Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

Being rigged for ultraquiet made everyone tense, but as a defensive tactic, it worked. One moment, the Victor’s sonar could hear Roanoke ; the next, it would hear nothing. It would look to the Soviet boat as if Roanoke had vanished. So long as they didn’t make any sudden turns or pick up speed to more than five knots, they were invisible.

Tim had seen ultraquiet from the other side too. A few underways back, while they were shadowing a Victor, the Soviet sub had dropped off his sonar like a ghost. It was disconcerting, even frightening. He had known that the sub was out there, possibly loading its torpedoes while they scrambled to find it, but it was completely invisible to him. The only way to locate the Victor would have been to use active sonar, but that would effectively have handed them a target to lock on to. It had turned into a waiting game to see who blinked first. In the end, the Victor had chosen to slip away rather than attack. Tim could only hope for a similarly peaceful outcome now.

“Diving Officer, prepare for deep submergence,” the captain said. “Make our depth seven-five-zero.”

“Seven-five-zero, aye,” Lieutenant Duncan replied. “Make our depth seven-five-zero.”

“Seven-five-zero, aye, sir,” Jerry replied. “Making our depth seven-five-zero, aye.”

With Roanoke on alert, it looked as though the animosity between Lieutenant Duncan and Jerry had been shelved for the moment. They were working together seamlessly now. Tim wished it could stay that way, but he knew Duncan well—the harping and picking would start up again at the first opportunity. A tiger didn’t change its stripes, and a bully didn’t suddenly lose the urge to shit on everyone below him.

The dive alarm didn’t sound when they were rigged for ultraquiet, but Tim braced in his seat as the deck tilted beneath him.

“We have to go deep,” Captain Weber said. “Let her follow if she dares.”

“And if that doesn’t work, sir?” the officer of the deck asked.

“Then we’ll still have the advantage. They can’t radio back to their command center about us without rising to periscope depth, and if they do that, we’ll just slip away right under them. If they stay the course at their current depth and keep following us, the thermocline will cut them off from communicating. Spicer, I want a close eye on that boat. If she so much as twitches in our direction, I want to know about it.”

“Aye, sir,” Tim said.

Roanoke descended quickly to 500 feet, then 600, and finally 750. Captain Weber ordered their speed cut to three knots, which would let them run so quietly, the Victor would have no choice but to ping them with active sonar if it wanted to find them.

“Spicer, what’s their position?” the captain called into the sonar shack.

Tim relayed the latest reading to him. “They’re moving slow and quiet, sir, just like us. They might be searching for us.”

“Are they still using passive sonar?” he asked.

“Aye, sir,” Tim said. “They think it’s keeping them undetected, but I’ve got them on the sonar. Just barely, but they are there.”

“Good,” the captain said. “Keep watching them, Spicer. I want regular updates. Helmsman, left full rudder. Steady course three-zero-zero.”

The helmsman replied, “Left full rudder, aye, sir. Making our course three-zero-zero, aye.”

Watching the cascade of colors on his display screen, Tim felt his back and shoulders tensing. He told himself the Victors were obsolete, decaying submarines with antiquated sonar equipment that couldn’t find a honking car in an empty parking lot. He told himself that even if the Victor did find them, it wouldn’t fire on Roanoke unless they had trespassed into Soviet waters. He tried hard not to think about the South Korean jetliner the Soviets had shot down earlier this year, and all the subsequent news reports that questioned whether it had actually been in Soviet airspace. Had that Soviet pilot simply been trigger happy, or had word come down from the Kremlin ordering their military to shoot first and ask questions later? Tim prayed they weren’t about to find out.

It was Murphy’s Law: whatever could go wrong would go wrong, and at the worst possible time. As far as Lieutenant Commander Jefferson was concerned, this whole damn underway was Murphy’s Law in operation, with all its corollaries. One dead crewman, one sick crewman, a couple of smashed lights, a dead radio, and now there was a Soviet bear on their tail. Not even two weeks into the op, and Jefferson had already given up waiting for something to go right.

Where had the Victor come from? How had they run into one so soon? He thought back to the map on the captain’s desk, the lines he was drawing that extended into Soviet territory. Was it possible they had crossed the border without a heads-up from Captain Weber? What would make the captain keep something that important from the crew?

If this was more than reconnaissance, if this was a spy mission, the navy shouldn’t have sent a submarine. They should have taken a page from the KGB playbook and sent a spy boat disguised as a trawler. That would have served the Soviets right, considering that was what they always did. Everyone knew that the Russian trawlers were spy ships, of course, but if the US Navy so much as touched one of them, the Soviets started screaming in the UN assemblies about American imperialists encroaching on civilian fishing boats.

What a mess. Sometimes he wondered whether the Cold War would ever end, or whether the two superpowers would be stuck playing out the same scenarios until the end of time—advance and retreat, advance and retreat, like an unending global-scale game of Stratego. Except that the whole world was at stake.

Jefferson paused outside the closed hatch to the torpedo room. No longer just a makeshift morgue, the torpedo room was now quarantine too. There was nowhere else on Roanoke to keep the sick and possibly contagious Steve Bodine safely away from the rest of the crew. Matson had to be stationed there with him; it was the only way the hospital corpsman could continue to treat Bodine and respond quickly to any sudden changes in his health. Jefferson could tell Matson hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of staying in the torpedo room, but the corpsman knew what was at stake and kept his opinion to himself.

Jefferson had seen with his own eyes what bad shape Bodine was in. He was clearly sick with the same thing that had made Warren Stubic delirious enough to shut himself in the freezer. The thought of losing Bodine put a knot in his gut. He couldn’t help thinking of all the conversations they’d had, all the times Bodine had sought him out for advice. Jefferson felt like a mentor to him.

Bodine had been reluctant to open up at first. He had trouble trusting anyone after his experience at Navy Boot Camp, where several of his white classmates had treated him like a pariah, as though he didn’t belong there. Their contempt had been plain even though strictly enforced navy rules prevented them from perpetrating outright abuse or harassment. But through it all, Bodine never buckled. He pushed forward, he did the work, and he graduated to the submarine service.

Bodine had come to trust Jefferson eventually, and soon enough he began confiding all his hopes and fears for his life, his career—everything. During their off hours, Bodine often came to him to ask how he managed life on a submarine with so many men whose only knowledge of black men was gleaned from TV shows or movies—or, worse, from news reports about drug dealers and gang violence. Jefferson taught him to keep his cool when dealing with the tyranny of small minds. They both had seen their share of adversity, almost all of it aimed squarely at the color of their skin. It had brought them together, and he hoped his advice had made Bodine stronger. But now Bodine was deathly sick, and Jefferson didn’t know how to handle that.