Reed never noticed one of the junior officers enter the wardroom, seat himself at the other end of the table with a mug of coffee, then think better of disturbing the exhausted admiral. Rising quietly from the table, he tiptoed silently out. Beside one elbow was Reed’s message board containing the brief action report from Olympia. That had changed his outlook tremendously. He knew that Danilov had been sent out with three submarines, and that two of them were gone. Six other attack submarines had been dispatched by the Russians. He was sure that there were no others to the east and that Seratov was alone. That allowed him to accelerate Olympia’s speed, sending her directly across the top of the world. His orders were for her to transit in deep water north of the Queen Elizabeth Islands until reaching a point opposite Perry Land near the northernmost tip of Greenland. Then she was to head north with the intention of coming in behind the additional Soviet submarines.
His greatest concern of the moment was not Abe Danilov or any of the Soviet attack submarines. He was sure that Danilov would attempt to keep a reasonable distance between himself and Imperator, delaying any attack until his reinforcements were closer. The Russian admiral already understood more of Imperator’s capabilities than he should have — and that was the crux of Reed’s problems. Hal Snow’s too-quick decisions and instant retaliation had spawned a gnawing concern in the eyes of his commander.
Since Imperator was a task force within a single hull, it had originally appeared easier to command that task force from another unit, and distance offered the advantage of added perspective. But the more Andy Reed considered Hal Snow’s reactions to date, he wondered whether he shouldn’t be sailing with him. Reed was positive that if there was any weakness on Imperator, Abe Danilov would be searching for it. It meant a great deal for Imperator to move cautiously on cat’s feet. At one time, Snow would have been the man almost everyone in the sub force would have chosen for the job. Andy Reed wasn’t so sure he was that man today.
Hal Snow was restless. Imperator could go faster than they now were moving, but he was limited by Houston’s speed. Snow desperately wanted to catch up to Danilov, sink him as rapidly as possible, then look for more Russians. To him, that was his singular goal and there should be no deviation. Sweep away anyone in the way, and charge on in to finish the job!
He climbed out of his bunk, slipping on wrinkled trousers and shirt, and wandered down to the wardroom. It was deserted. All the old magazines had been neatly stacked before someone headed for his own bunk, and there had been no one in there recently to mess things up. Snow had no interest in disturbing the watch. Finally, he decided to stop by Carol Petersen’s room. She’d been pleasant enough the previous evening.
The curtain had been pulled over her doorway, and no light peeped through. He considered calling her name, but that seemed a crude thing in the middle of the night, nor was there any reason to disturb any of the others along the corridor. Finally, he tapped lightly on the bulkhead, hoping she might also be having trouble sleeping. There was no answer. Snow decided there was no further reason to bother anyone. He shuffled back down the corridor in the direction of his own room.
As the footsteps disappeared down the linoleum passageway, Carol Petersen relaxed with a soft sigh of relief. She sensed how troubled Snow was, but there was no time now to comfort him — nor did she care to encourage his attention.
Only the watch section remained awake through the artificial night induced by Imperator’s computer. Caesar drove the immense submarine through the icy arctic waters toward the North Pole with only the slightest hum, one that her crew had become quickly inured to. There was no sound for them — there were watches, drills, periods to eat, periods to sleep. With the exception of normal security patrols that Snow had begun, as a sort of backup to the time that Snow feared Caesar might fail, most of the crew remained in the after section of the ship.
If Imperator’s length could be divided into four football fields, the hindmost would take up the engineering and propulsion spaces; only those who ran the equipment entered that area. The control and living spaces were ahead of that section — the thinking, fighting part of the ship, as Snow liked to say. Ahead of that was the main storage compartments; here were the tanks and helicopters and armor belonging to the marine contingent. Though Caesar also watched over this area, Colonel Campbell had established duty sections to patrol his heavy equipment. Like Snow, he could not be convinced that Caesar was able to control everything. From the day he was commissioned, it had been drilled into him that marines protected their own weapons, and it would be no different now. It also kept busy a marine unit that had little idea why it had been transferred at sea to a monster submarine that was taking them to an unknown destination. Colonel Campbell had explained to Reed that these marines were no different than any others — they were always ready to fight, but, if they didn’t know where or when, they had to be kept busy. So each marine stood one-in-three watches, having no idea what lay in the after half of this immense ship or what unknown element guarded them as they patrolled their spaces.
What no one else understood was that the captain sensed the eeriness of the situation as much as they did.
9
ANDY REED HAD been captivated by maps since he was a kid, learning early on that they could make the world come alive. His father often explained that it was impossible to read a book about a place you’d never been if there was no map. Once the shape of a place could be pictured — the lakes and rivers and mountains, the locations of cities and the roads that connected them — then the actions of the characters in the book could be pictured with clarity.
As Andy grew older and sailed with his family in the summers, charts became just as appealing. He learned how to navigate his sailboat among the coastal islands and rocks, or into the harbor by sighting the church steeple and the water tower on the highest point in town. He could also imagine the ocean bottom in bold relief just like the landscape on a map, picturing in his mind the offshore trenches, the rocks where the lobstermen dropped their pots, and the broad banks where fish schooled.
Now, as Reed leaned over the chart table in the rear of Houston’s control room, he studied his position in relation to the North Pole and the land masses to the south and east. The chart displayed no land whatsoever, the closest being Ellesmere Island almost six hundred miles away. Overhead was solid ice broken only by occasional polynyas or leads that might close at any time. The floor of the Arctic Ocean was six thousand feet below as they raced northward five hundred feet under the ice.
Chief Quartermaster Gorham leaned on the opposite side of the chart table, watching Reed with obvious interest. The admiral was experimenting with various courses and speeds, plotting positions in relation to a Soviet submarine that had yet to be located. His methods were decidedly old-fashioned, at least to a quartermaster who had always located his position with the aid of satellites and computers and digital displays. This admiral was using a compass, a protractor, and his imagination. Chief Gorham had never served in anything other than a nuclear submarine and had no concept of balancing on a wildly gyrating bridge to shoot a star or take a noon sun line, more or less plot it manually in a tiny chart house to fix a ship’s position. There had been stories about submarine officers doing that even as recently as the sixties — but nothing like that in his experience.