“He’s turning toward,” called Schultz in the stillness, shouting from the sonar room. “He’s swinging to the right! He’s broadside to us right now! Shoot him! Shoot him right now!”
“Make haste slowly,” said Buck. “Make sure we don’t miss. Deedee, set in starboard ninety. He’ll go ahead emergency as soon as he hears us, so spread the fish forward to cover a ten-knot speed increase. Schultz”—he raised his voice to be sure the sonarman would hear—“can you separate the Cushing’s echo from the target’s?”
Jerry Abbott jumped back into the sonar shack. Unnecessarily. “Yes, sir!” Schultz, beseeching: “I’ve got them both! He’s the far one!”
“Very well,” said Buck. “Get me a single-ping range and bearing!”
A wail from Schultz. A cry of pain. “He’s fired! Cushing’s fired!”
“He’s not shooting at us!” Buck’s voice was loud in the dead silence. “Single-ping range! Now!”
The ping went out instantaneously, so loud that everyone jumped a second time. “We’re on automatic to Deedee!” assured Abbott.
“Set!” said Brown.
“Fire!” said Buck Williams. The word was an expletive.
Unlike the new torpedoes, which swam out of their tubes silently on their own power, the older ones had to be expelled, shot out by a blast of water. In the forward torpedo room the firing ram slammed back and forth four times, resounding loudly, masochistically, throughout the interior of the ship. Four massive water-hammer jolts shook her hull, ten seconds apart. Four times the compressed air returning the ram to battery snarled and snorted through its control valves and the vents at the end of the stroke. Four old Mark Fourteen torpedoes, each following ten seconds after its predecessor, evenly diverging to the right, roared out of their torpedo tubes. They headed directly for the Cushing. A few hundred yards beyond her was the enemy.
“He’s got his halo up!” Abbott, calling from the sonar shack. No pretense of silence now. There was noise in the water. Lots of noise. Manta had suddenly transformed herself into the noisiest submarine ever in the Arctic Ocean. She would have made a huge spike in every sonar within miles. And four old steam-driven torpedoes, lovingly overhauled but roaring like banshees because that was the way they had been built, were driving madly through the sea, their single-stage turbines blaring at high, clattering pitch. “Cushing fired a Mark Forty! It’s gone into the halo! … And, that’s it! It’s stopped! We heard the motor stop!” Jerry was at last excited. He could be forgiven. So could Schultz, after twelve hours of steady concentration on his sonar, watching an underwater game in which his own life was one of the pawns.
“That shot from Keith was his way of telling the Russian something,” said Rich. “Keith was hoping he wouldn’t have time, with the short range, to get up that halo defense of his.”
“At least, now Keith knows he’s not alone around here!” said Buck.
The enemy submarine’s captain heard the single-ping range being taken, instantly knew what it portended, instantly ordered emergency speed. The whine of her adversary’s madly cavitating propeller filled Manta’s sonar shack. Schultz later claimed he had also heard her rudder slam hard over against the stops. As it did so, the thin fan of torpedoes, now covering a spread of two ship lengths, passed under the Cushing, kept on going…
The intruder heard them coming, heard their roaring grow suddenly much louder when part of it was no longer screened by the helpless bulk of the big missile submarine. Her screw had begun to bite. Maybe she could get clear. She was moving ahead, but slowly, so slowly, and the torpedoes were so close…
The first torpedo, aimed to hit amidships in case the enemy did not move, missed astern by a large margin. The second missed by only a few feet. The fourth and last inevitably missed ahead, for the third one struck home, and exploded.
Whatever their shortcomings of modernity, Mark Fourteen torpedoes packed far more explosive than the newer, far more exotic, antisubmarine torpedoes. Their mission, after all, had been to sink big surface ships. For this, hundreds of pounds of the most powerful explosive were needed. If possible, the bottom of the target should be beaten in, her keel shattered, or her whole side torn off, from turn of the bilge to the main deck. By contrast, only a small hole, merely big enough to let in the sea, is needed to upset a submarine’s delicate submerged buoyancy and send it to the bottom forever.
Assisted by the rigid incompressibility of seawater and the poised pressure ready to squeeze everything together, invade every opening, the detonation of 800 pounds of torpex was cataclysmic. The entire middle of the enemy submarine disintegrated, blown into thousands of pieces, many of them tiny shards of metal with razor-sharp edges, all of them hurled with bulletlike velocity in all directions. Steel bulkheads — or portions of them still remaining — were penetrated by them. No life could exist near them; but all life anywhere near had been obliterated already. And the grenadelike fragments themselves did not travel far, for the waiting sea, in its instantaneous rush resembling a bomb exploding inward, swallowed everything up.
The two halves of the submarine, the propeller still spinning rapidly on the cone-shaped stern, were driven apart by the explosion. Then they upended and sank separately to the bottom of the Fletcher Abyssal Plain, 12,000 feet down.
“Keith,” said Buck softly on the turned-down UQC, “it’s Buck. Do you read?”
“Affirmative, old man! What a relief to hear your voice! I’ll never in my life forget that uproar when your firing ram started cycling over there behind us! I thought I’d faint! And then when we heard your fish coming right at us, well, I kept thinking it had to be you, but I had heart failure anyway, all over again!”
“Sorry we couldn’t warn you in advance. We had to let him keep thinking he’d sunk us. But how’re you doing? The boss wants to know.”
Keith’s exuberant voice dropped. “Not too good, Buck. That last fish of his hit in the double hull section, back aft. That was lucky because we’re not taking water very fast. But we can’t stop the leak. I’ve had to abandon the auxiliary machinery compartment. We’ve got everyone forward and the compartment’s pressurized. For now we can hold her by pumping our variable tanks, and then we’ll hold her with the main ballast tanks. But the leak’s in the overhead, and we can’t stop it with air pressure or anything! I’m afraid we’re done!” Keith had evidently placed his hand over his mouth so that his words would not be overheard.
“What’s the time, Keith? Rich is right here. Do you read me?”
Again the muffled voice, hand still guarding it. “I get you. We can hold out for two or three hours more, I guess. Not much more. I’m putting a down angle on her right now, to get the stern up and reduce sea pressure. But that can’t last. The ballast tank around the compartment is wrecked, too, of course. We’re running the drain pump but the water’s gaining. Finally we’ll be hanging on our forward ballast tanks with an up angle, and when she gets heavy enough she’ll drift away from the ice.”
Richardson and Williams conferred hurriedly, then Rich picked up the mike. “Keith, how many wet suits have you?”
“Four, I think — yes, four.”
“We have six. Three qualified scuba divers. How many do you have?”
“Two. Some others have done it for recreation.”
“All right. Listen. Stand by to transfer your men to the Manta through the escape hatches! Get your scuba experts suited up, and one of the amateurs. We’ll do the same. Our boys will bring our extra suits and tanks over to you. Buck is bringing the Manta up alongside you right now. We’ll rig a line between us, as close as we can snub it. The divers can guide the men across the line and into our hatch, and then cycle the gear back to you. First thing you do is rig one of your deck cleats, and then rig your forward escape chamber so you can use the lower hatch and keep an air bubble inside. Can you handle that?”