“Mark the sounding,” the OOD ordered.
“Mark the sounding, aye, sir,” the quartermaster replied from the navigation electronics station. “Sounding two-three-nine fathoms, sir.”
Tim did the sounding calculation in his head. The ocean floor was 1,434 feet below them.
“Officer of the Deck,” Captain Weber said, “make our depth one-three-zero-zero feet.”
Thirteen hundred feet—Jesus. Roanoke was a Los Angeles–class submarine, which meant their crush depth was 1,475 feet. They would be descending dangerously close to that threshold—closer than he had ever been. Tim felt a bead of nervous sweat break free and trickle down his forehead. It was called “crush depth” for a reason. If a sub went below that depth, the pressure on the outer hull would squeeze it like a tin can, until it finally imploded. The fuel and air tanks would follow suit, as well as the inner hull. A leak on a sub was bad enough, but if the hull broke open, it wouldn’t be a leak; it would be an unstoppable flood of water rushing in at horrifically high pressure. If they were lucky, the air trapped inside the sub would form bubbles at either end, where the crew could gather to slowly suffocate in the dwindling oxygen. If they weren’t lucky, the trapped air would escape out of the broken hull immediately and they would all drown. Either way, everybody died, and neither way sounded pleasant.
“Captain, we’re making five knots and rigged for dive,” the OOD reported.
“Officer of the Deck, dive,” Captain Weber ordered.
“One-three-zero-zero, aye, sir. Diving Officer, submerge to one-three-zero-zero,” the OOD ordered. Then he announced into the phonetalker, “Dive! Dive!”
Once again, because they were rigged for ultraquiet, there was no dive alarm. The floor tilted precipitously as the submarine dived more steeply than before, setting Tim’s nerves even more on edge.
Lieutenant Duncan updated their depth every few seconds. “Seven-seven-five feet, sir… eight-two-five… eight-five-zero… nine-zero-zero…”
At 900 feet, Tim knew, the pressure bearing down on the hull was 400 pounds per square inch. The bulkheads began to creak and squeal. He tried not to think about a beer can getting stomped.
“Nine-two-five, sir,” Duncan continued. “Nine-five-zero.”
“Spicer, any reaction from our friend the Victor?” Captain Weber asked.
“None, sir,” Tim replied, grateful for a chance to focus on something other than the loudly groaning hull. “The Victor is holding steady.”
“Excellent,” the captain said. “Let me know if that changes.”
Tim stared at his screen, wondering what was happening on board the Soviet sub right now. Could she no longer detect Roanoke, or was she just patiently watching them dive?
“One-zero-zero-zero feet, sir,” Duncan reported. “One-zero-five-zero.”
The bulkheads groaned as if the sub itself were in pain. The sound was loud. Too loud. There was no way the Victor, even with its lousy sonar equipment, could fail to hear it. And if the Victor heard them, it would come and investigate. Tim prayed Captain Weber knew what he was doing.
“One two-five-zero,” Duncan reported. “Sir, we’ve reached one-three-zero-zero feet.”
“One-three-zero-zero, aye,” the OOD said.
“Officer of the Deck, make our speed two knots,” Captain Weber said.
They slowed to a crawl, 1,300 feet below the surface of the ocean, just a few fathoms from the floor, in a submerged world that was as dark as a cave. For a few seconds, everything was quiet. And then, suddenly, the blip on the sonar screen began to turn.
“Captain, sir, the Victor is moving,” Tim called.
Captain Weber hurried into the sonar shack. He stood directly behind Tim’s chair, watching the screen.
“They’ve slowed to two knots and executed a turn, sir,” Tim reported.
“They’re trying to find us,” the captain said.
The Soviet submarine moved slowly, practically at a drift. Thirty slow, tense minutes passed as it caught up to Roanoke’s position. Thirty minutes of Tim staring at the sonar screen and tracking the Victor’s bearing. Thirty minutes during which every crewman in the control room sat silently and nervously at his station. Thirty minutes of listening to the hull’s ominous creaks and rumbles.
The Victor floated right above them. Instinctively, Tim held his breath. He looked up at the ceiling as if he might see through the hull to the Soviet submarine above them. Everyone was quiet. The bulkheads groaned. Tim wished he could shut them the hell up.
The Victor passed over Roanoke and kept moving.
Tim let out his breath. “They don’t know where we are, sir. I don’t know how they didn’t hear the hull, but they’re still trying to find us.”
“They heard us; they just can’t find us,” the captain explained. “We’re shielded. I saw it on the charts earlier: an oceanic trench big enough for us to hide in. The only thing their sonar is going to pick up is solid rock.”
Frustrated at losing them, the Victor switched to active sonar and lit up on Tim’s console like a Christmas display. The Soviet sub gave off three loud pings, but the captain was right: all she could detect was the ocean floor. Rigged for ultraquiet and shielded by the trench, Roanoke was impossible to hear. The Victor tried again, and a third time. Still finding nothing, she finally changed course and sailed away.
Captain Weber gave it another hour, just to be on the safe side, but the Victor never came back. When he called off the ultraquiet, Tim and the other techs in the sonar shack cheered and slapped one another on the back. He could hear the sailors in the control room doing the same, and in a brief fit of optimism, he hoped this moment of triumph might make Jerry and Lieutenant Duncan put their differences aside. If anything could inspire them to bury the hatchet, successfully eluding a Soviet submarine in pursuit might be just the thing.
The captain ordered the boat back up to 600 feet, on a bearing north and west. Tim went back to watching his sonar screen, but his elation slowly gave way to worry again. Unlike most of Roanoke’s crew, he knew the truth about the op. The new course the captain had given would take them deep into Soviet territory. And somewhere in those unfriendly waters, a prototype of the Soviets’ super sub was waiting.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A sudden, loud crash startled Jerry awake. He lay in the darkness of his curtained rack, heart pounding from the spike of adrenaline, and wondered whether he had really heard something or only dreamed it.
Things in the control room had been tense all through his watch—at least, until the captain finally shook the Soviet boat off their tail. After that, Jerry’s mind and body had been so exhausted that when his sleep section came, he nodded right off instead of lying awake for hours as usual. But now, damn it, he was awake again. His annoyance grew as the silent minutes ticked by and he became convinced that he had dreamed the noise—woken himself up, sabotaging his own sleep section.
The rack he slept in didn’t have a lot of room. Its thin foam mattress was narrower than a standard twin bed, with just enough space to sleep provided he didn’t move around too much. Jerry had learned quickly not to turn over in his sleep and risk falling out of his rack. His was the topmost rack in a triple-decker berth, which meant it would be one hell of a fall. No one would call the racks comfortable, but he had managed to sleep just fine in them for years. It was only on Roanoke that he had trouble sleeping, and it wasn’t the rack’s fault. It was Lieutenant Duncan’s. No, if he was going to be honest with himself, it wasn’t even Duncan. It was the way Duncan reminded him every day of what happened on Phildelphia. What kept him awake was his own sense of guilt, the ever-present question of whether or not he had done the right thing.