“Molly Malone?” asked a perplexed cook’s helper, his first haul on the Roosevelt. A chief of the boat poured himself another coffee, offering the pot around. “Molloy Deep,” he explained, “about seven hundred miles from the Pole. Over fifteen thousand feet straight down. Less chance of being detected.”
“You mean we just sit there?”
“You hayseed,” said a torpedoman’s mate. “Christ, three thousand feet’s our crush depth.”
“What I mean,” the chief told the newcomer, “is that there’s lots of deep water room so we can keep moving to different launch spots.” The chief quickly switching the subject to the chromium guard around the twin silex glass coffeepots. “Those are a bit loose,” he told the cook’s helper. “Better make sure they’re secure. Don’t want anything dropping. They’d hear it from here to Murmansk.”
“No sweat,” put in the cook. “Once we’re north of sixty-five, we’ll be under drift ice. North of seventy-five, we’re under pack. Have a roof over our heads, eh, Chiefie?”
“Don’t matter. Fix those guards.”
“Will do.”
As the chief walked out of the mess, the cook’s helper noted, “He doesn’t look too happy.”
“Ah,” retorted the cook, “probably put a packet on us going south — instead of north.”
“What’s wrong with north?”
“Friggin’ dangerous,” said a torpedoman’s mate. “Ain’t nothin’ right with it. Fuckin’ cold, too.”
In Control, Robert Brentwood told the navigator to instruct the Cray NAVCOMP to plot a course for latitude sixty-two degrees north, longitude thirty-two degrees ten minutes west, which would bring Roosevelt to a point over the Reykaanes Ridge, south of Iceland. This position would put them 430 miles southwest of Iceland’s North Cape before they headed for the narrow Denmark Strait of the GI — Greenland-Iceland— Gap, in parts no deeper than five hundred feet. From there Brentwood intended to execute a zigzag/weave pattern leading eleven hundred miles farther north to Koldewey Island at the southernmost extent of the pack ice that extended like a long, right-handed thumb pointing down from the Pole into the Greenland Sea.
In all, the war patrol would run west of Scotland to Reykaanes Ridge, then north beyond Koldewey Island to the fifteen-thousand foot deeps along the Fracture Zone around Spitzbergen Island, putting the Sea Wolf between Greenland’s northern reaches and northwestern Russia. In all, the journey of around three thousand miles would normally take her the best part of four days at her flank speed of thirty knots plus. But moving more slowly, at a third of her speed, so the cooling pumps would not have to work so hard, therefore limiting the sub’s noise, the slower trip, while navigating through the ice fields and the southward-flowing East Greenland Current, would take around thirteen days.
While the Greenland-Iceland Gap was known to mariners at large as the GI Gap, to the NATO sub crews it was the “Gastrointestinal Tract”—the one where ships’ quartermasters recorded a higher than usual consumption of Pepto-Bismol as drift ice, calved from the pack ice, ground together all around you like a giant grinding his teeth. It also added ominous and forbidding tones to the sound waves coming in via the Sea Wolf’s towed passive sonar array, which was integrated with the conformal bow-mounted passive hydrophones. Which meant it could confuse sonar operators.
Brentwood bent over the chart, carefully circling the six stations he would have to maintain in the Arctic deep, ready on a moment’s notice, should the occasion ever arise, to attack one or all of the more than forty-five Russian navy, army, and air force bases on Kola Peninsula — from the ice-free ports of Polyarnyy and Murmansk in the west as far east as Amderma on the Kara Sea and Uelen on Siberia’s edge that looked out on the Bering Sea, less than a hundred miles from Alaska and only eleven hundred miles from Unalaska, where his sister, Lana, was stationed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As commander of all U.S. forces in Europe Gen. Douglas Freeman left Brussels with four F-18 fighters escorting him on the first leg of his circuitous ten-thousand-mile journey to Korea via a U.S. stopover where he would secretly consult with the president at Camp David, Freeman’s look-alike, seconded from the Fifth Canadian Army’s entertainment battalion, left the icy barrens of Newfoundland for the flight across the pole to Brussels’ NATO headquarters.
David Brentwood and Lili were in the Brussels gallery, admiring the Rubens, which, along with other masterpieces, had been relegated to a rather poky basement of the museum because of the possibility of Soviet rocket salvos.
He admired Lili’s knowledge of Rubens and other painters — Caravaggio, Bernini, Berckhuide, and Hals — he’d never heard of. Her mention of them made him feel “provincial,” as his sister, Lana, and probably Melissa would have teasingly called him. He even felt prudish in front of Rubens’s voluptuous women, whereas Lili talked about them at a deeper level with such affection and knowledge of detail that it was clear she had been nurtured by such paintings and felt a need for them, as much a part of her life as baseball was to him. His older brother, Robert, had written home in much the same vein about his fiancée, Rosemary, who taught Shakespeare.
It made David feel slightly inferior to Lili, despite the fact that he was older. But she had none of the pomposity of some of the self-proclaimed aficionados of art who flaunted their disdain for the neophyte.
He tried to understand the paintings, but at heart displayed more curiosity about how they were done than what they depicted. But Lili put him at ease, telling him he shouldn’t even try to explain them. “It is better to feel them, David,” she advised, happy with the joy of showing her handsome young American the best of her culture. “Do you feel them?” she asked.
He thought for a moment. “I suppose so. They look warm—”
“Yes!” she said triumphantly, squeezing his hand in delight. “Rubens always makes it come alive so.” She glanced about the basement gallery. “Of course, they are not in a very nice setting, and the light is not good.”
“It’s fine,” David assured her. “Makes them seem cozier.”
She didn’t understand the word. He explained by pulling her closer to him, to the stern disapproval of the security guard, and David felt the happiest he’d been since — he couldn’t remember when. He told Lili. She said nothing, putting her head on his shoulder as they sat in silence on the bench in front of a Vermeer, each lost in one another until reluctantly David reminded her they must soon head for the train station.
“If only we could stay,” she said, sighing. “Forever.”
“We will,” he said. Perhaps, he thought, remembering his mother’s time-honored adage, God did work in mysterious ways. Perhaps Lili would take away the pain of losing Melissa.
“A penny for your thoughts?” said Lili, looking up at him.
“What — oh. I was thinking we’d better be going or the mad sergeant will have me down as AWOL.” David stood up, searching for change in his pocket. “Which reminds me, I forgot to make that call. There a phone somewhere?”
“You can call from the station.”
“All right.”
As he waited for the British captain to answer, David realized that any line in NATO HQ might well be tapped by anyone from NATO’s own intelligence to a SPETS undercover operative, and so he spoke to the British captain in deliberately vague terms about hearing news from a sergeant that perhaps HQ Brussels should know about.