She backed away a couple of steps and caught the grab rail. Looking into his face, she could see that he had felt the same sensation.
Only, he hadn't been afraid of it.
She started to speak again, not quite knowing what she was about to say, when the raucous blaring of the klaxons cut her off.
"General quarters! General quarters! All battle stations close up and rig for surface and ASW engagement!"
They split apart, bolting for their duty stations.
"Captain on the bridge!" Ken Hiro sang out as she brushed past the light curtain behind the center console.
"As you were." She shot her first look forward, over the heads of the helmsmen and out the windscreen.
She'd been right to come up here instead of to the Combat Information Center. You could fight men off a CRT screen, but the weather you had to go face-to-face with.
The seas were running at least Force Five: steep-sided gray combers with twenty-five knots of wind peeling spray off their crests. A roiling overcast hung low over the ship and hazed into a dense bank of sea smoke to the north.
The sky was brighter to the south, but it was with that odd, yellowish pale tint that denoted what polar hands called "ice blink," refracted sunlight trapped between the cloud cover and the frozen sea. Not far out that way was the outermost fringe of Antarctica's icy armor.
The more immediate problem lay straight on beyond the Cunningham' s bow. To the west, an ominously dark smear ran across the joining of the sea and sky.
A glance at the meteorological repeaters verified that she was looking at a squall line running vanguard to a mean-looking localized cold front.
"Okay, Ken," Amanda said to her exec. "We're going to be keeping the con up here. Get us a line on the squawk box to Combat Information Center and keep it open."
"Aye, aye, Captain. Glad to have you with us."
She circled the helm station and took a position leaning into the grab rail that ran just beneath the curved row of battle data repeaters at the front of the bridge. Most of the strike damage had been repaired. A new thermoplastic door had been inset in the portside bridge-wing access and the shattered flatscreens had been replaced. Only the shrapnel scarring on the decks and bulkheads and the stark white bandaging on the side of Hiro's face served to recall what had happened here the day prior.
"Okay, CIC. This is the Captain. What do you have for me?"
Back aft, freezing air boiled into the hangar as the helipad elevator sank down to accept Retainer Zero One. At their equipment lockers at the head of the bay, Arkady and his SO geared up quickly, survival suits over flight suits and Mae West life jackets over both.
Snagging up his helmet, Vince reached over and slapped the actuator key on the flight-status board inset in the bulkhead. The bar graphs of the pitch-and-roll inclinometers and the wind-velocity gauge shot up their scales and began to blip an ominous red as they intermittently drifted above their safety levels.
"Hey, Lieutenant," Grestovitch asked uneasily. "We're not actually gonna launch in this shit, are we?"
"The fates will decree, Gus. Let's saddle up."
"It was a single thirty-second signal intercept off a low-powered surface-search radar." Christine Rendino's filtered voice filled the bridge. "Bearing about fifty degrees relative off the starboard bow. Range indeterminable but pretty close. Couldn't make the system signature, maybe a Terma.
"The thing is that the signal broke intermittently and there was a lot of output waver, like maybe you had waves breaking over the emitter head."
"Like we might have a sub out there who stuck his radar mast up to have a look around?"
"Exactly, boss ma'am. He didn't get us, though. McKelsie reports that his signal strength was way below anything that could get a return off of us."
"Oh, he's got us, Chris. He probably picked us up on his passive sonar arrays, then he executed that radar sweep to verify who we are. When he failed to get a radar return off us, that would give him his positive ID."
Amanda called back over her shoulder to the control stations. "Lee helm. Rig for silent running. All stop on main engines and feather your propellers. All power rooms to idling output. Activate Prairie Masker and convert to hydrojet propulsion, one hundred percent power."
"Aye, aye, converting to hydrojet propulsion. Prairie Masker is on-line. Ship now rigged for silent running."
In acknowledgment of the fact that the modern submarine was possibly the single deadliest enemy the surface warship must face, the Cunningham's stealth defenses extended below the waterline. Her power plants were "rafted" in heavy sound-suppressive insulation and she was equipped with a Prairie Masker compressor system that could sheath her hull in further layers of noise-killing air bubbles.
In addition, she mounted a set of auxiliary pumpjet drives in her propulsor pods, a silent propulsion option that did not produce the churning cavitation of conventional ship's screws.
"Tactical Officer, bring up your V-ROC nights."
Down on the sweep of the Duke's long foredeck, a series of small, hexagonal doors snapped open on the upper surfaces of the three Mark 42 Vertical Launch Systems. Beneath each door was a watertight plastic cap sealing a missile silo, and beneath that, a V-ROC, a vertically launched antisubmarine rocket, the fleet's premier long-range sub killer.
They just needed something to use them on. The tactical displays showed only empty water.
"Sonar, are you getting anything at all?"
"Nothing passively, Captain. Conditions in the surface sound duct are deteriorating due to the weather, and we're getting some background noise from the ice pack."
Christine's voice cut in on the circuit. "If this is that Argentine Kockums 471 we lost track of a few days ago, we're not talking about a submarine as much as we are a large chunk of solidified silence."
Amanda gave a nod that her friend could not see. Of all of the weapons in the Argentine arsenal, those Swedish attack boats were probably the closest to being on a par with the Cunningham's technology. One of them was out there now, hovering in the deepwater darkness, listening, trying to line up a killing shot.
"What do you think, Ken?"
Hiro gave the bill of his officer's cap an uneasy tug. "I'd say that without putting a helo up, we don't have much chance against this guy."
"I agree." Amanda hesitated a moment and again scanned the clouded horizon. "We'd really be stretching the air-operations envelope, though."
A wind-driven slash of spray across the glass in front of her made her decision.
"Let's hold off on the helo launch. Helm, come left to two six zero. Let's open the range a little and see if we can sneak past this guy."
Minutes passed. Amanda frowned down into the tac displays as they remained obstinately empty. Snapping the jack of her headset into an access point on the console, she called up the direct sound feed coming from the hydrophones. Bypassing the cascade display, she used the computer filters to separate out the different movements of the Antarctic sea's life song.
On the surface, the hiss-and-break turbulence of wave action was dominant, the boiling intermix of ocean and air being whipped up by the oncoming storm. Beyond that, Amanda could make out the soft sizzling of a bank of krill, running deep just off the bottom. And then there was the rolling, over-the-horizon rumble of the pack, the accumulated sound of a billion tons of ice, butting and splintering in its glacial-speed dance around the southern continent.
Whatever noise the Argentine sub was producing was being lost in that acoustic environment — as was the Cunningham's trace, Amanda hoped.
Amanda unplugged the jack with an impatient yank.