“And take a batch of pictures through the periscope, too, to prove it! Our intelligence boys will love us for that!”
“We’d better go to battle stations, boss. Whoever these people are, their history shows they’ll resent strangers taking pictures through the periscope!”
“I was about to say the same, Buck. But don’t sound the alarm. Pass the word quietly in case they’ve got a sonar watch on.”
Positioning the Manta in the center of the artificial polynya was easy; it was more than twice her length in both dimensions. The difficulty lay in bringing the submarine up slowly, using buoyancy only — with no way on she got no benefit from her control surfaces — and stopping her ascent at exactly the right depth. The periscope itself could be varied in height from the conning station deck to the overhead, thus giving the diving officer a few feet of flexibility in case Manta began to rise or descend unexpectedly. A person using the periscope could do it either lying on his stomach or standing, or anywhere in between so as to expose only the desired amount of the instrument. The big job was Clancy’s, for it took consummate skill to hold the great steel bulk of the submarine within five feet of the desired depth without motion of any kind.
Tom Clancy was fortunately entirely equal to the task. With Buck at a half-crouch, the tip of Manta’s high periscope came one inch above the mirrorlike surface of the artificial lake. Buck spun it around swiftly, dropped it two feet below the surface. “I didn’t see anyone looking,” he said, speaking quickly, “but there’s a lot going on. I could see cranes, a hangar and several huts, all painted white or covered with snow. Quite a few people wandering around, too.”
“Can I have a look?” Rich could not keep the eagerness from showing in his voice.
“That’s what we’re here for! That and the camera!”
Through the tiny prism at the top of the attack periscope, Rich was first conscious of the height of the ice all around: nearly ten feet above the surface, he estimated, high above the minimal periscope height he and Buck had determined was all they would risk. This was not an ordinary floe. The ice must extend five times that far below the surface. The Soviets had preempted an ice island for their missile station! Then he saw the hangar, a large, white, arched-roof building vaguely resembling the quonset hut which had been their quarters in Idaho. The elevated white booms of two large cranes were prominent against the sky.
He was dictating his observations rapidly to two quartermasters and two yeomen as he swiftly traversed the periscope. Near the hangar he thought he could distinguish an aircraft, though of this he could not be sure for the height of the ice interfered, and it would not be wise to raise the ’scope higher for a better look. The structure enclosing the tops of the silos, white like all the other construction, apparently even with the ice surface, formed a portion of one side of the polynya. One silo door was open; he could see the twin halves standing vertically, parallel to each other. Extending for some distance below the water surface, and in the air up to the level of the ice ledge, the two silos nearest him were covered with metal siding, again white, but artfully camouflaged where it entered the water. At a distance it resembled the edges of the polynya. The smooth steel glistened in a non-icelike manner, however, and from nearby it looked more like the side of a ship, painted white, without portholes.
Alongside the shiplike siding, mooring cleats — they could only be for submarines — had been built. They too had been painted white, but there were dark rope burns which proved they had been used. And, as Buck had said, there were numbers of people to be seen, all dressed in heavy clothing.
Rich dunked the ’scope several times as he made his methodical traverse, and he maintained a constant monologue dictating his observations. The necessity of maintaining no more than an inch or so of periscope exposure in the calm waters of the artificial polynya caused him to vary his attitude from standing fully erect to squatting on his haunches, once lying flat on his stomach to bring the eyepiece of the periscope as near to the deck as was possible while Tom Clancy fought to keep Manta’s 3,000 tons of steel from drifting higher.
It was with surprise that Rich noted, when he finally dunked the ’scope a little farther than usual and turned it over to the camera party, that he had been using it less than five minutes. The camera party itself, with four cameras ready and the arc of interest carefully defined, accomplished its mission in half a minute.
Buck retrieved the periscope, spun it twice rapidly as he bounced around on his haunches, once inspecting the sky, then dropped it to the bottom of its well.
“This has been mighty well done, Skipper,” he heard Richardson say, more loudly than necessary, so that he would be overheard by nearly everyone in the control room. “Now let’s get away from here and get off that message!”
Rich might have gone on, was, in fact, preparing to say a few words in specific praise of Tom Clancy and his diving team, when all thought was abruptly reoriented by a thunderous crash! Manta’s deck seemed to buckle, then straighten. Richardson felt himself flung into the air, saved himself from falling by grabbing the guardrail around the periscope station, found it vibrating madly. Buck had also nearly been thrown off his feet, he noticed, and several of the men in the control room had truly been knocked down. The atmosphere in the control room was alive with particles of paint, dust and cork. Manta’s entire interior resounded like a huge steel drum.
“All compartments report!” said Buck urgently to the battle stations telephone talker a few feet away. Rich found himself blessing the foresight which had led them to order the ship rigged for depth charge and the crew at action stations beforehand. Then the second depth charge arrived, if anything, closer than the first. And then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth…
Nikolai Konstantinov Shumikin, commander of the First Soviet Arctic Free Missile Base, was seriously worried. For a time things had been going so well, and now, ever since he had sent Zmentsov back to prevent escape of the damaged American missile submarine, the sixth sense which had always served him had not been functioning. Number one, there had been a second very recent transmission in undecipherable code from somewhere nearby, and for this last one there was no clear explanation. Grigory Ilyich Zmentsov, skipper of the Novosibirsky Komsomol, had suggested the one before it must have been from a submarine sent from the United States to render assistance to the one they had so cleverly immobilized. The trapped vessel, the newest model of Polaris missile submarine, must not be permitted to escape. The Americans had no right to attempt to make the Arctic Ocean into a place from which they might shoot Polaris missiles! His own top-secret missile base, of course, was a very different thing. It was more like an extension of Russia’s land mass a little farther into the sea: perfectly legitimate, even if subterfuge had been necessary because of stupid treaties. But not a missile submarine! That was too much!
His first report, praising the Novosibirsky Komsomol and her commander for so brilliantly carrying out his instruction to damage the American submarine in an apparent accident, had resulted in deserved praise for himself as well. It had been an extraordinary stroke of luck to have been forewarned of the expected appearance of the enemy sub, and to have had Grigory Ilyich and his specially configured Novosibirsky Komsomol ready. Reporting the loss of one of his aircraft as due to a weapon fired from the damaged submarine had given the Kremlin an excellent pretext for the decision to take the damaged vessel into custody, and it had also camouflaged the bombing run he had ordered. That had been necessary to prevent the enemy submarine from escaping. The intent, after all, had been only to drive her back under the ice once more, so that she could not further communicate with her headquarters, and this had been achieved. It was simply unfortunate that she had managed to surface and get those two initial messages off.