A regular mooring line already had been led from the Manta across the Cushing’s bow to one of the bitts in the tender’s side. By heaving in with her bow capstan, Manta had eased her stern clear, so that Cushing’s rounded belly would not brush against her vulnerable inboard propeller. Two sailors with coiled heaving lines appeared on Manta’s forecastle, two more on deck aft of her sail. Their presence was precautionary; they would probably not be needed. Rich glanced at his watch. It was precisely ten a.m., the agreed-on time for getting underway. Both Keith and Buck had grown up with Rich’s method of line handling, to pass all routine orders by telephone to the various stations. Except in emergency, there would be no frantic-sounding shouts from the bridge of either ship. Evolutions would be done quietly, in virtual silence, the better to be heard if voice commands became necessary. Watching, Richardson realized that these two skippers whom he had known so long were maneuvering their ships almost as though an extension of himself were doing it. In effect, they were extensions of himself, for he had trained them. And there was another ingredient, in a way much like the war days — and suddenly the old tense miasma enveloped him in clammy vapors: a gut feeling of unspoken anxiety. The ship getting underway was going on a special mission, into danger above and beyond that usually associated with a submarine voyage. As in the war years, she might, indeed, never return.
Richardson’s reverie was broken by the blast of a foghorn. One long blast: the Cushing was backing. Water surged gently up from abaft her rudder, swept forward until it lapped the rounded hull where it emerged from the water. The remaining lines attaching the departing submarine to the Proteus on her port hand and the Manta on her starboard were cast loose, swiftly hauled in: Cushing’s, which had held her alongside Proteus, to be quickly stowed in her deck lockers; Manta’s to be merely kept on deck in readiness to be put over to the tender as soon as the missile submarine was clear. Movement was now evident. Cushing’s sail was slowly drawing aft. As it passed clear, heaving lines were flung down from the tender to land their weighted ends on Manta’s deck. At first they were merely hand-held until danger had passed of inadvertently snagging someone or something on the departing Cushing. As soon as she was clear they were successively attached to Manta’s mooring lines and the lines dropped into the water, so that unseen hands on board the tender could haul them in. By the time Cushing’s bow had passed from between the ships the space between Proteus and Manta was already spanned by four mooring lines. Two of them, powered by capstans on Manta’s bow and stern, were slowly hauling her and her immobile sister, Swordfish, across the intervening water preparatory to reestablishing the cobweb of lines and communications which had been broken only minutes before.
Now clear in the Thames River, Cushing had the problem of turning around in the relatively narrow channel. Of a later design than Manta, Cushing had only a single propeller, necessarily behind the rudder instead of ahead, as in the more conventional configuration. She had been able to turn slightly while backing, now lay almost exactly across the channel. Backing and filling was possible with a smaller ship, and could also be done with Cushing’s ponderous bulk and great length, but there was an easier solution at hand. The tug carried out its second mission of the morning by putting its heavily fendered nose against the missile submarine’s bow and pushing it downstream. After a suitable interval, screw turbulence showed astern, the topside section of the Cushing’s rudder indicated it had gone to full left, and the sleek whale-shaped form began to gather headway.
There was a wave from the departing submarine’s bridge. Richardson could not from the distance identify who this was, but it must be Keith. He waved back. Someone on the Manta’s bridge did the same. The tiny microcosm of the world which she and her crew constituted was now cut off, an entity all its own, a totally independent spaceship coursing toward the opening vastness, leaving behind the infrastructure that had created her and sent her forth. Save for the vital linkage of the radio, from this moment the Cushing and her crew were alone. The world was water, the land merely markings on a chart to be avoided as her navigators plotted the directions and distances she was to go.
Richardson stood watching until the submarine had passed Southwest Ledge lighthouse, at the mouth of the Thames River, and was lost to view. Disquietude possessed him as he finally turned to reenter his quarters. This was certainly not the first time he had watched a departing ship until she was out of sight, nor the first time he had thought of the ridiculous old nautical adage that doing so brought bad luck. Why, then, did it rest like a weight in his mind?
Buck Williams’ normal combination of jocular seriousness was for once totally absent. He was seated facing Richardson in the Commodore’s Office on board the Proteus, fingers holding the porcelain handle of a cup of black coffee in one hand, its saucer palmed in the other. There was a look of honest bewilderment on his features.
“What I can’t understand,” he was saying, “is the priorities. The Manta’s a good boat. We don’t need much of a refit. I know you couldn’t give us priority until the Cushing got underway, and even though Keith never said a word I’ve got a pretty good idea of why. But that was three days ago. What’s holding things up now? We can easily finish our refit in the ten days we have left alongside. All we need from the tender is a little help with some of the bigger jobs. The Proteus can do it with her elbow.”
“I know, Buck,” said Richardson.
“That’s what I can’t understand. Yesterday the squadron engineer said he didn’t know when we’d have all our work done, but then he clammed up and wouldn’t talk. I was fixing to come up here anyway when you sent for me. We’ve never failed a commitment yet. We’re all keyed up to get into that North Atlantic barrier exercise we’re scheduled for. It’s the first time the Iceland-Faeroe barrier will have nukes in it, and I want to show what we can do!”
Richardson was looking steadily at Buck, listening. Williams sensed he might be getting through to him, warmed to his topic. “We can make a whale of a difference,” he said. “Our assignment is to be the barrier backup, sort of like a safety man on football defense. The diesel boats in the barrier will be vectoring us to find the transitors. It will be easy to find the diesel transitors — they’ll have to snorkel and that’s when we’ll get them — but nailing the old Seawolf is going to be a problem, even if she is a mite noisy for these days.”
“How do you propose to do it?” Richardson’s eyes had not wavered. There was an expression of ineffable sorrow on his face, something behind the shadow in his eyes that could not be stated. But Buck could not be sure, was in any case so wrapped up in his schemes that the question was irresistible.
“Radio communication between barrier submarines has always been the big problem, and now that we’re in it the problem will be bigger. When you’re down listening below the thermal layer you can’t be at periscope depth transmitting information. So you have to break off listening and come up to where you can get a transmitting antenna out of water. By the time you’ve gone through all the procedural business to get a message off, half the time your contact is gone when you get back down there. It isn’t so bad with snorkelers, mainly because they have to move so slowly. But the Seawolf is as fast as we are. She’s a different story altogether. Ultimately we’re going to have to figure out a better way to make tactical contact reports. Maybe by releasing something through our signal ejector that floats up and broadcasts a taped message. Right now, though, we’ve been working on Keith’s old idea.”