“It just might be Pasadena, Captain.”
What in the world would Wayne Newell be doing out here? Newell possessed an ability to turn up at the strangest places … even to say the oddest things. Steel grew to understand over the years that it was his nature. The man’s instincts were amazing. Much of the time that strange place was also the right one for Newell. He never seemed to make mistakes either. Rather, it was a talent he took advantage of, making the best out of a difficult situation, profiting on the negative, turning a loss into a gain!
Was it possible he might just have ended up out here by pure happenstance? Ridiculous! Steel wasn’t about to convince himself that this was one more situation where Wayne Newell had fallen headfirst into the pile and was here to give Manchester an assist in a hairy situation. Chance might play a big part in a lot of things that happened to Newell — but not something like this.
Ben Steel understood even before he was ready to admit it that there was no possible way he would talk himself into adding one more gold star to the Newell myth. It was better to sit back and analyze the situation and let the other captain initiate something. Be coy!
And that was no sea transit Pasadena was making. She was evidently moving quietly — as if she were tracking someone.…
The weather in the north Pacific had deteriorated even more. It was beyond anything the captain of SSV-516 had ever seen. Captain Markov had experienced violent winter storms in such forbidding seas as the Barents and the Norwegian and even the North Atlantic off the coast of Labrador. He’d also come up against summer hurricanes and cyclones in southern waters. But the combination of storms that swept across Siberia and the Bering Sea down onto SSV-516 actually frightened him.
The wind force increased — steady winds crept over a hundred knots, with gusts well beyond that — until the anemometer was ripped away. Windblown spray that tore at exposed skin made it impossible to determine the types of precipitation that froze to the pilothouse windows. Immense waves, some of them towering above the bridge, seemed to attack from every direction. Captain Markov was attempting to hold his bow at an angle into the wind. He’d been forced to reduce speed for safety purposes until he was just making bare steerageway. Time and again the helmsman was unable to get the ship back on course and they were forced to steer with their engines.
Waves continued to crash down on the bow, pressing it beneath tons of water. Each time, the ship won the titanic struggle, shuddering against tremendous weight as she rose against the suffocating ocean. The combination of wind and sea on either beam would push SSV-516 over on her side and hold her there until crewmen wondered whether she would ever right herself. And when the ship was twisted down forward and over on her side, a wave might strike from astern, lifting her stern so high that the screws were exposed. This would drive her bow farther beneath the surface, leaving her momentarily without steering control or power.
Internally, anything that hadn’t been lashed down was hurled about until it either smashed or was secured. Food had become a memory. The galley remained secured. The groan and screech of metal echoed through the entire ship as seams were stretched beyond their designed endurance. Those crew members off watch huddled in silent groups. Sleep was impossible. There was a constant rattling against the outer bulkheads as small, external pieces of their ship were sacrificed to the storm.
It was during an especially deep roll to port, over fifty degrees, with the bow deeply buried beneath torts of water, that a huge wave swept over SSV-516 from starboard. She was forced deeper beneath the sea. The men in the pilothouse watched the inclinometer surge past sixty degrees, then hold at that angle for what seemed an eternity before she began to right herself.
Then a second wave swept over her from the same direction. The forward radome was wrenched away with a horrible grinding sound that roared through the entire ship. The surging water swept it back into the mast, then tumbled it against the second radome before it bounced off the stack and was carried away into the darkness.
A frantic voice came over the speaker in front of the captain, “Pilothouse … we’ve lost all communications.…”
“Can we still send to the American submarine?”
“Negative. Nothing. No satellite contact … nothing.…”
Captain Markov’s fear for his ship disappeared for an instant as he realized that their mission — the control of Pasadena’s message traffic — had just been lost.
Wally Snyder emerged from the radio shack near the entrance to the engineering spaces and wandered aimlessly into Pasadena’s control room. The stricken expression on his face instantly ignited the aura of fear and suspicion that had overspread the submarine. His demeanor was totally at odds with the man that everyone had known until that moment. His Pasadena baseball cap had been misplaced. His hair was rumpled and his uniform shirt hung loosely outside wrinkled pants. His eyes, until that moment the mirror of an outgoing personality, appeared lifeless and vague.
His gaze fell without recognition on each of the men who watched his progress through the control room. Catching sight of the captain, he ambled up beside Wayne Newell. “Captain, I need to talk to you.” His voice was a monotone.
“Not now, Wally.” The captain never looked in his direction. “We’re in the process of prosecuting a couple of contacts … gonna man battle stations shortly.” Newell had been pacing, peering over the diving officer’s shoulder on one side of control, studying the settings on the fire-control officer’s console on the other, glancing at the chart on the navigation table. He’d been standing beside the OOD when Snyder appeared at his side, rocking on his heels nervously. “This is what we’ve been waiting for and—” His words were uttered in a tone that would have convinced any other individual that he obviously had nothing of value to contribute.
“Captain,” the young officer interrupted, “I really do need to talk to you.” His voice remained calm and unexpressive, in direct opposition to the harried expression on his face.
“Wally,” Newell responded irritably, glancing quickly in his direction for the first time, “perhaps you don’t understand. Let me try this in English,” he explained acidly. “We have a mission. There is a Soviet boomer to port that needs to be sunk, and she may have a watch dog guarding her.”
“Should I explain my problem right here?” They were standing alongside the periscope. Wally’s voice was a monotone. “It concerns us all anyway.” He wasn’t about to be put off.
Newell, one ear cocked, took a few steps in the opposite direction, trying to hear Steve Thompson’s voice from sonar. He couldn’t quite make out what was going on in there, but it was something new and he was curious. Snyder was only serving as an irritant. “Yeah, go ahead,” was the eventual response.
“We have no satellite communications, Captain.” He waited for a response before continuing. “We raised the antenna about forty-five minutes ago during our regular comm period and there was nothing … absolutely nothing.”
He had gained Wayne Newell’s attention. The captain’s eyes were riveted on his own.
“That’s right, sir. Zip … zero … squat….” His voice remained totally devoid of expression. Only his eyes now revealed the stricken look of a man who has known absolute fear. He had just imagined the world totally devastated, barren, devoid of….