“I concur with our path, but I’m still concerned about ridges.”
“We just have to watch out for them and go slow. If we go bump at five knots, nothing’s going to breach the pressure hull. We’ll have dry racks all the way to the Pacific.”
Brody watched Senior Chief Schmidt sip coffee, rub his eyes, and gaze at green static on the narrowband frequency display. Brody wondered what Schmidt saw and stared at a green fuzzy line rising on the monitor. It seemed no more than static to Brody.
Schmidt flipped a trackball with the index finger of one hand and slipped a headset over his ears with the other. He lowered his head and closed his eyes. Brody was bursting with curiosity but let Schmidt battle in silence to discern real noise from sonic hallucinations and memories.
“It’s the scraping noise of a Trident submarine’s distillate brine pump,” Schmidt said. “Captain, this is the Colorado.”
“I’ll be damned,” Brody said. “We just found a ghost.”
“Sir, we should try to penetrate the ice and tell someone he’s alive. And maybe we can get some clear orders about whether we’re supposed to trail him or take him out.”
“No, he’d hear us, and it could take us ten tries to break through. I don’t want to risk it. We’d lose him again before we could tell anyone.”
“So what do you want to do, sir?”
“The President told the world that the Colorado was destroyed. Orders or not, I’m going to prove him right.”
For thirty-six hours, the Miami closed distance on the Colorado, crossing behind its baffles and passing to its far side. The change in the geometry enabled Brody to trace out the Trident’s path. The targeting solution tightened as he moved in for the kill.
He felt that he was living an out-of-body experience. Someone else, his coldhearted clone, was commanding the Miami to kill Jake.
“Shoot tube one!” he said.
His ears popped as high-pressure air thrust an Advanced Capability ADCAP torpedo into the Arctic Ocean.
High-pitched chimes from the Colorado’s torpedo alarm paralyzed Renard.
“Shit! Torpedo!” McKenzie said.
“Arctic tactics,” Renard said. “We’re going to the roof.”
“We can’t break through!” McKenzie said.
“Do as I say,” Renard said. “Mister Tiger, rudder amidships. Order a full backing bell.”
Renard grabbed a microphone.
“Torpedo in the water,” he said. “Stop the ship.”
The ship shuddered. Renard thought of the children he and Marie would never have.
“Torpedo? Why the fuck are we stopping?” Bass asked over the circuit.
“Follow my orders!” Renard said.
He joined McKenzie by the ship’s control panel.
“I need your help,” Renard said. “Get us to the roof and keep us there.”
His face puffy with sleep, Jake sprang into the control room wearing underwear and a tee-shirt.
“Why are we at all stop?” Jake asked.
“We cannot outrun a torpedo. I’ve started an ice picking maneuver.”
“Bullshit! We need speed,” Jake said and reached for the circuit.
“No, Jake! I assure you this is the proper under-ice tactic. Trust me!”
Jake gazed in silence.
“By the time we could achieve evasion speed,” Renard said, “it would be too late.”
Jake flipped a switch to silence the torpedo alarm chimes.
“No bearing change,” Jake said. “Coming straight for us. Frequency’s American.”
“Even an American torpedo can be fooled, Jake.”
“An ice pick, huh? Let’s do it right, then. We’re going dead silent.”
Jake’s confidence gave Renard a glimmer of hope that he would see Marie again.
“Scott,” Jake said, “head below and de-energize the four-hundred-hertz machines. Silence alarms on the way down.”
“Scram the plant,” Jake said over the circuit. “Dump all buses. We’re going super quiet. Brace for impact.”
Darkness enshrouded the control room. The deep swish of cooling fans faded. Renard watched dim emergency bulbs backlight Jake as he ran around the room silencing battery-powered buzzers.
Renard’s stomach dropped as the Colorado’s sail struck the ice. He grasped a railing for support. A shock wave jostled his bones, and the deck plates rolled underfoot.
Technical manuals hit the deck and pencils rolled off the navigation table. Staring forty degrees down at the opposite wall, Renard realized that the Colorado’s sail acted as a fulcrum against the ice.
At least the ship had reached the roof, he thought. He had a chance to survive, provided his aging mind had remembered the correct arctic tactic.
The seeker of the Miami’s ADCAP torpedo transmitted a thirty-two-kilohertz acoustic signal. The seeker heard its return bouncing off an inverted ice ridge. It transmitted again to verify the target. Then a third time.
Convinced it had found a target, the weapon followed its under-ice protocols. It ceased transmitting and listened but heard no mechanical noises. It accelerated toward the ridge, slowed, and listened again.
It heard ice buckling under glacial pressures — the creaking, the snapping, and the echoes from the shallow sea floor — but nothing it classified as mechanical.
The ADCAP torpedo concluded that the ridge was not a submarine. It re-energized its active seeker and raced toward the expected location of the Colorado.
The ADCAP seeker detected its sonic return from the Colorado’s hull. It slowed and listened, but it heard creaking that it identified as shifting ice. Hearing no mechanical frequencies, the torpedo continued under the Colorado.
The torpedo circled back, re-identified the Trident as part of the natural world, ran out of fuel, and sank.
“Where’s our torpedo, executive officer?” Brody asked.
“It’s circled back and shut down, sir,” Parks said. “No sign of the Colorado. Just ice activity.”
“You think he ice picked?”
“Yes, sir, possibly. But whatever he did, we’ve lost our element of surprise. It’s a level playing field right now. I recommend disengaging and waiting it out.”
“He’s a sitting duck now,” Brody said.
“He’s alerted,” Parks said.
“We know his location. We can fire torpedoes and auto-detonate them. If we don’t sink him we’ll at least shake him loose.”
“We may be off on his location,” Parks said. “Plus he’ll hear our torpedoes. They’d work like tracer bullets going the wrong way.”
Brody leaned forward.
“What’s wrong, Pete?”
“Don’t mistake me for a coward, sir, but I won’t support a suicidal one-for-one exchange.”
“The last time we had this conversation, you were afraid I’d gone soft. Now you say you won’t support me?”
“This ship has one hundred and twenty-five men relying on you to get them home safe. I think you’re pissed that he shot at us and then got away. I think you’ve turned one-eighty and are out on a vendetta.”
Brody looked around the control room. Nobody stood within earshot of his exchange with Parks, but his men seemed to understand the discussion. For the first time since taking the Miami against the Severodvinsk, he read doubt in his crewmen’s faces.
He would have to rebuild their trust.
“Very well,” Brody said. “We’ll race ahead and ambush him on the other side.”