Richardson broke the silence. “Buck, this is a real emergency! I’d call Norfolk right away, but there’s only a duty officer and a communication watch on, and anyway they’ll not have Keith’s message decoded yet. How quick can you pull your ship together and get out of here?”
“Tomorrow, like I said. But we’re not on any emergency basis.”
“Go down right now and check the critical items. Be back here in an hour. We can have a quick breakfast while we talk it over and get ready to phone Norfolk. Put your crew under emergency notice, but don’t tell anyone why. I’ll see what the Proteus can do to speed up getting the two towing rigs ready. By that time they’ll have decoded the message and rushed it to Admiral Murphy, and he’ll be anxious to talk to us and Washington both.”
Reveille was sounding aboard the Proteus as they locked the steel door of the coding room behind them.
11
There had been no warning whatever of the presence of another submarine, or anything else, for that matter, until too late to avoid. It must have been a submarine, running silent, close to the underside of the ice. Nothing else could have produced the sudden, disconcerting heave of Cushing’s big hull, the metallic grinding sound as her propeller mangled its seven exotically shaped blades into twisted bronze, the shriek of tortured bearings in her engineroom as the propeller shaft bowed in the middle and then returned to normal. The initial shock had thrown the big missile submarine heavily to starboard. It was followed by a series of smaller, more scraping blows. The Cushing heaved upward from the stern, and suddenly it was over, the noise gone, leaving only reverberations in the water and slow-growing appreciation of disaster.
An inspection of the turbine mounts and the propeller-shaft steady bearing, carefully conducted later, confirmed that these massive mechanisms had been displaced as much as half an inch, and had then returned to their normal positions. The findings had been greeted with incredulity by Cushing’s engineer officer, Curt Taylor, and by all the enginemen and machinists who had made the measurements; but the proof was there, marks in the machinery foundations themselves. Only Keith, when he saw them with his own eyes, could accept the undisputable evidence. Some years previous he had viewed remote-control movies in slow motion of what actually happened when a sister ship of the old Eel had been subjected to a test depth charging. The veteran hulk had been depth charged to destruction, but the cameras, specially protected, had been brought back by divers who had carefully entered the shattered and flooded old hull after it was all over.
Keith and the other viewers of the film had had it run several times, at both fast and slow speeds, before they could believe what they saw: steel forgings stretching like rubber, snapping back to their original configurations; pieces of heavy equipment moving radically, sometimes as much as a foot or more, in relation to each other; more slender rods and pipes bending and springing like so many thin rubber bands, and then, after the shock, looking as if nothing had happened — except for a cloud of paint particles which had flaked off and, for several seconds, floated to the deck amid the dust and trash also flung there.
Any theory that vibration communicated to the camera itself could have been responsible for what the films showed was disproved by the fact that the objects in view moved in disparate directions, some one way and some another. Some of them, less securely fastened, continued to vibrate for several perceptible, rapidly diminishing, cycles. In succeeding and more powerful charges some were broken clean, or their securings sheared off. At the end, there was the horrendous flooding entry of white water as the lethal charge finally breached the stout old hull. Keith and the other wartime submariners present had sat several seconds in silence after the film was over. There had been no noise, no accompanying crash of depth charges, no terror or pain inflicted. But Keith, and the others, had needed none. The view of the tortured machinery had been enough. Each had his own memories of depth chargings, and some, like Keith, would always carry in their minds the knowledge that what they had just witnessed, in the safe confines of one of the Pentagon’s movie auditoriums, might have been the last thing seen on earth by their old friends and shipmates.
After the films Keith no longer wondered why it was that Eel’s hull had appeared to whip during depth charging, how it could be that the main engines — those huge locomotive-type diesels — had seemed to bounce convulsively on their bed plates. They had, even though no one would believe it at the time. The pictures in slow motion, taken at ten times normal film speed, demonstrated that his instantaneous impressions during the war — and those of others who had seen similar things — had not been wrong. They had not been hallucinations due to stress. These extraordinary things had actually happened.
Irrefutably it had happened to the William B. Cushing herself, even though the shock had been one of collision, not nearby explosion. It took the calm evaluation of all the evidence to reach the inescapable conclusion. This amount of damage could only have happened by collision with another steel hull — and at some speed.
Keith had been maneuvering his ship slowly, positioning her under the most promising frozen-over opening in the ice found so far. Originally it had been a long crack, or lead, in the ice floe. Instead of being closed by action of the wind and ocean currents it had remained open, perhaps even widened slightly, while the somewhat less saline water at the surface froze into a permanent bridge over the opening. The double echo trace on Cushing’s upward-beamed fathometer indicated the thickness as somewhere between three and four feet. But the crack was narrow, less than one hundred feet in width, rimmed by old ice floes twenty feet thick or more. Seen from below, it was in shape a ravine in an otherwise fairly smooth, inverted plain of ice.
In order to break through the thin ice cover it was first necessary to position the bulbous 420-foot Cushing lengthwise between the two downward-projecting, near vertical ice cliffs on either side of the lead, bring her up gently and carefully, exactly midway in the thin spot. Keith, at Cushing’s control station, knew he was not yet at a depth shallow enough to strike the ice. His first, instantaneous reaction was that there must have been an unnoticed, disastrously deep ice pinnacle — the bottom of an unseen berg embedded in the ice floe — against which Cushing’s propeller, instantly stopped but not until it had turned half a dozen revolutions against whatever it was that she had struck, had received considerable damage.
But sonar, which had continuously been reporting all clear, had suddenly announced strange propeller noises dead astern in the baffles, and close aboard. Many crew members later reported having heard them throughout the hull at the time of the collision, with or without earphones, along with a cacophony of machinery noises from some other ship. The report from sonar was simultaneous with a tremendous upward heave aft which could only have resulted from something big passing underneath. Keith had just lowered his periscope, had been watching the underside of the ice through his controllable TV camera and its paired searchlights. Hurriedly he swiveled it around to extreme horizontal train, saw bubbles and turbulent water rising around his own ship’s hull.
The foreign submarine must have been traveling recklessly fast so close to the undersurface of the ice. She must surely be nuclear-powered, and she must have been running in the silent mode (which might indicate knowledge that an American submarine was in the vicinity). Coming from astern and at a somewhat greater depth, she had struck the Cushing right aft on a slightly divergent heading and had bumped some distance along her bottom before breaking clear. Why sonar had not previously given some warning would bear investigation, both as to Cushing’s own sonar and the sonar conditions themselves, but Keith was well aware of the vagaries of underwater sound transmission under the best and most usual of conditions, particularly astern, where there was a masking effect from one’s own machinery and propeller. Here in the Arctic, under bumpy, fissured ice floating on a layer of brackish water, there was every opportunity for sound reception to be erratic.