“The fires were probably doused by the flooding,” commented the OOD.
“Even so,” rejoined Valery, “the tanker’s own engine oil should—”
Suddenly Valery snapped the grips hard against the scope’s stainless steel column. “Down scope. Dive to five hundred.”
“Down scope… dive to five hundred!” repeated the OOD. The diving officer stood directly behind the two planesmen, hands gripping their two bucket seats, knuckles white as he watched the gauge of the sub. If they dove at too steep an angle, the sub’s stern would come clear out of the water before they were fully submerged.
“
As the torpedo officer confirmed the order, Valery explained the rush to the OOD. “A helicopter’s coming off the second tanker. Most likely for crew rescue but could be ASW.”
For a second Valery chastised himself for not having fired the submarine simulator before the attack, but it was an enormously expensive piece of equipment. Besides shooting out millions of rubles with each fish, its noise, while a decoy for any ASW aircraft or ship in the area, would have been picked up by the SOSUS, the underwater microphone arrays of the sound surveillance system, giving the sub’s general “area position” away. With the depth needle approaching five hundred meters, Valery decided he’d made the right decision, saving the simulator till now. True, he’d glimpsed the helicopter on the tanker’s deck for only a split second, but he was sure its rotors had been spinning, ready for takeoff, possibly with ASW munitions.
“Level at five hundred, sir.”
“Fire decoy!”
“Decoy fired, sir.”
“Silent running,” ordered Valery.
“Silent running, sir.”
From now on if any crew member made a mistake — dropped anything on the metal deck that might be picked up in the sound channel — it would cost the man three months’ pay plus a “zebra”—a black-striped demotion entry on his blue service sheet.
But Valery himself had made a serious error. The Bell 212 twin-turboshaft chopper rising aft off the second tanker’s stern housing pad was interested only in trying to rescue two crew members whose salt-activated vest lights were orange pinpoints in the raging cauldron about the stricken tankers. The spray-roiling beam that was the chopper’s searchlight turned rust-red above the blankets of burning oil. In the beam’s circle that was moving up and down the chaotic sea like an undulating sheet of blood, the two crewmen lay limp in the helo’s harness, having suffocated in the oil after having been concussed by the explosions of the torpedoes. Likewise, scores of seabirds were already smothered in the bunker “C” crude.
Sandra Thompson, Llamos, and the starboard lookout struggled on the slippery incline of the stern deck of the first tanker. The ship’s two halves continued drifting apart as the three survivors tossed over a white, drum-size Beaufort canister, its tether flying free of the ship like some long snake. The canister hit the water, instantly shedding its fiberglass shell and blossoming into a tent raft of vivid Day-Glo magenta highlighted by the fire on the second tanker aboard which small, toylike figures could be seen vainly manning a crisscross of hoses.
“Inflate your vest,” Llamos shouted to the starboard lookout. “Hold your breath as long as you can and—” Llamos’s voice was whipped away by the gale-force winds as he pointed toward the treacle-moated raft now about thirty feet away from the badly listing stern section. The lookout jumped.
Sandra pulled the C02 string on her life vest, heard the sudden hiss of air, felt the Mae West swelling above her bosom as she tightened the waist straps and bent down to inflate the vest of the injured radio man whom she and Llamos had dragged precariously from the bridge. Llamos had taken a turn about the operator’s waist with a painter from one of the lifeboats to prevent the injured man from sliding down the deck that was now dangerously slick with the oil which had been blown skyward in towering black spumes before falling back on the tankers, drenching the four and fuelling the fires with a driving black rain. The radio man was so quiet, Sandra thought he was dead, but putting her finger on his carotid artery she thought she felt a faint pulse.
“Go!” Llamos yelled out to her. “Jimmy and I’ll look after him. You need to reach the raft. Transmit our—” He didn’t finish, his voice drowned in a gush of superheated steam, a boiler beneath them exploding, splitting the ship’s port after section, the stern heaving, the stack spewing boiling water swept forward for hundreds of yards in the gale force winds. The stern was now split and sliding back into the sea, rolling, revealing the flanges of its enormous prop blades. Llamos and the other three were toppling out of control down the cliff of the deck. A lifeboat wrenched from its davits swung upward like a trapeze, smashing itself to splinters. The hissing roar of the stern was so loud it could be heard above the gale by the few crewmen still battling the second tanker’s fires. Unable to save Sandra or the others, the two-man helo crew watched helplessly as the rear half of the MV
The chopper’s pilot had ordered his assistant to jettison the bodies of the two dead men they’d hauled up, lessening the chopper’s weight so the helo might try to pick up as many survivors as possible from the twenty- five-man crew on the second tanker and any others who, inconceivable as it appeared, might be alive on the forward section of the first tanker. Though still afloat, it was certain to go under within minutes.
The pilot shouted his instructions regarding excess weight into the throat mike, and his assistant, after having grabbed the auto-flash Canon and taking head shots of the two dead men for later identification, pushed the bodies out. The chopper banked in the darkness toward the stern of the second tanker, its fire now so fierce, there was no hope of the ship’s hoses extinguishing it. The hot air currents streaming up from the blazing ship were so powerful that the pilot knew there was no chance of getting anywhere close to the deck.
Cautiously he brought the chopper toward the stern, his visibility now reduced to zero because of the continuing oil smudge on his windscreen combining with the buildup of salt crust, a combination the wipers couldn’t handle. His assistant saw a crimson streak several hundred yards away to the east— a flare — and in its flickering light the Day-Glo of a Beaufort “Teepee.” Yelling at the pilot and gesturing eastward, the assistant guided them to the point seventy feet away. The chopper hovered above the raft and lowered the harness, swiveling in the C clip. But then seeing the raft was overcrowded with survivors from both tankers and that this could easily lead to a capsize should the chopper be suddenly caught in an updraft, the pilot shouted into the mike, “We’re only a few miles from shore. Best leave ‘em for Air Sea Rescue in the morning. Stand a better chance, I reckon.”
“I dunno,” yelled the assistant. “Could go belly-up anyway in the swells.” During the second of hesitation the Bell 212, which could not fly on one engine unless traveling in excess of one hundred miles per hour, gave a shudder. An engine coughed, then the other cut out, its air filter jammed solid with soot from the oil fire. The chopper plunged, its rotors chopping into the loaded raft. Then, catching a swell, the blades cartwheeled the chopper several hundred feet, splashing into the mousse of bunker “C,” parts of the main rotor whistling through the gale. Everyone aboard the tent raft was drowned, in effect suffocated by the oil, including Sandra Thompson and the two-month-old child she was carrying.
General Grey had thought nothing of Freeman’s call about the peculiar condition of winter ice in the Bering Strait. Surely the Pentagon planners would know this. Grey called downstairs to make sure. They didn’t know. This shocked Grey, but even so it wasn’t Freeman’s familiarity with the minutiae that now impressed him but rather the simple yet profound realization that for Freeman to think of such a detail in the midst of his wife’s catastrophic injury meant that the soldier in Freeman was not only alive and well, but there was only the soldier — that Freeman was straining at the leash. With his genius for logistical detail as well as strategic thought he was unquestionably the man for the job. America had never fought a sustained Arctic war, but now, with the Mideast oil wells afire and the Siberians having answered President Mayne with the sinking of the two American tankers, which by itself constituted an immediate threat to the U.S. oil supply from the Alaskan North Slope, the U.S. had no option. It was war.
Grey lifted his Pentagon scrambler phone, got the Joint Chiefs’ approval, including that of the CNO, Admiral Horton; then he rang the White House and suggested that General Douglas Freeman be appointed commander in chief, Operation Arctic Front, the moment he landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base Alaska. The president approved.
The call came through to Freeman in Monterey as Marjorie was watching a news flash cutting into “The
