Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

“Too bad.” Rodgers smiled in the semidarkness. “I coulda blow’d one guy’s pecker right off!”

“You done good, people,” Smith said. “Ready to move out, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah.” Shamed by his performance, the lieutenant let Smith lead them off. They crossed the gravel road and a hundred yards later were in yet another lava field, climbing over rocks into the wasteland. Their wet fatigue pants clung to their legs, drying slowly in the cool westerly breeze.

USS PHARRIS

“Our friend the November doesn’t have an anechoic coating,” ASW said quietly, pointing to the display. “I think that’s him, running to catch up with the convoy.”

“We have this trace plotted at about forty-six thousand yards,” the tactical action officer said.

“Get the helo up,” Morris ordered.

Five minutes later, Pharris’s helicopter was running southwest at full speed, and Bluebird-Seven, another P-3C Orion, was closing on the datum point from the east. Both aircraft flew low, hoping to surprise the submarine that had killed one of their flock and gravely damaged another. The Russian had probably made a mistake by increasing his speed. Maybe he had orders to trail the convoy and radio data for other submarines to use. Maybe he wanted to catch up to make another attack. Whatever the reason, his reactor pumps were running and making noise that his hull could not contain. His periscope was up, and that gave the aircraft a chance to spot him with their look-down radars. The helo was closer, and its pilot was communicating with the tactical coordinator of the Orion. This could be a textbook attack if things worked out right.

“Okay, Bluebird, we are now three miles from datum center. Say your position.”

“We’re two miles behind you, Papa-One-Six. Illuminate!”

The systems operator flipped the cover off the radar switch and moved it from Standby to Active. Instantly, energy began to radiate from the radar transmitter slung under the helicopter’s nose.

“Contact, we have a radar contact bearing one-six-five, range eleven hundred yards!”

“Stream the MAD gear!” The pilot advanced his throttles to race toward the contact.

“We got him, too,” the Tacco called swiftly. The petty officer beside him armed a torpedo, setting its initial search depth for a hundred feet.

The helicopter’s anticollision lights came on, the red lights flashing in the darkness. No sense in hiding their approach now. The sub must have detected their radar signals and would now be attempting a crash dive. But that took more time than he had.

“Madman, madman, smoke away!” the systems operator screamed.

The smoke was invisible in the darkness, but the short green flame was an unmissable beacon in the darkness. The helo banked left, clearing the way for the Orion now only five hundred yards behind him.

The P-3C’s powerful searchlights came on, spotting the telltale wake left by the now-invisible periscope. The MAD contact had been right on, the pilot saw at once. The Orion’s bomb doors swung open and the torpedo dropped toward the black waters along with a sonobuoy.

“Positive sonar contact, evaluate as submarine!” a sonar-board operator said over the intercom. The tone lines displayed on his screen were exactly what a November at high speed looked like, and the torpedo chasing her was already on continuous pinging. “Torpedo is closing the target rapidly . . . Looks good, Tacco, closing . . . closing-impact!” The torpedo’s sound tracing merged with that of the submarine, and a brilliant splotch appeared in the waterfall display. The Orion’s operator switched the sonobuoy from active to passive, recording the recurring rumbles of the torpedo warhead explosion. The submarine’s screw sounds stopped, and again he heard the sound of blowing air that quickly stopped as the submarine began her last dive.

“That’s a kill, that’s a kill!” exulted the Tacco.

“Confirm the kill,” Morris said over the radio. “Nice job, Bluebird. That was a real quick-draw!”

“Roger, copy, Pharris. Thank you, sir! Beautiful job with the helo and the detection, guy. You just got another assist. Hell, we might just orbit you for a while, Captain, looks like you got all the action. Out.”

Morris walked to the corner and poured himself a cup of coffee. So, they had just helped to kill a pair of Soviet submarines.

The TAO was less enthusiastic. “We got a noisy old Foxtrot and a November who did something dumb. You suppose he had orders to trail and report, and that’s why we got him?”

“Maybe,” Morris nodded. “if Ivan’s making his skippers do things like that-well, they like central control, but that can change if they find out ifs costing them boats. We learned that lesson ourselves once.”

USS CHICAGO

McCafferty had his own contact. They had been tracking it for over an hour now, the sonar operators struggling to discern random noise from discrete signal on their visual displays. Their data was passed to the firecontrol tracking party, four men hovering over the chart table in the after corner of the attack center.

Already the crew was whispering, McCafferty knew. First the yard fire before they were commissioned. Then being pulled out of the Barents Sea at the wrong time. Then being attacked by a friendly aircraft . . . was Chicago an unlucky boat? they wondered. The chiefs and officers would work to dispel that thought, but the chiefs and officers held it, too, since all sailors believed in luck, an institutional faith among submarines. If you’re not lucky, we can’t use you, a famous submarine admiral once said. McCafferty had heard that story often enough. He had so far been devoid of luck.

The captain moved back to the chart table. “What’s happening?”

“Not much in the way of a bearing change. He has to be way out there, skipper, like the third convergence zone. Maybe eighty miles. He can’t be closing us. We would have lost the signal as he passed out of the zone.” The executive officer was showing the strain of the past week’s operations, too. “Captain, if I had to guess, I’d say we’re tracking a nuclear sub. Probably a noisy one. Acoustical conditions are pretty good, so we have three CZs to play with. And I’d bet he is doing the same thing we are, patrolling a set position. Hell, he could be running back and forth on a racetrack pattern, same as us. That would account for the minimal bearing changes.”

The captain frowned. This was the only real contact he’d had since the war started. He was close to the northern border of his patrol area, and the target was probably just on the other side of it. Going after it meant leaving the bulk of his assigned sector unprotected

“Let’s go after him,” McCafferty ordered. “Left ten degrees rudder, come left to new course three-five-one. All ahead two thirds.”

Chicago rapidly turned to a northerly heading, accelerating to fifteen knots, her maximum “silent” speed. At fifteen knots the submarine radiated only a small amount of noise. The risk of counterdetection was slight, since even at this speed her sonars could detect a target five to ten miles off. Her four tubes were loaded with a pair of Mk-48 torpedoes and two Harpoon antiship missiles. If the target was a submarine or a surface ship, Chicago could handle it.

GRAFARHOLT, ICELAND

“You’re early, Beagle,” Doghouse replied.

Edwards was sitting between two rocks and leaning back against a third, the antenna resting on his knee. He hoped it was pointing in a safe direction. The Russians, he figured, were strung mostly along the coast from Keflavik to Reykjavik, well to the west of the direction to the satellite. But there were houses and factories below him, and if they had a listening post down there . . .

“We had to get here before it got too light,” the lieutenant explained. They had run the last kilometer with the rising sun behind them. Edwards took some small comfort in the fact that the Marines were puffing harder than he was.

“How secure are you?”

“There is some movement on the road below us, but that’s a good ways off, maybe a mile.”

“Okay, you see the electrical switching station southwest of you?”

Edwards got out his binoculars with one hand to check. The map called the place Artun. It held the main electrical transformers for the power grid on this part of the island. The high-voltage lines came in from the east, and the feeder cables radiated out from this point.

“Yeah, I see it.”

“How are things going, Beagle?”

Edwards almost said they were going great, but stopped himself. “Lousy. Things are going lousy.”

“Roger that, Beagle. You keep an eye on that power station. Anything around it?”

“Stand by.” Edwards set down the antenna and gave the place a closer look. Aha! “Okay, I got one armored vehicle, just visible around the corner on the west side. Three-no, four armed men are in the open. Nothing else that I can see.”

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