distance, the ice looked like a heavily demarcated horizon, a solid white line between the gray of the sea and the leaden blue of the sky. As the
Cushing
drew cautiously nearer it was evident that it was not solid, for what appeared to be the
edge was a mass of broken blocks, crumbled off the solid ice behind by the combined action of sea movement and the weakening effect of melting. Most of the pieces nevertheless were of quite respectable size, several tons in weight and many feet across; and when Keith decided he had approached as close as was prudent he turned to a course parallel to the putative frontal edge for a close and leisurely inspection, all the while maintaining a continuous and careful watch ahead. It would not do to damage valuable periscopes by ramming them against a miniature iceberg during a quixotic rubberneck tour for crew members!

The coloration of the ice and ice blocks was fascinating, even though he had been prepared by his reading. White on top, of course, and white on the broken-off edges, down to the waterline. But where the ice entered the water it assumed a greenish tinge. Some of the blocks were wallowing gently in the nearly motionless sea, enough that he could see a foot or more below their normal waterlines, far enough to note that the light green shaded swiftly to almost black. Some of the pamphlets he had read had explained it: This was the norm for much of the Arctic, though not for all of it. The discoloration was the combined result of normal sea growth and water action on tiny organisms frozen into the ice when it was formed. These organisms, and growth on the ice under surface, formed much of the food for the wildlife—the seals, porpoises, whales and fish—and through them for the bears and man himself. The white mass was essentially snowfall over the frozen sea ice, built up during the years it had slowly circulated around the Arctic basin.

Ice, to Keith, should be white; or at least clear, like frozen water. But he had learned it could be a number of other colors, the slimy blue-green of the undersides of these blocks being only one of several manifestations. It was also hard, both from the cold and from the compression to which it was so often subjected, and deserving of respect.
Cushing
had been built with an ice suit, one of the reasons she had been chosen for this mission. Her sail was specially strengthened, as were her propeller, hull and control surfaces. In addition, her sailplanes were designed so that they could be put on ninety degrees rise, straight up and down, to facilitate breaking through the ice if necessary. She could cope with the ice, if handled intelligently, but she could not ignore the facts of physics, either. For the next few
weeks he and his ship would be spending all their time in intimate relation with this common, yet most unusual, substance. It behooved him to learn what he could of it at first hand.

Sunlight was waning when Keith decided that his crew and he had had enough opportunity to inspect the ice under which they would henceforth be operating. He housed the periscopes, retracted the radio antenna masts, ordered deep submergence and set the course due north. Jim Hanson had obtained several Loran fixes, and the next thing would be to detect the nearest part of Spitsbergen, Prins Karls Forland, on sonar and Fathometer, in the place where it was supposed to be. This would confirm the practicability of avoiding unwanted shallow water should there be difficulty with other navigational equipment. From this time onward, except for occasional tests of missiles,
Cushing
would be divorced even from periscope view of the surface of the sea, confined—except for thinner ice in a rare winter polynya—beneath a virtually impenetrable layer of ice twenty feet thick.

In obedience to his operation order, Keith set a slower speed of advance than before, and when the upward-beamed fathometer showed that block and brash ice had given way to solid cover he doubled the sonar watch. As the
Cushing
drove ever northward, her echo-ranging sonar probed ahead, on a secure and varying frequency, listening for the somewhat mushy return which would spell danger. If there were a return echo, any attempt to halt
Cushing
's forward progress would be useless. Like all nuclear submarines, however, especially the whale-shaped ones, she turned on a dime, far more sharply than any surface ship could possibly hope to match. Here lay her safety. Keith's orders to his officer of the deck and helmsman were simple and direct. “If deep ice is contacted ahead, immediately put the rudder hard over away from it, and then call me.”