Ian Slater - World in Flames

Robert Brentwood and the chief engineer, the pile of blueprints before them, turned pale gray in the reddened-out control room light, as they pored over the sub’s intricate systems, Brentwood posing possibilities, the chief listening. But, confronted by the sheer logic of physics, the chief was forced to reject all the captain’s proposals as unworkable due to some irreparable malfunction caused by the Alfa’s attack, both acutely aware of the supreme irony, voiced disgustedly by the chief, that the only thing still in full working order was “Sherwood Forest” and its firing control system.

“Rifle’s in fine working order, eh, Chief?” said Brentwood. “But the rifleman is down.”

“That’s about it.” Behind them, Peter Zeldman kept moving from the red of Control to the blue light of the sonar, everyone in the ship knowing that after the explosions, both enemy air and sea vessels could be moving toward them to investigate. Zeldman stared at the fathometer, willing its recorder needle to move upward from two hundred feet. For one breathless moment he saw the needle registering 199, 198, 197, only to see it fall back to 203, the momentary rise due not to any increase in buoyancy in the sub’s ballast tanks, as he’d hoped, but rather to a cold “updraft,” or column of water rising locally because of differences in the sea’s salinity.

“If I didn’t know better,” Zeldman told Sonar Operator Emerson, “I’d say some joker was up there trying to get us mad.”

Emerson didn’t reply. Despite the small cross he unabashedly wore about his neck, he rarely spoke about his religious beliefs, but he believed unreservedly in the goldfish-bowl view of God: that the Creator made the world, put us in to swim, and after that, it was up to the goldfish — that divine intervention came only at the beginning, and all else was a matter of accident in which only a person’s will and courage could alter the outcome. If it was their fate to die, then they would all enter God’s other domain in which judgment would be revealed. Sonarman Link, Emerson’s colleague and backup on the shift, thought all religion “bullshit,” and the two were the best of friends, their bond mutual tolerance for each other’s “weird” beliefs, and their love, their passion, to be what they were— America’s point men in the earth’s largest domain.

“Any change in the ice growl?” asked Zeldman.

“Nothing, sir,” replied Link, knowing that Zeldman’s question was to verify Emerson’s evaluation that there was no “singing”—significant sound amid the cacophony of ice growl, shrimp snapping, and other ocean noises.

In Control, the light from the reactor room lit up.

“Con?” acknowledged Brentwood.

“Captain, we have a minor steam leak.”

“Can you contain it?” asked Brentwood calmly.

“No problem at the moment, sir.”

“Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. “You in foil?” He was referring to the bright silver heat-reflecting suit with air-breathing hose attached, which was required by regulation for any repairs in the reactor room.

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Brentwood turned back to the blueprints of the sub. “Enter it in the log, Pete.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Zeldman.

Brentwood stood up, ran his fingers through his hair, and, arms akimbo, rotated his torso to rid himself of the stiffness of having been hunched over the blueprints for so long. “Going aft to stretch my legs, Chief. You come up with anything, call me immediately.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

What Brentwood meant beneath the mundane exchange was that it was time to “walk through”—to see how each department on the four levels of the sub was holding up. As he passed the galley, he could smell hamburgers frying. “Sliders, Cook?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Suits me,” said Brentwood easily. Farther on, he saw two stewards coming toward him from Sherwood Forest laden down with bags of onions and potatoes that had been strung up from the maze of pipes that surrounded the six missile tubes. Next, he passed a man coining up from the stern ballast area and noticed the sailor’s yellow thermoluminescent dosimeter was missing from his belt. “Where’s your TD, sailor?”

The man looked down guiltily, “Sorry sir — loosened my belt on the off shift and—”

“Go get it,” said Brentwood, patting him on the shoulder and passing on into the cool, clean, polished smell of Sherwood Forest, the ventilators’ fans like a running stream. It made no sense to him but, compared to the rest of the sub, in Sherwood Forest, for all its electronic wizardry, he had the same feeling of tranquillity that he had experienced as a boy in the woods of Washington State and Oregon.

Standing close together against the missiles’ firing control panels were two technicians, the first checking the twenty-five rows of circuit indicator lights on one of the tall, blue-gray consoles, the other man checking the first man’s every move, verifying the sequence. Another pair were checking the missile tubes’ monitors, making sure the humidity and temperature in each of the six chocolate-brown missile tubes were within operational parameters.

As Robert walked down the starboard side, the big white numbers on the chocolate tubes indicating missiles one, three, and five passed him like slow tracer as he kept moving through the “forest” that took up a full third of the sub. His sense of frustration at not being able to get his men out of harm’s way, unable to maneuver except for the two paltry five-knot-maximum props set in the after-ballast tanks, while the six multiwarhead missiles were safe, grew until he had to caution himself to calm down. If only they could get to the surface, rising fast enough to smash through sonar-identified thinner ice, they might stand some chance. But unless the sub could rise, the hope of getting the men out, airlifted off the ice to Spitzberg or south to Iceland or even west to Greenland, was just a dream. Realistically, however, Robert Brentwood knew their only prospects now were that the sub would in fact go deeper if any more leaks occurred, and each inch she fell increased the “taffy”—the effect of increased water pressure over her entire hull.

After reaching the reactor room and satisfying himself that the steam leak was in fact minor, he passed on to the engine room, noting along the way that some of the green rubberized tile on the walkway had curled at the edges. It was down here that some of the worst leaks had occurred before the pumps had got them under control. “You boys enjoy the dip?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” answered a ginger-headed young auxiliary room mechanic who looked to Robert Brentwood as if he must be no more than nineteen or twenty — about the same age as Rosemary’s younger brother, whose bones now lay scattered somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic. Brentwood saw the man’s dosimeter had exceeded the two-hundred-rad mark, and the young man saw him notice but smiled good-naturedly before turning away, busying himself with the oil pressure gauges.

Robert Brentwood was so moved by the young mechanic’s quiet bravery that as he headed back through Sherwood Forest, he took out a Kleenex, pretending to blow his nose, using the tissue as a cover for the overwhelming tears of pride and the sense of honor it gave him to command such men. Seeing another pair of missile technicians working the port-side monitors, he quipped lightheartedly, “Hope you boys aren’t getting bored down here.”

“No sir, Captain,” answered one. “These D-5s are more temperamental. Humidity’s—”

It came to him in a flash. He could have hugged the technician — name patch Sayers — except they would have labeled him as a Section-Eight. As it was, the two technicians saw Brentwood do something that no one had ever seen “Bing” do. He began running through the sub, the alternate numbers of the missiles on the port side — two, four, six, — flashing by him. Halfway along, he heard the soft gong: “Captain to Control. Captain to Control.”