“It’s turning! The submarine is in a hard left turn…” Both Stalzer and Oliver pressed their headsets against their ears. “It’s gone! I got noise in the water, but it’s gone.”
Green turned. “What do you mean it’s gone?”
Stalzer and Oliver relaxed the pressure.
“It’s back. We got it.” Oliver reached up and moved the pointer on the display slightly. “Wow! It’s bearing dead ahead again; no bearing drift.”
Stalzer’s eyes squinted for a moment and then opened wide. “We have a decoy in the water! That’s no submarine; that noise I heard was it launching a decoy.”
“Steady on course two-four-zero, reduce speed to eight knots.” Bocharkov then turned to Tverdokhleb. “Time to deep water?”
Tverdokhleb flipped his ruler along the chart, running a pencil line down it. His tongue protruded slightly from between clinched lips.
“I said, how long until deep water?” Bocharkov repeated.
The vibration of the earlier maneuver and speed was slacking off as the K-122 slowed and steadied up on a new course.
The navigator looked up. “Maybe seven minutes on this course at speed eight knots.”
“Reduce speed to six knots!” MacDonald shouted.
The Dale vibrated as the speed rapidly decreased. It would take a minute or so for the destroyer to come down to six knots.
Motion to his right caught MacDonald’s attention. It was the running lights on the Coghlan and they were on a constant bearing. He pressed the toggle. “Combat, Skipper. What is the Coghlan doing?”
A second passed before Burnham’s voice came back. “Last report showed two-seven-zero at ten knots, sir. That was ten minutes ago.”
“I hold him constant bearing.”
More valuable time passed before Burnham replied. “Sir, we are calling him. The radar repeater shows he has changed course and is closing us.”
MacDonald grabbed the bridge-to-bridge radio handset. The bridge-to-bridge was the opened radio that every ship in the world carried that allowed them to communicate not only with one another when their paths crossed, but with Harbor Control when they approached a port, and the tugs that many times helped guide them into and out of ports.
“Coghlan, this is Dale. I hold you on constant bearing. Request you change course-speed.”
“Dale, this is Coghlan. We have had to change to course two-zero-zero to maneuver through a mess of fishing boats. Will be maneuvering back to base course two-seven-zero in a few minutes.”
“Coghlan, we are engaged in serious maneuvering and you are constricting my—”
“Sir,” the quartermaster called from the navigator’s table. Lieutenant Goldstein was walking toward the table. The quartermaster of the watch bent over the chart, dragging a pencil down the line of a ruler. “Coghlan is less than three miles and is CBDR. Unless she changes course in the next fifty seconds, we are going to be in extremis.”
FOURTEEN
“Steady on course two-two-zero! Speed eight knots,” Orlov announced.
The aft hatch opened. The zampolit Lieutenant Golovastov and the GRU Spetsnaz Dolinski entered together. Bocharkov saw the neatly folded message in Golovastov’s hand. Now was not the time for this.
“Depth?” Bocharkov asked.
“Sixteen meters.”
That was good. They had just done some high-speed turns and the planesman expertise — under the chief of the boat’s close supervision — had kept the K-122 at the same depth. He was happy they had not breached the boat or hit the bottom.
Ignatova motioned to Golovastov, who glared back, but continued toward Bocharkov. Dolinski ambled quietly behind the zampolit, ignoring the XO’s motions. The time for politics was before the battle, not in the middle of it.
The two men marched right up to where Bocharkov stood.
“Lieutenant Tverdokhleb! What is my depth? Where am I?” Bocharkov shouted, his eyes burning into Golovastov, who now stood in front of him, Dolinski slightly behind the zampolit.
“Sir, we are two kilometers off Cubi Point. Charts show fifty meters of water beneath the keel.”
Bocharkov nodded, his eyes never leaving the zampolit. Fifty meters was twenty more than he’d had minutes ago. “Time to deep water?” he asked aloud.
“Five minutes,” Tverdokhleb answered.
“Five minutes,” Orlov repeated.
“Is it light above me yet?”
“Fourteen minutes until dawn,” Tverdokhleb said.
Bocharkov glanced at the clock.
Ignatova put the weapons console handset in its cradle and started toward Bocharkov. He saw the movement. “XO, tell Engineering my intentions are to stay on course and speed for the time being. Once the Americans have regained contact, we will conduct a similar maneuver again along with decoys. We’ll need power to do it.”
It was a meaningless order. Ignatova stopped and glanced for a second at the two junior officers standing in front of Bocharkov, before returning to his position.
Bocharkov was surprised to see Orlov move closer to his position, away from the center of the control room where the office of the deck normally stood when the boat was at general quarters.
Finally, Golovastov cleared his throat.
Bocharkov ignored it. “Raise periscope,” he said. He’d take a quick look around and then lower it before some alert topside watch on the destroyers saw the wake that eight knots would create around the tube.
“Excuse me, Captain,” Golovastov said.
The noise of the hydraulics raising the periscope masked Golovastov, so Bocharkov ignored him as he bent to unfold the handles on the scope. He pressed his eyes against the eyepiece and rode the scope up. Let the two junior officers stand there. Let them wait on display for everyone to see. He was trying to save the ship, not read some Party-political message from Moscow. If it were important, it would be from the commander Pacific Fleet.
“Sir, Contact Two has changed course,” Lieutenant Yakovitch, the assistant weapons officer, said, sticking his head inside the control room from the sonar space. “It is CBDR — constant bearing, decreasing range.”
“Bearing?” Bocharkov asked as he spun the periscope toward his starboard side.
“Bearing three-zero-zero true, sir.”
“Speed?” Bocharkov asked as he aligned the scope with the compass bearing.
A slight pause occurred before Yakovitch replied, “Contact is at twelve knots.”
“Twelve knots?”
Yakovitch acknowledged the speed of the contact.
Bocharkov grunted, but his eyes never left the periscope as he focused on the running lights. Twelve knots was too fast for most destroyers to have passive contact. The American sonar pulses were coming from Contact One, the combatant behind them. The lights blurred into focus. It took him only a couple of seconds to tell he was looking at the port bow of the destroyer. Bocharkov glanced at the compass. Same bearing.
“Our contact behind us?”
“On course two-zero-zero, sir, slight left-bearing drift.”
If the two destroyers continued on their courses, he would have a narrow window in which to escape. He grunted again. How could he—
“Captain, I must insist you acknowledge Moscow’s message.”
Bocharkov stepped back quickly. “Lower periscope.”
As the hydraulics kicked in, he jerked the message from Golovastov and quickly scanned it. Then he handed it back. “Are you satisfied?”