No, the mid-Kurils was the best option.
"Helm! Come to course one-four-five."
"Helm to course one-four-five, aye aye, sir!"
"Make our speed ten knots."
"Make revolutions for ten knots, aye, sir!"
"Kind of an inglorious end to the operation, sir," Latham said. He sounded disappointed, as though the whole affair had wrapped itself up too quickly for him.
"What did you want, a blazing run home on the surface?"
"No, sir. I just man, well, this boat has never failed in its mission before."
"This boat hasn't yet. We delivered the people where they wanted to go. We made the rendezvous for pickup, even if they didn't. We conducted the seabed survey. And now we're going home. That's all the glory I care for, anyway."
"I guess you're right."
"In any case, I'm not going to breathe easy until—"
"Conn! Sonar!"
"Sonar, Conn. Go ahead."
"New contact, designated Sierra Five-zero, bearing one-one-zero, range estimated at ten thousand yards. I've got twin screws, a big sucker. Wait one… okay, the computer IDs her as a Kresta II. Probably the Marshal Voroshilov, sir."
"Do you have a heading on her?"
"Sounds like she's heading south, Captain, across our path. She's making turns for ten knots. Just loafing, sir. Not in a hurry at all."
"Thank you, Sonar. COB? What can you tell me about a
Kresta II?"
"Big monger. Seventy-seven hundred tons' displacement fully loaded. Five hundred twenty-one feet long. Nineteen-
foot, eight-inch draft. Top speed about thirty-four, thirty-five knots. Heavily armed. Ten 533mm torpedo tubes in two quintuple launchers. Two SS-N-3 Goblet launchers. Eight Silex ASW missiles in two quad launchers. RBU-6000 and RBU-2000 ASW rocket launchers. And various antiaircraft guns, 30mm and 4.57mm. She'll also have a helipad aft, with a Ka-25 Hormone helo for ASW work."
"Thank you, COB." He exchanged looks with Latham. "Coincidence? They're just passing through? Or are they tracking us?"
"No reason to think they've heard us, Captain. Chances are they're covering themselves by posting a few ships at each likely waypoint. Cape Yelizavety qualifies, if only because it's on the shortest route out of Sakhalin Bay."
"I concur. Maneuvering! Slow to five knots."
"Slowing to five knots, aye, sir."
"Well let him pass in front of us," he told Latham. "Helm, steady as you go."
"Helm, steady as you go, aye, sir."
"My only question… "
"Yes, sir?"
"A ship that big usually has escorts. Why is he traveling alone?"
"I imagine they're in a bit of disarray right now, after chasing all over after us."
"Hmm. Maybe. Don't care to gamble on it, though. The Russians are usually pretty methodical. Isn't like them to lose focus like that."
"You think it's a trap?"
"After what we've seen so far, Number One, it's definitely a possibility."
Captain First Rank Viktor Dubrynin held the headset to his ear, listening to the sonar signal. He could hear the deep, steady thrum of the Marshal Voroshilov's twin screws, the hiss of his wake. And beneath that …
He thought for a moment he'd heard something, far out in the black and impenetrable depths of Okhotsk.
It might have been a submarine. Lieutenant Vladimir Krychkov had called him to the sonar console moments before, after thinking he'd heard the distinctive throb of a submarine power plant. The question… whose was it? The American was almost certainly in this area — Dubrynin was willing to stake his career on it — but so too were a large number of Russian submarines. An entire PLARB bastion had been designated in the waters southeast of here, almost straight ahead, and there would be ballistic-missile submarines hiding there. And there were the attack boats, some guarding the PLARBs, others hunting for the American.
No doubt Vetrov's Krasnoyarskiy was somewhere close by as well. The man wasn't that skillful, but he was lucky, and sometimes luck was more to be treasured than skill. Vetrov might have guessed the American would be passing this point as well.
What had Krychkov heard?
Ivan Rogov was running just ahead of the Marshal Voroshilov, probing the sea ahead with his sonar. Somewhere out there, the American sub was trying to sneak away.
And Dubrynin was going to find him….
24
"Captain? Sonar. Navigational request."
"Go ahead, Rodriguez. What do you have in mind?"
"Could you bring us forty degrees to port, please?"
"Very well. Helm! Come to one-eight-five."
"New course, one-eight-five, aye aye, sir."
"Mr. Latham? Take over here. I'm going up to the sonar shack."
"Very well, sir."
He ducked through the doorway into the long, narrow sonar room, where Rodriguez, Kellerman, and another rating were sitting at the consoles, headsets in place. "Well, Rodriguez? Where are you taking my boat?"
Rodriguez pointed to the waterfall on his monitor, green light cascading down the screen. "You see that, sir? That's the Kresta II."
"Okay…. "
"Now … this spike, right here? That is not a Kresta."
"All right, what is it?"
"Low-frequency noise… about fifty hertz. Sounds like a cyclic pump operating at three thousand revs per minute. Divide that by sixty cycles, and you get fifty hertz. The Soviets have pumps like that on some of their newer submarines, in the power-plant cooling assemblies."
"You think that's a Russian sub?"
"Yes, sir. A very close Russian sub, with most of its sound masked by the Kresta. It could be some sort of machinery operating on board the Kresta, of course. But… " He turned a pointer dial, changing the screen display. "Directional analysis puts that pump noise ahead of the Kresta. Not by much, but enough to make me think it's a sub. I figured if you could give me a look from the side arrays, I could sharpen up my DA."
"You got it."
Pittsburgh's main sonar was her big, BQQ-5A spherical array tucked into her bow, but she had lateral arrays as well. The bow sonar actually was omnidirectional, giving coverage across 150 degrees to either side of the bow, leaving only a sixty-degree wedge centered on dead astern to which it was deaf, and its coverage included all of the area to either side covered by the hull array.
However, the hull array could register much lower frequencies than the bow sonar, all the way down to fifty hertz, where the coverage for the bow sonar ranged from 750 hertz on up to two kilohertz.
And what was key to this tactical problem was the fact that the hull array was also stretched out across the length of the Pittsburgh's hull. Just as depth perception improved with eyes set farther apart, a sonar's resolution of the direction a sound was coming from improved with individual microphones strung along the vessel's 360-foot length, rather than from the equipment compacted into the spherical bow assembly. By turning broadside to the unknown source of sound, Rodriguez ought to be able to get a better look at it… and possibly distinguish it entirely from the Kresta II.