The Circle (35 page)

“What I'm worried about is getting locked in these troughs,” Bloch muttered.

“Locked in? We just turn out of them. Like we did before.”

“You need power for that, too, sir. I knew a guy was on the
Dewey,
out in the Philippines in '44. They rolled so bad, they lost lube-oil suction and steering. They could only make five knots on one shaft. They were stuck in the trough for three hours, damn near went over.”

They fell silent again as the roll lengthened. Dan counted. Eleven thousand, twelve thousand, thirteen thousand. She rolled to the right, the wind howled, and she trundled slowly over to the left. He counted, feeling his heart shaking his chest. Thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand—

“She's not coming back,” a voice yelled in the sliding, banging dark.

Ryan
toppled over, not all at once but with agonizing slowness.

Someone shouted to the dark, “God, bring her back!”

A hatch or a door came open to starboard, and suddenly water was cascading in.

Dan thought, This is it. The waves knock her down and the wind holds her there till she dies. He'd never see the baby, never even know whether it was a boy or girl.

Isaacs said, “If we goes over, there anybody around to get us, Mr. Lenson?”

He thought about telling him there was. Then he thought, better stick with the truth. He said quietly, “Nobody I know of. But I don't think we'll any of us suffer too long.”

The ship shuddered under them. He felt the rumble of the screws racing at full power. It wouldn't help, not on this course. No amount of power would.

Then he felt her stern start to rise. They grew heavy and then light. The hangar seemed to spin.

Ryan
sagged back two or three degrees to starboard. She gave a deep groan. The screws faltered, then raced suddenly, shaking her stern like an arrow held by the tail. The deck rose again and came back a few more degrees.

Ryan
straightened up under them with a rumbling sigh, and the wind rose again to a terrifying whine.

“Thanks, Lord,” somebody said out loud, and there were mutters of agreement, some of it profane.

Dan wondered whether Packer had given up. Then he knew it was foolish even to wonder that. The phone behind him squealed. He picked it up. “Lenson.”

“Dan? Rich. Get your guys out on deck again. We got to get more of this ice off.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Just to let you know, because it's your space: Captain's told DC Central to prepare to flood the chain locker.”

“Aye, sir.”

*   *   *

THIS time, Packer gave them half an hour. In thirty minutes of furious effort, the men got the last of the ice stripped off the 01 level, and started on the top of the hangar.

Dan was turning to with them, swinging one of the scarred-up bats, when he saw two men climbing the mainmast. Ohlmeyer and Heering were feeling their way up it with lines and chipping hammers like climbers up the face of a narrow glacier. The gunner's mate had an olive-drab haversack on his back. He realized after the second look that it must be one of the demolition charges.

He found out later that Packer had ordered the flooding then. The chain locker, forward powder magazine, all but one of the potable water tanks, and two deep storerooms aft.

At 0530, the captain brought her around again for the fourth try. But now when she took the first roll, there was a lightning crack aloft and a spurt of black smoke.

The bedspring framework of the air-search antenna toppled out of it. A corner of it smashed into the anemometer, wiping it off the mast. The little vane sailed away, its propeller windmilling, as the radar cartwheeled once and, trailing cables, plunged down into the slick-looking sea in the lee of the laboring ship.

The higher the weight, the worse its effect on stability. Dan, watching, multiplied the mass of the antenna, motor, and gear train by its height above the keel. As far as he could figure, it was better than taking fifteen tons of ice off the main deck.

Whether it was that or the flooding, or both, this time she rode better. She was logy but didn't seem to be rolling as far. She rode differently, no longer rising to the waves, but sliding her nose under them, like an old cat burrowing under the blankets on a winter night. He watched the seas sweep across the forecastle, so deep that he couldn't see the ground tackle for minutes on end. They swept over the mount, burying it, just the tip of the UHF antenna atop it sticking up like a periscope. Just as well we flooded the magazine, he thought.

For a moment, his swollen, wooden, blood-imprinted face tried to smile. It was as if
Ryan,
hunting a submarine, was determined to become one herself. Then his quivering lips stilled.

Only if she went down, she'd never come up.

He was thinking about coffee and dry clothes when the 1MC said, faint above the renewed howl of the wind, “Now relieve the watch. On deck, Antisubmarine Condition One Alfa, Watch Section Two.”

16

DAWN arrived on schedule a little before 1100. Dan was topside when it came, making his way aft toward the head. He stopped for a moment in the lee of the bridge.

He stared out, shivering, as gray light seeped slowly back into the world of sixty-seven and some degrees north.

It showed him a universe conceived in monochrome. The sky was low and less gray than gray-black, as if slag heaps were smoldering just below the jagged horizon. Why did that edge seem closer, as if the world had shrunk overnight? As
Ryan
inclined sluggishly, he gripped the icy steel of the splinter shield and leaned out, looking down.

Yes. The black boot topping was two or three feet beneath the average waterline. The old destroyer was riding lower, like a gradually soaking log.

Beneath the growing light the sea steamed like a boiling kettle. White haze moved steadily past the laboring ship, pushed by the wind. Only dimly, in the last minute before they were on them, could he see the oncoming swells. He tried to count seconds between the crests. They were confused, hard to tell apart, but they seemed longer. They were still high, though. Thirty feet from crest to trough was his estimate. Their smooth gray faces drew closer and closer, solidifying gradually behind the sea smoke, then suddenly leaping from ghostliness into imminence, towering like black cliffs under the slaty sky. They collapsed with the roar of a gravel slide, shattering suddenly into white froth over new white ice.

The deck reeled back to port, flinging him downward through space. Clinging to the rail, he stared down into the smoky, roiling, gray-green surface. For a moment, in the smooth funneled surface of an eddy, his own blurred face peered back from beneath the sea.

From all this, he computed slowly that the prevailing swell was still from the starboard beam, or maybe a little abaft it. The wind had veered and was almost from astern. The storm center was still moving north, then. Good; about time they had a break. But then, if they had to steam southwest, they'd be beam-on again.

“There's no way you can win,” he said, then stopped himself. Not out loud! He
was
getting tired.

On the bright side, she was still afloat. Nine hours ago, you wouldn't have bet your paycheck on that, he thought.
Ryan
was wallowing, half submerged. She wasn't designed to ride this way. Old steel wouldn't take the strain forever. But at least she was coming back from the rolls. And for the last few hours, she'd been making twelve, sometimes fifteen knots as Packer ordered turns cranked on.

Then he remembered the floe. A shiver traced his spine under the foul-weather jacket. He squinted forward, scanning the hunchbacked sea. The lookouts had been doubled, and they'd maneuvered to avoid three more since sighting the first. Nothing now, though. He decided it was safe to take a leak.

The bridge urinal was aft of the pilothouse, tacked on as an afterthought next to the forward stack. A steel closet the size and shape of a coffin shielded it from wind and spray. Rock salt and broken glass grated under his boots as he set his legs apart, leaned against the bulkhead, and wearily hauled it out.

So far, this watch was a zero. They were making easting, but they had no contact. Reed and Orris kept talking about a front they expected to cross. They seemed to think that was hiding the sub from them. But whatever the reason, so far Sonar reported only the low-frequency rumble of ice floes grinding themselves to slush.

The only interruption of the hours of waiting and listening had been two messages. The one from CINCLANTFLT ordered Packer for about the eleventh time to make every effort to locate B41. The other, relayed from the British, was a heads-up on an AGI, a Soviet intelligence ship, headed in their direction from the vicinity of the Skagerrak. The original date time group of the contact was twelve hours old, which meant it might be anywhere by now. The surface radar showed nothing; electronic countermeasures, ditto.

He didn't like what it all pointed to—that they'd lost their quarry—but there wasn't much point denying it. They'd done their best. They'd held on to a nuke in a sea state 7 storm for almost twenty-four hours. Not too shabby! But they'd lost it at last. Sooner or later, even Packer would have to admit that.

Anyway, another hour and he'd be off watch and dead to the world. He sighed as used coffee hit stainless steel. The stack was right behind him, radiating heat. It was almost comfortable.

On the far side of the speckled peeling steel, the wind howled and hummed. He was used to it now. It was almost like silence, and silence would have shouted louder than any sound. Now it merged with the whine of the intake blowers and the hiss of spray. He slumped forward, letting his eyes close on gritty fatigue just for a moment.

*   *   *

THE next thing he knew something cold and wet was pressing against his cheek and somebody was tugging on the collar of his jacket. “Yeah, here he is,” Pettus was shouting. Then his voice came close. “Jesus, Mr. Lenson, you want to crap out, I can show you better places than that. Get up, man, they want you back in Combat.”

When he got back to CIC, angry at himself, angry at Pettus, and angry at Evlin, the others were all still in the same places it seemed they had kept since the ship was commissioned. Pedersen, Matt, Lipson, Evlin, Silver, and Packer. He'd always remember them just like this, standing like the goddamn Dutch Masters around the plotting table. It was stenciled on his brain.

Now they were discussing where B41 might have gone in the hours since they'd lost track of her.

“She can't be moving very fast,” muttered Evlin. Beneath the fluorescent illumination, bluer than daylight, the flat sheet was blank save for the concentric glowing circle that represented
Ryan
's eastward creep. “After that first real noisy burst, she never made over fifteen knots the whole time we held contact. I think that's all she can make, and her CO'll hold that down because of the noise. Now she's on the far side of this front. She can't move fast through ice, either, unless she gets deep, and then she'll be in the sound channel and we'll pick her up. He knows that. So I'd look for her around two hundred feet, right about”—his hand hovered over a white emptiness a foot or so southeast of the rosette, then came down, fingers splayed—“right about here.”

“He thinks he's lost us.”

“I'd agree with that, yes, sir.”

“Captain?”

Packer lifted his head slowly.

It was Trachsler. One of the damage-control officer's arms was strapped into a brace. His other hand held a large flat book. Dan wondered how he'd gotten up the ladders. “Ken, you shouldn't be walking around with that busted wing,” Packer said.

“That's all right, sir. Look, can I brief you on our counterflooding, on buoyancy—”

“Yeah, damn right. Let's get out of Al's way here.”

They moved off to the radio desk, and Dan heard Trachsler's whispery voice grave and low, going over cross curves of stability and free surface and loss of reserve buoyancy. He sounded like an undertaker discussing the cost of the obsequies. Dan breathed deeply, fighting a sudden access of fear. Every once in a while it reached in through the exhaustion and squeezed his gonads. Couldn't Packer just admit he'd lost? He reached out to brush gray paint with his fingertips. Solid steel. But only a quarter of an inch thick. How much longer could it keep out the sea?

How much longer would Packer expect it to?

*   *   *

AT 1140, Cummings arrived to relieve him. Dan was taking off his phones when the Sonar Control intercom came on over their heads. “Evaluator, Sonar,” it said. He tried to ignore it as it hissed for a moment. Then it said, “There it is again. Must have just crossed the front. Evaluator, Sonar: active sonar on bearing one-one-zero true. I say again, active sonar, bearing one-one-zero degrees true!”

Evlin was hanging on the button only a second ahead of Packer. “What kind of sonar?”

“We're trying to figure that out, sir; we'll tell you soon's we do,” said Orris's high voice. The leading sonarman sounded exhausted and anxious. “Permission to lower VDS to four hundred feet, see if we can get a direct path.”

Packer leaned over Evlin's shoulder and said into the speaker, “Granted.” Evlin snapped off. The captain said, “Could that be him?”

“Could be, sir.”

“Going active to keep clear of the ice? Now that he figures he's lost us.”

“Could well be,” said the ops officer again, detaching his glasses. Under them his eyelids were inflamed. He massaged them delicately with the balls of his fingers, then fitted the glasses back on. Across from him, Matt and Lipson got up from their perches on the desk, pulled their pencils off where they were stuck to the overhead with tape, and checked the points with the grave expressions of infantrymen inspecting the bores of their rifles.