by Tom Clancy
“It’s almost too easy,” the XO observed to the skipper.
“You’re right, X, disable the computer,” Ricks ordered.
Lieutenant Commander Wally Claggett, Executive Officer, “Gold,” USS Maine, walked back to the machine and switched it off. “We have a casualty to the HP computer ... looks like it’ll take hours to fix,” he announced. “Pity.”
“Thanks a lot,” Ensign Ken Shaw observed quietly to the quartermaster hunched next to him at the chart table.
“Be cool, Mr. Shaw,” the petty officer whispered back. “We’ll take care o’ ya. Don’t need that thing now anyway, sir.”
“Let’s keep it quiet in the attack center!” Captain Ricks observed.
The submarine’s course took her northwest. The sonar operators fed information to the attack center as she did so. Ten minutes later, the tracking party made its decision.
“Captain,” Ensign Shaw announced. “Estimate contact Sierra-5 is in the first CZ, range looks like three-nine thousand yards, course is generally southerly, speed between eight and ten knots.”
“You can do better than that!” the CO announced sharply.
“Conn, sonar, Sierra-5 looks like Akula-class Soviet fast-attack, preliminary target ident is Akula number six, the Admiral Lunin. Stand by”—a moment’s silence—“possible aspect change on Sierra-5, possible turn. Conn, we have a definite aspect change. Sierra-5 is now beam-on, definite beam-aspect on target.”
“Captain,” the XO said, “that maximizes the effectiveness of his towed array.”
“Right. Sonar, conn, I want a self-noise check.”
“Sonar aye, stand by, sir.” Another few seconds. “Conn, we’re making some sort of noise ... not sure what, rattle, like, maybe something in the after ballast tanks. Didn’t show before, sir. Definitely aft ... definitely metallic.”
“Conn, maneuvering room, we got something screwy back here. I can hear something from aft, maybe in the ballast tanks.”
“Captain,” Shaw said next. “Sierra-5 is now on a reciprocal heading. Target course is now southeasterly, roughly one-three-zero.”
“Maybe he can hear us,” Ricks growled. “I’m taking us up through the layer. Make your depth one hundred feet.”
“One hundred feet, aye,” the diving officer responded immediately. “Helm, five degrees up on the fairwater planes.”
“Five degrees up on the fairwater planes, aye. Sir, the fairwater planes are up five degrees, coming to one hundred feet.”
“Conn, maneuvering, the rattle has stopped. It stopped when we took the slight up-angle.”
The XO grunted next to the Captain. “What the hell does that mean ... ?”
“It probably means that some dumbass dockyard worker left his toolbox in the ballast tank. That happened to a friend of mine once.” Ricks was truly angry now, but if you had to have such incidents, here was the place for them. “When we get above the layer, I want to go north and clear datum.”
“Sir, I’d wait. We know where the CZ is. Let him slide out of it, then we can maneuver clear while he can’t hear us. Let him think he’s got us scoped before we start playing tricks. He probably thinks we don’t have him. By maneuvering radically, we’re tipping our hand.”
Ricks considered that. “No, we’ve canceled the noise aft, we’ve probably dropped off his scopes already, and when we get above the layer, we can get lost in the surface noise and maneuver clear. His sonar isn’t all that good. He doesn’t even know what we are yet. He’s just sniffing for something. This way we can put more distance between us.”
“Aye aye,” the XO responded neutrally.
Maine leveled off at one hundred feet, well above the thermocline layer, the boundary between relatively warm surface water and the cold deep water. It changed acoustical conditions drastically and, Ricks judged, should eliminate any chance that the Akula had him.
“Conn, sonar, contact lost on Sierra-5.”
“Very well. I have the conn,” Ricks announced.
“Captain has the conn,” the officer of the deck acknowledged.
“Left ten degrees rudder, come to new course three-five-zero.”
“Left ten degrees rudder, aye, coming to new course three-five-zero. Sir, my rudder is left ten degrees.”
“Very well. Engine room, conn, make turns for ten knots.”
“Engine room, aye, turns for ten knots. Building up slowly.”
Maine steadied up on a northerly course and increased speed. It took several minutes for her towed-array sonar to straighten out and be useful again. During this time, the American submarine was somewhat blinded.
“Conn, maneuvering, we got that noise again!” the speaker announced.
“Slow to five—all ahead one-third!”
“All ahead one-third, aye. Sir, engine room answers all ahead one-third.”
“Very well. Maneuvering, conn, what about that noise?”
“Still there, sir.” “We’ll give it a minute,” Ricks judged. “Sonar, conn, got anything on Sierra-5?”
“Negative, sir, holding no contacts at this time.”
Ricks sipped at his coffee and watched the clock on the bulkhead for three minutes. “Maneuvering, conn, what about the noise?”
“Has not changed, sir. It’s still there.”
“Damn! X, bring her down a knot.” Claggett did as he was told. The skipper was losing it, he realized. Not good. Another ten minutes passed. The worrisome noise aft attenuated but did not go away.
“Conn, sonar! Contact bearing zero-one-five, just appeared real sudden, like, it’s Sierra-5, sir. Definite Akula-class, Admiral Lunin. Evaluate as direct-path contact, bow-on aspect. Probably just came up through the layer, sir.”
“Does he have us?” Ricks asked.
“Probably yes, sir,” the sonarman reported.
“Stop!” another voice announced. Commodore Mancuso walked into the room. “Okay, we conclude the exercise at this point. Will the officers please come with me?”
Everyone let out a collective breath as the lights went up. The room was set in a large square building shaped not at all like a submarine, though its various other rooms duplicated most of the important parts of an Ohio-class boomer. Mancuso led the attack-center crew into a conference room and closed the door.
“Bad tactical move, Captain.” Bart Mancuso was not known for his diplomacy. “XO, what advice was that you gave to your skipper?” Claggett recited it word for word. “Captain, why did you reject that advice?”
“Sir, I estimated that our acoustical advantage was sufficient to allow me to do that in such a way as to maximize separation from the target.”
“Wally?” Mancuso turned to the skipper of the Red Team, Commander Wally Chambers, about to become the CO of USS Key West. Chambers had worked for Mancuso on Dallas, and had the makings of one hell of a fast-attack skipper. He had just proven that, in fact.
“It was too predictable, Captain. Moreover, by continuing course and changing depth course you presented the noise source to my towed array, and also gave me a hull-popping transient that ID’d you as a definite submarine contact. You would have been better off to turn bow-on, maintain depth, and slow down. All I had was a vague indication. If you’d slowed down, I would never have ID’d you. Since you didn’t, I noted your hop on top the layer and sprinted in fast underneath as soon as I cleared the CZ. Captain, I didn’t know I had you until you let me know, but you let me know, and you did let me get close. I floated my tail over the layer while I stayed right underneath it. There was a fairly good surface duct, and I had you at two-nine thousand yards. I could hear you, but you couldn’t hear me. Then it was just a matter of continuing my sprint until I was close enough for a high-probability solution. I had you cold.”
“The point of the exercise was to show you what happened when you lost your acoustical advantage.” Mancuso let that sink in before going on. “Okay, so it wasn’t fair, was it? Who ever said life was fair?”
“Akula’s a good boat, but how
good is its sonar?”
“We assume it’s as good as a second-flight 688.”
No way, Ricks thought to himself. “What other surprises can I expect?”
“Good question. The answer is that we don’t know. And if you don’t know, you assume they’re as good as you are.”
No way, Ricks told himself.
Maybe even better, Mancuso didn’t add.
“Okay,” the Commodore told the assembled attack-center crew. “Go over your own data and we do the wash-up in thirty minutes.”
Ricks watched Captain Mancuso exit the room, sharing a chuckle with Chambers. Mancuso was a smart, effective sub-driver, but he was still a damned fast-attack jockey who didn’t belong in command of a boomer squadron because he simply didn’t think the right way. Calling in his former shipmate from Atlantic Fleet, another fast-attack jockey—well, yeah, that’s how it was done, but damn it! Ricks was sure he’d done the right thing.
It had been an unrealistic test. Ricks was sure of that. Hadn’t Rosselli told the both of them that Maine was quiet as a black hole? Damn. This was his first chance to show the Commodore what he could do, and he’d been faked out of making a favorable impression by an artificial and unfair test, and some goofs from his people—the ones Rosselli had been so damned proud of.
“Mr. Shaw, let’s see your TMA records.” “Here, sir.” Ensign Shaw, who’d graduated sub school at Groton less than two months before, was standing in the corner, the chart and his notes grasped tightly in his tense hands. Ricks snatched them away and spread them on a worktable. The Captain’s eyes scanned the pages.
“Sloppy. You could have done this at least a minute faster.”
“Yes, sir,” Shaw replied. He didn’t know how he might have gone faster, but the Captain said so, and the Captain was always right.
“That could have made the difference,” Ricks told him, a muted but still nasty edge on his voice.
“Sorry, sir.” That was Ensign Shaw’s first real mistake. Ricks straightened, but still had to look up to meet Shaw’s eyes. That didn’t help his disposition either.
“‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it, Mister. ‘Sorry’ endangers our ship and our mission. ‘Sorry’ gets people killed. ‘Sorry’ is what an unsatisfactory officer says. Do you understand me, Mr. Shaw?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine.” The word came out as a curse. “Let’s make sure this never happens again.”
The rest of the half hour was spent going over the records of the exercise. The officers left the room for a larger one, where they would relive the exercise, learning what the Red Team had seen and done. Lieutenant Commander Claggett slowed the Captain down.
“Skipper, you were a little hard on Shaw.”
“What do you mean?” Ricks asked in annoyed surprise.
“He didn’t make any mistakes. I couldn’t have done the track more than thirty seconds faster myself. The quartermaster I had with him has been doing TMAs for five years. He’s taught it at sub school. I kept an eye on both of them. They did okay.”
“Are you saying the mistake was my fault?” Ricks asked in a deceptively gentle voice.
“Yes, sir,” the XO replied honestly, as he had been taught to do.
“Is that a fact?” Ricks walked out the door without another word.
To say that Petra Hassler-Bock was unhappy was an understatement of epic proportions. A woman in her late thirties, she’d lived over fifteen years on the run, hiding from the West German police before things had simply become too dangerous, precipitating her escape to the East Zone—what had been the East Zone, the Bundeskriminalamt investigator smiled to himself. Amazingly, she’d thrived on it. Every photo in the thick file showed an attractive, vital, smiling woman with a girl’s unlined face framed by pretty brown hair. This same face had coldly watched three people die, one after several days of knifework, the detective told himself. That murder had been part of an important political statement—it had been at the time of the vote on whether or not to allow the Americans to base their Pershing-2 and Cruise missiles in Germany, and the Red Army Faction had wanted to terrify people into seeing things their way. It hadn’t worked, of course, though it had made the victim’s death into a gothic exercise.
“Tell me, Petra, did you enjoy killing Wilhelm Manstein?” the detective asked.
“He was a pig,” she answered defiantly. “An overweight, sweaty, whoremongering pig.”
That was how they’d caught him, the detective knew. Petra had set up the kidnapping first by attracting his attention, then by establishing a brief but fiery relationship. Manstein had not been the most attractive example of German manhood, of course, but Petra’s idea of women’s liberation was rather more robust than the norm in Western countries. The nastiest members of Baader-Meinhof and the RAF had been the women. Perhaps it was a reaction to the Kinder-Küche-Kirche mind-set of German males, as some psychologists said, but the woman before him was the most coldly frightening assassin he’d ever met. The first body parts mailed to Manstein’s family had been those which had offended her so greatly. Manstein had lived for ten days after that, the pathologist’s report stated, providing noisy red entertainment for this still-young lady.
“Well, you took care of that, didn’t you? I imagine Günther was somewhat unsettled by your passion, wasn’t he? After all, you spent—what? Five nights with Herr Manstein before the kidnapping? Did you enjoy that part also, mein Schatz?” The insult scored, the detective saw. Petra had been attractive once, but no longer. Like a flower a day after cutting, she was no longer a living thing. Her skin was sallow, her eyes surrounded by dark rings, and she’d lost at least eight kilos. Defiance blazed out from her, but only briefly. “I expect you did, giving in to him, letting him ‘do his thing.’ You must have enjoyed it enough that he kept coming back. It wasn’t just baiting him, was it? It could not have been just an act. Herr Manstein was a discerning philanderer. He had so much experience, and he only frequented the most skillful whores. Tell me, Petra, how did you acquire so much skill? Did you practice beforehand with Gunther—or with others? All in the name of revolutionary justice, of course, or revolutionary Kameradschaft, nicht wahr? You are a worthless slut, Petra. Even whores have morals, but not you.
“And your beloved revolutionary cause,” the detective sneered. “Doch! Such a cause. How does it feel to be rejected by the entire German Volk?” She stirred in her chair at that, but couldn’t quite bring herself ... “What’s the matter, Petra, no heroic words now? You always talked about your visions of freedom and democracy, didn’t you? Are you disappointed now that we have real democracy—and the people detest you and your kind! Tell me, Petra, what is it like to be rejected? Totally rejected. And you know it’s true,” the investigator added. “You know it’s no joke. You watched the people in the street from your windows, didn’t you, you and Günther? One of the demonstrations was right under your apartment, wasn’t it? What did you think while you watched, Petra? What did you and Günther say to each other? Did you say it was a counterrevolutionary trick?” The detective shook his head, leaning forward to stare into those empty, lifeless eyes, enjoying his own work as she had done.
“Tell me, Petra, how do you explain the votes? Those were free elections. You know that, of course. Everything you stood for and worked for and murdered for—all a mistake, all for nothing! Well, it wasn’t a total loss, was it? At least you got to make love to Wilhelm Manstein.” The detective leaned back and lit a small cigar. He blew smoke up at the ceiling. “And now, Petra? I hoped you enjoyed that little tryst, mein Schatz. You will never leave this prison alive. Never, Petra. No one will ever feel pity for you, not even when you’re confined to a wheelchair. Oh, no. They’ll remember your crimes and tell themselves to leave you here with all the other vicious beasts. There is no hope for you. You will die in this building, Petra.”
Petra Hassler-Bock’s head jerked at that. Her eyes went wide for an instant as she thought to say something, but stopped short.
&nb
sp; The detective went on conversationally. “We lost track of Günther, by the way. We nearly got him in Bulgaria—missed him by thirty hours. The Russians, you see, have been giving us their files on you and your friends. All those months you spent at those training camps. Well, in any case, Günther is still on the run. In Lebanon, we think, probably holed up with your old friends in that ratpack. They’re next,” the detective told her. “The Americans, the Russians, the Israelis, they’re cooperating now, didn’t you hear? It’s part of this treaty business. Isn’t that wonderful? I think we’ll get Günther there ... with luck he’ll fight back or do something really foolish, and we can bring you a picture of his body.... Pictures, that’s right! I almost forgot!
“I have something to show you,” the investigator announced. He inserted a videocassette into a player and switched on the TV. It took a moment for the picture to settle down into what was plainly an amateur video taken with a hand-held camera. It showed twin girls, dressed in matching pink dirndl outfits, sitting side by side on a typical rug in a typical German apartment—everything was fully in Ordnung, even the magazines on the table were squared off. Then the action started.
“Komm, Erika. Komm, Ursel!” a woman’s voice urged, and both infants pulled themselves up on a coffee table and tottered toward her. The camera followed their halting, unstable steps into the woman’s arms.
“Mutti, Mutti!” they both said. The detective switched the TV off.
“They’re talking and walking. Ist das nicht wunderbar? Their new mother loves them very much, Petra. Well, I thought you’d like to see that. That’s all for today.” The detective pressed a hidden button and a guard appeared to take the manacled prisoner back to her cell.
The cell was stark, a cubicle made of white-painted bricks. There was no outside window, and the door was of solid steel except for a spyhole and a slot for food trays. Petra didn’t know about the TV camera that looked through what seemed to be yet another brick near the ceiling, but was really a small plastic panel transparent to red and infrared light. Petra Hassler-Bock retained her composure all the way to the cell, and until the door was slammed shut behind her.
