Keith turned the paper over. Although Peggy had digressed into a discussion of the idyllic joys of a permanent home, the flower and vegetable garden she proposed to start (she could have done that anywhere!) and the general peace and contentment long-term permanence seemed to spell for her, his brow remained furrowed. The letter was four pages long, closely written on two sheets of paper. Midway through page three his frown deepened.
It’s different with someone like Laura Richardson, Nancy Dulany or Cindy Williams, you know. All three of their husbands are graduates of the Naval Academy, and that means that the Navy will look out after them. You’re not. Someday the Navy is just going to drop you when you least expect it. I’ve been seeing quite a bit of Laura lately, as I told you. Sometimes I even make up excuses to go by, even if she sometimes seems so smug because of her husband. Sometimes I think he’s the one talking to me instead of her. I know he was your former skipper and all that, and you think the sun rises and sets in him. So does she, even though she was married once before and she must have heard of that Joan person he had the wartime fling with.
She never has said much about the war, but I’ll just bet she knows about Joan. One time it nearly came up but somehow she sidestepped it, and I didn’t have the nerve to come back to it. Laura is a pretty cool number, not like Cindy Williams. Cindy is just a sweet kid. I wonder if Laura’s heard that story going the rounds about how maybe the Commodore’s old friend, Joe Blunt, didn’t die of a tumor on board the Eel after all. We’ve talked about this, and I know you don’t believe it, but a lot more people are talking about it now than before. The way I hear it now is that somebody got to him in the middle of that depth charging when you all must have been half crazy anyway, and the Navy just covered it up with that business about his dying from a brain tumor.
Keith clenched his fist, slammed the opened desk top in front of him with it as he turned to the last page of the letter.
She probably has heard it, too — like I said, she’s a cool number — but it doesn’t seem to faze her a bit. Even so, I like her. Maybe I can get her to unbend a little bit while you’re away. It would be interesting.
There was a little more to the letter but Keith hardly saw it. “Stay away from Laura, Peggy,” he muttered under his breath. It was like her to say nothing to him of all these thoughts she had been having, to hold them within her and then lay them all out when he was unable to answer, unable to prevent her from doing whatever it was she had in mind to do about it. Cushing was already well at sea, deeply submerged. In emergency he could transmit a message, but not about something like this. Even if he could send Peggy a message, what would he say? He felt himself trapped, powerless, his comfort and security at home suddenly destroyed, or, at least, endangered. “Damn Peggy anyway!”
Running deep beneath the surface, her main coolant pumps at half speed, U.S.S. William B. Cushing effortlessly put 360 nautical miles behind her per day. She would make a landfall at Spitsbergen — if indeed a “landfall” was the proper terminology — for the latest report of ice reconnaissance by air had placed the edge of the late winter ice pack well to the south of that frosty land, and the confirmation of position would have to be by sonar and fathometer. Even this, while good conservative practice, was probably of little real use compared to the phenomenal accuracy and dependability of the two inertial navigation sets with which the Cushing was equipped. After Spitsbergen, at the reduced speed required by the operation order upon going under the ice, the North Pole would be some four days’ steaming away.
Normally, the ice would be only a few feet thick at the edge of the pack, gradually — but fairly rapidly — increasing to the average winter thickness of about twenty feet. An iceberg, however, could be much deeper. Granted, bergs are not very apt to be encountered in the pack ice, the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. Icebergs come from glaciers on Greenland, which break off when the glacier hits the sea. As they slowly drift southward, they can be a fantastic hazard to navigation until they have slowly melted into the sea. Generally they stay close to the shore of Greenland, but occasionally an errant one may unexpectedly be caught, like ships of bygone years, in the middle of the ice pack. There, its behavior would be controlled by the circular motion of the drifting ice in the Arctic basin rather than the southbound currents which affect most of them, and it would be carried down into the Atlantic Ocean with the ice pack.
Encountering an iceberg at sea in northern latitudes, or in the ice pack, was, Keith knew, of far greater concern than encountering another submarine. For one thing, it would make no noise, unless wind or sea conditions were heavy, causing it to grind against surrounding pack ice. It would simply lie there, a stone-hard cliff hundreds of feet in depth, hanging in the midst of watery space like a gigantic trap for an unwary submarine. Keith saw to it that several hours a day were spent studying the ice patrol reports and the reference material with which he had been provided. Although the packet was a thick one, he took the time to read it all twice, and hold wardroom seminars in addition.
Contrary to popular belief, a submarine crew underway is at least as busy as the crew of any other type of ship. In the first place, the ability to submerge makes the submarine infinitely more complicated than any surface ship; and in the second, the submarine crew is smaller, for her very nature requires the minimum practicable crew, in the most confined of quarters. While underway, everyone except the captain, executive officer, ship’s doctor and the cooks stands two four-hour watches per day. Regular drills, exercises in the many evolutions of which the ship must remain capable, come out of the off-watch time of two-thirds of the ship’s company. So do cleaning the ship, routine ship’s work, repairs to machinery or — the more usual case — regular maintenance. The idea that a submarine crew finds time hanging heavy on its hands while their ship drives her way submerged across an ocean or halfway around the world is unrealistic. A submarine does not even float without attention, like an ordinary ship, but maintains a specific depth at the will of her masters. The days pass swiftly. The pressure of day-to-day routine is inescapable. Keith made the most of the time he had.
The ice pack appeared on schedule. Keith had instructed Jim Hanson to adjust speed in order to reach it during the daylight hours. At the proper time he brought the ship to periscope depth so that those of the crew who were interested could look at it through the spare periscope while the Cushing approached at slow speed. He himself spent long minutes inspecting the thin white line which appeared on the horizon just at noontime, interspersing his own looks with letting an eager sailor have a turn. Cushing’s other periscope had been turned over to the crew entirely, but it soon was apparent that a single ’scope could not suffice for everyone to have the long look he obviously wanted. And Keith had to admit to himself that he was in truth exercising a skipper’s privilege with the other, that a major portion of his own interest was purely personal curiosity.