The Circle (31 page)

“He read the water better than we did. He found a dicothermal layer that bent sound right around him.”

“Dicothermal,” said the high voice. “From the Greek; meaning, cold as a dyke.”

“Crawl back into those earphones, Orris.”

“Wait a minute, Lootenant. There's women on that submarine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Got to be. I hear screw noises.”

“We're getting tired, gentlemen,” Evlin announced.

Just then, the captain returned. He looked around at them. His face darkened.

“Knock it off,” James Packer said. “This is no game.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Silver, ask Romeo Delta for an update, please.”

*   *   *

FOR a while, he dreamed of food. Then he dreamed of sitting down. Finally he just dreamed of getting off watch. And at last, he dreamed, and prayed, that
Ryan
would steady herself just for one minute. That was all he wanted from life.

He clung to the table till his hands cramped like an old man's.

*   *   *

AT 2300, Packer went forward again. The men watched the lighted rosette, the “bug,” glumly while he was gone. When he came back, he stood over the air scope for a while. Dan heard a grasshopper clicking as he sucked on his empty pipe.

“We got a problem, Al.”

“What's that, sir?”

“This bow slamming kicks up a lot of spray. It's getting colder, too. I had one of the signalmen put the light on the top hamper. You can see it hit the stacks and freeze. It's over a foot thick on the mast platforms.”

“We ought to ballast, sir,” said Evlin. He rubbed his mouth. “Mr. Talliaferro brought that up yesterday. Why don't we ballast?”

“Because it fouls the tanks. Once you get saltwater in there, you can pump all you want, but when you put fuel in again, you'll still have contamination.” Packer added heavily, “That's why.”

“We'll have to sooner or later, sir. As we burn fuel, she gets lighter below. As the ice accumulates, she gets heavy above. You don't need an inclining experiment to tell you—”

“Yeah, that's what Ed was shouting at me about just before you came on watch.”

Dan studied the captain covertly. Were those shadows at the corners of his mouth a smile? He looked so exhausted, it was hard to tell. They disappeared as a flame flared, was sucked down into the bowl of his pipe, flared up again. “You think I should, too, huh?”

“In your position, I would, sir. I understand the contamination problem, but it seems secondary.”

“It's not secondary to me. We lose the engines in these seas and we'll broach. Granted, if that happens and we're unstable, we won't come back, but given the choice, I'd rather not broach in the first place. That's why so far I've rated dependable power over ballast.”

“They lost some of this class in the war, didn't they, Captain? In a typhoon, from not ballasting?”

Packer shook his head sharply. “I know what you mean, but that was different.” He glanced at the curtain, then pulled his eyes back. “Those were prewar destroyers, not
Gearings.
During the war, they got loaded up with a lot of new stuff—radars, AA guns—and nobody kept track of their stability. Some of them ballasted, but it didn't save them. The court of inquiry concluded they lost power, fell off into the trough, started rolling, and capsized.”

The 29MC interrupted them with a monotone. “This is the evening sonar-conditions summary. Sea suction intake is thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, salinity thirty-four parts per thousand. Predictions, have been prepared for the following conditions: water depth sixteen hundred fathoms; own ship speed less than twenty knots; true wind speed, off the scale.

“BT drop and the deep history shows a sound-speed profile with good mixing down to four hundred feet and a faint thermocline at eight hundred. Beyond that, it's a straight fall down to a thousand five hundred. Best sensor is predicted to be passive VDS at five hundred feet. Target's best depth to listen is three hundred and his best depth to evade is below eight hundred. We have no best search speed due to heavy ambient noise. Active sonar prediction is poor due to sea return.

“Passive predictions: near surface, very poor; best depth, twelve thousand yards; convergence zone one, twenty-five thousand yards.”

Evlin reached up absently and hit the lever. “Mark, what's range to the bird?”

The gears ground in the air-search repeater. “Twenty-four thousand.”

“That's only twelve miles. According to that prediction, if he's over the sub, we ought to be picking him up, too.”

“With the SQS-thirty-five.”

“Right,” said Packer, and he sounded not tired anymore, but decisive. “And we aren't. So he's not below the layer, where we expect him. He's shallow. Sonar, Captain: Bring the fish up to one hundred feet. Search on one hundred and fifty—hertz band.”

The 29MC acknowledged. Minutes dragged by. Then somebody shouted, “Bingo!” behind the black curtain.

“Evaluator, Sonar: Passive contact against heavy background noise, bearing zero-nine-two true. No bearing drift. No doppler. Classification,
Yankee
-class submarine! We got her!” His jubilation was echoed around the plotting table. But the captain just snapped, “Pass it to the aircraft. Tell your weapons crews, Lenson,” and the smiles froze and an instant later vanished, like gun smoke whipped away by a gale.

*   *   *

THEY held the submarine for the next hour and twenty minutes on passive VDS. The P-3 made two more low passes, two more MAD contacts, then lost it. It had used up all its sonobuoys, so now
Ryan
held on alone. They began passing range and bearing data the other way, to the plane.

The bearing remained steady. Since sonar could predict the width of the CZ band, they had a rough range, too. That also remained steady.

Dan wondered what was going on inside the captain's head. Since
Ryan
was moving generally south, albeit slowly, that meant the sub was moving south, too. But every time Orris reported, he mentioned ambient noise. The high voice sounded more worried as time dragged by. As midnight passed, he reported the noise was increasing, that they were losing the signal in it. Evlin ordered the fish winched in to fifty feet— so shallow, it started to broach. Sonar reported “lost contact.” He dropped it back to two hundred. They picked it up again, but so faint, it dropped in and out of detectability.

“Captain,” said Evlin. He raised his voice. “Captain!”

Packer jerked his head up from the radio desk. Evlin explained that they were losing contact.

While he was talking, Reed came out of the sonar shack and propped his leanness against the first-aid cabinet. His eyes glowed with fatigue. Dan thought: We've had a few hours off between watches; no sleep, but we could move around, relax a little. He's gone right from evaluator to sonar control and back. When Evlin finished, Reed told the captain, who had turned his face wordlessly to him, “It's ice.”

“Ice? What ice?”

“Ask the bird if there's ice out there. Floes, or small bergs.”

But when Silver asked, the P-3 said he couldn't see the surface at all, it was too dark. He'd had to climb to get out of icing. He said he couldn't stay much longer, either.

“Where the hell did my pipe…? Okay, but where's his relief? He was supposed to be here by now.”

“Wait one,” said the TACCO's voice. They knew Romeo Delta's copilot by name now: Lieutenant Wycoff. He was off the circuit for a while. When he came back on, he sounded apologetic. “
Ryan,
Romeo Delta.”

“Go ahead, Romeo Delta,” said Silver, speaking slowly and distinctly into the handset. If you spoke too soon after you keyed, it broke sync, and all the listener heard was a hissing rush like a faulty toilet.

“This is Romeo Delta. Keflavik advises they have Condition Charlie at present with fifty-knot winds.”

“Give me the set, Mark,” said Packer. The captain rubbed his forehead as he waited for the scrambler. “This is Jim Packer,
Ryan
actual, Lieutenant. What's Condition Charlie?”

“Sir, that's a whiteout. When the wind gets above so high, it picks up loose snow, and it sort of hovers, and after a while you can't even see your props. They can't take off and we can't land. Commander Gephardt's talking to Bodo now; we'll probably have to divert to there or Kinloss, or maybe Machrahanish.”

“Are you telling me he can't take off?”

“That's about it, sir, not till the whiteout dies down. It's not the wind, a P-three can take off in just about anything, but you got to be able to see.”

“How much longer can you stay on station?” asked Packer, and his face looked like cast iron now.

“Headed south at this time, Captain. I gave you all the time on top I can. I'll have to shut down two engines to make Scotland. I'm sorry. Over.”

“I understand. Thanks for your support.
Ryan
out.”

He hung up the handset. No one spoke for a few seconds. Finally, Evlin looked back at Reed.

“Icebergs,” the ASW officer said again. “He went east looking for them. I think he's found some. The ice changes the salinity, and the grinding of the floes covers his noise. If we can't close, we're going to lose him, sir.”

“I don't want to come left,” said the captain. “I don't know if she'll take it, frankly.”

“Then shoot,” said a voice behind them.

Benjamin Bryce came into the circle of light around the plotting table. Evlin and Pedersen gave way as he leaned over the chicken tracks of hours of hide-and-seek. “You got to do it this time, Jimmy John.”

“What are you doing up here, Ben?”

“I came up to see how it was going. And I'm glad I did, hearing the advice you're getting from your JOs.” Bryce put his knuckles on the glass. “Word with you?”

“Will it take long?”

“You need to hear it.”

Bryce and Packer went back by the evaluator's desk, back on the port side of CIC. It put them around the corner from the men at the plot, but only ten feet from Dan. He couldn't hear everything. The wind howl and the slamming and the mutter of the plotters overlaid it. But he couldn't help hearing Bryce say, “I wondered how much longer it was going to take you to figure out how this had to end.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I heard what Reed was saying. Only thing to do is put an Asroc out there, right now, while you still got contact. Don't ask permission. Just do it. Otherwise, you lose him. And you can't afford that. Can you?”

Their voices lowered then, and he saw Evlin's eye on him; he grabbed the mouthpiece and said, “Uh, all stations, comm check.” They answered, drawling, jaded, and he lost the rest of the exchange behind him.

Packer came back a few minutes later. “Any better?”

“Sonar reports still losing strength, sir. The SNR—signal-to-noise ratio—”

“I know what SNR is, Chief.”

“Yes, sir. Anyway, it's still dropping.”

Packer looked at the plot for another few seconds. “Draft a message, Al,” he said at last.

Evlin grabbed the pad of blanks.

“Make it Flash precedence. Top Secret. USS
Ryan
to CINCLANTFLT. Subject: twenty-four hundred contact status.

“Para One. Due to weather degradation, P-three support no longer available. Sea state my posit is seven plus, wind eighty-five knots gusting to over one hundred.

“Para Two. Due to inability to conform to eastward movement B forty-one, anticipate losing contact in next half hour or hour time frame. Request instructions.”

The captain put his pipe in his mouth. His lips pursed around it, then flattened into a white line. “Okay, that's all; get it out.”

When the pneumatic tube to Radio hissed, he turned to Dan. “Lenson, tell Asroc Control to prepare a two-round salvo of Mark forty-fours. Al, give him a bearing and range. Report when ready.”

Dan felt unreal. He stared for a moment too long, because Packer added angrily, “You hear me?”

“Uh, aye aye, sir. Asroc Control, WLO: Prepare two Asrocs for launch.”

“Say again, there?” a lazy voice drawled in his ear. “Doin' 'nother drill? We just did one last—”

“This is no drill.” He steadied his voice and took the slip of paper Pedersen handed him. “Firing data follows. Target range is twenty-four thousand, five hundred yards. Bearing will be set from Sonar. Set Mark forty-four to circular search, five-hundred-foot floor, one-hundred-foot ceiling. Report when ready to launch.”

“Shit fire,” the voice said, and there was a hasty scramble of shouting, orders on the far end of the line. Dan licked his lips and glanced at Evlin. The operations officer was studying the trace, face sober behind the glasses.

“Sir, you're not really planning to—”

“I don't want to, Al, but I don't have the big picture. Keep updating the bearings and ranges. Make water entry point for the torpedoes about two thousand yards ahead of the last reported position. Dan, what are they giving you?”

“Uh, no word back yet, sir.”

At the same moment, an agitated voice in his headphones said, “WLO, Asroc Control.”

He grabbed his mouthpiece. “Go ahead.”

“Sir, we have a casualty on the launcher. The elevation motors—something about the elevation motors, Steffy says. Frozen, or something.”

Dan felt his hands go numb in horror and dismay. “What are you telling me? We've been on station for ten hours now! You reported manned and ready!”

The voice became evasive. “Yessir, we were manned, but nobody told us to train and elevate. We tried to do it just now and something's fucked. Stefanick's out there trying to find out what's wrong. There's a lot of ice all over the launcher.”