Aboard the Roosevelt, submariner Evans had been silenced. Forever. Yet even in death he seemed to be screaming, his face an agony frozen in time, the cheek beneath his left eye swollen so that the eye was little more than a slit, the left side of his face appearing longer than his right, his mouth agape, right eye open and staring. His whole expression was one of terror, paralyzed before the second of impact. The bosun who had aided Robert Brentwood in giving the seaman the shot of Valium to quieten him down was trying to make sure the hospital corpsman had given him the correct dosage. Maybe the corpsman, unwell himself at the time, had somehow given him a larger dose than he meant to give him. But the corpsman shook his head, his tone adamant.
“No way, José. I didn’t give you an overdose. Don’t pin it on me. Here—” He turned away, trying to abort a sneeze-unsuccessfully. He took down the sick bay clipboard, tapping the day’s entry with his Vicks inhaler. “There it is, Chief. Twenty milligrams. You signed for it.”
“Then what the hell—” began the bosun, the corpsman using the inhaler to dismiss the bosun’s question.
“Who knows? Could’ve had a stroke. Heart attack. Combination of factors.”
“Skipper thinks he killed him.”
Despite his fever, the corpsman, though looking across at the bosun with rheumy eyes, still managed an air of a professional clinician. “Natural psychological reaction. Skipper’s not used to doing it.”
“Yeah, well, anybody kick off after you’ve given them a shot?”
“No.” The corpsman stared at him, then shifted his gaze to Evans, pulling back the sheet by the government-issue tag. “By the look of him — I’d say he died of fright. Pink elephants. Sure as hell didn’t die of a cold.”
“What the hell you mean?”
“Delirium tremens. Like I told you before. That’s where pink elephants come from.”
“Stop jerking me around.”
“Listen,” said the corpsman, sticking the Vicks inhaler into his nostril, one finger flattening the other nostril as he took a deep breath, “I’m telling you, Chief. Alcoholics who’re forced dry see more than pink elephants.”
The bosun remembered Evans screaming about snakes. Maybe the corpsman was right. “But I thought the Valium was supposed to calm him. Take the edge off?”
“Not enough,” said the corpsman. “Once you’ve flipped out, normal dose doesn’t do much for you. I could’ve told the old man that.”
“Why the hell didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“Shit, you weren’t there. Back here sittin’ on your ass.”
“Listen, man, I was pushing a one oh five.”
“What?”
“Temperature. Fever — or hadn’t you noticed?” With that, the corpsman took a thermometer from its sheath, glanced at it, shook the mercury column down before slipping it under his tongue. “ ‘Sides, I thought it best to keep away from everyone. It’s one mother of a virus.”
The corpsman, thermometer sticking out like a small cigarette from his mouth, looked down at his watch.
“Then,” said the bosun, pulling the sheet back over Evans’s face before they took him to a forward food freezer, “what the hell did kill Evans?”
The bosun has his thumb on the intercom button and asked someone to come up and help him with the corpse. Looking at Evans, still puzzled, he told the hospital corpsman, “You know, they say that flu in 1918 killed more guys than the war did.” He thought the hospital corpsman was going to bite the thermometer clean in half.
The bosun had merely meant it to take a little wind out of the corpsman’s sails, but later, when he entered the Roosevelt’s redded-out control room, which smelled like an auto showroom, unlike the disinfected sick bay, he saw the officer of the deck, First Mate Peter Zeldman, standing forward of Brentwood, directly behind the planesman’s console, and asked him if any of the crew on watch had gone off sick, reported a fever. But he didn’t get his answer, the sonar operator cutting in, “We have an unclassified surface vessel-five thousand yards. Closing.”
“Signature check?” Zeldman asked Sonar, conscious of Brentwood moving over from the periscope island, watching the “shattered ring” pulse on the pale green screen.
“No known signature,” replied Sonar, moving his head closer to the console, working the constant compromise between volume and tone needed to discriminate one noise from another in what nearly everyone but a sailor assumed to be a quiet domain. In reality the sea was a never-ending “frying pan” of energy, a night jungle of noise, countless billions of shrimp, microscopic organisms, clicking and sizzling amid the eerie haunting trumpets of the giant mammals in constant search for food.
“Could it be using baffles?” put in Brentwood.
“Signature pattern congruent with full hull, sir.” He meant that there was no sign of the kind of blistering effect on the outer ring of the echo pulse that might indicate symmetrical baffles.
“Put it on the PA,” Zeldman ordered Sonar. “Squelch button.” The next second all the crewmen in the control room could hear the muted engine sounds of the unknown surface vessel. Zeldman was ambivalent about the procedure. Sometimes he thought it only made everyone more edgy, but he’d been told by Brentwood how putting incoming noise on the PA, provided it wasn’t loud enough to send out its own pulse reverberating through the hull, could sometimes help the sonar operator. Those enlisted men who had been sailors in civilian life could not only help identify the vessel type but sometimes even luck out on its probable nationality. This could save a captain or his executive officer from ordering a preemptive launch of a torpedo or Tomahawk cruise missile, which, while it would almost certainly take out the oncoming vessel, would also end the submarine’s greatest weapon, its silence, revealing its exact location.
The UCV speed was now showing twenty knots on the digital readout — too fast for most noncombat vessels. But Brentwood knew that in trying to maintain the U.S. Navy’s “rollover” strategy — rolling over all obstacles, including Russian sub packs, in order to get vital resupply to NATO and Europe — the United States had made up for lost time with an industrial miracle that even dwarfed previous Japanese achievements. The industrial “miracle,” spurred on by uncertainty about the level of Japan’s commitment to the war effort, beyond her helping to ferry American troops across to Korea, was that the U.S. East Coast shipyards and those in San Diego were producing “prefab thirty-thousand-ton merchantmen,” called “Leggo ships” by the submarine crews, at the rate of one every seven days. It wasn’t as fast as the one Liberty ship every four days achieved by the American Kaiser Shipyards in World War II, but for a computer age, it was impressive, the Leggo ships stronger because of the laser spot welding, and faster.
Brentwood put it to Zeldman and the RO that it was quite possible the noise they were hearing was that of a Leggo. With the merchantmen rolling off the slipways at more than three a week, there was no way, he pointed out, that Roosevelt’s computer could have all Leggo noise signatures in its memory. Each time the subs returned from patrol, they were routinely issued the top secret taped signatures of the thirty-five Leggos built in the yards during the patrol. Besides, the moment the merchantmen were completed, they were pressed into service, without the normal time set aside for sea trials during which the noise signatures of ships were normally taped and refined to register any changes made by the yard-birds.
“Could be one of ours,” conceded Zeldman, watching Brentwood’s expression, trying to anticipate which course of action he would take.
“Forty-three hundred and closing,” came Sonar’s coolly modulated tone. The ship was coming right for them. In just over seven minutes it would be directly over the Roosevelt, now lying still, on listening mode only.
Brentwood ordered everything closed down except the “coffee grinder,” the reactor at the very heart of the sub that not only powered the Sea Wolf but which would take hours to fire up. Zeldman was worried that Brentwood was placing too much faith in the anechoic paint layer on the hull, which absorbed sonar pulses from another source, thus minimizing, sometimes eliminating, echo ping and so denying a hunter any “noise scent” at all.
Suddenly, with each man silent, rigid, as if welded to his post, the submarine seemed to shrink inside. It was true that for the men who had experienced life in the old diesel-electric subs and for one or two who had served, when very young, in the last boats of World War II, the Sea Wolf was infinitely more spacious. Curtained for privacy, individual bunks in nine-man dormitories, good-sized lockers beneath, rack space large enough to hang a full dress uniform, a soundproofed audio booth and video room for two movies a week, the modern Sea Wolf was a limousine compared to a standard sedan. Still, for most of the crew, who didn’t know the old pigboats, who hadn’t experienced what it was like at the end of your watch to have to roll into the sweat-soaked bunk of your replacement, and, except for the cook and the oiler, to be allowed only one three-minute shower a week, the Roosevelt was still crowded. Every now and then even a fully trained crewman would crack from what was euphemistically called DCS — developed claustrophobia syndrome.
As he listened to the heavy, gut-punching throb of the approaching vessel, it occurred to the hospital corpsman that perhaps Evans hadn’t had the DTs after all. Maybe he’d cracked under the strain of such claustrophobia. No matter how much bigger the Roosevelt was, compared to the old pigboats, it was still a submarine, with every available space jammed with equipment, including lead shot which could be jettisoned to accommodate new equipment so as not to alter the sub’s buoyancy. The corpsman knew that by any landlubber’s reckoning, the sub was still a long, steel coffin, and every man aboard knew that below her “crush” depth of three thousand feet, the enormous pressure driving her toward the bottom at over a hundred miles an hour, the sub would implode — flattened like a beer can beneath a boot.
“Two thousand and closing,” reported Sonar, his voice not so steady now, and hoarse, the sound of the UCV’s props increasing, having changed from a deep, rhythmic pulse to a churning noise that now seemed to be coming at them from every direction.
“Torpedoes ready?” asked Brentwood.
“Ready, sir,” confirmed Zeldman.
Brentwood glanced up at the fathometer. They were in shallower water. It made him more vulnerable to shock waves from any explosion.
“Set forward one and two for SI. Stern five and six for SI,” ordered Brentwood, quietly and distinctly, his command heard clearly in both forward and aft torpedo rooms, the fish being set for SI, or sensor impact, the unknown surface vessel now so close that the trailing wires which normally ran back from the torpedoes to the sub need not be used — the close proximity of the oncoming ship in effect a point-blank target for the twenty-eight-mile Mark-48s.
“Fifteen hundred. Closing,” came Sonar’s voice. “Speed increasing to twenty-seven knots. Most likely a cruiser, Captain. Friendly or not, I can’t tell.”
The choice for Brentwood was clear and stark. Under the authority of chief of naval operations, he could risk attacking any UCV if the UCV had not been identified by signature. In the cruel equation of war, the risk of sinking a “friendly” did not come near to the cost of losing a Sea Wolf, with its capacity as “platform of last resort” to take out a minimum of twenty-four major Soviet cities and/or ICBM “farms” from over two and a half thousand miles away. Yet Brentwood knew that even if the ship wasn’t using a chopper-dangled sonar mike because of the vicinity of its mother ship’s noise, if he fired, the UCV’s on-board sonar would instantly have his precise position. He could then expect to be dumped on by a cluster of “screamers,” as the U.S. sailors called the Soviet RBU—Raketnaya Bombometnaya Ustanovka—antisubmarine rockets. Fired in paired sequence from twelve-barrel horseshoe-configuration launchers, the five-foot-long, forty-two-pound warheads would rip the Roosevelt apart. The later models, being fitted by the Soviets with World War II-type Stuka dive-bomb whistles, were given the name “screamers,” and their noise, traveling much faster underwater than in air, struck deep into the collective psyche of all NATO submariners.
“Thirteen hundred yards and closing.”
The signature computer was still running, maddeningly indecisive, flashing orange bars across its green screen, indicating possible “enemy” match-ups with a plus or minus ten percent error in noise signatures. But only if the orange stripes went to kit-kats, solid brown stripes, would it mean an enemy vessel for sure — light blue bars representing possible “friendlies,” solid blue for confirmed. “One thousand and closing. Still stripe orange.” Zeldman said nothing, jaw clenched, his reflection staring back at him in the computer’s screen, guessing that if Brentwood had decided to risk the Roosevelt’s silence, he would have fired already. Instead it seemed he was gambling that the surface vessel — a cruiser, by the multiple echoes coming in via Roosevelt’s towed sensor array — was now having its active sonar blanketed in the shallower water by the thrashing of its own props. If so, the cruiser might pass over them, waiting for a clearer echo.
But on the Yumashev, Captain Stasky could still pick up enough echo from the submarine’s bulk. If it was the American sub from Holy Loch, he knew that the whooshing sound of one of its 280-mile-range Tomahawk missiles, capable of being fired from the torpedo tube eighty feet beneath the surface, would alert not only the Yumashev but every Soviet Hunter/Killer south of the Greenland-Iceland-Norway Gap.
Also knowing the primary mission of the Sea Wolfs was to wait, to keep the United States’ last weapons platform intact should the Soviet ICBMs be unleashed, and that Roosevelt’s captain was engaged to be married, Stasky believed that it was all the more likely that the American somewhere beneath the Yumashev had deliberately held his fire. The American might also be confused by the new refit baffles welded on the Yumashev at the Tallinn Yards. Whatever the reason, the fact was that the American had held his fire, and Stasky believed that despite the chrezmerny zvuk machiny— “override clutter”—the Yumashev was getting from its own sonar echoes in the shallower water, the sub that his cruiser had picked up earlier must be in the near vicinity.
“Gotontes! Vesti ogon gruppoy RBU!”—” Roll drums! Fire RBU! All clusters!”
“Drums rolling,” confirmed the first mate, who then flipped up the Perspex protector, pushing the fire button for both twelve-barrel rocket launchers on either side of the stern helicopter hangar and the other two twelve-barrel launchers in the foc’s’le. From the starboard wing, the cruiser’s third mate and a midshipman, collars buffeted by the cold wind, watched the oil-drum-sized depth charges plopping unceremoniously over the stern, quickly disappearing in the ship’s boiling wake, the scream of the first salvo of antisub rockets filling the air, along with the thudding noise from gray bunches of mallet-shaped depth charges fired high in a scatter pattern, leaping into the air like grotesque quail.
The officer of the deck, already having started the clock, was counting, “One, two, three—” the drums timed to go off at greater depths than the RBUs. Stasky saw the first blip on the screen, the sonar alarm Dipping frantically like a smoke detector. “Torpeda v nashem napravlenii! Napravo!”— “Homing torpedoes! Hard right!”
The Yumashev heeled to starboard, discharging a cascade of khlam— “chaff,” aluminum strips and wafers designed to addle American torpedo sensors. As the RBU rockets were influence-fused, for magnetic signature, the Yumashev’s skipper knew the chaff might prematurely trigger them, but the old-fashioned drum charges set only for depth might still do the trick, though with the Americans’ titanium-reinforced hull, a drum charge would have to strike the hull itself to implode the sub.
“Dive — two thousand!” ordered Brentwood. It meant approaching crush point, but the stern planesman to his left didn’t hesitate and there was the surge of water pouring into the tanks. During the “hard,” steep-angled dive, Brentwood braced himself against the girth rail that ran around the raised periscope island as to his right the bow planesman watched depth gauge and trim as the Roosevelt, already having fired four Mk-48s, sank like a stone, nose first.
Six… seven… eight seconds, and aboard the Yumashev, Stasky knew something had gone wrong. The sea astern, off his port quarter, should be erupting in towering greenish-white mushrooms streaked with black oil from the sub’s raptured hydraulic systems. Instead the Yumashev’s captain looked out on a sea that was exploding only here and there. He estimated that less titan twenty percent of the RBUs and depth charges were detonating.
“Bozhe moy, Mendev!”—”My God, Mendev!” he said, turning to his first mate. “Chto zhe tut takogo?”— “What’s wrong?”
On Roosevelt, the depth gauge’s needle was passing the two-thousand-feet mark and quivering. There was a hiss, then a jet of water — thinner than a needle. Coming in at over a thousand psi, it created a stinging aerosol, a “car wash” mist in the control room, temporarily blinding the planesman and the chief petty officer watching the ballast tank monitors. In six seconds the Roosevelt had reached twenty-one hundred feet. There was a dull thump, then another, the sound punching Brentwood so hard in the stomach, he could tell the depth charge was even closer than the sound indicated. The sub leveled out at twenty-three fifty, its pressure hull starting to groan. Three minutes passed and nothing. Then another explosion so close that it threw him back against the periscope rail, the Roosevelt shuddering so violently it blurred the red-eyed squares of the monitors, more jets of water shooting into the control room, creating an even denser aerosol.
“Up angle!” shouted Zeldman.
In the forward torpedo room, rivets began popping, one ricocheting about the titanium casing until it lodged in a crewman’s brain, splattering the pinkish-gray mass over the bulkhead, another smashing a Perspex fire button protector, sending off a torpedo. The torpedo was not yet armed, but its impact inside the tube was like that of a bullet in a closed barrel, its flame-burst concussing several crewmen in the torpedo room. The fire in the tube quickly died through lack of oxygen, but not before the meticulously tooled lining of the tube had been badly scoured. The first torpedo that Roosevelt had fired from the forward section and the two fired from the stern had gone haywire, heading into the fallen “chaff,” but these torpedoes’ premature explosion sent shrapnel whistling high into the air, inadvertently clearing a path for the lone stern-fired Mark-48 that was still running. It glanced the Yumashev’s starboard bow beneath the water-line — not enough to sink her, but the shock wave of methane and carbon dioxide from the explosive gases was enough to buckle the cruiser’s outer plating, imploding it with an elliptical gash twelve feet long and three feet wide.
The Russians were quick to the pumps, however, and with watertight compartments sealed, the cruiser was able to limp away at five knots, her two twin Goblet antiaircraft missiles, which could also be used in an antiship role, intact as well as her Kamov-26 over-the-horizon missile-targeting helicopter. The Kamov was already airborne, its contra-rotating rotors catching afternoon sunlight, its bug-eyed face, remarkably like that of a blowfly, hovering off the ship’s port quarter, its chin-mounted Bulge-B surface-search radar already scanning the horizon for any NATO ships that might be diverted to the area by the British commander of the western approaches. The helicopter’s radar and its height allowed it to pick up hostile targets well beyond the seventy-nautical-mile limit of the Yumashev’s head net-C air search radar.
The Allied ships the Yumashev expected didn’t materialize, most of them within steaming distance committed to the vital convoy duty farther south, where the Gulf Stream curves into the North Atlantic drift. But Allied aircraft did come, the Russian sub chaser detected by another sub chaser, a Dassault-Breguet Atlantic-2 patrol aircraft, which, too slow, low on fuel, and not equipped to attack the seven-thousand-ton cruiser, relayed the information to St. Mawgan, the USAF communication center in Cornwall.
Within five minutes, south of St. Mawgan, in the lush and windswept countryside, the orange jet of flame from a Sepecat Jaguar could be seen as the aircraft taxied out of its hardened “splashed-greens” camouflaged shelter onto a short stretch of highway, the blacktop marked off by detour signs. The plane’s high wing would enable it to take off from half the tarmac length usually used in its close support and reconnaissance role. Normally a light-strike aircraft kept for coastal defenses and photographic overflights of the battlefields across the Channel, the Franco-British jet had been scrambled because RAF fighter squadrons were in the process of intercepting large incoming Soviet formations over the North Sea. The Jaguar, its dark green-gray shape fleetingly veiled in fog, began its short run, the two eight-thousand-pound Adour turbofans, on afterburner, thrust into the mottled sky over England’s Land’s End, taking it to Mach 1.1 in less than a minute. The pilot, Roger Fernshaw, kept the plane low, where its small wing and fly-by-wire touch controls enabled the Jaguar to skim over the ruffled, cobalt-colored sea without emitting telltale radar signals, its FIN digital inertial navigation and weapon aiming system going through its paces, Fernshaw checking his HUD or head-up display and the Ferranti laser range and marked-target seeker. The late sun glinted momentarily off the metallic sea as Fernshaw punched in the coordinates for the Yumashev’s last reported position as relayed via St. Mawgan by the Dassault-Breguet patrol aircraft.
He saw a fleeting shadow below him, began evasive action, then realized it was the shadow of the external fuel pod needed to give the Jaguar an extended range of twenty-one hundred miles as it streaked west sou’west, armed on all five hard points, including two fifteen-hundred-pound Exocet missiles.
Inside the Roosevelt, everything was shaking violently, as if in an earthquake, both the deep rumble and high-pitched screeching of her bent prop reverberating throughout. Suddenly the sub jerked hard right, sending Brentwood and Zeldman crashing into the scope island, Brentwood striking his head on the girth rail.
A crewman grabbed for one of his sneakers floating in the ankle-deep pool now sloshing between the control room’s sill and the forward electronics room.
“What the hell—” Brentwood began, but now the noise had suddenly decreased, the chief engineer apparently having dropped the sub’s speed to five knots on his own initiative as the sub leveled out fifty feet above her crush depth. Yet Brentwood knew that despite the reduction in the noise level and the fact that most of the leaks had been sealed, his sub was in serious trouble. The noise was still a problem, a giveaway to an enemy sub anywhere within fifty miles or so. And now a bank of square red eyes, circuit monitors, grew bright, the control room’s light dimming with the drop in current.
In the gloomy light the sound of the sloshing water created an ominous overtone amid the crunching noise of the prop’s warp and, above, the rhythmic pulse of the pumps. He gave the order to reduce speed still further, but the vibration unexpectedly grew worse and for a second all monitors faded.
“Fucking great!” someone said.
“Hold your tongue!” snapped Brentwood. “Mr. Zeldman!”
“Sir?”
“Shut down the prop.”
“Yes, sir.”
For a moment all was quiet — the sub in neutral buoyancy, no longer diving or rising. Then they could hear a choking, gurgling noise, the only sound above the rapid purr of the pumps that were sucking up the water, transferring it to number one ballast tank. Brentwood ordered the other tank vented to keep the sub in neutral trim and listened to the damage reports coming in. Someone had thrown up and the stench was overpowering, telling Brentwood that the airconditioning was out of action. In an effort to get the crew’s full attention back on their job, he chewed out a forward torpedo room bosun for not responding earlier but was chagrined to discover the bosun had already done so — that what he was now receiving was a follow-up report.
“You were out for a bit, sir,” explained Zeldman. Brentwood apologized to the bosun over the intercom, then turned to Zeldman.
“Where’s the Russian?”
“Three miles off, sir, and limping. Looked like we banged him up pretty—”
“Damn it! Give me a bearing.”
“Yes, sir. Zero three seven, sir.”
“Very well.” He called the reactor room. “You all right back there, Chief?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stern room?” asked Brentwood.
“Man missing, sir.”
“Who?”
“We’re not sure, Captain. We had a ‘Rover’ working the watch overlap.”
“Well, find out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Probably in the can,” said Zeldman, risking a note of levity after the tension of the Russian attack. The sonar operator gave a forced laugh.
Brentwood saw the square red eyes of the circuit monitors lighting up — full power restored. He shook his head. It was an infuriating dilemma, enough to elicit a record three “damns” from him in as many seconds. Here was the pride of the U.S. Navy, America’s vessel of last resort, with power to burn, its reactor-driven steam turbines back to generating enough power to light a city of over a hundred thousand. But to what effect? With a damaged prop, the sub, even if it used its auxiliary diesel hookup or, failing that, the “bring it home” capability of the smaller “dolphin dick”—the emergency screw slotted in the stern ballast — could only make a maximum of three to five knots. It meant that for combat purposes, self-defense included, the Roosevelt was virtually dead in the water — a sick whale in a sea full of sharks. On top of this, Zeldman informed him that the hydraulic line for the sail’s starboard diving plane was losing pressure — a possible perforation. It couldn’t be repaired; they’d have to go to manual override, a slow business at the best of times.
Another report came in from the forward torpedo room. Using a chain pulley to recradle one of the three-and-a-half-thousand-pound Mark-48 torpedoes which had shaken loose in the pitch darkness that had followed the final salvo of RBU rockets, the torpedo crew found the missing seaman, an electrician’s mate. They were unable to identify him for five minutes or so, his dog tags embedded in the bloody mash that had been his head.
Brentwood issued orders for the emergency prop to be extended from its ballast sheath and engaged. Its fanlike whir was quiet enough, picked up by the sub’s implant hull mikes, the TACTAS, or towed array, mikes having been knocked out by two of the Russian drum charges. Brentwood tapped on the NAVCOMP keys, the computer screen’s warm amber readout informing him that at its maximum speed of five knots, it would take Roosevelt twelve days at least, through enemy-sub-infested waters, to reach Land’s End at the southwestern tip of England. If they turned about and headed south against the stream, to Newfoundland, it would take them much longer. Either way, they would be in constant danger of being discovered through the noise of the emergency prop. If this happened, the Roosevelt would have only five knots against a Hunter/Killer’s forty.
Brentwood ordered the emergency prop resheathed. They would wait for the next scheduled rendezvous with the TACAMO — take charge and move out — aircraft due in seventy-three hours time. He would take her up, out of the sea noise, give a signal requesting emergency assistance, then go down and wait rather than move and risk “noise shorts”—any noise from inside the sub that could resonate loudly enough from the hull to give away its presence. But Robert Brentwood knew that the waiting was by far the hardest thing for a submariner to do.
“Don’t sweat it,” the quartermaster told one of the fire control technicians in the forward compartment. “With the freshwater converter and our freezers, we’ve got enough food and fresh water down here to last us a year. Hell, we convert so much fresh water, we have to dump half of it.” It was meant to be a reassuring thought until an electrician’s mate pointed out that by now the noise of their engagement with the cruiser must have been picked up by both sides’ ocean-bottom arrays scattered at various points throughout the North Atlantic. Further reducing their chance for a pickup tow by a fast navy tug to one of the big sub tender/floating docks was the gale warning from the last TACAMO contact. On top of that, there was the problem of whether the TACAMO aircraft would arrive on schedule, if at all, given the increasing Russian air cover of Soviet Hunter/Killer packs which had broken out south of the Greenland-Iceland Gap and the Iceland-Faroes Gap.
Brentwood knew the only other choice he had was to take the sub to the surface just minutes before the next scheduled TACAMO contact and risk “pop-up, pop-down”—putting up the vertical VHF (very high frequency) aerial with which Roosevelt could send a high-intensity “burst” message more quickly than from the slower “fishline” trailing VLF aerial. He would expose the HF aerial for no more than thirty seconds, then retract and submerge. Even so, the danger was that any penetration of the sea’s surface could be picked up by Soviet satellite — not so much by the protrusion of the aerial itself but rather from discoloration or “ruffle” caused by the warm water envelope around the sub entering the surface temperature zone. Nothing could be done to prevent this warm envelope, the result of pumps having to continually cool the “coffeepot” or nuclear reactor, from rising to the surface with the sub. Brentwood knew that a Soviet satellite spotting the TD, or temperate differential, “patch” would give the Soviet Hunter/Killers the Roosevelt’s exact position rather than that reported by the Russian surface vessel that had attacked him. He could keep the Roosevelt deep to eliminate the thermal patching, but this would make him unable to use the VHF to ask for help. Any way he moved, it was risky.
In the meantime he decided to take her up halfway toward VLF depth, where any thermal patching would not be as recognizable via satellite and could be interpreted as local upwelling from one of the millions of oceanic springs venting from the sea floor.
In the quiet, redded-out control room the bulkhead was now beaded in flamingo-colored droplets of condensation.
He called for the chief electrician’s mate in charge of the stern torpedo room and also for the next shift’s sonar operator.
“Chief, I want you to get a MOSS. Here—” Brentwood showed him the drawing of the mobile submarine simulator. “Here, I’ve drawn a sketch of what I want you—”
“Sir!”
It was the hospital corpsman, looking worried. “We’re going to have to deal with Evans…”
For a second Brentwood thought Evans must be alive after all — awakening from a deep coma that they’d mistaken for death. Lord knows it had happened before. In the old days, navy regulations held that before placing a body in a canvas shroud, a stitch of catgut had to be made, passing the needle through the skin fold between the nose and lips — one of the most sensitive areas — to make sure the man was really dead. Dealing with Evans’s corpse was the last thing Brentwood wanted to think about, but he knew the corpsman was correct. Modern-day regulations made it mandatory that a body which may be harboring infectious disease must be frozen as soon as possible and while “in this condition must be dispatched” no matter what the state of sea.
“Very well,” Brentwood answered. “Ten minutes. Flag party astern.” But he wanted no part of it. All he knew for certain was that Evans had died shortly after he’d given him the shot of diazepam. Worst of all, quietening him had done no good — the Russian ship having zeroed in on the Roosevelt anyway. Evans’s death had achieved nothing but cast a pall of pessimism about the boat. Roosevelt was the world’s most modern vessel, but a death aboard was as bad an omen to its crew as it had been for the sailors of Vasco de Gama and Columbus. For many aboard the sub who did not have the religious faith of their seagoing forebears, it was worse. Not a warning but a prophecy.
For Brentwood, Evans’s death wasn’t the first he’d witnessed at sea, but it was the first in his command, the first he was directly responsible for. During the Russians’ attack, he’d forgotten about it, but now it returned with the corpsman and he felt it start to gnaw at him like an old childhood shame — a terrible thing said to one’s parents, an act of deliberate cruelty to a family pet — like something one conceals for years now rising up from a hidden deep. It was not Evans’s death alone that began eating away at Robert Brentwood but the sudden and totally unexpected loss of control he’d seen in the man — the putrid stench of the seaman’s body the unmistakable sign of a body having lost all self-control. Brentwood was determined he would put it out of his mind, but as with so many things hidden under great pressure, the childhood fear of losing control wormed its way back to consciousness. Brentwood kept talking about the MOSS. To dwell on death, his father had told him, was a surefire way to self-pity, and then you didn’t belong on a sub, you belonged on a couch. Couches, said the admiral, were places for people to escape from facing things head-on — the way some men went to sea to get away from their wives.
For a second Robert Brentwood thought of his brother Ray, captain of a guided missile frigate, who had been horribly burned after a swarm of North Korean missile boats had attacked his ship, the USS Blaine, off South Korea. Ray, it was said by some, had lost control, giving the order to abandon ship when it was still salvageable. Others said he hadn’t given any such order — that one of the ship’s mates had mistaken a hand signal from Ray in the inferno that engulfed the Blaine’s bridge movements after impact. Whatever had happened, Ray no longer had a command. And only now, three months and eight operations later, did the tightly polished skin, grafted from thigh and buttocks, even begin to make his face look anywhere near human.
As the chief electrician’s mate and the next watch’s sonar operator turned and walked away with his sketch, Robert Brentwood got tough with himself. He didn’t agree with his father about a lot of things, including his view of psychiatrists, but he knew his father was right about the captain of a ship. He, Robert Jackson Brentwood, was supposed to be one of the navy’s best and brightest, commander of the most powerful warship in history and his country’s last line of defense. If he couldn’t handle it, he should hand it over to Zeldman right now. It was time to bury Evans.
“Excuse me,” he said briskly as he passed the electrician’s mate and the sonar operator, who were also headed for the stern section with the sketch of the MOSS. Without turning to them, Brentwood ordered, “Don’t wait until we finish with Evans. Get started on that right away.”
“Be a bit crowded, sir.”
“I know, but it can’t be helped. They’re still mopping up the forward torpedo room. I want it done in ten hours, well before the next scheduled TACAMO station.”
The mate frowned, the red glow accentuating his baldness as his hand swept from eyebrows to the back of his head. “Sir, I don’t know if we — I mean, we’ll have to use a torch and-”
“Ten hours!” said Brentwood.
Sonar turned to the mate. “He’s a hard bastard. Doesn’t give a shit about Evans.”
“Yeah, well,” said the chief. “Nothing we can do for Evans now, is there?”
“The skipper needn’t have given him that shot.”
“Old man’s call, Sonar.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Come on,” said the chief. “Can’t do the fucker by ourselves.” For a moment Sonar thought the chief meant Evans. When they got to the machine shop and showed him the sketch, the machinist shook his head, pointing at the skipper’s arrowed instructions with an oil rag. “No way, Chiefie. Not in ten hours.”
“Why?” asked the chief, surprising Sonar.
“That shank,” said the machinist, “is titanium-reinforced. Isn’t a fucking wiener.”
“What’s the matter? I thought you were Mr. fucking ‘Can-Do,’ “ said the mate.
“Can-Do,” a big, gangly man from West Virginia, fixed Sonar in his stare. “What do you think?”
Sonar made a face bordering on neutrality. One of the ROs came over, asking where the captain was.
“Aft torpedo room, I guess,” answered the Virginian.
The RO, who came from Utah and had only been aboard for one other patrol, was already known as “Mr. Clean” because of his pink baby-face complexion, despite him being in his early forties. He didn’t like Can-Do’s tone and bawled out the Virginian for wearing “booties,” the yellow rubber shoe covers worn by men as they entered the reactor room so as to prevent transporting any radioactive dust throughout the sub. “Take those back to the reactor room,” said the RO.
“Sorry, sir, I forgot,” said Can-Do, giving the RO an “up yours” sign as the officer walked out into the ruby sheen of the passageway.
“Crack in the coffeepot,” said Can-Do, reaching down for the yellow booties. “That’s why he’s so goddamned testy.”
“Bullshit!” said the electrician’s mate. “If the reactor had a fissure in it, we’d have a bright patch on our chest.” Sonar craned his neck, looking down for any color change in his dosimeter.
“I don’t mean the outer casing,” continued Can-Do. “The inner wall.”
“Christ — it’s the strongest thing on the boat,” said the mate.
“You telling me it’s impossible?” asked Can-Do.
“Un-fucking likely,” said the mate. “Anyway, keep it to yourself. You’ll frighten young Sonar here.”
Sonar was keeping right out of it, giving all his attention to the skipper’s diagram, knowing he’d have to test it when Can-Do was finished — if he was finished in time.
As it turned out, the Virginian was wrong — there wasn’t a fissure in the reactor, the officer was upset because he’d just heard Evans was about to be deep-sixed. The RO was a “mustang,” a man who’d come up through the ranks, and he identified more than most officers with the enlisted men. He was also a practicing Mormon, and though he hadn’t known Evans personally, he offered to help the burial party.
“Shroud has to be weighted heavily at this depth,” Brentwood told him. “Don’t want anything floating topside giving us away. Those Russians probably got a new noise signature from us after those depth charges. No good helping them to pinpoint our—”
“I’ll look after it, sir,” said the RO.
“Very well.”
The officer thought Brentwood could have shown a little more sensitivity about Evans rather than simply treating the corpse as a nuisance to get rid of. It didn’t jibe with what he’d heard about the skipper, who, among Roosevelt’s crew, was affectionately known as “Bing.” Something to do with Bing Crosby was it? — maybe the skipper sang in the shower or something. But apparently the nickname had nothing to do with his love of old-fashioned music, “Bing” deriving more from his old-fashioned nature. Rumor had it that, knowledgeable as he was about the world of the submarine, he was, despite his engagement to some Englishwoman, extraordinarily naive when it came to the opposite sex. Mr. Clean had never discovered precisely why the crew was convinced of this, other than it had something to do with what the English called a “trollop,” a woman of easy virtue, approaching him at some party in Scotland, and Brentwood, ever so polite, trying to gracefully decline her advances, whereupon the woman started screaming at him, calling him a straitlaced “old bastard”—a “Bing Crosby.” Had the revered crooner from the 1940s held rigid views about premarital sex? Anyway, the RO didn’t care whether the skipper was considered unpracticed in matters of sex. Maybe, in a world of AIDS, he was merely being careful. All the RO wanted to know was how good a sub captain the forty-three-year-old skipper was. Maybe his apparent lack of sensitivity as far as Evans was concerned might in fact be his preoccupation with the array of hard choices that confronted him if Roosevelt was to have any hope of survival. He saw the hospital corpsman walking down the passageway with what looked like two plastic garbage bags except for the glistening of the zippers on the body bags. Two of the men wounded in the depth charge attack had died.
Aboard the Yumashev, Captain Stasky was breaking radio silence. He knew that, slowed down as he was and with his general position probably known because of the explosions of the few depth charges that had worked, there wasn’t much chance of the enemy not knowing where he was. But even if this were not so, Stasky knew it was his duty, regardless of his own safety and that of his crew, to inform Northern Fleet headquarters immediately that more than half the depth charges he’d dropped had been duds.
It was not merely for the sake of the safety of the other ships in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Pacific Fleets, however, that Stasky ordered the coded message be sent without delay — but because of his own status as commander of a cruiser bearing the coveted white-backed red star with four black circles, the highest antisubmarine warfare efficiency rating awarded by the fleet commander. His own career was at stake.
Aboard the USS Roosevelt, six men crammed in around the torpedoes, their caps off as Robert Brentwood began the service, the men’s faces showing the strain of the Yumashev’s depth attack on them, lines of tension etched deeply in their faces in the red battle light, several of the men gripping their blue baseball-style caps. Only the reactor room officer appeared calm, a serenity about him that Brentwood found more disconcerting man helpful, especially when, as captain, he was trying to present the coolest demeanor he could while reciting the age-old prayer for those killed at sea. At such moments, Brentwood, though he was the one speaking, often felt outside himself, more an observer, he thought, than a participant in the proceedings.
As he closed the prayer book, Brentwood nodded to the torpedoman’s mate. The mate palmed the clearing control for tubes seven and eight. There was a dull thud, a gush of water like a toilet flushing, then a hiss of compressed air as the shrouds were shot out, the mate immediately venting the tubes, readying them to receive Mark-48 torpedoes. There were tears in Brentwood’s eyes. He turned away and cleared his throat, then turned to the small clump of men before he left for the eighty-two-yard walk back to control. “Thank you for being here.”
There was an awkward murmured response, one of the men, a yeoman, watching intently as Brentwood stepped over the sill of the watertight door, past the reactor room, heading into “Sherwood Forest,” where the six Trident C missiles stood, their silos dwarfing their human controllers.
“Thanks for being here?” said the yeoman. “Where the hell else would we be? On Coney Island?” He glanced across at a young quartermaster to get his reaction. The quartermaster gave a noncommittal shrug. He was enjoying the show.
“He meant thanks for coming, you asshole,” chimed in an off-duty planesman.
“I fucking know that,” said the yeoman.
“Then what are you bitching about?”
The yeoman didn’t know specifically, only that Brentwood’s tears disturbed him. Perhaps Brentwood reminded him too much of his old man, a typewriter salesman, who’d always cut an imposing figure most of the time. A no-nonsense, strong type — a heap of quiet self-confidence— before computers. Too old to change, and sometimes he’d start thanking you for doing the simplest thing when it was your job. Got all weepy and scared the hell out of you — whole world seemed it would come apart and just swallow you up. It meant he was against the ropes about something — couldn’t handle it himself anymore.
“Little things are important,” the yeoman answered the planesman obliquely. With his old man, it hadn’t been anything spectacular at first — nothing you’d really notice. Just a few drinks to begin with. Then a few pills to “calm my nerves.” Then he couldn’t get up mornings. Pretty soon he was incapable of making any important decision. “See your mom” became the cry. The yeoman told the planesman the scuttlebutt from the hospital corpsman was that Captain “Bing” had been white as a toilet, hand shaking, as he’d given Evans the shot. What the yeoman didn’t tell the planesman was that his rather had been scared shitless of needles too. And so was he. That’s what was wrong — pretty soon his old man had started freaking him out too. The planesman dismissed the scuttlebutt. “Aw, shit — corpsmen always like to make things bigger than they are. Makes ‘em feel important. Hell, I know plenty of guys who don’t like getting shots. Go weak at the knees. So what? What do you want? Joe Montana?”
“Fucking right,” said the yeoman.
“Then, buddy,” put in a torpedoman, “you’re on the wrong friggin’ boat.”
“That’s what I’m thinkin’.”
“Well — what are you planning to do about it?” the planesman said. “Swim?”
“Nothing you can do, is there?” replied the yeoman.
“For Christ’s sake, you’re making a big thing out of squat all.”
“Listen, man. It’s the little things that count. Right? Isn’t that how they weed everyone out at the school? Guy panics for a second in the dive tank and he’s out.”
“Balls!” said the torpedoman. “Don’t know anyone who liked being in the tank.”
“Yeah — but you didn’t show it, right?” pressed the yeoman.
“Hey,” said the torpedoman. “I’d rather the guy running this boat show a little compassion than have some hard-ass Quigg.”
“Who’s Quigg?” asked the yeoman.
The torpedoman looked across at the planesman disbelievingly. “He doesn’t know who Quigg was.”
“So?” said the yeoman. “You gonna tell me?”
“You don’t have to worry,” cut in the planesman. “Bing’ll get us out of this. He’ll get us home.”
“Yeah,” added the torpedoman. “We’ll be in Faslane before you know it.” Faslane was the village for Holy Loch.
“At five knots,” said the yeoman, “it’ll take a fucking year.”
“Not to worry, yeo, we’ve got enough food to—”
“Fuck! You told us that before. We’re crawlin’ along like some fucking turtle and you’re worried about goddamned chow. You can’t eat yourself out of a HUK pack. Their goddamned Alfas are faster than we are.”
The planesman slapped on his submariner’s cap and, without another word, left the torpedo room, making his way forward, the torpedoman following.
“Time he had furlough,” said the planesman, half-jokingly. “He’s more goddamned worried than the old man.”
“Not surprised,” said a voice behind them. The planesman saw it was a two-striper, the young quartermaster, who’d been draped against the torpedo, his neat dark beard matching the dark, short-sleeved uniform that distinguished him from the rest of the Roosevelt’s crew. He’d been so quiet, they’d almost forgotten he was there.
“What do you mean?” the torpedoman asked.
“He had a girl in Glasgow,” explained the quartermaster. “Killed in one of the rocket attacks.”
“Better keep an eye on him then,” said the planesman.
“Who?” said the quartermaster. “Me?”
“You seem to know all about him.”
“Hell, I hardly know him.”
It was one of the problems on the big pigboats — on any large vessel. Even though the seventy-day assignments meant they were together on the sub for forty days straight, with twenty-five days tied up alongside Holy Loch, some of the ship’s company, working eight hours on, twelve off, never met. Often all there was to know about a man apart from his technical qualification was whatever the scuttlebutt happened to pass on, and that was notoriously unreliable. “Hell,” said the quartermaster, “I don’t even know myself.” The other two laughed. They thought it was a joke.
“Come on,” said the torpedoman. “I’ve got to report to the chief up in the machine room. Bing’s got him working on some special rig.”
“What kind of rig?” inquired the planesman.
“I don’t know. All I do know is the old man wants it ready before the next TACAMO rendezvous.”
“There’ll be no rendezvous,” said the planesman. “Any of our E-6As come this way, the Russians’ll blow ‘em out of the sky.”
“I think maybe the old man knows that,” said the quartermaster.
“Then how we going to confirm our position?” argued the planesman. “Either way, we’ll have to go up with an aerial.”
“If the TACAMO comes, we can use the floater,” proffered the quartermaster. He meant the floating low-frequency wire.
“Still have to go up a ways,” said the planesman. “Takes too friggin’ long for data transmission. Russkies’ll be waiting for that. We need a burst message — a lot of data — quickly. Tell us where the fuck we are and what’s going on up there. For my money, that means sticking our UHF out of the water.”
“That’s no friggin’ good,” said the torpedoman. “They could spot that on SATCON. Our warm wave’d be too close to the surface anyway. They’d pick us up on the satellite’s infrared.”
“Satellite can’t cover the whole ocean,” said the quartermaster.
“They don’t have to with us doin’ three and a half knots,” put in the planesman.
“Shit!” said the quartermaster. “I thought that yeo was a rain face.”
“Ah—” said the torpedoman, “what the hell? We’re probably worrying about nothin’—right?”
No one answered.
Walking into his cabin, Robert Brentwood drew the green curtains shut, tossed his cap onto its hook, and stood for a minute studying the map of the North Atlantic taped to the bulkhead above the safe. Three things worried him. First, the navigation computer was malfunctioning as a result of the last depth charge, so that unless he had a clear sky for a star fix, it was imperative the TACAMO aircraft make its rendezvous to give them their exact position. Even as the sub rose via slow and quiet release of ballast, feeling its way toward the surface to wait for the TACAMO, it was already drifting off position. Second, once Roosevelt began to move under power of the “switchblade” prop now sheathed in the forward ballast tank, the resistance caused by the towed array, normally of no consequence when the sub was at full speed, would decrease its five knots to three. He was bothered, too, by a seemingly unimportant incident — the fact that the hospital corpsman had interrupted him about Evans when he was giving his instructions about the MOSS to the electronics mate and sonar operator. It wasn’t the corpsman’s cutting into the conversation that bothered Robert Brentwood, but the anxiety behind it. That could spread faster than the flu that had killed Evans. Or had it? And could the orders he had given the mate and Sonar be carried out before the scheduled TACAMO rendezvous?
He depressed the intercom button for “Control” and told Zeldman to wake him two hours before the ETA of the TACAMO aircraft.
“Will do,” came Zeldman’s breezy reply. Before he lay down on the bunk, Brentwood took off his rubber sneakers, the reason for them — no noise shorts — bringing back Evans’s terrified face. He tried to think of something else, but it wasn’t easy. Civilians, he mused, always thought you got used to seeing death. Maybe you did on the battlefield. Maybe his youngest David, who had fought in Korea shortly after the beginning of the war, was used to it. And Ray — well, no one could hope to know what Ray thought anymore. The photos of David and Ray were on his desk in the antiroll gimbals mounting, as were those of his mom and dad and Lana. Lana was really the loner in the family, but he felt closer to her than any of them. Maybe it was because she was the second oldest of the four. What had happened to her since the spate she’d gotten into in Halifax? What had happened to all of them? It would be months before he would know — if he ever did — his ship crippled somewhere west of the mid-Atlantic ridge, and Soviet Hunter/Killers breaking out through the Greenland-Iceland-Norway Gap. If he was a betting man, he thought he would sit this one out. But fate had thrown the dice and he had no choice.
He lay back and pulled out Rosemary’s picture from his shirt pocket. He had had it laminated with plastic in London. It was crazy, he knew, but if he went down forever — if he was to die in the Roosevelt—the thought of her photo eaten away by the salt, devoured by some shark or other blood-crazed denizen, bothered him. If anyone else saw it, they would just assume he’d laminated it for normal wear and tear. True, too. He kissed her, popped the photo in his pocket, and reached up for his Walkman earphones. They were cold and he held them in his hands to warm them. A dank, sour smell assailed his nostrils. He sat up, peeled off a sock, and sniffed—”Holy”—took the other one off, and, balling them, prepared to pop them in the laundry hamper at the foot of the bunk. The first one was a perfect basket. The next shot was to be the winning goal in sudden death overtime. Seattle and the Celtics, eighty-four apiece. It missed. An omen?
Don’t be damn silly, he told himself, and plugged in the earphones. Rewinding the tape, he heard the high screech-like a torpedo closing. He stopped it, pushed “play,” and lay back. There were a lot of “ifs” hanging about, but one certainty he’d been taught at Annapolis was that when you’re the commanding officer, “there is no possibility of assist.” You had to be alert, and that meant you had to get sleep. “Remember Montgomery,” one of his instructors had been fond of saying. “Delegate authority until you’re needed.” You simply had to wait. He closed his eyes and listened to the timbre of Johnny Cash and “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Problem was, would they finish the MOSS in time for the TACAMO rendezvous? He was wide awake.