Part 69 (1/2)
”A carrier has a slightly larger deck. You're not doing a story about me, are you?”
”Why not? You killed three submarines yesterday.”
O'Malley shook his head. ”Two s.h.i.+ps, two helos, plus some help from the rest of the screening force. I just go where they send me. There's a lot to sub-hunting. All the parts have to work or the other guy wins.”
”Is that what happened last night?”
”Sometimes the other guy does something right, too. I just spent four hours looking and came away empty. Maybe that was a sub, maybe not. Yesterday was pretty lucky all the way around.”
”Does it bother you, sinking them?” Calloway asked.
”I've been in the Navy for seventeen years and I've never met anybody who likes killing people. We don't even call it that, except maybe when we're drunk. We sink s.h.i.+ps and try to pretend that they're just s.h.i.+ps-things without people in them. It's dishonest, but we do it anyway. h.e.l.l, this is the first time I've actually done what my main job is supposed to be. Until now all my combat experience has been search-and-rescue stuff. I never even dropped a war-shot on a real sub until yesterday. I haven't thought about it enough to know if I like it or not.” He paused. ”It's an awful sound. You hear rus.h.i.+ng air. If you penetrate the hull at deep depth, the sudden pressure change inside the hull supposedly causes the air to ignite and everyone inside the boat incinerates. I don't know if it's true, but somebody told me that once. Anyway, you hear the rus.h.i.+ng air, then you hear the screech-like a car throwing its brakes on hard. That's the bulkheads letting go. Then comes the noise of the hull collapsing, hollow boom, sort of. And that's it: a hundred people just died. No, I don't much like it.
”The h.e.l.l of it is, it's exciting,” O'Malley went on. ”You're doing something extremely difficult. It requires concentration and practice and a lot of abstract thought. You have to get inside the other guy's head, but at the same time you think of your mission as destroying an inanimate object. Doesn't make much sense, does it? So, what you do is, you don't think about that aspect of the job. Otherwise the job wouldn't get done.”
”Are we going to win?”
”That's up to the guys on land. All we do is support them. This convoy's going to make it.”
FLZIEHAUSEN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY.
”They told me you were dead,” Beregovoy said.
”Not even scratched this time. It startled Vanya here out of a sound sleep, however. How does the attack go?”
”Initial signs are promising. We have an advance of six kilometers here, and almost as much here at Springe. We might have Hannover surrounded by tomorrow.”
Alekseyev found himself wondering if his superior had been right. Perhaps NATO lines had been thinned so much they'd been forced to give ground.
”Comrade General.” It was the Army intelligence officer. ”I have a report of German tanks at Eldagsen. He-he just went off the air.”
”Where the h.e.l.l is Eldagsen?” Beregovoy peered down at the map. ”That's ten kilometers behind the line! Confirm that report!”
The ground shook under them, followed by the roar of jet engines and launching missiles.
”They just hit our radio transmitters,” the communications officer reported.
”Switch to the alternate!” Alekseyev shouted.
”That was the alternate. They took out the primary last night,” Beregovoy answered. ”Another is being a.s.sembled now. So we use what we have here.”
”No,” Alekseyev said. ”If we do that, we do it on the move.”
”I can't coordinate well that way!”
”You can't coordinate at all if you're dead.”
USS CHICAGO.
All h.e.l.l was breaking loose. It was like a nightmare, except you woke up from those, McCafferty reminded himself. At least three Bear-F patrol aircraft were overhead, dropping son.o.buoys all over the place, two Krivak-type frigates and six Grisha patrol boats had shown up on the sonar, and a Victor-III submarine had decided to come to the party.
Chicago had nibbled the odds down some. For the past few hours, fancy footwork had killed the Victor and a Grisha and damaged a Krivak, but the situation was deteriorating. The Russians were mobbing him, and he would not be able to keep them at arm's length much longer. In the time it had taken him to localize and kill the Victor, the surface groups had closed five miles on him. Like a boxer against a puncher, he had the advantage only as long as he kept them away.
What McCafferty wanted and needed to do was talk with Todd Simms on Boston to coordinate their activities. He couldn't, because the underwater telephone couldn't reach that far and made too much noise. Even if he tried to make a radio broadcast, Boston would have to be near the surface, with her antenna up to hear him. He was sure Todd had his boat as deep as he could drive her. American submarine doctrine was for each boat to operate alone. The Soviets practiced cooperative tactics, but the Americans never felt the need. McCafferty needed some ideas now. The ”book” solution to the tactical problem at hand was to maneuver and look for openings, but Chicago was essentially tied to a fixed position and could not stray too far from her sisters. As soon as the Russians understood that there was a cripple out there, they'd close in like a pack of dogs to finish Providence off, and he would not be able to stop them. Ivan would gladly exchange some of his small craft for a 688.
”Ideas, XO?” McCafferty asked.
”How about, 'Scotty, beam us up!' ” The executive officer tried to brighten things a bit. It didn't work. So, okay, maybe the skipper wasn't a Star Trek fan. ”The only way I see to keep them off our friends is to get them to chase us awhile.”
”Go east and attack this group from the beam?”
”It's a gamble,” the exec admitted. ”But what isn't?”
”You conn her. Two-thirds, and hug the bottom.”
Chicago turned southeast and increased speed to eighteen knots. This was a fine time to find out how accurate our charts are, McCafferty thought. Did Ivan have any minefields set here? He had to shut that thought out. If they hit one, he'd never know it. The executive officer kept the submarine within fifty feet of where the chart said the bottom was-actually he hedged, keeping fifty feet above the highest bottom marker within a mile. Even that would do no good if there was an uncharted wreck. McCafferty remembered his first trip into the Barents Sea. Somewhere close to here were those destroyers sunk as targets. If he hit one of those at eighteen knots . . . The run lasted forty minutes.
”All ahead one-third!” McCafferty ordered when he couldn't stand it anymore. Chicago slowed to five knots. To the diving officer: ”Take her up to periscope depth.”
The planesmen pulled back on their controls. There was some minor groaning from the hull as the outside water pressure relented, allowing the hull to expand an inch or so. On McCafferty's order the ESM mast went up first. As before there were several radar sources. The search periscope went up next.
A weather front was moving in, with a rain squall to the west. Fabulous, McCafferty thought. There goes ten percent of our sonar performance.
”I got a mast at two-six-four-what is it?”
”No radar signals on that bearing,” a technician said.
”It's broken-it's the Krivak. We got a piece of her, let's finish her off. I-” A shadow went across the lens. McCafferty angled the instrument up and saw the swept wings and propellers of a Bear.
”Conn, sonar, multiple son.o.buoys aft!”
McCafferty slapped the scope handles up and lowered the scope. ”Take her down! Make your depth four hundred feet, left full rudder, all ahead full.”
A son.o.buoy deployed within two hundred yards of the submarine. The bra.s.sy sound of its pings reverberated through the hull.
How long for the Bear to turn and drop on us? On McCafferty's order a noisemaker was ejected into the water. It didn't work, and he fired off another. One minute pa.s.sed. He'll try to get a magnetic fix on us first.