The silo complex, which had begun to list to one side, straightened. It had been built with tremendously strong and wide underpinning in the ice itself, firmly planted into the rigid crystalline structure and then “cemented” in place by water. Its designer had proudly stated that it would continue to float, and remain operable, even if two of its silos were damaged or destroyed, and this had, by consequence, been written as one of the operational requirements. Now he was proved wrong, for the weight of the two flooded silos dragged down the entire structure, the whole section of the ice island into which it had been built, to within inches of the water level in the polynya. Seawater began to trickle around the hinges of the missile exit doors of the two undamaged silos, and into the long, narrow, unsealed cracks separating their halves.
The personnel of the undamaged silos needed no encouragement to evacuate. They had already been severely shaken by the two heavy explosions they had felt, and all electric power had cut off. Candles and battery-powered lights only heightened their appreciation of danger. When one of their number frantically reported that water was only centimeters from the portals of the crew entry hatches, they unceremoniously started up the interior ladders to the top level and ran out. They were barely in time, for great cracks had begun appearing in the laden ice. Water was coming through them, collecting on the surface, everywhere. Within minutes, a stream of water was running down the personnel hatches. The base commander, confronting the men as they ran, furiously ordered them back to their stations, but they stood stolidly, affecting not to hear him, not daring to obey.
By this time the burning silo had begun to resemble a missile trying to drive itself farther into the ice. Violent, rocketlike flame was erupting from the exploded silo doors, reaching, like a searing blade, a hundred feet into the air. From there it gradually turned increasingly deep shades of red until finally the fire cone petered out, some six hundred feet above the ice, in a plume of jet-black smoke.
It had been a mistake to tie in the aircraft hangar’s services with those supporting the silos. The designer had used the opportunity to include its foundations with theirs also, and the whole ice slab, with its network of steel beams, insulated conduits, pipes and cables, had been laid out with great engineering skill and frozen solidly together. It cracked in several places, but the steel links in the ice held firm, and the entire camp area began to sag. Then, with a great smashing of ice, groaning of tortured metal and snapping of steel reinforcements, along with a continuous popping of burst rivets, stretched hoses, broken pipes and tangled utility lines of all kinds, the hangar, silos, cranes and all equipment in the vicinity slowly began to descend into the sea.
Or, rather, the sea waiting underneath simply poured up through the cracks, and out of the lowered edge of the polynya, to inundate the space recently occupied. A huge slab of ice cracked free from the rest of the ice island, just beyond the hangar, and irresistibly was dragged down by the weight of two full silos and two more filling rapidly.
Sensing the danger from the suddenly slanted footing and the water creeping ever farther over familiar environs, everyone in the camp began to run toward the only undamaged area, the aircraft landing strip. Nikolai Shumikin, despairingly recognizing the inevitable, could do no more than follow. The last man out of the ruined missile base, he stepped reluctantly off the sinking ice and the shattered remains of his command, stood on the edge of the runway, on the good ice.
His mind was still numb as to the magnitude of the disaster, but he knew that full appreciation would come in time. Everything was going straight to hell! And he would not be able to escape blame. Everything had gone wrong, beginning with the time that American missile submarine had arrived in the Arctic! He was furious with himself, furious with Grigory Ilyich, in a rage against his watch officer and the sonar watch-standers who should have heard the submarine returning. The fact that there might have been nothing to hear did not even enter his head. They should have alerted him!
He shaded his eyes as he looked into the low-lying sun, and with despair saw the hangar, with one plane inside, both cranes, the other aircraft which had been temporarily parked outside the hangar, the radio hut and his two big anti-aircraft guns, flanking their combined ammunition magazine, gently dropping out of sight, following the already vanished silos.
For a long time, Nikolai Konstantinov Shumikin stood looking at the scene of his disaster. That it was a personal as well as an official one could not be doubted. And then he saw a strange periscope rising out of the once again smooth waters of the much enlarged polynya. It was club-headed, with a large glass window — two glass windows, in fact. And it kept rising, higher and higher, until the black foundations underneath also broke water, and then the entire hull of a submarine.
It was a strange submarine, one he had never seen before. And it seemed to surface in a strange way, somehow oddly tilted, with the highest exposed portion of the hull at the point farthest away from the periscope. No men were to be seen. No one came on deck, or into what he assumed must be the bridge area, near the base of the periscope, although he could hear some noises of concealed activity apparently from that vicinity.
The periscope itself, he could tell from the glass windows at the top, was in nearly constant motion, although frequently it steadied for long minutes during which he felt it was leveled exactly at him. He felt distinctly uneasy at such times, as though he were in personal danger, but there were men watching him from the runway, and he stood his ground.
After about an hour, air bubbled from around the hull of the strange submarine, and it slowly descended back into the water and disappeared.
19
“This is Joan Lastrada, Laura. I’m in New London for a few hours. May I come over?” Laura recognized the infrequently heard voice instantly.
A Navy sedan dropped her off and departed. Pouring coffee, Laura looked at her visitor with warmth. Joan was still slender, still had the heavy black hair coiffed with just the right nonchalance. The strong bones beneath her dark eyes accentuated the slightly concave cheeks. Her complexion was smooth, understated; perhaps a bare touch of makeup. Was that a gray hair over one temple? No matter. Laura, too, once in a while used some coloring. Women could appreciate the necessity for these things.
Joan’s gray suit was exactly right to set off her hair and eyes. Laura could feel the strength in the long, tapering fingers when they shook hands. Joan shook hands firmly, almost like a man, she thought.
“It’s so nice to see you, Joan,” Laura began as she offered the cream and sugar. “Neither? No wonder you’re so stylish! It’s been almost a year since we’ve talked,” she went on tentatively. “I don’t think I ever adequately expressed how very much I appreciate what you did. Rich mustn’t ever find out, though, because you know how Navy men are about official business. He was very clear that I was never to bring the subject up with you, but he couldn’t forbid you to call me. All the same, I couldn’t even call back to find out if you’d been able to do anything. But I knew you must have been the one responsible for old Brighting’s change of heart. It was great of you to do that, Joan.”
Joan waved aside Laura’s apology. “Don’t worry about that. All I did was make him see that Rich wasn’t involved in Scott’s plan for BuPers to take over selection of nuclear trainees.” She hesitated. Her eyes flickered, then steadied honestly on Laura’s. “Besides, I guess you know I used to be very fond of Rich — long ago, during the war.”