The navigator examined his chart quickly, a quartermaster assisting him to plot the bearings to the signal sources.
“Captain.” The navigator looked up. “Bearings are consistent with two known shore radar transmitters, and three Don-2 sets match the bearings of Sierra-2, -3, and -4.” He referred to the plotted positions of the three Soviet surface ships. “We got one unknown, bearing zero-four-seven. What’s that one look like, Harkins?”
“A land-based India-band surface search, one of those new ‘Shore Cans,’ ” the technician responded, reading off frequency and pulse-width numbers. “Weak signal and kinda fuzzy, sir. Lots of activity, though, and all the transmitters are dialed into different frequencies.” The technician meant that the radar searches were well coordinated, so that the radar transmitters would not interfere with one another.
An electrician rewound the videotape, allowing McCafferty to reexamine what he’d seen through the periscope. The only difference was that the periscope TV camera was black and white. The tape had to be run at slow speed to avoid blurring, so rapidly had the captain made his visual search.
“Amazing how good nothing can look, eh, Joe?” he asked his executive officer. The cloud ceiling was well below a thousand feet, and the wave action had rapidly coated the periscope lens with water droplets. No one had ever invented an efficient gadget for keeping that lens clear, McCafferty reflected, you’d think that after eighty-some years . . .
“Water looks a little murky, too,” Joe answered hopefully. A visual sighting by antisubmarine warfare aircraft is one of the nightmares all submariners share.
“Doesn’t look like a nice day to fly, does it? I don’t think we have to worry about somebody getting an eyeball sight on us.” The captain spoke loudly enough for the control room crew to hear.
“The water deepens out some for the next two miles,” the navigator reported.
“How much?”
“Five fathoms, skipper.”
McCafferty looked over at the XO, who was conning the boat at the moment. “Use it.” On the other hand, some helicopter jockey might get lucky . . .
“Aye. Diving officer, take her down another twenty feet. Gently.”
“Aye.” The chief gave the necessary orders to the planesmen and you could feel the sighs through the attack center.
McCafferty shook his head. When was the last time you saw your men look relieved over a twenty-foot change in depth? he asked himself. He went forward to sonar. He did not remember being there only four minutes earlier.
“How are our friends doing, chief?”
“The patrol boats are still faint, sir. They seem to be circling—the bearings are changing back and forth like they been doin’. The boomer’s blade count is also constant, sir, he’s just toolin’ right along at fifteen knots. Not especially quiet, either. I mean, we still got plenty of mechanical transients, y’know? There’s maintenance work—lot of it—going on in there, by the sound he’s making. Want to listen in, skipper?” The chief held up a pair of earphones. Most sonar scanning was done visually—the on-board computers converted acoustical signals into a display on TV-type tubes that looked most of all like some sort of arcade game. But there was still no real substitute for listening in. McCafferty took the phones.
First he heard the Delta’s whirring reactor pumps. They were running at medium speed, driving water out of the reactor vessel into the steam generator. Next he concentrated on the screw sounds. The Russian boomer had a pair of five-bladed screws, and he tried to make his own count of the chuga-chuga noise made as each blade made its circuit. No good, he’d have to take the chief’s word, as he usually did . . . klang!
“What was that?”
The chief turned to another senior operator. “Hatch slammin’?”
The first-class sonarman shook his head judiciously. “More like somebody dropped a wrench. Close, though, pretty close.”
The captain had to smile. Everybody aboard was trying to affect a casual manner that had to be outrageously faked. Certainly everyone was as tense as he was, and McCafferty wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of this miserable lake. Of course he couldn’t act in such a way as to allow his crew to become overly concerned; the captain must be in total control at all times—what fucking games we play! he told himself. What are we doing here? What is going on in this crazy world? I don’t want to fight a fucking war!
He leaned against the doorframe, just forward of the control room, only a few feet from his own stateroom, wanting to go in, just to lie down for a minute or two, to take a few deep breaths, maybe go to his sink and splash a little cold water . . . but then he might accidentally look in the mirror. None of that, he knew. Command of a submarine was one of the last truly godlike jobs left in the world, and at times it required a truly godlike demeanor. Like now. Play the game, Danny, he told himself. The captain withdrew a handkerchief from his back pocket and rubbed his nose with it, his face locked into a neutral, almost bored expression as his eyes traced over the sonar displays. The cool captain . . .
McCafferty returned to the attack center a moment later, telling himself that he’d spent just enough time to inspire his sonar crewmen without pressuring them with too much attention from the CO. A fine balance. He looked around casually. The room was as crowded as an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day. His men’s outwardly cool faces were sweating, despite the nuclear-powered air conditioning. The planesmen especially were concentrating on their instruments, guiding the submarine down an electronically defined display, with the diving officer—Chicago’s most senior chief—right behind them.
In the center of the control room, the two side-by-side attack periscopes were fully retracted, with a quartermaster’s mate poised to raise them. The XO paced as much as he could, looking at the chart every twenty seconds or so as he turned at the rear of the compartment. Not much here to complain about. Everybody was tense, but all the work was getting done.
“All things considered,” McCafferty said for all to hear, “things are going pretty good. Surface conditions are working against them detecting us.”
“Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye.” The captain took the phone.
“Hull-popping noises. He seems to be surfacing. Yeah, target is now blowing tanks, skipper.”
“Understood. Keep us posted, chief.” McCafferty put the phone back. He took three steps back to the chart table. “Why surface now?”
The navigator stole a cigarette from an enlisted man and lit it. McCafferty knew he didn’t smoke. The lieutenant nearly gagged on it, drawing a brief smirk from a second-class quartermaster and a rueful grin from the navigator. He looked over at the captain.
“Sir, something is wrong about this,” the lieutenant said quietly.
“Just one thing,” the captain asked. “Why did he surface here?”
“Conn, sonar.” McCafferty went forward and took the phone again. “Skipper, the boomer’s doing a long blow, really blowing his tanks out like, sir.”
“Anything else unusual?”
“No, sir, but he must’ve just used a lot of his reserve air, sir.”
“Okay, chief, thank you.” McCafferty hung up and wondered if that meant anything.
“Sir, you ever done this before?” the navigator asked.
“I’ve trailed a lot of Russian boats, but no, never in here.”
“The target has to surface eventually, only sixty feet of water down here along Terskiy Bereg.” The navigator traced his finger along the chart.
“And we have to break off the trail,” McCafferty agreed. “But that’s another forty miles.”
“Yeah.” The navigator nodded agreement. “But starting five miles back, this gulf starts to narrow down like a funnel, and for a submerged sub, it eventually closes down to two, then only one safe passage. Jeez, I don’t know.” McCafferty came aft again to examine the chart.
“He was content to run fifteen knots at periscope depth all this way down from Kola. The usable depth has been
about the same for the past five hours—just bottomed out some—and figures to be the same for another hour or two . . . but he surfaces anyway. So,” McCafferty said, “the only change in environmental conditions is the width of the channel, and that’s still over twenty miles . . .” The captain mulled this over, staring down at the chart. The sonar room called yet again.
“Conn, aye. What is it, chief?”
“New contact, sir, bearing one-nine-two. Designate target Sierra- 5. Twin-screw surface ship, diesel engines. They just came on all at once, sir. Sounds like a Natya-class. Bearing changing right to left slowly, seems to be converging with the boomer. Blade count puts her speed at about twelve knots.”
“What’s the boomer doing?”
“Speed and bearing are unchanged, skipper. The blow has ended. She’s on the surface, sir, we’re starting to get pounding and some racing on her screws—wait a minute . . . an active sonar just started up, we’re getting reverbs, bearing seems to be about one-nine-zero, probably from the Natya. It’s a very high frequency sonar, above aural range . . . I make it twenty-two-thousand hertz.”
An icy ball suddenly materialized in McCafferty’s stomach.
“XO, I’m taking the conn.”
“Aye, Captain, you have the conn.”
“Diving officer: get her up to sixty feet, high as you can without broaching her. Observation! Up scope!” The search scope came up and McCafferty met it as he had before and quickly checked the surface of the sea for shadows. “Three more feet. Okay, still nothing. What’s the ESM reading?”
“Now seven active radar sources, skipper. Plot out about the same as before, plus the new one at one-nine-one, another India-band, looks like another Don-2.”
McCafferty turned the periscope handle to twelve-power, its highest setting. The Soviet missile submarine was sitting extremely high in the water.
“Joe, tell me what you see,” McCafferty asked, wanting a quick second opinion.
“That’s a Delta-III, all right. Looks like she’s blown dry, Cap’n, they come out pretty far, and that looks like about three or four feet higher than they usually do. He just used up a lot of his air . . . That might be the Natya’s mast ahead of her, hard to be sure.”
McCafferty could feel that his own Chicago was rolling. His hands tingled with the transmitted wave-slaps against the periscope. The seas were crashing against the Delta, too, and he could see water splashing in and out of the limber holes that lined the boomer’s flanks.
“ESM board says that signal strengths are approaching detection values,” the technician warned.
“His periscopes are both up,” McCafferty said, knowing that his scope had already been up too long. He squeezed the trigger to double the magnification. It cost optical detail, but the picture zoomed in on the Delta’s conning tower. “The control station atop his sail is fully manned. Everyone has glasses . . . not looking aft, though. Down scope. Diving officer, take her down ten feet. Nice work, planesmen. Let’s see that tape, Joe.” The picture returned to the TV monitor in a few seconds.
They were two thousand yards behind the Delta. Beyond her by about half a mile was a spherical radar dome, probably the Natya, rolling noticeably with the beam seas. To house her sixteen SS-18 missiles, the Russian sub had a sloped turtleback, and from directly aft it looked like a highway ramp. An ungainly design, the Delta, but she had to survive only long enough to launch her missiles, and the Americans had no doubt that her missiles worked just fine.
“Look at that, they blew her so high half her screws are clear,” the XO pointed.
“Navigator, how far to shallow water?”
“Along this channel, a minimum of twenty-four fathoms for ten miles.”
Why did the Delta surface this far out?
McCafferty lifted the phone. “Sonar, tell me about the Natya.”
“Skipper, he’s pinging away like mad. Not toward us, but we’re getting lots of reflections and reverberations off the bottom.”
The Natya was a specialized mine-hunter . . . also used, to be sure, as an escort for submarines in and out of safe areas. But her mine-hunting VHF sonar was operating . . . dear God!
“Left full rudder!” McCafferty shouted.
“Left full rudder, aye!” The helmsman would have hit the overhead but for the seatbelt. He instantly snapped his wheel to port. “Sir, my rudder is left full!”
“Minefield,” the navigator breathed. Heads all over the room turned around.
“That’s a good bet.” McCafferty nodded grimly. “How far are we from the point where the boomer rendezvoused with the Natya?”
The navigator examined the plot closely. “Stopped about four hundred yards short of it, sir.”
“All stop.”
“All stop, aye.” The helmsman dialed the annunciator handle. “Engine room answers all stop, sir. Passing left through one-eight-zero, sir.”
“Very well. We ought to be safe enough here. You have to figure the Delta’d rendezvous with the sweeper a few miles clear of the field, right? Anybody here think Ivan would gamble with a boomer?” It was a rhetorical question. Nobody ever gambled with boomers.
Everyone in the control room took a deep breath at the same moment. The Chicago slowed rapidly, her turn taking her broadside to her previous course.
“Rudder amidships.” McCafferty ordered one-third speed and lifted the phone for sonar. “The boomer doing anything different?”
“No, sir. Bearing is still constant at one-nine-zero. Speed still fifteen knots. We can still hear the Natya pinging, nearing one-eight-six, and her blade count is now about fifteen knots, too.”
“Navigator, start figuring a way for us to get out of here. We want to keep well clear of all those patrol boats and report this news in as quick as we can.”
“Aye. Three-five-eight looks pretty good for the moment, sir.” The navigator had been updating that course continuously for two hours.
“Sir, if Ivan really has laid out a minefield, part of it’s in international waters,” the exec noted. “Cute.”
“Yeah. Of course, to them it’s territorial waters, so anybody bumps into a mine, it’s just too damned bad—”
“And maybe an international incident?” Joe observed.
“But why did they ping at all?” the communications officer asked. “If they got a clear channel they can navigate visually.”
“What if there’s no channel at all?” the exec answered. “What if they set ground mines, and moored mines strung, say, at a uniform depth of fifty feet. You have to figure they’d be a little nervous that a mine or two might have too long a mooring cable. So they’re playing it safe, just like we’d do. What’s all that tell you?”
“Nobody can trail their boomers without surfacing . . .” the lieutenant understood.
“And we sure as hell aren’t going to do that. Nobody ever said that Ivan was dumb. They got a perfect system here. They’re putting all their missile boats where we can’t get at them,” McCafferty went on. “Even SUBROC can’t make it from where we are into the White Sea. Final point, if they have to scatter the boats, they don’t have to screw around in a single channel, they can all surface, spread out, and run for daylight.
“What this means, gentlemen, is that instead of detailing an attack boat to guard every boomer against somebody like us, they can put all the missile boats into one nice, safe basket and release their attack boats to other missions. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
NORTH ATLANTIC
“Ship in view, this is U.S. Navy aircraft on your port beam. Please identify, over.” Captain Kherov handed the bridge-to-bridge phone to a Red Army major.
“Navy, this is the Doctor Lykes. How are y’all?” Kherov spoke halting English. The major’s Mississippi accent might as well have been Kurdish for all he understood of it. They could barely make out the haze-gray patrol aircraft that was now circling their ship—circling, they noted, at a five-mile distance and certainly inspecting them through binoculars.
; “Amplify, Doctor Lykes,” the voice ordered tersely.
“We’re out of New Orleans, bound for Oslo with general cargo, Navy. What’s the big deal?”
“You’re well north of a course to Norway. Please explain, over.”
“Y‘all read the damned papers, Navy? It’s liable to get dangerous out here, and this big ole ship costs money. We got orders from the home office to keep close to some friendly folks. Hell, we’re glad to see ya’, boy. Y’all want to escort us a ways?”
“Roger, copy. Doctor Lykes, be advised no submarines known to be in this area.”
“Y’all guarantee that?”
This drew a laugh. “Not hardly, Doc.”
“That’s about what I thought, Navy. Well, if it’s all right with you, we’ll keep heading north a ways and try to stay under your air cover, over.”
“We can’t detail an aircraft to escort you.”
“Understood, but you will come if we call you—right?”
“That’s a roger,” agreed Penguin 8.
“Okay, we’ll continue north, then turn east for the Faroes. Will you warn us if any bad guys show up? Over.”
“If we find any, Doc, the idea is we’ll try an’ sink ’em first,” the pilot exaggerated.
“Fair enough. Good huntin’, boy. Out.”
PENGUIN 8
“God, do people really talk like that?” the pilot of the Orion wondered aloud.
“Never heard about Lykes Lines?” his copilot chuckled. “They used to say they wouldn’t hire a guy ’less he had a Southern accent. I never believed it until now. Nothing like tradition. He is kinda off the beaten track, though.”
“Yeah, but until the convoys form up, hell, I’d try to bounce from one protected area to another. Anyway, let’s finish the visual.” The pilot increased power and headed in closer while his copilot lifted the recognition book.
“Okay, we have an all-black hull with ‘Lykes Lines’ on the side, midships. White superstructure with black diamond, a block L inside the diamond.” He lifted his binoculars. “Lookout mast forward of the superstructure. Check. Superstructure is nicely raked. Electronics mast is not. Proper ensign and house flag. Black funnels. Winches aft by the barge elevator—doesn’t say how many winches. Damn, she’s carrying a full load of barges, isn’t she? Paintwork looks a little shabby. Anyway, it all checks with the book; that’s a friendly.”