by David Poyer
Lenson gripped the table, swallowing dry heaves. The closed cold air of the electronics spaces was supposed to be recycled through filters, but now it stank of cigarette smoke and barf and ozone. The compartment and the men sealed in it were progressing through space in slow gigantic bounds, like a bucking brontosaur. First pencils floated into the air, then everyone’s head snapped down as they crashed into the sea. Then came the slow crawl upward again, his stomach contracting, anticipating that sickening descent.…
When they’d relieved, Reed had updated them on the action since noon. The first P-3B antisubmarine aircraft, call sign RD04, had reported in on the ASW tactical net at 1300. Later than they’d hoped, but doubly welcome, since Ryan still hadn’t regained contact.
Reed explained that in “creep mode” a nuclear sub was lucky to make three knots, little more than a brisk walk. Even so, after two hours the “farthest on circle,” the area within which the sub had to be, covered 113 square miles. With each hour, that area increased geometrically, and the probability of reacquisition dropped accordingly.
Reed suspected B41 was trying to escape to the southwest. That had been its course at first intercept. So when the P-3 pilot placed himself under Ryan’s advisory control, Packer had ordered him to lay a Julie barrier twenty miles southwest of the “datum,” the latitude and longitude of the last solid contact.
Dan listened intently. The pubs he’d read yesterday had defined a “Julie barrier” as a miles-long line of sonobuoys—floating microphones with battery-powered radio transmitters—dropped in a carefully spaced sequence. On a second pass, the plane dropped small explosive charges. If the sonobuoys were laid properly, they’d pick up the echoes of the explosions from the sub’s hull and transmit them to the aircraft. The P-3 plotted the results and radioed Ryan the target’s position, course, and speed.
Reed had spread out the last two plotting sheets, pointing out where the plane had laid two successive barriers, then extended them to the west. Unfortunately, all they’d detected were faint echoes that the operators on the P-3, orbiting at 22,000 feet, evaluated as schools of fish.
At 1500, they’d had a break. A Flash message reported SOSUS contact from a naval facility in Norway.
Dan didn’t know what that was, so he asked. Reed said SOSUS was a supersecret network of bottom-laid hydrophones, sensitive but not always dependable. In any case, it only gave a line of bearing, unless two stations could fix the same signal.
The message reported intermittent twin-screw tonals on a bearing that passed east and south of Ryan’s position. Packer had instantly ordered the plane to leave its barriers and drop another, using its last dozen sonobuoys, twenty miles to the east. The first pass had picked up a sizable echo outside the new pattern, twenty-eight miles southeast by east of Ryan.
Reed had leaned back wearily as he concluded. “That’s the good news: Romeo Delta’s got him hooked, and he knows it. He’s making runs this way and that, changing depth, trying to shake loose, but he’s basically nailed. The bad news is that we can’t get over to where he is because it’d put us beam-on to the prevailing sea. So for the moment, we’re letting the airedales carry the ball. We’re heading south, making eight to ten knots good. That’s closing the range slowly. When we get to CZ range, twenty-one, twenty-two thousand yards, we’ll try to pick him up again with the VDS.
“I guess the short version is, we still hold him, and it’s thirty hours till the cavalry gets here. Now I’m gonna take fifteen minutes to eat and shit, then back to Sonar. Any questions?”
Evlin had asked him about how much longer the aircraft had on station. Reed said RD had fuel for four more hours before he had to return to Iceland, and another plane with full tanks and sonobuoy bays would be overhead before he left. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“Later. Has he reported any channel-lock problems?”
“No, there’s enough frequency separation that the barriers don’t interfere with each other.”
Evlin turned to the captain, who had watched the turnover silently. “Sir, I have the watch as evaluator.”
“Okay, Al. Thanks, Aaron, good work.”
When Reed was gone, Evlin said, “Any instructions for me, sir?”
Packer blinked slowly and shifted on his stool. “Not really. Just stay on his tail, and keep our powder dry. I’d rather hold contact myself, but second best’s having the plane locked on. He’s got Mark forty-sixes aboard. He can shit a torp, two seconds’ notice. The idea of one-six-zero, that’s as close as we can get to heading east without falling off into the trough.”
“My question is, why’s he going east at all?”
Packer said, and his voice was patient and heavy, “I figure, because he figures we’re looking for him to go southwest. The SOSUS indication tells me he’s pulling power off his reactor again, not full power, but enough to put machinery sound in the water. He’s either running low on juice or trying to slip around our flank. If they hadn’t tagged him, he’d have made it, too. This is a sharp bear. We’ve got to keep him on a short leash. Next time, we may not be so lucky.”
“Coffee, sir?” said one of the OSs. Packer took it without answering and sucked deeply, as if it were brewed with the water of eternal life.
“But he can’t get anywhere if he goes east. There’s nothing that way but the Norwegian coast.”
“That’s a good place to hide, Al. Lots of cozy little fjords there he can duck into and nobody would ever find him. Not us, not the Norwegians, not the Soviets.”
“But isn’t he trying to get south, into firing range?”
“Nobody knows.” Packer’s face was rigid with fatigue, but behind the rising smoke from the pipe his eyes glittered. “That’s his capability. His intentions, who knows? If the Russians are telling the truth, then he’s probably headed southwest. If they’re lying, if he’s really just out here to give them an excuse to surge their forces before we wake up to what’s going on—then all he has to do is lose us, and the first inning of the war goes their way.”
Pedersen said, “You don’t think that’s what’s happening, do you, sir?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, Chief. But I’ll bet anything you want that question’s getting asked at the Joint Chiefs level, maybe higher. I’ll guarantee you, the CINCs are recommending getting the fleet under way. Once that starts, the Reds are going to ask themselves, Do they jump the gun, follow up on B forty-one, crazy or not, or wait to be bottled up? We’ve always thought the big one would start in Central Europe, maybe just because the last two have. But it could be starting out here. Right now.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“Hammerhead, this is Romeo Delta Zero Four. Over.”
The voice came wrapped in static from one of the speakers above the plot. Evlin nodded to Silver. The CIC officer cradled the handset, waiting for the beep and green light that signaled the voice scrambler was engaged. When it came he said rapidly, “Hammerhead. Over.”
Through the roar of interference and amplification, the distant voice said, “This is Romeo Delta marking on top of trace at angels twenty-two. We hold contact proceeding one-zero-zero at nine knots, forty-eight thousand yards from you on a bearing of zero-nine-five. We made one low pass for ID and got a positive MAD contact. Man, it’s rough down there. How do you skimmers stand it in that stuff?”
Dan knew now MAD meant a magnetic anomaly. The plane’s instruments had detected something made of steel down there, a lot of steel. “Plot that,” he muttered to Matt.
“Give him a roger, out,” said Evlin. “No, wait. Ask him if he has contact with his follow-on yet.”
Silver asked the pilot about his relief. When the scrambler synced, they heard the drone of turboprops before he said, “That’s a charlie. I’ll be handing off to Delta Delta three three. Right now, he’s holding on Runway One waiting for visibility to clear. I told him it’s heavy shit out here, make sure his deicers are checked out. Over.”
“Okay, sign off,” said Ev
lin. He reached up and hit the button on the 29MC. “Sonar, Evaluator: Bearing to contact is zero-nine-five. Search on same freq bands as before.”
As Sonar rogered, Dan depressed the button on his mouthpiece. He had word to pass, too. “Asroc Control, Torpedo Control, Director fifty-one: This is WLO. Target bears zero-nine-five true, range forty-eight thousand. An ASW aircraft is orbiting over it at twenty thousand feet.”
The petty officers at the various stations rogered indifferently. He pressed the button again. “Look, you guys, stay on the ball. Make sure you’re aimed out on these bearings.”
When the listless voices rogered again, one of them left his button down while he added a yawn. It was just another drill to them. Well, he could sympathize. He felt sick again, nauseated and weak. He’d tried to eat, but lost it, then given up trying. This time when he got off he was heading straight for his rack. He was so zonked he saw things moving in the corners of CIC. But when he looked, there was nothing there.
Evlin was studying the plot. Dan could see programs running behind his glasses. Every couple of seconds he frowned up at the silent intercom. Pedersen advised the plotters in a low tone how to record the MAD vector and extend the farthest-on circle from it.
He eased his phones and drifted over to the air scope. Silver stood over it, a grease pencil sticking out of his beard. They watched the sparkling wand of the trace sweep around. A bright pip flared to the southeast. Silver ratcheted the knobs and set the cursor on it. “The bird,” he muttered. “Got to keep track of it, case they lose an engine, or something.”
Dan nodded, but thought that if it went down in weather like this, there wasn’t much point in knowing its location. Even a four-engine wouldn’t leave much but an oil slick, and from what Packer and Evlin were saying, Ryan wouldn’t be able to get over there to rescue them. A destroyer didn’t expose herself to forty-foot seas from the beam—especially when she was losing stability with every pound of ice.
“Sir, who shall I give this to?” asked someone behind them. When he turned, a shuddering petty officer in a wet pea coat was holding out a glass slide. Silver told him to take it in to the sonarmen.
For the next two hours, Dan stood as his legs went through pain into numbness. His feet felt as if they’d swollen to fill every seam in his shoes. The ship soared and plunged, hammered and rang like a hollow tube on a blacksmith’s anvil. From time to time the lights flickered and the scopes contracted to tiny bright points, like electronic diamonds, then whirred back up to life. The P-3 held contact as if epoxied to the sub. Packer sat on his stool, blinking slowly as he tasted smoke, let it trickle out. The only conversation was the mutter of the plotters as they copied data from Romeo Delta. With dull curiosity Dan watched Packer struggle against going into the sonar shack. But every ten or fifteen minutes, he lost and disappeared behind the black curtain.
Once, when he was back there, Dan heard Evlin mutter something. He leaned to him. “Sir?”
“Sorry. Talking to myself. I still don’t understand why he’s running east.”
“Like the captain said, because we expected him to go southwest.”
“I don’t agree. He’s got to go south. Otherwise, he’ll be boxed up when our nukes get here. Time’s running out on him. He’s got to know that, that he won’t be the only submarine out here for very long. And once our boats get their teeth in him, he’s not going to get away.”
“Then what happens?”
“Then somebody’s going to have to decide who fires the first shot.”
“Evaluator, Sonar: Still no contact. Continuing search.”
“Evaluator, aye.”
* * *
AROUND 2230, Packer lumbered to his feet again. He started for the sonar shack, but made a U-turn outside the curtain and went forward instead. He said he’d be in his cabin, to call him if anything happened.
When he disappeared, the ASW plotting team seemed to wilt. Evlin sighed, digging his fists into his back. Dan heard his spine pop. “Didn’t I see a jug of coffee? Thanks. Okay, school call. Might as well take advantage of this for training. Dan, Mark, you want to catch this.
“Okay, now … where to start. Maybe with the sound-speed diagram. You guys know about thermoclines.”
“Layers of colder and warmer water,” said Dan.
“Right. But they aren’t discontinuous; they’re areas of gradual change. Normally you get warm water at the surface, then a band where temperature decreases rapidly with depth. Then an area of more gradual drop. Below say three hundred meters, you don’t see much change even between winter and summer. The thermoclines move up and down in diurnal and seasonal cycles.
“Okay; why do we care? Because sound speed varies with temperature. Also with salinity, but in the open sea, temperature’s what you most care about.
“Remember that slide Pelouze brought up here a while ago? That’s a BT slide. BT means bathythermograph. It’s a little instrument that goes down and comes up and gives us a plot of depth versus temperature. From that, with some charts, the sonar weenies—”
From behind the black curtain: “Watch it, Mr. Evlin.”
“—like Petty Officer Orris, can predict sonar propagation. Give ’em the equation, Orris.”
A high voice from the inner sanctum chanted, “C equals 1448.96 plus 4.951 T minus 5.304 times ten to the minus two T squared plus 2.374 times ten to the minus four T cubed plus 1.34 (S minus 35) plus 1.630 times ten to the minus two D plus 1.657 times ten to the minus seven D squared minus 1.025 times ten to the minus two T (S minus 35) minus 7.139 times ten to the minus thirteen T D cubed.”
“Thank you, Petty Officer Orris. The sea acts on sound like glass on light. It can focus it or blur it; wrap it around corners, carry it hundreds of miles in channels, or bend it straight down to the bottom. The sub’s figuring all this, too. He tries to hide; we try to guess where the best place to hide will be. Cat and mouse. Only he does this every day. Fortunately, the P-three evens things up. Everything clear as mud?”
“Where did he go when he disappeared this morning?” Dan asked. “One minute he was there, the next minute—a ghost.”
“He read the water better than we did. He found a dicothermal layer that bent sound right around him.”
“Dicothermal,” said the high voice. “From the Greek; meaning, cold as a dyke.”
“Crawl back into those earphones, Orris.”
“Wait a minute, Lootenant. There’s women on that submarine.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Got to be. I hear screw noises.”
“We’re getting tired, gentlemen,” Evlin announced.
Just then, the captain returned. He looked around at them. His face darkened.
“Knock it off,” James Packer said. “This is no game.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Silver, ask Romeo Delta for an update, please.”
* * *
FOR a while, he dreamed of food. Then he dreamed of sitting down. Finally he just dreamed of getting off watch. And at last, he dreamed, and prayed, that Ryan would steady herself just for one minute. That was all he wanted from life.
He clung to the table till his hands cramped like an old man’s.
* * *
AT 2300, Packer went forward again. The men watched the lighted rosette, the “bug,” glumly while he was gone. When he came back, he stood over the air scope for a while. Dan heard a grasshopper clicking as he sucked on his empty pipe.
“We got a problem, Al.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“This bow slamming kicks up a lot of spray. It’s getting colder, too. I had one of the signalmen put the light on the top hamper. You can see it hit the stacks and freeze. It’s over a foot thick on the mast platforms.”
“We ought to ballast, sir,” said Evlin. He rubbed his mouth. “Mr. Talliaferro brought that up yesterday. Why don’t we ballast?”
“Because it fouls the tanks. Once you get saltwater in there, you can pump all you want, but when you put fuel in ag
ain, you’ll still have contamination.” Packer added heavily, “That’s why.”
“We’ll have to sooner or later, sir. As we burn fuel, she gets lighter below. As the ice accumulates, she gets heavy above. You don’t need an inclining experiment to tell you—”
“Yeah, that’s what Ed was shouting at me about just before you came on watch.”
Dan studied the captain covertly. Were those shadows at the corners of his mouth a smile? He looked so exhausted, it was hard to tell. They disappeared as a flame flared, was sucked down into the bowl of his pipe, flared up again. “You think I should, too, huh?”
“In your position, I would, sir. I understand the contamination problem, but it seems secondary.”
“It’s not secondary to me. We lose the engines in these seas and we’ll broach. Granted, if that happens and we’re unstable, we won’t come back, but given the choice, I’d rather not broach in the first place. That’s why so far I’ve rated dependable power over ballast.”
“They lost some of this class in the war, didn’t they, Captain? In a typhoon, from not ballasting?”
Packer shook his head sharply. “I know what you mean, but that was different.” He glanced at the curtain, then pulled his eyes back. “Those were prewar destroyers, not Gearings. During the war, they got loaded up with a lot of new stuff—radars, AA guns—and nobody kept track of their stability. Some of them ballasted, but it didn’t save them. The court of inquiry concluded they lost power, fell off into the trough, started rolling, and capsized.”
The 29MC interrupted them with a monotone. “This is the evening sonar-conditions summary. Sea suction intake is thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, salinity thirty-four parts per thousand. Predictions, have been prepared for the following conditions: water depth sixteen hundred fathoms; own ship speed less than twenty knots; true wind speed, off the scale.
“BT drop and the deep history shows a sound-speed profile with good mixing down to four hundred feet and a faint thermocline at eight hundred. Beyond that, it’s a straight fall down to a thousand five hundred. Best sensor is predicted to be passive VDS at five hundred feet. Target’s best depth to listen is three hundred and his best depth to evade is below eight hundred. We have no best search speed due to heavy ambient noise. Active sonar prediction is poor due to sea return.
