“You got it. But I want to do it during a scheduled turn so I can point our active sonar at it without pissing it off.”
“That’s easy. Give me sixty seconds, faster if you need.”
“No hurry.”
Fifteen minutes later, Remy and Henri arrived in the control room, rumor spreading like wildfire on submarines.
“What’s on your mind, Jake?” Henri asked.
“I need to get a message to Olivia, and I need the Ambush to be okay with me coming shallow to do it.”
“What message?”
“I’m going to ask for divine intervention.”
CHAPTER 22
“Keep turning,” Jake said. “Steady course two-seven-zero.”
“That’s deviating from our prescribed search pattern,” Henri said.
“I know. Steady course two-seven-zero.”
The deck remained tilted below Jake’s feet.
“Transmit secure active pulse sequence,” he said.
Remy staring over his shoulder, Kang tapped the screen and sent the chirps of acoustic energy into the water toward the Ambush.
“The sequence was transmitted,” Kang said.
Remy and Kang burned their eyes on their monitors, seeking discrete frequencies arriving from the direction of the British submarine.
“Nothing,” Remy said.
“Henri, all stop. Stop the shaft,” Jake said.
“The shaft is stopped.”
“Still nothing,” Remy said.
“Transmit again,” Jake said.
“Still nothing,” Remy said. “Still no sign of the Ambush, but it must be driving into our baffles. You’re running out of time until it’s outside the arc of our ability to transmit.”
“Quadruple the power and transmit again,” Jake said.
Kang sent out the pulses, and ten seconds later, the Subtics system whined with an automated alert.
“Active transmission sequence received from the Ambush,” Remy said. “It’s ordering us to come shallow.”
“Okay, then,” Jake said. “Bring us shallow, Henri, and raise the radio mast. Line me up with satellite communications to Pierre’s phone, and keep watch to see if the Ambush tries to contact us directly.”
Surface swells imparted a gentle rock on the Specter. Jake balanced one hand against the metal railing while holding a phone handset to his cheek with the other. He heard Renard’s voice.
“Yes, my friend?” the Frenchman asked. “What news?”
“No news. Sorry to excite you. But I need to talk to Olivia. I also need the Ambush to know what I’m doing, however Olivia wants to communicate with it. The commanding officer doesn’t seem to want to talk via high-frequency voice transmission.”
“I don’t blame him. High-frequency voice propagates along wave tops and is much less secure than satellite links. Excuse me while I find Olivia.”
Jake returned the phone to its cradle and pressed a key that routed incoming audio to a loudspeaker. He then turned to a console.
“Let’s take a look around, just for fun.”
He tapped a screen, ordering the Specter’s periscope to rise and snap a panoramic full-circle picture. Spread across two monitors, the image showed blue sky and white crests of water. Concentrating on the bearing of the Ambush, he noticed a tall swell blocking his view.
“Let’s try it again.”
A new panoramic image replaced the old on Jake’s adjacent screens, and he saw a dark line jutting from the water’s surface.
“I see the Ambush’s radio mast. It’s listening. Just not in the mood to talk, I guess.”
Olivia’s voice filled the compartment.
“Hello, Jake?” she said.
He snapped the phone from its cradle for a semi-private chat.
“Can you get a satellite with thermal imaging to search the waters around the Falklands? The San Juan is going to have to snorkel eventually, and I want you to catch it when it does.”
“I imagine there’s already a satellite looking for it. Satellites search for ships all the time. But there’s a lot of ocean to cover. This doesn’t sound like much of an epiphany.”
“But if you calibrate the sensors to detect the heat signature of a snorkeling submarine, you can reduce your margin of sensitivity and widen the search area for a faster and more effective search.”
“It could work,” Renard said.
“Didn’t know you were part of the conversation,” Jake said.
“You didn’t ask,” Renard said. “I suppose you intend to use the Specter to calibrate the satellite sensors.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “One calibration now under daylight. One in the middle of the night when it’s cooler.”
“The Specter’s heat dissipation design is more advanced than that of the San Juan,” Renard said. “A satellite finely tuned to recognize your snorkeling heat signature would easily see that of the San Juan. This could make a satellite search quite fruitful.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Jake said.
Olivia challenged the efficacy.
“Say it does work? How long will the San Juan remain snorkeling, and how will I contact you if it’s found?”
Jake appreciated that she had paid attention to operational constraints during her time spent with him aboard a submarine years ago.
“It’s about four hours, if it’s doing full battery charge,” Jake said. “As for contacting me, you can’t. But you can contact the Ambush, and it can order me shallow to receive coordinates.”
“He must mean extremely low-frequency transmission,” Renard said. “It’s a strategic communication system designed to contact ballistic missile submarines.”
“I bet every British submarine has a wire to receive that frequency,” Jake said. “And not just the ballistic missile subs.”
“Correct,” Renard said. “Of course, we’ll need Olivia to convince the United States Navy to lend the use of its transmission stations.”
“American policy is to not interfere with this,” she said.
“It’s impossible to get caught,” Jake said. “Nobody can prove that you were looking with a satellite, and nobody can prove that you rousted the Ambush to come shallow with a few cryptic characters from a strategic communications system.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “It’s just my ass riding on this.”
“Your ass is riding on me finding a needle in this forsaken haystack. You have little choice.”
“Fine, I’ll do it,” she said.
“Do you know if the commander of the Ambush is willing to talk to me, or is he just taking satellite downloads?”
“If you’ve got a message for him, you’d better tell me,” she said.
“Okay, tell him that I’m going run my diesels as soon as I hear from you that the satellite is watching me and is ready to calibrate its search routine.”
“Stay shallow until I can call you back about that.”
“Of course. Also tell him that I’m going to use secure active pulses to look for the San Juan, just in case it helps.”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” she said. “You may as well line up to snorkel.”
“You must admire a woman who understands submarine operations,” Renard said. “I don’t believe that a woman ever told me how to run my submarine when I commanded them.”
“You’re just jealous because I thought of this satellite idea, and you didn’t.”