“Probably an acquisition exercise. Skip Tyler says those doors are for a new drive system.”
“Indeed.” Greer sat back. “Tell me about it.”
Ryan took out his notes and summarized his education in submarine technology. “Skip says he can generate a computer simulation of its effectiveness,” he concluded.
Greer’s eyebrows went up. “How soon?”
“End of week, maybe. I told him if he had it done by Friday we’d pay him for it. Twenty thousand sound reasonable?”
“Will it mean anything?”
“If he gets the background data he needs, it ought to, sir. Skip’s a very sharp cookie. I mean, they don’t give doctorates away at MIT, and he was in the top five of his Academy class.”
“Worth twenty thousand dollars of our money?” Greer was notoriously tight with a buck.
Ryan knew how to answer this. “Sir, if we followed normal procedure on this, we’d contract one of the Beltway Bandits — ,” Ryan referred to the consulting firms that dotted the beltway around Washington, D.C., “ — they’d charge us five or ten times as much, and we’d be lucky to have the data by Easter. This way we might just have it while the boat’s still at sea. If worse comes to worst, sir, I’ll foot the bill. I figured you’d want this data fast, and it’s right up his alley.”
“You’re right.” It wasn’t the first time Ryan had short circuited normal procedure. The other times had worked out fairly well. Greer was a man who looked for results. “Okay, the Soviets have a new missile boat with a silent drive system. What does it all mean?”
“Nothing good. We depend on our ability to track their boomers with our attack boats. Hell, that’s why they agreed a few years back to our proposal about keeping them five hundred miles from each other’s coasts, and why they keep their missile subs in port most of the time. This could change the game a bit. By the way, October’s hull, I haven’t seen what it’s made of.”
“Steel. She’s too big for a titanium hull, at least for what it would cost. You know what they have to spend on their Alfas.”
‘Too much for what they got. You spend that much money for a superstrong hull, then put a noisy power plant in it. Dumb.”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t mind having that speed, though. Anyway, if this silent drive system really works, they might be able to creep up onto the continental shelf.”
“Depressed-trajectory shot,” Ryan said. This was one of the nastier nuclear war scenarios in which a sea-based missile was fired within a few hundred miles of its target. Washington is a bare hundred air miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Though a missile on a low, fast flight path loses much of its accuracy, a few of them can be launched to explode over Washington in less than a few minutes’ time, too little for a president to react. If the Soviets were able to kill the president that quickly, the resulting disruption of the chain of command would give them ample time to take out the land-based missiles — there would be no one with authority to fire. This scenario is a grand-strategic version of a simple mugging, Ryan thought. A mugger doesn’t attack his victim’s arms — he goes for the head. “You think October was built with that in mind?”
“I’m sure the thought occurred to them,” Greer observed. “It would have occurred to us. Well, we have Bremerton up there to keep an eye on her, and if this data turns out to be useful we’ll see if we can come up with an answer. How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been on the go since five-thirty London time. Long day, sir.”
“I expect so. Okay, we’ll go over the Afghanistan business tomorrow morning. Get some sleep, son.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Ryan got his coat. “Good night.” It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Marriott. Ryan made the mistake of turning the TV on to the beginning of Monday Night Football. Cincinnati was playing San Francisco, the two best quarterbacks in the league pitted against one another. Football was something he missed living in England, and he managed to stay awake nearly three hours before fading out with the television on.
SOSUS Control
Except for the fact that everyone was in uniform, a visitor might easily have mistaken the room for a NASA control center. There were six wide rows of consoles, each with its own TV screen and typewriter keyboard supplemented by lighted plastic buttons, dials, headphone jacks, and analog and digital controls. Senior Chief Oceanographic Technician Deke Franklin was seated at console fifteen.
The room was SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) Atlantic Control. It was in a fairly nondescript building, uninspired government layer cake, with windowless concrete walls, a large air-conditioning system on a flat roof, and an acronym-coded blue sign on a well-tended but now yellowed lawn. There were armed marines inconspicuously on guard inside the three entrances. In the basement were a pair of Cray-2 supercomputers tended by twenty acolytes, and behind the building was a trio of satellite ground stations, all up- and down-links. The men at the consoles and the computers were linked electronically by satellite and landline to the SOSUS system.
Throughout the oceans of the world, and especially astride the passages that Soviet submarines had to cross to reach the open sea, the United States and other NATO countries had deployed gangs of highly sensitive sonar receptors. The hundreds of SOSUS sensors received and forwarded an unimaginably vast amount of information, and to help the system operators classify and analyze it a whole new family of computers had to be designed, the supercomputers. SOSUS served its purpose admirably well. Very little could cross a barrier without being detected. Even the ultraquiet American and British attack submarines were generally picked up. The sensors, lying on the bottom of the sea, were periodically updated; many now had their own signal processors to presort the data they forwarded, lightening the load on the central computers and enabling more rapid and accurate classification of targets.
Chief Franklin’s console received data from a string of sensors planted off the coast of Iceland. He was responsible for an area forty nautical miles across, and his sector overlapped the ones east and west so that, theoretically, three operators were constantly monitoring any segment of the barrier. If he got a contact, he would first notify his brother operators, then type a contact report into his computer terminal, which would in turn be displayed on the master control board in the control room at the back of the floor. The senior duty officer had the frequently exercised authority to prosecute a contact with a wide range of assets, from surface ships to antisubmarine aircraft. Two world wars had taught American and British officers the necessity of keeping their sea lines of communication — SLOCs — open.
Although this quiet, tomblike facility had never been shown to the public, and though it had none of the drama associated with military life, the men on duty here were among the most important in the service of their country. In a war, without them, whole nations might starve.
Franklin was leaning back in his swivel chair, puffing contemplatively on an old briar pipe. Around him the room was dead quiet. Even had it not been, his five-hundred-dollar headphones would have effectively sealed him off from the outside world. A twenty-six year chief, Franklin had served his entire career on destroyers and frigates. To him, submarines and submariners were the enemy, regardless of what flag they might fly or what uniform they might wear.
An eyebrow went up, and his nearly bald head cocked to one side. The pulls on the pipe grew irregular. His right hand reached forward to the control panel and switched off the signal processors so that he could get the sound without computerized interference. But it was no good. There was too much background noise. He switched the filters back on. Next he tried some changes in his azimuth controls. The SOSUS sensors were designed to give bearing checks through the selective use of individual receptors, which he could manipulate electronically, first getting one bearing, then using a neighboring gang to triangulate for a fix. The contact was very faint, but not too far from the line, he judged. Franklin queried his computer terminal. The USS Dallas was up there. Gotcha! he said with a thin smile. Another noise came through, a low-frequency rumble that only lasted a few seconds before fading out. Not all that quiet, though. Why hadn’t he heard it before switching the reception azimuth? He set his pipe down and began making adjustments on his control board.
“Chief?” A voice came over his headphones. It was the senior duty officer.
“Yes, Commander?”
“Can you come back to control? I have something I want you to hear.”
“On the way, sir.” Franklin rose quietly. Commander Quentin was a former destroyer skipper on a limited duty after a winning battle with cancer. Almost a winning battle, Franklin corrected himself. Chemotherapy had killed the cancer — at the cost of nearly all his hair, and turning his skin into a sort of transparent parchment. Too bad, he thought, Quentin was a pretty good man.