The submarine's engines fairly exploded into action. A flurry of orders had the helmsmen push their controls to the stops.
"Torpedo in the water, starboard side!'' a sonarman screamed.
McCafferty reacted at once. "Left full rudder!"
"Left full rudder, aye!" The speed log was at ten knots and rising quickly. They passed below one hundred feet.
"Torpedo bearing one-seven-five relative. It's pinging. Doesn't have us yet."
"Fire off a noisemaker."
Seventy feet aft of the control room, a five-inch canister was ejected from a launcher. It immediately started making all kinds of noise for the torpedo to home in on.
"Noisemaker away!"
"Right fifteen degrees rudder." McCafferty was calmer now. He'd played this game before. "Come to new course one-one-zero. Sonar, I want true bearings on that torpedo."
"Aye. Torpedo bearing two-zero-six, coming port-to-starboard."
Chicago passed through two hundred feet. The boat had a twenty-degree down angle. The planesmen and most of the technicians had seatbelts to hold them in place. The officers and a few others who had to circulate around grasped at rails and stanchions to keep from falling.
"Conn, Sonar. The torpedo seems to be following a circular path. Now traveling starboard-to-port, bearing one-seven-five. Still pinging, but I don't think it has us."
"Very well. Keep those reports coming." McCafferty climbed aft to the plot. "Looks like he made a bad drop."
"Could be," the navigator agreed. "But how in hell-"
"Had to be a MAD pass. The magnetic anomaly detector. Was the tape running? I didn't have him long enough for an ID." He checked the plot. They were now a mile and a half from where they'd been when the torpedo was dropped. "Sonar, tell me about the fish."
"Bearing one-nine-zero, dead aft. Still circling, seems to be going down a little. I think maybe the noisemaker drew him in and he's trying to hit it."
"All ahead two-thirds." Time to slow down, McCafferty thought. They'd cleared the initial datum point, and the aircraft's crew would need a few minutes to evaluate their attack before beginning a new search. In that time they'd be two or three miles away, below the layer, and making little noise.
"All ahead two-thirds, aye. Leveling off at eight hundred feet."
"We can start breathing again, people," McCafferty said. His own voice was not as even as he would have preferred. For the first time, he noted a few shaky hands. Just like a car wreck, he thought. You only shake after you're safe. "Left fifteen degrees rudder. Come left to two-eight-zero." If the aircraft dropped again, no sense in traveling in a straight path. But they should be fairly safe now. The whole episode, he noted, had lasted less than ten minutes.
The captain walked to the forward bulkhead and rewound the videotape, then set it up to run. It showed the periscope breaking the surface, the first quick search... then the smoke marker. Next came the aircraft. McCafferty froze the frame.
The plane looked like a Lockheed P-3 Orion.
"That's one of ours!" the duty electrician noted. The captain stepped forward into sonar.
"The fish is fading aft, Cap'n. Probably still trying to kill the noisemaker. I think when it hit the water it circled in the wrong direction, away from us, I mean."
"What's it sound like?"
"A lot like one of our Mark-46s"-the leading sonarman shuddered-it really did sound like a forty-six!" He rewound his own tape and set it on speaker. The screeeing sound of the twin-screw fish was enough to raise the hairs on your neck. McCafferty nodded and went back aft.
"Okay, that might have been a Norwegian P-3. Then again it might have been a Russian May. They look pretty much alike, and they have exactly the same job. Well done, people. We're going to clear the area." The captain congratulated himself on his performance. He'd just evaded his first war shot-dropped by a friendly aircraft! But he had evaded it. Not all the luck was with the other side. Or was it?
USS PHARRIS
Morris was catnapping in his bridge chair, wondering what was missing from his life. It took a few seconds to realize that he wasn't doing any paperwork, his normal afternoon pastime. He had to transmit position reports every four hours, contact reports when he had any-he hadn't yet -but the routine paper-shuffling that ate up so much of his time was a thing of the past. A pity, he thought, that it took a war to relieve one of that! He could almost imagine himself starting to enjoy it.
The convoy was still twenty miles to his southeast. Pharris was the outlying sonar picket. Her mission was to detect, localize, and engage any submarine trying to close the convoy. To do that, the frigate was alternately dashing-"sprinting"-forward at maximum speed, then drifting briefly at slower speed to allow her sonar to work with maximum efficiency. Had the convoy proceeded at twenty knots on a straight course, it would have been nearly impossible. The three columns of merchantmen were zigzagging, however, making life a little easier on all concerned. Except on the merchant sailors, for whom station-keeping was as foreign as marching.
Morris sipped at a Coke. It was a warm afternoon and he preferred his caffeine cold.
"Signal coming in from Talbot, sir," the junior officer of the deck reported.
Morris rose and walked to the starboard bridge wing with his binoculars. He prided himself on being able to read Morse almost as quickly as his signalmen: REPORT ICELAND ATTACKED AND NEUTRALIZED BY SOVIET FORCES X EXPECT MORE SERIOUS AIR AND SUB THREAT X.
"More good news, skipper," the OOD commented.
"Yeah."
USS NIMITZ
"How did they do it?" Chip wondered aloud.
"How don't matter a damn," Toland replied. "We gotta get this to the boss." He made a quick phone call and left for flag country.
He almost got lost. Nimitz had over two thousand compartments. The Admiral lived in only one of them, and Toland had only been there once. He found a Marine sentry at the door. The carrier's commander, Captain Svenson, was already there.
"Sir, we have a Flash message that the Soviets have attacked and neutralized Iceland. They may have troops there."
"Do they have aircraft there?" Svenson asked at once.
"We don't know. They're trying to get a recon bird to take a look, probably the Brits, but we won't have any hard information for at least six hours. The last friendly satellite pass was two hours ago, and we won't have another one of those for nine hours."
"Okay, tell me what you have," the Admiral ordered.
Toland went over the sketchy data that had come in the dispatch from Norfolk. "From what we know, it was a pretty off-the-wall plan, but it seems to have worked."
"Nobody ever said Ivan was dumb," Svenson commented sourly. "What about our orders?"
"Nothing yet."
"How many troops on Iceland?" the Admiral asked.
"No word on that, sir. The P-3 crew watched two relays of four hovercraft. At a hundred men per load, that's eight hundred men, at least a battalion. probably more like a regiment. The ship is large enough to carry the equipment load for a full brigade and then some. It's in one of Gorshkov's books that this sort of ship is uniquely useful for landing operations."
"That's too much for a MAU to take on, sir," Svenson said. A Marine Amphibious Unit consisted of a reinforced battalion of troops.
"With three carriers backing them up?" Admiral Baker snorted, then adopted a more thoughtful pose. "You could be right at that. What does this do to the air threat to us?"