The Passage

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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Table of Contents
This book is dedicated to those who fled
And those who died.
When they demanded your labor,
They found defiance;
When they demanded your voice,
They found silence;
When they denied you ballots,
You voted with your lives.
You could not bend or compromise.
So, like sand eroding from under foundations,
You slipped away, grain by grain,
In the most grievous battle of all,
Facing them alone, or holding your children's hands
With the most desperate bravery
Until you knew freedom—or night.
As the last walls fall
It is your victory.
We will not forget your struggle.
May we be as brave
When ours is upon us.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
For this book, I owe a great deal to James Allen, Joe Anthony, Mark Bakotic, Tom Bates, Jake and Ellwood Blues, Lauryl Boyles, Bill Buehler, Robert Carter, Andrew Diamond, Carol E. W. Edwards, Ann McKay Farrell, Kathy Fieler, Mark Gibson, Paul Golubovs, Frank and Amy Green, David Grieve, David Helmold, Milo Hyde, Robert Kerrigan, Larry Lane, Lloyd Lighthart, Rene Maynard, Frank McCall, Jim McIngvale, Will Miller, Lenore Hart Poyer, Alan Poyer, Jason Poyer, Lin Poyer, Miguel and Maria Roura, Angela Speranza, George Witte, and many others. All errors and deficiencies are my own.
F
IFTY miles off the coast of Siberia, the sea was a wind-scratched, ash-colored desert, heaving almost imperceptibly under a steely sky. Here and there, calm patches reflected the passing clouds like old mirrors. A faint cold wind off the Gydan Mountains moaned as if bereft, unheard by any ear.
Four hundred feet below the surface, a shadow slipped slowly through the dark.
The submarine milled northward at a pace no faster than a leisurely stroll, balanced on the knife edge of a thermocline. The huge machined-bronze propeller rotated its seven blades once every two seconds. Only the faintest blue filtered down to it through the cold and murky sea.
It was not the darkness that hid the three-hundred-foot-long, thirty-foot-diameter steel hull of USS
Threadfin.
It was silence. Pumps silent, plant silent, the hot radioactive water seeped through the vertical core of its reactor without throb or hum. Like a trespassing cat, she placed paw after paw, barely breathing, eyes wide and ears up, through the deep silence.
Standing behind the plane control stations, not looking at the diving officer, her captain murmured, “Woody, sure we're not getting too heavy?”
“No, sir,” said the junior officer. “We're trimmed out right. But damn it, I'd like to try it, one of these missions.”
“It's not going to make much difference at this speed. We're putting out more decibels from the screw than any kind of flow noise.”
“It'd work,” said the diving officer stubbornly. “I was talking to the sonar officer off one of the six-eighty-eights; they were playing around with it at Tongue of the Ocean. Regular two-part epoxy, got it from Servmart. They laid it in all the hull gaps, the safety
tracks, retractable cleats, forward escape trunk. Then ground it smooth. Same-same with the flood ports, except one flush-closing valve—”
“But think how hard it'd be to get it out after the mission was over. And flow noise is a squared delta. Right now, there isn't anything in the ocean quieter than we are—except maybe a jellyfish.”
The conversation was interrupted by a chief auxiliaryman. He reported that the problem with the rudder emergency-mode valve had been resolved. It had been clogged by a Kimwipe. The captain examined the frayed cloth absently. Under normal circumstances, he'd have exploded, asked who had inspected the last maintenance job. Now he just said, “Thanks. We'll talk about it later, Chief.” He was still watching the diving-control station, staring through the dials. A grease-penciled placard above the panel read: DAYS OUT OF PEARL: 91. DAYS TO PEARL: 36.
Eighty feet aft of the control room, locked into the five-foot-diameter escape trunk he'd spent the last three days in, a thirty-year-old master diver from Eugene, Oregon, took a test breath off a Mark 16 closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus. The 7 percent helium-oxygen mix tasted like stale ice. He was sweating under waffle-knit underwear and a dry suit. He blew out, trying to relax, and peeled a scrap of Saran Wrap—from the sandwiches they'd been living on since they went into saturation—off the number two diver's leg.
Two decks down, a sonarman sucked his lip, hunting through the static of overamplified noise for the sound he'd heard, very faintly, fifteen minutes before. He didn't want to report it too early. As soon as he spoke, the captain would want a bearing, range, classification. His fingers nudged the dial a millimeter left. Finally, he reached for the intercom.
In the control room, a speaker said, “Conn, Sonar: probable pinger bearing three-five-one. Contact is very faint.”
“Sonar, Conn aye,” said the officer of the deck.
“Ease us over there, Woody,” said the captain. “Remember, we're hitting freshwater strata up here; we're not far from the mouth of the river. Slow and easy. No transients, no knuckles, let's oil our way in. Take her under the layer for the approach.”
“Aye, sir. Come left, steady course three-five-zero,” said the OOD. He wiped his hands on his trousers. “Dive, make your depth six hundred feet.”
“Make my depth six-zero-zero feet, Dive aye,” repeated the diving officer. He was a slight blond twenty-five-year-old from Bow, New Hampshire, and had left a pregnant wife behind in base housing. Submerged,
Threadfin
could copy broadcast, though it could not, on the current mission, transmit. Two weeks ago, a ten-word
Red Cross message had told him he was the father of an eight-pound, seven-ounce girl. But there was no word in it about his wife, and he worried in well-worn grooves about her as he maintained the bubble between up one and down one.
In the sonar room, the technician stared at a screen of green light. A voice said in his headphones, “Hey, officer a' the deck wants an estimated range?”
“Tell him five to ten miles.”
“That a good range?”
“What you want up there, want me to run out with a tape measure?”
“Sonar estimates ten to twenty thousand yards, sir.”
“Silence the boat.”
Four discreet tones sounded in berthing compartments and in the engine room, in the sonar room and the wardroom and the long low-overheaded space smelling of oil and canned air where the torpedomen lay beneath the weapons, staring upward. In the scullery, the cooks slipped off their shoes and moved quietly about, securing pots and soup kettles. The engineers eased circuit breakers out on air-conditioning units. In the fan rooms, the blades slowed in their cages, whirring down to a stop.
The captain lifted his head, sensing the cessation of air movement on the nape of his neck. He unzipped the collar of his coveralls and took another deep breath. “Drop her to three knots.”
“Maneuvering, Conn: Make two-zero turns.”
The chief of the watch muttered into his sound-powered phones, relaying the order aft.
Back in the escape trunk, the divers pulled Navy Special Warfare—issue fins and masks over dry suits already sodden with trapped sweat. They checked watches, buddy lines, weight belts, duration/depth computers, and pony bottles. They wore no snorkels, no inflatable life preservers. If they saw open sky on this dive, they'd die in agony, coughing their lungs up in scarlet foam.
The sonarman nudged his dial left, then right. He frowned. “Conn, Sonar: new DIMUS trace, Sierra four-seven, bearing two-five-eight.”
DIMUS was digital multibeam steering, the equipment that gradually sampled noises too faint to hear out of the random crackle of the sea. “Bearing drift, classification?” the OOD asked.
“Sierra four-seven classified warship. Making three hundred turns on, uh … two three-bladed screws. Drawing left slowly. We're picking up an occasional fifty-kilohertz pinging, sounds like the fathometer.”
“Probably out of Kamenskoye. Put a tracker on him. Notify me if there's any indication he's sniffed us.”
“Sonar aye.”
A long period of silence. The sonarman watched the screen as the prickle of ship sound ebbed, till it merged back into the hiss and crackle of the never-silent sea. He listened at the same time to the pinger, now dead ahead, as every ten minutes it emitted its low, short-burst narrowband signal, nearly undetectable unless you knew exactly where to look.
“Estimated range to pod, one mile. Permission to take a sounding?”
The captain considered. He needed to know how far above the seafloor he was. But to do that, he'd have to put sound in the water. Contrary to the three cardinal principles of submarine stealth, which are: one: Be as quiet as possible. Two: If you must make sound, try to disguise it as something else. And three: If neither one nor two is possible, then go ahead and make the noise, but don't repeat it, and move away as quickly as consistent with principle number one.
In this case, each submarine assigned to Operation Northern Bells had been equipped with, among other special gear, a fathometer that operated at the same frequency as the depth-finding gear installed in the Soviet trawler fleet. A hunting sub or destroyer would likely classify it as from one of the dozens of small fishermen that dotted these far-northern waters.
He nodded silently to the officer of the deck, who kept his eyes on the fathometer. The display came on, flickered, registered 0000, then, for a moment, 80 M, then 0000 again. Then it went off.
“All stop! Diving Officer, I need her about two tons heavy. Do it slow, no transients, no pump noise.”
The chief of the boat bent over the ballast-control panel. He pressed two circular symbols, which changed to red open circles; waited thirty seconds, his eye on a slowly rising column of light; then pressed again. “Two tons flooded.”
“Retract pit sword.” The OOD glanced at the captain, who was staring forward again, deep in thought.
He was seeing it all in his mind.
To his left, perhaps fifty miles to port, was the Soviet mainland, the barren, isolated Magadan Peninsula. To starboard, seventy miles away, was Kamchatka, a dangling, even more godforsaken appendage of Siberia that had no value the Russians or anyone else had ever been able to find. Save one: a harbor, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, now home to the ballistic missile submarines of the Soviet Pacific Fleet and control center for the SS-12 ICBMs of the Rocket Forces based there. This narrow neck of sea was all that separated the two.
For the last eleven hundred miles, since threading La Perouse
Strait,
Threadfin
had been in Soviet territorial waters. For the last six days, she'd run silent, sometimes at seven knots, sometimes at five, sometimes at two, and sometimes at a dead stop, drifting with the deep currents; and once at twenty knots, racing westward as Soviet sonars searched and probed the sea behind her.
Now she approached her goal, and he rubbed his chin and stared blankly at the readouts. This was sticking your crank under the guillotine, he thought. The Soviets had shot down a civilian jetliner that strayed over this area. They'd not let a submarine escape once it was detected.
But the reward … that made the risk worthwhile. Or at least those who'd sent them thought so.
“Sir?” said the diving officer, and the captain nodded, once.
“Pass the word to the divers: It's up to them now.”
 
 
INSIDE the escape trunk, sealed in with a closed hatch below and another above, the master diver heard the order without change of expression. He sucked the empty space where a tooth had exploded years before, when he came up too fast from five hundred feet. The helium atmosphere distorted speech, so he said nothing to his partner. Just held up a finger, tapped his watch, then pointed at the four-inch-thick screw-sealed hatch above them. He reached up to spin a valve wheel open, bent, and cracked another. The smell of the sea hit his nose, cold, dank, as water began gushing in.
His hands moved with the familiarity of long practice, checking the oxygen bypass valve, the straps and nonmagnetic buckles, the lighted oxygen/CO
2
readouts clamped to his mask. As the rising water chilled his thighs, he sealed tempered glass over his face, twisted the bottle valve handwheel to full ON, and took a deep breath. He set the outer ring on his TAG/Heuer to twenty minutes past the hour.
Ten minutes later, the hatch lifted from the flush curvature of the submarine's hull. The lead diver pulled himself through, into darkness. He fumbled at his belt.
The light showed the black torpedo shape of
Threadfin's
hull stretching back into darkness. He pulled himself along it, keeping his breathing slow. The indicator inside his mask stayed green. He felt the number two diver behind him, heard a clank and scrape as he fended off. They fell together, linked by the buddy line, toward the bottom.
As they dropped, he fumbled at his waist. The box came on, red light—emitting diodes flickering as he swung it left, then right.
His knees hit bottom, sinking into cold ooze. He angled up again and finned westward, following the device held out at arm's length like a compass. A faint green radiance in the enormous night marked the number two diver following him, off to his left and slightly above.
 
 
BEHIND them, hunched in front of the sonar stacks, the sonarman was tuning slowly across the band between 2 and 3 kilohertz. Occasional transients spiked the display. There was no periodicity, though, and when he tuned closer, he saw only random dancing light, heard nothing but the steady hiss and crackle of the empty sea.
 
 
THE lead diver swam steadily through the dark, sixty beats a minute, following the green LEDs like an aviator on instruments. Gas rasped in his ears and parched his throat. Eight hundred feet, he thought. That means, if you don't find Big Mama sub again, there is no way you don't die.
A section of the panel previously dark suddenly came to life. A blue LED flickered, strengthened, became steady; then another. When the third flickered on, he immediately stopped swimming, sank toward the bottom, brought his fins under him, and swam back the way he had come.

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