Submerging even with only one pump was risky. I'd been foolish to let him move away from us before he had at least two of them back on line.
"Where is he now?"
"Fifty miles astern of us, sir. Headed this way at five knots on emergency diesel propulsion." The TAO, a submariner by trade, looked distinctly worried. "She's like a freight train with that thing running.
They won't need a visual or outside targeting data to find her."
"How many S-3s do we have in the air?"
"Just one, Hunter 701." He circled the cursor around the symbol.
"And he's at bingo fuel."
"Figures." I buzzed CDC and got Reddy on the horn. "We need to set Flight Quarters and get gas in the air along with some more USW assets."
"Working on it now, sir. We're coming right as I speak."
I glanced up at the ship's heading indicator and saw he was right.
Like I said, Reddy's a good man. "How much longer?"
"Eight minutes, maybe a little less. We're crewing up helos and S-3s right now, along with a tanker."
"What about fighters?" I asked.
"I've got them on deck after the S-3s."
"Move them up. Two of them at least." I could not have pointed to any one factor that made me give the order. There were no launch indications coming in from SCIF, no other data to suggest that we were about to have MiGs inbound again. But they'd been so ready to send them out before, had done so twice already with absolutely no provocation. I wasn't taking any chances this time.
"Aye, aye, Admiral," Reddy said after a moment. He was waiting for an explanation, but I didn't have time for one right then. I hung up the phone and reached for the microphone to tactical and got the cruiser on the circuit.
"Same MEZ and safe passage sectors as before," I told the TAO. I could hear the activity in the background behind him. "No indications ― just be ready to launch on a moment's notice."
"We're ready now," the cruiser TAO answered. "Just give us a target."
"I hope you don't have one. Be ready anyway." I signed off and turned back to my own watch team. They were puzzled but ready.
COS poked his head into TFCC. "Admiral, the Norwegians are pleased to help out. They're dispatching one of their deployed icebreakers. She'll rendezvous with us at the line of demarcation, about fifty miles ahead." "Do they have any reports on the ice?" I asked.
"It's setting in now, sir. But nothing their ship can't handle."
"How about Jefferson?" Silence then. "They said it might be tricky, sir. They're talking with Captain Reddy now, working out a plan."
"We can get through, can't we?"
"If we steam straight for them right now, sir, we can."
The wrong answer. There was no way I could head for the icebreaker, not with my submarine under siege from two very potent Russian boats. I glanced up at the relative wind indicator. We'd come around to a decent course for launching aircraft. Just at that moment, I heard the rumble overhead increase into a full Tomcat howl. The plat camera showed two fighters on the cat with the USW assets lined up behind.
"Tell them to stand by, then," I said. "Try to get a feeling about whether or not they're going to be willing to come in after us if we get in a tough spot."
I saw doubt on COS's face. Privately, I agreed it would be unlikely, but I wasn't going to say so in front of the troops. The Norwegians had to live in this part of the world with the Russians, and they weren't likely to want to charge into the middle of a confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. "We'll take whatever they can give us."
"Roger that, sir." COS headed off to make sure everyone was playing from the same game book.
"Sir? Is there anything I should know?" the TAO asked.
I knew why he was asking. I'd known about the sub; maybe there was something else I was keeping from them. The TAO had the balls to put me on the spot about it.
"No, nothing. Just call it a bad feeling, that's all," I answered. I watched the screen as the fighters arced out from the carrier, followed in short order by their slower USW brethren, with the helos bringing up the rear. The fighters would be first on station over the sub.
"Admiral, all aircraft launched and four Hornets in Alert Five," the TAO said. "The air boss is ready to recover the fighters in the stack."
Tombstone. There was no time now for what I needed to say to him, not with the sub in trouble and air on the way to the rescue. Maybe later.
Might be better that way anyway give us both a chance to cool off, avoid saying words that we could never take back.
"Very well," I said. "And Admiral Magruder should be first on deck, shouldn't he?"
The TAO pointed at the screen. "He would have been."
I started swearing as I saw what the double nuts bird was doing…
17
As I saw it, there wasn't much choice. I'd been monitoring the problems with the sub on tactical and saw the carrier start its turn into the wind. The word came out that we'd stay in the marshal pattern while the fresh fighters and USW birds were launched. But I could tell from the seas that it was going to take some time to get into favorable winds, and the ice creeping out from the shoreline and down from the north was going to be a problem in sustained operations.
So there we were, flying fat, dumb and happy with a hefty fuel reserve ― what else were we supposed to do?
"Skeeter," I said over our private coordination circuit, you ready?"
Two clicks acknowledged my transmission. "Let's go, then. Combat spread, you take high." Another two clicks, and I saw Skeeter up above me peel out of marshal and head east. I was just a split second behind him.
Skeeter climbed and settled in at the correct altitude, taking his cues from me. I descended to seven thousand feet, with Skeeter maintaining the correct separation slightly behind me.
The submarine was tough to pick out at first. The sea up here was dark, oily black. Gator vectored me in on her LINK position. I finally found a streak of black in the whitecaps and blowing spray. "Got her," I announced.
"Me, too," Skeeter said. "Looks like her playmates are still submerged."
"I'm going down to take a look, maybe reassure her that we're in the area. Stay at this altitude unless I tell you otherwise." Two clicks again.
I descended in a tight spiral centered on the stricken sub. There were people in her sail, three of them that I could make out. No obvious signs of damage, no smoke. They stared up at me. I was at five hundred feet, low enough that they could make out my tail insignia. I wanted to make sure that they knew who we were.
The men in the sail were armed with shotguns. Even from this distance, they looked cold and miserable.
Then I saw why. Barely below the surface, only three hundred yards away, I could see an area of darker water. A feather trailed aft from a periscope poking up from the sea. As I watched, the Russian submarine's sleek sail broke the surface of the water, followed by the bow at a slight up angle and then the stern. An odd conical pod stuck up from the tail assembly.
The Victor, then. But where was the Akula? And just what did they have planned for our sub?
The Victor was edging in, her own sail now filling with people. Two of them were struggling with equipment. They propped it up on the edge of the sail, evidently into a slot built to accommodate it, then stepped back.
Machine guns. Probably fifty cal from the looks of them, or the Russians equivalent. Not much use against anything except a lightly armored craft.
Like a submarine.
Or a Tomcat.
The USW aircraft weren't going to be much use, not unless they had loaded a gun into the slot on the SH-60. I doubted that they had ― using the fifty cal required leaving the side door open, and the wind-chill factor in this climate would be deadly.