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"Skipper. He had his eyes glued to it."
"Were we in that?"
"No. You had the hatch sealed before the count went up."
Ramsey shivered, stared at the dial: 42,000 milli-R. "That's almost at a
self-sustaining level. Would be if it weren't for current diffusion."
"Where's that thermal?" asked Bonnett.
Ramsey tried a short-range pulse, checked the back wave. "Try two degrees
starboard . . . right."
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"My, we're salty," said Bonnett.
"We're in it," said Ramsey. "Radiation dropped, too." He looked at the big
pressure gauge: 262 psi.
The Ram's deck remained tilted downward.
"We're in it," repeated Ramsey. "Let's level out."
"Buoyancy in the tow," gritted Bonnett. He flicked the button on his chest
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mike: "Skipper, buoyancy in the tow."
Back came Sparrow's voice: "What's our depth?"
"We're in the thermal -- about 600 feet."
"Bring us around to westward -- make it 260 degrees even."
"What if we lose the thermal?"
"Just see that we don't."
"How's Joe?" asked Ramsey.
"Full of needle holes," said Sparrow.
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Bonnett spun the helm, brought up the bow planes, dropped them, found the
stabilizing point. The deck inclined forward at an uneasy three degrees.
"She wants to coon dog on us," said Ramsey.
"Why couldn't oil be a nice heavy substance like lead?" asked Bonnett. He
changed the pitch on the rear planes, readjusted the bow planes, glanced at
the pitlog. "The drag's cutting our speed in half."
Sparrow ducked through the door into the control room, looked to the rear
plane setting, swept his glance across the control reading dials.
Ramsey abruptly realized that in the one sweeping glance Sparrow had
familiarized himself with the facts of his vessel's life.
He's part of the machine, thought Ramsey. "The tow's riding stern-heavy," said
Bonnett. "We lost ballast from the bow. What we need is some nice
non-radioactive bottom muck to replenish ballast."
Ramsey looked at the sonoran chart. The red dot on their position stood north
of the blighted Scottish skerries, course line pointing toward Newfoundland.
"Seamount Olga is right in our path," he said. "Its west slope would be
scoured by clean currents and --"
"It may be hotter than our damper rods," said Sparrow. "But it's a good
chance. That's why we changed course."
"Outside radiation's up a few points, Skipper. The thermal's thinner than our
diameter here."
"Steady as she goes," said Sparrow. "The tank hull took a near-limit dose back
there. It'll have to go through decon anyway. Our concern now is to get that
oil home."
"It's hot, too," said Bonnett. "But usable," Ramsey reminded him. Sparrow
said, "The immediate problem is how to get that ballast off the bottom when we
can't go down to it. I think we're going to have
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to waste another fish." He turned to Ramsey. "Johnny, do you feel hot enough
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on the remotes to snag our ballast hose in the fin prongs of one of our Con-5
fish?"
Ramsey remembered Teacher Reed at the torpedo base on Boca Raton. He had
patted the agate-smooth skin of a thin torpedo. "This is the Con-5. Those
buttons in the nose are radar and TV
eyes. Through them, you sit right in the nose of this baby while you guide her
into the target." And he had turned then to a black radio case with stub
antenna protruding from it. "Here are the controls. Let's see what you can do.
This one's a dud, so you can make lots of errors."
"Well, what do you think?" asked Sparrow.
"Once that baby's out of her rack, she's charged and ready to blow. If I smack
the pin into something near the hull, we've had it."
"You don't think you can handle it?"
"I didn't say that." Ramsey looked at his hands. They were steady. "I can do
it if anybody can but --"
"Youth is what it takes," said Sparrow. "Les and I are growing old."
"Howdy, Grandad," said Bonnett.
"I'm serious," said Sparrow. "The end of that ballast hose sticks out only
about a foot. The Con-5 will have to be moving better than fifteen knots to
snag the hose tightly. That means --"
"That means I'd better be right," said Ramsey.
"Right the first time," said Bonnett.
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Ramsey shrugged. "Well, at Boca Raton they said I took to the Con-5 like it
was --"
"Boca Raton?" asked Sparrow. "What's at Boca Raton?"
And Ramsey realized he had made another error. Boca Raton was a torpedo school
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