Phoenix Sub Zero

“Helm, all stop. Diving Officer, prepare to hover.

Phone talker, to maneuvering, scram the reactor and shut the main steam bulkhead valves.”

The order to scram the plant went out, surprising even Houser. Kane was going further than stopping and hiding.

He was after total ship silence.

“Ready to hover. Captain.”

“Very well. Dive. Bring us up to the ice cover. Two feet per second.”

“Two feet per second rise, sir. Depth setting 100 feet.”

The fans in the room wound down, making the room immediately stuffy.

“Maybe we should cut off the firecontrol system,” Houser said. “It’s eating power and we don’t have any torpedoes anyway.”

“Shut it down, O.O.D.”

Mcdonne’s face had turned blotchy red but he kept his mouth shut.

“Five hundred feet, sir.”

“Sir, maneuvering reports reactor scram with the bulkhead steam valves shut.”

Quickest way to shut down the engineroom, Kane thought.

The ship would be whisper-quiet now, only the hissing of air into the depth-control tanks making noise.

“Captain, we’re about out of high-pressure air. I’ll have to hover on the trim pump.”

Kane bit his lip. The massive pump would eat battery power, but after their emergency blows to get off the bottom they had not had a chance to run the air compressors and refill the banks. There was no choice.

“Very well, Chief. Hover on the trim pump. Phone talker, to the engineer, report time on the battery.”

“Conn, sonar, understand we’re hovering to avoid the torpedoes.

Request we turn the ship to get the torpedoes out of the baffles.”

“Sonar, Captain, no.”

“Sir, engineer reports a half-hour on the battery, maybe more if we dump forward loads.”

Kane understood. Sonar wanted to start the thruster and burn power to monitor the battle. The engineer wanted to shut down sonar and conserve battery juice. “Two hundred feet, sir,” the diving officer reported.

“Ease the ascent to one foot per second.”

“One eight zero feet, sir.”

Kane waited, knowing the torpedoes were still screaming in at him. Two minutes later the deck jumped as the sail collided with the bottom of the icepack overhead. They had stopped.

“Give us just enough buoyancy to stay here without listing over.”

“Aye, sir. Trim pump is shut down.” “What now. Captain?” Mcdonne asked.

“Now we wait,” Kane said. The room was much quieter without the roar of the air handlers. Kane stepped to the door to sonar and looked in on Sanderson. The sonar chief gave him a sour look.

“Can’t hear anything but this ice,” Sanderson said. “The torpedoes are still directly astern in the baffles.”

“Keep listening. If you hear them in front of us, they went by.”

“I’ll be sure to let you know, sir.” Sanderson turned back to his console, ignoring Kane.

Kane stepped back into the room. The faces of the watchstanders, to a man, were hollow, dark circles under their eyes, fatigue and fear sapping their energy. Kane had a feeling the trip was almost over. The only question was how it would end.

USS SEAWOLF

“Check fire,” Pacino ordered. “Sonar, Captain, do you have any bearing separation between own-ship units and Target One? And what’s the status of the Phoenixt’ Pacino was greeted by half-startled looks. He recognized that he was interrupting the execution of his own orders: to shoot the weapons in the room until only one was left. But a thought had crept up on him that he was shooting on old data. The torpedoes had been between their sonar ears and the target and the friendly. Anything could be happening out there. Without data, there were no decisions, only ignorance.

“Conn, sonar, no bearing separation. Torpedoes are masking Target One and the Phoenix.”

Pacino stepped toward the chart table on the port side, away from the attack center. The ship was south of a ridge that ran mostly east-west, separating the Labrador Basin from the Davis Strait and the Baffin Bay. The ridge, labeled by the chart as Ungava Ridge, resembled an upside-down smile, concave from Seawolfs perspective. At places the ridge grew shallow, in one point to the west—at Davis Peak—it went all the way up to 100 fathoms. He looked at the chart and bent to examine it more closely. Despite the shallowness of the Ungava Ridge and the proximity of Davis Peak, he decided to drive westward off the line-of-sight to the Destiny. There was still plenty of room, forty miles before the rise of Davis Peak, making the course viable, but even as he ordered the helmsman to put the rudder over and set his course for west-northwest, Pacino realized that this was contrary to his instinct, which, given an arbitrary choice of a course, would be to choose one with more open ocean.

He shrugged it off but it stuck in his mind.

“Sonar, Captain, we’re moving off the track heading west to get some parallax on the target. Report anything you have on Target One if and when it comes out of the way of the torpedoes.”

“Sonar, aye.”

“Helm, all ahead standard.”