And at the same time, a fifth American submarine, the Los Angeles class boat Pittsburgh, had surfaced ten miles off the east coast of Sakhalin, opposite the port of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk.
The Soviet reaction had been predictable, and instantaneous. The Pittsburgh was well outside the three-mile limit declared by the United States, but well inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by Moscow… not to mention being a good two hundred miles within a body of water claimed in its entirety by the Soviet Union.
Pinpointed almost at once by half a dozen radar transmitters, from Novikovo in southern Sakhalin to an Ilyushin-38 May operating out of Petropavlovsk, the Pittsburgh had instigated a leisurely turn back out to sea, then submerged once more with an almost royal arrogance.
With four electronic surveillance submarines listening, a full alert had been sounded throughout the Soviet Far East, from Vladivostok in the south to tiny, remote Anadyr, far to the north on the Bering Sea. ASW aircraft had lifted into the dark, partly overcast skies. Ships had gotten under way. SAM batteries had been manned. Radar had swept skies and sea alike.
And the four spy subs had recorded every movement, every radio call, every radar bandwidth from their watery blinds in the icy black waters off the Soviet homeland.
It was an old game, a game as old as the Cold War itself, a matching of wits and nerve, of technology and crew training in secret and out-of-the-way arenas around the world. It was also a war, and a deadly one. The battles, the heroes, the stakes were never published, never revealed to the civilian community… but the casualty lists were real. If the Russians managed to corner the Pittsburgh, they would find a way to bring her to the surface. By their way of thinking, they were defending their sovereign territorial waters; they were as skittish about U.S. subs lurking in the Sea of Okhotsk as their American counterparts would be about Russian boats cruising up the Chesapeake to eavesdrop on electronic chitchat coming out of the Pentagon or Fort Meade.
"How much more time are you going to need?" Perrigrino asked, breaking Travers's reverie.
Travers looked at his watch. Operational orders called for listening to Soviet signals and recording them for at least three hours … but dawn in these waters was at 0451 hours … several minutes ago, now. He knew Perrigrino was less than enthusiastic about trying to slip away from the approaches to a heavily traveled military port under the light of day. These waters were shallow, this close inshore, and a submerged submarine could be picked out sometimes by its shadow, from the air.
"We either move out now, so we can be in deep water by the time it's fully light," he said, "or we stay put until after dark. Your call, Captain. We have a lot of good stuff already… including the sighting of that Mike."
"Yeah, but another twelve hours would give us a lot more, right?"
"Certainly." Travers nodded. Perrigrino had the rep of an aggressive sub skipper, one who wasn't afraid to get in close and tight when it counted.
Perrigrino pulled up another chart and studied it for a moment. This one was a close-up look at the Bay of Tauyskaya and the approaches to Magadan. An island, Ostrov Zav'yalova, marked the southern boundary to the bay.
The captain pointed, indicating the waters just north of the slender island. "We've got us a great hide here," he said. "There's enough junk in these waters to cover us even if they start active pinging. I think we're best off staying put. If anything, it'll give us a longer run in darkness to make it out of this hole, down Kamchatka's west coast and out through the Kuril'skiy Straits. XO?"
"I concur, Captain."
"Okay," Travers said. "We'll keep our ears on."
He was still troubled, however, as he made his way down the ladder, turned left, and headed forward toward the torpedo room. While U.S. subs had performed a variety of espionage operations in the Sea of Okhotsk, everything from cable tapping to monitoring the splashdowns of Soviet missile tests, this was the first time they'd tried deliberately provoking a Soviet military response. The idea, Travers had heard, had come in the wake of the Soviet downing of a civilian airliner, the ill-fated Korean Air Lines Flight 007, in 1983. U.S. and Japanese intelligence assets, including an American ELINT aircraft over the Pacific, had picked up a wealth of data on Soviet military responses as the Boeing 747, with 269 people on board, had been pursued by a MiG and shot down by close-range missile fire.
Those civilians had been among the casualties of this sometimes not-so-cold war. Soviet actions that night had fully demonstrated their willingness to defend their territory with lethal force.
How, he wondered, would they react to the unprovoked intrusion by an American attack submarine?
Joe McNally grumbled about the fact that he'd forgotten the coffee.
2
Commander Mike Chase leaned in what he trusted was a casual manner against one of the stanchions next to Pittsburgh's periscope walk and looked up at the heavily painted maze of pipes, fittings, and cable bundles running among the fluorescent lighting fixtures of the combat center's overhead. The pings were coming faster now, shrill, hard punches of sound that rang through the boat's hull and internal spaces like the tolling of enormous, high-pitched bells.
This, he reflected, with just a trace of bitterness, is one hell of a way to end up my final cruise aboard this boat.
"Of course it's just a guess," the boat's XO said quietly, "but I think they just might have us where they want us." LCDR Frederick Yates Latham, as always, was unhurried and unperturbed, an expert at the subtle understatement and the faintly sardonic quip. Just once, Chase thought, he'd like to know what the young Executive Officer was really thinking. As always, though, those pale, ice-blue eyes and recruiting-poster features gave nothing away. "Diving Officer," Chase said. "What's the depth below keel?"
Lieutenant Francis J. Carver looked at a gauge on his board. "One-nine-six feet beneath the keel, Captain," he said. "We're coming up on the hundred-fathom line."
"Very well. Tell me when we hit the line."
"Report crossing the hundred-fathom line, aye, sir."
Carver was new aboard the Pittsburgh, young and green, but he seemed to have all his shit in one seabag, as the saying went. He'd come aboard back at Mare Island just before the Pittsburgh had gotten under way, replacing the boat's previous D.O., John Quimby. After almost three years of sea duty, much of that spent aboard the Pittsburgh, Quimby had finally swung a billet in a postgrad course at Monterey, headed for a master's in aeronautical engineering.
Quimby was going to be missed, damn it. The 'Burgh was about to move into some shallow and treacherous waters, and chances were they were going to have to do some fancy depth changes, hard, fast and accurate. Chase would have liked a more experienced man behind the planesman.