Cold is the Sea (26 page)

“Negative, Rich. There's too much activity over the equator.” Rich caught the sharp glance from Buck, grimaced understandingly in return. “Our second message explains it better. It's great to hear you, though. Over.” Keith spoke rapidly, now that communications had been established. There was just enough emphasis on the word “great” to accentuate the undercurrent of anxiety in his words.

“That's okay, Keith. We just want you to know we're with you, and will keep this circuit up on our end. Anytime you want to use it, open up and we'll be here. Over.”

Keith evidently had begun talking even before Rich enunciated the final word. “—help a great deal,” his voice said. “There's not much time—” There was a short pause, someone saying something in the distance, words unintelligible, then Keith's voice again, speaking even more rapidly. “Got to go. Thanks for calling. I'll come back to you when I can. Out.” There were both urgency and finality in his voice.

“He's under a lot of pressure, Buck,” said Rich gravely. “Something's really wrong up there.”

“We hardly got a chance to talk at all. I was hoping there'd be enough time to say more than just ‘hello,' ” said Williams, betraying his own concern by speaking nearly as rapidly as Keith. “Should we tell him we're on our way to help him? He might be able to hear us even if he can't answer.”

“No. He's signed off. That's telling us something, right there. Probably he's already retracting antennas and flooding tanks. No point in adding any more complication to his life right now. Let's take this message of his and decode it. That's the most useful thing we can do.”

Buck hesitated an instant, then said, “Shall I leave instructions up here about guarding the voice frequency? I'll join you in a minute.”

“Okay, Buck, thanks,” said Richardson. “I have the key to the coding room down in my safe. Tell the chief to set up a continuous watch on voice and CW both, and call one of us if they hear anything. Also, they should record all transmissions on tape, especially if we're not there to hear them. The squadron
office has a tape recorder. Have them get it up here and be ready to use it.”

Setting up the coding machine was an unfamiliar exercise for both officers, although both had been well versed in an earlier model. An added complication was the necessity of implementing a totally new top-secret code, extracted from the code room safe. Much reference to the printed instructions and many false starts were necessary before the machine finally began to type out intelligible copy. Richardson and Williams, their heads nearly touching, read the words as they appeared from under the typing bar.

“This
CHARLIE JULIET
business is silly,” muttered Buck as the first words appeared. “What good is a code name in a ciphered message?”

Rich did not answer. The next few words engaged his full attention. He could feel Buck Williams' heavy breathing, only inches away.

             
FROM CHARLIE JULIET X SECOND REPORT FOR COMSUBLANT COMSUBRON TEN X MAX SHAFT SPEED TWENTY RPM WITH HEAVY VIBRATION X PROPELLER STERN PLANES AND LOWER RUDDER DAMAGED COLLISION SUBMERGED OBJECT BELIEVED TO BE SOVIET SUBMARINE X SECONDARY PROPULSION MOTOR WIPED OFF X NO SERIOUS LEAKS X NO PREVIOUS SONAR CONTACT X MILITARY TYPE AIRCRAFT APPARENTLY SEARCHING AREA X UNABLE INSPECT SCREW WITHOUT RISK DETECTION X ICE COVER FIFTEEN DASH TWENTY FEET EXCEPT POLYNYAS AND LEADS FEW AND FAR BETWEEN WHERE FROZEN ONLY THREE DASH FOUR FEET X INSPECTION MANDATORY BEFORE PROCEEDING DUE VERY HEAVY VIBRATION X REMAINING IN POLYNYA POSITION GOLF NOVEMBER TWO NINE AWAITING OPPORTUNITY USE DIVERS X SUSPECT BENT SHAFT X WILL REPORT RESULTS ASAP X IN VIEW APPARENT DAMAGE BELIEVE MUST ABORT MISSION BUT UNABLE ESTIMATE ABILITY YET TO CLEAR PACK X

Richardson broke the silence. “Buck, this is a real emergency! I'd call Norfolk right away, but there's only a duty officer and a communication watch on, and anyway they'll not have Keith's
message decoded yet. How quick can you pull your ship together and get out of here?”

“Tomorrow, like I said. But we're not on any emergency basis.”

“Go down right now and check the critical items. Be back here in an hour. We can have a quick breakfast while we talk it over and get ready to phone Norfolk. Put your crew under emergency notice, but don't tell anyone why. I'll see what the
Proteus
can do to speed up getting the two towing rigs ready. By that time they'll have decoded the message and rushed it to Admiral Murphy, and he'll be anxious to talk to us and Washington both.”

Reveille was sounding aboard the
Proteus
as they locked the steel door of the coding room behind them.

11

T
here had been no warning whatever of the presence of another submarine, or anything else, for that matter, until too late to avoid. It
must
have been a submarine, running silent, close to the underside of the ice. Nothing else could have produced the sudden, disconcerting heave of
Cushing
's big hull, the metallic grinding sound as her propeller mangled its seven exotically shaped blades into twisted bronze, the shriek of tortured bearings in her engineroom as the propeller shaft bowed in the middle and then returned to normal. The initial shock had thrown the big missile submarine heavily to starboard. It was followed by a series of smaller, more scraping blows. The
Cushing
heaved upward from the stern, and suddenly it was over, the noise gone, leaving only reverberations in the water and slow-growing appreciation of disaster.

An inspection of the turbine mounts and the propeller-shaft steady bearing, carefully conducted later, confirmed that these massive mechanisms had been displaced as much as half an inch, and had then returned to their normal positions. The findings had been greeted with incredulity by
Cushing
's engineer officer,
Curt Taylor, and by all the enginemen and machinists who had made the measurements; but the proof was there, marks in the machinery foundations themselves. Only Keith, when he saw them with his own eyes, could accept the undisputable evidence. Some years previous he had viewed remote-control movies in slow motion of what actually happened when a sister ship of the old
Eel
had been subjected to a test depth charging. The veteran hulk had been depth charged to destruction, but the cameras, specially protected, had been brought back by divers who had carefully entered the shattered and flooded old hull after it was all over.

Keith and the other viewers of the film had had it run several times, at both fast and slow speeds, before they could believe what they saw: steel forgings stretching like rubber, snapping back to their original configurations; pieces of heavy equipment moving radically, sometimes as much as a foot or more, in relation to each other; more slender rods and pipes bending and springing like so many thin rubber bands, and then, after the shock, looking as if nothing had happened—except for a cloud of paint particles which had flaked off and, for several seconds, floated to the deck amid the dust and trash also flung there.

Any theory that vibration communicated to the camera itself could have been responsible for what the films showed was disproved by the fact that the objects in view moved in disparate directions, some one way and some another. Some of them, less securely fastened, continued to vibrate for several perceptible, rapidly diminishing, cycles. In succeeding and more powerful charges some were broken clean, or their securings sheared off. At the end, there was the horrendous flooding entry of white water as the lethal charge finally breached the stout old hull. Keith and the other wartime submariners present had sat several seconds in silence after the film was over. There had been no noise, no accompanying crash of depth charges, no terror or pain inflicted. But Keith, and the others, had needed none. The view of the tortured machinery had been enough. Each had his own memories of depth chargings, and some, like Keith, would always carry in their minds the knowledge that what they had just witnessed, in the safe confines of one of the Pentagon's movie auditoriums, might have been the last thing seen on earth by their old friends and shipmates.

After the films Keith no longer wondered why it was that
Eel
's hull had appeared to whip during depth charging, how it could be that the main engines—those huge locomotive-type diesels—had seemed to bounce convulsively on their bed plates. They had, even though no one would believe it at the time. The pictures in slow motion, taken at ten times normal film speed, demonstrated that his instantaneous impressions during the war—and those of others who had seen similar things—had not been wrong. They had not been hallucinations due to stress. These extraordinary things had actually happened.

Irrefutably it had happened to the
William B. Cushing
herself, even though the shock had been one of collision, not nearby explosion. It took the calm evaluation of all the evidence to reach the inescapable conclusion. This amount of damage could only have happened by collision with another steel hull—and at some speed.

Keith had been maneuvering his ship slowly, positioning her under the most promising frozen-over opening in the ice found so far. Originally it had been a long crack, or lead, in the ice floe. Instead of being closed by action of the wind and ocean currents it had remained open, perhaps even widened slightly, while the somewhat less saline water at the surface froze into a permanent bridge over the opening. The double echo trace on
Cushing
's upward-beamed fathometer indicated the thickness as somewhere between three and four feet. But the crack was narrow, less than one hundred feet in width, rimmed by old ice floes twenty feet thick or more. Seen from below, it was in shape a ravine in an otherwise fairly smooth, inverted plain of ice.

In order to break through the thin ice cover it was first necessary to position the bulbous 420-foot
Cushing
lengthwise between the two downward-projecting, near vertical ice cliffs on either side of the lead, bring her up gently and carefully, exactly midway in the thin spot. Keith, at
Cushing
's control station, knew he was not yet at a depth shallow enough to strike the ice. His first, instantaneous reaction was that there must have been an unnoticed, disastrously deep ice pinnacle—the bottom of an unseen berg embedded in the ice floe—against which
Cushing
's propeller, instantly stopped but not until it had turned half a dozen revolutions against whatever it was that she had struck, had received considerable damage.

But sonar, which had continuously been reporting all clear, had suddenly announced strange propeller noises dead astern in the baffles, and close aboard. Many crew members later reported having heard them throughout the hull at the time of the collision, with or without earphones, along with a cacophony of machinery noises from some other ship. The report from sonar was simultaneous with a tremendous upward heave aft which could only have resulted from something big passing underneath. Keith had just lowered his periscope, had been watching the underside of the ice through his controllable TV camera and its paired searchlights. Hurriedly he swiveled it around to extreme horizontal train, saw bubbles and turbulent water rising around his own ship's hull.

The foreign submarine must have been traveling recklessly fast so close to the undersurface of the ice. She must surely be nuclear-powered, and she must have been running in the silent mode (which might indicate knowledge that an American submarine was in the vicinity). Coming from astern and at a somewhat greater depth, she had struck the
Cushing
right aft on a slightly divergent heading and had bumped some distance along her bottom before breaking clear. Why sonar had not previously given some warning would bear investigation, both as to
Cushing
's own sonar and the sonar conditions themselves, but Keith was well aware of the vagaries of underwater sound transmission under the best and most usual of conditions, particularly astern, where there was a masking effect from one's own machinery and propeller. Here in the Arctic, under bumpy, fissured ice floating on a layer of brackish water, there was every opportunity for sound reception to be erratic.

The
Cushing
had not yet been quite lined up with the frozen lead when the collision took place. Keith had been maneuvering with both his main power and the auxiliary “outboard motor,” the retractable emergency electric propulsion motor, when the impact came. It shoved the huge submarine ahead and sideways and changed her heading thirty degrees, by chance positioning her almost exactly as Keith had wanted her. He seized the opportunity, brought her the rest of the way up against the frozen surface, then began blowing his main ballast tanks.

Cushing
's sail, specially reinforced to take the pressure, dug into the ice above and broke through with a great creaking and
groaning of stressed steel, carrying a big chunk of ice “frosting” atop the black, rectangular-appearing structure. Her sailplanes, turned to a vertical position, sliced through the ice neatly and almost noiselessly on each side. Aft, the topside rudder, apparently undamaged, thrust through also, like a distant sentinel. Keith stopped blowing before the submarine was lightened sufficiently for her entire body to heave up the ice under which it lay. The three or four feet of undisturbed ice would conceal the big black hull from surface or air observation, while the narrow crevasse into which he had brought her would tend to protect her from detection underwater, should the other submarine find its way back to the place of the collision. It was almost like an underwater garage. Only the bottom portion of the missile submarine's hull would project below, visible, to be sure, to any submarine coming close enough to inspect through its periscope, but surely invisible to any sonar search. Above the ice blanket, radar might possibly distinguish the sharper outline of
Cushing
's sail from the many rough protuberances of the ice field, but the greatest danger of detection was visual. That black rectangle and its smaller satellite, the rudder, could be seen for miles.