THE SEVENTEENTH DAY
“Eight more hours,” Ryan whispered to himself. That’s what they had told him. An eight-hour run to Norfolk. He was back at the rudder diving-plane controls by his own request. Operating them was the only thing he knew how to do, and he had to do something. The October was still badly shorthanded. Nearly all of the Americans were helping out in the reactor and engine spaces aft. Only Mancuso, Ramius, and himself were in control. Bugayev, with the help of Jones, was monitoring the sonar equipment a few feet away, and the medical people were still worrying over Williams in sick bay. The cook was shuttling back and forth with sandwiches and coffee, which Ryan found disappointing, probably because he had been spoiled by Greer’s.
Ramius was half sitting on the rail that surrounded the periscope pedestal. The leg wound was not bleeding, but it had to be hurting more than the man admitted since he was letting Mancuso check the instruments and handle the navigation.
“Rudder amidships,” Mancuso ordered.
“Midships,” Ryan turned the wheel back to the right to center it, checking his rudder angle indicator. “Rudder is amidships, steady on course one-two-zero.”
Mancuso frowned at his chart, nervous at being forced to pilot the massive submarine in so cavalier a manner. “You have to be careful around here. The sandbar keeps building up from the southerly littoral drift, and they have to dredge it every few months. The storms this area’s been having can’t have helped much.” Mancuso went back to look through the periscope.
“I am told this is a dangerous area,” Ramius said.
“The graveyard of the Atlantic,” Mancuso confirmed. “A lot of ships have died along the Outer Banks. Weather and current conditions are bad enough. The Germans are supposed to have had a hell of a time here during the war. Your charts don’t show it, but there’s hundreds of wrecks spotted on the bottom.” He went back to the chart table. “Anyway, we give this place a nice wide berth, and we don’t turn north till about here.” He traced a line on the chart.
“These are your waters,” Ramius agreed.
They were in a loose three-boat formation. The Dallas was leading them out to sea, the Pogy was trailing. All three boats were traveling flooded-down, their decks nearly awash, with no one on their bridge stations. All visual navigation was being done by periscope. No radar sets were operating. None of the three boats was making any electronic noise. Ryan glanced casually at the chart table. They were beyond the inlet proper, but the chart was marked with sandbars for several more miles.
Nor were they using the Red October’s caterpillar drive system. It had turned out to be almost exactly what Skip Tyler had predicted. There were two sets of tunnel impellers, a pair about a third of the way back from the bow and three more just aft of midships. Mancuso and his engineers had examined the plans with great interest, then commented at length on the quality of the caterpillar design.
For his part, Ramius had not wanted to believe that he had been detected so early on. Mancuso had ultimately produced Jones with his personal map to show the October’s estimated course off Iceland. Though a few miles off the ship’s log, it was too close to have been a coincidence.
“Your sonar must be better than we expected,” Ramius grumbled a few feet from Ryan’s control station.
“It is pretty good,” Mancuso allowed. “Better yet, there’s Jonesy — he’s the best sonarman I’ve ever had.”
“So young, and so smart.”
“We get a lot of them that way,” Mancuso smiled. “Never as many as we’d like, of course, but our kids are all volunteers. They know what they’re getting into. We’re picky about who we take, and then we train the hell out of ’em.”
“Conn, sonar.” It was Jones’ voice. “Dallas is diving, sir.”
“Very well.” Mancuso lit a cigarette as he went to the intercom phone. He punched the button for engineering. “Tell Mannion we need him forward. We’ll be diving in a few minutes. Yeah.” He hung up and went back to the chart.
“You have them for more than three years, then?” Ramius asked.
“Oh, yeah. Hell, otherwise we’d be letting them go right after they’re fully trained, right?”
Why couldn’t the Soviet Navy get and retain people like this? Ramius thought. He knew the answer all too well. The Americans fed their men decently, gave them a proper mess room, paid them decently, gave them trust — all the things he had fought twenty years for.
“You need me to work the vents?” Mannion said, coming in.
“Yeah, Pat, we’ll dive in another two or three minutes.”
Mannion gave the chart a quick look on his way to the vent manifold.
Ramius hobbled to the chart. “They tell us that your officers are chosen from the bourgeois classes to control ordinary sailors from the working class.”
Mannion ran his hands over the vent controls. There sure were enough of them. He’d spent two hours the previous day figuring the complex system out. “That’s true, sir. Our officers do come from the ruling class. Just look at me,” he said deadpan. Mannion’s skin was about the color of coffee grounds, his accent pure South Bronx.
“But you are a black man,” Ramius objected, missing the jibe.
“Sure, we’re a real ethnic boat.” Mancuso looked through the periscope again. “A Guinea skipper, a black navigator, and a crazy sonarman.”
“I heard that, sir!” Jones called out rather than use the intercom speaker. “Gertrude message from Dallas. Everything looks okay. They’re waiting for us. Last gertrude message for a while.”
“Conn, aye. We’re clear, finally. We can dive whenever you wish, Captain Ramius,” Mancuso said.
“Comrade Mannion, vent the ballast tanks,” Ramius said. The October had never actually surfaced and was still rigged for dive.
“Aye aye, sir.” The lieutenant turned the topmost rank of master switches on the hydraulic controls.
Ryan winced. The sound made him think of a million toilets being flushed at once.
“Five degrees down on the planes, Ryan,” Ramius said.
“Five degrees down, aye.” Ryan pushed forward on the yoke. “Planes five degrees down.”
“She’s slow going down,” Mannion observed, watching the handpainted depth-gauge replacement. “So durn big.”
“Yeah,” Mancuso said. The needle passed twenty meters.
“Planes to zero,” Ramius said.
“Planes to zero angle, aye.” Ryan pulled back on the control. It took thirty seconds for the submarine to settle. She seemed very slow to respond to the controls. Ryan had thought that submarines were as responsive as aircraft.