Richardson had been anticipating the need for this information. “Three-four-five on the grid!” he answered.
“Make your course three-four-five, helm! — Jerry!” he barked. “Stay here on the control station and relay for me!” He returned to the sonar console. “Where’s the fish now?” he asked.
“I’ll lose it when we get it astern,” said Schultz anxiously, beads of sweat all over his face. “It’s about half a mile away right now!”
“Do we have any speed estimate on it?”
“It took about three minutes from the time he fired until he hit our decoy. That’s thirty knots, Buck!” The look on his superior’s face had never been grimmer.
“This old bucket’s never gone that fast in her life, but she’s sure going to try now!” Buck thought. He picked up the telephone. “Harry? The fish chasing us can make thirty knots. How bad do you guys want to live, back there?”
Hanging up, he said to Rich, “They won’t have to gag the safety valves, like in the old days of steam engines, because they’ll be using all the steam as fast as our two kettles back there can make it, and the pressure’s going to drop. But everything else, they’ll do. What we need, right now, is pounds of steam per minute. More pounds of steam through those steam generators than they ever made before!”
Richardson nodded quietly, as Jerry Abbott called in, “Steady on three-four-five. Depth two hundred. Speed twenty, increasing!” Incongruously, his mind traveled backward many years, back to a submarine-school qualification exercise in his first command, the old S-16. The old destroyer Semmes, acting as target, had nearly rammed the S-16. By swift action, in analogy not far removed from that just taken by Buck, he had managed to avoid the disaster. Through it all, Tex Hansen, submarine-school training officer, two years senior to Rich, had not said a word, even though his own life, too, hung in the balance. Once in a while, over the years, he had wondered how it felt to contain one’s self in such circumstances. Now he knew.
Strange that in the face of mortal danger, with total and terrible dissolution perhaps only moments away, he could feel so calm, so detached from it all. It was almost as though he were somewhere else, someone else, contemplating it, even enjoying the heightened sensation of it, but not affected by any of it at all. He had felt this way before. Very much this way. And he knew, without any doubt whatever, that Buck was experiencing precisely the same emotions, probably the same thoughts. His asides during the emergencies which had flowed upon him, one after the other, proved it.
“The fish is pinging!” Schultz murmured, sweating heavily, his shirt suddenly dark with moisture. How could he hear, with the tumultuous wash of Manta’s frantically whirling propellers exactly between his sonar head and the target-looking torpedo? It figured, of course, that if anyone could hear through all the turmoil, he could. He was the most expert, the most experienced, sonarman on board.
So the fish was pinging. It must be close, close enough for the last-stage target-searching cycle to have been activated. It would home in on the echoes, drive in with the full speed of its little motor, until fatal contact was made. What was Buck doing?
“Twenty-six knots! Increasing slowly!” called Jerry Abbott.
“Open vents! Blow main ballast! One-minute blow, wide open!” Buck’s orders reminded Rich of a time, under very similar circumstances indeed, when he had issued the identical command. Perhaps it would have the same effect.
The clank of the nearby vent opening. The noise of blowing. “Speed now twenty-seven!” said Jerry Abbott. “Still increasing very slowly!”
“It’s still pinging astern!” Schultz.
There was that tight grin on Buck’s face. “Here we go, Skipper. The last maneuver!” He leaned out of the sonar room door, called, “Right full rudder! Leave it on! Thirty degrees down angle! Make your depth nine hundred feet! All hands stand by for steep angles!”
At twenty-seven knots, the Manta pitched into the curve like an aircraft doing a spiral dive. She listed twenty degrees or more into the turn, her bow swept downward, her gyrocompass repeaters began to spin like so many tops. Rich could feel the centrifugal forces on his body, and the slippery angle of the deck beneath him. Hanging on to the motor-generator stand outside the sonar room, he heard Abbott, gripping the rail a few feet above him, say with forced calm, “Speed nineteen. Passing five hundred feet. Two complete circles.” There was a roaring somewhere in the water. Rich could sense the furiously flailing screws stirring it up in a way no submarine had ever stirred it up, spraying a screaming froth of cavitation in all directions, a veritable column of violently disturbed water, a spiral, vertical column 500 feet in total height, a corkscrew of turbulent currents, upright in the sea, tight with the tiny diameter that only a high-powered nuclear submarine could achieve, impervious to sonar, filled with its own sound and its own echoing defiance.
“Eight hundred fifty feet! Leveling off!” said Jerry.
“Rudder amidships!”
“Rudder is amidships!” cried the helmsman, throwing his weight into the effort, supporting himself against slipping by hanging on to his steering wheel, yet stopping the rudder exactly on center. Manta’s deck flattened out with a smooth snap roll.
“Nine hundred feet!” called Abbott. “Speed increasing rapidly! Twenty-one … twenty-three … twenty-seven … increasing slowly now … twenty-eight-a-half …” Relieved of the slowing effect of the hard-over rudder and planes, Manta was bouncing forward almost as if shot from a bow, rocketing through the sea depths with a reckless abandon as her powerful heart rammed the superhot pressurized water — her lifeblood — through her steam generators.
“Mark your head!” said Buck.
“Mark your head!” shouted Jerry Abbott.
“Three-zero-four!” said the helmsman.
“Three-zero-four!” reported Jerry.
“Let her go three-one-zero!” said Buck. He picked up the handset. “Maneuvering? Harry? How you doing back there?” He put it down, grinning that same tight grin. “Rich, Harry says he’s broken every operating rule old man Brighting and his engineering boys ever thought of, except one. He’s still got a working reactor. But everything’s heating up back there. Bearings and such. He can’t go on indef—”
BLAM! A loud, somewhat muffled, strangely reverberating bang. Close, but not intimately close. “All ahead one-third!” ordered Buck. “We beat it the hard way, Skipper!” He grabbed the handset again. “Harry, you did it! Cool her down gently back there, and treat her like the queen she is! May Martin Brighting live a thousand years!”
“Go to silent running, Buck! Shift to battery. Stop all machinery. NOW!”
Williams gave the order, then he demanded the customary damage reports. Midway through them, the puzzled look on his face suddenly vanished.
17
“Buck, that was simply beautiful!” said Richardson. “That vertical corkscrew you made in the ocean must have seemed like a solid wall to the little fellow’s sonar. So it drove into it and set off the detonator. Whatever made you think up that maneuver?”