“How far?” said Keith. He reached his side with a huge leap up the metal steps, aided by the handrail on either side.
“On the horizon.”
“Is it coming this way?”
“Couldn’t tell. It wasn’t coming right at us. Yet, anyway.”
“Could you see any markings?”
“Too far.”
With a decisive movement, Keith shoved the hydraulic control handle, started the periscope up. “I’ll have to take a look,” he muttered to Hanson as the shiny tube began to rise. “It can’t be one of ours, though. Do we have anyone topside?”
“Negative,” said Hanson. “We’re standing lookout watch on the periscope. All hatches are shut.”
“Good,” said Keith as the periscope handles appeared smoothly out of the periscope well. He snapped them down, hooked his right elbow over one handle, his left hand on the other, applied his face to the rubber guard around the eyepiece. “We can’t dive out of this hole we’re in until we know if we have propulsion,” he said as he began swinging the tall, thin instrument. “We’ll never get back to it, and we sure won’t be able to look around for another one. Their boat must have some problems, too. It must have taken a lot of damage, considering how hard he hit us.”
“You think they’re looking for him?” Hanson asked the question in a low voice, standing alongside Keith as he began swiftly rotating the periscope.
“Probably.” Keith answered without taking his eye from the eyepiece, leaning to his left as he let the weight of his body help spin the periscope. He stopped suddenly, straightened up slightly, began swiftly manipulating the periscope controls. Then, very rapidly, he spun the instrument around twice, stopped on the same bearing, looked for a long instant and flipped up the handles.
Jim Hanson, his hand on the control handle, pulled it toward him. “What do you see?” he asked as the periscope dropped away.
“There’s three planes out there circling around something.”
“How far?”
“On the horizon. Maybe a little beyond. Probably about where you saw the first one.”
“You think they’re looking for the boat that hit us?”
“That would be pretty fast work. Could be, I s’pose, but I’d be a little surprised if they’re out looking for him this soon. We’ve not even got an answer to our message yet.”
“Could you make out the markings?”
“No. But I’m glad we had enough white paint to cover everything that came up through the ice. I’m not too anxious for them to find us. Not yet, anyway, especially if they’re out here for some other reason.” Keith paused. “Listen,” he resumed, “I don’t want to use the periscope any more than we can help. It increases the chances they’ll spot us on their radar. But we’ve got to keep a watch on them. So there’ll have to be a topside lookout. Get a watch set up right away. He’ll need heavy-weather gear, and a heater in the bridge cockpit. Also, have him keep a white sheet or tablecloth wrapped around his head and upper body.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Hanson.
Keith was grateful for the reversion to official language. Jim Hanson’s questions had begun to be uncomfortable. Although Jim was his most trusted subordinate, he had known him only during the year or so of the ship’s precommissioning and training period. Such questions Keith might have asked of Rich, as his executive officer, because the relationship had been going on so much longer and was so much deeper. Or, they might have been required during combat, when one of an exec’s duties was to inform himself of everything his commanding officer knew and thought. Keith’s eyes followed Jim as he left the periscope platform to see about organizing the lookout watch. It was the first time he could recall having been even mildly displeased with him.
And then the idea introduced itself that, for Jim, it was the nearest thing yet to a combat situation. Jim was doing exactly what Keith had done, many times before. The difference was in the nature of the antagonist. Jim’s questions, in fact, were nearly the same ones Keith had asked of Rich. And suddenly Keith wondered why he had had such feelings in the first place. Could it, perchance, be the result of his own inadequacies? For he could already feel, growing within him, still held rigidly beneath the level of conscious recognition, the dread of what he was going to discover when at last the propeller could be inspected.
With the secondary propulsion system gone and the main propulsion out of commission, either with propeller blades crumpled or the shaft so far out of line that it could not be used, there would be no way of moving the Cushing. He and his ship and crew were trapped in the Arctic, as surely as those old wooden whaling ships! He dared not even drop out of the frozen lead in which he had surfaced, for fear of not being able to return to it!
Drafting the second message had been done with speed and urgency, yet it had taken well over an hour. And there were many discarded pieces of paper, carefully collected by Trumbull for destruction by burning. This process, too, reminded Keith of the many wartime moments when he had participated in the same thing: the drafting and redrafting; the poring over words and phrases; the painstaking distillation of every drop of meaning, accidental, possible or intended; the equally painstaking concern over how every word would — or could — be interpreted by the recipients. The effort to compress as much meaning as possible into the fewest words, knowing they would be subjected to the same process by those to whom addressed, and by many others besides.
After careful observation of the aircraft in the distance, Keith decided they were engaged in some activity centered in the vicinity where he had first seen them, not searching the area in general. There was, however, at least one plane continuously in the air, or so it seemed, for there had been only a few periods of any length during which none was visible. During the first one, a work party managed to chop a small hole in the ice behind the rudder and confirmed, from what they could see through the clear, still water, that the propeller had been badly damaged. But reappearance of a plane, albeit still on the horizon, caused Keith to countermand dispatch of the diver — the man had already gone to the bridge in his rubber suit and breathing gear — and hurriedly call back his men from the ice. Thereafter he had been more cautious. An hour later he had progressed no farther than thinking about sending out a new group when another aircraft sighting nullified the idea once more.
Timing of the second message had been exactly as Rich and Buck had surmised, planned so that it could go out while there was the best chance of reception on the east coast of the United States. The certainty that his first message must have galvanized his friends into tense attention awaiting his second had even translated into the likelihood they would try to intercept it direct, in Proteus’ radio room. And, just as Rich and Buck guessed, Keith was in his own radio room, earphones plugged into the circuit, while his second message was being sent out. There had been a perceptible thrill as he recognized the sudden, but not totally unexpected, interposition of a new station on the circuit transmitting his own wolfpack code.
Setting up the single side-band radio was swiftly done. There was a rush of sibilant reverberation as the initial transmissions were made. Chief Radioman Melson had his fingers on the fine-tuning dial, rotated it ever so slowly. Suddenly, as though it were from a ship close aboard, instead of thousands of miles away, Richardson’s voice boomed over the radio room loudspeaker. “Buck is here, too… How are you, old man?” There was a nuance of meaning in the words deeper than the mere formalities. In a guarded sort of way Richardson was asking how Keith — and his ship — really were.
Keith had not thought about security. The order to go to voice communication was sufficient, so far as he was concerned, and only now, sensing Richardson’s own reticence at speaking out plainly, did the possibility of interception by unwanted listeners cross his mind. They would need special equipment, able to monitor the entire frequency spectrum, but undeniably it could be done if the need had been anticipated.