To Kill the Potemkin (26 page)

"And
if she
doesn't?"

"We'll
have to
wait and see."

Sorensen
played
the brief tape of the picket,
backed it up and ran it through a series of filters that corrected the
distortion and removed extraneous sound. Then he ran it through the
signature
program.

"Okay,
Fogarty,
what is it?"

"I'm
not sure."

"Is
it Soviet?"

"Yes."

"How
do you know?
That might be Her
Majesty's Ship
Valiant
."

"He
moved when we
moved, and stopped
when we stopped. He's hostile. He's up above four hundred feet trying
to listen
to us, trying to decide which one to follow, and his prop cavitated
just so.
November class, even the computer knows that. It's not the Alpha."

November
was flashing on
the screen.

"Very
good,
Fogarty. See, there's nothing
so mysterious about these Russians and their noisy boats. Let's play
the tape
again. It
could
be the Alpha simulating a November."

While
the tape
was running, Sorensen stood up
and looked at the chart of Soviet subs. He tapped the drawing of the
November
class attack subs. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, I recognize that
boat.
That's our old friend
Arkangel
.
Jesus, they must've pulled that thing out of mothballs. Wow, we don't
need
sonars to pick up
Arkangel
.
All we need is a Geiger counter."

"What
do you
mean?"

"I
mean, that is
a hot boat. She's so
radioactive I bet she glows in the dark. I sure wouldn't want to be on
it. If
you can feel sorry for any Russian sailors, think about that. Those
suckers get
more radiation in a month than we'll get in five hundred years. Just
for them
to come this far from Murmansk and then have to go back means every one
of
those guys has been zapped... Sonar to control, we have a signature.
November class, it's
Arkangel
."

"Very
well,
sonar. Control to
communications."

"Communications,
aye."

"Prepare
to send
up a radio buoy on my
order. Message as follows: Hostile contact thirty-six degrees
thirty-four
minutes north, six degrees forty-one minutes west. Priority one."

"Priority
one,
aye."

They
waited in
silence, drifting slowly in
the slight current.
Vallejo
was three miles south,
six hundred feet
deeper, and also drifting. The Russian was eight miles west and making
no
noise.

Sorensen
hunched
over his console, quietly
humming and beeping along with the faint sounds of marine life that
came
through his earphones. Every few minutes he looked casually at Fogarty,
noting
the exhaustion beginning to etch deep lines under the young sailor's
eyes.

After
two hours
Sorensen was ready to have
Fogarty relieved. He whispered, "You're through, kid. Hit the sack."

Fogarty
shook his
head

"That's
an order.
Get outta—"

"Attention
all
hands. General quarters,
general quarters. Man battle stations. Man battle stations. Prepare for
maneuvering."

On
the screen
they could see
Vallejo
already moving.

"Okay,
Fogarty, I
guess you're going to
stay put. You awake?"

"Never
felt
better in my life."

"Control
to
navigation. Set course three
three one."

"Course
three
three one, aye."

"All
ahead slow."

"All
ahead slow,
aye."

The
ship
shuddered once and began to move.
Vallejo
was heading south and
Barracuda
north. The Russian
hesitated, then moved toward
Vallejo
.

"Son
of a bitch,"
Sorensen said.
"She didn't take the bait. This stupid fucker is in for it now."

In
the control
room Springfield called
communications. "Send up the buoy."

"Communications
to control. Buoy
away."

From
the top of
the sail a small float
detached itself from the ship and rose to the surface. A small,
powerful radio
beamed an encoded, enciphered, compressed and scrambled message to
Rota. Thirty
seconds later an alarm sounded on the Spanish aircraft carrier
Dédalo
, and
helicopter rotors started churning up the night.

"Control
to
weapons."

"Weapons,
aye."

"Lieutenant,
load
tubes three and six.
Conventional warheads, wire-guided."

Hoek
could sense
his blood pressure rising.
He began to sweat. "Conventional warheads, wire-guided, aye. Weapons to
torpedo room."

"Torpedo
room,
aye."

"Chief,
load
tubes three and six with
Mark thirty-sevens, Mod three. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not
a
drill."

Lopez
pushed a
button on his console and a
red light began to blink in the torpedo room. The torpedo-men jumped to
attention.

"Johnson,"
Lopez
yelled across the
room, "load three and six. This... is... not... a...
drill."

The
torpedomen
unbolted two torpedoes from
their bays and slipped them into tubes. When the inner doors were
locked, the
targeting computer began feeding data to the on-board computers behind
the
warheads.

"Control
to
weapons, lock on
sonar."

"Lock
on sonar,
aye."

Hoek
punched
buttons on his console, and the
signature of the November was fed into the torpedoes.

"Flood
tubes."

"Flood
tubes,
aye."

Fogarty
listened
to the sound of seawater
rushing into the torpedo tubes, thinking the war of nerves was about to
become
something else... "We can't sink her," he muttered, "she's in
international waters—"

"There
is no way
in hell the skipper is
going to let
Arkangel
or any other Russian sub put
a tail on a
boomer," Sorensen cut him off. "Not allowed. No way. We know it, and
the captain of
Arkangel
knows it. An attack
submarine like that one,
or
this one, is considered the most destabilizing military
unit you can
get. Suppose the Russians had a tail on every one of our boomers. They
could
sink all of them all at once. Result—no second strike, no deterrence.
So we
don't even give them a chance. Just like they wouldn't give us a
chance—"

"Control
to
sonar. Echo range, maximum
power, target-seeking frequency. Let him have it, Ace."

Sorensen
nodded,
and Fogarty took a deep
breath. The Russian on his screen had become much more than a blip. In
a
fraction of a second Fogarty remembered his first sonar lashing, the
collision
and Sorensen's tape. He was ready. His onetime concern for the Russians
was
gone. They hadn't sunk anyway, just faked it... Deliberately he
locked the
echo ranger on the Russian sub, turned it up to maximum power, and
pushed the
button. The echo came back with a resounding ping.

In
the control
room every screen came alive
with incoming data from the target. Each man was holding his breath.
They were
alone, no longer a so-called "instrument of national policy" but a
state unto themselves in the open sea. In a matter of moments they
might be
infamous, or dead, or worse.

This
time the
Russians did not hesitate. The
single ping from the target-seeking sonar meant the next thing they
would hear
would be a torpedo.
Arkangel
made an abrupt
ninety-degree turn and suddenly
the sea erupted with the roar of her machinery. She cut loose all her
raw
power, and in a matter of seconds she was heading due west at thirty
knots,
leaving
Vallejo
free to begin her patrol unmolested.

It
happened so
fast... no one had time to
feel relief.

Fogarty's
heart
was banging his ribs hard
enough to make his chest hurt. He could almost taste the adrenaline.

Sorensen
was
standing up, his face an inch
from the screen. "That was close," he mumbled. "That was awfully
goddamn close."

He
sat down, with
unsteady fingers lit a
cigarette, took a long deep drag.

"Is
it over?"
Fogarty said.

"Yeah,
it's over."

"She
sure hauled
ass, didn't she?"

"It
was, you
might say, the prudent
thing to do, under the circumstances. She was outnumbered, after all."
He grinned.
"You sure put the fear of God into them, Fogarty. Shit, you put the
fear
of God into me."

Fogarty
stood up
and took off his earphones.
He was flexing his hand muscles, snapping his fingers over and over
from a fist
into a straight edge. Sorensen saw the glint still flickering in his
eyes.
Maybe he had pushed the kid too hard. Fogarty's lifetime of
self-control could
blow up. He was like a volcano waiting to erupt...

Fogarty
said, "I
scared the shit out of
myself."

"Take
it easy,
it's over."

Fogarty
shook his
head. "They'll come
back, they'll always come back, and we'll chase 'em and—"

"
And
as long as we win the battles, we won't have to win the war."

"You've
got a
smart answer for
everything, Sorensen. Well why don't we follow her, chase her all the
way to
the ice—?"

"Jesus,
next
you'll ask me why we didn't
blow her to hell. What did you do, take an upside-down pill?"

"Listen,
Sorensen, you told me to shape
up and do my job. So I'm doing it. Okay?"

"Sure,
okay,
killer." He smiled
when he said it. "But don't turn into another Davic. Stay cool."

"There's
nothing
cool
about a
target-seeking sonar. It's about as hot as you can get."

"It's
sure as hot
as I ever want to see
it... Listen, Fogarty, you scared yourself, you scared me. It's
okay, sooner
or later we all scare ourselves down here. We all feel like killers
sometimes.
You just got to put the beast back in his cage and keep him there...
You're
tired, you've had a busy day. Go get yourself some sleep."

Fogarty
reached
for the door, smiled.
"Okay, cowboy, I'll try to belay the beast. Whatever you say."

The
quartermaster's voice came through the
speakers just then. "Secure from general quarters. Secure from general
quarters. Midrats are now being served in the mess. That is all."

Fogarty
opened
the door to find Pisaro about
to move in from the control room.

"Pardon
me, sir,"
Fogarty said as
he stepped past.

Pisaro
shut the
door and sat down next to
Sorensen.

"Pretty
hairy,
wouldn't you say,
Ace?"

"I'd
say,
Commander."

"Did
the kid do
okay?"

"He's
not ready
to stand watch by
himself. He got pretty excited, but he'll get used to it, as much as
anybody
ever does. This kind of thing can make you grow old quick."

"Look,
Ace, are
you positive that was
Arkangel?
"

"Yes,
sir. That
was old dirty Ivan, in
person, polluting the Atlantic. Must be a new crew. They're probably
using the
old one to light up Leningrad."

"No
more dirty
tricks?"

"I
don't think
so, sir. Not this
time."

"All
right. We're
going to run a rear
guard for
Vallejo
until she clears the Strait.
You're relieved. Davic is
on his way in here. Go get yourself some grub."

The
longitude and latitude readouts on the navigation console stopped
flickering
and came to a rest.
Barracuda
hovered six hundred
feet deep at the edge
of the Atlantic. Above her, dozens of ships passed through one of the
busiest
waterways of the world, oblivious to her presence.

"Attention
all hands, this is the captain. We are now on-station four miles west
of the
Strait of Gibraltar. Our orders are to monitor all westbound submarine
traffic
passing from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. We might be here
quite some
time waiting for the Alpha. When she emerges, our orders are to track
her into
the Atlantic. Be advised that three more Soviet subs have been detected
in the
eastern North Atlantic. One of them is certainly
Arkangel
.
Twelve hours ago they were reported
approximately three hundred miles northeast of Rota. Prepare for combat
drills.
That is all."

Some
two
hundred surface ships and several submarines passed through the Strait
of
Gibraltar every day, giving the crew plenty of targets for combat
drills. At
the moment twelve ships were on the sonar screens, eleven surface ships
and a
Turkish Navy relic from World War Two making a submerged passage
east-bound
through the Strait.

Willie
Joe was practicing for his qualifying exam for first class. While Davic
and
Fogarty watched, Willie Joe sat with Sorensen, tracking the old sub.
They
listened to the fixed arrays on the bottom ping off the Turkish hull.
The sub
was so old the computer had no record of her signature. Always
thorough,
Sorensen recorded her machinery and logged it into the signature
program.

Willie
Joe
tracked the sub through the
Strait, a difficult task because of the heavy surface traffic. At the
extreme
edge of his range, when he was about to lose it, the new sonars picked
up
another submerged contact. A sub was hovering near the eastern entrance
to the
Strait.

Willie
Joe
shouted, "Sweet Jesus, it's a
nuke. It's the Russkie—" He immediately punched the button on the
console
that turned on his intercom mike, but before he could speak, Sorensen
stabbed
at the keyboard and turned it off.

"Take
it easy,
Willie Joe. Check it out.
Listen up, she's not going anywhere. Get a positive ID."