Seas of Crisis (18 page)

Chapter 18

A
s soon as he’d transferred to
Carter
again at the start of the second rendezvous, Dashiyn Nyurba had given a high priority to exercise. The rule of thumb for commandos in transit submerged on a submarine was to work out hard six hours a day. On
Challenger
this had been difficult, because her provisions for physical fitness were rudimentary.
Carter
’s Multi-Mission Platform, in contrast, included a superbly equipped PT room with two dozen of the latest workout machines—like a top-of-the-line health club without any windows, with rather Spartan decor, and with extra vibration damping and noise suppression engineered in.
She also has an expanded sickbay, with two experienced combat trauma surgeons aboard, to treat incoming wounded from my squadron.

Nyurba could tell that he and his four SERT Seabees had lost conditioning during their unexpected, extended rehearsals with Commodore Fuller, when Kurzin had needed to send them back to
Challenger
at the end of the first rendezvous. By dint of effort and copious sweat, with Nyurba egging the others on, in the few days still available they built back toward the peak of strength and endurance they’d need in Siberia.

Tougher training now could mean less bleeding later.

As Nyurba climbed up the sail-trunk ladder and stood on the open grating at the top, the first things that struck him were the fresh, tangy salt air, the feel of the bracing wind on his face, and the immensity of the twilit sky above, a deep electric aquamarine. He drew in delicious lungfuls. He blinked to help his eye muscles focus, for the first time in weeks, at actual infinity instead of optical illusions within a virtual-reality helmet. He experienced, by the sudden lack of it, how claustrophobically confined he’d been inside
Challenger
and
Carter
and the minisub. Then, despite the extreme-weather clothing that he wore against the Arctic chill, he felt starkly naked as he stood in the tiny cockpit on
Carter
’s sail.

All parts of the submarine that he could see from outside, with the ship on the surface now, were coated bluish-white. This included the sail itself, plus her entire long rounded hull—and even the top of the rudder sticking out of the water, aft of where the teardrop-shaped hull tapered into the very cold sea. The radar-absorbent tinting, the first of its kind on a nuclear sub, had been applied when the ship was in dry dock; though the yard workers made jokes about it, the paint job didn’t seem funny to Nyurba at present. It was a matter of life and death.

What was missing was the minisub, no longer carried on
Carter
’s back. Since it couldn’t be deployed while
Carter
was surfaced—it weighed almost sixty tons, sitting high and dry—it had already been released and was waiting submerged with its two-man crew, away to port.

Above Nyurba, on the sail roof, two crewmen in white camouflage smocks—lookouts—peered through image-stabilized binoculars, their urgency and concern infectious.
Carter
’s photonics masts were both raised, though only by inches, their sensor heads spinning and bobbing as they scanned in every direction for threats on visual and infrared. The electronic support measures antennas atop both heads were steadily feeding data for analysis below; airborne surface-search radars were the ESM technicians’ main worry. The depth here was less than ninety feet, and too soon
Carter
wouldn’t be able to dive at all if she’d wanted to.

Nyurba didn’t bother with binocs; he didn’t need them. Flat ice floes, the occasional jutting berg, smashed-up bergy bits, and slush were all around. So were birds and seals—resting on the floes and bergs, or flying or slipping into and out of the water. Their noises were familiar; they’d been coming over the sonar speakers in
Carter
’s control room the whole time she worked her way southeast to the edge of the solid cap and onward into the marginal ice zone. Then she’d blown her main ballast tanks in spurts while the crew hoped the sounds, if detected by the Russians, would be mistaken for whales cavorting.

What was unfamiliar to Nyurba was this sensation of being so terribly exposed. Every minute counted. But this was the only way to get the German minisub into practical range of the mainland, almost a hundred miles further south through the increasingly less ice-choked and ever more shallow East Siberian Sea. From here the mini’s fuel load was just enough to make the trip there and back only once, even at slow speed, and this would never do for shuttling eighty commandos with all their equipment to the beach. The idea of towing the mini once released had been rejected early on:
Carter
wasn’t designed for it, improvised tow cables would foul her sternplanes or rudder, and any pitching in rough seas would whipsaw the minisub violently. It had been known for months that, as part of the overall mission concept,
Carter
would need to surface and serve as a special operations taxi until the distance to Russian soil became much shorter.

Captain Harley stood shoulder to shoulder with Nyurba, in the cockpit that was officially called the ship’s bridge.
Carter
was stopped, dead in the water. She rolled and pitched in the moderate swell, the same swell that made the chunks of ice in all directions bob rhythmically, almost hypnotically. A phone talker was next up through the sail trunk. He squeezed in beside Nyurba, but Harley already had an intercom headset on and was plugged into the bridge connection. He was frowning, his thin lips pursed, his blue eyes darting everywhere with a power of perception that impressed Nyurba. His own instincts from prior land combat screamed to crouch low, keeping his head down, but Harley stood extra erect, setting an example that all those with him were quickly inspired to follow. He took evident pride, even relish, in steering his ship and leading his crew into harm’s way on his country’s most vital strategic business.

“Control, Bridge,” Harley said, “tell Colonel Kurzin we are ready.”

Nyurba’s job was to help supervise from the bridge—the highest available vantage point—and to interface with Captain Harley on any sudden tactical emergencies.

Thick round hatches on the hull swung open against their massive, hydraulically damped hinges. Men began to climb out quickly, also garbed in white. At the same time, three other men clambered up the bridge trunk inside the sail, wordlessly squeezing past Nyurba and Harley. One carried a scoped sniper rifle, wrapped in white tape to break up its outline. The other two each lugged a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile launcher, with outer parts dappled in white. Nyurba helped the threesome reach the roof of the sail, where they took up positions and clipped on safety harnesses—also white, instead of red-orange.

The sniper’s job was to scare off or kill any polar bears that came too close. Polar bears were good swimmers; they negotiated the gaps between grinding floes with ease, and tended to be attracted to any surfaced submarine. The missiles would protect
Carter
in a different way, from attack by aircraft, but only as a last resort if the Russians opened fire first.

Carter
’s topside, fore and aft, grew crowded with men from Kurzin’s team. They opened locker doors faired smoothly into her superstructure—a low, free-flooding casing that ran for much of her length just above the actual pressure hull. With coordination born of constant practice during training, the men hurriedly removed and laid out heavy scrolls—like baseball field ground cloths, only colored bluish-white. Divers were lowered on lifelines, and they fastened one edge of the cloths to
Carter
’s port side below her waterline. Other men threw grapnels, attached to thick manila ropes, past the ship’s starboard side, grabbing at the border of a large floe that drifted beyond a gap of fifteen yards of sea; the old-fashioned manila was needed because it wouldn’t stretch like modern nylon. Still other men lowered cylinder-shaped bumpers, attached to nylon lines, into the watery gap on the starboard side. They each played out some twenty feet of line, placing the bumpers to protect the widest part of
Carter
’s hull, then fastened the free ends to light-duty cleats that unfolded from the superstructure.

Nyurba could hear Kurzin shouting angrily for his men to work faster. Two from the commando team, Seabees under Nyurba, came up through the sail trunk, standing on upper rungs of the vertical ladder, with more rolled cloths across their shoulders.

Harley noticed them, inspected the other frenzied activity, gestured for them to come up, and then used his lip mike. “Helm, Bridge, on auxiliary maneuvering units, translate ship to starboard until physical contact is made with floe. Make your rate of closing one-tenth knot.” He sounded, if anything, jaunty, as if he were at a yacht club event—Harley seemed the type who’d belong to one, too.

The Seabees squeezed awkwardly into the overcrowded cockpit. They began to unfold the sheets they carried and lowered their edges over the sides of the sail, a twenty-five-foot drop into the hands of men waiting below on the hull; Nyurba’s chief almost poked him hard in the eye with his elbow. The lookouts, the missileers, and the sniper led one cloth aft on the sail roof, making sure it lined up with holes meant for
Carter
’s masts, then wriggled out from underneath. They tossed the cloth’s free end down at the back of the sail, then stood on the cloth and resumed their vigils. The Seabees fastened it to the other cloth, now draped over the front part of the sail. This cloth piece had a square hole cut for the cockpit, so Nyurba and Harley could see.

Captain Harley would speak into his lip mike now and then, saying things like, “Very well, Sonar,” or “ESM, Bridge, Aye,” or “On the acoustic link, signal minisub, ‘Understood.’ ” His vessel was at battle stations, and he had the deck and the conn. Two Seahorse III probes were on station, wide apart, miles ahead of the ship, their stealthy antennas raised, passing live signals intercepts back through the tethers to the NSA specialists and
Carter
’s supercomputer. There was still a chance, or so Nyurba hoped, that they’d pick up something useful to Kurzin later.

Nyurba felt a bump and saw a sloshing of greenish water, as
Carter
eased alongside and touched the floe. Harley had made very sure that her horizontal sternplanes would be far enough aft past the end of the floe to not be endangered by the invisible, hard, unyielding underwater part of this gigantic slab of ice.

Men handling the grapnel lines ceased taking in the slack. Keeping them taut, they wrapped their ends of the manila ropes around large unfolding cleats, ones big enough to hold against immense strain.

The divers, back up on the hull, swam across and climbed onto the floe. The whole thing projected barely a couple of feet out of the water, on average. Its sides were a wet, translucent blue; swells would slap against it, and seawater sloshed and sluiced in puddles and rivulets near its fringes. Its middle, almost as big as two football fields joined end to end, was featureless and flat. Dry parts of the top were covered with what looked to Nyurba like white detergent power—recent sleet or granular snow.

Carter
was made fast to the floe, whose smooth bottom extended twenty feet beneath the waves. The third Seahorse probe had checked, and Kurzin and Harley had agreed that, from the several floes they’d examined while staying submerged, this one would do best. Camouflage-cloth edges were passed across to the floe, and were firmly fastened using ceramic-composite spikes.

Kurzin, on the hull near where the minisub had been carried, shouted something. In a moment the phone talker spoke. “Colonel Kurzin asks, How do we look?”

Nyurba inspected their handiwork.
Carter,
draped in a tenting of camouflage cloth that extended over the water and onto the ice, would pass well enough for a medium-tall hummock at one side of a flat floe, a not uncommon shape for something broken off the edge of the pack ice. The cloth suppressed any heat signature and gave off a radar reflection similar to ice.

“What do you think, sir?” Nyurba asked Harley.

Harley smiled. “Perfect.”

“I agree.” Nyurba told the phone talker to ask Kurzin if they were ready to test the mooring lines yet.

“All men are off the floe and out of the water on deck, sir,” the phone talker said.

As the hubbub of manual labors subsided, sea birds began to alight on the floe, and even on portions of
Carter.

“Good,” Harley said. “An illusion of normalcy.”

“Agree, sir. Can’t hurt.”

Harley used his intercom mike, sounding as always brisk and precise. “Helm, Bridge, ahead one-third, maintain present ship’s heading, using rudder as required. Make turns for three knots, inform maneuvering room that steam throttle will need to be opened wider due to drag of large moored load.”

Harley listened on his headset, and seemed satisfied. “Very well, Helm.”

Water churned aft of
Carter
’s rudder. The mooring lines creaked and seawater squirted from between their strands as they drew extra tight, but they held.
Carter
and the floe began to move, slightly crabwise until the helmsman found the rudder deflection that kept the lash-up on a straight course.

“Sir,” the phone talker said, “Colonel Kurzin reports special topside watch is set to monitor for gaps in cloth and possible problems with mooring.”

Harley made eye contact with Nyurba. He wasn’t smiling now.

“Let’s hope the Russians don’t notice we aren’t moving quite like the rest of the sea ice. . . . And that we don’t get in someone’s way in the Northern Sea Route shipping lane, so an icebreaker comes pay a visit to shove us aside.”

Nyurba just nodded. He could think of other things that might go wrong. When the sea ice around them now began to dwindle, as they eased their way toward the Alazeja River mouth, they’d appear more and more like an errant floe with a peculiar mind of its own. Given the restricting bottom contours and extremely shallow depth in this whole area,
Carter
would have to follow a course that bucked the trend of normal floe drift. At least the prevailing wind and surface current were mostly in their favor.