Red Storm Rising (1986) (95 page)

“Your name Beagle?”

It required the greatest effort of his life to open his eyes. He saw a black man standing over him.

“Who’re you?”

“Sam Potter. I’m a lieutenant with Second Force Recon. You’re Beagle, right?” He turned. “We need a corpsman over here!”

“My people are all hurt.”

“We’re working on it. We’ll have you outa here in five minutes. Hang in there, Beagle. I gotta go do some work. Okay, people,” he called loudly. “Let’s get those Russians checked out. If we got any live ones, we wanna move them the hell off this rock right now!”

“Michael?” Edwards was still confused. Her face was right above his when he lost consciousness.

“Just who the hell is this guy?” Lieutenant Potter asked five minutes later.

“Wing-wiper. He done good,” Smith said, wincing with his own injuries.

“How’d you get here?” Potter waved for his radio operator.

“We fucking walked all the way from Keflavik, sir.”

“Quite a trip, Sarge.” Potter was impressed. He gave a short radio order. “Chopper’s on the way in now. I guess the lady goes out too.”

“Yes, sir. Welcome to Iceland, sir. We been waiting for you.”

“Take a look, Sarge.” Potter’s arm swept to the west. A series of gray bumps on the horizon headed east toward Stykkisholmur.

They were still out there, McCafferty was sure—but where? After killing the last Tango, contact had never been reestablished with the other two Russian submarines. Eight hours of relative peace rewarded his evasive maneuvering. The Russian ASW aircraft were still overhead, still dropping sonobuoys, but something had gone wrong for them. They weren’t coming very close now. He’d had to maneuver clear only four times. That would have been a lot in peacetime, but after the past few days it seemed like a vacation.

The captain had taken the chance to rest himself and his crew. Though they would all have gratefully accepted a month in bed, the four or six hours of sleep they’d all had were like a cup of water for a man in the desert, enough to get them a little farther. And there was only a little farther to go: exactly one hundred miles to the jagged edge of the arctic ice. Sixteen hours or so.

Chicago
was about five miles ahead of her sisters. Every hour, McCafferty would maneuver his sub to an easterly course and allow his towed-array sonar to get a precise fix on them. That was hard enough:
Boston
and
Providence
were difficult to pick up even at this distance.

He wondered what the Russians were thinking. The mobbing tactics of the Krivak-Grisha teams had failed. They’d learned that it was one thing to use those ships for barrier operations against the Keypunch team, but something very different to rush after a submarine with long-range weapons and computerized fire-control. Their dependence on active sonobuoys had reduced the effectiveness of their ASW patrol aircraft, and the one thing that had nearly worked—placing a diesel sub between two sonobuoy lines, then spooking their target into moving with a randomly dropped torpedo—had failed also.
Thank God they didn’t know how close they came with that,
McCafferty thought to himself. Their Tango-class subs were formidable opponents, quiet and hard to locate, but the Russians were still paying for their unsophisticated sonars. All in all, McCafferty was more confident now than he’d been in weeks.

“Well?” he asked his plotting officer. “Looks like they’re steaming as before, sir, about ten thousand yards behind us. I think this one’s
Boston.
She’s maneuvering a lot more.
Providence
here is plodding along pretty straight. We got a good fix on her.”

“Left ten degrees rudder, come to new course three-five-five,” McCafferty ordered.

“Left ten degrees rudder, aye, coming to new course three-five-five. Sir, my rudder is left ten degrees.”

“Very well.” The captain sipped at a cup of hot cocoa. It made a nice change of pace from coffee.
Chicago
turned slowly north. In the engine spaces aft, the submarine’s engineer crew kept watch on their instruments as the reactor plant turned out an even 10-percent power.

About the only bad news was the storm on the surface. For some reason a series of squalls was parading around the top of the world, and this one was a real growler. The sonar crew estimated fifteen-foot waves and forty-knot winds, unusual for the arctic summer. It knocked 10 to 20 percent off their sonar performance, but would make for ideal conditions as they approached the icepack. The sea conditions would be grinding acre-sized ice floes into ice chips, and that much noise would make the American subs very hard to detect in the ice. Sixteen hours, McCafferty told himself.
Sixteen hours and we’re out of here.

“Conn, sonar, we have a contact bearing three-four-zero. Not enough data to classify at this time.”

McCafferty went forward to sonar.

“Show me.”

“Right here, skipper.” The chief tapped the display. “I can’t give you a blade-count yet, too sketchy for anything, Well, it smells like a nuclear boat,” the chief allowed.

“Put up your model.”

The chief pushed a button and a secondary screen displayed the predicted sonar range, generated by computer from known local water conditions. Their direct-path sonar range was just over thirty thousand yards. The water was not deep enough yet for convergence zones, and they were beginning to get low-frequency background noise from the icepack. It would impede their ability to discriminate sonar contacts in the same way bright sunlight lessens the apparent intensity of an electric light.

“Getting a slow bearing change here. Going left-to-right, bearing to target is now three-four-two . . . fading out a little bit. What’s this?” The chief looked at a new fuzzy line on the bottom of the display. “Possible new contact bearing zero-zero-four.” The line faded out and stayed out for two minutes, then came back on bearing zero-zero-six.

McCafferty debated whether to go to battle stations. On one hand he might need to engage a target very soon . . . but probably not. Wouldn’t it be better to give his crew a few more minutes’ rest? He decided to wait.

“Firming up. We now have two possible submarine contacts, bearing three-four-zero and zero-zero-four.”

McCafferty went back to control and ordered a turn east, which would track his towed array on the new targets, plus give a cross bearing on each from which to compute range. It gave him more than he bargained for.

“Boston
is maneuvering west, sir. I can’t detect anything out that way, but she’s definitely heading west.”

“Sound general quarters,” McCafferty ordered.

It was no way to wake up from needed sleep, the captain knew. In berthing spaces all over the boat, men snapped instantly awake and rolled out of their bunks, some dropping to the deck, others climbing upright in the crowded spaces. They ran to stations, relieving the routine watch-standers to head for their own battle stations.

“All stations report manned and ready, sir.”

Back to work. The captain stood over the plotting table and considered the tactical situation. Two possible enemy submarines were astride his course to the ice. If
Boston
was moving, Simms probably had something also, maybe to the west, maybe aft. In twenty short minutes, McCafferty had gone from coolly confident to paranoid again. What were they doing? Why were two subs almost directly in his path?

“Take her up to periscope depth.”
Chicago
rose slowly from her cruising depth of seven hundred feet. It took five minutes. “Raise the ESM.”

The slender mast went up on hydraulic power, feeding information to the electronic-warfare technician.

“Skipper, I got three J-band aircraft search sets.” He read off the bearings.
Bears or Mays,
McCafferty thought.

“Look around. Up scope.” He had to let the periscope go all the way up to see over the wave tops. “Okay, I got a May bearing one-seven-one, low on the horizon, heading west—she’s dropping buoys! Down scope. Sonar, you have anything to the south?”

“Nothing but the two friendly contacts. Boston is fading out on us, sir.”

“Take her back down to six hundred.”
The Russians are supposed to depend almost exclusively on active sonobuoys, dammit.
He ordered a turn back to the north once they reached the ordered depth, and slowed to five knots. So they’re trying to track us
passively now. They must have gotten a twitch somewhere . . . or maybe nowhere.
Passive sonar tracking was technically very demanding, and even the sophisticated signal-processing equipment in Western navies made for many false contacts . . .
On the other hand, we’ve pretty well telegraphed our course. They could flood the area. Why didn’t we try something different? But what?
The only other passage north was even narrower than this. The western route between Bear Island and the North Cape of Norway was wider, but half of the Soviet Northern Fleet had a barrier there. He wondered if
Pittsburgh
and the rest had escaped safely. Probably. They should have been able to run faster than Ivan was able to hunt. As opposed to us.

This is how we hunt the Russians, McCafferty thought.
They can’t hear our passive buoys, and they never know when they’re being tracked or not.
The captain leaned against the rail surrounding the periscope pedestal.
The good news,
he told himself,
is that we’re damned hard to hear. Maybe Ivan got a twitch, maybe not. Probably not. If they heard us for sure, we’d have a torpedo in the water after us right now. But we don’t, so they don’t.

“Bearings are firming up on both forward contacts.”

In open ocean water, they’d have a layer to fool with, but there was none here. The combination of fairly shallow water and the overhead storm eliminated any chance of that.
Good news and bad news,
McCafferty thought.

“Conn, sonar, new contact, bearing two-eight-six, probable submarine. Trying to get a blade count now.”

“Come left to three-four-eight. Belay that!” McCafferty changed his mind. Better to be cautious than bold here. “Come right to zero-one-five.” Then he ordered
Chicago
down to one thousand feet. The farther he got from the surface, the better the sonar conditions he would have. If the Russians were near the surface to communicate with their aircraft, their sonar performance would suffer accordingly. He’d play every card he had before committing to battle. But what if—

He faced the possibility that one or more of the contacts were friendly. What if
Sceptre
and
Superb
had received new orders because of the damage to
Providence?
The new contact at two-eight-six could be friendly, too, for that matter.

Damn!
No provision had been made for that. The Brits said they’d leave as soon as the boats reached the pack, that they had other things to do—but how often had
his
orders been changed since May? McCafferty asked himself.

The only thing he could do was try to establish the range to and identity of his three contacts. It took another ten minutes for sonar to work on the contacts.

“They’re all three single-screw boats,” the chief said finally.

McCafferty grimaced. That told him more about what they weren’t than what they were. The British submarines were all of a single-propeller design. So were the Russian Victor and Alfa classes.

“Machinery signatures?”

“They’re all running at very low power settings, skipper. Not enough for a classification. I got steam noises on all three, that makes ’em nues, but if you look here you can see that we’re just not getting enough signal for anything else. Sorry, sir, that’s the best I got.”

The farther we go east, McCafferty knew, the less signal his sonar would have to work on. He ordered a turn to reverse course, coming to a southwesterly heading.

At least he had range. The northerly targets were eleven and thirteen miles away respectively. The western one was nine miles off. All were within range of his torpedoes.

“Conn, sonar, we have an explosion bearing one-nine-eight . . . something else, a possible torpedo at two-zero-five, very faint, comes in and out. Nothing else in that area, sir. Maybe some breaking-up noises at one-nine-eight. Sorry, sir, these signals are very weak. Only thing I’m really sure of is the explosion.” The captain was back in sonar yet again.

“Okay, Chief. If it was easy, I wouldn’t need you.” McCafferty watched the screen. The torpedo was still running, with a slowly changing bearing. It was no danger to Chicago. “Concentrate on the three submarine contacts.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

Chicago
continued southwest. McCafferty was stalking his western target now. He thought it the least likely to be friendly. The range closed to eight miles, then seven.

“Captain, classify the target at two-eight-zero as an Alfaclass!”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir. That is an Alfa-type engine plant. I have it clearly now.”

“Set it up! We’ll run one fish in deep, dogleg it at low speed, then pop it up right underneath him.”

His fire-control crew was getting better by the day. It almost seemed that they were working faster than the computer support.

“Skipper, if we shoot from this deep, it’ll take a lot of our reserve high-pressure air,” the exec warned.

“You’re right. Take her to one hundred feet.” McCafferty winced.
How the hell did you let yourself forget that?

“Fifteen-degree rise on the planes!”

“Set—solution set, sir.”

“Stand by.” The captain watched the depth-gauge needle turn counterclockwise.

“One hundred feet, sir.”