Firespill (22 page)

Ramsey tapped the gauge a second time from habit. “Ah, sorry, what’s that, Chief?”

“P.O. Lane—he should have been down here looking for Lambrecker. Have you seen him?”

The seaman seemed to be having trouble getting a reading through the humidity-fogged glass. “Yeah. Saw him in the engine room a while back—talking to Haines, I think.”

“You sure? I’ve been looking for him everywhere.”

“Yeah—I think…” Ramsey hesitated. “Come to think of it, I never saw him go through aft. He may have ducked down to stores.”

The chief caught a stanchion as he temporarily lost his sense of balance, dizzy from the effort of walking and breathing in the oppressive atmosphere of the after compartment. Ramsey reached out and held him steady. A moment later he felt better. “Thanks,” he said. Relaxing his grip on his truncheon and letting it swing freely from its wrist strap, he began to descend the stores room steps, calling out, “You there, Johnny?”

He never even saw Sheen come from behind him with the wrench. Now only the fourth officer, the chief engineer, and Jordan stood in the way of complete surprise. They would be next.

All O’Brien could hear when he returned to the control room was the distinctive ping of the sonar. It told him that Sparks must recently have switched it from passive to active mode, and if he expected an echo it must mean that by now they were within ten miles of the fishing boat’s approximate position.

But the captain, sensing what O’Brien was thinking, shook his head discouragingly. “We were getting too much background noise from the fire on passive. Goddamn thing’s making a hell of a row.” He stopped for another breath. “Almost impossible to pick up their engine in that. Have a listen.”

The sonar operator switched from active back to passive as O’Brien lifted the earphone. All he could hear was a deafening, splitting crackle like the sound of a cypress forest fire. He handed back the earpiece and glanced at the chart. “We should be in the area, though.”

The captain was leaning against the search periscope. The temperature in the control room had risen to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and all the salt pills were gone. O’Brien felt uncomfortable about not having reported the Lambrecker incident, but the captain’s shining, haggard face and labored breathing vindicated his decision. They all needed to hold together just a bit longer. Once the rescue began, if it began, everyone would be too busy to worry about his own troubles. Besides, Lambrecker would be found sooner or later.

As the remaining minutes slipped by, and the sonar sent its ping racing out through the deep layers of ocean, Captain Kyle watched the sweep of the sonar illuminating the screen in frosty, short-lived segments.

O’Brien was right; they should be just about within echo range of the fishing boat—if it still existed. But even if it did exist, he had no way of knowing how far the firespill had forced it away from its original position.

He worried too about the sub’s fast-depleting battery. If electric power were to drop much further,
Swordfish
would be largely disabled, unable to drive quickly to the surface or to take evasive action. He thought of the old days in the Tench class subs. Running at maximum speed in these conditions then would have meant that your battery would be out in an hour. The Ranger class had extended that time, but even so,
Swordfish
would have no margin to spare in getting out after the rescue. He chewed at his lower lip. Maybe he should call it off now.

He ran his eye over the chart. They were approaching the blue X which O’Brien had marked on his preplotted course as the limit of their power capability at full speed—their point of no return. If only they could have half an hour’s running on the surface, thought Kyle. It would be slower—the sub reached maximum speed only when submerged—but it would allow him to re-oxygenate and at least partially recharge the batteries.

The clock’s minute hand jerked forward. It was almost 2000. Kyle watched one more sweep of the sonar’s arm and went back to the chart. The area of the firespill given earlier by Pacific Fleet H.Q.’s satellite pictures resembled a huge dumbbell, with two roughly circular areas joined by a narrower waist.

O’Brien was going over the course again, trying to find the delicate balance between the highest possible speed and the longest time available. If they kept up their eighteen knots, they would have to turn back soon. But if they slowed down, not only would it put the Vice-President in jeopardy, but any power they saved would be useless if the spill had widened so much as to make escape from under it impossible. And less speed meant that they would be down longer, increasing the danger of suffocation.

At 2003 O’Brien cursed lightly. His sweaty fingers had slipped on the dividers, smearing some of his penciled calculations, and the perspiration from his forehead continued to blur his vision as he tried to concentrate. Kyle moved back to the sonar and asked, “Rescue team ready?”

O’Brien frowned. He had told the captain that all was ready an hour ago, when he had checked the team huddled beneath the forward hatch. “They’re all set, sir.”

Kyle bobbed his head by way of tired acknowledgment, his eyes fixed on the screen, as if his very presence might somehow induce a blip to appear. Without looking up he asked, “What’s our power supply?”

O’Brien had told him that too, five minutes ago. They had half an hour left before they would have to turn back and about two hours to try to outrun the firespill. “Approximately two and a half hours, sir.”

“I want it on the nose, Number One.”

The starboard planesman shifted slightly in his seat. “Watch what you’re doing,” snapped Hogarth. O’Brien deliberately took time to mop his neck and face before answering the captain, hoping to convey to him that it was doing nothing to reduce the strain on everybody to ask the same questions every five minutes.

“Power supply is two and a half hours, Captain.”

“That was ten minutes ago.”

O’Brien murmured to himself in exasperation, then answered, “Two hours and twenty minutes power remaining, Captain.”

“All sectors conserving?”

“Yes, sir. Air conditioning and lighting at minimum.”

The captain had not taken his eyes off the sonar screen. “I want the air conditioning shut down completely—including food refrigeration unit.”

“Sir?”

“Shut down
all
air conditioning—including food refrigeration unit.”

This time both planesmen looked straight at Hogarth. The officer said nothing. “Yes, sir,” answered O’Brien wearily. He was about to use the phone to convey the order but changed his mind; any more talking would only irritate Kyle further, glued as he was to the screen, tense for the faintest echo. Instead O’Brien spoke quietly to the gofer. “Go tell whoever’s looking after the air-conditioning generator to shut it down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Slade, a short, red-haired assistant engineer of Irish extraction who had just dragged himself from his forward torpedo room bunk to stand relief duty in the small midships generator room, couldn’t believe the order. “Are they crazy? It’s over a hundred and ten fucking degrees in here. I’m relieving a guy who just passed out.”

The gofer shrugged. “It’s hotter’n hell in control too.”

Slade threw a switch. “All right, all right—I’ll shut the bloody thing down. They made contact yet?”

“Nope.”

“We’re gonna have to turn pretty goddamn soon, you know that?”

Again the gofer shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to be held at all responsible for anything that went on in the control room. As he stepped over the bulkhead on his way back to his post, Slade called after him, “Hey, gofer. You hear about Lambrecker?”

The gofer looked puzzled. “Being arrested? Yeah, I heard.”

“Arrested, bullshit—he’s out. Broke loose from the ship’s office.”

“Jesus! Where is he?”

“Don’t know.” Slade breathed heavily and used an old oil rag to wipe his face. “Want to know something else?”

“What?”

“Evers—the guy down with bums in sick bay.”

“Yeah—what about ’im?”

“Sick bay attendant thinks he’s gonna kick off. He’s in shock. I just saw him. He’s been throwin’ up all over the place. Looks like a fucking ghost. That’s all Lambrecker needs, I can tell you.”

“Jesus.”

Slade’s hand stopped moving over his throat; the dirty rag hung loosely down his chest. “You mean you never heard about that in Control either?”

“I—I never heard nothing.”

Slade stuffed the rag in his back pocket. “Huh—they probably don’t even know themselves, the assholes. Who’s running this son of a bitch anyway?”

The gofer shrugged once more and walked off. Back in Control he reported to O’Brien. “I told Slade, sir. He’s shut ’er down.”

O’Brien merely nodded, and the gofer stood silently in a comer, wondering whether he should pass on what he’d just heard.

The captain was back at the chart table, one ear still on the sonar, annoying O’Brien again with more questions. “What’s our air supply?”

“Four hours maximum.”

As casually and quietly as he could, and so the others could not hear, Kyle, picking up the report that had just been passed to him from the radio room, asked, “From your calculations, will that get us out?”

O’Brien answered just as quietly, “No, sir. Not the way we came in. The fire’s spread all around the back of us, if these coordinates from Esquimalt still hold.”

“No reason to suppose they don’t, is there?”

“Well, they can’t tell us a thing from satellite pics anymore. There’s too much smoke. And even if they could, our aerial is whiplashing so much that reception is unreliable as well. Most of the time Sparks is just getting static. We haven’t received the U.S. Coast Guard’s report yet, but my guess is that we might have, well, overstretched ourselves already. The firespill may have spread much more than we anticipated.”

Kyle tapped the waist of the dumbbell-shaped area. “If we aim to run across here on our way out, will that give us more time in the search zone?”

O’Brien looked at the figures that crisscrossed his note pad. “No, sir.” His finger rested on the middle of the eastern bulge of the dumbbell. “Last we heard, the Vice-President was here in the middle of the eastern sector. We passed from the western sector—where we first got the message—under the narrow waist, which incidentally isn’t so narrow—it’s estimated to be a hundred miles across. It will be easier to keep running and try to come out under the end of the eastern bulge. That’s closest to the coast, where someone might be able to reach us. If we turn back to the waist hoping to break clear north or south, we might find the waistline has expanded, especially if it’s met up with that Japanese LNG spill. Then we’d be right back under a fire zone with no one anywhere near the sub. And we’d be completely alone.”

“What makes you so sure we’ll get out under the eastern rim?”

“I’m not, but we might just as well try to outrun the front of the spill as go back into it.” O’Brien swept his hand across the whole area. “I’ll lay ten to one that given these currents, that so-called waist no longer exists.”

The chief engineer, cursing the wear and tear that such long patrols invariably put on a submarine’s hull, rang the control room and asked for the captain.

“Yes, Chief?”

“We’re losing pressure in one of the for’ard fuel tanks. It’s not much, but it looks like a leak.” There was a pause as the captain wondered what this new information might do if conveyed to the crew. For an instant he almost wished himself back in an O class sub, where such a leak, though common enough, would have been impossible to detect. As nonchalantly as he could, he replied, “Right, Chief. Wouldn’t bother anyone about it, though. What d’you think?”

“I understand,” said the chief and hung up. But the gofer in his comer could tell that something was amiss. He decided that he should contain himself no longer. He certainly didn’t want to be held responsible for withholding information from the officers; besides, he was afraid of what might happen if any of the crew took matters into their own hands. He turned to the auxiliary-man and blurted out, “Lambrecker’s escaped.”

Everyone in Control turned towards him. For a few seconds, the only sound was the lonely ping of the sonar. Kyle swung round at O’Brien. “Did you know about this, Number One?”

“Yes, sir. But I have a search party looking for him. I thought it best not to worry you about—”

The captain grabbed the phone and rang for Second Officer Grant. The gofer had also intended to tell them about Evers, but the expression on Kyle’s face silenced him.

There was no reply from Grant. Perspiring heavily, his already reddened face showing purple in the control room light, Kyle lifted the phone again and rang O’Brien’s cabin. O’Brien said nothing. Kyle smashed the receiver down and rang for the fourth officer, embarrassment fueling his anger.

“Yes?”

Kyle took a second to get his breath. “This is the Captain. Lambrecker’s escaped. On a boat this size it—it—” Again he had to pause for breath. “Goddamn it!” he exploded. “It shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes to find the son of a bitch. I want him under arrest—in a straitjacket if necessary. Understood?”

There was a click on the other end.

Kyle stood still, sweat pouring out of him, his eyes fixed on O’Brien. Maybe, he thought, maybe O’Brien had been won over, and that was why he hadn’t said anything about Lambrecker’s escape. He kept looking at O’Brien for several seconds. O’Brien had been in charge of all navigation. Maybe now they were heading out of the fire. He should have plotted and checked the course himself. He’d trusted O’Brien completely. Finally, as O’Brien steadfastly met his eye Kyle decided that suspicion had temporarily distorted his reason. If he couldn’t trust Bud O’Brien, there was no hope of beating them anyway. He pointed to the phone. “That was Lambrecker.”

“Jesus,” muttered O’Brien. “That’s why everything’s been so quiet.”

Suddenly the three officers and seamen felt isolated—cut off from the rest of the
Swordfish
. They all knew that now Lambrecker and his followers, whatever their number, must have taken the remaining officers and N.C.O.’s prisoner along with anyone else who had resisted them. With a few strategically placed men it would not be difficult to seize control of the sub.