"Your name Beagle?"
It required the greatest effort of his life to open his eyes. He saw a black man standing over him.
"Who're you?"
"Sam Potter. I'm a lieutenant with Second Force Recon. You're Beagle, right?" He turned. "We need a corpsman over here!"
"My people are all hurt."
"We're working on it. We'll have you outa here in five minutes. Hang in there, Beagle. I gotta go do some work. Okay, people," he called loudly. "Let's get those Russians checked out. If we got any live ones, we wanna move them the hell off this rock right now!"
"Michael?" Edwards was still confused. Her face was right above his when he lost consciousness.
"Just who the hell is this guy?" Lieutenant Potter asked five minutes later.
"Wing-wiper. He done good," Smith said, wincing with his own injuries.
"How'd you get here?" Potter waved for his radio operator.
"We fucking walked all the way from Keflavik, sir."
"Quite a trip, Sarge." Potter was impressed. He gave a short radio order. "Chopper's on the way in now. I guess the lady goes out too."
"Yes, sir. Welcome to Iceland, sir. We been waiting for you."
"Take a look, Sarge." Potter's arm swept to the west. A series of gray bumps on the horizon headed east toward Stykkisholmur.
USS CHICAGO
They were still out there, McCafferty was sure-but where? After killing the last Tango, contact had never been reestablished with the other two Russian submarines. Eight hours of relative peace rewarded his evasive maneuvering. The Russian ASW aircraft were still overhead, still dropping sonobuoys, but something had gone wrong for them. They weren't coming very close now. He'd had to maneuver clear only four times. That would have been a lot in peacetime, but after the past few days it seemed like a vacation.
The captain had taken the chance to rest himself and his crew. Though they would all have gratefully accepted a month in bed, the four or six hours of sleep they'd all had were like a cup of water for a man in the desert, enough to get them a little farther. And there was only a little farther to go: exactly one hundred miles to the jagged edge of the arctic ice. Sixteen hours or so.
Chicago was about five miles ahead of her sisters. Every hour, McCafferty would maneuver his sub to an easterly course and allow his towed array sonar to get a precise fix on them. That was hard enough: Boston and Providence were difficult to pick up even at this distance.
He wondered what the Russians were thinking. The mobbing tactics of the Krivak-Grisha teams had failed. They'd learned that it was one thing to use those ships for barrier operations against the Keypunch team, but something very different to rush after a submarine with long-range weapons and computerized fire-control. Their dependence on active sonobuoys had reduced the effectiveness of their ASW patrol aircraft, and the one thing that had nearly worked-placing a diesel sub between two sonobuoy lines, then spooking their target into moving with a randomly dropped torpedo-had failed also. Thank God they didn't know how close they came with that, McCafferty thought to himself. Their Tango-class subs were formidable opponents, quiet and hard to locate, but the Russians were still paying for their unsophisticated sonars. All in all, McCafferty was more confident now than he'd been in weeks.
"Well?" he asked his plotting officer.
"Looks like they're steaming as before, sir, about ten thousand yards behind us. I think this one's Boston. She's maneuvering a lot more. Providence here is plodding along pretty straight. We got a good fix on her."
"Left ten degrees rudder, come to new course three-five-five," McCafferty ordered.
"Left ten degrees rudder, aye, coming to new course three-five-five. Sir, my rudder is left ten degrees."
"Very well." The captain sipped at a cup of hot cocoa. It made a nice change of pace from coffee. Chicago turned slowly north. In the engine spaces aft, the submarine's engineer crew kept watch on their instruments as the reactor plant turned out an even 10-percent power.
About the only bad news was the storm on the surface. For some reason a series of squalls was parading around the top of the world, and this one was a real growler. The sonar crew estimated fifteen-foot waves and forty-knot winds, unusual for the arctic summer. It knocked 10 to 20 percent off their sonar performance, but would make for ideal conditions as they approached the icepack. The sea conditions would be grinding acre-sized ice floes into ice chips, and that much noise would make the American subs very hard to detect in the ice. Sixteen hours, McCafferty told himself. Sixteen hours and we're out of here.
"Conn, sonar, we have a contact bearing three-four-zero. Not enough data to classify at this time."
McCafferty went forward to sonar.
"Show me."
"Right here, skipper." The chief tapped the display. "I can't give you a bladecount yet, too sketchy for anything, Well, it smells like a nuclear boat," the chief allowed.
"Put up your model."
The chief pushed a button and a secondary screen displayed the predicted sonar range, generated by computer from known local water conditions. Their direct-path sonar range was just over thirty thousand yards. The water was not deep enough yet for convergence zones, and they were beginning to get low-frequency background noise from the icepack. It would impede their ability to discriminate sonar contacts in the same way bright sunlight lessens the apparent intensity of an electric light.
"Getting a slow bearing change here. Going left-to-right, bearing to target is now three-four-two... fading out a little bit. What's this?" The chief looked at a new fuzzy line on the bottom of the display. "Possible new contact bearing zero-zero-four." The line faded out and stayed out for two minutes, then came back on bearing zero-zero-six.
McCafferty debated whether to go to battle stations. On one hand he might need to engage a target very soon... but probably not. Wouldn't it be better to give his crew a few more minutes' rest? He decided to wait.
"Firming up. We now have two possible submarine contacts, bearing three-four-zero and zero-zero-four."
McCafferty went back to control and ordered a turn east, which would track his towed array on the new targets, plus give a cross bearing on each from which to compute range. It gave him more than he bargained for.
"Boston is maneuvering west, sir. I can't detect anything out that way, but she's definitely heading west."
"Sound general quarters," McCafferty ordered.
It was no way to wake up from needed sleep, the captain knew. In berthing spaces all over the boat, men snapped instantly awake and rolled out of their bunks, some dropping to the deck, other climbing upright in the crowded spaces. They ran to stations, relieving the routine watch-standers to head for their own battle stations.
"All stations report manned and ready, sir."
Back to work. The captain stood over the plotting table and considered the tactical situation. Two possible enemy submarines were astride his course to the ice. If Boston was moving, Simms probably had something also, maybe to the west, maybe aft. In twenty short minutes, McCafferty had gone from coolly confident to paranoid again. What were they doing? Why were two subs almost directly in his path?