Page 89 of Enemy Within
And they were headed right down the center.
Nerves radiated from the three men seated at the diving station. The helmsmen and planesman sat behind commercial airplane-style control yokes, each linked to the rudder and the diving planes, controlling the boat’s course and depth. Behind them, the diving officer, Lieutenant “Roller” Whipple, sat, double, triple, and quadruple-checking their every move, and taking over when needed. The engine room telegraph also squatted between the three men, the old-school turns like a rotary phone telegraphing to the engine room to give the captain the power he needed.
Roller was young and had earned his nickname the hard way, Anderson said. He’d rolled the sub through the ocean like a sea snake for months, barely able to keepHonoluluat the right depth and trim when he first came on board. More than one officer had puked when he was at the helm.
Senior Chief Garcia kept an eye on him from his own station, manning the ballast control panel. He was in charge of the boat’s dive and surface, keeping the sub buoyant while submerged, and her levels trim and even. Above him, two bright-red Chicken Switches hovered on the control panel. If all hell broke loose, he yanked those switches and high-pressure air forced out the water in the buoyancy tanks in one explosive rush. If that happened,Honoluluwould blast out of the water, rising like a torpedo fired from her own tubes. Except, under the ice, she’d slam up against the ice sheet, and if it wasn’t thin enough to give, she’d smash into a billion pieces and sink to the bottom of the Arctic Abyss.
Captain Anderson pulled down the handset for the boat’s intercom and flipped to the main channel. “All hands, this is the Captain. We’re preparing to enter the Strait. From here on out, there are no drills. Once we reach the other side, we’re at war.”
Sergey hovered at Jack’s side in the dim light, standing beside Sasha. Something had changed between them, from the day before to now. Instead of turning away from each other, they now turned toward each other, standing inside each other’s shadow. Sergey kept one hand on Sasha at all times, and Sasha tried to keep Sergey within the breadth of his shoulders. It felt like Ethan was looking into a mirror.
“Captain,” Navigation officer Lieutenant Commander Jacinto said, “seven minutes until Little Diomede. Turn in nine minutes. New heading will be three-three-six degrees to Herald Canyon.” Jacinto was a thin man, almost gangly, and he folded over his plotting table like it was a toy he couldn’t let go of. Calculated precision and dead seriousness were etched into the lines of his face, a steel-hardened exactitude that submariner navigators required.
“Diomede will pass to port?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Captain Anderson nodded once. “Ocean depth?”
“Ninety-six feet, Captain.”
“Roller, make your depth eighty feet. Slow to six knots.”
Roller’s wide eyes bulged like a King Charles spaniel. He responded immediately. “Eighty feet and six knots, aye aye, sir.” His jaw kept moving, a manic, mechanical chewing. Three packs of nicotine gum were stuffed in the front pocket of his uniform top.
Ethan exhaled, nice and slow, asHonolulucrept through the Strait. Anderson kept his gaze locked on the displays, his eyes flicking from depth to trim to angles and back again. “We’re passing through the shallowest part now,” he murmured, leaning close to Jack. “Our keel is just over ten feet above the ocean floor. If a wave breaks over the surface, we flash our skirts to anyone out there. We’re close enough to throw a rock and hit both Russia and the US. We are feet from either nation.”
Jack swallowed. He stayed silent.
“Ocean depth ninety feet, Captain.”
Anderson’s eyes flicked back to the screens. His jaw clenched.
“One-minute warning.” Behind them, the navigator called out their course and bearing again. “Turn in forty-five seconds, Captain.” Big and Little Diomede were two rocky outcroppings of bird shit and dust in the middle of the Bering Strait, two and a half miles apart from each other. The borders between Russia and the United States ran down the exact center of the waters between the islands.
Jack leaned into Ethan. He slipped his hand through Ethan’s, lacing their fingers together.
“Five, four, three, two, one, andmark.”
“Helm, five degrees left rudder. Heading three-three-six degrees. Keep the turn gentle,” Anderson growled. “If you turn us too sharp, we’ll roll and expose our port side out of the water.”
Roller didn’t blink as he repeated his orders. “Five degrees left rudder, heading three-three-six degrees, gentle turn, aye aye, Captain.”
Slowly, the Conn tipped sideways, a gentle bank as the sub turned, moving out of the Strait and into the Russian Arctic. Ethan looked to Jack and met his gaze. In the darkness, Jack’s eyes gleamed, a shine that made the blue of his eyes look like stars burning in the night sky.
“This is it,” Jack breathed. “We’re at war.”
THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT would be waiting on the other side of the Strait. During Anderson’s brief, the captain outlined every possible scenario, from empty polar seas all the way to Madigan to a silentAkulalying in wait, a Russian hunter-killer submarine of their own. What did Madigan have at hand? What had Moroshkin taken over the pole with him to Canada? What elements of the Russian Northern Fleet had defected during the coup, and who had simply pointed their boat as far from Russia as possible and tried to flee the calamity? No one knew the answers. Unknowns stacked against their operation, giant question marks that could spell disaster.
Beyond the Strait, geography opened up a triangle of terrible waters. Undersea mountain ranges of plunging ice thrusting downward from the polar ice cap created caverns and jungles nearly impossible to navigate. Shallow waters and shoals narrowed the potential routes to one: Herald Canyon, to the starboard of Wrangel Island, a barren rock in Russia’s desolate Siberian Sea.
Herald Canyon was a notorious ice maze. Even in summer, the ice never completely melted, and the shift and slam of the bergs and the ice sheets sent slabs of ice deep into the waters. The ocean floor was shallow, still a part of the continental shelf off of Russia. A flat plain that rose and rose, trying to pin submarines like butterflies to the bottom of the ice, trap them and strangle each boat out of its depth.
The deepest pass through Herald Canyon was the Wrangel Trough, an ancient riverbed that had once cut through the Siberian Plains when the Sea had been a steppe that linked Russia to America millions of years ago. Successfully navigating through the Wrangel Trough would turn them into salmon swimming upstream, dodging the shallows and the plunging ice, squeezing through passes barely large enough for their hull, and praying that they were alone.
Under the ice, sonar,Honolulu’seyes and ears, barely worked. The Arctic wreaked havoc on sound and sonar. In the open ocean, American submarines could pick out the sound of a toilet flushing on a cruise ship and the footfalls of a guard walking a perimeter, the hushed whispers of a drug deal going down. Sailing into the Arctic was like putting a blindfold on and earplugs in, and spinning someone around until they were dizzy. Mazes of ice jungles, floating icebergs with keels that plunged hundreds of feet into the waters, ice sheets that rumbled and crunched, and wild sea life all created an undersea opera of acoustic chaos. Sonar displays looked like snow on an old television set. Making sense of the undersea world was a nightmare. The mix of fresh water from the ice and saltwater in the depths bounced sound waves like a hall of mirrors. And when the sea floor dropped out beneath them, sonar reflections and refractions bounced off the bottom of the ice and into the depths.
At best, they could see the bottom of the ocean and the bottom of the ice and figure out a way to navigate through the pinched corridor.
