Triumph (31 page)

Indeed, with the passing of months each group even radioed to the rest the alleged names of its asserted "total of survivors"--in no case more than fifty per group, whereas the observant but undetected United States Navy satellite had disclosed about a hundred thousand people, minimally, and perhaps twice that number, as still living and urgently at work.

In a final conference Vice-Admiral Sydnor, the carrier's skipper, summed up the American plan for a truly "last-ditch" effort:

"We're agreed, then, gentlemen, that as soon as I return to my ship, she will head due south under full power and, skirting Antarctica, return to the natural "slip" where we originally hid her, there to be quickly camouflaged." His brilliant eyes looked from face to face beneath black, beetling brows. "You sub skippers will join me, at the intervals arranged, by following courses you know, one at a time, first rendezvous to occur ninety days hence. It will be hard on your men. You will have to depend more and more"--he grinned--"on our night work.

Thank God, the
Conner's
deep-freezes are again full of
something,
even if it's only tuna! Albacore.
Whatever.
Night fishing here, by all hands, Denton, was a
hell
of a
bright
idea!"

"Thank you, sir."

The carrier captain's tornadic personality was renowned. A Virginian, Lee Warington Sydnor seldom was lavish with praise. "My men," he said unthunderously now, "went crazy over that first meal of fresh meat you anglers supplied! They are still fish-crazy."

Dingo's Exec smiled without joy. "Our gang doesn't care what it eats, just so it eats something
long enough!"

Vice-Admiral Sydnor bellowed,
"Right!
And let's get on with it! In ninety days, on the carrier, we will have done our job. New warheads will be ready for the missiles on your four Sharks. You will enter our hidden slip in the manner described. The rearming of your missiles will be done as planned. We shall then conduct the mission as per orders you know. I think that's about all. I daresay you gentlemen would like to have one more final and general conference with me before we make our effort. It will not be necessary, I believe. If it is, I shall inform you at rendezvous, as you, in turn, come alongside. But I would prefer to avoid any maneuver that might result in your four boats and my carrier being even within a thousand miles of the same spot at anyone time.
As you know.

"My carrier may well be located by the enemy and destroyed before your arrival at the Pacific hiding place, in sequence and separated, as you will be, by great distances.

The carrier also may be found and vaporized
after
anyone of you reaches her and while that boat is being rearmed. She may be destroyed later on. Any of
you
may be found en route and destroyed by some Soviet nuclear hunter-killer sub we don't know of. Or from the air. Even from space. If the carrier
is
lost before we rearm you, then you, at least, can attempt what is essential. If any of
you
are lost, those who remain can try at the set instant, carrier or not, new warheads or not. That, I believe, is all. I'm damned anxious to get my ship away from this area. It's too dangerous for my liking, in several ways." He shook twenty hands.

"Good luck!" echoed as he was taken from the
Tiger Shark
toward his distant, uneasy carrier.

Immediately after he was piped aboard the
Conner
headed south, and in minutes, it seemed to the men on the bridge of the
Tiger Shark,
she had vanished at tremendous speed, vanished under the lush, tropical stars, her bows throwing a briefly visible, phosphorescent wave as she'd gathered speed and knifed into the slow, easy swells of the Indian Ocean.

The Shark-class submarines took back the officers and specialists who had attended that final conference. Then they too vanished, and even more rapidly than the carrier. Its immense bulk had settled beyond a star-marked horizon, hut the four boats submerged and at maximum cruising depth scattered in four directions. When dawn seeped across the indigo immensity of the region, no sign remained of the strange, long vigils held there.

The
Tiger Shark,
like the rest, was shorthanded, owing to the men transferred to her stricken sister sub, the
Whale Shark.
She headed west. In the next ninety days she was expected to make a cautious, slow voyage up the Atlantic after rounding Africa at a distance. On, from there, beneath the north polar ice, into the Pacific, and south, standing off the Alaskan, Canadian, and American coasts. South, still, off Central America, and at last, timing the turn to allow the
White Shark
to precede her by a specified interval, west beneath the Pacific for her remeeting with the carrier.

The
Tiger Shark's
skipper had drawn the shortest of four matches, held by Vice-Admiral Sydnor. He would, consequently, be last rearmed, and last away for attack, saving only the carrier herself.

The voyage, even though made shorthanded, could have been accomplished far more quickly, had that been desired. Dingo Denton had at first worried that his crew, spending all their days and many nights submerged, would grow restive--for the
Tiger
Shark,
being last in line, would not reach the carrier, providing she would be there to reach, until the ninety days had passed for weapons refabrication and twenty more had been allowed for the scheduled rearming of the other three submarines.

Dingo had worried for nothing. His crew, to a man, was single-mindedly devoted to the now-hopeful chance of action against an incredibly ruthless foe--a satanic foe, they felt. So they bore the long watches without complaint.

On the second of the major legs of the vast journey, however, there came a period of great strain and fear, then near-panic, shattering all plans.

The
Tiger Shark
was some hundreds of miles clear of the Aleutian Islands when a Chief came to her skipper's cabin, knocked, and stated, "We've made a distant contact that could be an enemy sub."

Dingo hit the deck and, shoeless, shot up the ladders to the conning tower. The
Tiger Shark
already had shifted to its slow but far more silent propulsion system, moving a hundred fathoms down and sliding deeper, with every man on board tense and speechless, save for whispering, and every man at his battle station, straining to collect information or carry out soundlessly signaled commands.

Even the first problem was great:

Was it a whale they could now dimly sense? Or a mere unusual echo from a convection current? Some unknown shape and sound of sea-life that merely suggested another sub?

When they finally knew a submarine lay ahead, at about their depth, the problem changed:
enemy?
Or some American submarine, not part of the "Last Ditch" program, but still in service?

During the next hours of chase and retreat, of loss and recovery, those questions were resolved, one by one, through the patient analysis of incoming data. The answer was as appalling as it was challenging: they had come upon a Soviet nuclear submarine. But by the time that was certain, other data made Dingo whisper, from sweat-bordered lips, to his sweat-drenched Exec. "She's stalking us,
too!"

Then, blindman's buff in the depths became a game in which the fastest-reasoning skipper of the more-maneuverable (or the luckier) boat had, at best, a minutely better chance to survive.

Only
that.

For if either ship fired, the other would reply. Both carried torpedoes with multi-kiloton warheads that would home on the enemy vessel, however she twisted, plunged upward, dived. With such weapons loosed by the vessels, neither could expect to escape sudden destruction amid a sea-compressed, nuclear fireball.

The Soviet boat suddenly went dead.

Bunch Cunningham whispered in horror, "They're going to shoot!" Sweat then dripped from his forehead to the chart beneath his eyes.

The skipper unconsciously watched its falling drop as he answered, "Looks like it."

Then his eyes fixed on the sweat-pinked chart. Far below them the irregular sea floor rose in hummocks with sharp cliffs. At the moment the
Tiger Shark
lay above a deep vale in that subsea cordillera. Dingo perceived as much, and acted. His orders were whispered to the death-pale Chief "talker" and went, electrically, to men in the control room and in both the forward and aft torpedo compartments.

The
Tiger Shark
burst into life, heedless, then, of noise, her men aware of an appalling fact: the enemy had fired.

From the
Tiger's
bow tubes, two homing nuclear torpedoes surged toward the soundless, motionless foe, miles away. From her stern tubes a torpedo-shaped object was ejected. Upon clearing the boat it expanded, as mechanical arms swiftly opened a vast, tight-packed bundle of steel wiring that became a submarine-shaped, sub-sized framework of wire. Self-propelled, it at once began to back slowly away from the diving
Tiger Shark.
By then, hydrophones and computers had reported the course and speed of the torpedoes fired from the enemy boat. But by then the
Tiger Shark,
decks sloping beyond any regulation-allowed level, was plunging under full thrust of all power, toward the walled valley below.

What then happened was reconstructed later. The cliff-like sides of the submarine mountains did, in time, shield the
Tiger Shark
from the homing enemy torpedoes so that their pursuit devices, momentarily losing track of their metal target, in the next instant received informative pulses from the great, wire, shadow sub. The torpedoes made an error, "built" into them by engineers who had anticipated that the enemy might try to dodge behind a rock mass on bottom, but not that an enemy sub could or would produce, so swiftly, so large-sized a moving steel "dummy" in its stead. The pair of torpedoes therefore veered on a course that would strike the heart of the wire mock-up, and, as American engineers had hopefully foreseen, one grim weapon ran slightly ahead of the other. The wire sides were encountered; they gave upon impact of the leading weapon; but the framework lacked rigidity enough to set off its detonating mechanism. However, the torpedo running parallel, but a length behind, now cut in to hit the most massive metal it could "discern," its own fellow weapon. This second torpedo exploded.

But by that time the tremendous shocks of the
Tiger Shark's
two hits were felt. In spite of the protection of the cliff, they hammered the deep-running submarine as a maul might bash a steel pipe. The
Tiger's
lights went out. One nuclear reactor ceased supplying power. And before any command could be given by the shaken skipper, a second blow, from the single Soviet torpedo to detonate, wrenched the
Tiger Shark
anew, and from a nearer region.

In the chaotic dark, shouted reports poured in to Dingo. His boat was leaking in a hundred places. There was a rise of radiation in the chambers nearest one reactor. The helm gave only sluggish response. His command to bring the boat up was answered with volleys of, "Aye aye, sir!" But the
Tiger Shark
did not soon surface. . . .

In a late, clear afternoon, after forty minutes of ponderous surge, of valiant human struggle and violent brain-and-hand work done in the gleam of flashlights, she finally wallowed into daylight.

On the surface, pumps began pouring out water that by then had the lowest decks awash. Taking a risk of exposure that was now essential, the officers studied the damage.

One reactor was out of commission and leaking; they had no immediate knowledge of the reason. Many plates had been sprung. The other reactors, and three still-operable motors, should still keep the boat moving, but only on the surface. Lead-brick walls soon were raised. They blocked the radiation so the men not at once affected were safe. Other men, in suitable gear, could enter the nuclear engine room, learn, and perhaps repair, the damage--or at least stop the leak providing, always, the core hadn't been smashed up in such a manner that it would "run away" before they could act, and drown them in radioactive death. There was nothing to do but remain surfaced and try.

A week later, with two dead and three still critically ill from radiation sickness, the
Tiger Shark
had dumped overboard the ultrahot (but shielded and unrepairable) core of plutonium that had done the radiation harm. The boat, although one reactor short, was still adequately powered. Her plates were being repaired by men in diving suits and men above the water line.

Day and night the undersea and atmospheric glow of welding torches winked on and off in blue dazzle around the submarine. Had a ship or plane come that way, the
Tiger Shark
would have been easily sighted from far off--a vessel smoke-shrouded by day, and at night set about, above and below, with electric sparklers. So it would seem, even to a distant plane or vessel.

But none came that way.

As more time passed, the surviving officers and men became certain the Soviet submarine they had destroyed, at such cost and with such appalling risk, had not dared to signal her contact with the enemy to the active Red bases, the nearest of which, behind Kamchatka, was not distant, considering a submarine's signal range.

It had not occurred to Dingo, either, to make any attempt in that deep-sea hide-and-seek eternity, or during repairs, to send a message to the presumably-hidden
Conner.

Signaling the carrier or a sister sub would be tantamount to announcing to the U.S.S.R.

the existence not only of the
Tiger Shark,
but of some other vessel. Even if you were to be atomized, moments later, in this final dueling, you said nothing.

The cold, foggy seas--when good visibility did sometimes occur--were empty.

Time passed. In due course Dingo determined his boat was fit for the rest of its voyage and for the planned effort after that. He ordered the sub down, still with comfortable time to complete the cruise to the lonely Pacific isle where, it was fervently hoped, the hidden aircraft carrier would be found, safe and ready.