Total War

Chapter Eleven

"All right. Let's just pretend we did a shakedown run and we'll all rest easily. The electric boat fixers here wouldn't let us down," Captain Mitch Wilmer intoned quietly into the microphone. He could hear the faint echo of his own voice coming back to him through the open doorway leading from the bridge over the intercom speaker just beyond. "We're going down now and Mr. Billings, the exec, tells me the water's fine. Anything you need to know, I'll keep you posted. Wilmer out."

Snapping the microphone back into its mounting bracket on the console dominating the central core of the U.S.S. Benjamin Franklin's bridge, Wilmer turned to the young man standing just below him by the seated corpsman, saying, "All right, Mr. Billings. You're on. Take her down, Pete."

"Aye, aye, sir," Billings snapped. Then, "Prepare for negative buoyancy. All ahead one-quarter. Check the trim on the starboard diving planes, Smith! Let's get those tanks going. Blow number two and number four. All right, blow one and three. Secure."

A smile crossing his lips, Wilmer cut in on Billings. "I'll be in my cabin for a minute, Pete." Glancing at his Rolex-just about an hour out of New London, Connecticut, now, he saw-he snatched up his baseball cap with the gold braid on the bill and left the bridge. He caught sight of the new sonar man. The man seemed pretty competent. Then he walked down the companionway and to his quarters.

Letting himself in, he snapped on the light, walked past the smaller compartment where he slept and straight toward his desk at the far end of the main cabin. He tossed the baseball cap on the small easy chair, walked around behind the desk and sat down, snatching a thumbnail full of Copenhagen snuff and slipping it into the pouch in his left cheek. He glanced at the photo of his wife and two daughters on his desk.

Fishing in his trouser pocket for his keys, he found the right one and opened the large false drawer at the bottom of the right pedestal of the desk. Bending down to see, he twirled the combination on the small safe there, opened the fireproof door, and reached inside, past his log, for the envelope he'd been given. Wilmer closed the safe, then the desk, and ripped open the manila envelope around the Top-Secret seal. Inside, was a smaller, white envelope. He opened it. On letterhead from the Chief of Naval Operations was printed a single word: "Morningstar."

"Wonderful," Wilmer muttered to himself. He put the orders down on his blotter and opened the safe again. This time he had to get out of his chair to reach all the way into the back of the safe and work the combination for access to the interior compartment. Tucked inside was a packet of bulging envelopes, each with a code word printed in the upper left-hand corner and stamped again across the closure flap-just as a precaution, he'd been told, that in haste someone didn't open the wrong orders.

"Let's see," he muttered again. "Hippodrome, Indiana, Igloo." Then, flipping through more of the envelopes, he realized that someone was ignoring alphabetical order. "Poker" was in front of "Barricade."

But then he found what he was searching for.

"Morningstar," he read aloud, then checked that the envelope was perfectly sealed and checked the code name in the upper left-hand corner and across the seal. He stood and walked to his cabin door. He locked it and threw the bolt. Orders were orders, he thought. Going back to his desk, he opened the envelope.

The coordinates in the first paragraph startled him. Using the old Perry route past Baffin Bay and Greenland, he'd intersect the Nautilus polar exploration route-the same route Byrd had used in part-bypassing Franz-Josef Land. Then he'd strike out across the Barents Sea toward the Kanin Peninsula. His target lay 67 degrees north, 31 degrees east, near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. The icepack would be above the Ben Franklin until she was halfway out of the Barents Sea.

"Wonderful," he said again. There were submarine pens near Murmansk and Archangel and those were his targets.

"Captain..." The voice on the intercom was that of Pete Billings, his exec.

"Captain here," he switched. "What is it, Pete?"

"Probably nothing much, sir, but the Russians sure got a whole hell of a lot more trawlers out here than usual."

"Figures, Pete," Captain Wilmer sighed. "Don't get into a fender-bender with the con. I'll be along in a minute or so. Keep me posted if you need to." Wilmer switched off "Trawlers," he muttered. Why the Soviet Navy still relied so heavily on trawlers was beyond him. Soviet satellite tracking was just as good as its American counterpart-or was supposed to be-and subs could be tracked by infrared from space a lot more accurately than sonar from the ocean surface. Shrugging his shoulders Wilmer replaced the orders, noted what had transpired-including the trawlers-in his log book, then closed the interior and exterior safe doors and locked the desk.

Putting the keys back in his pocket, Wilmer reached reluctantly into the bottom drawer on the other side of the desk. His 1917 1A1-slightly oily to the touch-was there, next to its shoulder holster. Standing up, he slipped the harness over his head and left shoulder and settled the strap across his chest, checked the .45 for a full magazine and empty chamber, lowered the hammer, and put the pistol away beside his left armpit. He snapped the strap of the holster closed over it. Wilmer had never liked guns, felt uncomfortable wearing one, and doubted that if he ever needed to use the pistol, he could hit anything with it after all these years.

He reached down to the intercom and flipped the switch to call the sub's hailing system. "Attention, all hands, this is the captain. We are now officially on alert. Section chiefs, report to your stations. All officers, meet with me on the bridge in ten minutes." He started to click off, then thought better of it and added, "We'll be going under the ice on this run, coming up near the Soviet mainland." Technically, he was disobeying the standing orders by telling this to the crew, but made the command decision that everyone would be better off knowing something. "We are not on a war footing. I repeat, not a war footing. So take it easy. Wilmer out."

He snatched his hat as he walked to the door, then passed into the companionway. He passed a seaman first class on his way toward the bridge and noticed that the man was nervously eyeing the .45 automatic he carried. Wilmer smiled at him, murmuring, "Everything's jake."

Wilmer spent a long time on the bridge, then retired again to his cabin, not bothering to eat, telling Billings, "Wake me before we're too close to the ice, Pete." Wilmer tried sleeping, couldn't, then took two sleeping pills. He disliked the way his mouth would taste afterward, but rationalized their use since he would get little rest once under the ice, and after that-he didn't know...

There was knocking on his cabin door. Wilmer sat bolt upright, then wiped his hand across his face.

Another reason he hated sleeping pills was because they always caused him to dream. And worse still, all he could ever remember of the dreams were that they were horrifying, but he could never remember why.

"Yoh," he shouted, and the knocking stopped.

"Approaching the icepack sir!" The muffled voice on the other side of the door he recognized as that of Dan Kimberly, a chief.

"Gotcha, Dan," Wilmer rasped, his mouth dry. "With ya' in a sec'." Feeling his face again, he decided on a quick shave. He swung his feet off his bunk and into his shoes and went into the bathroom. Five minutes later he was going along the companionway, the .45 back under his arm. On the bridge, he saw Billings, walked up behind him, and said, "You get any sleep, Pete?"

"No, sir. Figured I would after we got under the ice."

"You're lucky-I can never sleep worth a damn under the ice. I think I'm claustrophobic or getting that way after all these years. Hell of a thing for a submariner, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," Billings said.

Turning around, Wilmer looked to the man beside the most exotic of the consoles, the ice machine with the long technical name everyone shortened to "Watchyamacallit," the machine that gave a constant readout on the thickness of the ice overhead.

"Got the Watchyamacallit all revved up, Henderson?" Wilmer asked.

"Aye, aye, Captain."

"Okay," Wilmer said, then turned to Billings.

"Take her under the ice, Pete."

As Wilmer leaned back against the railing on the central island, he told himself again that there was no real change. You were still under tons of water-just tons of ice over that. And surfacing was possible-unless the ice was too thick. And you always rode the instruments like a mother hen looked after her chicks; only, under the ice, the instrument readings had to be more precise and their readings could change more quickly.

An hour later, just as Wilmer was preparing to get Billings to take his promised sleep, the new sonar man called out, "Blip, approximately five hundred off the starboard bowplane."

Five hundred what, man?" Wilmer rasped. "Sing it out!"

"Make that five hundred-four seventy-five yards now, sir."

Wilmer was already standing behind the sonar man, Billings off to his right behind another console operator.

"Russian, Captain?" Billings asked.

"Hell if it's American-unless we got submarines they haven't told me about. Yeah, Russian, all right. Looks like this is kind of a busy street, huh?" Wilmer turned to Billings, then glanced back at the scope in front of him.

The man working the console tugged at his earphones, saying, "Captain, I'm pickin' up something. I can't be sure what it is."

"Gimme that," Wilmer said, his words harsher than his tone. He took the earphones and twisted them around so he could hear; then looked down at the scope.

"Did a pinch on sonar once, a long time ago," Wilmer recited, slowly.

Turning to Billings, he rasped, "Load up number one and two with conventionals, and ready number three with-" Dropping the earphones, he shouted, "Dammit-that was a torpedo being launched!"

"Captain! We got it on the scope here! Comm' right at-"

"Hard starboard-all ahead three quarters. Make that all ahead full!" Wilmer shouted. The Russian torpedo slicing through the water off the port bow sounded just inches away when it made an echo along the length of the hull. Wilmer, Billings, and every man on the bridge watched along its path as if somehow they could see it.

"Fire one! Fire two!" Wilmer snapped.