'Only just,' said the Exec.
The skipper scratched his nose. He turned to Schlegel, 'It's usually a bit hairy before we get to the ice- limits.'
At the ice-limits the thickness is more predictable but the ocean is shallower, and after that we must turn to follow the Russian coastline towards the White Sea. There the shore-line ice starts building together. That's the worst section of all.
'That Polish sub has gone?' said Schlegel.
'Still on our sonar — she's turned almost parallel again.'
'She's tailing us,' said Schlegel. He looked at Ferdy.
'No,' said the skipper. 'She probably can't see us. She could be having the same ice problems we have. Her sonar range is nothing — she'd be rubbing noses with the Eskimoes before they'd have a reading.'
'She knows we're here?'
'She knows we're somewhere. They can hear our sonar hitting them. But they can't get us on their sonar.'
'But she's making good speed,' said Schlegel.
'They have better charts than we do for this area. Neither of us can guess the ice but she knows the soundings: it helps.'
'I'd like to take a poke at it,' said Schlegel.
'We both have plenty to occupy us at present,' said the skipper.
'The history of the world,' said Ferdy. 'Overlooking small enemies in the threat of greater ones — all history comes down to that finally.'
Ferdy was wearing a black silk dressing-gown, its dark red kerchief fixed with a gold pin. The Captain looked at him as if noticing his attire for the first time. Finally he nodded. 'I suppose.'
'Still shoaling, sir.'
It was the great silt deposits that made the sea bed flat, but beneath the silt, the bottom was hard enough to take the floor from under us. There was only eighty feet of water below us now, and above us another pressure ridge was building, under the nervous pen of the fathometer. Again the ink line faltered and turned back.
'Down another fifty,' said the Captain.
We sank deeper. The pen line shrank away from the horizontal line that represented the top of our sail. I heard Ferdy sigh. We levelled off and the pen made a beautiful tall canopy above us.
'This is going to be a tough one,' said the Captain. 'Come left to north-east.'
'Lagoon ahead,' said the sonar operator.
'How far?'
'A mile, a bit more perhaps.'
'Here she comes again.'
This was a big ridge, the keel of an enormous floe.
The drawing showed how it had been born out of corrugated ridges jammed so tight together that the whole floe tilted, so that the pen drew a mad inverted porcupine shape upon the thin white paper.
'Down thirty.'
'Goddamn that packing.' The Captain reached into his shirt collar to mop up the trickles of cold water that had been dripping from the periscope, increasing their rate of flow as the water became colder. The dribbling water had started off as a joke, but now the thought of icy water on the other side of the steel hull raised no laughs.
'Hold that,' said the Captain.
Now there was just a swirl of silt beneath us. The fathometer was wobbling as it tried to register upon the soft bottom dislodged by our passing.
'Full astern — hold it, hold it'
The floor tilted as the propellers came to a standstill and then began slowly to turn the other way. For a moment the sub became unstable, like a dinghy riding out a long wave. Then the props picked up speed and the forward movement stopped us with a shudder and a loud rumble.
'Dead slow.'
Now the needle made a series of corrugations over the dark horizontal line that was us. The Captain clamped his hand over his face as if he'd been hit, but I knew he was listening to the scrape of ice along the hull. It came scratching along the metal like predatory fingernails.
The ship had lost all forward speed now. 'Negative buoyancy,' said the Captain. There was a lurch and then a groan. The buoyancy chambers rang with a hollow sound as the ship sank to the ocean floor. I lost my balance as we heeled over ten degrees.
Everyone held on to a bulkhead, pipe or fitting. The Captain took the P. A. microphone. 'Attention all hands. This is the Captain speaking. We are resting on the ocean bed while I take a good look at the sonar. There is no need for any alarm. Repeat: there is no need for any alarm.' The Captain replaced the mike and beckoned Schlegel and me over to the control console. He sat down and mopped his brow with a paper tissue. 'I think we'll have to try another way through, Colonel.'
'How?'
'We'll go south until we find the end of the rafted ice.'
'I don't know much about rafted ice, Captain, but it sounds pretty unlikely that it's going to get better that way. This stuff builds from the shore outwards. Or that's what I hear.'
'Or until we find one of the sea passages that the ice breakers clear all the way to Murmansk.'
'Nothing doing,' said Schlegel. 'That would prejudice my mission. I need a whip antenna in the air inside the next sixty minutes.'
'Impossible,' said the 'Captain. He mopped his brow with a fresh tissue and, taking careful aim at the waste- bin, he threw it away with all the care and attention of an Olympic; champion.
'You've got a lagoon a mile or so ahead. We're going to squeeze this pig-boat through the mud and make it by the time the big hand's on twelve. Got it?'
'I've got it all right,' said the Captain. 'But you. haven't. Prejudicing your mission is tough, but prejudicing my ship is not a contingency.'
'The decision is mine,' said Schlegel softly. He glanced over his shoulder, but we weren't getting much attention from the rest of them. 'And the sealed orders in your triple-lock safe will say so. Meanwhile glim this.' His passed the Captain an official-looking envelope. Inside it there was a sheet of paper headed 'Director of Undersea Warfare' and there was a Pentagon letterhead and lots of signatures.
'And if you find that impressive,' warned Schlegel, 'let me tell you that the one in your safe is from Joint Chiefs.'
'There is no one can authorize me to risk my ship,' said the Captain primly. He looked round at me. I was the only person in earshot.
'Listen,' said Schlegel in that Bogart voice with which I'd seen, him thrash champions. 'You're not speaking to some chicken-shit soldier-boy, Captain. I was riding pig-boats before you were riding kiddie cars. I say she'll go through and I'm not asking your advice.'
'And I say…'
'Yes, and you say I'm wrong. Well, you prove I'm wrong, sailor-boy. You prove I'm wrong by jamming us under the goddamn ice-flow. Because if you turn us around and toddle off home I'll make sure they kick your ass from sun-up to sack-time. Because you can't prove
The Captain had spent a long time since last getting that kind of treatment. He stood up, gasped and sat down again, to mop his brow. There were two or three extra-long minutes of silence.
'Take her through, son,' coaxed Schlegel. 'It'll be all right, you'll see.' Schlegel mauled his face, as I'd seen him do at other moments of stress.
The Captain said, 'The floe over us is maybe as big as the UN building; solid as concrete.'
'Captain. There's some kid out there… driving along the road that follows the Kola Fjord north from Murmansk. He's in some lousy Russian automobile, and the ice is getting under his wiper blades. He's been watching the mirror for the last half hour, dreading to see the headlights of a prowl car. When he gets into position, on some desolate section of freezing cold headland, he's going to open up the boot and start fooling with the
