To Kill the Potemkin (12 page)

Fogarty
watched
the screen. "He's around
the point," he said.

Sorensen
held up
his thumb. "Go."

"Sonar
to
weapons," Fogarty said.
"Lock on weapons guidance."

"Weapons
guidance
locked on sonar,"
said Hoek over the intercom. "Tracking target."

"Five,
four,
three, two, one.
Fire."

The
ship bucked
as it spat out a torpedo, and
the bow angled up for a moment until the trim computer automatically
pumped
water forward to compensate for the loss in weight. Sorensen listened
to
confirm the torpedo was a dummy. The motor never kicked in and it sank
into the
mud of the gulf.

Hoek
was yelling
through the intercom,
"Sorensen, what's the matter with you? Hit them with the target
sonar."

Fogarty
stared at
his console. The
narrow-beam echo ranger was locked onto
Mako
and
tracking her course,
but Fogarty, remembering his own recent sonar lashing, couldn't help
thinking
of the sonar operators whose eardrums were about to take a pounding.
Another
moment's delay and those same operators would hear the sound of the
dummy
whooshing out of the tube, and they would return the favor.
Reluctantly, he
pushed the button on his console.

Glaring
at
Fogarty, Sorensen said, "The
next time you hesitate on a direct order will be your last."

Sound.
Fogarty
had learned, traveled through
warm shallow seawater at 4921.25 feet per second. 12.33 seconds later
two men
were screaming in
Mako
's
sonar room, and three more in her control room.

On
Barracuda
there were cheers. Hoek
even did a little war dance in his seat.

Mako
was now
hors de
combat
, and five of
her
crew had ringing ears. The umpire aboard
Mako
immediately noted the
"kill," as did Billings, the umpire aboard
Barracuda.
Both
ships sent up radio buoys.

"Well
done," said
Flowers.
"Congratulations."

"Sorry
about your
men," answered
Springfield. "Buy you a drink in Norfolk."

"Sink
the
Hawk
and I'll buy you
one."

Springfield
retracted his buoy, and
Barracuda
continued north for three hours on electric power,
making sure
there was no second picket. Finally the main turbine was cut in.

"All
ahead full,"
ordered
Springfield, and
Barracuda
lunged forward like a
dolphin.

Six
hours after
leaving Naples,
Barracuda
raced through the Tyrrhenian Sea, heading for the Strait of Bonifacio.

"Attention
all
hands, attention all
hands. Secure from general quarters. The movie this morning will be
Bonnie
and Clyde
at zero nine hundred in the mess. That is all."

After
eliminating
Mako
from the
wargame, the crew was jubilant. In the galley Stanley was preparing
cioppino
from fresh fish taken on at Naples.

"What
is it?"
asked Cakes.

"Shark
soup,"
Stanley replied with
a grin.

In
the torpedo
room Lopez was feeding Zapata
and smoking a huge stogie. Aft, even the nucs got cute and painted the
profile
of a sub on the casing of turbogenerator number one.

Coming
off watch,
Fogarty went to the movie,
and Sorensen went looking for Eddie Luther, the corpsman. With a peek
at the
watch sheet in the control room he learned that Luther was taking his
turn on
Sorensen's Beach.

Luther,
a dapper
little man with a taste for
jazz and no scruples whatsoever, sold amphetamines.

No
one was on
duty in the steering machinery
room when Sorensen banged on the door to the Beach. When it opened,
Sorensen
heard Cal Tjader playing on his machine. Silently, Luther passed
Sorensen a
packet of ten Dexamyl tablets in exchange for a ten dollar bill, and
Sorensen
headed for the sonar room to test all the circuits in his console.

Two
hours later,
on his way to the mess.
Sorensen felt the ship reduce speed. As he was munching a hamburger, it
came to
a complete stop.

"Attention
all
hands, this is the
captain. We have entered French territorial waters approximately thirty
miles
off the coast of Corsica. We are attempting to contact a French
submarine
operating in this area. All hands to maneuvering stations. That is all."

Sorensen
took up
a cup of coffee and walked
back to the sonar room.

The
Strait of
Bonifacio between the islands
of Corsica and Sardinia was slightly over six miles wide at its
narrowest
point. Small islets guarded both sides of the eastern entrance, and
dangerously
shallow shoals surrounded the western exit into the Mediterranean.

There
were three
channels deep enough for
submerged passage, two on the Italian side and one on the French. Each
was a
sonar trap. The bottom was seeded with fixed arrays of active and
passive
sonars impossible to elude. The echo rangers also served as submarine
beacons
to guide submerged ships through the Strait, which was frequently
transited by
submarines from all NATO navies, plus the French, but always with prior
notice.

The
Italians had
extremely quiet
diesel-electric subs and competent sonar operators. As part of NATO,
the Italians
would report
Barracuda
s presence to the fleet, and
so the element of
surprise would be lost. The French were less predictable, though
generally
inhospitable toward incursions into their territorial waters.

Springfield
decided to gamble on the French.
So soon after withdrawing from NATO, the French Navy was not inclined
to
cooperate with their former allies in small matters. The worst they
could do
was deny
Barracuda
passage through the Strait and
send her back the way
she came.

When
it arrived,
contact was with
Sirène
,
a diesel-electric of the Daphné class. Davic, on duty in the sonar
room, was
not surprised to discover the French sub already on an interception
course with
Barracuda.
Springfield ordered all stop, and they waited.

As
soon as
Sorensen arrived in the sonar room
he could see the French sub moving slowly across his screen. The chop
of her
propellers came through the speakers.

"Get
lost, Davic."

"The
French are
pigs," Davic, the
linguist, muttered on his way out. "De Gaulle thinks he's Napoleon."

Fogarty
came in
and sat down.

"Practice
your
sonic codes,"
Sorensen said. "You're going to need them."

Maneuvering
in
close proximity to another
submerged ship was a tricky business. Sorensen never enjoyed it. A
collision
underwater could rupture the pressure hulls of both ships and send
their crews
to the bottom.

Three
quarters of
an hour after the first
contact,
Sirène
came to a full stop five hundred yards away, her echo-ranging sonar
pinging
every three seconds off
Barracuda'
s hull with
monotonous regularity.
Sorensen didn't know how adept the French were at identification. They
might
mistake
Barracuda
for a Soviet sub, in which case
there was no telling
what her captain might do. While he was considering this possibility
the pings
ceased, were replaced by a standard NATO sonic
code. The French
sonar operator was tapping out an enciphered message in Morse over a
gertrude,
the underwater telephone. Sorensen transcribed the message onto a
notepad, and
the captain took it into the locked code room to decode it.

Captain
Springfield composed his reply as a plea from one submariner to another.

While
the
French captain decoded Springfield's message,
Sirène
did not communicate
with the surface. Her captain alone was deciding what to do.

"Well
I'll be goddamned," said Pisaro. "Looks like Netts had it rigged all
the time."

Springfield
said nothing, studied a chart. Two
nerve-racking hours were required to align both subs astride the beacon.
Barracuda
, on the
right,
was longer and broader of beam than
Sirène
, and the
Italian operators of the
fixed arrays would surely
notice something peculiar about the
passage. In order to resolve the anomaly they would go through
channels, would
inform their superiors, who would then query the French commander on
Corsica.
The French also would have both subs on their screens and yet be unsure
of what
was happening. By the time it was sorted out.
Barracuda
should
be clear
of the Strait, Captain Delongue would have explained the situation to
his
superiors and would receive either a pat on the back or a court-martial.
The
latter was a real possibility, and Springfield felt a certain distaste
about
requesting Delongue, a man he did not know, to take that risk.

Slowly
the two subs moved into the Strait. The course marked by the
beacons included three turns, the last of which curved around dangerous
shoals
off the Iles Lavezzi, a cluster of islets a mile off the tip of
Corsica.
Sorensen locked his side-to-side sweeping array to the left in order to
report
instantly any maneuvering by
Sirène
,
and fed the data to the navigator in the control room. Fogarty
monitored the bottom scanner to make sure the depth under the keel
corresponded
with the chart. The captain stood at the sonar repeater in the control
room and
kept his eyes on both screens while giving orders to the helm.

The
first turn headed the ship on a southwesterly course that paralleled
the Italian passage through the Strait. In the belly of the ship the
inertial
navigation gyros spun on their axes, sending the digital readouts of
longitude
and latitude on the navigator's console spinning dizzily until the turn
ended.

They
were at periscope depth, but no periscope from
Barracuda
broke the surface. Springfield navigated on gyros and sonar alone.

Sirène
also ran without benefit of periscope, radar
or communication gear. In his log Delongue cited sea conditions and
the
presence of merchant ships in the Strait. No submarine captain would
ever risk
damage to his precious surface gear, but Delongue's real reason was
that he
didn't want to answer any questions until he cleared the Strait.

The
second turn,
to the right, brought them
within half a mile of the main Italian fixed-arrays. Pings echoed back
and
forth between the two subs, and off the bottom and the surface, sending
a weird
and confusing signal back to the Italian operators on Sardinia.
Sorensen
imagined them listening to this strange mix, scratching themselves and
trying
to puzzle it out. He was sure they could hear coolant pumps and they
probably
were asking themselves if the French had secretly developed a nuclear
attack
submarine.

As
the ships
eased into the final turn, the
depth gauge on Fogarty's bottom scanner suddenly began to rise.

"Sorensen,
look
at this...?"

Sorensen
twisted
around to look at Fogarty's
screen and recognized the rising pattern of bottom sand. He immediately
unlocked the side-to-side sweepers from the French sub and started
looking for
obstructions. If there was anything big resting on the bottom, they
were going
to hit it, but the screen showed nothing but the rising shoal a half
mile away.

Sorensen
spoke
into the intercom. "Sonar
to control. Shoals bearing two nine seven, depth one two zero feet and
rising.
One one five feet."

"Control
to
sonar," said the
captain, "we have it on the screen. Mr. Pisaro, take her up to
sixty-five
feet."

"Depth
sixty-five
feet, aye. Rig for
steep angles."

The
command
rippled throughout the ship.
Sailors in every compartment grabbed whatever was close and held on.

"Stern
planes up twenty degrees."

"Up
twenty degrees, aye."

"Pump
forward trim tank number one to aft trim tank number
two."

The
bow rose sharply and the prop drove the sleek hydrodynamic hull
toward the surface.
Sirène
began to rise alongside,
but not nearly so
quickly. The diesel-electric sub did not have the power to drive
herself
rapidly up or down in a state of neutral buoyancy.

The
shoals continued to rise. Springfield realized he would have to
surface or reduce speed, steer to the left and fall in behind the
French sub in
order to avoid grounding on the shoals.

"All
stop," he said. "I'll be damned if I'm going to
surface in the Strait."

From
his diving console Pisaro said, "That French captain is
covering his ass, protecting himself from a court-martial sure as hell."

"Sonar
to control.
Sirène
is moving deeper into the
channel.
Range one one zero yards, one two zero yards, one three zero yards."

"He's
giving us room to maneuver," said the XO. "He can
tell them he tried to make us surface and then that he had to move to
avoid a
collision."

"All
right," said the captain. "By now, the Italians know
something funny is going on, but they'll want to talk to the French
before they
do anything else. Let's just get the hell out of here. All ahead slow.
Left
full rudder."