“Trawls. Lot of commercial fishing goes on there. They tangle their nets on the wreck. It looks like Gulliver on the beach at Lilliput.”
“You’re right! I remember that”, Morris said. “That explains the noise. It’s the tide, or currents whistling through all those cables.”
O’Malley nodded. “Yep, that could explain it. I still want to give it a look.”
“Why?”
“All the traffic coming out of New York has to pass right overtop the place for one thing. Ivan knows we got a big convoy forming up in New York-he has to know unless the KGB has gone out of business. That’s one hell of a good place to park a submarine if they want to put a trailer on the convoy. Think about it. If you get a NLAD contact there, you write it off. The noise from a reactor plant at low power probably won’t be louder than the flow noise over the wreck if they get in close enough. If I was a real nervy sub-driver, I’d think hard about using a place like that to belly-up.”
“You really do think like them”, Morris observed. “Okay, let’s see how we should handle this . . .”
0230 hours. Morris watched the takeoff procedures from the control tower, then walked forward to CIC. The frigate was at battle stations, doing eight knots, her Prairie/Masker systems operating. If there were a Russian sub out there, fifteen or so miles away, there was no way she’d suspect a frigate was nearby. In CIC the radar plot showed the helo moving into position.
“Romeo, this is Hammer. Radio check, over,” O’Malley said. The helicopter’s on-board data link also transmitted a test message to the frigate. The petty officer on the helicopter communications panel checked it out, and grunted with satisfaction. What was that expression he’d heard? Yeah, right-they had a “sweet lock on momma’s gadget.” He grinned.
The helo began its search two miles from the grave of Andrea Doria. O’Malley halted his aircraft and hovered fifty feet above the rolling surface.
“Down dome, Willy.”
In the back, the petty officer unlocked the hoist controls and lowered the dipping sonar transducer down a hole in the belly of the helicopter. The Seahawk carried over a thousand feet of cable, enough to reach below the deepest of thermocline layers. It was only two hundred feet to the bottom here, and they had to be careful not to let the transducer come near the bottom for risk of damage. The petty officer paid close attention to the cable and halted the winch when the transducer was a hundred feet down. As with surface ships, the sonar readout was both visual and aural. A TV-type tube began to show frequency lines while the sailor listened in on his headphones.
This was the hard part, O’Malley reminded himself. Hovering a helicopter in these wind conditions required constant attention-there was no autopilot-and hunting for a submarine was always an exercise in patience. It would take several minutes for the passive sonar to tell them anything, and they could not use their active sonar systems. The pinging would only serve to alert a target.
After five minutes they had detected nothing but random noise. They recovered the sonar and moved east. Again there was nothing. Patience, the pilot told himself. He hated being patient. Another move east and another wait.
“I got something at zero-four-eight. Not sure what it is, a whistle or something in the high-frequency range.” They waited another two minutes to make sure it wasn’t a spurious signal.
“Up dome.” O’Malley brought the helicopter up and moved off northeast for three thousand yards. Three minutes later the sonar went down again. Nothing this time. O’Malley changed positions again. If I ever write a song about hunting submarines, he thought, I’ll call it “Again, and Again, and AGAIN!” This time a signal came back-two signals, in fact.
“That’s interesting”, the ASW officer aboard Reuben James observed. “How close is this to the wreck?”
“Very close,” Morris answered. “Just about the same bearing, too.”
“Could be flow noise”, Willy told O’Malley. “Very faint, just like the last time.”
The pilot reached up to flip a switch to feed the sonar signal into his headset. We’re looking for a very faint signal, O’Malley reminded himself. “Could be steam noise, too. Prepare to raise dome, I’m gonna go east to triangulate.”
Two minutes later, the sonar transducer went into the water for a sixth time. The contact was now plotted on the helicopter’s on-board tactical display that sat on the control panel between pilot and copilot.
“We got two signals here,” Ralston said. “About six hundred yards apart.”
“Looks that way to me. Let’s go see the near one. Willy—”
“Cable within limits, ready to raise, skipper.”
“Up dome. Romeo, Hammer. You got what we got?”
“Affirmative, Hammer,” Morris answered. “Check out the southern one.”
“Doing that right now. Stand by.” O’Malley paid close attention to his instruments as he flew toward the nearer of the two contacts. Again he halted the aircraft. “Down dome.”
“Contact!” the petty officer said a minute later. He examined the tone lines on his display and mentally compared them with data he had on Soviet submarines. “Evaluate this contact as steam and plant noises from a nuclear submarine, bearing two-six-two.”
O’Malley listened for thirty seconds. His face broke into a slight smile. “That’s a nuc boat all right! Romeo, Hammer, we have a probable submarine contact bearing two-six-two our position. Moving to firm that fix up right now.”
Ten minutes later they had the contact locked in. O’Malley made directly for it and lowered his sonar right on top of the contact.
“It’s a Victor-class”, the sonarman aboard the frigate said. “See this frequency line? A Victor with his reactor plant turned down to minimum power output.”
“Hammer,” Morris called. “Romeo. Any suggestions?”
O’Malley was flying away from the contact, having left a smoke float to mark it. The submarine probably hadn’t heard them because of the surface conditions, or if he had, he knew his safest bet was to sit on the bottom. The Americans carried only homing torpedoes, which couldn’t detect a submarine on the bottom. Once launched, they’d either motor along in a circle until running out of fuel or drive straight into the bottom. He could go active and try to flush the submarine off the bottom, he thought, but active sonar wasn’t all that effective in shallow water, and what if Ivan didn’t move? The Seahawk was down to one hour’s fuel. The pilot made his decision.
“Battleaxe, this is Hammer. Do you read, over?”
“Took your time to call us, Hammer”, Captain Perrin replied at once. The British frigate was monitoring the search closely.
“You have any Mark-11s aboard?”
“We can load them in ten minutes.”
“We’ll be waiting. Romeo, do you approve a VECTAC?”
“Affirmative” Morris answered. The vectored attack approach was perfect, and he was too excited at what they had here to be annoyed at O’Malley for bypassing him. “Weapons free.”
O’Malley circled his aircraft at one thousand feet while he waited. This was really crazy. Was Ivan just sitting there? Was he waiting for a convoy to pass by? It was about an even-money chance that he’d heard the helicopter. If he’d heard the helo, did he want the frigate to come in so he could attack her? His systems operator watched the sonar display intently for any change in the signal from the contact. So far there’d been none. No increase in engine power, no mechanical transients. Nothing at all but the hissing of a reactor plant at fractional power, a sound undetectable from more than two miles off. No wonder several people had looked and found nothing. He found himself admiring the nerve of the Soviet submarine commander.
“Hammer, this is Hatchet.”
O’Malley smiled to himself. Unlike American procedures, the Brits assigned helicopter names associated with that of their mother ships. HMS Brazen’s helo was “Hussy.” Battleaxe’s was “Hatchet.”
“Roger, Hatchet. Where are you?”
“Ten miles south of you. We’ve two depth charges aboard.”
O’Malley switched his flying lights back on. “Very well, stand by. Romeo, the way I want to work this, you give Hatchet a radar steer to our sonobuoy and we’ll use our sonar for the cross-bearing to drop. Do you concur, over?”
“Roger, concur,” Morris answered.
“Arm the fish,” O’Malley told his copilot.
“Why?”
“If the charges miss, you can bet he’ll come off the bottom like a salmon at spawning time.” O’Malley brought his helo around and spotted the blinking anti-collision lights of the British Lynx helicopter. “Hatchet, tallyho, I have you now at my nine o’clock. Please hold your current position while we get set. Willy, any change in the contact?”
“No, sir. This dude’s playing it awful cool, sir.”
You poor brave bastard, O’Malley thought to himself. The smoke float atop the contact was about burned out. He dropped another. After rechecking his tactical display he moved to a position one thousand yards east of the contact, hovered fifty feet above the surface and deployed the dipping sonar.