The Circle (14 page)

And he believed that; that they were meant for each other; created for each other.

How mysterious it all was!

Through the thin fabric of his pocket, his fingers touched unyielding want. He'd read somewhere that a man's desire slacked off after eighteen. So far, it seemed to be getting worse. He wavered for a moment. He should turn in. No, he should write the accident report. But first he'd stop in the shower stalls. When he was this horny, release took only a moment. The most potent and precious fluid in the world, lost by the thousands of gallons this night in silent cars, urinals, boys' bedrooms all over the planet …

He was walking past the gun when he realized several men were standing in its shelter. He couldn't make out how many, or what they were doing. Just vague forms, and the glow of cigarettes.

At the same moment he sensed them, the knot broke. A red glow flew over his head, shedding sparks, like a bottle rocket. Part of his mind waited for the burst, the flash, to illuminate their faces. Instead, it fell into the sea and died, and the dark remained.

“Who's there?” he said loudly, resolved this time to make his authority felt.

Without warning, a body slammed into him. He lost his footing as the stern twisted and dropped, and staggered back. He came up against the starboard deck edge and threw out an arm instinctively for the lifeline.

It wasn't there.

He sensed more than felt the dark rush of men, and dropped to his knees. Fingernails scrabbled down his jacket. His arm found a stanchion, tried to close on it. He was forced back instead. The deck edge bit into his leg.

His scream was instantly cut off as he hit something unyielding and terrifically hard, and rolled off it into the sea.

His arm, flung wide in the same gesture as a dropped baby's, struck something slick and salt-gritty and hooked into it with iron force. He twisted with the same reflex and wrapped his other arm around it. His legs and lower body hit something yielding at the same instant, yielding, fluid and so cold that his breath exploded from him in a paroxysmal exhalation.

He realized he was on the screw guard, a structure of steel pipe that kept the propellers clear of the piers. Somehow, he kept silent—partly because he had no breath. His fingers were tearing off. The sea sucked him down with incredible force. His legs trailed underwater. Voices gabbled above him. Then the sea rose and submerged him, freezing all thought in his brain.

He understood then that he was dead.

He felt the sea harden his fingers to metal, freeze his arms in their clutch around steel. Rusty steel. It needed chipping and painting. Make a note—

The wave receded, leaving him gasping, his eyes at the same moment burning and numbed. The screws, a few feet down, demanded his body with irresistible authority. His weakening hands scraped a few inches backward before his locked arms stopped against a support beam.

He saw the rest of it in that moment. The shock of cold as he let go. Fighting to the surface, only to see the stern light rising and falling, glimmering fainter, sinking at last beneath the waves. Drifting alone, the chill biting deeper each moment, a numb conquest cell by cell.

The sea would receive his body with the same silent equanimity as it received a bullet, a stone, a ship.

Then his imagination died and he had no thought at all. He knew simply and solely that he had only a few seconds left in which he could still try to regain the ship. And that he probably wouldn't make it.

As he realized this, understood it through the same instinct that had flung out his arm, the sea rose again and the ship dragged him through it with terrific force and instantly penetrating cold. The life was leaving his arms. His legs were already gone, weights tied to his waist, a dead burden dragging him down.

The sea receded. Through his blurred eyes rose light glowed from the signal shack high above. With unreasoning cunning, his body waited till the roll lifted him. Then it shifted one hand upward and pulled with such force that in that instant he feared he might tear the steel. Muscle strands snapped in his chest like strings.

His hand caught the next beam, but his fingers wouldn't close. He crooked his wrist around it instead, like a wooden hook, and, with another terrific and despairing lunge, pulled his chest up onto the guard.

The sea returned and he held, grimly, knowing his grip inadequate. But he was higher now, and when it receded, he got his knees up on the beam. Then he jumped. Too quickly, and his foot slipped. His chest slammed down across the deck edge. Lights exploded in his head. But at the same instant, his hand caught the base of a stanchion.

He pulled himself over and rolled desperately across the flat, cold steel, as far as he could get from the edge. Then he pushed himself to his feet, gasping, his lifeless hands raised, though he couldn't make them into fists.

He crouched there for long minutes, listening, peering into the wind and the dark. His heart was trying to fight free of his ribs.

There was no one else on the fantail.

When he could walk, he staggered forward and hooked his hand around the dogs of a hatchway. Shuddering, blinded by sudden light, he turned back from it to vomit into the darkness.

II

THE SEA

7

Latitude 63°–10′ North, Longitude 10°–33′ West: 116 Miles East of Iceland

FROM thirty thousand feet—the cruising altitude of the airliners, hurtling from Scandinavia toward Labrador, which were the only other evidence of human presence in this waste of water east of Iceland—the destroyer would have been invisible. Would have been impossible for the sharpest eye to discern, lost in an immense bowl of furry ocean, its wake indistinguishable in hundreds of thousands of square miles of whitecapped sea.

From much lower, from an altitude that would have made a pilot sweat, for forced down here there could be no rescue, he might have made her out, and seen that
Ryan
was making heavy weather. Her bullnose pointed doggedly northeast, into the teeth of the prevailing sea. Low and narrow, she did not so much ride as drill through, burrow under, penetrate the swells. Gray as slate, their tops frayed into spray by thirty knots of wind, they rolled inexorably in to burst with drumming booms over the forecastle. Swept aft in tattered streamers, lifted in curved veils over the forward mount, the white of spray contrasted with the dogfish gray of ocean, the sullen pewter sky. Rain mixed with blown seawater rattled in volleys against the sealed windows of the pilothouse.

Behind them, beside Al Evlin, Dan stared out on the combat of ship and sea. He held tightly to the overhead rail, fighting the endless stagger and plunge of the overheated space. He felt sick and weak, but alert. He winced as a vicious heel brought his weight against the cuts in his hands. The cuts he'd gotten going over the side the night before.

“It's not too bad on this course,” said Evlin. The operations officer was wedged between the radar and the helm. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. “It'll be worse when we start quartering. These seas take us from the beam, we'll be doing some rolling then.”

This pitching's bad enough, Dan thought. Climbing a long swell,
Ryan
leaned backward like a runner taking a hill. The wind tore at her superstructure and whistled in her upperworks. Then, at the crest, as the spray clattered like hail on the windows and transparent sheets of water, mirroring the macrocosm in their own wind-roughened surface, surged for the scuppers, she staggered over like a drunk shoved from behind. Then down she went into the trough, leaving the men in the pilothouse staring into the sea, though their eyes were straight ahead.

“You know much about CZ ops?” Evlin was saying in his gentle voice.

“Ceasing what?” Dan jerked his eyes away from the belly of a comber. He'd been thinking about something else. About the moment he'd believed himself dead. He'd been imagining how Betts would take the news. It hadn't been a warm, fuzzy thought. He ought to stop by ship's office and look at his page two, make sure his next of kin, his GI insurance beneficiaries were up-to-date.

“Convergence zone operations. Why we're getting set to tow this fish all over the Arctic Ocean.”

He forced his mind back to the bridge of
Ryan.
“It's sonar, right?” he said too loudly, then lowered his voice. “We had the theory at school.”

“Well, you probably know more about it than I do, then.”

“No. Tell you the truth, we didn't get into tactical applications. That stuff was all secret.”

“Okay.” Evlin's eyes lighted up; he was, Dan reflected, never so happy as when he was explaining something. He finished burnishing his glasses with lens paper and put them on. “You know how the conventional sonars work, like the one under our hull. Send out a pulse, detect the echo, then measure range and bearing and present it on a screen.”

“Yeah.”

“That works okay, but only out to a few thousand yards. Maybe five miles max, in good conditions. Now, that was enough when you were dealing with diesel subs. You could detect their scopes and snorkels with radar, move in and force them down; then localize them with the active sonar and drop your depth charges.”

“Active sonar?”

“Active, you ping and listen; passive, you just listen.”

“That's right; I remember that,” he said, feeling guilty and stupid. His knees hurt. He closed his eyes briefly to fatigue and nausea, then opened them again. The wipers whipped back and forth, shrieking on the downstroke as they slapped crystalline spray from the windows. At the edges it was freezing to a white crust. The steam pipes thudded and clanked, stuffing the closed pilothouse with oppressive heat.

“But the new Soviet subs go faster than
Ryan
can. Thirty knots, maybe more. And when the sea kicks up, it's worse: A surface ship's got to slow, but they don't. Down deep, they can hear better than us, too. Trying to find one of them with a standard sonar's hopeless. They hear you first, and move out of the way; or maybe just linger outside your active range, and send in a couple of torpedoes.”

“I get you.”

“The idea of the IVDS, independent variable depth sonar, is to get down where they hide. The winch gear astern reels out a towed body, with a specially designed sonar head inside, on a cable eight hundred feet long. That puts the transducers between two hundred and six hundred feet down, depending on the length of cable we deploy and the tow ship's speed. Now, you said you knew about convergence zones?”

“I think. Maybe.”

“I'll go over it quickly, then. Sound bends in the ocean. Usually upward, like a reverse rainbow. Depending on the temperature layers, it'll bend up from the source, hit the surface, and bounce. Then do it again. Or it'll scatter at the first bounce, if the surface is rough.

“The first convergence zone is generally around thirty miles from the radiating source and is diffused across a band three to five miles wide. If there's another bounce, it's sixty miles away, and the band's six miles wide. Sometimes you get a third one, ninety miles away, or even more. See how it extends the range? Once you can hear the sub—and Soviet subs are pretty noisy—you can send somebody out after it, like a helicopter, or another submarine.”

“Or use the Asroc.”

“Yeah. Only whatever you fire, it has to do the damage.”

“What's that mean?”

“You tell me. On the CZ detection—or if you see a periscope pop up on the radar, say—you have a location but not a course and speed. So the area where the sub could be expands with time. The formula's simple, pi R squared. In an hour, a sub traveling thirty knots can be anywhere in three thousand square miles. So if you want to fire on a detection and you can't do it immediately—?”

“Then you expend more ordnance?”

“Or use a special weapon.”

He'd heard that euphemism before. “We have nukes aboard?”

“There's a magazine back in what used to be the Dash hangar. But back to—what were we talking about?—convergence zones. You can get them sometimes with a hull-mounted sonar, but it's clearer if you get down below the surface layers and wave noise. Also you can do bottom-bounce and sound-channel operations better with a towed sonar. I read in
Navy Times
they're going to buy them for every destroyer in the fleet; that is, if they test out as good as they sound on paper.”

Dan was listening, but nausea was demanding most of his attention. He bent to fit his face into the rubber hood of the radar. Its smell of old sneakers didn't help.

The scope was flecked with random light. Wave clutter, so dense near the center that anything less than a mile away would be wiped out. He flicked a switch, varying the pulse length; no change. It had gone out completely for three hours on the midwatch, leaving them blind in utter darkness. Silver said it was the spray, water in the waveguides. There hadn't been any contacts since they'd refueled, so it probably hadn't been really dangerous, but he was glad to have it back.

“Okay, but what's the idea on testing it here? Up above the Circle, north of Iceland and all.”

“This is the killing ground. Half the subs in the Soviet Navy are based out of the Kola Peninsula. If the balloon goes up, they've got to get out into the Atlantic and cut off our resupply route to Europe. Only way out's through the Gap—between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. We've got listening gear on the bottom and P-threes flying out of Iceland. The surface fleet will be up here, and so will our subs. If we stop them here, and hold the line in Germany, that might finish the war without going nuclear—assuming mankind is so stupid as to let one start.”

Yes, Dan thought, of all the officers aboard
Ryan,
only Evlin would tack on that at the end. “Okay, I get it now,” he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. “Jesus Christ, it's hot in here. Can't we crack a hatch, sir? Just a little?”