Cold is the Sea (24 page)

“It's one of our main communications stations serving the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean,” ventured Buck, aware that Richardson knew this as well as he.

“It's a quarter of the way around the world from here. Keith must have had the devil of a time getting through,” said Richardson musingly, as he closed the empty suitcase, shoved it into a corner.

“Is that why you think he made the message so short? But he couldn't have known it would have to go through Asmara before he opened up!”

“Maybe he did at that, Buck.” The younger officer felt his senior's measured gaze. “He knew he'd have to raise some very distant station and start with a lot of procedure signals. So there would be a lot of lost time before he could even get to the main part of the message.”

“So?”

“So maybe someone might try to jam his transmission! That would be another reason to make it short!”

Comprehension on Williams' face, but still a question. “Why didn't he say so, then? He'd want us to know that, if he expected it, wouldn't he?”

Richardson's voice dropped a half-octave, as he answered. “Security, Buck. They didn't get that submarine up there overnight! This wasn't all just an unhappy accident. I'm guessing it wasn't, and I think Keith is guessing the same thing. At least, it might not be. If it isn't, they've been reading our mail for a long time. And it stands to reason, if the collision was deliberate, that was no ordinary submarine!”

“Good Lord.” Buck expelled the words not as an exclamation
but almost as a sigh. “So you figure maybe they sent whatever is up there because they knew Keith was coming into the Arctic Ocean?”

“Only a guess, I said.”

“You're reading an awful lot into this little message, Rich.”

“The next installment from Keith will tell a lot more. That's why I figured I'd better spend the night aboard. He's going to send another message, and he'll time it for when we're in darkness. If we can intercept his transmission direct, instead of depending on some shore station to relay it, we might learn quite a bit just from the way he sends it.”

Buck was silent for a short moment, then said musingly, “He'll know we'll be anxious for his follow-up message, all right, but why should he wait with sending it? We'd get it sooner with another relay through Asmara or Guam, or somewhere, than if he waits till we're in darkness and there's a chance of giving it to us direct.”

“Sure. But it's Keith up there, and he knows we're down here. What would you be thinking, right now, if you were in his shoes?”

“Well, I guess it's obvious I'd be hoping my friends in New London would rally around.”

“You know damn well they would, Buck. And you'd also know that Keith and I would be having this very talk, right about now, and would be sitting in our radio room when your message comes over the air. And you'd also know that we'd figure you'd be in yours.”

“I see what you mean,” said Buck, slowly. “That's just what he'll do.” Then a thought struck him. “Do you think we could talk to him by voice?”

Richardson hesitated before answering. “No. At least, not for anything really important. Maybe our single side-band set can reach him, and hear his, but what could we say that's worthwhile? Any real information he wants to send will come coded, in the right code this time, and by CW.”

“Coded dots and dashes are fine, Rich, but just think what it will do for Keith and his whole crew if we can talk to him by voice!” Buck was speaking rapidly now, throwing all he had into it. “We don't know anything at all about what kind of shape he's in. He'll tell us in his next message. He's probably already got it
drafted. What he and his whole outfit want to hear is that we're right in there with them, and using every resource the Navy's got. There's no rule against voice, is there?”

“No—voice doesn't have the range CW has. But you can't encipher voice. No voice code is secure. If our guess is right there's bound to be an army of unfriendly communication types monitoring everything that goes on the air in that area.”

Buck could sense his superior's desire to be convinced, could hardly wait to press the argument. “I'm talking about morale, boss, not security. We don't need to say anything at all that refers even to where they are, or what they're doing. Don't you think Keith knows us well enough to read between the lines of whatever we say to him?”

Weakening, Rich nodded at the justice of this point. However, he persisted. “The problem is that we'll be making him transmit a second time. If they're monitoring the Arctic, maybe with direction finders, we're making it that much easier for them to locate him. We've no idea what they're up to. I agree it will be good for his morale—and ours, too—if we can come up on voice with him. And he is in international waters, and has every right to send anything he wants. But if there's something funny going on it would be wrong to make him send a lot of procedural transmissions to establish the voice contact.”

Satisfied that he had won, Buck nodded in his turn. “That's no problem, boss. The call-up procedure and all that, I mean. We can get around that easy. We'll use our old wolfpack code. He'll be sitting there in his own radio room and hear it himself, and it'll work like a charm!”

Richardson felt his own enthusiasm beginning to match that of his junior. “You did say that you and Keith had resurrected that old wolfpack code of ours. How would you use it?”

“We wait for him to send the next message, right? We hear it come in, right in our radio shack. The minute he gets the receipt from the shore station working him, we break in with the wolfpack code and tell him what we're up to. He won't have to come back at us on CW, and there'll be no prelims on voice either. Then we shift right over to the single side-band set and talk to him. He won't transmit one single syllable until he opens up to answer, and he'll not have to do that if he doesn't want to.”

“Looks like you're planning for us to break a couple of our
communication rules, Buck, but it sounds good. The most important thing of all, though, will be that message he'll be sending. No interference with that, and no making him repeat on voice what he's already put in the message!” He stopped, then continued, “I want to get on top of that right away, as soon as it comes in. Do you want to help me be the decoding board?”

“You know you couldn't keep me away, Skipper,” said Buck with a warm smile. “But do you think a broken-down old submarine skipper and squadron commander will be able to run one of those new coding machines?” The smile of anticipation on his face belied the words.

“Then you'd better take over one of the division commanders' staterooms and get what sleep you can. When the message comes in we'll be up for quite a while, working on it. Maybe you should tell Cindy you'll not be home tonight.”

Buck grinned. “I did already,” he confessed.

The ship intercom phone buzzed on the bulkhead above Richardson's steel bed. He reached for it swiftly, alertness awakening throughout his body.

“Commodore, this is Radio. We're intercepting a message from the
Cushing
to NSS Annapolis. He's coming in loud and clear.”

“Call Commander Williams in ComSubDiv One-oh-One's room. I'll be right up!” He slammed the telephone into its cradle, jammed his feet into slippers, ran out the door in his pajamas.

Buck, barefooted, carrying his shoes, arrived in the radio room only seconds after he did. Evidently he had been sleeping in his underwear, had delayed only to pull on his trousers.

There were three crewmen there, one a supervisor. “I called you as soon as the message started coming in, Commodore,” the senior said with a hint of pride in his accomplishment. “We're copying it at two stations.” He indicated the two radiomen seated at their typewriters, earphones on their heads, clacking the keys with measured simultaneous cadence as their eyes stared miles beyond the radio receivers banked directly in front of them.

“Have you another set of earphones?” Richardson knew there must be, automatically reached out his hand. Buck Williams, he saw, likewise could hardly contain his eagerness.

“Yessir. But we can only plug you in at one station.” The
supervisor handed Richardson a single set of earphones, swiftly plugged in the other end of the six-foot cord. Rich fumbled with the headpiece, detached one of the earphones from its clip, handed it to Buck, put the headpiece with now a single earphone to his head. Buck, crowding close to be within range of the wire attached to his earpiece, held it to his near ear. The earpieces were fitted with earmuff-type coverings to cut out extraneous sound. Both men cupped their hands over their unused ears, strained to blot out all other sensation.

XVTMW
, said the radio waves.
PLTMV ZAWLN MMPTL XZBKG
—the rhythm was steady, hypnotic. Glancing over the shoulder of one of the radiomen, Williams could see the encrypted message forming before his eyes. There were already three lines of type, ten five-letter groups per line, all neatly columnar, the letters coming one by one as the distant operator hammered them out with his radio key. Like many officers, Williams had learned Morse code early in his career. He had never become as good at it as the radiomen who dealt with it every day, but he could recognize the letters, although not fast enough to receive a message at normal transmittal speed.

“Dash-dot-dash-dot,” went the faint signal. The letter
C. C
appeared on the paper as the radioman hit the typewriter key. Then a single dash, the letter
T
. Then three more: o. Holding both hands, one with an earphone, to his head, Buck could visualize the distant operator, far to the north, beating out the dots and dashes as rapidly as he could, yet well aware that a rhythmic swing, and steady, precise formulation of the letters was vital to accurate receipt. He was obviously a professional. Buck would have described him as having a “copperplate hand,” meaning that the dots and dashes were crisply distinguishable, the spaces between them always the same, the spaces between letters slightly longer but also exactly the same, the spaces between groups longer yet but still unvarying. Keith must also, at that very moment, be hunched in a chair alongside his radio operator, a spare set of earphones on his head, following his radio transmission with his ears and with his mind. He would hear the signals streaming out from his ship, imagine them crossing the frozen ocean, bouncing at least once off the ionosphere and finally coming within range of the tall, huge antennas across the Severn River from the Naval Academy. There, the so-carefully-
tuned receivers would amplify them back into the audible range to be copied. In his own receivers he would hear also the much fainter notes of the distant station as Annapolis responded to his call and indicated readiness to receive the message. He would listen as his radiomen confided his enciphered letters to the aether, hear the procedure signals calling for repeats of doubtful passages if any, finally hear the
R
for receipt that indicated the shore station now assumed responsibility for the message and its delivery to the addressees. Not until a message of this importance had cleared completely would Keith himself—short of urgent matters elsewhere—leave his radio room.

But would Keith know that his two closest friends were similarly occupied, that they had lain in wait to intercept his expected second message, had carefully planned to be in the
Proteus
' radio room to hear it directly, from his own transmitters? It was what Keith himself would do were the situation reversed, and if he was anywhere within reach of the proper receivers. But there was no way Keith could be sure that Rich and Buck, his most immediate associates, had monitored the ship-to-shore frequency and were taking his message directly, that they were at that moment directly connected to him by the tenuous, invisible, fragile radio waves emanating from his own radio room. For that matter, he expected Buck to be at sea in the already-begun barrier exercise.

But, beyond doubting, the hope would have been in his mind. Positive confirmation would be a tremendous booster to morale. If possible it should be done. How to alert him?

“Chief,” Buck said to the radio supervisor, speaking in a low voice so as not to interrupt the concentration of the men receiving the message, uncovering his left ear as he did so, “Chief, is your transmitter on this frequency?”

“Yessir. The Commodore had us do that this afternoon—I mean yesterday. But we don't have the power to reach the
Cushing
where she's at.”

“You mean we don't have the power of a big shore station. We can hear
Cushing
okay, and we have bigger transmitters than she has. So she ought to be able to hear us.”

“Sometimes it works,” said the supervisor doubtfully, “but the
Cushing
didn't know which shore station in the whole world
would be the one that could hear her message. You never know that.”

“Sure, but maybe she aimed it at us, Chief. She picked a time when we'd be in darkness. Maybe she's hoping we would think of putting this watch on her frequency.”

“Annapolis answered her call-up, sir,” the chief radioman said earnestly. “All we're doing is copying her message. There's no way she could know we're on the circuit. Since we're in port, we're not allowed to use the ship-to-shore frequency. Even if we did open up as soon as she's finished with NSS, we might be just enough off-frequency from her that she won't hear our weak signal.”