The Circle (25 page)

It propelled him into blackness, and bitter cold. He clung to the door as it slammed open, pinned by a gale that jackhammered his breath back down his throat. Pellets of semiliquid ice lashed his face. For a second he hung there. Go on, or retreat? The dark was an open maw, bellowing in his face. Above him the wind screamed and struggled, caught in the steel and lines and antennas above the signal bridge.

Well, no danger from the kinnicks out here tonight. Even the lookouts had been pulled inside. He fought the door, first angrily, then in near panic, knowing he had only seconds to get it closed and get up the ladder. Finally he got it far enough away from the hull that the wind grabbed it out of his hands. It sealed with a thump. He slammed the dogging bar home, ducked his head for a breath, then turned. Groped out in front of him in absolute blackness. Where the hell—

His hands closed on ice-encrusted, water-slick handrails. A bit of Plebe Year trivia surfaced into the heaving void of his conscious mind: “What's the only ship in the Navy with water-cooled handrails, Mr. Lenson?” “The USS
Arizona,
in Pearl Harbor, sir.” The rungs were crusted, too, with the Teflon-slick curves of wet ice. He scrabbled upward till his boots felt the flat. One deck gained, one to go.

Suddenly he sensed something behind him. Hair rose on the back of his neck. He gripped the handrail and half-turned, sucking black air through clenched teeth.

The sea hurtled in out of the dark, crests glowing and flickering with a running, velvety fire. It bulged over him as he crouched, frozen, staring up.

The thirty-foot wave exploded against dented steel in a roaring seconds-long welter of glowing green. He gripped the rails desperately. Cold air froze in his throat. Hard things clattered around him, rattled and grated. Ice clunked and rattled down along the ladder steps.

When the sea retreated, the ship staggered upright like a bloody, exhausted bull. He sucked black ice spray. Icy needles novocained his gums. The wind injected his neck and ears.

He grabbed steel and ice and surged upward a few more steps before he slipped. His knees slammed into unyielding metal. His bare hands scrabbled over the greasy ice. Only by hooking one arm around a riser did he catch himself from going back down. Then the stern rose, and rose, and for a moment the slanting ladder was nearly level.

He skidded, slid, and clawed the last few steps. His knees felt dull, the stunned sensation that meant when they woke up they'd hurt like hell. At the top of the ladder he hesitated. Then, deliberately, he turned to face it.

He stared out into the Arctic night, the mad storm sea in winter darkness, here at the top of the world. The ocean seethed below him. The gale whipped spray out of the dark, flash-froze it, and slashed it across his face like a shotgun blast of rock salt. He was scared and light-headed and his heart was hammering like an outboard motor. But he was grinning, too, grinning into the wind.

“Fuck you,” he said through teak lips.

When the pilothouse door slammed shut behind him he clung to it, panting in the sudden dark closeness, the steady warm pressure of bodies and electric heat.

“You ready to relieve me? About goddamn time.”

An unfamiliar voice, a taller than usual form. Then he remembered Trachsler was out of action. This was Carl Murphy, the sonar officer, a chief warrant the other officers called Super Goat. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing the sour-bitter acid his stomach insisted he taste. “What you got?”

They went over the usual things, course, speed, boiler status. Murphy said the wind was southerly now, and would probably veer even more as the storm neared.
Ryan
was headed 180 degrees true, with all four boilers on-line, but making only ten knots. “Just keep her nose to the wind,” the warrant said. “Go too fast in a head sea, you'll bash in the bow plating. Saw it happen on the
Ernest G. Small,
Sasebo to San Fran … you got military air distress, fleet common, international distress freqs on the bridge. Captain's in his sea cabin an' all's right with the
Ryan.
Any questions?”

“I relieve you. Oh, you got the conn?”

“No. You do, kid.” The slouching shadow returned his salute and a moment later was gone. He swung instantly to the bow, caught the white grin of a comber headed for his throat.

“Hard right rudder!”

And behind him, world without end, the tired, bored voice of Coffey again. “Hard right rudder, aye.”

*   *   *

TWO hours later, he was clinging to the repeater, head void of everything but cross swells and rudder orders and turn counts, when the sonar intercom light blinked on. It was Reed. He said they had a contact.

“A sonar contact?”

“Yeah, a sonar contact. That's mostly the kind we get down here in Sonar. You know what to do? I report it to you, you tell the OOD, and he tells the captain.”

He was too tired to resent the patronizing. He just hit the key twice, acknowledging. Evlin was bent over the bucket, so he groped around for the buzzer and flipped up the cover of the speaking tube.

“Yeah.” The brass pipe made Packer's voice hollow and metallic, as if he was talking into a spittoon.

“Captain, this is Ensign Lenson, on the bridge.”

“Yeah. How's it … how's it going out there?”

“Okay, sir. Sir, Sonar reports a contact at the first CZ range. It's got a…” He paused, trying to repeat it the way he'd heard it. “It's a strong one hundred fifty–hertz source. Sonar thinks it could be a Soviet sub running noisy.”

For a moment he heard nothing but the wind. Some freak hole or poorly fitted flange made the hollow brass sigh and whistle, as if its diameter held a miniature cyclone of its own. Then Packer said, his voice more alert now, “I'll be right there.”

*   *   *

HE showed up a few minutes later. Dan was wrestling the ship around to starboard, trying to outguess the swells. He heard Packer and Evlin talking, then the click and rush of the intercom. Shielded flame clicked on, then off. He smelled tobacco. Packer straightened from a crouch.

“Boatswain!”

“Bos'n, aye, sir!”

“Call away the antisubmarine tracking team.”

“Now, sir? It's two in the morning—”

“Do it, Pettus,” Dan snapped.

The third-class hit the exterior speakers too, by mistake, and Dan heard the words wrestle with the wind out on the main deck; wrestle, and lose, tear, and fly away in tatters over the lightless waste of storm-racked sea. “Now hear this. Set the ASW tracking team. That is: Set the ASW tracking team.”

He stopped thinking about it, concentrating on the next swell. Did they come in patterns out of the fog, out of the dark? He sensed a cross swell, maybe two, but he couldn't predict the seas. Right rudder, left rudder, right. Steady up. Steady as she goes … shift your rudder. His knees hurt now, and something clicked when he bent the left one. Sweat dripped under his jacket. Minutes eroded with excruciating slowness, but he had no consciousness of passing time.

The intercom, at his elbow. Silver. “Hey, Bridge, you got Lenson up there?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Sullivan was our weapons liaison. You replace him, right? Get back here and get these phones on. Assist the evaluator.”

“I'm the JOOD right now.”

But when he looked around for Evlin, Dan saw he was handing the watch over to Rich Norden, and at that moment Barry Ohlmeyer, behind him, said, “I'm your relief. Make it quick, they want you in CIC.”

*   *   *

THE last time he'd been in the Combat Information Center, it would have made bats happy. Now, shielded lights were snapping on and screens were brightening into iconic life; petty officers were strapping themselves into seats; seamen were buckling on helmets and unspinning coils of phone cord. A second-class radarman rifled life vests to raised hands through slanting space with the skill of a quarterback. Lenson stood at the door, trying not to vomit again. Assist the evaluator.… Evlin and Silver were adjusting headsets and helmets in a corner. He staggered toward them, fetching up against a waist-high table. Two enlisted men were covering it with what looked like white butcher paper from a roll, ripping it off, taping it down with masking tape.

Silver spoke into a rubber muzzle, then tucked one earphone back. He said rapidly, “Get those phones on. Plug in this socket. No, this one. Keep the wire clear, it's gonna get snarly around here. You got JC, five-JP, eight-JP—”

“Wait a minute, Mark! Help me out! What am I supposed to
do?
”

Silver leaned his beard forward and hissed, pissed off and disgusted. “You're the …
weapons … liaison … officer!
Understand? You follow the action on the plotting table here. Search, classification, then attack. You pass shit to the guys on the weapons, the Asroc and the torpedoes, see, and the guns. Then when the attack starts, you make sure there aren't any friendlies in the way, other ships or anything, and that the evaluator knows about any problems.
Jesus!
Okay?”

“We aren't really going to attack anybody, are we?”

“Course not. Use your fucking head!… CIC, aye, go ahead, UB plot.”

Dan got the earphones on and the helmet buckled over them. He could hear people talking on the circuit, but he wasn't sure who they were, or whether he should make them stop. He stared around, trying to make sense of what he saw.

CIC was twenty feet wide by twenty feet long. The overhead was a foot above his helmet. He, Evlin, Silver, and three enlisted men were grouped in the forward right corner. Ahead was the radio desk, with a denimed back to them. On the far side of that bulkhead were the gun-director drives and the captain's sea cabin. To their right, at arm's length, was a folding partition that led to the electronic countermeasures room. Aft of that was a first-aid locker. Directly aft, again within arm's reach, was another folding door that led to underwater battery plot and sonar. This was half open, and through it he could see the circular glows of screens, the green-lighted faces of seated men. To their left was the rest of CIC, with twenty-two guys in it, and all their equipment and gear.

“Mark, datum,” said Silver, and Dan pulled his attention back to the plotting table. Across from him, Chief Pedersen grunted, “Five hundred an inch, or a thousand?”

“Thousand yards an inch.”

Switches clicked. A light came on inside the table, shining up through the glass top, under the paper.

Dan leaned forward, over the little rayed circle that projected on the sheet. The rosette was graduated in hundreds of yards. As he watched, the two enlisted men moved in, keeping their bodies out from between Evlin and the circle of light. One swung a hinged ruler. Both writing at once, their hands curled round each other like circling carp, they placed a red line and a black dot, and penciled in the time: 0334. The black dot was at the center of the lighted circle. The red line, a line of bearing from it, was almost a yard away, at the far end of the table. Pedersen was spieling off numbers. As Dan watched, their eyes swung up to the bulkhead clock. Exactly sixty seconds later they bent again, and he saw that both new marks had moved, the lighted circle that was
Reynolds Ryan,
and the red line that was—

Suddenly, belatedly, he understood. Reed had detected a submarine. It wasn't a scheduled playmate, but Packer had decided to use it as a training target, exercising the VDS and the ASW team.

But now, in the middle of the night, in the midst of a storm? For a moment, he wondered whether that was wise.

Just then, Packer came through the curtain from Sonar. He was dressed now, khakis and bomber jacket. The light over the table etched shadowed eyes, tight lips, drawn cheeks. “Al, how's that contact look? Got a course and speed yet?”

“It'll take a few minutes, sir; all passive gives us is bearings.”

“Okay, but I need data much scoche. Give me a ballpark soon as you can.”

“Permission to relax battle dress in CIC, sir?”

“Granted, Chief.”

Helmets rattled back into racks. Packer leaned against the radar repeater and patted his pockets. “What've we got down there?” he asked, packing the pipe with vanilla-scented tobacco.

Evlin reached above his head to the intercom, even though, Dan thought, he could just as easily have turned and slid open the partition and talked to the sonarmen directly. He noticed other circuits and instruments above them, in easy reach from the plot. They were labeled
SONAR RANGE INDICATOR, SONAR CONTACT INDICATOR, TA
/740
SECURE VOICE.
There were also two more radio remotes, three barrel switches for phone circuits, and a battle lantern. “Sonar, Evaluator. What's your classification on the goblin?”

“Hard to say, sir. He's so noisy, it's hard to get a discrete spectrum. A hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy decibels. It's a nuke for sure, twin screws, so it's Soviet. But I can't tell what type.”

“Why's he making so much noise?”

“Sounds like a glitch, sir. Could be lube oil, or reduction-gear casualty would make a wideband grinding like that.”

The captain asked whether they had a speed estimate. The sonarman said not from bearing rate, but from turn count he was probably making about fifteen knots.

The clock clicked over, and the plotters bent again, pencils poised like wasps depositing eggs. “Got a range yet, South Plotter?” Packer asked the one with the red pencil. His dungaree shirt was stenciled
M. A. MATT.

“No, sir. Bearings are steady.”

“He's coming right for us, sir,” said Pedersen.

Packer sucked his pipe, staring at the plot. “Are you getting that from the IVDS or the twenty-three?”

The AN/SQS-23, Dan remembered, was the ship's regular sonar, housed in a dome below the keel.

“From the fish, sir.”

“Can you get a bearing from the twenty-three, too? Triangulate?”