“Left full rudder, aye!”
“Passing through one hundred feet. Speed fifteen knots,” the XO reported.
“There he is,” McCafferty said. The pings from the helicopter’s active sonar reverberated through the hull. “Reverse your rudder. Shoot off a noisemaker.” The captain ordered his submarine back to an easterly course and reduced speed as they dropped through the layer. With luck the Soviets would mistake the noisemaker for the cavitation noises of the submarine and attack it as Chicago drew clear.
“Conn, sonar, we have a destroyer heading in, bearing three-three-nine. Sounds like a Sovremenny-torpedo in the water aft. We have one torpedo in the water bearing two-six-five.”
“Right twenty degrees rudder. All ahead two-thirds. Come to new course one-seven-five.”
“Conn, sonar, new contact, twin screws, just started with a low-frequency sonar, probably a Udaloy, blade count says twenty-five knots, bearing three-five-one and constant. Torpedo bearing changing, heading aft and fading.”
“Very well.” McCafferty nodded. “The helicopter dropped on the noisemaker. We don’t have to sweat that one. All ahead one-third, make your depth one thousand feet.”
The Sovremenny he didn’t worry too greatly about, but the Udaloy was another thing entirely. The new Soviet destroyer carried a low-frequency sonar that could penetrate the layer under certain conditions, plus two helicopters and a long-range rocket-boosted torpedo weapon that was better than the American ASROC.
Ba-wah! The sound of a low-frequency sonar. It had hit them on the first shot. Would it report Chicago’s position to the Udaloy? Or would the submarine’s rubber coating prevent it?
“Target bearing three-five-one. Blade count is down, indicates speed of ten knots,” sonar reported.
“Okay, he’s slowed to search for us. Sonar, how strong was that ping?”
“Low edge of detection range, sir. Probably did not get a return off us. Contact is maneuvering, bearing now three-five-three. Continuing to ping, but his sonar is search-lighting west-to-east away from us. Another helo is pinging, sir, bearing zero-nine-eight. This one’s below the layer, but fairly weak.”
“XO, take us west. We’ll try to loop around them to seaward and approach their amphibs from the west.” McCafferty returned to the sonar room. He was tempted to engage the Udaloy, but could not launch a torpedo this deep without using a dangerously high amount of his reserve high-pressure air. Besides, his job was to kill the command ships, not the escorts. His fire-control team set up a solution anyway in case killing the Russian destroyer became a necessity.
“God, what a mess,” the chief breathed. “The depth-charging up north has tapered off some. Bearing is steadying down on these contacts here. Either they’ve resumed their base course or they’re heading away. Can’t tell which. Uh-oh, more sonobuoys are dropping down.” The chief’s finger traced the new dots, in a steady line-heading toward Chicago. “Next one’s going to be real close, sir.”
McCafferty stuck his head into the attack center. “Bring her around south, and go to two-thirds.”
The next sonobuoy splashed into the water directly overhead. Its cable deployed the transducer below the layer and began automatic pinging.
“They got us for sure, skipper!’
McCafferty ordered a course change to the west and again increased to full speed to clear the area. Three minutes later a torpedo dropped into the water, either dropped by the Bear or fired from the Udaloy, they couldn’t tell. The torpedo started searching for them from a mile off and turned away. Again their rubber anechoic coating had saved them. A helo’s dipping sonar was detected ahead of them. McCafferty went south to avoid it, knowing that he was being driven away from the Soviet fleet, but unable to do much about it at the moment. A pair of helicopters was now after him, and for a submarine to defeat two dipping sonars was no simple exercise. It was clear that their mission was not so much to find him as to drive him off, and he could not maneuver fast enough to get past them. After two hours of trying, he broke off for the last time. The Soviet force had moved beyond sonar range, their last reported course being southeast toward Andoya.
McCafferty swore to himself He’d done everything right, gotten through the outer Soviet defenses, and had had a clear idea of how to duck under the destroyer screen. But someone had gotten there first, probably attacked Kirov-his target!-and messed everything up for his approach. His three Harpoons had probably found targets unless Ivan had shot them down-but he’d been unable even to monitor their impacts. If they had made impacts. The captain of USS Chicago wrote up his contact report for transmission to COMSUBLANT and wondered why things were going the way they were.
STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND
“A long way to go,” the fighter pilot said.
“Yeah,” Toland agreed. “Our last report had the group heading southeast to evade a submarine attack. We figure they’re back to a southerly course now, but we don’t know where they are. The Norwegians sent their last RF-5 in to look, and it disappeared. We have to hit them before they get to Bodo. To hit them, we need to know where they are.”
“No satellite intel?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. I go in with the reconnaissance pod, out and back . . . four hours. I’ll need a tanker to top me off about three hundred miles out.”
“No problem,” the RAF group captain agreed. “Do be careful, we need all your Tomcats to escort the strike tomorrow.”
“I’ll be ready in an hour.” The pilot left.
“Wish you luck, old boy,” the group captain said quietly. This was the third attempt to locate the Soviet invasion force by air. After the Norwegian reconnaissance aircraft had disappeared, the Brits had tried with a Jaguar. That, too, had vanished. The most obvious solution was to send a Hawkeye with the strike to conduct a radar search, but the Brits weren’t letting the E-2s stray too far from their shore. The U.K. radar stations had taken a fearful pounding, and the Hawkeyes were needed for local defense.
“It’s not supposed to be this hard,” Toland observed. Here was a golden opportunity to pound the Soviet fleet. Once located, they could strike the force at dawn tomorrow. The NATO aircraft would swoop in with their own air-to-surface missiles. But the extreme range of the mission gave no time for the strike force to loiter around looking. They had to have a target location before they took off. The Norwegians were supposed to have handled this, but NATO plans had not anticipated the virtual annihilation of the Royal Norwegian Air Force in a week’s time. The Soviets had enjoyed their only major tactical successes at sea, and they were successes indeed, Toland thought. While the land war in Germany was heading toward a high-technology stalemate, up to now the vaunted NATO navies had been outmaneuvered and outthought by their supposed dullard Soviet adversaries. Taking Iceland had been a masterpiece of an operation. NATO was still scrambling to reestablish the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom barrier with submarines that were supposed to have other missions. The Russian Backfires were ranging far into the North Atlantic, hitting one convoy a day, and the main Russian submarine force hadn’t even gotten there yet. The combination of the two might just close the Atlantic, Toland thought. Then the NATO armies would surely lose, for all their brilliant performance to date.
They had to stop the Soviets from taking Bodo in Norway. Once emplaced there, Russian aircraft could attack Scotland, draining resources from the German front and hampering efforts to interdict the bomber forces heading into the Atlantic. Toland shook his head. Once the Russian force was located, they’d pound hell out of it. They had the right weapons, the right doctrine. They could launch their missiles outside the Russian SAM envelopes, just as Ivan was doing to convoys. It was about time things changed.
The tanker lifted off first, followed half an hour later by the fighter. Toland and his British counterpart sat in the intelligence center napping, oblivious to the teletype printer that chattered in the corner. If anything important came in, the junior watch officers would alert them, and senior officers needed their sleep, too.
“Huh?” Toland started when the man tapped his shoulder.
“Coming in, sir-your Tomcat is arriving, Commander.” The RAF sergeant handed Bob a cup of tea. “Fifteen minutes out. Thought you might wish to freshen up.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.” Toland ran a hand over his unshaven face and decided not to shave. The group captain did, mainly to preserve the look that went with an RAF mustache.
The F-14 came in gracefully, its engines idling and wings outstretched as though grateful for the chance for a landing on something larger than a carrier. The pilot taxied into a hard shelter and quickly dismounted. Technicians were already removing the film cartridge from the camera pod.
“Nothing on their fleet, guys,” he said at once. The radar-intercept officer came down behind him.
“God, there’s fighters up there!” The RIO said. “Haven’t seen so much activity since the last time we went through aggressor school.”