14

“TIME, eighteen thirty-one. Standby—shift,” said Pedersen, swinging the rule clear. The officers stepped back, bracing themselves against repeaters and vertical plots as Matt and Lipson rolled the old plot up and off the table. The chief radarman stepped in with fresh paper. Dan swallowed hard, grabbed the edges, held it flat for taping. As their hands lifted, the plotting and evaluation team leaned forward again, Packer with them, part of the huddle around the smooth white field on which they were locked in the long game.

Lenson gripped the table, swallowing dry heaves. The closed cold air of the electronics spaces was supposed to be recycled through filters, but now it stank of cigarette smoke and barf and ozone. The compartment and the men sealed in it were progressing through space in slow gigantic bounds, like a bucking brontosaur. First pencils floated into the air, then everyone’s head snapped down as they crashed into the sea. Then came the slow crawl upward again, his stomach contracting, anticipating that sickening descent.…

When they’d relieved, Reed had updated them on the action since noon. The first P-3B antisubmarine aircraft, call sign RD04, had reported in on the ASW tactical net at 1300. Later than they’d hoped, but doubly welcome, since Ryan still hadn’t regained contact.

Reed explained that in “creep mode” a nuclear sub was lucky to make three knots, little more than a brisk walk. Even so, after two hours the “farthest on circle,” the area within which the sub had to be, covered 113 square miles. With each hour, that area increased geometrically, and the probability of reacquisition dropped accordingly.

Reed suspected B41 was trying to escape to the southwest. That had been its course at first intercept. So when the P-3 pilot placed himself under Ryan’s advisory control, Packer had ordered him to lay a Julie barrier twenty miles southwest of the “datum,” the latitude and longitude of the last solid contact.

Dan listened intently. The pubs he’d read yesterday had defined a “Julie barrier” as a miles-long line of sonobuoys—floating microphones with battery-powered radio transmitters—dropped in a carefully spaced sequence. On a second pass, the plane dropped small explosive charges. If the sonobuoys were laid properly, they’d pick up the echoes of the explosions from the sub’s hull and transmit them to the aircraft. The P-3 plotted the results and radioed Ryan the target’s position, course, and speed.

Reed had spread out the last two plotting sheets, pointing out where the plane had laid two successive barriers, then extended them to the west. Unfortunately, all they’d detected were faint echoes that the operators on the P-3, orbiting at 22,000 feet, evaluated as schools of fish.

At 1500, they’d had a break. A Flash message reported SOSUS contact from a naval facility in Norway.

Dan didn’t know what that was, so he asked. Reed said SOSUS was a supersecret network of bottom-laid hydrophones, sensitive but not always dependable. In any case, it only gave a line of bearing, unless two stations could fix the same signal.

The message reported intermittent twin-screw tonals on a bearing that passed east and south of Ryan’s position. Packer had instantly ordered the plane to leave its barriers and drop another, using its last dozen sonobuoys, twenty miles to the east. The first pass had picked up a sizable echo outside the new pattern, twenty-eight miles southeast by east of Ryan.

Reed had leaned back wearily as he concluded. “That’s the good news: Romeo Delta’s got him hooked, and he knows it. He’s making runs this way and that, changing depth, trying to shake loose, but he’s basically nailed. The bad news is that we can’t get over to where he is because it’d put us beam-on to the prevailing sea. So for the moment, we’re letting the airedales carry the ball. We’re heading south, making eight to ten knots good. That’s closing the range slowly. When we get to CZ range, twenty-one, twenty-two thousand yards, we’ll try to pick him up again with the VDS.

“I guess the short version is, we still hold him, and it’s thirty hours till the cavalry gets here. Now I’m gonna take fifteen minutes to eat and shit, then back to Sonar. Any questions?”

Evlin had asked him about how much longer the aircraft had on station. Reed said RD had fuel for four more hours before he had to return to Iceland, and another plane with full tanks and sonobuoy bays would be overhead before he left. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Later. Has he reported any channel-lock problems?”

“No, there’s enough frequency separation that the barriers don’t interfere with each other.”

Evlin turned to the captain, who had watched the turnover silently. “Sir, I have the watch as evaluator.”

“Okay, Al. Thanks, Aaron, good work.”

When Reed was gone, Evlin said, “Any instructions for me, sir?”

Packer blinked slowly and shifted on his stool. “Not really. Just stay on his tail, and keep our powder dry. I’d rather hold contact myself, but second best’s having the plane locked on. He’s got Mark forty-sixes aboard. He can shit a torp, two seconds’ notice. The idea of one-six-zero, that’s as close as we can get to heading east without falling off into the trough.”

“My question is, why’s he going east at all?”

Packer said, and his voice was patient and heavy, “I figure, because he figures we’re looking for him to go southwest. The SOSUS indication tells me he’s pulling power off his reactor again, not full power, but enough to put machinery sound in the water. He’s either running low on juice or trying to slip around our flank. If they hadn’t tagged him, he’d have made it, too. This is a sharp bear. We’ve got to keep him on a short leash. Next time, we may not be so lucky.”

“Coffee, sir?” said one of the OSs. Packer took it without answering and sucked deeply, as if it were brewed with the water of eternal life.

“But he can’t get anywhere if he goes east. There’s nothing that way but the Norwegian coast.”

“That’s a good place to hide, Al. Lots of cozy little fjords there he can duck into and nobody would ever find him. Not us, not the Norwegians, not the Soviets.”

“But isn’t he trying to get south, into firing range?”

“Nobody knows.” Packer’s face was rigid with fatigue, but behind the rising smoke from the pipe his eyes glittered. “That’s his capability. His intentions, who knows? If the Russians are telling the truth, then he’s probably headed southwest. If they’re lying, if he’s really just out here to give them an excuse to surge their forces before we wake up to what’s going on—then all he has to do is lose us, and the first inning of the war goes their way.”

Pedersen said, “You don’t think that’s what’s happening, do you, sir?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think, Chief. But I’ll bet anything you want that question’s getting asked at the Joint Chiefs level, maybe higher. I’ll guarantee you, the CINCs are recommending getting the fleet under way. Once that starts, the Reds are going to ask themselves, Do they jump the gun, follow up on B forty-one, crazy or not, or wait to be bottled up? We’ve always thought the big one would start in Central Europe, maybe just because the last two have. But it could be starting out here. Right now.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“Hammerhead, this is Romeo Delta Zero Four. Over.”

The voice came wrapped in static from one of the speakers above the plot. Evlin nodded to Silver. The CIC officer cradled the handset, waiting for the beep and green light that signaled the voice scrambler was engaged. When it came he said rapidly, “Hammerhead. Over.”

Through the roar of interference and amplification, the distant voice said, “This is Romeo Delta marking on top of trace at angels twenty-two. We hold contact proceeding one-zero-zero at nine knots, forty-eight thousand yards from you on a bearing of zero-nine-five. We made one low pass for ID and got a positive MAD contact. Man, it’s rough down there. How do you skimmers stand it in that stuff?”

Dan knew now MAD meant a magnetic anomaly. The plane’s instruments had detected something made of steel down there, a lot of steel. “Plot that,” he muttered to Matt.

“Give him a roger, out,” said Evlin. “No, wait. Ask him if he has contact with his follow-on yet.”

Silver asked the pilot about his relief. When the scrambler synced, they heard the drone of turboprops before he said, “That’s a charlie. I’ll be handing off to Delta Delta three three. Right now, he’s holding on Runway One waiting for visibility to clear. I told him it’s heavy shit out here, make sure his deicers are checked out. Over.”

“Okay, sign off,” said Evlin. He reached up and hit the button on the 29MC. “Sonar, Evaluator: Bearing to contact is zero-nine-five. Search on same freq bands as before.”

As Sonar rogered, Dan depressed the button on his mouthpiece. He had word to pass, too. “Asroc Control, Torpedo Control, Director fifty-one: This is WLO. Target bears zero-nine-five true, range forty-eight thousand. An ASW aircraft is orbiting over it at twenty thousand feet.”

The petty officers at the various stations rogered indifferently. He pressed the button again. “Look, you guys, stay on the ball. Make sure you’re aimed out on these bearings.”

When the listless voices rogered again, one of them left his button down while he added a yawn. It was just another drill to them. Well, he could sympathize. He felt sick again, nauseated and weak. He’d tried to eat, but lost it, then given up trying. This time when he got off he was heading straight for his rack. He was so zonked he saw things moving in the corners of CIC. But when he looked, there was nothing there.

Evlin was studying the plot. Dan could see programs running behind his glasses. Every couple of seconds he frowned up at the silent intercom. Pedersen advised the plotters in a low tone how to record the MAD vector and extend the farthest-on circle from it.

He eased his phones and drifted over to the air scope. Silver stood over it, a grease pencil sticking out of his beard. They watched the sparkling wand of the trace sweep around. A bright pip flared to the southeast. Silver ratcheted the knobs and set the cursor on it. “The bird,” he muttered. “Got to keep track of it, case they lose an engine, or something.”

Dan nodded, but thought that if it went down in weather like this, there wasn’t much point in knowing its location. Even a four-engine wouldn’t leave much but an oil slick, and from what Packer and Evlin were saying, Ryan wouldn’t be able to get over there to rescue them. A destroyer didn’t expose herself to forty-foot seas from the beam—especially when she was losing stability with every pound of ice.

“Sir, who shall I give this to?” asked someone behind them. When he turned, a shuddering petty officer in a wet pea coat was holding out a glass slide. Silver told him to take it in to the sonarmen.

For the next two hours, Dan stood as his legs went through pain into numbness. His feet felt as if they’d swollen to fill every seam in his shoes. The ship soared and plunged, hammered and rang like a hollow tube on a blacksmith’s anvil. From time to time the lights flickered and the scopes contracted to tiny bright points, like electronic diamonds, then whirred back up to life. The P-3 held contact as if epoxied to the sub. Packer sat on his stool, blinking slowly as he tasted smoke, let it trickle out. The only conversation was the mutter of the plotters as they copied data from Romeo Delta. With dull curiosity Dan watched Packer struggle against going into the sonar shack. But every ten or fifteen minutes, he lost and disappeared behind the black curtain.

Once, when he was back there, Dan heard Evlin mutter something. He leaned to him. “Sir?”

“Sorry. Talking to myself. I still don’t understand why he’s running east.”

“Like the captain said, because we expected him to go southwest.”

“I don’t agree. He’s got to go south. Otherwise, he’ll be boxed up when our nukes get here. Time’s running out on him. He’s got to know that, that he won’t be the only submarine out here for very long. And once our boats get their teeth in him, he’s not going to get away.”

“Then what happens?”

“Then somebody’s going to have to decide who fires the first shot.”

“Evaluator, Sonar: Still no contact. Continuing search.”

“Evaluator, aye.”

*   *   *

AROUND 2230, Packer lumbered to his feet again. He started for the sonar shack, but made a U-turn outside the curtain and went forward instead. He said he’d be in his cabin, to call him if anything happened.

When he disappeared, the ASW plotting team seemed to wilt. Evlin sighed, digging his fists into his back. Dan heard his spine pop. “Didn’t I see a jug of coffee? Thanks. Okay, school call. Might as well take advantage of this for training. Dan, Mark, you want to catch this.

“Okay, now … where to start. Maybe with the sound-speed diagram. You guys know about thermoclines.”

“Layers of colder and warmer water,” said Dan.

“Right. But they aren’t discontinuous; they’re areas of gradual change. Normally you get warm water at the surface, then a band where temperature decreases rapidly with depth. Then an area of more gradual drop. Below say three hundred meters, you don’t see much change even between winter and summer. The thermoclines move up and down in diurnal and seasonal cycles.

“Okay; why do we care? Because sound speed varies with temperature. Also with salinity, but in the open sea, temperature’s what you most care about.

“Remember that slide Pelouze brought up here a while ago? That’s a BT slide. BT means bathythermograph. It’s a little instrument that goes down and comes up and gives us a plot of depth versus temperature. From that, with some charts, the sonar weenies—”

From behind the black curtain: “Watch it, Mr. Evlin.”

“—like Petty Officer Orris, can predict sonar propagation. Give ’em the equation, Orris.”

A high voice from the inner sanctum chanted, “C equals 1448.96 plus 4.951 T minus 5.304 times ten to the minus two T squared plus 2.374 times ten to the minus four T cubed plus 1.34 (S minus 35) plus 1.630 times ten to the minus two D plus 1.657 times ten to the minus seven D squared minus 1.025 times ten to the minus two T (S minus 35) minus 7.139 times ten to the minus thirteen T D cubed.”

“Thank you, Petty Officer Orris. The sea acts on sound like glass on light. It can focus it or blur it; wrap it around corners, carry it hundreds of miles in channels, or bend it straight down to the bottom. The sub’s figuring all this, too. He tries to hide; we try to guess where the best place to hide will be. Cat and mouse. Only he does this every day. Fortunately, the P-three evens things up. Everything clear as mud?”

“Where did he go when he disappeared this morning?” Dan asked. “One minute he was there, the next minute—a ghost.”

“He read the water better than we did. He found a dicothermal layer that bent sound right around him.”

“Dicothermal,” said the high voice. “From the Greek; meaning, cold as a dyke.”

“Crawl back into those earphones, Orris.”

“Wait a minute, Lootenant. There’s women on that submarine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Got to be. I hear screw noises.”

“We’re getting tired, gentlemen,” Evlin announced.

Just then, the captain returned. He looked around at them. His face darkened.

“Knock it off,” James Packer said. “This is no game.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Silver, ask Romeo Delta for an update, please.”

*   *   *

FOR a while, he dreamed of food. Then he dreamed of sitting down. Finally he just dreamed of getting off watch. And at last, he dreamed, and prayed, that Ryan would steady herself just for one minute. That was all he wanted from life.

He clung to the table till his hands cramped like an old man’s.

*   *   *

AT 2300, Packer went forward again. The men watched the lighted rosette, the “bug,” glumly while he was gone. When he came back, he stood over the air scope for a while. Dan heard a grasshopper clicking as he sucked on his empty pipe.

“We got a problem, Al.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“This bow slamming kicks up a lot of spray. It’s getting colder, too. I had one of the signalmen put the light on the top hamper. You can see it hit the stacks and freeze. It’s over a foot thick on the mast platforms.”

“We ought to ballast, sir,” said Evlin. He rubbed his mouth. “Mr. Talliaferro brought that up yesterday. Why don’t we ballast?”

“Because it fouls the tanks. Once you get saltwater in there, you can pump all you want, but when you put fuel in again, you’ll still have contamination.” Packer added heavily, “That’s why.”

“We’ll have to sooner or later, sir. As we burn fuel, she gets lighter below. As the ice accumulates, she gets heavy above. You don’t need an inclining experiment to tell you—”

“Yeah, that’s what Ed was shouting at me about just before you came on watch.”

Dan studied the captain covertly. Were those shadows at the corners of his mouth a smile? He looked so exhausted, it was hard to tell. They disappeared as a flame flared, was sucked down into the bowl of his pipe, flared up again. “You think I should, too, huh?”

“In your position, I would, sir. I understand the contamination problem, but it seems secondary.”

“It’s not secondary to me. We lose the engines in these seas and we’ll broach. Granted, if that happens and we’re unstable, we won’t come back, but given the choice, I’d rather not broach in the first place. That’s why so far I’ve rated dependable power over ballast.”

“They lost some of this class in the war, didn’t they, Captain? In a typhoon, from not ballasting?”

Packer shook his head sharply. “I know what you mean, but that was different.” He glanced at the curtain, then pulled his eyes back. “Those were prewar destroyers, not Gearings. During the war, they got loaded up with a lot of new stuff—radars, AA guns—and nobody kept track of their stability. Some of them ballasted, but it didn’t save them. The court of inquiry concluded they lost power, fell off into the trough, started rolling, and capsized.”

The 29MC interrupted them with a monotone. “This is the evening sonar-conditions summary. Sea suction intake is thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, salinity thirty-four parts per thousand. Predictions, have been prepared for the following conditions: water depth sixteen hundred fathoms; own ship speed less than twenty knots; true wind speed, off the scale.

“BT drop and the deep history shows a sound-speed profile with good mixing down to four hundred feet and a faint thermocline at eight hundred. Beyond that, it’s a straight fall down to a thousand five hundred. Best sensor is predicted to be passive VDS at five hundred feet. Target’s best depth to listen is three hundred and his best depth to evade is below eight hundred. We have no best search speed due to heavy ambient noise. Active sonar prediction is poor due to sea return.

“Passive predictions: near surface, very poor; best depth, twelve thousand yards; convergence zone one, twenty-five thousand yards.”

Evlin reached up absently and hit the lever. “Mark, what’s range to the bird?”

The gears ground in the air-search repeater. “Twenty-four thousand.”

“That’s only twelve miles. According to that prediction, if he’s over the sub, we ought to be picking him up, too.”

“With the SQS-thirty-five.”

“Right,” said Packer, and he sounded not tired anymore, but decisive. “And we aren’t. So he’s not below the layer, where we expect him. He’s shallow. Sonar, Captain: Bring the fish up to one hundred feet. Search on one hundred and fifty—hertz band.”

The 29MC acknowledged. Minutes dragged by. Then somebody shouted, “Bingo!” behind the black curtain.

“Evaluator, Sonar: Passive contact against heavy background noise, bearing zero-nine-two true. No bearing drift. No doppler. Classification, Yankee-class submarine! We got her!” His jubilation was echoed around the plotting table. But the captain just snapped, “Pass it to the aircraft. Tell your weapons crews, Lenson,” and the smiles froze and an instant later vanished, like gun smoke whipped away by a gale.

*   *   *

THEY held the submarine for the next hour and twenty minutes on passive VDS. The P-3 made two more low passes, two more MAD contacts, then lost it. It had used up all its sonobuoys, so now Ryan held on alone. They began passing range and bearing data the other way, to the plane.

The bearing remained steady. Since sonar could predict the width of the CZ band, they had a rough range, too. That also remained steady.

Dan wondered what was going on inside the captain’s head. Since Ryan was moving generally south, albeit slowly, that meant the sub was moving south, too. But every time Orris reported, he mentioned ambient noise. The high voice sounded more worried as time dragged by. As midnight passed, he reported the noise was increasing, that they were losing the signal in it. Evlin ordered the fish winched in to fifty feet— so shallow, it started to broach. Sonar reported “lost contact.” He dropped it back to two hundred. They picked it up again, but so faint, it dropped in and out of detectability.

“Captain,” said Evlin. He raised his voice. “Captain!”

Packer jerked his head up from the radio desk. Evlin explained that they were losing contact.

While he was talking, Reed came out of the sonar shack and propped his leanness against the first-aid cabinet. His eyes glowed with fatigue. Dan thought: We’ve had a few hours off between watches; no sleep, but we could move around, relax a little. He’s gone right from evaluator to sonar control and back. When Evlin finished, Reed told the captain, who had turned his face wordlessly to him, “It’s ice.”

“Ice? What ice?”

“Ask the bird if there’s ice out there. Floes, or small bergs.”

But when Silver asked, the P-3 said he couldn’t see the surface at all, it was too dark. He’d had to climb to get out of icing. He said he couldn’t stay much longer, either.

“Where the hell did my pipe…? Okay, but where’s his relief? He was supposed to be here by now.”

“Wait one,” said the TACCO’s voice. They knew Romeo Delta’s copilot by name now: Lieutenant Wycoff. He was off the circuit for a while. When he came back on, he sounded apologetic. “Ryan, Romeo Delta.”

“Go ahead, Romeo Delta,” said Silver, speaking slowly and distinctly into the handset. If you spoke too soon after you keyed, it broke sync, and all the listener heard was a hissing rush like a faulty toilet.

“This is Romeo Delta. Keflavik advises they have Condition Charlie at present with fifty-knot winds.”

“Give me the set, Mark,” said Packer. The captain rubbed his forehead as he waited for the scrambler. “This is Jim Packer, Ryan actual, Lieutenant. What’s Condition Charlie?”

“Sir, that’s a whiteout. When the wind gets above so high, it picks up loose snow, and it sort of hovers, and after a while you can’t even see your props. They can’t take off and we can’t land. Commander Gephardt’s talking to Bodo now; we’ll probably have to divert to there or Kinloss, or maybe Machrahanish.”

“Are you telling me he can’t take off?”

“That’s about it, sir, not till the whiteout dies down. It’s not the wind, a P-three can take off in just about anything, but you got to be able to see.”

“How much longer can you stay on station?” asked Packer, and his face looked like cast iron now.

“Headed south at this time, Captain. I gave you all the time on top I can. I’ll have to shut down two engines to make Scotland. I’m sorry. Over.”

“I understand. Thanks for your support. Ryan out.”

He hung up the handset. No one spoke for a few seconds. Finally, Evlin looked back at Reed.

“Icebergs,” the ASW officer said again. “He went east looking for them. I think he’s found some. The ice changes the salinity, and the grinding of the floes covers his noise. If we can’t close, we’re going to lose him, sir.”

“I don’t want to come left,” said the captain. “I don’t know if she’ll take it, frankly.”

“Then shoot,” said a voice behind them.

Benjamin Bryce came into the circle of light around the plotting table. Evlin and Pedersen gave way as he leaned over the chicken tracks of hours of hide-and-seek. “You got to do it this time, Jimmy John.”

“What are you doing up here, Ben?”

“I came up to see how it was going. And I’m glad I did, hearing the advice you’re getting from your JOs.” Bryce put his knuckles on the glass. “Word with you?”

“Will it take long?”

“You need to hear it.”

Bryce and Packer went back by the evaluator’s desk, back on the port side of CIC. It put them around the corner from the men at the plot, but only ten feet from Dan. He couldn’t hear everything. The wind howl and the slamming and the mutter of the plotters overlaid it. But he couldn’t help hearing Bryce say, “I wondered how much longer it was going to take you to figure out how this had to end.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I heard what Reed was saying. Only thing to do is put an Asroc out there, right now, while you still got contact. Don’t ask permission. Just do it. Otherwise, you lose him. And you can’t afford that. Can you?”

Their voices lowered then, and he saw Evlin’s eye on him; he grabbed the mouthpiece and said, “Uh, all stations, comm check.” They answered, drawling, jaded, and he lost the rest of the exchange behind him.

Packer came back a few minutes later. “Any better?”

“Sonar reports still losing strength, sir. The SNR—signal-to-noise ratio—”

“I know what SNR is, Chief.”

“Yes, sir. Anyway, it’s still dropping.”

Packer looked at the plot for another few seconds. “Draft a message, Al,” he said at last.

Evlin grabbed the pad of blanks.

“Make it Flash precedence. Top Secret. USS Ryan to CINCLANTFLT. Subject: twenty-four hundred contact status.

“Para One. Due to weather degradation, P-three support no longer available. Sea state my posit is seven plus, wind eighty-five knots gusting to over one hundred.

“Para Two. Due to inability to conform to eastward movement B forty-one, anticipate losing contact in next half hour or hour time frame. Request instructions.”

The captain put his pipe in his mouth. His lips pursed around it, then flattened into a white line. “Okay, that’s all; get it out.”

When the pneumatic tube to Radio hissed, he turned to Dan. “Lenson, tell Asroc Control to prepare a two-round salvo of Mark forty-fours. Al, give him a bearing and range. Report when ready.”

Dan felt unreal. He stared for a moment too long, because Packer added angrily, “You hear me?”

“Uh, aye aye, sir. Asroc Control, WLO: Prepare two Asrocs for launch.”

“Say again, there?” a lazy voice drawled in his ear. “Doin’ ’nother drill? We just did one last—”

“This is no drill.” He steadied his voice and took the slip of paper Pedersen handed him. “Firing data follows. Target range is twenty-four thousand, five hundred yards. Bearing will be set from Sonar. Set Mark forty-four to circular search, five-hundred-foot floor, one-hundred-foot ceiling. Report when ready to launch.”

“Shit fire,” the voice said, and there was a hasty scramble of shouting, orders on the far end of the line. Dan licked his lips and glanced at Evlin. The operations officer was studying the trace, face sober behind the glasses.

“Sir, you’re not really planning to—”

“I don’t want to, Al, but I don’t have the big picture. Keep updating the bearings and ranges. Make water entry point for the torpedoes about two thousand yards ahead of the last reported position. Dan, what are they giving you?”

“Uh, no word back yet, sir.”

At the same moment, an agitated voice in his headphones said, “WLO, Asroc Control.”

He grabbed his mouthpiece. “Go ahead.”

“Sir, we have a casualty on the launcher. The elevation motors—something about the elevation motors, Steffy says. Frozen, or something.”

Dan felt his hands go numb in horror and dismay. “What are you telling me? We’ve been on station for ten hours now! You reported manned and ready!”

The voice became evasive. “Yessir, we were manned, but nobody told us to train and elevate. We tried to do it just now and something’s fucked. Stefanick’s out there trying to find out what’s wrong. There’s a lot of ice all over the launcher.”

“You let ice accumulate on the Asroc launcher?”

“What’s going on, Lenson?” Packer’s voice, sharp as a whip crack.

For a quarter of a second, he was tempted to lie, buy time, hope it was something they could fix quickly. Instead he made himself say, “Sir, there’s some problem with the launcher.”

“What kind of problem?”

“They’re tring to find out, sir, but it sounds like an elevation motor.”

“There’re four elevation motors on that mount, and eight launch rails. One better work. Find out how long it’ll be to fix it.”

“Is Stefanick back yet? Do you have any idea how long it’ll take to repair?” he asked desperately. The voice on the other end said, hurt, “Jeez, sir, he just went outside. Give him a couple minutes, all right?”

Evlin and Packer moved a few steps off. He heard them discussing torpedo run-out range, but his concentration was on his earphones. He wanted to tear them off and run aft, see what was going on himself. He wanted to strangle somebody. Every weapons station was supposed to check the gear when they manned up, and every hour thereafter while they were at GQ. He felt hot and ashamed. His hands shook as he pressed the button again. “Asroc Control, CIC—”

“Wait one, here’s Stefanick now.”

The captain came over and stood glaring at him, waiting. He couldn’t meet Packer’s eyes as he repeated what the voice told him. “Sir, there’s a glycol cooling and heating system in the launcher, that runs through a saltwater heat exchanger that also heats the hydraulic fluid. They say the heat exchanger must have ruptured. The saltwater mixed with the glycol and it’s all frozen now. They’re going to have to thaw it out and drain it, then flush it with fresh water and replace the—”

“Can they get a weapon off? I can turn the ship in bearing if they can’t turn the mount.”

“Wait one, sir.” Sweat ran down his back as he repeated the captain’s questions. “Sir, Petty Officer Stefanick says it won’t elevate, either, and none of the launcher doors will open. The whole hydraulic system’s fucked, and he thinks the motors burned out while he was trying to move it.”

“Shit,” said Bryce. “That’s the kind of work Norden’s been doing for you, I don’t wonder all his people are smoking that—”

Packer said, in a voice of only slightly controlled rage, “How about you, Ben? When’s the last time you were up there, inspecting?”

“Now, Jimmy John, I don’t see—”

“Al, is that Bear still around? The Soviet four-engine?”

“Haven’t had him on the scope since yesterday, sir. My guess is, they recalled him when they realized the storm was coming through here. It’s too rough and icy for him to do MAD sweeps down here.”

“Then we’re alone. Us and him. For another”—he glanced at the clock—“twenty-four, twenty-five hours.”

Evlin nodded.

There was a rumble over their heads, and a messenger tube farted itself into the padded cage. Simultaneously the 29MC lighted. “CIC, Radio; Flash incoming, rabbit’s in the hole.”

Packer got to it first. Dan watched as he scanned the message. As his shoulders sagged. When the captain looked up his face was no longer human. It was dark lava that had cooled and hardened into the shape of human features.

“What is it, sir?” asked Evlin.

“Maintain contact,” said Packer. He cleared his throat. “Just that: ‘Maintain contact at all costs with B forty-one.’”

“What did they say about preventing escape?”

“They didn’t say anything about that.” He folded the message and buttoned it into his breast pocket.

“It’s easy, then,” said Bryce. He lighted a cigarette with quick, nervous fingers. Sweat glittered on his scalp. “It’s there between the lines. They said it by not saying it. We just say we heard him open his tube doors. That covers our butts three ways to Sunday. I’ll talk to the sonarmen, if you want.”

Utter quiet, broken only by the scream of the storm.

“Okay, that’s it,” said the captain suddenly. They all looked at him. “It’s academic now; Asroc’s crapped out and we’re outside over-the-side torpedo range. I’ve got to go after him.

“Start coming around, Al. Tell Rich to come left gradually, ten degees at a time, and steady on one-zero-zero.”

“We’re going to roll like we’ve never rolled before, sir.”

“Pass the word, then. All hands stand by for violent motion. Do it, Mr. Evlin! And come up to twenty knots.”

Norden, from the bridge, acknowledged the order with misgiving in his tone. The radarmen grabbed handholds, set their feet wide, like sumo wrestlers readying themselves for an opponent’s charge. The rudder-angle indicator quivered, then moved left reluctantly. A second later the gyro began moving, too: 175, 170.

Watching it, watching Packer’s face watching it, Dan suddenly understood why the CO had buttoned the message into his pocket. It gave him authority for nuclear release. The six-digit code was right there in his pocket.

The key, if Captain James Packer miscalculated, to nuclear war.

The gyrocompass steadied at 170 for a few minutes. Ryan rolled, and it was bad, but not terrifying. They clung to the table, looking silently up as it began nudging left again.

At 160 the motion was worse. Packer’s face was taut in the dim light. No one looked at him; no one looked at each other. They just stared down at the flat paper that represented the wild sea outside. Not even the plotters spoke now. There was nothing to plot.

One fifty.… One forty. “Halfway there,” Pedersen muttered. Dan felt a surge of hope. No pitching, and even the roll wasn’t that awful, though the gale screamed outside like a thousand gut-shot horses.

“Hell, this ain’t so bad,” muttered Lipson.

Ryan went over then, suddenly, with incredible force, as if the outraged sea had only now perceived the trick they were trying to play. She lurched to starboard, stopped with a crashing jolt that flickered the lights; then shifted to port bodily, and rose, pressing their weights against the deck, as if they stood watch for a moment on some more massive planet than Earth.

She hurtled over to port and kept going. Their feet shot out from under them. The captain’s stool let go, slammed over and dumped him into Petty Officer Matt. The lights flickered again and went out. The battle lantern clicked on, projecting a weak yellow spot onto the suddenly dark plotting table. Dan tried to fight free of the phone cord, but it was too steep to regain his feet. From outside came the terrifyingly close crash of the sea hammering against the bulkhead just outside Combat. The 21MC, the command intercom, broke out in a series of half communications, cut off as others began shouting into the line.

“Chief. Chief—”

“She’s not coming back!”

“Combat, Bridge—”

“Combat, Bridge, this is Main Control. We’re taking water down the intakes to port. Is the captain up there? Securing blowers, securing boilers—”

“Negative!” Packer shouted. “Somebody tell him—keep them on the line. Tell the bridge, come back to one-nine-zero. Damn it, Silver, get off me!”

Dan was first up, but only because he was on top of the heap. He got the wire off his legs, climbed over bodies to get to the intercom. He repeated the captain’s orders.

“Bridge aye; I hear you.” Norden’s voice, more strained than Dan had ever heard before it. Behind it was shouting and the crash of breaking glass.

Dan sniffed. Was that smoke? Probably just Bryce’s cigarettes, Packer’s pipe. Still, it smelled like paper burning, not—

The door to the bridge slammed open. Through it, he heard Norden shouting, “Coming back to one-nine-zero. Main Control, give me emergency flank on the port shaft. Coffey! Right hard rudder!”

Through the shrieking and crashing came a sodden rumble from above them, a clattering, sullen roar like an anchor chain running out.

The smoke smell grew suddenly sharp. If they didn’t smell it, he did. “Fire!” he shouted. At that same moment, someone else shouted, “Fire in the pilothouse!”

The captain’s voice was unnaturally calm in the din. “Get off me, whoever’s on my legs. Lenson, see what’s going on on the bridge.”

“Yessir.” He tore off the last of the wire and picked his way forward, climbing over men and shifting shoals of pubs, walking on the front panels of equipment as often as the deck.

On the bridge, flashlights licked about. He grabbed Pettus in midleap and asked where the fire was. The third-class said, “Oh, we got it out already. Space heater tipped over into some of the charts. Ali, he hit it with an extinguisher. Hold on!”

He screamed that last into his ear, and Dan grabbed the lee helm instinctively, jerking his head around to where the boatswain was staring.

That was when the sea blindsided them, smashing not inward but downward on the now near-horizontal windows on the starboard side. The unbroken ones bulged inward under the impact of tons of water and ice. “Right hard rudder!” Norden was shouting. And Coffey was shouting back, “It’s all the way over! Won’t go no farther!”

Dan clung to the helm, staring around. Ryan was pinned. Her rudder was over, her engines running all out, but the wind was lying on her, and every time she tried to rise, the sea smashed her back down. The waves hammered her like a street fighter stamping a fallen opponent to death. Another window bulged, then shattered, and the sea cascaded through, spraying him with icy water, broken Plexiglas, ice. He couldn’t smell smoke anymore. All the windows on the starboard side were smashed.

Suddenly Packer was on the bridge. The captain shoved him aside and grabbed the brass handles of the engine-order telegraph. He racked them all the way back and all the way forward. “Rich! Give her left rudder!”

“Left rudder, sir? But—”

But Coffey was already bending. The wheel blurred as he spun it with one hand, clinging to the binnacle stand with the other. “Left hard, my rudder’s left hard.”

“Not hard, Coffey, full.”

“Ease to left full … rudder at left full!”

Packer’s voice cut the darkness and confusion like a machete through tangled black yarn. “Norden, by God, when I give an order, I want it obeyed, not questioned!”

“Yessir, I—”

“Never mind now. You have the conn back. Bring her stern through and steady on three-five-zero. Use full speed, twist her fucking tail. We can’t hang around in these troughs.”

Past him, Dan saw Norden, face linen white, eyes fixed. His mouth moved but nothing emerged. “D’you hear me?” Packer said sharply.

“Yeah … yes, sir. This is Lieutenant Norden, I have the conn! Come left, left full rudder, steady three-five-zero!”

But in that pause between Packer’s order and the rudder’s first leftward movement, the ship reeled and rose. Dan felt her lift as if to fly, like a sparrow trying to escape the bulletlike dive of a hawk. But even as she came up, he knew with numb, helpless terror that it wasn’t going to be enough.

The wave hit them like a lead avalanche. The last windows blew inward. The black sea roared through the pilothouse, smashing men down as they struggled to stand on wet tile, sending hot fizzing sparks through radio remotes in the instant before they shorted and went dead. He hung from the EOT, numb with fear, unable to look away.

Ryan didn’t come back.

She hung there, leaning far over to port, and the wind keened around her like a thousand jets going over on afterburner. She didn’t move, and he realized suddenly how unnatural it was, how terrifying, when a ship didn’t move.

Water rushed past him, icy black, pouring down through the shattered starboard windows, pouring down from above. For an eternity he knew he’d never come to the end of, he looked past his dangling, kicking boots through the windows to port. They were completely covered with the foamy darkness that had nothing beneath it but the bottom, two thousand fathoms down. If he let go, he’d drop straight down through them, straight into the sea.

Then, so slowly it seemed to take forever, the old destroyer staggered a few degrees back. Then Chief Yardner was between him and It, slamming and dogging the heavy armored ports of the inner pilothouse. He heard Packer shouting over the roar of countless tons of falling water: “… Circle William, set it now, everything but the main intakes. Ed, you got any free surface in the bilges?”

“Foot or so, sir, we’re pumping down as fast as we can, but we’re taking water somewhere.”

“Shit. Okay, ballast now. Ballast her down. You hear me? She’s worse than I expected. That last roll, we were right on the edge.”

Talliaferro’s voice acknowledged faintly, as if there wasn’t enough power to get his voice from Main Control up to the bridge.

Ryan came back a little more, then suddenly lifted and swooped madly in a great crack-the-whip as the sea shoved her quarter up and around. Coffey slipped on the deck and went down, hard. The wheel spun unmanned for a moment before Dan grabbed it. He yanked it over to left full and then the black seaman was up again, saying, “I got it, sir,” shoving back in front of him.

“Bridge, Main Control.”

“Captain here. Go ahead, Ed.”

“Sir, bad news. We’re already ballasted.”

“What? Without orders? Christ, what—”

“No, sir.” The voice came louder now. “I didn’t give orders to. But when the oil king went to crack the valves to the fire main, they were already open. The wing tanks are full. It must have been a while ago, too, ’cause they’re topped up, no free surface. I’m trying to find out how it happened now.”

“Find out later. Right now, look for what else we can flood. To starboard, preferably, that’s windward up here. And keep those boilers on the line.”

Packer cut off, interrupting the chief engineer in midacknowledgment. He stared around, and saw Dan.

For a fraction of a second, so transient Dan wondered ever after whether it was just the shift of a flashlight, Packer smiled at him.

Then he turned away. “Rich, you hear that?”

“Uh, yes, sir. Sir, we’re steady on three-five-zero.”

“Okay, that’s good for now. But I’ve got to go east, not north. Hear what I’m saying? I’ve got to go after this bastard or we’ll lose him. He’ll tiptoe away in that fucking ice, and we’ll never see him again. Till we hear that launch impulse, when the missiles come out of the tubes. And unless we’re sitting on top of him, right then, there won’t be a goddamn thing we can do about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, we were ballasted, but we still went to sixty degrees on that roll. And she didn’t want to come back. We’re way more tender than we ought to be. We either got free surface somewhere, or a lot more ice than I thought. I can’t come right again till we get rid of it.… Mr. Sullivan!”

Dan got up from his half seat against the helmet stowage. “Lenson, sir.”

“Yeah, Lenson. Get your division up on deck. Muster them in the Dash hangar. Sledgehammers, axes, pry bars, every man bring a tool. Rich, tell Main Control to get steam hoses rigged to the oh-two level. We’ve got to get some of this ice off.”

“Now, sir? It’s pitch-dark—”

“Now, Rich, now. In half an hour, I’m coming right, and if we’re not ready, we’re going to roll, and if we don’t come back, that’s just tough titty. So get cracking! Dan, get your people moving; they won’t have long to work. Make sure they wear foul-weather gear and life jackets.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And lines, lifelines. If anybody goes in the water, I won’t be able to come about for them. Make sure they understand that. Move, Lenson!”

“Aye, sir,” he said without thinking, the way you responded at the Academy after a two-hour come-around, when your body screamed so loud your mind could no longer make itself heard. Then only something more kept you going. Something deeper. Discipline, and pride, and something that was neither of these, though it was part of them. Maybe it was only knowing it had to be done. Past Packer’s squinted eyes, he caught the cracked face of a clock. It had stopped at five minutes past midnight.