John R. Monteith
Rogue Hunter
CHAPTER 1
Captain Second Rank Dmitry Volkov raised his head and pressed his palms into the navigation table. His back straightening, he felt cloud’s lifting from his mind’s haze.
“Say that again.”
“Sir, the dolphins report a submerged contact,” the sonar operator said.
He stretched his hands to the overhead piping to squeeze blood through his cramping muscles. He absorbed the absurdity that a dozen sonar systems, twice as many radars, and lasers scouring the Sea of Azov had failed where two mammals had succeeded in discovering Ukrainian saboteurs.
“Summon the trainer.”
He watched the young sailor raise a sound-powered phone to his cheek as he rousted his shipmates to the manhunt.
“I’ve got a few people looking for him, sir. Are you sure you don’t want to page him on the open circuit?”
“You heard the dolphins,” Volkov said. “There’s a submerged contact out there. I’m not risking the noise.”
His wait proved short when the trainer stepped through the room’s forward watertight door. Lithe, the dolphins’ master slipped into the compartment with the dexterous ease of the animals he commanded. Eager eyes glared back at him.
“What did they say?” the trainer asked.
“Submerged contact,” Volkov said. “I want you to discern the details.”
The trainer bumped the sonar operator’s shoulder as he sat at the console beside him.
“Let me hear the recording.”
Volkov watched the trainer slip headphones over his ears and listen as the sonar operator pressed his capacitive touchscreen to replay the transmission.
“That’s Andrei,” the trainer said. “He’s reporting a submerged contact.”
“I know that much,” Volkov said. “What else?”
The trainer shook his head and frowned.
“There won’t be anything else because he’s awaiting your command before sending more data.”
At the onset of his submerged anti-saboteur patrol, Volkov had foreseen a negligible probability of needing to communicate with the dolphins. His failure to memorize the proper response to their report embarrassed him.
“I see,” he said. “And how should I respond?”
“If you’ll allow, sir, I’ll handle it.”
“Let me know your intent before you transmit each message.”
“Of course, of course. Just let me talk to him. He’s probably worried since you haven’t responded yet.”
“Very well,” Volkov said. “Shift control of the underwater communications to the trainer.”
“Shifting control of the underwater communications to the trainer, sir,” the sonar operator said. “Control is shifted.”
“Tell me what you’re saying,” Volkov said.
“I’m sending him the basic acknowledgement message. Even if Andrei is managing to remain calm, Mikhail must be terrified. He’s fragile, emotionally. He must think I’ve abandoned them.”
“I can think of worse fates for dolphins.”
The trainer glared at him.
“They’re not made of steel. They’re made of flesh like us. They’d be saddened by the loss of a friend like me.”
“Emotional or not, I’ll give them credit for their tactical value — provided this supposed submerged contact proves real.”
“It will. May I transmit?”
“Very well, transmit the acknowledgement message.”
Volkov twisted a knob above his head to pipe sound through the compartment’s loudspeakers. He listened as his submarine, the Improved Kilo Project 636-class Krasnodar, simulated an aquatic animal by broadcasting a recorded dolphin’s message.
The series of whistles meant nothing to him, but the relaxed features on the trainer’s face affirmed their intended significance.
“That should calm them,” the trainer said.
“Very well,” Volkov said. “Now I want information. Start with bearing and range to the contact. Can they do that?”
“They can determine all the information you could want as a holographic image in their minds. Their challenge is trying to tell us about it. We seem quite limited to them compared to their understanding of the undersea world.”
“Spare me the sermon and tell them to locate the target.”
The trainer tapped his screen, and a new series of recorded whistles from the Krasnodar’s hydrophones filled the room. Moments later, Volkov heard a dolphin’s high-pitched response.
“They’ve echolocated the contact,” the trainer said.
Volkov forced himself to incorporate the bottlenose dolphins’ perspectives into his tactics to identify, and possibly destroy, the submerged contact. He accepted their view of the undersea world as a sonic painting, but their mental pictures eluded his grasp. He sought the limited, discrete information they could share.
“If I remember correctly,” he said, “the next step is to determine their position.”
“Yes,” the trainer said. “I taught them to respond immediately to a certain click which gives the range. You already know the bearing of their incoming responses. I’ll do it three times to get an average. May I?”
“Go ahead.”
Three series of outgoing recordings followed by mammalian responses filled the control room.
“Based upon round-trip timing and the sound-velocity profile in these waters, the distance to the lead dolphin is nine thousand yards,” the sonar operator said.
“Very well,” Volkov said. “Plot it on the chart.”
Below his chin, the icon of a thick black cetacean appeared. He scowled.
“That’s a whale,” he said.
“It’s the closest thing to a dolphin we have in the system, sir.”
“So be it. Now tell me where the submerged contact is relative to my dolphin-whale.”
“I’ll query for the bearing next,” the trainer said.
“Go ahead.”
Another exchange of chirps and whistles.
“I taught them to understand bearings like the hours of a clock. Our submarine is twelve o’clock to their reference. Andrei says the submerged contact is at three o’clock.”
“Very well,” Volkov said. “What about range?”
“That’s unfortunately the least accurate parameter. The best I could teach them was near, far away, or in between. They roughly understand near as within a nautical mile, far as beyond ten.”
“So be it. Go ahead and ask.”
More chirps.
“In between,” the trainer said.
“Call it five nautical miles and plot it,” Volkov said. “Give it a radius of uncertainty of five nautical miles.”
An icon of a submarine surrounded by a translucent circle of uncertainty appeared near a pipeline and utility cables that supplied natural gas, electricity, and telecommunications between mainland Russia and Crimea.
“Sons of bitches,” Volkov said. “Man battle stations. Ready tube one to attack this new submerged contact.”
The senior enlisted sailor on watch, a veteran with a tight face, crow’s feet, and a graying beard, orchestrated the actions of the half dozen men in the control room and the newcomers who responded to the battle stations command.
“Now, order the dolphins to approach the target,” Volkov said.
A frown cast a shadow over the trainer’s eyes.
“Is there a problem?” Volkov asked.
The trainer’s shoulders rose and slumped with his sigh. Perplexed, Volkov stared at him and pondered the man’s hesitance. Resentment gave way to curiosity, which succumbed to understanding. Feeling the crew’s eyes upon him, he measured his words as he dismantled the impasse.
“I see,” he said. “Can you give them the order, or would you prefer that I spare you from this burden?”
“You can’t do this. Why would you risk them?”