A smile of relief on Peggy’s face, or was it one of gratification? More worrisome, Cindy gave her a startled look. But there was no turning back.
“Our three men served together during the war. That’s why Rich is out with Buck right now. This is all very secret information” (God forgive her!) “and I shouldn’t be telling anyone, but you two are married to the two skippers involved, and if anyone has a right to know, you do. Anyway, that’s why all the mystery. Please don’t say a word about this to anyone. Anyone at all. You’ve got to keep it to yourselves, because I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone either. Nobody knows what’s really going on” (this, at least, was completely true) “but you can bet on one sure thing. Before long, Buck and Rich and the Manta will be there too!”
Cindy’s expressive eyes were turned full on her. Laura could sense the disapproval issuing from them. No doubt Cindy, too, had her own ideas about her husband’s latest mission. Perhaps Buck had told her more than Rich had told Laura. If he had, he must have sworn her to secrecy. In any case, she had kept silent. Now she would believe Laura had confirmed her surmises, or revealed what Buck had cautioned her not ever to speak of — whichever — and in the process, because Peggy would not keep quiet, had thereby increased the danger to be faced by her own husband.
No help for it. It had had to be done. Perhaps Laura could later explain it all to her privately. Cindy was saying something. Were her lips a shade more compressed than usual? Laura could not be sure. “Peggy,” Cindy said, “all of us have to be realistic. Now of all times. We’ve got to remember that our three husbands have gone through a lot together. Whatever’s going on, if Rich and Buck are in it too, you can be sure Keith could have no better help anywhere. If he had his choice, this is exactly what he would want.”
“Realistic, you say! Realistic!” The word had triggered something, the wild irrationality Laura had already sensed. “I’m the one who’s realistic! I’m sick of everything about the Navy, I tell you!” Peggy rose to her feet, face flushed, hands clenched at her sides. “I’m not part of it, and Keith’s not part of it either! It does anything it wants to you. Anything!” Her eyes were glaring, her breath came in short quick pants through reddened nostrils. “I hate it, I tell you! And I hate both of you, too! You’re both part of the clique that’s running things. You’ve had your own way too long! I know all about that patrol on the Eel when old Commodore Blunt was killed, and I know all about the Lastrada dame, too. She had a much bigger piece of Jim than you ever did, Laura, my dear. She serviced half the men on Oahu at one time or another. She had a piece of Rich, too, before you got him. She was screwing him every night for a while! There’s a lot more to that story than you know, I guess!
“And Rich should never have brought old Blunt back to Pearl Harbor in a torpedo tube. He should have dumped the body at sea, the way they do everyone else. The Navy docs tried to cover by saying he died of a brain tumor, but they never explained that broken neck he also had…”
The livid, twisted look on Peggy’s face was positively leering. Her mouth held a distorted, exulting expression. Laura stood rigid, her hand an inch from Peggy’s shoulder. For an insane instant, there was the temptation to smash her across the face with open palm and every bit of strength she possessed. Instead, she steeled herself to speak coldly, contemptuously. She pronounced each word distinctly, knowing that doing so helped her retain that shred of control which alone kept her from succumbing to the tearing outrage within her. “Peggy, that is absolutely unforgivable. There is nothing more I can do for you. You are unwelcome in my house. Please go away. Now.”
Cindy hustled Peggy to the hall closet, draped Peggy’s coat around her shoulders and threw on her own, and then, nervously but determinedly, led her out the door.
Alone at last, Laura found her hands trembling as she carried her tea tray back into the kitchen. They were trembling only partly in suppressed rage, for even though she knew she was privy to no secrets (thank God Rich had protected her) she had come perilously close to saying too much to a woman she did not trust.
14
Unlike Keith, Rich and Buck planned no ceremonial inspection of the edge of the ice cap. Manta simply remained deeply submerged and at high speed, aware of the approximate location of the southern boundary of the cap from ice patrol reports, and specifically, as she passed under it, from her upward-beamed fathometer — and went immediately from the domain of light and air to that of darkness and ice. Henceforth she would be confined to her stored oxygen and waste removal capabilities. After a final recharge of air from the surface, a regular schedule was begun of bleeding oxygen into the ship from her storage bank of compressed oxygen and eliminating carbon dioxide and the sinister carbon monoxide through absorption and burning. The daily slow depletion of oxygen, causing lassitude and discomfort during the couple of hours preceding the snorkel period when the air was changed, became a thing of the past. “We’re keeping the oxygen above twenty percent by volume, and we figure we can stay completely submerged for thirty days,” said Buck. “After that, we might have a problem. We could stretch things some by bleeding good air out of one of our compressed air banks while we’re pumping it down with our compressors into a different one.”
“You trying to teach me some new submarining, old man?” Rich grinned at Buck over their afterdinner coffee cups. “Seems to me, in the dim dark ages of the diesel boats, we used to do that to save the compressed oxygen. We had to pay for oxygen out of our ship’s quarterly allotment back then, not like now. You modern submariners don’t know what it was like, in the bad old days.”
“You go right straight to hell, Commodore. We’re doggone glad we don’t. And so are you, very respectfully, sir, and all that.” The best part of the day was at hand. The strenuous and sometimes ingenious drills were over, the air in the confined hull was sweet and invigorating, the evening movies were being set up in the wardroom and crew’s mess hall. Everything was as it should be. The entire calculations of strain on the towing gear, from initial contact to the steady-state towing phase, had been gone over. The devices themselves had both been inspected, their few moving parts lubricated, the strain gauges tested. They had suffered no deterioration from their week in the slimy cold of the stern torpedo tubes, were as ready as they could be.
To the gratification of Rich and Buck, the new settings on the reactor controls had worked out to twenty-three percent increased power, and with everything wide open the Manta had actually logged almost twenty-four knots, beyond the capability of the electronic log to measure. Speed had been computed from propeller rpm. Following the test run, however, and except for short periods during certain of the new drills, they had decided to continue at the old speed and keep the new power in reserve for use when and if the situation demanded it.
By this time, Manta’s course was due north. There were less than a thousand miles to go to reach the Cushing’s estimated position at grid Golf November two-nine. Tomorrow Buck would shift navigational plot and the inertial navigation system to the polar grid.
“We’re nearly there, Buck,” Rich said after a moment, the easy smile on his face fading slightly. “We should be making contact with Keith within forty-eight hours. I’ve got to admit the whole thing’s beginning to build up in my mind. It’s been a great trip up to now…” He paused. His face grew more serious. “I mean, it’s been really relaxing. But do you feel like a movie tonight? I sure don’t.”