on watch wore rubber shoes, and unnecessary machinery–the ice maker in
the galley and the soda machine in the mess among others–had all been
shut down.
“Very well, Diving Officer,” Montgomery said. “Maintain depth and
trim.”
“Maintain depth and trim, aye, sir.”
Four hundred twenty feet seemed like a lot of water, but in fact that
depth was only sixty feet deeper than the Galveston was long. She was
capable of diving to twelve hundred feet or more, and working this far
inshore always posed extraordinary difficulties for a submarine. The
chances for discovery were increased a hundred fold, and if they were
discovered, there was no place to run or hide. Somewhere astern,
perhaps ten miles off, was a new addition to the carrier battle group,
another improved Los Angeles attack sub, the Morgantown. Together, the
two nuclear subs had been steadily working their way toward the Murman
coast, moving with extreme stealth through one of the deadliest arrays
of antisubmarine defenses on the planet.
They were now far inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by Russia as her
territorial waters. The Kola Inlet was opening up directly ahead, and
the small island called Ostrov Kildin was less than seven miles to
starboard.
Their position was complicated by the fact that they were moving south
down one of the busiest shipping channels of the former Soviet Union,
the sole shipping lane to the busy ports of Murmansk, Severomorsk, and
Polyamyy.
Attack subs were arguably the single most useful tool in the U.S.
Navy’s inventory … though aviators or skimmer crews would never have
admitted the fact. When something went wrong with diplomacy anywhere in
the world, sending a carrier battle group was a great way to send a
message, a very loud message, to the offending party: “Behave or we’ll
flatten you.” Time after time, as regional conflicts and brushfire wars
had broken out across the face of the globe, the planners in Washington
had repeated that time-honored phrase, “Where are the carriers?”
But far more often it was necessary to take a more diplomatic tack–or a
more covert one–and an aircraft carrier with ninety planes sitting off
the coast in question was not exactly a comfortable statement in the
language of diplomacy. If a CBG penetrated this far into foreign
territorial waters, it was an act of war.
But a submarine, on the other hand … that was different. A Los
Angeles attack sub could slip silently into enemy waters, listening to
radio traffic, counting ships and radar sources and aircraft, then slip
away without anyone knowing it’d been there. Throughout the Cold War,
American attack subs had repeatedly penetrated such closely guarded
Soviet fortresses as the Shelikhova Gulf, the Tatarskiy Strait, the
White Sea, and the Gulf of Finland. The nature and specifics of those
penetrations were all still highly classified.
“Control room, Sonar.”
“Control room. What is it, Ekhart?”
“I’ve got an ID on Sierra Two. Riga-class frigate. Still at
one-seven-five. Estimate he’s making turns for one-five knots.”
A Riga-class frigate, a sub-hunter for sure. She’d be a hair under
three hundred feet long, with a displacement of about twelve hundred
tons. Either a Herkules or a Pegas high-frequency sonar mounted in the
hull. ASW weapons including RBU-2500 rocket launchers, depth charges,
and 533mm torpedoes.
Ping!
Every man in Galveston’s control room froze, eyes turning toward the
overhead.
“Control room, Sonar. Sierra Two has gone active on sonar.”
There were two types of sonar, passive and active. With passive sonar,
a ship or submarine simply listened for noise produced by the
target–the sound of its screws, the machinery in its engine room, the
pumps circulating water through its nuclear reactor, the clang of a
carelessly dropped tool. Active sonar, on the other hand, transmitted a
pulse of sound, then listened for the echo from a solid target. Far
more accurate than passive listening–through pinging, a sonar operator
could get an accurate measurement of the range to the target–active
sonar had the single disadvantage that it gave the transmitting vessel
away. Submarines nearly always preferred to use passive sonar only.
Destroyers and other ASW surface ships, however, rarely cared whether
their quarry heard them or not. This one was almost certainly sweeping