The Circle (32 page)

“You let
ice
accumulate on the Asroc launcher?”

“What's going on, Lenson?” Packer's voice, sharp as a whip crack.

For a quarter of a second, he was tempted to lie, buy time, hope it was something they could fix quickly. Instead he made himself say, “Sir, there's some problem with the launcher.”

“What kind of problem?”

“They're tring to find out, sir, but it sounds like an elevation motor.”

“There're four elevation motors on that mount, and eight launch rails. One better work. Find out how long it'll be to fix it.”

“Is Stefanick back yet? Do you have any idea how long it'll take to repair?” he asked desperately. The voice on the other end said, hurt, “Jeez, sir, he just went outside. Give him a couple minutes, all right?”

Evlin and Packer moved a few steps off. He heard them discussing torpedo run-out range, but his concentration was on his earphones. He wanted to tear them off and run aft, see what was going on himself. He wanted to strangle somebody. Every weapons station was supposed to check the gear when they manned up, and every hour thereafter while they were at GQ. He felt hot and ashamed. His hands shook as he pressed the button again. “Asroc Control, CIC—”

“Wait one, here's Stefanick now.”

The captain came over and stood glaring at him, waiting. He couldn't meet Packer's eyes as he repeated what the voice told him. “Sir, there's a glycol cooling and heating system in the launcher, that runs through a saltwater heat exchanger that also heats the hydraulic fluid. They say the heat exchanger must have ruptured. The saltwater mixed with the glycol and it's all frozen now. They're going to have to thaw it out and drain it, then flush it with fresh water and replace the—”

“Can they get a weapon off? I can turn the ship in bearing if they can't turn the mount.”

“Wait one, sir.” Sweat ran down his back as he repeated the captain's questions. “Sir, Petty Officer Stefanick says it won't elevate, either, and none of the launcher doors will open. The whole hydraulic system's fucked, and he thinks the motors burned out while he was trying to move it.”

“Shit,” said Bryce. “That's the kind of work Norden's been doing for you, I don't wonder all his people are smoking that—”

Packer said, in a voice of only slightly controlled rage, “How about you, Ben? When's the last time you were up there, inspecting?”

“Now, Jimmy John, I don't see—”

“Al, is that Bear still around? The Soviet four-engine?”

“Haven't had him on the scope since yesterday, sir. My guess is, they recalled him when they realized the storm was coming through here. It's too rough and icy for him to do MAD sweeps down here.”

“Then we're alone. Us and him. For another”—he glanced at the clock—“twenty-four, twenty-five hours.”

Evlin nodded.

There was a rumble over their heads, and a messenger tube farted itself into the padded cage. Simultaneously the 29MC lighted. “CIC, Radio; Flash incoming, rabbit's in the hole.”

Packer got to it first. Dan watched as he scanned the message. As his shoulders sagged. When the captain looked up his face was no longer human. It was dark lava that had cooled and hardened into the shape of human features.

“What is it, sir?” asked Evlin.

“Maintain contact,” said Packer. He cleared his throat. “Just that: ‘Maintain contact at all costs with B forty-one.'”

“What did they say about preventing escape?”

“They didn't say anything about that.” He folded the message and buttoned it into his breast pocket.

“It's easy, then,” said Bryce. He lighted a cigarette with quick, nervous fingers. Sweat glittered on his scalp. “It's there between the lines. They said it by not saying it. We just say we heard him open his tube doors. That covers our butts three ways to Sunday. I'll talk to the sonarmen, if you want.”

Utter quiet, broken only by the scream of the storm.

“Okay, that's it,” said the captain suddenly. They all looked at him. “It's academic now; Asroc's crapped out and we're outside over-the-side torpedo range. I've got to go after him.

“Start coming around, Al. Tell Rich to come left gradually, ten degees at a time, and steady on one-zero-zero.”

“We're going to roll like we've never rolled before, sir.”

“Pass the word, then. All hands stand by for violent motion. Do it, Mr. Evlin! And come up to twenty knots.”

Norden, from the bridge, acknowledged the order with misgiving in his tone. The radarmen grabbed handholds, set their feet wide, like sumo wrestlers readying themselves for an opponent's charge. The rudder-angle indicator quivered, then moved left reluctantly. A second later the gyro began moving, too: 175, 170.

Watching it, watching Packer's face watching it, Dan suddenly understood why the CO had buttoned the message into his pocket. It gave him authority for nuclear release. The six-digit code was right there in his pocket.

The key, if Captain James Packer miscalculated, to nuclear war.

The gyrocompass steadied at 170 for a few minutes.
Ryan
rolled, and it was bad, but not terrifying. They clung to the table, looking silently up as it began nudging left again.

At 160 the motion was worse. Packer's face was taut in the dim light. No one looked at him; no one looked at each other. They just stared down at the flat paper that represented the wild sea outside. Not even the plotters spoke now. There was nothing to plot.

One fifty.… One forty. “Halfway there,” Pedersen muttered. Dan felt a surge of hope. No pitching, and even the roll wasn't that awful, though the gale screamed outside like a thousand gut-shot horses.

“Hell, this ain't so bad,” muttered Lipson.

Ryan
went over then, suddenly, with incredible force, as if the outraged sea had only now perceived the trick they were trying to play. She lurched to starboard, stopped with a crashing jolt that flickered the lights; then shifted to port bodily, and rose, pressing their weights against the deck, as if they stood watch for a moment on some more massive planet than Earth.

She hurtled over to port and kept going. Their feet shot out from under them. The captain's stool let go, slammed over and dumped him into Petty Officer Matt. The lights flickered again and went out. The battle lantern clicked on, projecting a weak yellow spot onto the suddenly dark plotting table. Dan tried to fight free of the phone cord, but it was too steep to regain his feet. From outside came the terrifyingly close crash of the sea hammering against the bulkhead just outside Combat. The 21MC, the command intercom, broke out in a series of half communications, cut off as others began shouting into the line.

“Chief. Chief—”

“She's not coming back!”

“Combat, Bridge—”

“Combat, Bridge, this is Main Control. We're taking water down the intakes to port. Is the captain up there? Securing blowers, securing boilers—”

“Negative!” Packer shouted. “Somebody tell him—keep them on the line. Tell the bridge, come back to one-nine-zero. Damn it, Silver, get off me!”

Dan was first up, but only because he was on top of the heap. He got the wire off his legs, climbed over bodies to get to the intercom. He repeated the captain's orders.

“Bridge aye; I hear you.” Norden's voice, more strained than Dan had ever heard before it. Behind it was shouting and the crash of breaking glass.

Dan sniffed. Was that smoke? Probably just Bryce's cigarettes, Packer's pipe. Still, it smelled like paper burning, not—

The door to the bridge slammed open. Through it, he heard Norden shouting, “Coming back to one-nine-zero. Main Control, give me emergency flank on the port shaft. Coffey! Right hard rudder!”

Through the shrieking and crashing came a sodden rumble from above them, a clattering, sullen roar like an anchor chain running out.

The smoke smell grew suddenly sharp. If they didn't smell it, he did. “Fire!” he shouted. At that same moment, someone else shouted, “Fire in the pilothouse!”

The captain's voice was unnaturally calm in the din. “Get off me, whoever's on my legs. Lenson, see what's going on on the bridge.”

“Yessir.” He tore off the last of the wire and picked his way forward, climbing over men and shifting shoals of pubs, walking on the front panels of equipment as often as the deck.

On the bridge, flashlights licked about. He grabbed Pettus in midleap and asked where the fire was. The third-class said, “Oh, we got it out already. Space heater tipped over into some of the charts. Ali, he hit it with an extinguisher. Hold on!”

He screamed that last into his ear, and Dan grabbed the lee helm instinctively, jerking his head around to where the boatswain was staring.

That was when the sea blindsided them, smashing not inward but downward on the now near-horizontal windows on the starboard side. The unbroken ones bulged inward under the impact of tons of water and ice. “Right hard rudder!” Norden was shouting. And Coffey was shouting back, “It's all the way
over!
Won't go no farther!”

Dan clung to the helm, staring around.
Ryan
was pinned. Her rudder was over, her engines running all out, but the wind was lying on her, and every time she tried to rise, the sea smashed her back down. The waves hammered her like a street fighter stamping a fallen opponent to death. Another window bulged, then shattered, and the sea cascaded through, spraying him with icy water, broken Plexiglas, ice. He couldn't smell smoke anymore. All the windows on the starboard side were smashed.

Suddenly Packer was on the bridge. The captain shoved him aside and grabbed the brass handles of the engine-order telegraph. He racked them all the way back and all the way forward. “Rich! Give her left rudder!”

“
Left
rudder, sir? But—”

But Coffey was already bending. The wheel blurred as he spun it with one hand, clinging to the binnacle stand with the other. “Left hard, my rudder's left hard.”

“Not hard, Coffey, full.”

“Ease to left full … rudder at left full!”

Packer's voice cut the darkness and confusion like a machete through tangled black yarn. “Norden, by God, when I give an order, I want it obeyed, not questioned!”

“Yessir, I—”

“Never mind now. You have the conn back. Bring her stern through and steady on three-five-zero. Use full speed, twist her fucking tail. We can't hang around in these troughs.”

Past him, Dan saw Norden, face linen white, eyes fixed. His mouth moved but nothing emerged. “D'you hear me?” Packer said sharply.

“Yeah … yes, sir. This is Lieutenant Norden, I have the conn! Come left, left full rudder, steady three-five-zero!”

But in that pause between Packer's order and the rudder's first leftward movement, the ship reeled and rose. Dan felt her lift as if to fly, like a sparrow trying to escape the bulletlike dive of a hawk. But even as she came up, he knew with numb, helpless terror that it wasn't going to be enough.

The wave hit them like a lead avalanche. The last windows blew inward. The black sea roared through the pilothouse, smashing men down as they struggled to stand on wet tile, sending hot fizzing sparks through radio remotes in the instant before they shorted and went dead. He hung from the EOT, numb with fear, unable to look away.

Ryan
didn't come back.

She hung there, leaning far over to port, and the wind keened around her like a thousand jets going over on afterburner. She didn't move, and he realized suddenly how unnatural it was, how terrifying, when a ship
didn't move.

Water rushed past him, icy black, pouring down through the shattered starboard windows, pouring down from above. For an eternity he knew he'd never come to the end of, he looked past his dangling, kicking boots through the windows to port. They were completely covered with the foamy darkness that had nothing beneath it but the bottom, two thousand fathoms down. If he let go, he'd drop straight down through them, straight into the sea.

Then, so slowly it seemed to take forever, the old destroyer staggered a few degrees back. Then Chief Yardner was between him and It, slamming and dogging the heavy armored ports of the inner pilothouse. He heard Packer shouting over the roar of countless tons of falling water: “… Circle William, set it now, everything but the main intakes. Ed, you got any free surface in the bilges?”

“Foot or so, sir, we're pumping down as fast as we can, but we're taking water somewhere.”

“Shit. Okay, ballast now. Ballast her down. You hear me? She's worse than I expected. That last roll, we were right on the edge.”

Talliaferro's voice acknowledged faintly, as if there wasn't enough power to get his voice from Main Control up to the bridge.

Ryan
came back a little more, then suddenly lifted and swooped madly in a great crack-the-whip as the sea shoved her quarter up and around. Coffey slipped on the deck and went down, hard. The wheel spun unmanned for a moment before Dan grabbed it. He yanked it over to left full and then the black seaman was up again, saying, “I got it, sir,” shoving back in front of him.

“Bridge, Main Control.”

“Captain here. Go ahead, Ed.”

“Sir, bad news. We're already ballasted.”

“What? Without orders? Christ, what—”

“No, sir.” The voice came louder now. “I didn't give orders to. But when the oil king went to crack the valves to the fire main, they were already open. The wing tanks are full. It must have been a while ago, too, 'cause they're topped up, no free surface. I'm trying to find out how it happened now.”

“Find out later. Right now, look for what else we can flood. To starboard, preferably, that's windward up here. And
keep those boilers on the line.
”