“Enemy torpedo destroyed!” announced Link matter-of-factly. “Hostile vessel still closing.”
At the hostile’s speed of forty-five miles per hour, it would be in very close range within eleven minutes, and by now its active radar would have confirmation that its target, the Roosevelt, was traveling at no more than five knots. The hostile hadn’t fired any more torpedoes, suggesting to Brentwood that it was now going to rely on its superior speed to outmaneuver its slow target. The Hunter/Killer would try to stop him reaching the hole, unless Roosevelt could increase speed and so buy time. Brentwood unclipped the hand mike.
“Torpedo firing control. Stand by for snapshot two. One.”
“Standing by for snapshot, sir.”
“Very well. It’ll come in a rush,” added Brentwood. “Minimum range — one mile.”
“Understood, sir. One mile.”
“Just keep him away from me,” intoned Brentwood.
“You give me the angle, sir,” repeated Torpedo Control, “and we’ll get ‘im.”
“Chief engineer?” called Brentwood.
“Sir?”
“Possible to turn our main prop at all?”
“Sir, it’s bent to hell and gone — it’d shake the guts out of her. Too much torque. In half an hour — maybe less — we’d have leaks popping up—”
“What can you give me?” Brentwood cut in. “Maximum, Chief?”
“Five and a half,” said the chief resignedly but not liking it. “Maybe six with the help of the current, but we’ll wake up every son of a bitch from here to the South Pole, Captain.”
“We’ve already done that, Chief. Give it a burl.”
“Hold on to your dentures,” the chief advised. “It’s gonna shake ‘em loose.”
It was an understatement, and as if that weren’t enough, a report came in that not only was the oxygen generator down, but no attempts could be made to bleed oxygen from reserve bottles because of damage sustained to their valve heads and regulators.
“Also,” the damage report seaman was shouting, above the bone-shuddering noise of the main prop, “oxygen and Freon gas scrubbers — closing down.”
“Very well — light candles!” shouted Zeldman as Brentwood hooked back into missile firing control verification procedures.
“I hope,” Brentwood yelled out to the weapons officer, “those tube liners can take a bit of vibration?”
“No sweat!” came the weapons officer’s report, his voice loud over the intercom, practically blasting the headphones off Brentwood, starting a throbbing, hot, needlelike pain in his left ear. The prop, though bent only a few thousandths of an inch, was turning the pressure hull into what felt like an unbalanced spin dryer out of control, the torque creating mayhem in the kitchen, where hamburgers became airborne, coffee shot from pots in marble-sized globules, the crew hanging on to every hold bar, nook, and cranny they could find, the men in Control buckled up while the OOD gripped the back of the planesmen’s chairs. But the chief, as chiefs were wont to do, lived up to his promise and delivered six knots, which together with the four knots of the emergency “bring it home” twin screws in the after ballast tank, were pushing Roosevelt at ten knots, chopping her ETA in the area beneath the hole from what was a minute ago twelve minutes to less than six, the burning of the perchoate candles mixing with the stench of sweat that was pouring out of the men. Emerson gave up on sonar echoes, the sub’s din overwhelming its hydrophone sensors.
After three more minutes, Brentwood shouted orders to stop all engines in order to take an active sonar pulse. Emerson’s screen showed the Hunter/Killer was now at eleven thousand yards.
“Any fish yet?” Brentwood asked Emerson.
“No, sir.” Brentwood estimated the Roosevelt would have to stop in another three minutes if he was to engage any torpedoes the attacking sub might fire, leaving him only three minutes to retaliate and hopefully blow the HUK’s torpedoes out of the water. He called for full speed ahead, and again they were assaulted by a kind of shaking none of them had ever known.
“Sir!” cried Emerson, alarming everyone who heard him. So ingrained were they with the idea of being quiet on the sub that despite the tremendous roaring of the ship itself, shouting in Control was a “noise short” violation, as alien and upsetting to them as any moral dilemma they could possibly imagine. Emerson was cupping his hands about his mouth. “… flow…”
Robert Brentwood leaned down, straining to hear Emerson’s words, but it was no use. Suddenly Emerson leaned forward, tapping swiftly on the computer’s keys, the screen reading, “Hole in ice has shifted — now above us.”
Brentwood shouted again for “stop engines,” someone shouting in the relative silence, “Thank Christ!”
“Where’s the hostile, Emerson?” asked Zeldman.
“Bearing zero four one, sir. Speed forty knots.” Brentwood gave the helmsman the order to bring about Roosevelt’s bow. On the screen they could see the Hunter/Killer had fired one more fish at sixty-nine hundred yards.
“Torpedo firing control. Stand by for snapshot two. One,” ordered Brentwood. “Angle on the bow zero seven.”
“Angle on the bow zero seven.”
“Shoot when ready.”
Final bearing and distance were given and Brentwood heard the firing control officer announcing, “Solution ready… weapons ready… ship ready… stand by! Shoot! Fire!”
Brentwood turned to Peter Zeldman. “Unravel the VLF. I want to be ready to receive the moment we surface.”
The planesmen were so tense, the OOD told them to take a deep breath, that it’d be okay. They weren’t comforted. This was definitely not by the book.
Brentwood told everyone to hang on, cautioning the crew that with the damage already sustained, they were unlikely to be able to slow her down much on the rise.
The Mark-98 missile firing control system was all systems go, except for tube three, whose humidity control had gone haywire during the severe vibration.
Beneath the hum of the missile verification sequence, they could hear the steady roll of the VLF drum unwinding the antenna that would trail for over a thousand feet behind them if the hole in the ice was wide enough.
After the missile verification procedures and sequences were completed, Brentwood inserted his key to complete the circuit. The gas/steam generator ignited the small exhaust rocket at the base of number one tube. The sudden buildup of steam pressure from the rocket pushed the missile out of the tube, the blue protective membrane cap atop the tube shattering concentrically, the missile rising above the fairing of the pressure hull. The solid propellant of the first-stage booster ignited, the missile’s needlelike aerospike, which would extend its range if necessary, slid out of the nose, the missile now clearing the surface of the ice-free hole, back-flooding beginning immediately, the weight of the sub decreasing, the sub rising as the first ICBM burst clear of water, its orange tail flattening momentarily on the sea-air interface, its feral roar heard in the sub, and soon seen on radar screens all over the world, including those in SAC and on the Kola Peninsula, rising high over the vast ice cap in as straight a trajectory as could be attained, then falling back, crashing immediately, clearly unarmed, onto the ice pack and disintegrating.
This was followed by the second missile, lightening the Roosevelt further and also viewed on the radar screens of both sides as, unarmed like the first, it went up and fell in like fashion, crashing harmlessly into the ice miles from the Roosevelt, which was now broaching. Bursting through the ice hole in the Arctic Sea, the sub was hidden in a frenzy of gossamer white, her bow angle at forty-five degrees, water streaming off her into the churning sea, made more turbulent by the fierce bubbling of the torpedoes exploding a half mile away, breaking the spine of a Rubis-class Hunter/Killer, a French nuclear sub that had attacked Roosevelt after failing to get either prop or cavitation matchup because of Roosevelt’s damaged prop, the French sonar operator, running blind with only sound to guide, having misidentified the American Sea Wolf as a Russian Alfa.