“Sir, Moscow is ordering you to abandon this mission.”
“What the hell do you think I am doing, Lieutenant? And you,” he said, pointing at Dolinski. “Didn’t I tell you to get the hell out of my control room?”
Dolinski’s head jumped slightly as Bocharkov caught the Spetsnaz lieutenant off guard. Bocharkov knew what Dolinski wanted to see. He wanted to witness the zampolit taking him down a notch so he could go back and make his own report through his channels.
Dolinski snapped to attention. “Comrade Captain, I need to fully test the installation. To see if it works.”
“And you want me to run up the periscope? Stick an antenna in the air?”
“It would not take many minutes, sir.”
Bocharkov grunted. “It either works or it doesn’t. It is too late to be concerned about it, don’t you think?”
“But, it is part—”
“Look, we will test it later.”
“I need to test it now, sir.”
Bocharkov held up his hand. He looked at the two men. “Now, listen to me, you two. I am trying to save the boat. That message is useless to me right now. Your intelligence apparatus — whatever it was — is something we have no control over now. It is too late. And you are endangering our lives. Now, both of you get the hell out of my control room, and I don’t want to see you again until I call for you!” Bocharkov punctuated his words with his index finger jabbing at the men. He was unaware he was also stepping toward them.
Golovastov bumped into Dolinski as he stumbled backward, catching the Spetsnaz off balance. Dolinski pushed the zampolit forward, causing Golovastov to nearly bump into Bocharkov.
Without warning, Golovastov dashed toward the forward hatch. Dolinski nodded at Bocharkov with no expression across his face. Then the Spetsnaz lieutenant turned and casually followed the fleeing zampolit out the forward hatch.
Chief Ship Starshina Kostas Uvarova stepped over to the hatch and checked the watertight seal before nodding at Bocharkov. “It is sealed,” he said.
Bocharkov took a deep breath. This wasn’t over. The two zampolits would make trouble for him through their separate pipelines. But he had to survive this before he could worry about his future.
“Give me status on the contacts,” he ordered. While he listened to the same status from a minute earlier, he envisioned how events might unfold with the two American destroyers. What could he do and when could he do it to give the K-122 more breathing room toward the deep water?
“Four minutes to one hundred meters,” Tverdokhleb announced.
One hundred meters was better than fifty, but it still wasn’t enough to lose the Americans. He needed three hundred, then a thousand, then unlimited depth to escape and evade the clumsy destroyers. What would he do if he were the captain of one of the destroyers? Helicopters? The Americans had been experimenting with these unmanned DASH helicopters that seemed to take off and disappear over the horizon to never be seen again.
No, if he were the Americans, he would keep his forces in position for an attack and, once ready, sprint forward to try to drive the K-122 to the surface. He needed time, and he needed a sound layer of water between him and the surface to mask the noises being generated by the K-122. Two sound layers would be manna from heaven.
The isothermal layers of water would bounce his passive noise downward and send the American sonar pulses upward. Give him those conditions and he would lose the Americans in minutes.
“Water beneath my keel?”
Tverdokhleb shrugged. It was never good when a navigator shrugged.
“Do you know?”
“Sir, these charts are old. They indicate less than seventy-five meters. If we could do a depth—”
“It would tell the Americans where we are,” Bocharkov snapped. He should have thought of that while the Americans were pinging, when he might have been able to mask a single ping downward to find the bottom.
Dolinski grabbed Golovastov outside the control room. “We have a problem, comrade.”
Sweat poured from the brow of the K-122’s zampolit. The man nodded, taking in a deep breath, his chest shaking with the effort.
Dolinski pulled his handkerchief from his pocket. “Here, wipe the sweat from your face.”
“I think the captain is dangerous,” Golovastov muttered.
Dolinski gave a slow nod in agreement. “We need to tell Moscow.”
“We can’t,” Golovastov objected.
Dolinski smiled. “We are the representatives of the Party. We can do anything we want when we feel our nation is endangered.”
“What can we do?”
Dolinski quickly explained his plan. A minute later the two men were walking toward Communications. Golovastov had a worried look on his face. He also knew the incident in the control room had injured his prestige in front of the crew. By the time the two of them reached the communications compartment, he had regained some of composure. Here the communicators would not know of the confrontation in the control room.
“Dale, this is Coghlan. We are turning back to base course two-seven-zero. Be advised there are numerous Filipino fishing boats north and northwest of us heading out to their favorite fishing grounds.”
Goldstein lifted the bridge-to-bridge microphone.
“Tell them to use Navy Red for their communications,” MacDonald said, referring to the secure comms.
Goldstein nodded. “Roger, copy all. Please shift to Navy Red.”
The voice from the Coghlan acknowledged the transmission.
They were lucky he didn’t bead window them. “Bead window” was the cover term transmitted in the open to tell the user he was transmitting classified or sensitive information.
MacDonald pushed the toggle switch of the 12MC and relayed the information about the fishing boats to Combat. Then he added, “Have we reestablished contact with the submarine?”
“That is a negative, sir,” Mr. Burnham replied. “Too much clutter in the water. Do you want us to pulse them again?”
It takes a minimum of three pulses for a good targeting solution. If he turned on the sonar for the third pulse, would the Soviet captain react, thinking the next thing he would hear would be American torpedoes headed his way? If he did, would he fire first?
“How close are we to the contact?” MacDonald asked.
“Last status was five minutes ago, Captain. At that time we had him six hundred yards, sir. We were closing at the time. The enemy submarine was on a course of two-two-zero at four knots. When we hit him with the second pulse, he went balls-to-the-wall on speed, turned left, put a knuckle in the water…”
“How do we know it was a knuckle?”
“It faded within a couple of minutes. The submarine also released a decoy, but it failed to fool our sonar team.”
“If the submarine increased speed, then we ought to be hearing the cavitation.”
“We think it went silent, hiding behind the noise of the cavitation and the noisemaker it released.”
“Very well.” He put the handset back in the cradle and looked over at Goldstein. “Slow to four knots.”
He listened as the order cascaded from the officer of the deck to the helmsman, each one in the line of command repeating the order given him. At the navigation plotting table, the quartermaster grabbed the logbook and wrote the time of the order along with the order given. Somewhere in Washington, D.C., every logbook of every warship that ever sailed under the American colors was stored.
MacDonald wanted to be in Combat. Navy tradition had the captain on the bridge, but warships were fought from the combat information center in this modern era. He walked the length of the bridge, peering forward. Off his bow, somewhere beneath those dark waters and within a mile of him, was a Soviet submarine. Angst built as he waited for his sonar team to regain contact. To lose a submarine within a mile of you inside American-controlled shallow water was not good. He stopped and wondered for a moment if maybe the Dale could have passed over the submarine.