“It’s obvious we’d not have been able to stay down much longer, Commodore,” said Buck. “Jerry says there’s five feet of water in the stern room. It’s still coming in fast, but with the shallower depth and air pressure in there, he thinks we can cope with it.” Then he went on, speaking more slowly, with a certain deliberate formality in his words. “Commodore, this illegal base has opened fire on us without cause, and it has damaged us. The submarine based here sank the Cushing and caused the loss of eleven good men, one of them our close friend. I request permission to return the fire!”
Williams saw once again the faraway look in the face and eyes of his superior. Rich spoke quietly, almost pensively. “No, Buck. We’re not at war, and we’ll not attack in cold blood. I killed a man that way, once, during the war, and I vowed I’d never do it again. Shape your course away from here at shallow depth, and we’ll let Washington handle it when they get our message!”
“My God, boss! What do you mean, ‘cold blood’? After what they’ve done? This ship is a man-of-war! They can’t shoot at us without getting shot back at!”
“They can’t hurt us now, Buck. And Bungo Pete — I mean, Captain Tateo Nakame — couldn’t hurt us then, either. I drove him to shooting with his rifle when he saw what we were doing to his lifeboats!”
Buck’s arm around his shoulder was almost like a blow. “Skipper!” he hissed, “stop it! You heard what Keith said, and I’ve been saying the same thing! Stop it! You hear me? Okay, we’ll not try to get even with these bastards, but you’ve got to promise me to stop it!” Both hands were now on Rich’s shoulders, gripping them.
Jerry Abbott, coming on the tableau, ever afterward puzzled over the meaning of what he saw. Nor did he have any way of realizing that it was he who at that instant changed the entire complexion of the private talk between his skipper and their admired, but unaccountably suddenly irresolute, squadron commander. “Skipper!” he said to Buck, “we’ve got to surface! We can’t stop the water! We’ll have to get the stern as high as we can and remake the seal with flax packing! The graphite seal is completely shot, and it’s getting worse fast!”
“How long can we hold out the way we are, Jerry?” asked Buck.
“Who knows? The seal might let go any minute! A couple of hours, no more. With air pressure in the stern room, I mean. We’ll have to let it off to go back in there, and there’s no telling what will happen then!”
“How long will it take to make the change once you start?”
“About an hour. It’s a big job, but we have everything we need to do it, once we can stop the water from coming in like this!”
Richardson, listening, knew that Admiral Donaldson’s cryptic words aboard the Proteus, and in the sedan returning to the airfield in Groton, had at last achieved their full meaning, even though neither he nor anyone could have anticipated the situation. “The United States needs someone who can make the right decision at the right time, and take the responsibility for it, Rich. That’s the main reason you’re going along on this trip. You may run into a lot more up there than we expect!” Aloud, Rich said, “There’s only one place around here we can bring her to the surface, Buck!”
“How are we—” Buck began, but Richardson interrupted him.
Speaking loudly, so as to be overheard, Rich said, “Buck, enter in your log that because there is only one place to surface, which is occupied by a hostile force that not once but several times has endeavored to destroy this ship and all on board, and has now seriously damaged her so that the lives of all hands depend on her coming to the surface to make repairs, the commander of Task Group 83.1 has ordered destruction of the offensive power of the said base so that Manta can surface unmolested!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“I will sign the entries in the quartermaster’s notebook and the official log to attest to their accuracy. And now, make ready the torpedoes!”
Nikolai Konstantinov Shumikin, finally relaxed at his desk, was beginning to be pleased with himself. No matter how you cut it, no matter that the American missile submarine had got away, or that the Novosibirsky Komsomol had been unaccountably and unfortunately lost, the American submarine which had had the temerity to lift her periscope in the middle of his own artificial lagoon was now also resting on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. He himself had heard the torpedo explosion which had killed her, and he had heard some of the desperate moves she had made to save herself. With her had died the possibility of premature revelation of the existence of his missile base. This the Kremlin intended to announce at the appropriate and propitious time, as the many briefings he had received had made clear. His primary responsibility was to safeguard its secrecy until then, and he had succeeded. It had been at some cost, but he had been successful.
He would compose a priority message explaining that a number of exotic weapons had been used against him, all illegally and all unsuccessful, that Grigory Ilyich Zmentsov and his whole crew in the Novosibirsky Komsomol had died heroically defending their country, and that his own inspired crew had finally sunk the American submarine responsible for it all. Having the trapped missile submarine slip through his fingers, for there was no way to find her now, was a misfortune, but it would have to be accepted. Certainly that had been through no fault of his. On the contrary, it was he who had taken the decisive action which had nearly captured her after all — and, in any case, she could know nothing about the existence of the missile base.
Loss of the Novosibirsky Komsomol would be the hard thing to explain, but surely the Naval Ministry knew they were taking this risk when they fitted her out for her special mission. Nevertheless, he would have to provide sufficient detail so that a plausible announcement as to the circumstances could be made. He was beginning to grapple with the problem, had decided he would have to send two messages, one in language proper for public distribution, the other a more private, more accurate explanation for official use only, when suddenly the alarm bell jangled. “Torpedo fired!” shouted a hoarse voice over the command intercom.
Shumikin leaped to his feet, pressed the button overriding the sonar room. “What do you mean, ‘torpedo fired,’” he snarled. “Who ordered it?”
“It’s not us, Commander, It’s that submarine! We heard it firing! There’s two torpedoes, now! We can hear them! They’re coming this way! Very noisy! They’re big torpedoes!” The voice rose in a shriek, then was cut off.
A tremendous geyser of water and explosive gas burst out of the open silo, rose high above it and, descending, drenched everything within several hundred yards, Nearly simultaneously, a wracking, explosive BOOM shattered the calm atmosphere. A plume of gray smoke shot high above the ice, then lazily drifted away in the still air.
The ruined silo, instantly filled with angry water, jerked sideways, hanging from the heavy steel foundations built into the ice and from its moorings to the other three. The ice cracked on the far side of the hangar, and the water level rose several feet up the steel facing of the Novosibirsky Komsomol’s mooring pier.
The second torpedo struck a silo diametrically opposite the one first hit. Its exit doors burst open. A second geyser of water, mixed with smoke and gas, shot into the air. This time it was followed by a streak of white-hot fire from the ruptured fuel section of the missile recently lowered into it.