"And a submarine's greatest strength is its invisibility," Allison said. "If the bad guys know where to look for you, you're dead."
O'Brien was used to the old hands on board the Pittsburgh painting gloomy pictures to bait the nubs, a reasonably harmless way of passing the time. Chief Allison, especially, liked to tell sea stories about some of his earlier boats, and some of those could stand your hair on end.
This, however, didn't sound like a sea story.
"There's a story going around the Fleet," Allison went on, "about an American submarine, a Sturgeon, I think, that got cornered by the Russians right here in the Sea of Oshkosh. She was spotted, boxed in, and depth charged until she was forced to surface. Of course what happened next was pretty well buried. They hushed it up completely."
"What did happen?" Benson wanted to know.
"I don't know," Allison said. "I told you they hushed it up!"
"Now you sound like Big C," O'Brien said. "A conspiracy of silence?"
Allison laughed. "Just because you're paranoid… "
"Doesn't mean they're not out to get you," the others chorused.
For O'Brien, it felt as though the laughter that followed rang just a bit hollow.
"It has begun, Felix Nikolaevich," Captain Vetrov told his executive officer. He jerked a thumb toward the speaker above the sonar console at the port-aft end of the control room. "You hear that? The wolves have scented the prey!"
The eerie, mournful ping of multiple sonars chirping and ringing through the ocean deeps punctuated the air in the compartment, each as sharp as shattering crystal. The initial chirp of each pulse was hard and clear; the returning echoes wavered and faded like dreams. The ASW surface vessels were roughly ten miles ahead, moving south, away from the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets.
The starpom's eyes were on the waterfall displays at the Sonar Officer's station. "It doesn't appear the prey has been flushed yet," he said.
"No. No… but they will be! And when they are …" Vetrov's right fist smacked hard against his open left palm. "We will be there, torpedoes loaded and ready!"
"The orders are to force the American to the surface," the starpom reminded him.
He waved a hand. "Yes… yes, I know my orders. But I also know my duty. The Americans have entered our waters, attempting to play the old game on our back porch. This time, we will end it, once and for all. One way or the other, my friend, the American will not escape!"
Vetrov's smile broadened. He found he was eager for this confrontation.
Yes, he would show them.
He would show them all….
22
"I don't think we're going to work our way in any closer," Gordon said, face pressed up close against the Number 18 periscope's eye guard. "That place is way too lively for my blood."
He slowly panned the scope, studying the town. In infrared, the clapboard-and-shingle walls of the houses were plainly visible in shades of green and yellow. The heat signatures of people were brighter yellow, while the engine blocks of automobiles and several Zil trucks shone white.
Latham, Randall, and Master Chief Warren were watching the video feed from the periscope on one of the control-room monitors. "I like it better when you can get shots of girls sunbathing on the beach," Warren said.
"Not this time, COB," Gordon said. "We'll see what we can do back in California."
"Make it a nude beach, sir," Scobey said from the chart table, and several of the men in the control room chuckled.
"Request noted, Big C," Gordon said. "Fill out the forms and send them through channels."
"Those trucks," Randall said, breaking the mood, "they look military."
"Hard to tell with this resolution," Gordon said. "Those people on the beach might be soldiers, though."
"Who else is going to be running around on a beach at zero-dark-thirty?" Warren asked.
Gordon continued walking the scope. The town wasn't very large — a small huddle of ramshackle-looking houses and a few larger buildings, with a lot of clutter that gave the place a run-down and ill-kempt look. The waterfront consisted of a few tottering piers and pilings, with some decrepit fishing smacks and trawlers moored alongside. At least there were no military vessels — none that he could see, at any rate. Rodriguez had tracked several small ASW craft through this area two nights ago, but they appeared to have moved on.
There was no sign of the fishing craft code-named "Stenki." The craft moored at Vlasjevo's waterfront were all too small.
If the activity concentrated in the southern part of the Zaliv was indeed part of a tap aimed at the Pittsburgh, it was almost certain that Johnson and his confederates had been captured.
But Gordon didn't want to abandon them without at least an attempt to find out what had happened… or bring them back off the beach.
During the past fifteen hours, they'd worked the boat slowly up the coast, moving out into deeper water for the dangerous, daylight hours, then slipping in to the rendezvous point after dark. When Stenki failed to show at 2200 and again at 2300, Gordon had ordered maneuvering and helm to inch the submarine in toward the coast closer still, edging along a slowly shoaling bottom until they were just off the fishing village of Vlasjevo. In water so shallow that the top of Pittsburgh's sail was just beneath the surface, Gordon brought the vessel to a silent hover and watched through the periscope, searching for some trace of the missing trawler.
With no trace of the boat to be seen in the village itself, he gave the necessary orders to set the Pittsburgh in motion, moving slowly west, parallel to the coast.
Two miles west of the town, he walked the scope around, centering at last on something glowing. "Mr. Randall? What do you make of that?"
Randall studied the object on the monitor closely. "Hard to say, sir. It looks like the Stenki… about the right size, anyway. But it looks like she was burned."
"That yellow glow on the screen means there are pieces that are still pretty hot," Gordon explained. "Up forward… that looks like a mast or a boom that fell across her deck, and most of the superstructure has been burned."
"Funny angle," Warren said. "Is she aground?"
"Looks like. I think there must be a sandbar or something there, and she was run aground… maybe deliberately."
"They could have gotten off," Latham said, but he didn't sound hopeful. "If a patrol boat or something was chasing them, set them afire, maybe, they might've run aground deliberately, jumped overboard, and made it to shore."
"A lot of maybes, there," Randall said. He looked at Gordon. "I'd still like to check it out, sir."
Gordon gave him a humorless smile. "Feeling responsible for the packages, Lieutenant?"
"Well, yes, sir. I am. It was my responsibility to get them to Stenki… and my responsibility to get the Americans back off again."
"I suggest you detail your two men. I can give them a couple of hours, no more. We're dangerously exposed here, and I want to be gone well before daylight."
"I'd like to go myself, sir."
"Negative. You've still got two broken ribs."
"Easy swim, sir. I've done worse."
"Not off of my boat, you won't. Or shall I call Doc Pyter up here?"