Red Storm Rising Part 16

USS CHICAGO.

"What's the sounding?" McCafferty asked quietly.

"Fifty feet under the keel," the navigator answered at once. "We're still well outside Russian territorial waters, but we start approaching real shoals in twenty miles, skipper." It was the eighth time in half an hour that he had commented on what lay ahead.

McCafferty nodded, not wanting to speak, not wanting to make any unnecessary sound at all. The tension hung in the attack center of the Chicago like the cigarette smoke that the ventilators would not entirely remove. Looking around, he caught his crewmen furtively disclosing their states of mind with a raised eyebrow or a slightly shaken head.

The navigator was the most nervous of all. There were all sorts of good reasons not to be here. Chicago might or might not have been in Soviet territorial water, itself a legal question of no small complexity. To the northeast was Cape Kanin; to the northwest, Cape Svyatoy. The Soviets claimed the entire region as a "historic bay," while the United States chose to recognize the international twenty-four-mile closure rule. Everyone aboard knew that the Russians were more likely to shoot today than request a decision under the International Law of the Sea Convention. Would the Russians find them?

They were in a bare thirty fathoms of water-and, like the great pelagic sharks, nuclear attack submarines are creatures of the deep, not the shallows. The tactical plot showed bearings to three Soviet patrol craft, two Grisha-cla.s.s frigates and a Poti-cla.s.s corvette, all specialized antisubmarine s.h.i.+ps. All were miles away, but they were still a very real threat.

The only good news was a storm overhead. The twenty-knot surface wind and sheets of falling rain made noise that interfered with sonar performance-but that included their own sonar, and sonar was their only safe means for getting information.

Then there were the imponderables. What sensing devices did the Soviets have in these waters? Might the water be clear enough that a circling helicopter or ASW aircraft could see them? Might there be a Tango-cla.s.s diesel boat out there, moving slowly on her quiet, battery-powered electric motors? The only way they'd learn the answer to any of those questions was the metallic whine of a torpedo's high-speed propellers or the simple explosion of a falling depth-bomb. McCafferty considered all these things, and weighed the dangers against the priority of his Flash directive from COMSUBLANT: Determine at once the operating areas of REDFLT SSBNs.

That sort of language gave him little leeway.

"How tight is the inertial fix?" McCafferty asked as casually as he could.

"Plus or minus two hundred yards." The navigator didn't even look up.

The captain grunted, knowing what the navigator was thinking. They should have gotten a NAVSTAR satellite fix a few hours ago, but the risk of detection was too high in an area crawling with Soviet surface craft. Two hundred yards, plus or minus, was fine accuracy by any rational standard-but not while submerged in shallow water off a hostile coast. How accurate were his charts? Were there unmarked wrecks out there? Even if his navigational data were completely accurate, quarters would be so tight in another few miles that a goof of two hundred yards could ground them, damaging the submarine . . . and making noise. The captain shrugged to himself. The Chicago was the best platform in the world for this mission. He'd done this sort of thing before, and he couldn't worry about everything at the same time. McCafferty took a few steps forward and leaned into the sonar compartment.

"How's our friend doing?"

"Continuing as before, skipper. No changes at all in the target's radiated noise level. Just toolin' right along at fifteen knots, dead ahead, no more than two thousand yards off. Pleasure cruise, like," the sonar chief concluded with no small irony.

Pleasure cruise. The Soviets were sortieing their ballistic missile submarines at intervals of one sub every four hours. Already a majority of them were at sea. They had never done that before. And all seemed to be heading east-not north and northeast as they usually did to cruise in the Barents or Kara seas, or most recently under the arctic ice cap itself. SACLANT had learned that piece of information from Norwegian P-3 aircraft patrolling Checkpoint Charlie, the spot fifty miles offsh.o.r.e where Soviet submarines always submerged. Chicago, the nearest sub to the area, had been sent to investigate.

They'd soon detected and gotten into trail position behind a Delta-III, a modern Soviet "boomer," as missile subs were known. Trailing her, they'd stayed within the hundred-fathom curve the whole way . . . until the target had turned southeast into shallow water toward Mys Svyatoy Nos, which led to the entrance to the White Sea-all of which was Soviet territorial water.

How far did they dare follow? And what was going on? McCafferty returned to control and went to the periscope pedestal.

"Look around," he said. "Up scope." A petty officer turned the hydraulic ring control and the portside search periscope slid upward from its well. "Hold!" McCafferty stooped at the conning station, catching the instrument as the quartermaster stopped it below the surface. From a position that was murderously uncomfortable, the skipper duck-walked the scope in a full circle. On the forward bulkhead was a television monitor which worked off a camera built into the scope. It was watched by the executive officer and a senior petty officer.

"No shadows," McCafferty said. Nothing to make him suspect that something was there.

"Concur, skipper," the XO agreed.

"Check with sonar."

Forward, the sonar watch listened carefully. Circling aircraft made noise, and there was about an even chance that they'd heard it. But now they heard nothing-which didn't mean that nothing was there, like maybe a high-flying chopper or another Grisha laying to, her diesels shut down as she drifted, listening for someone like Chicago.

"Sonar says they don't have anything, skipper," the XO reported.

"Two more feet," McCafferty ordered.

The quartermaster worked the lever again, bringing the periscope up by twenty-three inches, just barely out of the water in the troughs of the waves.

"Skipper!" It was the senior ESM technician. The highest item on Chicago's periscope was a miniature antenna array which fed signals to a broadband receiver. The instant it projected above the surface, three lights flickered on the ESM tactical warning board. "I read three-five, maybe six India-band search radars. Signature characteristics say s.h.i.+p and land-based search radars, sir, not, repeat not, aircraft sets. Nothing in the Juliet-band." The technician started reading off the bearings.

McCafferty allowed himself to relax. There was no way a radar could detect so small a target as his periscope in these waves. He turned the periscope in a complete circle. "I see no surface s.h.i.+ps. No aircraft. Seas about five feet. Estimate the surface wind from the northwest at, oh, about twenty, twenty-five knots." He snapped up the handles and stepped back. "Down scope." The oiled steel tube was heading down before he'd spoken the second word. The captain nodded approval at his quartermaster, who held out a stopwatch. The scope had been up above the surface for a total of 5.9 seconds. After fifteen years in submarines, it still amazed him how so many people could do so much in six seconds. When he'd gone through submarine school, the criterion had been a seven-second exposure.

The navigator examined his chart quickly, a quartermaster a.s.sisting him to plot the bearings to the signal sources.

"Captain." The navigator looked up. "Bearings are consistent with two known sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+ps. "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 'Sh.o.r.e 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 subst.i.tute 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-cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king 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 G.o.dlike jobs left in the world, and at times it required a truly G.o.dlike 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-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage. 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 s.h.i.+p, diesel engines. They just came on all at once, sir. Sounds like a Natya-cla.s.s. 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 cras.h.i.+ng against the Delta, too, and he could see water splas.h.i.+ng 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 gla.s.ses . . . 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 G.o.d!

"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."