‘You guys haven’t seen what’s happening upstairs. That skipper slides this office block through the water like a dune buggy.’ He gulped the hot coffee. He pulled a face as it burned him.
‘Be careful,’ said Ferdy. ‘That coffee is very hot.’
‘You should go on up on the sail sometime,’ said Schlegel. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief.
‘Not me,’ said Ferdy. ‘Not after seeing what it’s done to you, Colonel.’
Schlegel put his anorak into a locker and poured himself some iced water.
‘What was the skipper saying about oranges, Patrick?’
‘We usually put a couple of crates aboard, Colonel. It’s the first thing they run low on. And that way, we don’t have to feel guilty about giving them three extra mouths.’
‘Now I’ve got to chip in on that,’ said Schlegel.
‘Whatever you want to do,’ I said. I saw the Engineering Officer pass by the door on his way to the Manoeuvring Room. There was a double blast on the diving-klaxon. ‘Hold on to your ice water, Colonel,’ I told him.
The floor tilted suddenly. ‘Holy Moses,’ said Schlegel. The floor’s angle increased, and the ship lunged forward as the bow wave, which had been resting on us like a wall, streamed over the deck. Schlegel nearly lost his balance, and put out a hand to grasp the overhead piping. He smiled to show us how much he was enjoying it. After we passed a hundred feet the ship levelled off.
At a writing-desk in the corner of the lounge the doctor slammed his hands on to the cards to stop them sliding.
‘Does that happen often?’ Schlegel asked.
‘It’ll happen again within an hour,’ I said. ‘When we’re past Muck, Eigg and Rhum and into the Minches, he’ll take her down to four hundred feet. That’s cruising level. After that there’s nothing to do except watch Ferdy reading Brothers Karamazov: just as he’s been doing the last three trips.’
‘I can’t remember their damned names,’ said Ferdy.
‘I wouldn’t get too settled in,’ said Schlegel. ‘This trip is likely to be more active than usual.’
Neither of us answered.
Schlegel said, ‘I’m going to the Control Room if anybody wants me.’
Ferdy chortled after Schlegel had gone. ‘If anybody wants him,’ said Ferdy. ‘Where’s he think he is, the Playboy Club?’
I was wrong about the Captain waiting until we got to the Minches. The klaxon sounded and the floor tilted again. From the far end of the ship I heard a cry of pain from Schlegel as he fell and slid across the polished deck.
‘Good on the skipper,’ said Ferdy.
Conventional submarines make more speed on the surface than they can below it, but nuclear subs go faster submerged. Now, displacing four thousand tons of Atlantic Ocean, we were making better than twenty-five knots in the general direction of the Arctic. It was the literal end of the world: at this season the edge of the polar ice cap was as far south as it ever gets – locking Russia to the North Pole. To add to the fun, winter brings permanent night to the land of ice.
Apart from a bridge tournament that continued in the library, and the film show at 14.00 hours and 21.00 hours each day, there was little for us to do for the first three days. Even Schlegel simmered down enough to spend hours at a time reading The Biography of von Richthofen. Some of the corridor lights were dimmed from 20.00 until 07.00 hours in the morning. Apart from that, there was little difference between day or night, except that grapefruit segments and orange juice were on the chilled shelf for one meal in three. Once or twice we came up to periscope depth and let a blow of fresh air through the schnorkel. I suppose there was nothing wrong with the scrubbed air, but it was nice to smell the sea once in a while.
We had our own operators in the electronics rooms. When we surfaced they did the usual tests: tuning into the Northern Fleet transmitters at Murmansk and the big Baltic Fleet radio at Baltiysk – on the Frisches Haff. The submarine base at Kaliningrad – what used to be Königsberg – and the C-in-C Baltic Naval Air Force, have heavy radio traffic. If London’s reception is poor, surfaced subs in transit monitor for them.
There was nothing special on the data collection log except intercepts between a couple of conventional subs steaming a parallel course north with us. They were East Germans, from the submarine school at Sassnitz, taking the boats up in the direction of Poliarnyi. We read them on the sonar and ranged them. A nuclear power plant enables all the electronic equipment to give a performance superior to anything in a conventional boat. The Conning Officer pleaded to do mock attacks on them but the Captain wouldn’t even discuss it. The captains of these data collection subs are given the full treatment at New London before they take command. The idea of the Russians capturing one of them was CINCLANT’S constant nightmare. That’s why I was surprised that they’d chosen such a sub to do Toliver’s rendezvous for Remoziva.
The Norwegian Basin is a deep area of the Norwegian Sea that lies between Norway and Greenland. Even on the rim of the Basin there are still a couple of thousand metres of water. But before we were out of the northern end of the Basin, the sonar picked up the first of the drift-ice. Growlers, they call the grey chunks that float off the pack. They don’t remain flat side up, as they were when they were part of the floe. They tip over and look exactly like a submarine or a trawler. And if they are big enough, a gust of wind can catch them. Then they will sail off, leaving a wake behind them so that you start counting the seconds before a surface-to-surface hits you in the fanny.
We were having breakfast when the first growler was sighted. That morning there was cinnamon toast. Faintly, from the juke box in the crew’s quarters, I could hear Neil Diamond singing ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’.
‘The Captain says it’s a long way south,’ said Schlegel.
‘A north wind will bring them down a lot farther than this,’ said Ferdy. He turned to me. ‘What do you think he’ll do?’
‘Who?’ asked Schlegel. He didn’t like to be left out of things.
‘The skipper,’ I said. ‘He’ll go deep.’
‘Periscope depth,’ said Ferdy.
‘A quid,’ I said.
‘You’re on,’ said Ferdy.
‘Why do you think he’ll go deep?’ said Schlegel.
‘He’s a new kid. He’s full of the marvels of science, but he’ll want to convince himself that the sonar is perfect before we get into the rough stuff.’
‘And I’ve got a pound that says you’re wrong,’ said Schlegel.
That’s how I lost two quid. Mind you, Ferdy swore that Schlegel must have heard the Captain say what he intended to do beforehand. But hell, Schlegel isn’t short of a quid.
He took us up to periscope level. He was a new kid – I was right about that – so why didn’t I guess he’d be interested in seeing what the Arctic looked like.
It was an either/or situation. He could either take us down and rely on the machinery, or keep a sharp watch for ice on the surface. Ice is no softer than steel when you bump into it. Even a chunk no bigger than Ferdy could wreck the periscope vacuums.
‘That’s unkind,’ said Ferdy.
‘No bigger than a Shetland pony,’ I offered.
‘Shetland pony, I’ll accept,’ said Ferdy, and giggled. ‘Do you want another serving of cinnamon toast?’ He got to his feet to get it.
‘And bacon,’ I said.
‘You guys,’ said Schlegel. ‘That’s the third helping of cinnamon toast! You get no exercise, you don’t need all this chow.’
Suddenly there was a thump. Crockery smashed in the dining-room and a dozen pairs of boots fell out of the rack in front of me and shot across the deck towards Ferdy’s armchair.
‘My God! What’s that?’ said Ferdy.
The deck tilted. The forward motion stopped, as the screws went into reverse and the ship heeled over. I hung on to the bulkhead as I clambered forward to the Control Room. We went into a violent up-angle.
‘Hold it,’ said Schlegel when I got there. Already the C
aptain was at the sonar, hanging on to the operator to stop himself sliding across the floor.
‘Contact fifty yards dead ahead,’ said the Conning Officer. He’d thrown her into the tightest turn she was capable of and now we were beginning to straighten slowly.
‘What is it?’ said the skipper. He was a baby-faced Commander with tailored khakis and soft brown leather high boots. He rubbed his eyes. There were no shadows, no shade, no escape from the fluorescent lights that glared in the glass dials.
‘That goddamn Kraut sub,’ said the Conning Officer.
‘Are you sure?’ He looked not at the Conning Officer but to his Exec.
‘We’ve been watching her,’ said the Exec. ‘She’s been acting up … crossed our bow twice … then she dived ahead of us.’
They were both watching the sonar screen. The shape moved just a flicker. It was still, and then slowly it turned. You could have cut the tension with a knife.
‘Ten minds with but a single thought,’ said the skipper. Just the tiniest hint of a smile was on the corner of his lips but a bead of sweat on his forehead undid the cool he showed. He was right about this man’s mind. I was waiting for her bow tubes to come round to us, and not liking it.
Suddenly there was bedlam in the Control Room. The air was filled with raucous noises: flutes up and down the scale, and a rasping noise from the PA system. I looked at the console. The radar screen was a snowstorm that dashed vertically and diagonally in a mad rhythm.
The Captain took the PA microphone and, raising his voice to make it heard above the interference, said, ‘This is the Captain. Stay loose, everybody. It’s just their ECM.’
The noise increased to a frenzy as the German submarine’s counter measures jammed the electronics. Then it stopped and the instruments swung back to their rightful positions, the screen darkened and the PA speakers went silent.
‘She’s heading south – fast.’
‘Bastards!’ said the Exec.
The Captain walked over to the screen and patted the operator on the back. ‘Not too many more like that, Al.’
The boy smiled. ‘We’ll come back the scenic route, sir.’
‘Do that for me. My old lady will never forgive you if you do something silly now,’ said the skipper. He ran the back of his hand across his brow.
The Exec took the con again. I felt the edge of vibration as the screws began to turn and a ripple of freshly disturbed water ran along the hull like a cautionary finger.
‘Steer, Oh, three, five-er.’
We were on the way again.
‘Is this something I should try to get used to?’ said Schlegel.
‘They hassle us sometimes,’ said the Captain. ‘We displace four thousand tons. That East German skipper is in a tiny, thirteen-hundred-ton, W Class job …’ The Captain wiped his hands on a silk handkerchief. That’s the nuclear age, I thought; in the old days it would have been oily cotton waste.
‘How do you know?’
‘The size on the screen … and it’s their most common sub. They copied it from the Kraut’s old Type XXI, in the war. When he cuts my bow like that, he makes us slew round half the ocean to recover. We’re damned heavy, Colonel, and the trouble with the high cruising speed is … well, you just saw what it was.’
‘It makes us jumpy seeing those little conventionals jazzing across us like that,’ said the Exec. ‘Those are the babies that have the hunter-killer gear. When the chips go down, it won’t be the Red’s nukes that come after us, it will be their little conventionals. That’s why they keep building them.’
Schlegel nodded. ‘The East Germans are moving their hardware back to the Polish and Russian ports. They’ll be pushing some of it up into the Northern Fleet, too. Watch out for it.’
‘What’s their angle?’ said the Captain.
‘Don’t you get past the funnies section? The Russians are sitting down to talk about German reunification. You don’t imagine that they intend to let any of us capitalist reactionaries get our hands on it, before they complete an energetic asset-stripping operation, do you?’
‘What kind of ships do the East Germans have?’ the Captain asked. ‘And what kind of men?’
Schlegel waved to me. I said, ‘Frigates and coastal stuff. It took a long time before the Russians would let the DDR have submarines. But all the People’s Navy are ten-year men. Officer-training is a four-year stint and they have to do two years on the lower deck before they can even apply for it. So every officer’s had six years’ service.’
The Captain said, ‘If they only let six-year officers go to sea in this man’s navy, I guess we’d have me and Doc Harris. My Exec would be promised for next year.’
The Executive Officer didn’t smile. ‘Six years’ training, eh? Did you ever see a flotilla of those bastards come steaming through a NATO exercise, or any other Western naval unit? Twice I’ve seen them come right through the middle of ships at sea. No signals, no lights, nothing. And not turning a fraction off course. Came within ten yards of one destroyer. They know our safety instructions make us avoid collision. It makes them feel like big men doing that … six years! … seamen! Just bastards, that’s what they are.’
‘They do that to discover our emergency wavelengths,’ said the Captain. ‘There are always electronics boats with them when they do that.’
‘Bastards,’ said the Exec.
‘The East German ships are well built, I guess,’ said the Captain.
‘First class,’ I said. ‘That’s the DDR’s real value to the Eastern bloc – ship construction for satellite navies. And they have deep-buried oil supplies, submarine pens in cliffs, and yards well tucked away.’
‘Reunification, eh?’ said the Captain, as though he was hearing about it for the first time. ‘Sounds like it would be good for us. It would push the Reds right back to Poland, wouldn’t it?’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Or bring them right up to Holland. Depends whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.’
19
Submarine units of any type surfaced within range of enemy Class A missiles will be considered destroyed.
RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON
‘Navigator to the Control Room.’
I came awake suddenly. The door was not fully closed and there was a dull orange light from the corridor. I switched on the bulk light and looked at my watch. It was the middle of the night. Schlegel’s bunk was empty and so was Ferdy’s. I dressed hurriedly and went forward.
At first the drift-ice is no more than a few patches. Then the sonar starts picking up the big floes: as big as a car, as big as a house, as big as a city block. And is it seven-eighths, or nine-tenths, of an iceberg that remains submerged and invisible? Well, who cares how much. Enough submerged to shred us. Or, as Schlegel explained to the Captain, enough to cool every Martini from Portland to LA.
But once you dive under the ice you are committed to the element of the water. And this was not the two-thousand-metre deeps of the Norwegian Basin. We were over the Jan Mayen Ridge and into the Barents Sea to where your ocean is measured in feet. For eight hours under the Polar pack we could predict the ice thickness with a reasonable degree of certainty, but after that we were in the ‘brash and block’ and some of those pieces could be any size at all. I’d heard about these deep winter trips but this was the first one I’d ever done, and now and again I found myself thinking of the ship they lost two winters before.
‘Engineering Officer to the Control Room.’
‘Any sign of that goddamn Polack sub?’
‘The two of them went off the screen south.’
‘Murmansk. Watch out for them on sonar.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Shoaling steeply, sir.’
‘Watch her, Charlie – even slower, I think.’ The skipper turned to Schlegel and me. ‘This chunk of ice above us is a mile wide.’
‘That big?’ said Schlegel.
‘The one beyond is nearer nine miles wide,’ said the Captai
n.
When the Captain wasn’t looking, Schlegel pulled a face at me. He was right, what the hell are you supposed to say. Next the kid was going to be showing us his appendix scar.
‘All hands. This is the Captain speaking. Complete silence throughout the ship.’
The pings of the sonar were suddenly very loud. I looked round at the crowded Control Room. The duty watch were fully dressed in their khaki shirts and pants, but the Captain was in his shirtsleeves and the Navigator was in striped pyjamas.
American submariners had been charting the beds of the Arctic seas for many years. They’d recorded the canyons and the peaks of the shallow northern seas, in thousand-mile highways that could be followed as a truck driver uses the motorways of Europe. But truck drivers do not have an unpredictable roof of solid ice above their head: great floes, with keels so deep that they’d scalp him unless he steered off the highway and bumped across uncharted routes trying to find a way through unscathed.
‘Pressure ridge coming up, sir.’ Ferdy moved aside as the Captain pushed past him.
The needle of the sonar drew a picture of the ice above us. In winter, the newly formed ice presses against the older floes, forcing them down deep into the water. The pen inked a careful drawing of the ridges: up and down, up and down like a fever chart: each one a little farther down.
‘I don’t like it, Charlie.’
‘No, sir.’ The ship was unnaturally still: men held their breaths, left words unsaid, itches unscratched.
The log needle was on eight knots, the depth gauge needle on two hundred. The only sound was the hum of the machinery and the steady ping of the sonar. The ship edged forward. The sonar needle came lower this time. Each ice ridge had been thicker: eighty feet, then ninety feet, reaching down to us. A hundred and five! Now the needle passed the previous peak, and still kept coming. One hundred and ten, one hundred and fifteen!
‘Jeeeesusss! Take her down!’
‘Negative buoyancy.’ The planesmen had been ready for the order. The two sailors slammed the controls and the nose tilted. ‘To two hundred and fifty.’