“Bullshit!” roared the base commander, Adm. Roger D. Rutgers the Second. “Must be a code screw-up,” he informed the Wave secretary.
“No, sir. We’ve had it confirmed.”
“Well, I’ll be—”
“Sir!” It was the Wave, trying frantically to signal with her eyes that someone was right behind her. “Ah, Admiral…” she spluttered. “Sir, this is Captain — I mean—”
“It’s all right, Sue, calm yourself,” said Rutgers as he saluted and, coming around from his desk, offered his congratulations to Ray Brentwood. Brentwood returned the salute, shook hands, relished it, and wasted no time with small talk. He had a list, a short one, which he presented to Rutgers. Point one — he wanted all commanders of ASW ships in port to report to his office immediately. Two — all ASW ships in port that were seaworthy were to be fully loaded and ready for sea by 0700, only a few hours away.
The base commander pointed out, “with all due respect,” which Brentwood knew was without any respect at all, that the large number of civilian longshoremen involved in the loading of stores would have, by union regulations, to be given at least forty-eight hours written advance notice of any such change in the agreed-upon working hours.
“Admiral Rutgers,” said Ray Brentwood, “under the power invested in me through the president’s executive emergency war order 1347D-5, any longshoreman refusing to load American warships at any time will be shot under the conditions which apply to all alien and/or indigenous saboteurs. And if you don’t have the ships loaded, I’ll shoot you!”
The Wave was speechless.
“In all my years—” began Rutgers.
“Admiral Rutgers, if you don’t do what I tell you and get those commanders to my office right now — none of us will have any years left.”
“Where,” thundered Rutgers, barely under control, “is your office?”
It was the only time that Ray Brentwood had smiled since arriving in San Diego. “IX-44E.”
“What the hell’s IX—?” Rutgers asked Sue, so incensed, he could barely speak. The Wave ran her finger quickly down the long list of auxiliary vessels. “It’s — it’s a barge, sir.”
“A what?”
“Barge, sir. Sludge removal.” she replied, frightened, adding timidly, “propelled.”
“Propelled!”
They said Rutgers sounded like a sea lion bull in the San Diego Zoo.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The chief engineer aboard the USS Roosevelt had managed, by raising more pressure in the lesser-damaged port ballast tanks, to force out more water. For a while, as the sub rose to just over two hundred feet below the ice roof of the surface, it seemed as if, with her “flaps down”—diving planes reversed in the vertical position, ready to “pick” the ice— survival was near at hand. But then she stopped rising, the damage sustained by the ballast tanks under the Alfa’s attack too great to allow further lift.
The emotional roller coaster of depression after the near fatal miss by the Alfa’s torpedoes, the belief that they were trapped, then the mounting excitement as the ship had slowly risen a little, and then the plunge back again into depression as she lay there, was almost too much to bear. But bear it they did, without histrionics or ill temper but quietly now and bravely, as if all the world were watching when they knew the world was not, that they were alone, each submariner’s doubts and fears battened down in the watertight compartments of his soul.
Not one whined about the contaminated atmosphere they now breathed as a result of the radioactive water that had poured into the sub. Depending on where they were in the sub at the time, they had received between 250 and 480 rads, which, in the cold, undeniable statistics of radioactivity, meant that more than 50 percent of these men would the within weeks or months, depending on their individual metabolism. Those who’d received between 100 and 200 rads were already doomed to shorter life expectancy through longer-term cancer, and any children they might have would be subject to the risk of genetic defects, even if old “Bing,” as they referred affectionately to Robert Brentwood, could perform the impossible and get them out of the sub within the next few hours. For some, given what they saw as the utter impossibility of Brentwood ever getting them out of it, it was as if the gods were merely playing with them for their sport, for while monitors showed that the steel hatch covers of the missile tubes were unaffected, the escape hatch covers remained jammed shut.
Robert Brentwood and the chief engineer, the pile of blueprints before them, turned pale gray in the reddened-out control room light, as they pored over the sub’s intricate systems, Brentwood posing possibilities, the chief listening. But, confronted by the sheer logic of physics, the chief was forced to reject all the captain’s proposals as unworkable due to some irreparable malfunction caused by the Alfa’s attack, both acutely aware of the supreme irony, voiced disgustedly by the chief, that the only thing still in full working order was “Sherwood Forest” and its firing control system.
“Rifle’s in fine working order, eh, Chief?” said Brentwood. “But the rifleman is down.”
“That’s about it.” Behind them, Peter Zeldman kept moving from the red of Control to the blue light of the sonar, everyone in the ship knowing that after the explosions, both enemy air and sea vessels could be moving toward them to investigate. Zeldman stared at the fathometer, willing its recorder needle to move upward from two hundred feet. For one breathless moment he saw the needle registering 199, 198, 197, only to see it fall back to 203, the momentary rise due not to any increase in buoyancy in the sub’s ballast tanks, as he’d hoped, but rather to a cold “updraft,” or column of water rising locally because of differences in the sea’s salinity.
“If I didn’t know better,” Zeldman told Sonar Operator Emerson, “I’d say some joker was up there trying to get us mad.”
Emerson didn’t reply. Despite the small cross he unabashedly wore about his neck, he rarely spoke about his religious beliefs, but he believed unreservedly in the goldfish-bowl view of God: that the Creator made the world, put us in to swim, and after that, it was up to the goldfish — that divine intervention came only at the beginning, and all else was a matter of accident in which only a person’s will and courage could alter the outcome. If it was their fate to die, then they would all enter God’s other domain in which judgment would be revealed. Sonarman Link, Emerson’s colleague and backup on the shift, thought all religion “bullshit,” and the two were the best of friends, their bond mutual tolerance for each other’s “weird” beliefs, and their love, their passion, to be what they were— America’s point men in the earth’s largest domain.
“Any change in the ice growl?” asked Zeldman.
“Nothing, sir,” replied Link, knowing that Zeldman’s question was to verify Emerson’s evaluation that there was no “singing”—significant sound amid the cacophony of ice growl, shrimp snapping, and other ocean noises.
In Control, the light from the reactor room lit up.
“Con?” acknowledged Brentwood.
“Captain, we have a minor steam leak.”
“Can you contain it?” asked Brentwood calmly.
“No problem at the moment, sir.”
“Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. “You in foil?” He was referring to the bright silver heat-reflecting suit with air-breathing hose attached, which was required by regulation for any repairs in the reactor room.
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Yes, Captain.”