“I have a package to hand deliver to Admiral Foster,” an ensign announced a few minutes later. Foster’s flag secretary pointed him to the door.
“Good morning, sir! This is for you, sir.” The ensign handed Foster the wrapped cassette.
“Thank you. Dismissed.”
Foster inserted the cassette in the tape player atop his office television. The set was already on, and the picture appeared in several seconds.
Tyler was standing beside the CNO as it focused. “Yep.”
“Yep,” Foster agreed.
The picture was lousy — no other word for it. The low-light television system did not give a very sharp picture since it amplified all of the ambient light equally. This tended to wash out many details. But what they saw was enough: a very large missile submarine whose sail was much farther aft than the sails on anything a Western country made. She dwarfed the Dallas and Pogy. They watched the screen without a word for the next fifteen minutes. Except for the wobbly camera, the picture was about as lively as a test pattern.
“Well,” Foster said as the tape ended, “we got us a Russian boomer.”
“How ‘bout that?” Tyler grinned.
“Skip, you were up for command of Los Angeles, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We owe you for this, Commander, we owe you a lot. I did some checking the other day. An officer injured in the line of duty does not necessarily have to retire unless he is demonstrably unfit for duty. An accident while returning from working on your boat is line of duty, I think, and we’ve had a few ship commanders who were short a leg. I’ll go to the president myself on this, son. It will mean a year’s work getting back in the groove, but if you still want your command, by God, I’ll get it for you.”
Tyler sat down for that. It would mean being fitted for a new leg, something he’d been considering for months, and a few weeks getting used to it. Then a year — a good year — relearning everything he needed to know before he could go to sea… He shook his head. “Thank you, Admiral. You don’t know what that means to me — but, no. I’m past that now. I have a different life, and different responsibilities now, and I’d just be taking someone else’s slot. Tell you what, you let me get a look at that boomer, and we’re even.”
“That I can guarantee.” Foster had hoped he’d respond that way, had been nearly sure of it. It was too bad, though. Tyler, he thought, would have been a good candidate for his own flag except for the leg. Well, nobody ever said the world was fair.
“You guys seem to have things under control,” Ryan observed. “Does anybody mind if I flake out somewhere?”
“Flake out?” Borodin asked.
“Sleep.”
“Ah, take Dr. Petrov’s cabin, across from the medical office.”
On his way aft Ryan looked in Borodin’s cabin and found the vodka bottle that had been liberated. It didn’t have much taste, but it was smooth enough. Petrov’s bunk was not very wide or very soft. Ryan was past caring. He took a long swallow and lay down in his uniform, which was already so greasy and dirty as to be beyond hope. He was asleep in five minutes.
The Sea Cliff
The air-purifier system was not working properly, Lieutenant Sven Johnsen thought. If his sinus cold had lasted a few more days he might not have noticed. The Sea Cliff was just passing ten thousand feet, and they couldn’t tinker with the system until they surfaced. It was not dangerous — the environmental control systems had as many built-in redundancies as the Space Shuttle — just a nuisance.
“I’ve never been so deep,” Captain Igor Kaganovich said conversationally. Getting him here had been complicated. It had required a Helix helicopter from the Kiev to the Tarawa, then a U.S. Navy Sea King to Norfolk. Another helicopter had taken him to the USS Austin, which was heading for 33N 75W at twenty knots. The Austin was a landing ship dock, a large vessel whose aft end was a covered well. She was usually used for landing craft, but today she carried the Sea Cliff, a three-man submarine mat had been flown down from Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
“Does take some getting used to,” Johnsen agreed, “but when you get down to it, five hundred feet, ten thousand feet, doesn’t make much difference. A hull fracture would kill you just as fast, just down here there’d be less residue for the next boat to try and recover.”
“Keep thinking those happy thoughts, sir,” Machinist’s Mate First Class Jesse Overton said. “Still clear on sonar?”
“Right, Jess.” Johnsen had been working with the machinist’s mate for two years. The Sea Cliff was their baby, a small, rugged research submarine used mainly for oceanographic tasks, including the emplacement or repair of SOSUS sensors. On the three-man sub there was little place for bridge discipline. Overton was not well educated or very articulate — at least not politely articulate. His skill at maneuvering the minisub was unsurpassed, however, and Johnsen was just as happy to leave that job to him. It was the lieutenant’s task to manage the mission at hand.
“Air system needs some work,” Johnsen observed.
“Yeah, the filters are about due for replacement. I was going to do that next week. Coulda’ done it this morning, but I figured the backup control wiring was more important.”
“Guess I have to go along with you on that. Handling okay?”
“Like a virgin.” Overton’s smile was reflected in the thick Lexan view port in front of the control seat. The Sea Cliff’s awkward design made her clumsy to maneuver. It was as though she knew what she wanted to do, just not quite how she wanted to do it. “How wide’s the target area?”
“Pretty wide. Pigeon says after the explosion the pieces spread from hell to breakfast.”
“I believe it. Three miles down, and a current to spread it around.”
“The boat’s name is Red October, Captain? A Victor-class attack submarine, you said?”
“That is your name for the class,” Kaganovich said.
“What do you call them?” Johnsen asked. He got no reply. What was the big deal? he wondered. What did the name of the class matter to anybody?
“Switching on locater sonar.” Johnsen activated several systems, and the Sea Cliff pulsed with the sound of the high-frequency sonar mounted on her belly. “There’s the bottom.” The yellow screen showed bottom contours in white.
“Anything sticking up, sir?” Overton asked.
“Not today, Jess.”
A year before they had been operating a few miles from this spot and nearly been impaled on a Liberty ship, sunk around 1942 by a German U-boat. The hulk had been sitting up at an angle, propped up by a massive boulder. That near collision would surely have been fatal, and it had taught both men caution.
“Okay, I’m starting to get some hard returns. Directly ahead, spread out like a fan. Another five hundred feet to the bottom.”
“Right.”
“Hmph. There’s one big piece, ‘bout thirty feet long, maybe nine or ten across, eleven o’clock, three hundred yards. We’ll go for that one first.”
“Coming left, lights coming on now.”
A half-dozen high-intensity floodlights came on, at once surrounding the submersible in a globe of light. It did not penetrate more than ten yards in the water, which ate up the light energy.
“There’s the bottom, just where you said, Mr. Johnsen,” Overton said. He halted the powered descent and checked for buoyancy. Almost exactly neutral, good. “This current’s going to be tough on battery power.”
“How strong is it?”
“Knot an’ a half, maybe more like two, depending on bottom contours. Same as last year. I figure we can maneuver an hour, hour an’ a half, tops.”
Johnsen agreed. Oceanographers were still puzzling over this deep current, which seemed to change direction from time to time in no particular pattern. Odd. There were a lot of odd things in the ocean. That’s why Johnsen got his oceanography degree, to figure some of the buggers out. It sure beat working for a living. Being three miles down wasn’t work, not to John-sen.
“I see somethin’, a flash off the bottom right in front of us. Want I should grab it?”
“If you can.”
They couldn’t see it yet on any of the Sea Cliff’s three TV monitors, which looked straight ahead, forty-five degrees left and right of the bow.
“Okay.” Overton put his right hand on the waldo control. This was what he was really best at.
“Can you see what it is?” Johnsen asked, fiddling with the TV.
“Some kinda instrument. Can you kill the number one flood, sir? It’s dozzlin’ me.”
“Wait one.” Johnsen leaned forward to kill the proper switch. The number one floodlight provided illumination for the bow camera, which went immediately blank.
“Okay, baby, now let’s just hold steady…” The machinist’s mate’s left hand worked the directional propeller controls; his right was poised in the waldo glove. Now he was the only one who could see the target. Overton’s reflection was grinning at itself. His right hand moved rapidly.