An icy ball suddenly materialized in McCafferty’s stomach.
“XO, I’m taking the conn.”
“Aye, Captain, you have the conn.”
“Diving officer: get her up to sixty feet, high as you can without broaching her. Observation! Up scope!” The search scope came up and McCafferty met it as he had before and quickly checked the surface of the sea for shadows. “Three more feet. Okay, still nothing. What’s the ESM reading?”
“Now seven active radar sources, skipper. Plot out about the same as before, plus the new one at one-nine-one, another India-band, looks like another Don-2.”
McCafferty turned the periscope handle to twelve-power, its highest setting. The Soviet missile submarine was sitting extremely high in the water.
“Joe, tell me what you see.” McCafferty asked, wanting a quick second opinion.
“That’s a Delta-III, all right. Looks like she’s blown dry, Cap’n, they come out pretty far, and that looks like about three or four feet higher than they usually do. He just used up a lot of his air . . . That might be the Natya’s mast ahead of her, hard to be sure.”
McCafferty could feel that his own Chicago was rolling. His hands tingled with the transmitted wave-slaps against the periscope. The seas were crashing against the Delta, too, and he could see water splashing in and out of the limber holes that lined the boomer’s flanks.
“ESM board says that signal strengths are approaching detection values,” the technician warned.
“His periscopes are both up,” McCafferty said, knowing that his scope had already been up too long. He squeezed the trigger to double the magnification. It cost optical detail, but the picture zoomed in on the Delta’s conning tower. “The control station atop his sail is fully manned. Everyone has glasses . . . not looking aft, though. Down scope. Diving officer, take her down ten feet. Nice work, planesmen. Let’s see that tape, Joe.” The picture returned to the TV monitor in a few seconds.
They were two thousand yards behind the Delta. Beyond her by about half a mile was a spherical radar dome, probably the Natya, rolling noticeably with the beam seas. To house her sixteen SS-18 missiles, the Russian sub had a sloped turtleneck, and from directly aft it looked like a highway ramp. An ungainly design, the Delta, but she had to survive only long enough to launch her missiles, and the Americans had no doubt that her missiles worked just fine.
“Look at that, they blew her so high half her screws are clear,” the XO pointed.
“Navigator, how far to shallow water?”
“Along this channel, a minimum of twenty-four fathoms for ten miles.”
Why did the Delta surface this far out?
McCafferty lifted the phone. “Sonar, tell me about the Natya.”
“Skipper, he’s pinging away like mad. Not toward us, but we’re getting lots of reflections and reverberations off the bottom.”
The Natya was a specialized mine-hunter . . . also used, to be sure, as an escort for submarines in and out of safe areas. But her minehunting VHF sonar was operating . . . dear God!
“Left full rudder!” McCafferty shouted.
“Left full rudder, aye!” The helmsman would have hit the overhead but for the seatbelt. He instantly snapped his wheel to port. “Sir, my rudder is left full!”
“Minefield,” the navigator breathed. Heads all over the room turned around.
“That’s a good bet.” McCafferty nodded grimly. “How far are we from the point where the boomer rendezvoused with the Natya?”
The navigator examined the plot closely. “Stopped about four hundred yards short of it, sir.”
“All stop.”
“All stop, aye.” The helmsman dialed the annunciator handle. “Engine room answers all stop, sir. Passing left through one-eight-zero, sir.”
“Very well. We ought to be safe enough here. You have to figure the Delta’d rendezvous with the sweeper a few miles clear of the field, right? Anybody here think Ivan would gamble with a boomer?” It was a rhetorical question. Nobody ever gambled with boomers.
Everyone in the control room took a deep breath at the same moment. The Chicago slowed rapidly, her turn taking her broadside to her previous course.
“Rudder amidships.” McCafferty ordered one-third speed and lifted the phone for sonar. “The boomer doing anything different?”
“No, sir. Bearing is still constant at one-nine-zero. Speed still fifteen knots. We can still hear the Natya pinging, nearing one-eight-six, and her blade count is now about fifteen knots, too.”
“Navigator, start figuring a way for us to get out of here. We want to keep well clear of all those patrol boats and report this news in as quick as we can.”
“Aye. Three-five-eight looks pretty good for the moment, sir.” The navigator had been updating that course continuously for two hours.
“Sir, if Ivan really has laid out a minefield, part of it’s in international waters,” the exec noted. “Cute.”
“Yeah. Of course, to them it’s territorial waters, so anybody bumps into a mine, it’s just too damned bad-”
“And maybe an international incident?” Joe observed.
“But why did they ping at all?”, the communications officer asked. “If they got a clear channel they can navigate visually.”
“What if there’s no channel at all?” the exec answered. “What if they set ground mines, and moored mines strung, say, at a uniform depth of fifty feet. You have to figure they’d be a little nervous that a mine or two might have too long a mooring cable. So they’re playing it safe, just like we’d do. What’s all that tell you?”
“Nobody can trail their boomers without surfacing the lieutenant understood.
“And we sure as hell aren’t going to do that. Nobody ever said that Ivan was dumb. They got a perfect system here. They’re putting all their missile boats where we can’t get at them,” McCafferty went on. “Even SUBROC can’t make it from where we are into the White Sea. Final point, if they have to scatter the boats, they don’t have to screw around in a single channel, they can all surface, spread out, and run for daylight.
“What this means, gentlemen, is that instead of detailing an attack boat to guard every boomer against somebody like us, they can put all the missile boats into one nice, safe basket and release their attack boats to other missions. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
NORTH ATLANTIC
“Ship in view, this is U.S. Navy aircraft on your port beam. Please identify, over.” Captain Kherov handed the bridge-to-bridge phone to a Red Army major.
“Navy, this is the Doctor Lykes. How are y’all?” Kherov spoke halting English. The major’s Mississippi accent might as well have been Kurdish for all he understood of it. They could barely make out the haze-gray patrol aircraft that was now circling their ship-circling, they noted, at a five-mile distance and certainly inspecting them through binoculars.
“Amplify, Doctor Lykes, ” the voice ordered tersely.
“We’re out of New Orleans, bound for Oslo with general cargo, Navy. What’s the big deal?”
“You’re well north of a course to Norway. Please explain, over.”
“Y’all read the damned papers, Navy? It’s liable to get dangerous out here, and this big ole ship costs money. We got orders from the home office to keep close to some friendly folks. Hell, we’re glad to see ya’, boy. Y’all want to escort us a ways?”
“Roger, copy. Doctor Lykes, be advised no submarines known to be in this area.”
“Y’all guarantee that?”
This drew a laugh. “Not hardly, Doc.”
“That’s about what I thought, Navy. Well, if it’s all right with you, we’ll keep heading north a ways and try to stay under your air cover, over.”
“We can’t detail an aircraft to escort you.”
“Understood, but you will come if we call you-right?”
“That’s a roger,” agreed Penguin 8.
“Okay, we’ll continue north, then turn east for the Faroes. Will you warn us if any bad guys show up, over.”
“If we find any, Doc, the idea is we’ll try an’ sink ’em first,” the pilot exaggerated.
“Fair enough. Good huntin’, boy. Out.”
PENGUIN 8
“God, do people really talk like that?” the pilot of the Orion wondered aloud.
“Never heard about Lykes Lines?” his copilot chuckled. “They used to say they wouldn’t hire a guy ‘less he had a Southern accent. I never believed it until now. Nothing like tradition. He is kinda off the beaten track, though.”
“Yeah, but until the convoys form up, hell, I’d try to bounce from one protected area to another. Anyway, let’s finish the visual.” The pilot increased power and headed in closer while his copilot lifted the recognition book.
“Okay, we have an all-black hull with ‘Lykes Lines’ on the side, midships. White superstructure with black diamond, a block L inside the diamond.” He lifted his binoculars. “Lookout mast forward of the superstructure. Check. Superstructure is nicely raked. Electronics mast is not. Proper ensign and house flag. Black funnels. Winches aft by the barge elevator-doesn’t say how many winches. Damn, she’s carrying a full load of barges, isn’t she? Paintwork looks a little shabby. Anyway, it all checks with the book; that’s a friendly.”