they were under the ice, he wouldn’t have to worry about CVs — surface vessels. Oh no? Emerson thought — what if he heard a sudden crackling noise? Would it be the sound of a Soviet sub “ice-picking” through the twelve-foot- thick ice cap to fire a cruise missile? Or would it be simply the ice pressure sounding off as great bergs, calved off one section of the ice pack, came up against another ice sheet? If you got too close to the sound layer, next thing you might hear could be a “triple”: three enemy torpedoes vectoring you even as you dived.
Emerson devoutly wished they were back in the good old plain dangerous North Atlantic and not up here in the depths of the Greenland Sea.
To make matters worse, Emerson could hear a crew member, a new planesman, being reminded by one of the chiefs that beneath the sea, sound traveled in excess of 3,000 miles per hour, compared to the mere 760 miles per hour in air, the sound in the seas racing through the more tightly bunched molecules of water.
But now at least the
It was at that moment, two hours into the dogwatch, that Emerson, while watching normal “pop bottle fizz,” electronic panicles jumping in uniform sine waves on his sonar computer, heard the sound of what he thought must be massive schools of shrimp “clacking,” bearing one six three degrees.
From the size of the blip and the direction, he guessed it was about ten miles from Molloy Deep, and worked back the vectors. It was also at this moment that Able Seaman Arthur G. Leach, a steward, was changing the bed linen on the executive officer’s bunk in the relatively tiny stateroom. Seeing a Walkman on the bed, he bent over, picked it up, and for a moment, seeing no one was around, slipped on the earphones and pressed the button — some old pop singer called Buddy Holly was singing a peppy song called “Peggy Sue.” Leach hadn’t heard the song before, but it had a nice, peppy beat to it, ‘bout some guy head over heels in love. Kinda mushy but catchy, reminding him of his high school dates.
After finishing the linen change, emptying the wastepaper basket, and putting the Walkman back on the captain’s bed, Leach headed down toward the galley for a coffee break. He walked behind the serving counter, took a mug out of its anti-roll hole, and lifted the three-quarter-full Silex pot of coffee out of its antiroll cradle.
Then it happened.
Whether the thing that started it was Leach still moving to the beat of the song he’d just heard, or, as he was to claim later, there’d been an alteration made in the trim of the ship which had caused the ship to yaw slightly, the fact was it happened. Some said it was a spot of butter on the galley’s decking that had probably caused him to lose his footing.
Other than Leach, the first to hear, or rather to “see,” it was Emerson in the blue glow of the sonar room one deck above. Suddenly he saw the steady hiccuping of “ice grind” and shrimp clacking interrupted by a burp: a rounded sine wave on the trace at zero seconds — which told him immediately that it had come from within the sub. He pressed the button for officer of the deck in Control.
“Zeldman, OOD.” Emerson could tell from Zeldman’s relaxed tone that they hadn’t heard it in Control, but even now he knew that the low-frequency thud in the one-hundred- to six-hundred-hertz range was radiating out from the hull at over three thousand miles per hour.
“What have you got?” asked Zeldman easily.
“Noise short, sir. From the sub.”
“Christ! How long?”
Emerson had already run back the tape. “It was one point two two seven seconds duration, sir.”
“Where in the sub — any ideas?”
“Galley maybe — short in one of the pumps. Insulation shot — I dunno for sure.”
“Hold on!” Zeldman said, pressing the intercom for the chief of the boat. “Chief — we’ve got a noise short. Take a party of six quickly — quietly — for a visual check. I’m calling all compartments now.”
“We’re on our way, sir,” said the chief. Next Zeldman pressed the engine room intercom. They reported nothing wrong. He went to the next most likely possibility, the galley, a bread mixer or some other piece of equipment that may have shorted out or not been seated properly before someone had had a chance to switch it off.
“Galley, Seaman Leach.”
“We’ve had a noise short — any of those mixers been on?”
“No, sir — ah, sir…”
“Yes?”
“Uh, sorry, sir. I dropped the coffeepot. Sort of busted against the bulkhead, I guess.”
“Uh…it was kind of full, sir.”
“Don’t you touch another thing. Stay right where you are.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry…”
Zeldman had already turned to the diving officer. “Take her to two thousand feet.” It was approaching their crush depth.
“Two thousand, sir,” said the officer of the deck, the order repeated again by the planesman, who gently pushed the control column forward as a pilot would in a shallow-angled dive. They’d been running near the surface, hiding in the ice clutter, and if the angle of dive was too acute, too fast, the stern of the 360-foot sub was in danger of slamming hard up against the ice, creating an even bigger noise short.
“Watch the bubble,” Zeldman heard the diving officer caution calmly in the background. Zeldman shot a quick glance at the chart, at the same time instructing the diving officer to call the depth.
“Three hundred feet… three fifty… four hundred…”
Zeldman quickly computed a new course away from their original tack, and the moment the diving officer informed him they were at two thousand, he ordered, “Change of course. Steer zero five two.”
“Change in course. Zero five two.”
“Speed ten knots.”
“Speed ten knots.”
“And if any other son of a bitch makes a noise, I’ll have his guts for garters.” No one spoke until Zeldman, leaving the redded-out Control, walked forward into the more comforting blue glow of the sonar room. But he knew the psychological effect of the color change was merely an illusion. “Pray to God, Emerson, no one heard us.”
“Yes, sir.”
But praying was no good. One point two two seven seconds was an age for someone whose digitized innards registered a noise lasting only milliseconds. The Russian Alfa had seen the
Captain Yanov ordered the Alfa to alter course, heading straight along the noise source bearing, and ordered all torpedo tubes, which were situated forward, ready for action. He did not want to switch on his active pinger, for this would alert the other sub, nor did he wish to increase speed too quickly, for even though his was the quietest class of Soviet submarine, his cooling pumps did not make him inaudible, and all they had was a heading, a bearing on the noise, no measure of distance. Yet he had no intention of losing the sub, whose distance, despite the lack of any accurate electronic means of measuring it without using an active pinger, was estimated by Yegor Petrov, his best sonar operator, purely on the basis of his long experience in the Arctic, as being probably plus or minus fifteen kilometers — nine miles — from them.
Yanov looked down at his chart overlay covering the Spitzbergen Fracture zone. “Any of our subs in the area?” he asked his OOD. “Apart from us, that is?”
Officer of the deck, Ivashko, had already anticipated the captain’s question, checking their position against the colored strips of the other Russian Hunter/Killer patrol routes. “Should be no interdiction with any of ours,
