the Kola channel, searching for intruders precisely like the Galveston.
Ping!
They were getting closer. Montgomery could hear the gentle
chug-chug-chug of the ship’s screws now, gradually growing louder.
Ping!
Just because Galveston’s crew could hear the active sonar of the
approaching surface ship, it didn’t necessarily mean they’d been
spotted.
Sonar was more complicated than simply making a noise and waiting for
the echo; discontinuities in the temperature and salinity of the water
could refract sound waves in odd ways, and a submarine as close to the
bottom as Galveston was now could be lost in the background clutter.
Shipping channels such as this were usually littered with wrecks or with
debris dumped from surface ships, and near naval bases they were sown
with undersea hydrophones, remotely activated mines, and various types
of detection equipment. Even if the Russian sonar operators heard an
echo, they might easily misinterpret it.
Getting any information at all out of a sonar return was an arcane and
mysterious art.
Ping!
The throb of the ship’s propellers sounded almost directly overhead.
Had they spotted the American submarine, now lying directly beneath
their keel?
Throughout the control room, every eye not focused on a specific readout
or instrumentation was fastened on the compartment’s overhead, as though
trying to pierce the double hull and the darkness and the water, to see
the looming presence of the Russian ship as it came closer … closer
…
… and then the sound of the Riga’s engines was dwindling … fading
into the distance somewhere astern.
And it was gone.
Slowly, Montgomery let out a sigh of pent-up breath. Though the
temperature throughout the boat was always maintained at a comfortable
seventy degrees, Montgomery realized his khaki uniform shirt was sopping
wet beneath his arms and down his spine. His left hand was gripping a
handhold on the attack periscope mounting so tightly his hand had
cramped.
“Just routine,” he said, letting go of the handhold and massaging his
fingers. “Cakewalk.” Several of the men in the control room chuckled
nervously. “Engineering Officer, Captain. Make turns for five knots.”
“Make turns for five knots, aye, sir.”
Galveston continued her creep toward the south, penetrating still deeper
into the Kola Inlet.
0615 hours
Tomcat 201
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Lieutenant j.g. Kathleen “Cat” Garrity sat in the rear seat of the F-14
Tomcat, which was parked on the starboard side of Jefferson’s flight
deck.
The long pins, each tagged with a red flag, that safed her ejection seat
mechanism had already been pulled. In front of her, the Viper Squadron
Co, Commander Willis F. Grant, better known aboard Jefferson by his
call sign “Coyote,” was going through the last of his pre-flight.
“Canopy coming down,” Coyote told her over the Tomcat’s intercom system,
or ICS. The transparent plastic bubble descended slowly over her head,
locking in place with a reassuring thump. “Starting engines.”
Cat’s heart was pounding beneath the tightness of her seat harness and
G-suit, and she could hear the rasp of her own breathing, thick behind
the rubber embrace of her oxygen mask, hissing in her ears. The
Tomcat’s twin F110-GE-400 engines spooled to life, their whine
penetrating the cockpit like rolling, high-pitched thunder. She
concentrated on finishing up her own pre-flight: WCS to STBY; wait for
the Weapons Control System light to come on, then flip the liquid
cooling switch from OFF to AWG-9. “AWG-Nine light’s Out,” she said.
That was as it should be.
“Rog,” Coyote replied.
Next she flipped the Nav Mode switch left of the radar display from OFF
to NAV, set IFF to STBY, and turned the radio knobs to BOTH and ON. On
the console just above her left knee was a keypad. Carefully, reading
from the penciled notations on a pad strapped to her thigh, she keyed in
Jefferson’s current longitude and latitude for the Tomcat’s on-board
computer: 22’05’15’ East, 71’00’35’ North–which translated as about
eighty miles off the northern coast of Norway. Finally she began
checking circuit breakers, by eye for those on her side consoles, and by
reaching up behind her head and feeling for the set behind the seat.
None had popped. Good. “Breakers all go.”
A loud thump from outside the aircraft startled her. The blue-shirted