Buck was still watching through the periscope. “Looks good, Commodore,” he said. “I’ll drop the ’scope at eighty feet.”
“Eighty-five feet,” said Clancy. “Rising steady. Zero bubble. Eighty-two feet. Eighty-one. Eighty feet.”
“Down ’scope,” said Buck, folding up the handles. The quartermaster on watch hit the periscope hoist control lever, and the precious instrument dropped into its well. “It looked about ready to hit the ice,” said Buck with a grin, “but I knew we had at least ten feet of gravy. It was kind of scary, though. Busting the ’scope against the bottom side of the ice would be a little hard to explain back in New London.”
Rich’s answering smile was testimony to his full appreciation of the situation, as well as his confidence in Buck.
“Seventy-five feet,” said Clancy. “She’s going up a little faster, now.” Perhaps a little more air had been used than absolutely necessary. The air bubbles in Manta’s ballast tanks would expand with the reduced pressure due to decreasing depth, and their resulting buoyant volume would increase. Simultaneously, the reduced salinity would have a contrary effect. Balancing the two opposing factors was a nice exercise in judgment.
“We’ll hit the ice at around fifty feet,” said Buck. “With six feet, maybe more, to break through, we’ll feel it. It’ll be a pretty solid jolt.”
Tom Clancy was calling out the depths. “Sixty-five feet,” he said. “Sixty feet.”
“Rig in bow planes,” ordered Buck. Unlike the Cushing, whose sailplanes could not be rigged in and consequently had been designed to elevate to ninety degrees and slice through the ice as the ship came up, Manta had the older design of bow planes in the forward superstructure which were always housed when the ship was on the surface. Were the entire superstructure of the submarine to break through the ice, a distinct possibility if its resistance proved to be less than expected, the planes would almost surely be damaged if they were rigged out and struck the underside of the ice flat.
“Bow planes rigged in,” reported McClosky.
“Fifty-five feet,” said Tom Clancy. “Fifty-four. Fifty-three. Fifty-two. Fifty-one. Fifty feet!”
Crunch! A tremendous washboiler sound of suddenly stressed metal. Manta’s deck seemed to drop away from them, her sturdy hull twanging, the myriad gauge dials in the control room vibrating in jangled disharmony. There was squeaking and moaning of steel girders, a heavy scraping noise, the sound of huge fingernails scraping a rough surface.
“Fifty feet,” said Clancy, reading from the large-scale depth indicator on the diving stand. “Fifty feet … just under fifty now … she’s going on up now … forty-nine and three-quarters … forty-nine, forty-eight … she’s moving right on up now, Captain. Forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five. Top of the sail is through, sir. Permission to blow all ballast?”
Buck, who with Rich had been following Clancy’s depth reports on the small-scale depth gauge in the periscope station, was hastily putting on cold-weather gear. “Blow all ballast!” he ordered, echoing Clancy’s request. “Let me know when the upper hatch is clear.”
“No way I can tell you that for sure, Skipper,” said Clancy with a grin of satisfaction. “We could have scooped up a tubful of ice on the bridge. It could be packed tight. I’ll tell you when it’s out of water, though.”
“Are all diving officers as persnickety on details as mine?” Buck asked Rich with a relieved grin of his own. Successful passage of Manta’s first test in the Arctic ice had infected him too.
“I sure don’t know as to that,” answered Richardson with mock gravity, “but I can remember a certain torpedo officer who was every bit as persnickety. How he ever got to be skipper of a nuclear boat I’ll never figure out!”
“Now, Commodore, you please be quiet about that pore ole nuke skipper, you hear? Can’t have my boys getting the wrong idea, you know!” The success of the moment was to be savored, even though fleetingly. Buck adjusted his face mask, spoke hurriedly to Jerry Abbott, stepped to the ladder leading into the hatch trunk, squeezed his bulky garments through the opening, began to climb through the lower hatch.
“Skipper,” said Buck savagely, “do you know how much good useful time we’ve wasted getting that damn message off?”
“I know.”
“Just about a full day. More than twenty hours! First we couldn’t find a thin place to break through. Then when we finally got up, there was so much ice driven down into the openings on the top of the sail that the antenna couldn’t be raised. But before we could get someone out there to work on it, we had about an hour’s chopping of ice on the bridge to clear away that huge chunk of ice on top of the sail so that a man could even reach the place. Then, when finally we got the antenna up, we couldn’t get anyone to answer our call-up. I got so cold waiting up there I couldn’t take it anymore and had to send for Jerry to take over. You’d have thought ComSubLant or somebody would have had every shore station in our whole system alerted!”
“It probably wasn’t ComSubLant’s fault, Buck. Radio conditions were bad, that’s all. Probably because the sun’s above the horizon now.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his fault. But then when we finally got Radio Guam to answer — think about that one, Guam! — they said we’d have to wait with our message because it didn’t have enough priority!”
“That was our own fault. We should have raised Keith’s priority. We did, after we got the word.”
“Well, okay. But we shouldn’t have had to do it. If Keith’s message was so important, better arrangements should have been made to get it by those who wanted it. Anyway, after three more hours fiddling around poking up through the ice like a damn black lighthouse, beating our brains out on the radio, sending repeats over and over again, finally we get the receipt and can go back down and begin what we came up here for.”
“I don’t blame you for feeling frustrated, Buck,” said Rich. “I feel the same way. I tried to argue Admiral Donaldson out of making us do this, but I couldn’t. It was a JCS order. Anyway, now it’s done. They’ve got their message, and we’re free to do our stuff.”
“I suppose I should look at it that way too,” said Buck morosely, “but I’ll sure feel better after we’ve got the Cushing out of this place. Whatever goes wrong I’ll blame on this delay, I know that.”
15
“Keith,” said Richardson over the UQC, speaking softly with the transmitter set at minimum gain, “do you have our dispatch about towing procedure? Any questions? Before trying the hookup we want to look you over through the periscope. What is your heading and exact depth, and where’s your anchor?” The words reverberated out along the carrier wave, could be heard dying in the distance.