North Cape (9 page)

and force the stern down farther, where the great engines could maintain a continual purchase on the water. In these winds, even a moment with the four screws out of water could find the battle cruiser being spun wildly by the winds, broadside to the waves. Once allowed to start, even a 16,50o-ton battle cruiser could be tumbled over beams end, turned turtle, and sunk.

The ballast tank was ice cold. Traces of water remaining after the pumping had frozen to a smooth glaze on bulkheads and deck. Folsom had to hang onto the metal rungs spaced in even rows along the side and bottom to cross the eight-foot space that separated the two hulls.

The outside of the ballast tanks acted as an integral part of the hull. The tank itself was crisscrossed with steel bracing bars. Folsom stood up gingerly, riding with the slow rise and fall of the ship, and flicked on the flashlight. The strong beam sprang out boldly in the wet air, striking the ice-and water-coated sides of the tank to flash back as sparkles from millions of diamonds. He played the beam along the tank wall until he found the eight-footlong gash, high up above the water line. Carefully he examined the steel plates that had been welded over the gash, checking for signs of water seepage. He could find no major breaks, and with the ice and dampness it was impossible to spot small leaks.

• Folsom stood uncertainly below the welded plates, playing the light around the sides of the tank. He would have felt much better if he dared order the tank flooded to capacity with sea water. Filling the tank would have eased the strain on the welded joints. But it might also put them far enough down into the waves so that they would never recover. Finally, after a long minute of helplessness coupled with frustration, he shrugged and turned back to the hatch, clicking off the light. Folsom carefully dogged the hatch shut and then made his way aft to the engine room, amidships.

Although the Robert F. Kennedy displaced 16,500 tons and was nearly seven hundred feet long, she carried a crew of only eighty men. With the ship standing to general quarters in the storm, most of this minimum crew was on duty or else snatching a few hours of restless sleep in the duty bunks scattered around the ship. A powered elevator took Folsom down to G deck and he walked aft another hundred feet, pushed open the engine-room hatch, and stepped into the softly lit, instrument-paneled room. The duty chief

nodded to him and came over as he approached the master control panel.

"What's she look like outside, Commander?" Lieutenant Charles Barrows grinned as Folsom slumped down into the extra command seat.

"Rough. The seas are running better than fifty feet right now. How are your engines doing?"

"Better question would be how's the hull doing."

Folsom grinned. "I guess-it would be at that. I was just up there. So far no sign of any separation and no seepage . . . but, I don't know."

Barrows nodded slowly. "How about if I send a couple of boys up to put in some strain gauges, wired to the control room. Shouldn't take more than an hour or so." Folsom nodded. "Good. That's really what I came down here to see about. By the way, how is the overhaul on number three free turbine coming along?" Barrows turned and reached across the console for a check list and leafed quickly through the pages. "They are reassembling the bearings now. Should have it all back together and checked out in twelve hours."

"Twelve hours . . Folsom made an elaborate face. "Way too long. Try and cut that in half.",

Barrows turned a startled face. "In half! For God's sake, what do you think we are, miracle men?" Nevertheless, he reached for a microphone and roared, "All right, you half-witted slackers. The Exec wants that number three engine operating in four hours. So -get off your tails and move."

"Six hours . . .7 he mumbled.

"It is rather important We are going to come about at o400, and if the seas or the winds get any worse, we are going to need all the power we can get. I sure would hate to see this bucket swing into a turn and keep right on going—straight down. Which brings me to the next point. Isn't there anything you can do about the ice on the deck? We are carrying nearly four hundred tons right now and the ship is so damn low she looks like a submarine."

Barrows scratched his head. "I sure as hell don't know what it would be. I am squeezing every last calorie of heat out of the reactor now. The cooling system is shut down for the lower decks

and I'm saving the reactor cooling system until we do come about. If I switch it off now, the reactor is going to overheat."

"Okay, I'll leave the details up to you. But the computer shows that if the ice-build-up rate continues steady, we are going to have about a hundred and fourteen more tons of the stuff on the deck by 0300. And that is going to make coming about very, very touchy.

"

Barrows tapped his fingers nervously on the console. "All right, let me see if we can come up with something else that will help the deck heaters out. Forty years ago—they tell me—they never worried much about ice build-up. If the deck heaters couldn't keep up, they just gave a hundred or so sailors safety lines and buckets of ashes and told them to go to it. But what the hell can you do with eighty men, sixty of whom are on duty during general quarters at any one time, and no ashes." He shook his head. "Progress. Sometimes it does more to work against you than for you." Folsom grinned and left, after extracting a promise to get the number three engine back on line as soon as possible. He went directly up to the bridge and to the computing table. As he climbed into his high seat again, he switched on the navigation course plot and studied the fine red line that had marked their progress since 1900 the previous evening. The red progress line was superimposed onto the projected course and showed every'

litttle deviation from the plot. But it was running fourteen miles• behind; it was clearly indicated by an angry red circle encompassing the end point of both lines. He sat at the console, unconsciously tapping a pencil while he tried to figure a way out. Increased speed would apply more pressure to the bow. If they camelate to the turnaround; point, they would be late to the rendezvous. If they stayed behind—and the computer showed that, given the same conditions, at turnaround time they would be thirty-two miles short—they would not be in the lee of the North Cape. And with the ice building up at an ever-increasing rate, it would be far too risky to attempt the turn in the open seas.

Folsom swiveled to stare out the forward ports. The heavy gray sky formed a low-hanging ceiling barely clearing the mountainous seas. It was now nearly 11oo, one hour past sunrise. But the sun, filtering down through thousands of feet of ice and storm cloud, shed very little light to relieve the funeral pall. The wind, throbbing around the ship and even through thick insulation, could be heard clearly above the low-key noises of the bridge. The barometer had dropped to the lowest point that Folsom had ever seen, 28.49

inches of mercury. He knew that the worst of the storm and winds were yet to come. And they were heading directly into the teeth of it—in fact, rushing headlong to meet it. The anemometer, clacking loudly on the masthead, was still registering a fairly steady wind speed of fifty-seven knots, a Force 11 wind, strong enough to blow the crests off the waves. As waves approach shore, an entirely different set of hydrodynamic principles come into play, and the waves become the more familiar breakers, with crests of roiling white water as they break on the beach. In mid-ocean, waves are usually long swells several hundred feet long, with a rounded bosom rolling to the far-distant shore. When the wind is strong, then the water forming the swell is pushed faster toward the crest so that it overshoots and falls free in a mass of white water. Out there, Folsom could see, the wind was blowing so hard that the water that was pushed over the crest was blown free into long streamers for fifty and sixty feet downwind. He shivered involuntarily before the frozen wastes of the Arctic Ocean.

But daydreaming would not solve his navigational problem, and for the hundredth time he damned the destroyer that had ripped their bow, thereby causing all these problems. With an undamaged bow, neither he nor Larkin would have worried about the effects of the angry seas on the bow. They would have put the ship onto a long, rectangular course until rendezvous time and the hell with the pounding on the bow. His thinking was interrupted by the appearance on the bridge of Barrows' electronics crew. They politely elbowed him aside to get at the electrical conduits over his console to run temporary lines from the strain gauges in the bow. With nothing else to do for the moment, Folsom wandered around the bridge and the various consoles as unobtrusively as possible, stymied by the mathematics of the situation.

A half hour later he thought he was beginning to see a way out of the problem. The wind speed had increased another three knots and the seas were running to swells nearly sixty feet high. The wind was blowing steadily from the north-northwest quarter, deviating little from 10° north, which was what he had been half hoping for. For the past twenty minutes he had' observed little or no deviation either in direction or speed. When he fed the new information into the course computers, it worked out perfectly. By falling off two points from the wind direction, he could bring the RFK farther to the west in a shallow arc that would increase the distance toward the Cape lee. Feeling very much like a skipper of a sailing ship, he ordered the course change to take advantage of the wind. The RFK rolled far to starboard as the two rudders inched over in response to the instructions from the bridge. The roll went on through thirty, then forty, then fifty, to fifty-seven degrees. Folsom watched the inclinometer with apprehension, and when the needle' began to move back toward vertical, he let out a pent-up breath. Good lord, he thought, if she would go over that far with just a minor change with the wind, how would she handle when it came time to reverse course. He glanced around the bridge and saw that the others on watch were also looking at the inclinometer and were just as apprehensive as he.

At 1200, Larkin came onto the bridge. He nodded to the officer of the watch, signed the log, and came over to Folsom's console. He turned, before saying anything to Folsom, and said, "Mr. Peterson, please stay on the bridge for a few minutes. I would like you to relieve me while Mr. Folsom and I go below."

The second officer nodded and sank back into his high seat and began flipping through ship's status report forms. Folsom unbuckled his seat belt and followed Larkin off the bridge, wondering what the captain had on his mind. Neither said a word until they entered Larkin's quarters.

"Sit down, Pete." He indicated a comfortable chair against the bulkhead. Folsom took the seat and glanced around at the comfortably appointed room. Larkin had thrown out the regulation Navy furniture as one of his first official acts on assuming command of the RFK, in the belief that a new skipper should assume all prerogatives in setting new traditions on a new ship. Certainly,. the comfortable living-room-style furniture was much more relaxing than the hard-backed steel and plastic furniture that had been furnished by the shipyard.

He accepted the coffee that Larkin ordered and sat back in the chair to watch his commanding officer pouring his own coffee. Folsom really knew little about Larkin, and he doubted that many men did. Larkin was old Navy, relaxed but steeped in tradition; he probably would have been more at home in the more easygoing Australian or Canadian navies if he were to be judged by his command style. In two years he had yet to hear the captain raise his voice to give an order. And he could not ever remember Larkin having to give an order twice.

But the man kept his own counsel. Never had there been an exchange of personal information between them. What little he knew about Larkin had been gleaned from his service record, to which Folsom, as executive officer, had access, and from talk around the various officers' clubs. The service record had been exceedingly dry, as always, but at the same time was an intriguing document, more from what it had implied rather than described. Folsom knew, for instance, that Larkin had commanded a destroyer during the Vietnam conflict and had been decorated with the Navy Cross for bravery under fire. But it had remained a noncommittal note in a record until he ran into a chance acquaintance in San Francisco who had been communications officer on the cruise for which Larkin earned the decoration.

The story was that Larkin had taken his destroyer to within a hundred yards of fringing reefs off the South Vietnamese coast just below the Demilitarized Zone. He was to lay down pointblank covering fire for a Korean patrol driven back and pinned down on the beach by a superior and well-dug-in North Vietnamese Army unit. Larkin had moved in so close that he had come under intensive mortar fire. The destroyer took three mortar rounds, one directly through the fan tail, which had exploded against the rudder controls, blasting them out of action. In spite of the damage, Larkin had remained on the scene, in fact moving in even closer to bring antiaircraft guns into broadside position to lay down a sweeping barrage for twenty minutes while army helicopters moved in to pull the Koreans out. The service record for some reason missed noting the award of the Republic of South Korea Distinguished Service Medal.

Folsom's friend had many other tales of Larldn's skill and bravery, which he was more than happy to relate to Folsom during a long two-fifths-of-gin afternoon and evening. All were in a similar vein. But what stuck most deeply in Folsom's memory was his friend's description of Larkin as an aloof, although quite personable, and lonely man. Exactly Folsom's own conclusion.

Even Larkin's face bore out his manner. It was a face that was at once alive but closed to outsiders. The gray eyes stared out at you from under straight, medium thin brows with a direct stare that forbade anything except the exact truth. Larkin was a tall man, but spare, almost to the point of gauntness in some respects. His face was thin, with the skin stretched tightly across the brow and nose. But the shoulders were broader than would have been expected for a man so tall and lean. There was something about the man, something in the posture, that Folsom could not isolate, that belied the personal aesthetism that really existed. The furniture in the cabin may have been comfortable and pleasantly arranged, but it was certainly not opulent. The color scheme matched the paneled and steel walls, but that was all. The desk, set under the air vent, was clean and neat. A choice selection of books could be seen in the barred rack over the desk and the titles were intriguing, indicating a disciplined mind.