The Cushing had not yet been quite lined up with the frozen lead when the collision took place. Keith had been maneuvering with both his main power and the auxiliary “outboard motor,” the retractable emergency electric propulsion motor, when the impact came. It shoved the huge submarine ahead and sideways and changed her heading thirty degrees, by chance positioning her almost exactly as Keith had wanted her. He seized the opportunity, brought her the rest of the way up against the frozen surface, then began blowing his main ballast tanks.
Cushing’s sail, specially reinforced to take the pressure, dug into the ice above and broke through with a great creaking and groaning of stressed steel, carrying a big chunk of ice “frosting” atop the black, rectangular-appearing structure. Her sailplanes, turned to a vertical position, sliced through the ice neatly and almost noiselessly on each side. Aft, the topside rudder, apparently undamaged, thrust through also, like a distant sentinel. Keith stopped blowing before the submarine was lightened sufficiently for her entire body to heave up the ice under which it lay. The three or four feet of undisturbed ice would conceal the big black hull from surface or air observation, while the narrow crevasse into which he had brought her would tend to protect her from detection underwater, should the other submarine find its way back to the place of the collision. It was almost like an underwater garage. Only the bottom portion of the missile submarine’s hull would project below, visible, to be sure, to any submarine coming close enough to inspect through its periscope, but surely invisible to any sonar search. Above the ice blanket, radar might possibly distinguish the sharper outline of Cushing’s sail from the many rough protuberances of the ice field, but the greatest danger of detection was visual. That black rectangle and its smaller satellite, the rudder, could be seen for miles.
Keith hesitated a moment to weigh the priorities. There was something he must do before clambering out on the submarine’s bridge and thence to the ice. There would be some delay, anyway, while a hastily organized working party hacked away with axes and crowbars at the huge, dripping ice cakes filling the bridge cavity. As soon as this was done they would move immediately to the area of the ship’s retractable antennas and clear them for hoisting. Ten or fifteen minutes, at minimum, would elapse before Cushing’s radio room could begin to transmit the message he and Jim Hanson had laboriously prepared.
Encryption had been completed only an hour or so ago, immediately after the decision that this fourth area of thin ice, frozen over as it was, was likely to be as satisfactory as any Cushing would find at this time of year. A message of some kind was overdue anyway. But the few minutes of delay before it could be sent were long enough to make a quick change to report the collision. It should be possible to do this without reencrypting the entire message. Howie Trumbull would be able to take care of it.
In only one thing were Richardson and Williams wrong in their evaluation of what had gone on aboard the Cushing. Keith was not in the radio room while his first message was being sent. He had handed the quickly revised text to Trumbull and then hurried to the bridge, donning on the run a heavy hooded parka, equally heavy wool trousers and thick boots.
The hatch trunk leading to the bridge was mercifully protected by the rounded forward portion of the sail, so that there was at least some transition from the temperature inside the submarine to that of the winter Arctic. His lungs nevertheless felt as though he had suddenly drawn in a shaft of solid ice. Two breaths later (he had become more cautious, breathed more gently) he was on the bridge, fumbling with the cords so as to draw tighter the hood of his parka. There was a mild but freezing wind. He had forgotten mittens, was torn between exposing his hands to pull on the drawstrings and thus protect his face — already beginning to feel numb — and plunging them into his parka pockets to keep his rapidly stiffening fingers from freezing. He kept his head below the oval cockpit, turned his back to the wind, drew up and knotted the drawstrings, finally shoved his hands into the grateful warmth of the pockets. There he found the pair of mittens some forward-thinking parka custodian had placed in them, drew them on, and immediately shoved his mittened hands under his armpits.
It was much easier to look to leeward, but he resolutely forced himself to survey the entire horizon. The binoculars he held to his face were some protection. The month of March was at midpassage. The vernal equinox was still a week away, and the sun had not yet broken above the horizon. Instead, it traveled unceasingly around through 360 degrees, out of sight, its location revealed by a spot of extreme brightness from which rays of sunlight, broken by unseen clouds, streamed upward. The entire Arctic was a rapidly lightening semitwilight zone. This close to the North Pole, the year was divided into only the dark period, the twilight, and the daylight. In Cushing’s location, within 200 miles of the Pole, the nearest equivalent of “night” was when the sun was directly across the Pole, thus farthest below the horizon. In navigation parlance, the sun “dipped” when it was due north, and came nearest to the horizon when it was due south. On the twenty-first day of June, when the sun was at its most northern point, to an observer exactly at the Pole it would be only about twenty-three degrees twenty-seven minutes above the horizon — and would appear to travel completely around him at that elevation during the day’s official twenty-four hours.
There had as yet been no perceptible warming of the Arctic wastes. Winter still had the area in its grip. The temperature topside, according to a thermometer which some quartermaster had thoughtfully placed in an angle-iron recess on the bridge before laying about with a crowbar, was a minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. From somewhere Keith recalled that this point, on the Centigrade scale, also read minus forty, the only place where the two coincided. Keith had lost sensation in his cheeks. Frostbite must be near. A few feet away, four men, garbed as he was, were demolishing the last of the ice on the rounded, ice-reinforced top of Cushing’s sail. They had been topside far longer than he. They must be nearly frozen. The unnatural stiffness of their features and the clumsiness of their movements showed it.
One thing he could do for them, for morale in general. It might even bring volunteers for any similar jobs. He fumbled for the button controlling the bridge speaker, pressed it with his knuckle through the thick wool-and-leather mittens, spoke into it. “Control, this is the captain. The ice-chopping crew is finished and coming below. Tell the doctor to issue them a ration of medicinal spirits first thing. Also to everyone else coming down from a topside detail. It’s cold up here. Be sure all hands coming topside wear face masks and full cold-weather gear.” He released the button, pressed it again. “I’m going out on the ice,” he said. “Send me a face mask, and keep a watch on me through the periscope.”