I hope I meet him. Oh, I hope I meet this clever man. For when I do, I will take a pair of large steel pliers — ,” Melekhin’s voice lowered to a whisper, “ — and I will crush his balls! Get me the small electric welding set, Comrade. I can fix this myself in a few minutes.”
Captain First Rank Melekhin was as good as his word. He wouldn’t let anyone near the job. It was his plant, and his responsibility. Svyadov was just as happy for that. A tiny bead of stainless steel was worked into the fault, and Melekhin filed it down with jeweler’s tools to protect the threads. Then he brushed rubber-based sealant onto the threads and worked the fitting back into place. The whole procedure took twenty-eight minutes by Svyadov’s watch. As they had told him in Leningrad, Melekhin was the best engineer in submarines.
“A static pressure test, eight kilograms,” he ordered the assistant engineer officer.
The reactor was reactivated. Five minutes later the pressure went all the way to normal power. Melekhin held a counter under the spout for ten minutes — and got nothing, even on the number two setting. He walked to the phone to tell the captain the leak was fixed.
Melekhin had the enlisted men let back into the compartment to return the tools to their places.
“You see how it is done, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, Comrade. Was that one leak sufficient to cause all of our contamination?”
“Obviously.”
Svyadov wondered about this. The reactor spaces were nothing but a collection of pipes and fittings, and this bit of sabotage could not have taken long. What if other such time bombs were hidden in the system?
“Perhaps you worry too much, Comrade,” Melekhin said. “Yes, I have considered this. When we get to Cuba, I will have a full-power static test made to check the whole system, but for the moment I do not think this is a good idea. We will continue the two-hour watch cycle. There is the possibility that one of our own crewmen is the saboteur. If so, I will not have people in these spaces long enough to commit more mischief. You will watch the crew closely.”
THE TWELFTH DAY
TUESDAY, 14 DECEMBER
The Dallas
“Crazy Ivan.’“ Jones shouted loudly enough to be heard in the attack center. “Turning to starboard!”
“Skipper!” Thompson repeated the warning.
“All stop!” Mancuso ordered quickly. “Rig ship for ultra-quiet!”
A thousand yards ahead of the Dallas, her contact had just begun a radical turn to the right. She had been doing so about every two hours since they had regained contact, though not regularly enough for the Dallas to settle into a comfortable pattern. Whoever is driving that boomer knows his business, Mancuso thought. The Soviet missile submarine was making a complete circle so her bow-mounted sonar could check for anyone hiding in her baffles.
Countering this maneuver was more than just tricky — it was dangerous, especially the way Mancuso did it. When the Red October changed course, her stern, like those of all ships, moved in the direction opposite the turn. She was a steel barrier directly in the Dallas’1 path for as long as it took her to move through the first part of the turn, and the 7,000-ton attack submarine took a lot of space to stop.
The exact number of collisions that had occurred between Soviet and American submarines was a closely guarded secret; that there had been such collisions was not. One characteristically Russian tactic for forcing Americans to keep their distance was a stylized turn called the Crazy Ivan in the U.S. Navy.
The first few hours they had trailed this contact, Mancuso had been careful to keep his distance. He had learned that the submarine was not turning quickly. She was, rather, maneuvering in a leisurely manner, and seemed to ascend fifty to eighty feet as she turned, banking almost like an aircraft. He suspected that the Russian skipper was not using his full maneuverability — an intelligent thing for a captain to do, keeping some of his performance in reserve as a surprise. These facts allowed the Dallas to trail very closely indeed and gave Mancuso a chance to chop his speed and drift forward so that he barely avoided the Russian’s stern. He was getting good at it — a little too good, his officers were whispering. The last time they had not missed the Russian’s screws by more than a hundred fifty yards. The contact’s large turning circle was taking her completely around the Dallas as the latter sniffed at her prey’s trail.
Avoiding collision was the most dangerous part of the maneuver, but not the only part. The Dallas also had to remain invisible to her quarry’s passive sonar systems. For her to do so the engineers had to cut power in their S6G reactor to a tiny fraction of its total output. Fortunately the reactor was able to run on such low power without the use of a coolant pump, since coolant could be transferred by normal convection circulation. In addition, a strict silent ship routine was enforced. No activity on the Dallas that might generate noise was permitted, and the crew took it seriously enough that even ordinary conversations in the mess were muted.
“Speed coming down,” Lieutenant Goodman reported. Mancuso decided that the Dallas would not be part of a ramming this time and went aft to sonar.
“Target is still turning right,” Jones reported quietly. “Ought to be clear now. Distance to the stern, maybe two hundred yards, maybe a shade less… Yeah, we’re clear now, bearing is changing more rapidly. Speed and engine noises are constant. A slow turn to the right.” Jones caught the captain out of the corner of his eye and turned to hazard an observation. “Skipper, this guy is real confident in himself. I mean, real confident.”
“Explain,” Mancuso said, figuring he knew the answer.
“Cap’n, he’s not chopping speed the way we do, and we turn a lot sharper than this. It’s almost like — like he’s doing this out of habit, y’know? Like he’s in a hurry to get somewhere, and really doesn’t think anybody can track — wait… Yeah, okay, he’s just about reversed course now, bearing off the starboard bow, say half a mile… Still doing the slow turn. He’ll go right around us again. Sir, if he knows anybody’s back here, he’s playing it awful cool. What do you think, Frenchie?”
Chief Sonarman Laval shook his head. “He don’t know we’re here.” The chief didn’t want to say anything else. He thought Mancuso’s close tailing was reckless. The man had balls, playing with a 688 like this, but one little screw-up and he’d find himself with a pail and shovel, on the beach.
“Passing down the starboard side. No pinging.” Jones took out his calculator and punched in some numbers. “Sir, this angular turn rate at this speed makes the range about a thousand yards. You suppose his funny drive system goofs up his rudders any?”
“Maybe.” Mancuso took a spare set of phones and plugged them in to listen.
The noise was the same. A swish, and every forty or fifty seconds an odd, low-frequency rumble. This close they could also hear the gurgling and throbbing of the reactor pump. There was a sharp sound, maybe a cook moving a pan on a metal grate. No silent ship drill on this boat. Mancuso smiled to himself. It was like being a cat burglar, hanging this close to an enemy submarine — no, not an enemy, not exactly — hearing everything. In better acoustical conditions they could have heard conversations. Not well enough to understand them, of course, but as if they were at a dinner party listening to the gabble of a dozen couples at once.
“Passing aft and still circling. His turning radius must be a good thousand yards,” Mancuso observed.
“Yes, Cap’n, about that,” Jones agreed.
“He just can’t be using all his rudder, and you’re right, Jonesy, he is very damned casual about this. Hmph, the Russians are all supposed to be paranoid — not this boy.” So much the better, Mancuso thought.
If he were going to hear the Dallas it would be now, with the bow-mounted sonar pointed almost directly at them. Mancuso took off his headphones to listen to his boat. The Dallas was a tomb. The words Crazy Ivan had been passed, and within seconds his crew had responded. How do you reward a whole crew? Mancuso wondered. He knew he worked them hard, sometimes too hard — but damn! Did they deliver!
“Port beam,” Jones said. “Exactly abeam now, speed unchanged, traveling a little straighter, maybe, distance about eleven hundred, I think.” The sonarman took a handkerchief from his back pocket and used it to wipe his hands.
There’s tension all right, but you’d never know it listening to the kid, the captain thought. Everyone in his crew was acting like a professional.