Rage of Battle

“Very well.” He called the reactor room. “You all right back there, Chief?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stern room?” asked Brentwood.

“Man missing, sir.”

“Who?”

“We’re not sure, Captain. We had a ‘Rover’ working the watch overlap.”

“Well, find out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Probably in the can,” said Zeldman, risking a note of levity after the tension of the Russian attack. The sonar operator gave a forced laugh.

Brentwood saw the square red eyes of the circuit monitors lighting up — full power restored. He shook his head. It was an infuriating dilemma, enough to elicit a record three “damns” from him in as many seconds. Here was the pride of the U.S. Navy, America’s vessel of last resort, with power to burn, its reactor-driven steam turbines back to generating enough power to light a city of over a hundred thousand. But to what effect? With a damaged prop, the sub, even if it used its auxiliary diesel hookup or, failing that, the “bring it home” capability of the smaller “dolphin dick”—the emergency screw slotted in the stern ballast — could only make a maximum of three to five knots. It meant that for combat purposes, self-defense included, the Roosevelt was virtually dead in the water — a sick whale in a sea full of sharks. On top of this, Zeldman informed him that the hydraulic line for the sail’s starboard diving plane was losing pressure — a possible perforation. It couldn’t be repaired; they’d have to go to manual override, a slow business at the best of times.

Another report came in from the forward torpedo room. Using a chain pulley to recradle one of the three- and-a-half-thousand-pound Mark-48 torpedoes which had shaken loose in the pitch darkness that had followed the final salvo of RBU rockets, the torpedo crew found the missing seaman, an electrician’s mate. They were unable to identify him for five minutes or so, his dog tags embedded in the bloody mash that had been his head.

Brentwood issued orders for the emergency prop to be extended from its ballast sheath and engaged. Its fanlike whir was quiet enough, picked up by the sub’s implant hull mikes, the TACTAS, or towed array, mikes having been knocked out by two of the Russian drum charges. Brentwood tapped on the NAVCOMP keys, the computer screen’s warm amber readout informing him that at its maximum speed of five knots, it would take Roosevelt twelve days at least, through enemy-sub-infested waters, to reach Land’s End at the southwestern tip of England. If they turned about and headed south against the stream, to Newfoundland, it would take them much longer. Either way, they would be in constant danger of being discovered through the noise of the emergency prop. If this happened, the Roosevelt would have only five knots against a Hunter/Killer’s forty.

Brentwood ordered the emergency prop resheathed. They would wait for the next scheduled rendezvous with the TACAMO — take charge and move out — aircraft due in seventy-three hours time. He would take her up, out of the sea noise, give a signal requesting emergency assistance, then go down and wait rather than move and risk “noise shorts”—any noise from inside the sub that could resonate loudly enough from the hull to give away its presence. But Robert Brentwood knew that the waiting was by far the hardest thing for a submariner to do.

“Don’t sweat it,” the quartermaster told one of the fire control technicians in the forward compartment. “With the freshwater converter and our freezers, we’ve got enough food and fresh water down here to last us a year. Hell, we convert so much fresh water, we have to dump half of it.” It was meant to be a reassuring thought until an electrician’s mate pointed out that by now the noise of their engagement with the cruiser must have been picked up by both sides’ ocean-bottom arrays scattered at various points throughout the North Atlantic. Further reducing their chance for a pickup tow by a fast navy tug to one of the big sub tender/floating docks was the gale warning from the last TACAMO contact. On top of that, there was the problem of whether the TACAMO aircraft would arrive on schedule, if at all, given the increasing Russian air cover of Soviet Hunter/Killer packs which had broken out south of the Greenland-Iceland Gap and the Iceland-Faroes Gap.

Brentwood knew the only other choice he had was to take the sub to the surface just minutes before the next scheduled TACAMO contact and risk “pop-up, pop-down”—putting up the vertical VHF (very high frequency) aerial with which Roosevelt could send a high-intensity “burst” message more quickly than from the slower “fishline” trailing VLF aerial. He would expose the HF aerial for no more than thirty seconds, then retract and submerge. Even so, the danger was that any penetration of the sea’s surface could be picked up by Soviet satellite — not so much by the protrusion of the aerial itself but rather from discoloration or “ruffle” caused by the warm water envelope around the sub entering the surface temperature zone. Nothing could be done to prevent this warm envelope, the result of pumps having to continually cool the “coffeepot” or nuclear reactor, from rising to the surface with the sub. Brentwood knew that a Soviet satellite spotting the TD, or temperate differential, “patch” would give the Soviet Hunter/Killers the Roosevelt’s exact position rather than that reported by the Russian surface vessel that had attacked him. He could keep the Roosevelt deep to eliminate the thermal patching, but this would make him unable to use the VHF to ask for help. Any way he moved, it was risky.

In the meantime he decided to take her up halfway toward VLF depth, where any thermal patching would not be as recognizable via satellite and could be interpreted as local upwelling from one of the millions of oceanic springs venting from the sea floor.

In the quiet, redded-out control room the bulkhead was now beaded in flamingo-colored droplets of condensation.

He called for the chief electrician’s mate in charge of the stern torpedo room and also for the next shift’s sonar operator.

“Chief, I want you to get a MOSS. Here—” Brentwood showed him the drawing of the mobile submarine simulator. “Here, I’ve drawn a sketch of what I want you—”

“Sir!”

It was the hospital corpsman, looking worried. “We’re going to have to deal with Evans…”

For a second Brentwood thought Evans must be alive after all — awakening from a deep coma that they’d mistaken for death. Lord knows it had happened before. In the old days, navy regulations held that before placing a body in a canvas shroud, a stitch of catgut had to be made, passing the needle through the skin fold between the nose and lips — one of the most sensitive areas — to make sure the man was really dead. Dealing with Evans’s corpse was the last thing Brentwood wanted to think about, but he knew the corpsman was correct. Modern-day regulations made it mandatory that a body which may be harboring infectious disease must be frozen as soon as possible and while “in this condition must be dispatched” no matter what the state of sea.

“Very well,” Brentwood answered. “Ten minutes. Flag party astern.” But he wanted no part of it. All he knew for certain was that Evans had died shortly after he’d given him the shot of diazepam. Worst of all, quietening him had done no good — the Russian ship having zeroed in on the Roosevelt anyway. Evans’s death had achieved nothing but cast a pall of pessimism about the boat. Roosevelt was the world’s most modern vessel, but a death aboard was as bad an omen to its crew as it had been for the sailors of Vasco de Gama and Columbus. For many aboard the sub who did not have the religious faith of their seagoing forebears, it was worse. Not a warning but a prophecy.

For Brentwood, Evans’s death wasn’t the first he’d witnessed at sea, but it was the first in his command, the first he was directly responsible for. During the Russians’ attack, he’d forgotten about it, but now it returned with the corpsman and he felt it start to gnaw at him like an old childhood shame — a terrible thing said to one’s parents, an act of deliberate cruelty to a family pet — like something one conceals for years now rising up from a hidden deep. It was not Evans’s death alone that began eating away at Robert Brentwood but the sudden and totally unexpected loss of control he’d seen in the man — the putrid stench of the seaman’s body the unmistakable sign of a body having lost all self-control. Brentwood was determined he would put it out of his mind, but as with so many things hidden under great pressure, the childhood fear of losing control wormed its way back to consciousness. Brentwood kept talking about the MOSS. To dwell on death, his father had told him, was a surefire way to self-pity, and then you didn’t belong on a sub, you belonged on a couch. Couches, said the admiral, were places for people to escape from facing things head-on — the way some men went to sea to get away from their wives.

For a second Robert Brentwood thought of his brother Ray, captain of a guided missile frigate, who had been horribly burned after a swarm of North Korean missile boats had attacked his ship, the USS Blaine,