‘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 Captain.
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.’
The world was tightening around us. The sonar needle did not stop and turn back until one hundred and forty. If we’d stayed at our previous level the ice would have taken five feet off our sail top.
‘Only just,’ said the Exec.
The skipper scratched his nose. He turned to Schlegel. ‘It’s usually a bit hairy before we get to the ice-limits.’
At the ice-limits the thickness is more predictable but the ocean is shallower, and after that we must turn to follow the Russian coastline towards the White Sea. There the shore-line ice starts building together. That’s the worst section of all.
‘That Polish sub has gone?’ said Schlegel.
‘Still on our sonar – she’s turned almost parallel again.’
‘She’s tailing us,’ said Schlegel. He looked at Ferdy.
‘No,’ said the skipper. ‘She probably can’t see us. She could be having the same ice problems we have. Her sonar range is nothing – she’d be rubbing noses with the Eskimos before they’d have a reading.’
‘She knows we’re here?’
‘She knows we’re somewhere. They can hear our sonar hitting them. But they can’t get us on their sonar.’
‘But she’s making good speed,’ said Schlegel.
‘They have better charts than we do for this area. Neither of us can guess the ice but she knows the soundings: it helps.’
‘I’d like to take a poke at it,’ said Schlegel.
‘We both have plenty to occupy us at present,’ said the skipper.
‘The history of the world,’ said Ferdy. ‘Overlooking small enemies in the threat of greater ones – all history comes down to that finally.’
Ferdy was wearing a black silk dressing-gown, its dark red kerchief fixed with a gold pin. The Captain looked at him as if noticing his attire for the first time. Finally he nodded. ‘I suppose.’
‘Still shoaling, sir.’
It was the great silt deposits that made the sea bed flat, but beneath the silt, the bottom was hard enough to take the floor from under us. There was only eighty feet of water below us now, and above us another pressure ridge was building, under the nervous pen of the fathometer. Again the ink line faltered and turned back.
‘Down another fifty,’ said the Captain.
We sank deeper. The pen line shrank away from the horizontal line that represented the top of our sail. I heard Ferdy sigh. We levelled off and the pen made a beautiful tall canopy above us.
‘This is going to be a tough one,’ said the Captain. ‘Come left to north-east.’
‘Lagoon ahead,’ said the sonar operator.
‘How far?’
‘A mile, a bit more perhaps.’
‘Here she comes again.’
This was a big ridge, the keel of an enormous floe.
The drawing showed how it had been born out of corrugated ridges jammed so tight together that the whole floe tilted, so that the pen drew a mad inverted porcupine shape upon the thin white paper.
‘Down thirty.’
‘Goddamn that packing.’ The Captain reached into his shirt collar to mop up the trickles of cold water that had been dripping from the periscope, increasing their rate of flow as the water became colder. The dribbling water had started off as a joke, but now the thought of icy water on the other side of the steel hull raised no laughs.
‘Hold that,’ said the Captain.
Now there was just a swirl of silt beneath us. The fathometer was wobbling as it tried to register upon the soft bottom dislodged by our passing.
‘Full astern – hold it, hold it.’
The floor tilted as the propellers came to a standstill and then began slowly to turn the other way. For a moment the sub became unstable, like a dinghy riding out a long wave. The
n the props picked up speed and the forward movement stopped us with a shudder and a loud rumble.
‘Dead slow.’
Now the needle made a series of corrugations over the dark horizontal line that was us. The Captain clamped his hand over his face as if he’d been hit, but I knew he was listening to the scrape of ice along the hull. It came scratching along the metal like predatory fingernails.
The ship had lost all forward speed now. ‘Negative buoyancy,’ said the Captain. There was a lurch and then a groan. The buoyancy chambers rang with a hollow sound as the ship sank to the ocean floor. I lost my balance as we heeled over ten degrees.
Everyone held on to a bulkhead, pipe or fitting. The Captain took the PA microphone. ‘Attention all hands. This is the Captain speaking. We are resting on the ocean bed while I take a good look at the sonar. There is no need for any alarm. Repeat: there is no need for any alarm.’ The Captain replaced the mike and beckoned Schlegel and me over to the control console. He sat down and mopped his brow with a paper tissue. ‘I think we’ll have to try another way through, Colonel.’
‘How?’
‘We’ll go south until we find the end of the rafted ice.’
‘I don’t know much about rafted ice, Captain, but it sounds pretty unlikely that it’s going to get better that way. This stuff builds from the shore outwards. Or that’s what I hear.’
‘Or until we find one of the sea passages that the ice breakers clear all the way to Murmansk.’
‘Nothing doing,’ said Schlegel. ‘That would prejudice my mission. I need a whip antenna in the air inside the next sixty minutes.’
‘Impossible,’ said the Captain. He mopped his brow with a fresh tissue and, taking careful aim at the waste-bin, he threw it away with all the care and attention of an Olympics champion.
‘You’ve got a lagoon a mile or so ahead. We’re going to squeeze this pig-boat through the mud and make it by the time the big hand’s on twelve. Got it?’
‘I’ve got it all right,’ said the Captain. ‘But you haven’t. Prejudicing your mission is tough, but prejudicing my ship is not a contingency.’
‘The decision is mine,’ said Schlegel softly. He glanced over his shoulder, but we weren’t getting much attention from the rest of them. ‘And the sealed orders in your triple-lock safe will say so. Meanwhile glim this.’ He passed the Captain an official-looking envelope. Inside it there was a sheet of paper headed ‘Director of Undersea Warfare’ and there was a Pentagon letterhead and lots of signatures.
‘And if you find that impressive,’ warned Schlegel, ‘let me tell you that the one in your safe is from Joint Chiefs.’
‘There is no one can authorize me to risk my ship,’ said the Captain primly. He looked round at me. I was the only person in earshot.
‘Listen,’ said Schlegel in that Bogart voice with which I’d seen him thrash champions. ‘You’re not speaking to some chicken-shit soldier-boy, Captain. I was riding pig-boats before you were riding kiddie cars. I say she’ll go through and I’m not asking your advice.’
‘And I say …’
‘Yes, and you say I’m wrong. Well, you prove I’m wrong, sailor-boy. You prove I’m wrong by jamming us under the goddamn ice-floe. Because if you turn us around and toddle off home I’ll make sure they kick your ass from sun-up to sack-time. Because you can’t prove your contention without sinking us.’
The Captain had spent a long time since last getting that kind of treatment. He stood up, gasped and sat down again to mop his brow. There were two or three extra-long minutes of silence.
‘Take her through, son,’ coaxed Schlegel. ‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ Schlegel mauled his face, as I’d seen him do at other moments of stress.
The Captain said, ‘The floe over us is maybe as big as the UN building; solid as concrete.’
‘Captain. There’s some kid out there … driving along the road that follows the Kola Fjord north from Murmansk. He’s in some lousy Russian automobile, and the ice is getting under his wiper blades. He’s been watching the mirror for the last half hour, dreading to see the headlights of a prowl car. When he gets into position, on some desolate section of freezing cold headland, he’s going to open up the boot and start fooling with the antenna of a radio transmitter to give us a message. He’s doing all that – and risking his neck – because he believes that freedom is a beautiful thing, Captain. Now, are we – sitting here in this air-conditioned rinky-dink with a rare steak, corn-oysters and blueberry pie on the menu tonight – are we going to let that kid call us up and get no reply?’
‘We’ll maybe lose the periscope,’ said the Captain.
‘Give it a whirl,’ said Schlegel.
Don’t let me leave you with the idea that I personally was joining Schlegel’s clamour for a chance to wriggle under the keel of that iceberg. Let that kid in the car keep right on driving if he’s nervous.
‘One more home-team try,’ said the Captain to his Executive, but no one gave the college cheer.
‘Five knots is all I want.’
The screws began to turn. As water flowed along the hull the deck lurched and slowly came level. I saw the Captain tell the Exec something and I guessed he was sending him off for the sealed orders before making the attempt to get through. That Captain didn’t trust anyone. That was wise of him.
I heard the pen scrape again. ‘More head room, skipper.’
He made a sound to show that he was unimpressed with the extra couple of feet clearance. But his eyes were on the sonar and the lagoon beyond the floe. ‘Close all watertight doors and bulkheads.’
I heard the metal thump closed and the locks tightened. A few of the crewmen exchanged blank stares. The phone rang. The Captain took it. He listened to the Exec for a moment. And then he looked at Schlegel. ‘OK, Charlie. Then let’s do that thing.’ He replaced the phone. ‘Here we go, Colonel,’ he said to Schlegel. Schlegel gave him a smile no thicker than a razor blade.
There was another soft scraping noise on the hull. We heard it clearly because everyone was holding their breath. The ship wriggled as the contact slowed one side of the hull and turned us a degree or two. The revolutions thrashed a little as the prop lost its hold and then gripped the water and went back to normal. Again the same thing happened, but suddenly we lurched forward and the pen scratched a near-vertical line that represented fifty feet or more. The pen came down again, but only made fifteen feet, and then was a steady corrugation on the polar pack no more than ten feet deep.
‘Can’t see that damned lagoon, Colonel.’
‘If we don’t pick up a suitable break in the ice inside thirty minutes I’m going to ask you to put a couple of fish into the underside of that polar pack.’
‘That doesn’t sound healthy,’ said the Captain. ‘We’d be only three ship-lengths away.’
‘Ever hear of Polaris subs, Captain?’ Schlegel asked.
The Captain said nothing.
‘I don’t know what kind of money that fleet of pig-boats costs, but you don’t think they built those contraptions without finding out how to knock a hole in the ice, do you?’
‘We’ve got thirty minutes yet,’ said the Captain.
‘Right,’ said Schlegel, and he threw a finger at the Captain. ‘Cool your kids off a little, huh?’
‘Attention all hands. This is the Captain. We’re under the polar pack. Resume normal activity but keep the juke box off.’
We found a suitably large polynya – which is the proper name for a lagoon in the ice – and, with careful attention to the sonar, the Captain began surfacing procedures.
We were all in the electronics room with the operators that were assigned to this watch. ‘I’ve got every permutation of message he can send on call in my head,’ said Schlegel.
‘Maybe he won’t call,’ said Ferdy.
‘We’ll give him two hours and then we’ll send the negative contact.’
‘Will the Captain hold her on the surface for two hours?’
‘He’
ll do what I tell him,’ said Schlegel, with one of his special scowl-like smiles. ‘Anyway, it’ll take his deck party an hour or more to paint the sail white.’
‘That won’t prevent us being picked up on the radar or MAD,’ said Ferdy.
‘Do me a favour and don’t tell that Captain,’ said Schlegel harshly. ‘He’s scared gutless already.’
‘He probably knows the radar chain better than you do, Colonel,’ said Ferdy.
‘That’s why the Colonel’s not scared,’ I added.
‘You guys!’ said Schlegel in disgust.
The radio call came through on time. It was coded in Norwegian, but any Russian monitoring crew would have to be unusually stupid to believe that there were a couple of Norwegian fishing trawlers out there in the deep freeze.
‘Bring number four net,’ came through in morse as clear as a bell and was followed by four five-figure cipher groups.
Schlegel looked over the operator’s shoulder as he deciphered and stabbed a group in the code book. He said, ‘Send that code for “market steady on today’s catches – no change expected tomorrow”. And then wait for them to close.’
Our operator released the key after the signature and there was the bleat of an acknowledgement. Schlegel smiled.
When we were back in the lounge Ferdy sank into an armchair, but Schlegel fiddled with the writing-desk light over the doctor’s one-man bridge game. ‘Our boy made it,’ Schlegel said.
‘Our boy with the suitcase radio set came in five by five. A powerful signal, and clear enough to compare with the Northern Fleet operational transmitter,’ I said.
Schlegel bared his teeth in a way that most people do only for the dentist. I was beginning to recognize it as a sign that he was on the defensive. ‘It was an official transmitter,’ he admitted. ‘Confirming the rendezvous with the helicopter.’
I stared at him. It seemed a lot of words for such a simple message, and why wasn’t it in high speed morse. ‘A Russian transmitter?’ I said. ‘So we are going bare-arse into a lagoon of their choosing?’
‘You don’t like the idea of it?’
‘With a Russkie egg-beater overhead? They could come down with a feather and tickle us to death.’