Had they stuck to the plan, he might already have put a dent in the Soviet Navy. Instead, someone had panicked over the new Soviet missile sub dispositions, and so far as he could tell, the result was that no one had accomplished much of anything. The Soviet subs that had come storming out of the Kola Fjord had not come south into the Norwegian Sea as expected. His long-range sonar reported possible submarine noises far to his north, heading west before fading out. So, he thought, Ivan’s sending his boats down the Denmark Strait? The SOSUS line between Iceland and Greenland could make that idea a costly one.
USS CHICAGO was steaming at five hundred feet just north of the 69′ parallel, about a hundred miles west of Norway’s rocky coastline. The Norwegians’ collection of diesel boats was inside of him, guarding their own coast. McCafferty understood that, but didn’t like it.
So far nothing had gone right, and McCafferty was worried. That was expected, and he could suppress it. He could fall back on his training. He knew what his submarine could do, and had a pretty good idea of what the Russian subs were capable of. He had the superior capabilities, but some Russian could always get lucky. This was war. A different sort of environment, not one judged by umpires and rule books. Mistakes now were not a matter of a written critique from his squadron commander. And so far luck seemed to be on the other side.
He looked around at his men. They had to be thinking the same thoughts, he was sure, but they all depended on him. The crewmen of his submarine were essentially the physical extensions of his own mind. He was the central control for the entire corporate entity known as USS CHICAGO, and for the first time the awesome responsibility struck him. If he messed up, all these men would die. And he, too, would die-with the knowledge that he had failed them.
You can’t think like this, the captain told himself. It will eat you up. Better to have a combat situation where I can limit my thinking to the immediate. He checked the clock. Good.
“Take her up to periscope depth,” he ordered. “It’s time to check for orders, and we’ll try an ESM sweep to see what’s happening.”
Not a simple procedure, that. The submarine came up slowly, cautiously, turning to allow her sonar to make certain that there was not a ship around.
“Raise the ESM.”
An electronics technician pressed the button to raise the mast for his broad-band receiver. The board lit up instantly.
“Numerous electronic sources, sir. Three J-band search sets, lots of other stuff. Lots of VHF and UHF chatter. The recorders are going.”
That figures, McCafferty thought. The odds against having anyone here after us are pretty low, though. “Up scope.”
The captain angled the search-scope lens upward to scan the sky for a nearby aircraft and made a quick turn around the horizon. He noticed something odd, and had to angle down the lens to see what it was.
There was a green smoke marker not two hundred yards away. McCafferty cringed and spun the instrument back around. A multiengine aircraft was coming out of the haze-directly in at them.
The captain reached up and spun the periscope wheel, lowering the instrument. “Take her down! All ahead flank! Make your depth eight hundred feet!” Where the hell did he come from?
The submarine’s engines fairly exploded into action. A flurry of orders had the helmsmen push their controls to the stops.
“Torpedo in the water, starboard side!” a sonarman screamed.
McCafferty reacted at once. “Left full rudder!”
“Left full rudder, aye!” The speed log was at ten knots and rising quickly. They passed below one hundred feet.
“Torpedo bearing one-seven-five relative. It’s pinging. Doesn’t have us yet.”
“Fire off a noisemaker.”
Seventy feet aft of the control room, a five-inch canister was ejected from a launcher. It immediately started making all kinds of noise for the torpedo to home in on.
“Noisemaker away!”
“Right fifteen degrees rudder.” McCafferty was calmer now. He’d played this game before. “Come to new course one-one-zero. Sonar, I want true bearings on that torpedo.”
“Aye. Torpedo bearing two-zero-six, coming port-to-starboard.”
Chicago passed through two hundred feet. The boat had a twenty-degree down angle. The planesmen and most of the technicians had seatbelts to hold them in place. The officers and a few others who had to circulate around grasped at rails and stanchions to keep from falling.
“Conn, Sonar. The torpedo seems to be following a circular path. Now traveling starboard-to-port, bearing one-seven-five. Still pinging, but I don’t think it has us.”
“Very well. Keep those reports coming.” McCafferty climbed aft to the plot. “Looks like he made a bad drop.”
“Could be,” the navigator agreed. “But how in hell-”
“Had to be a MAD pass. The magnetic anomaly detector. Was the tape running? I didn’t have him long enough for an ID.” He checked the plot. They were now a mile and a half from where they’d been when the torpedo was dropped. “Sonar, tell me about the fish.”
“Bearing one-nine-zero, dead aft. Still circling, seems to be going down a little. I think maybe the noisemaker drew him in and he’s trying to hit it.”
“All ahead two-thirds.” Time to slow down, McCafferty thought. They’d cleared the initial datum point, and the aircraft’s crew would need a few minutes to evaluate their attack before beginning a new search. In that time they’d be two or three miles away, below the layer, and making little noise.
“All ahead two-thirds, aye. Leveling off at eight hundred feet.”
“We can start breathing again, people,” McCafferty said. His own voice was not as even as he would have preferred. For the first time, he noted a few shaky hands. Just like a car wreck, he thought. You only shake after you’re safe. “Left fifteen degrees rudder. Come left to two-eight-zero.” If the aircraft dropped again, no sense in traveling in a straight path. But they should be fairly safe now. The whole episode, he noted, had lasted less than ten minutes.
The captain walked to the forward bulkhead and rewound the videotape, then set it up to run. It showed the periscope breaking the surface, the first quick search . . . then the smoke marker. Next came the aircraft. McCafferty froze the frame.
The plane looked like a Lockheed P-3 Orion.
“That’s one of ours!” the duty electrician noted. The captain stepped forward into sonar.
“The fish is fading aft, Cap’n. Probably still trying to kill the noisemaker. I think when it hit the water it circled in the wrong direction, away from us, I mean.”
“What’s it sound like?”
“A lot like one of our Mark-46s” -the leading sonarman shuddered-it really did sound like a forty-six!” He rewound his own tape and set it on speaker. The screeeing sound of the twin-screw fish was enough to raise the hairs on your neck. McCafferty nodded and went back aft.
“Okay, that might have been a Norwegian P-3. Then again it might have been a Russian May. They look pretty much alike, and they have exactly the same job. Well done, people. We’re going to clear the area.” The captain congratulated himself on his performance. He’d just evaded his first war shot-dropped by a friendly aircraft! But he had evaded it. Not all the luck was with the other side. Or was it?
USS PHARRIS
Morris was catnapping in his bridge chair, wondering what was missing from his life. It took a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t doing any paperwork, his normal afternoon pastime. He had to transmit position reports every four hours, contact reports when he had any-he hadn’t yet-but the routine paper-shuffling that ate up so much of his time was a thing of the past. A pity, he thought, that it took a war to relieve one of that! He could almost imagine himself starting to enjoy it.
The convoy was still twenty miles to his southeast. Pharris was the outlying sonar picket. Her mission was to detect, localize, and engage any submarine trying to close the convoy. To do that, the frigate was alternately dashing- “sprinting” -forward at maximum speed, then drifting briefly at slower speed to allow her sonar to work with maximum efficiency. Had the convoy proceeded at twenty knots on a straight course, it would have been nearly impossible. The three columns of merchantmen were zigzagging, however, making life a little easier on all concerned. Except on the merchant sailors, for whom station-keeping was as foreign as marching.
Morris sipped at a Coke. It was a warm afternoon and he preferred his caffeine cold.
“Signal coming in from Talbot, sir,” the junior officer of the deck reported.
Morris rose and walked to the starboard bridge wing with his binoculars. He prided himself on being able to read Morse almost as quickly as his signalmen: REPORT ICELAND ATTACKED AND NEUTRALIZED BY SOVIET FORCES X EXPECT MORE SERIOUS AIR AND SUB THREAT X.