USS CHICAGO
McCafferty had his own contact. They had been tracking it for over an hour now, the sonar operators struggling to discern random noise from discrete signal on their visual displays. Their data was passed to the firecontrol tracking party, four men hovering over the chart table in the after comer of the attack center.
Already the crew was whispering, McCafferty knew. First the yard fire before they were commissioned. Then being pulled out of the Barents Sea at the wrong time. Then being attacked by a friendly aircraft... was Chicago an unlucky boat? they wondered. The chiefs and officers would work to dispel that thought, but the chiefs and officers held it, too, since all sailors believed in luck, an institutional faith among submarines. If you're not lucky, we can't use you, a famous submarine admiral once said. McCafferty had heard that story often enough. He had so far been devoid of luck.
The captain moved back to the chart table. "What's happening?"
"Not much in the way of a bearing change. He has to be way out there, skipper, like the third convergence zone. Maybe eighty miles. He can't be closing us. We would have lost the signal as he passed out of the zone." The executive officer was showing the strain of the past week's operations, too. "Captain, if I had to guess, I'd say we're tracking a nuclear sub. Probably a noisy one. Acoustical conditions are pretty good, so we have three CZs to play with. And I'd bet he is doing the same thing we are, patrolling a set position. Hell, he could be running back and forth on a racetrack pattern, same as us. That would account for the minimal bearing changes."
The captain frowned. This was the only real contact he'd had since the war started. He was close to the northern border of his patrol area, and the target was probably just on the other side of it. Going after it meant leaving the bulk of his assigned sector unprotected
"Let's go after him," McCafferty ordered. "Left ten degrees rudder, come left to new course three-five-one. All ahead two thirds."
Chicago rapidly turned to a northerly heading, accelerating to fifteen knots, her maximum "silent" speed. At fifteen knots the submarine radiated only a small amount of noise. The risk of counterdetection was slight, since even at this speed her sonars could detect a target five to ten miles off. Her four tubes were loaded with a pair of Mk-48 torpedoes and two Harpoon antiship missiles. If the target was a submarine or a surface ship, Chicago could handle it.
GRAFARHOLT, ICELAND
"You're early, Beagle," Doghouse replied.
Edwards was sitting between two rocks and leaning back against a third, the antenna resting on his knee. He hoped it was pointing in a safe direction. The Russians, he figured, were strung mostly along the coast from Keflavik to Reykjavik, well to the west of the direction to the satellite. But there were houses and factories below him, and if they had a listening post down there...
"We had to get here before it got too light," the lieutenant explained. They had run the last kilometer with the rising sun behind them. Edwards took some small comfort in the fact that the Marines were puffing harder than he was.
"How secure are you?"
"There is some movement on the road below us, but that's a good ways off, maybe a mile."
"Okay, you see the electrical switching station southwest of you?"
Edwards got out his binoculars with one hand to check. The map called the place Artun. It held the main electrical transformers for the power grid on this part of the island. The high-voltage lines came in from the east, and the feeder cables radiated out from this point.
"Yeah, I see it."
"How are things going, Beagle?"
Edwards almost said they were going great, but stopped himself. "Lousy. Things are going lousy."
"Roger that, Beagle. You keep an eye on that power station. Anything around it?"
"Stand by." Edwards set down the antenna and gave the place a closer look. Aha! "Okay, I got one armored vehicle, just visible around the comer on the west side. Three-no, four armed men are in the open. Nothing else that I can see."
"Very good, Beagle. Now you keep watch on that place. Let us know if any SAMs show up. We also want data if you see any more fighters. Start keeping records of how many trucks and troops you see, where they're heading. Be sure to write things down. Got that?"
"Okay. We write it all down and report in."
"Good. You're doing all right, Beagle. Your orders are to observe and report," Doghouse reminded them. "Avoid contact. If you see enemy troops heading in your direction, bug out. Don't worry about calling in, just bug the hell out and report when you can. Now get off the air for a while."
"Roger that. Out." Edwards repacked the radio. It was getting so that he could do it with his eyes closed.
"What gives, Lieutenant?" Smith asked.
The lieutenant grunted. "We sit tight and watch that electrical place off that way."
"You s'pose they want us to turn some lights off?"
"There's too many troops down there, Sarge," Edwards replied. He stretched and opened his canteen. Garcia was on guard atop the knoll to his right, and Rodgers was asleep. "What's for breakfast?"
"Well, if you got peanut butter and crackers, I'll trade you my peaches for it."
Edwards ripped open the C-Ration container and inspected the contents. "Deal."
22- Ripostes
The submarine slowed to reacquire the target. She'd run deep at fifteen knots for over an hour, and now reduced speed and came up to five hundred feet, right in the middle of the deep sound channel. McCafferty ordered an easterly course, which allowed the towed-array sonar-his "tail"-to bear on the supposed target to the north. It took several minutes before the array was straight and aligned in the proper direction so that the sonar operators could begin their work in earnest. Slowly the data came up on their displays, and a senior petty officer plugged in a set of headphones, hoping for an aural detection. There was nothing to detect. For twenty minutes the screen showed only random noise patterns.
McCafferty examined the paper plot. Their erstwhile contact would now be exactly two convergence zones away and should have been easily detected, given known water conditions. But their screens showed nothing.
"We never did have a classification." The executive officer shrugged. "He's gone."
"Take her up to antenna depth. Let's see what's cooking topside." McCafferty moved back to the periscope pedestal. He could not fail to note the instant tension in the compartment. The last time they'd done this, they'd nearly been sunk. The submarine leveled off at a depth of sixty feet. Sonar did another check and found nothing. The ESM mast went up, and the electronics technician reported only weak signals. The search periscope went up next. McCafferty made a very quick check of the horizon-nothing in the air, nothing on the surface.
"There's a storm to the north, line squall," he said. "Down scope."
The executive officer grumbled an inaudible curse. The noise from the storm would make the normally difficult task of finding a conventional sub motoring along on battery power nearly impossible. It was one thing for them to dart a short distance out of their patrol area with a good chance for a kill. It was another to leave for a whole day looking for something that they might never find. He looked at the captain, waiting for the decision to be made.