Cold is the Sea (32 page)

“How did you leave Laura, Skipper?” asked Williams. “Short notice for her, wasn't it?” The question was part of an unofficial conversation, not meant, as the previous exchange had been, to be heard by others.

“Oh, she was caught by surprise, of course, but she took it in stride. She knew something was going on, especially with that late-night session aboard the
Proteus
. Also, she's guessed it has something to do with Keith, and that's got to be nothing but a woman's intuition.”

“She couldn't be your wife all these years and not know when something big is going on, Skipper. You've not had much sleep the last two nights, there was that thing in the paper about the
Cushing
, not that it had anything correct, and now you're suddenly taking the
Manta
off on a long cruise. I was bushed, myself, when I finally rolled into my bunk down below, but I was way better off than you because I'd already moved aboard. She's got to have guessed something's up.” Buck made no effort to stifle his huge yawn.

“I suppose I could have done some better planning,” said Rich. “Anyway, I'll have plenty of time to get rested before we hit the ice. Except for thinking about what Keith and his crew are going through, I could be a passenger. You're the one who's going to have to do all the work.” He put his binoculars to his eyes, and Buck knew he did not wish to pursue a discussion of last night's events.

“There's an emergency on,” Laura had said, “and it's got something to do with Keith. It's all over the base, and all over New London too.” She had been asleep, but had slipped on a robe to help Rich throw together some changes of clothing to take with him. When Rich did not answer, she went on, “Peggy called a couple of hours ago. She's hysterical.”

“What about?”

“Oh, everything. Sometimes I worry a little about her. If there's any gossip or rumor floating around about anything or anybody, she's heard it. She's a regular dirt hound, and it's practically an obsession with her. Right now there's a lot of loose talk going around about the
Cushing
, and I'll bet Peggy's heard it all. She's found out about that big secret conference you've just come from. Says it has got to be about the
Cushing
, and that the big Navy brass came up here in civilian clothes and went straight aboard the
Proteus
to talk to you about it.”

“Is that why she's hysterical?”

“Partly, I think. The rumors are about Keith, this time, even though they're not personal, and she's finding that hard to take. What set her off, though, was a telephone call from a newspaper in Washington.”

“What did the newspaper want?” Richardson paused in the act of selecting the right khaki shirts, turned to face her. “When did they call?”

“She called me right afterward, so it was just over two hours ago. Mainly, the man only asked if Keith was skipper of the
Cushing
, and when they had left New London. Where they were bound for. That sort of thing. In her frame of mind that would be enough to get her upset right there, but then he came on with something about Keith being mixed up in some kind of a fracas with the Russians, and that really scared her. I promised I'd call her back as soon as I'd had a chance to talk to you about it.”

“There's nothing I could tell her,” said Rich. “Was it the
reporter who told her about the conference? They ought not to be allowed to do that kind of thing. Calling up a skipper's wife with this kind of rumor . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, threw the shirts roughly into his suitcase.

“Maybe, I don't know. I heard about it earlier, though. A big Navy airplane landed over at Trumbull Field, and three Navy sedans were waiting for it and took everybody to the
Proteus
.”

“Well, you can't call her back,” said Richardson.

“Come on, Rich. Of all the things she's asked me for lately, this is the most legitimate. She's sitting by her phone right this minute. It's her husband. She's worried silly, and she needs help. I promised I'd call as soon as I'd talked to you. What can I tell her?”

“Well—okay. But you have to say that you don't know anything about any conference, one way or the other. So far as you know, Keith's all right. So's the
Cushing
. She's not to pay attention to any rumors about her. The
Manta
's going on routine training exercises.”

“Then why are you going along, Rich? She's going to ask that just as soon as she finds out you've gone, and that's going to be later on today sometime.”

“Tell her . . . tell her . . .” Richardson struggled with the words but more, Laura could see, with himself. “Well, all right, but you've got to make her swear to secrecy. I'm giving the
Manta
an Operations Readiness Inspection, an ORI. Got that? An ORI. It'll take a month, and Keith's going to be all right. That's the second point. Keith's going to be all right, but she's not to talk about it to anyone.”

“That sounds pretty mixed up to me,” said Laura, “but I'll try to put it across. You're giving the
Manta
an ORI, and somehow Keith's going to be okay. She'll know either the ORI's a fake, or else you're not doing anything for Keith. Besides, who ever heard of a month-long ORI? She won't buy that story.”

“Look Laura, whose side are you on? Just tell her what I said. You don't know what I'm doing either, do you? You don't know if this sudden trip has anything to do with Keith or not. We're doing everything we can. You just keep saying that I said Keith's going to be okay, and not to talk to any reporters. They don't know anything, and they'll just get her upset.”

There was unaccustomed asperity in Richardson's voice, which
he instantly regretted. Laura compressed her lips, said nothing. “Look, Laurie,” he said after a moment, coming around the bed and sliding his arm around her waist, “we're getting underway tomorrow, and I'll be gone for quite a while. And I can't tell you anything, even though I know I can trust you all the way. But we don't trust Peggy, do we? Whatever you or I tell her is as good as broadcast all over town. Besides, I don't want to think of her right now.”

Laura's face was close to his, her eyes wide open. She nodded her head against his. Her mouth parted slightly, and he could feel her body coming closer. Her arms moved against the small of his back, and then he was kissing her, pushing her down crosswise on the bed alongside the suitcase, fumbling with the buttons of her robe.

Later, lying clasped together in the delicious rumpled aftermath, he said, “Go ahead and call Peggy. Right now, if you want to. Tell her to keep her shirt on, and if she gets any more calls like that to refer them to Admiral Treadway. But don't get into any long talk with her at this time of the night. Just say she should keep her faith in the U.S. Navy. Then hang up and come back here.”

Laura rubbed her nose languidly against his cheek. “Aye, aye, sir, Commodore,” she said, “if you think you're up to it. But what do I say if she asks me if I've got my shirt on?”

13

T
he trip northward in the
Manta
was totally different from any submarine voyage Richardson had ever experienced. It was the first time he had embarked for such a long time and for such a distance in a nuclear submarine. At the beginning he had, of course, known what to expect. Diving was effortless; the diving alarm was apparently sounded more for the sake of tradition than to alert the crew. There was none of the old hurly-burly, no necessity for split-second timing to get engines off the line, exhaust valves shut, huge air-intake pipe sealed. The people on the bridge were allowed to get below with some dignity and without emergency; if one of them was held up for some reason, clothing snagged somewhere or some last-minute function that needed doing—such as securing a collapsible step against rattles during a prolonged submergence—time could be made for it. When the bridge hatch was closed and the lookouts had taken their seats at the diving controls, the diving officer ordered the vents opened, told the planesmen the depth he wanted, and
Manta
gently angled downward without missing a beat in the even rhythm of
her turbines. The initial course led directly off soundings, and as the bottom fell away the planesmen gradually increased depth until they were holding her steady—and stationary, from all sensation that anyone could observe—at the ordered cruising depth of 500 feet.

There was no feeling of motion, no feel whatever for the sea. The interior of the ship was a quiet, cylindrical cavern, full of controlled efficient activity, but they might as well have been buried in the earth, locked up in a cave somewhere. Of forward motion there was no indication whatever, except for the changes in the regular fathometer readings which were constantly plotted on a chart of the ocean-bottom contours, the single clocklike hand of the electronic log indicating
Manta
's speed as a fraction over nineteen knots, and the fact that the slightest motion of bow or stern planes was instantly reflected in the depth gauges.

The silence was of course not as real as the senses indicated, for everyone had from the beginning been attuned to the sibilant hum of the ventilation system and relegated it to the nonaware background of consciousness. Occasionally there was a gurgle of the hydraulic machinery, the swishing of confined oil under pressure, a repressed whistle of compressed air, each individual noise telling of some small operation helping to keep the
Manta
on course, speed and depth. Yet, despite these communications of the submarine's own inherent being and function, and despite, also, the concentration of the men at the diving stand—two planesmen and the diving officer of the watch—there was no feeling, no forced awareness, that this minute fragment of the world was moving at all.

Immediately aft of the control room, in a sealed compartment beneath the deck,
Manta
's heart was pumping out an unceasing supply of steam which passed into the engineroom in two great insulated, convoluted pipes leading to four turbines, two turbo-generator sets and the auxiliary steam line, and finally entered the condensers as fully expanded steam from which all the work had been extracted. The steam provided all the energy for the myriad pieces of machinery which made up the enormously complex synergistic whole and then, in the form of water, was pumped back into the steam generators to repeat the cycle. There, instead of from combustion of oil, gas or coal, heat was returned to it from the pressurized water of the reactor primary
loop—water under such great pressure that it could not flash into steam even under the tremendous, controlled temperature of nuclear fission. Here was the secret, for the nuclear power plant needs no combustion anywhere in the power cycle, and the fuel, built into the reactor, lasts for several years.

But as every man aboard the
Manta
well knew, the power of the atom is not released easily. Tremendously large, extraordinarily designed main coolant pumps circulate the pressurized water constantly from reactor to steam generators and back again. Equally unusual drive motors raise and lower the control rods which increase or decrease reactivity within the reactor. Extraordinary and unusual, because no leakage can be permitted; there can be no joint, no bearing or seal ring through which a drive shaft projects, no contaminating lubrication, no physical contact between driving agent and the driven. No leakage of any kind, not even an infinitesimal amount, can be allowed in the primary loop; for not only would radioactive contamination result, the pressure could not be maintained and the system would not function.

Over it all, monitoring every pressure, every temperature, every device, every important circuit and function, was one of the world's most detailed and complex instrumentation systems. And over the instruments the most highly selected and trained crew the Navy could put together maintained constant surveillance.

Pumps throbbed, generator sets hummed, turbines roared and reduction gears whined; in the engineroom there was purposeful movement and noise aplenty. But everything was nevertheless static. Every piece of machinery stood in its appointed place, delivered its product through shafts, cables, pipes or air lines, and reported its performance in gauges mounted nearby. Only the blurred revolution of two propeller shafts in the lower level of the engineroom evidenced movement—and even this was hardly visible, for the perfectly balanced shafts, turning at hundreds of revolutions per minute, seemed to be standing as solidly still as everything else around them. Just as the men were

Throughout the engineering spaces, men stood, or sat, before their machines, watching them attentively, occasionally making a tiny adjustment, carefully ministering to their needs, rooted to their duties for four hours at a time, eight hours out of every day.

But no one, encased in the elongated steel cylinder of which he
was a part, hurtling northward through the Atlantic Ocean, was unaware of the sea, even though he might pretend to ignore it. Not with the sea pressure of 500 feet of submergence squeezing the steel bubble enveloping him. The sea was unfelt physically, could be joked about, was taken as a matter of course. But not ignored. No matter where one was it was never far away. In some cases only inches. And, like all implacable fluids, it needed only a single entry point to begin its deadly work.

Manta
's annunciators had been placed on Ahead Flank even before clearing Montauk Point, and remained there twenty-three hours of every twenty-four. Her course, decided in advance, had been set on a broad, looping curve that would sweep her around Nantucket, the Grand Banks and Iceland before finally settling on due north. Day after day she burrowed through the North Atlantic, her sonar searching actively ahead and to both sides, her fathometer continuously recording the depth of water beneath her. Her whole being was concentrated on but a single objective: to reach, as soon as possible, the vicinity of position Golf November two-nine on the polar grid.