Cold is the Sea (54 page)

Jerry Abbott was undogging the door leading aft to the reactor compartment, was returning to the control room. He left a trail of water dripping on the deck behind him, and a large puddle began swiftly forming under him as he stopped, facing Buck. He was soaked through and breathing hard. “We can't hold her at this depth, sir,” he said rapidly. “We've got the packing nuts as tight as they'll go, but the water is coming in so hard that two of us had to hold a piece of sheet metal to deflect it so that one man could reach the gland nuts. We'll have to pressurize the compartment!”

“Is everybody out of there?” asked Buck.

“Not yet. Harry Langforth and Whitey Steele and our three best men are still working on the gland, but there's not much more they can do. The leak's still a bad one. The drain pump's taking a suction, but it can't pump very fast at this depth. The water's gaining fast, and I'm afraid the rest of the seal might blow out with the pressure!”

“We've got to stay down here for a while, Jerry, until that second torpedo either runs down or collapses. Have them abandon the stern room and start putting air in it. That will help the drain pump, and also cut down the rate of the leak!”

Abbott said, “Aye, aye, sir!” and ran aft. As he passed through
the watertight door he heard Buck order, “Port ahead two-thirds!”

“The best thing we can do is slow down, Skipper,” said Buck to Rich. “If they've got another fish ready we're still making so much noise it might be able to follow us! Everything else is silenced except the propeller!”

“Right!” It was not necessary to mention the fact that, in her present condition,
Manta
dared not slow to such a degree that she could not carry the increased weight. Buck would otherwise have ordered one-third speed. A glance at the diving station verified that Clancy had already begun to use angle on the stern planes to hold the stern up. More would be needed as speed dropped, as well as a large bubble of air in the after group of ballast tanks. They could hear the hiss of air as Abbott began to follow his orders at the stern room bulkhead.

Chief Sonarman Schultz finally made the report that had been so anxiously awaited. “When we quieted down I could still hear the torpedo pinging somewhere astern and above us,” he said. “Then it sort of petered out and stopped. I think it finally ran down!”

Clancy had been adding air for several minutes to the ballast tanks aft to compensate for the weight of the water in the stern room, and the anxious looks on his face and on those of his diving crew testified to their realization that the total cubic capacity of all of
Manta
's air banks could only expand six times against sea pressure at the 1,500-foot depth—far from enough to empty the after ballast tanks. A silent cheer went through the control room when Buck gave the order to bring the ship up.

“It's obvious we'd not have been able to stay down much longer, Commodore,” said Buck. “Jerry says there's five feet of water in the stern room. It's still coming in fast, but with the shallower depth and air pressure in there, he thinks we can cope with it.” Then he went on, speaking more slowly, with a certain deliberate formality in his words. “Commodore, this illegal base has opened fire on us without cause, and it has damaged us. The submarine based here sank the
Cushing
and caused the loss of eleven good men, one of them our close friend. I request permission to return the fire!”

Williams saw once again the faraway look in the face and eyes of his superior. Rich spoke quietly, almost pensively. “No, Buck.
We're not at war, and we'll not attack in cold blood. I killed a man that way, once, during the war, and I vowed I'd never do it again. Shape your course away from here at shallow depth, and we'll let Washington handle it when they get our message!”

“My God, boss! What do you mean, ‘cold blood'? After what they've done? This ship is a man-of-war! They can't shoot at us without getting shot back at!”

“They can't hurt us now, Buck. And Bungo Pete—I mean, Captain Tateo Nakame—couldn't hurt us then, either. I drove him to shooting with his rifle when he saw what we were doing to his lifeboats!”

Buck's arm around his shoulder was almost like a blow. “Skipper!” he hissed, “stop it! You heard what Keith said, and I've been saying the same thing! Stop it! You hear me? Okay, we'll not try to get even with these bastards, but you've got to promise me to stop it!” Both hands were now on Rich's shoulders, gripping them.

Jerry Abbott, coming on the tableau, ever afterward puzzled over the meaning of what he saw. Nor did he have any way of realizing that it was he who at that instant changed the entire complexion of the private talk between his skipper and their admired, but unaccountably suddenly irresolute, squadron commander. “Skipper!” he said to Buck, “we've got to surface! We can't stop the water! We'll have to get the stern as high as we can and remake the seal with flax packing! The graphite seal is completely shot, and it's getting worse fast!”

“How long can we hold out the way we are, Jerry?” asked Buck.

“Who knows? The seal might let go any minute! A couple of hours, no more. With air pressure in the stern room, I mean. We'll have to let it off to go back in there, and there's no telling what will happen then!”

“How long will it take to make the change once you start?”

“About an hour. It's a big job, but we have everything we need to do it, once we can stop the water from coming in like this!”

Richardson, listening, knew that Admiral Donaldson's cryptic words aboard the
Proteus
, and in the sedan returning to the airfield in Groton, had at last achieved their full meaning, even though neither he nor anyone could have anticipated the situation. “The United States needs someone who can make the
right decision at the right time, and take the responsibility for it, Rich. That's the main reason you're going along on this trip. You may run into a lot more up there than we expect!” Aloud, Rich said, “There's only one place around here we can bring her to the surface, Buck!”

“How are we—” Buck began, but Richardson interrupted him.

Speaking loudly, so as to be overheard, Rich said, “Buck, enter in your log that because there is only one place to surface, which is occupied by a hostile force that not once but several times has endeavored to destroy this ship and all on board, and has now seriously damaged her so that the lives of all hands depend on her coming to the surface to make repairs, the commander of Task Group 83.1 has ordered destruction of the offensive power of the said base so that
Manta
can surface unmolested!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“I will sign the entries in the quartermaster's notebook and the official log to attest to their accuracy. And now, make ready the torpedoes!”

Nikolai Konstantinov Shumikin, finally relaxed at his desk, was beginning to be pleased with himself. No matter how you cut it, no matter that the American missile submarine had got away, or that the
Novosibirsky Komsomol
had been unaccountably and unfortunately lost, the American submarine which had had the temerity to lift her periscope in the middle of his own artificial lagoon was now also resting on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. He himself had heard the torpedo explosion which had killed her, and he had heard some of the desperate moves she had made to save herself. With her had died the possibility of premature revelation of the existence of his missile base. This the Kremlin intended to announce at the appropriate and propitious time, as the many briefings he had received had made clear. His primary responsibility was to safeguard its secrecy until then, and he had succeeded. It had been at some cost, but he had been successful.

He would compose a priority message explaining that a number of exotic weapons had been used against him, all illegally and all unsuccessful, that Grigory Ilyich Zmentsov and his whole crew in the
Novosibirsky Komsomol
had died heroically defending their country, and that his own inspired crew had finally sunk the American submarine responsible for it all. Having the
trapped missile submarine slip through his fingers, for there was no way to find her now, was a misfortune, but it would have to be accepted. Certainly that had been through no fault of his. On the contrary, it was he who had taken the decisive action which had nearly captured her after all—and, in any case, she could know nothing about the existence of the missile base.

Loss of the
Novosibirsky Komsomol
would be the hard thing to explain, but surely the Naval Ministry knew they were taking this risk when they fitted her out for her special mission. Nevertheless, he would have to provide sufficient detail so that a plausible announcement as to the circumstances could be made. He was beginning to grapple with the problem, had decided he would have to send two messages, one in language proper for public distribution, the other a more private, more accurate explanation for official use only, when suddenly the alarm bell jangled. “Torpedo fired!” shouted a hoarse voice over the command intercom.

Shumikin leaped to his feet, pressed the button overriding the sonar room. “What do you mean, ‘torpedo fired,'” he snarled. “Who ordered it?”

“It's not us, Commander, It's that submarine! We heard it firing! There's two torpedoes, now! We can hear them! They're coming this way! Very noisy! They're big torpedoes!” The voice rose in a shriek, then was cut off.

A tremendous geyser of water and explosive gas burst out of the open silo, rose high above it and, descending, drenched everything within several hundred yards, Nearly simultaneously, a wracking, explosive BOOM shattered the calm atmosphere. A plume of gray smoke shot high above the ice, then lazily drifted away in the still air.

The ruined silo, instantly filled with angry water, jerked sideways, hanging from the heavy steel foundations built into the ice and from its moorings to the other three. The ice cracked on the far side of the hangar, and the water level rose several feet up the steel facing of the
Novosibirsky Komsomol
's mooring pier.

The second torpedo struck a silo diametrically opposite the one first hit. Its exit doors burst open. A second geyser of water, mixed with smoke and gas, shot into the air. This time it was followed by a streak of white-hot fire from the ruptured fuel section of the missile recently lowered into it.

The silo complex, which had begun to list to one side, straightened. It had been built with tremendously strong and wide underpinning in the ice itself, firmly planted into the rigid crystalline structure and then “cemented” in place by water. Its designer had proudly stated that it would continue to float, and remain operable, even if two of its silos were damaged or destroyed, and this had, by consequence, been written as one of the operational requirements. Now he was proved wrong, for the weight of the two flooded silos dragged down the entire structure, the whole section of the ice island into which it had been built, to within inches of the water level in the polynya. Seawater began to trickle around the hinges of the missile exit doors of the two undamaged silos, and into the long, narrow, unsealed cracks separating their halves.

The personnel of the undamaged silos needed no encouragement to evacuate. They had already been severely shaken by the two heavy explosions they had felt, and all electric power had cut off. Candles and battery-powered lights only heightened their appreciation of danger. When one of their number frantically reported that water was only centimeters from the portals of the crew entry hatches, they unceremoniously started up the interior ladders to the top level and ran out. They were barely in time, for great cracks had begun appearing in the laden ice. Water was coming through them, collecting on the surface, everywhere. Within minutes, a stream of water was running down the personnel hatches. The base commander, confronting the men as they ran, furiously ordered them back to their stations, but they stood stolidly, affecting not to hear him, not daring to obey.

By this time the burning silo had begun to resemble a missile trying to drive itself farther into the ice. Violent, rocketlike flame was erupting from the exploded silo doors, reaching, like a searing blade, a hundred feet into the air. From there it gradually turned increasingly deep shades of red until finally the fire cone petered out, some six hundred feet above the ice, in a plume of jet-black smoke.

It had been a mistake to tie in the aircraft hangar's services with those supporting the silos. The designer had used the opportunity to include its foundations with theirs also, and the whole ice slab, with its network of steel beams, insulated conduits, pipes and cables, had been laid out with great
engineering skill and frozen solidly together. It cracked in several places, but the steel links in the ice held firm, and the entire camp area began to sag. Then, with a great smashing of ice, groaning of tortured metal and snapping of steel reinforcements, along with a continuous popping of burst rivets, stretched hoses, broken pipes and tangled utility lines of all kinds, the hangar, silos, cranes and all equipment in the vicinity slowly began to descend into the sea.

Or, rather, the sea waiting underneath simply poured up through the cracks, and out of the lowered edge of the polynya, to inundate the space recently occupied. A huge slab of ice cracked free from the rest of the ice island, just beyond the hangar, and irresistibly was dragged down by the weight of two full silos and two more filling rapidly.