'Is this something I should try to get used to?' said Schlegel.
'They hassle us sometimes,' said the Captain. 'We displace four thousand tons. That East German skipper Is in a tiny, thirteen-hundred-ton, W Class job…' The Captain wiped his hands on a silk handkerchief. That's the nuclear age, I thought; in the old days it would have been oily cotton waste.
'How do you know?'
'The size on the screen… and it's their most common sub. They copied it from the Kraut's old Type XXI, in the war. When he cuts my bow like that, he makes us slew round half the ocean to recover. We're damned heavy, Colonel, and the trouble with the high cruising speed is… well, you just saw what it was.'
'It makes us jumpy seeing those little conventionals jazzing across us like that,' said the Exec. 'Those are the babies that have the hunter-killer gear. When the chips go down, it won't be the Red's nukes that come after us, it will be their little conventionals. That's why they keep building them.'
Schlegel nodded. 'The East Germans are moving their hardware back to the Polish and Russian ports. They'll be pushing some of it up into the Northern Fleet, too. Watch out for it.'
'What's their angle?' said the Captain.
'Don't you get past the funnies section? The Russians are sitting down to talk about German reunification. You don't imagine that they intend to let any of us capitalist reactionaries get our hands on it, before they complete an energetic asset-stripping operation, do you?'
'What kind of ships do the East Germans have?' the Captain asked. 'And what kind of men?'
Schlegel waved to me. I said, 'Frigates and coastal stuff. It took a long time before the Russians would let the D.D.R. have submarines. But all the People's Navy are ten-year men. Officer-training is a four-year stint and they have to do two years on the lower deck before they can even apply for it. So every officer's had six years' service.'
The Captain said, 'If they only let six-year officers go to sea in this man's navy, 1 guess we'd have me and Doc Harris. My Exec would be promised for next year.'
The Executive Officer didn't smile. 'Six years' training, eh? Did you ever see a flotilla of those bastards come steaming through a NATO exercise, or any other Western naval, unit? Twice I've seen them come right through the middle of ships at sea. No signals, no lights, nothing. And not turning a fraction off course. Came within ten yards of one destroyer. They know our safety instructions make us avoid collision. It makes them feel like big men doing that… six years!.. seamen! Just bastards, that's what they are.'
'They do that to discover our emergency wavelengths,' said the Captain. 'There are always electronics boats with them when they do that.'
'Bastards,' said the Exec
'The East German ships are well built, I guess,' said the Captain.
'First class,' I said. 'That's the D.D.R.'s real value to the Eastern bloc — ship construction for satellite navies. And they have deep-buried oil supplies, submarine pens in cliffs, and yards well tucked away.'
'Reunification, eh?' said the Captain, as though he was hearing about it for the first time. 'Sounds like it would be good for us. It would push the Reds right back to Poland, wouldn't it?'
'That's it,' I said. 'Or bring them right up to Holland. Depends whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.'
Chapter Nineteen
Submarine units of any type surfaced within range of enemy Class A missiles will be considered destroyed.
'Navigator to the Control Room.'
I came awake suddenly. The door was not fully closed and there was a dull orange light from the corridor. I switched on the bunk light and looked at my watch. It was the middle of the night. Schlegel's bunk was empty and so was Ferdy's. I dressed hurriedly and went forward.
At first the drift-ice is no more than a few patches. Then the sonar starts picking up the big floes: as big as a car, as big as a house, as big as a city block. And is it seven-eighths, or nine-tenths, of an iceberg that remains submerged and invisible? Well, who cares how much. Enough submerged to shred us. Or, as Schlegel explained to the Captain, enough to cool every Martini from Portland to L.A.
But once you dive under the ice you are committed to the element of the water. Arid, this was not the two- thousand-metre deeps of the Norwegian Basin. We were over the Jan Mayen Ridge and into the Barents Sea to where your ocean is measured in feet. For eight hours under the Polar pack we could predict the ice thickness' with a reasonable degree of certainty, but after that we were in the 'brash and block' and some of those pieces could be any size at all. I'd heard about these deep winter trips but this was the first one I'd ever done, and now and again I found myself thinking of the ship they lost two winters before.
'Engineering Officer to the Control Room.'
'Any sign of that goddamn Polack sub?'
The two of them went off the screen south.'
'Murmansk. Watch out for them on sonar.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Shoaling steeply, sir.'
'Watch her, Charlie — even slower, I think.' The skipper turned to Schlegel and me. 'This chunk of ice above us is a mile wide.'
'That big?' said Schlegel.
'The one beyond is nearer nine miles wide,' said the Captain.
When the Captain wasn't looking, Schlegel pulled a face at me. He was right, what the hell are you supposed to say. Next the kid was going to be showing us his appendix scar.
'All hands. This is the Captain speaking. Complete silence throughout the ship.'
The pings of the sonar were suddenly very loud. I looked round at the crowded Control Room. The duty watch were fully dressed in their khaki shirts and pants, but the Captain was in his shirtsleeves and the Navigator was in striped pyjamas.
American submariners had been charting the beds of the Arctic seas for many years. They'd recorded the canyons and the peaks of the shallow northern seas, in thousand-mile highways that could be followed as a truck driver uses the motorways of Europe. But truck drivers do not have an unpredictable roof of solid ice above their head: great floes, with keels so deep that they'd scalp him unless he steered off the highway and bumped across uncharted routes trying to find a way through unscathed.
'Pressure ridge coming up, sir.' Ferdy moved aside as the Captain pushed past him.
The needle of the sonar drew a picture of the ice above us. In winter, the newly formed ice presses against the older floes, forcing them down deep into the water. The pen inked a careful drawing of the ridges: up and down, up and down like a fever chart: each one a little farther down.
'I don't like it, Charlie.'
'No, sir.' The ship was unnaturally still: men held their breaths, left words unsaid, itches unscratched,
The log needle was on eight knots, the depth gauge needle on two hundred. The only sound was the hum of the machinery and the steady ping of the sonar. The ship edged forward. The sonar needle came lower this time. Each ice ridge had been thicker: eighty feet, then ninety feet, reaching down to us. A hundred and five! Now the needle passed the previous peak, and still kept coming. One hundred and ten, one hundred and fifteen!
'Jeeeesusss! Take her down!'
'Negative buoyancy.' The planesmen had been ready for the order. The two sailors slammed the controls and the nose lilted. 'To two hundred and fifty.'
The world was tightening around us. The sonar needle did not stop and turn back until one hundred and forty. If we'd starred at our previous level the ice would have taken five feet off our sail top.
