“Also listen for repetitive dolphin calls.”
He stepped away and leaned back into his chair as the sonar team settled into their search. The banter among them suggested they had information worth sharing, but he let them analyze the incoming sounds before prying for insight.
When he turned to face Cahill, the supervisor’s demeanor suggested hesitance.
“Nothing definitive yet,” he said.
“What do you have?”
“We hear over a dozen contacts running diesels. All sorts of merchant ships are crossing this sea and avoiding Jake’s minefield. And you have fishing ships starting and stopping.”
“One of the contacts could be the Kilo.”
“Agreed. But we don’t hear anything definitive enough yet to declare one as the Kilo. Once we can correlate the Kilo with its diesels, we can track it by its diesels, but we need to find it by other means first.”
“You understand that it needs to make dolphin noises once in a while to communicate with its dolphin friends.”
“Yes, but that’s highly random, if it’s going to happen at all. For all we know, the dolphins swam home after they attacked us.”
“Possibly. But have the team stay attentive to dolphin sounds on the bearings of all the diesels you hear.”
A sonar technician rotated his head toward his supervisor, who leaned to him, chatted, and came back to Cahill.
“He found another one out there,” the supervisor said. “That’s fourteen contacts running diesels.”
“I’ll give you a course change soon to drive the geometry and help you resolve course and speed estimates to the contacts.”
“That will help. I’ll have them start identifying each contact and ruling out the ones that aren’t the Kilo.”
Cahill calculated that the Russian surface fleet sprinted a mile farther from his cannons for every two minutes he spent searching for the elusive submarine.
“We’ll have to patient,” he said. “I’ll turn us north to drive geometry.”
Fifteen minutes later, his sonar team had discerned the noisy imperfections of civilian propellers on most of the contacts. His sailors identified the other contacts as fishermen running diesels for electric power while drifting.
“None of them are the Kilo?” he asked.
“None,” the supervisor said.
Then a young sailor heard a dolphin. The supervisor donned a headset and helped his technician listen in the direction of the mammal. Together, they discerned the faint rumble of quiet diesel engines.
“I never would have heard that engine if I didn’t know where to listen,” the supervisor said. “It’s quiet.”
“I’ll make another turn to drive geometry on the new contact,” Cahill said.
Two minutes later, the Goliath steadied on a new course, and the tactical data on the latest contact unfolded.
“You’ve got a contact moving at twelve knots,” he said. “You can’t hear any propeller blades yet, but it’s fifteen miles away and within ten miles of where we last solved for the Kilo’s position.”
“I think we found it,” the supervisor said. “It’s moving to the southwest, towards the Bosporus.”
“And towards Jake,” Cahill said. “Are you ready for some old school submarine work?”
“You mean to trail it?”
“Maybe. Let’s make sure it’s the Kilo, first. Dolphin noise plus a diesel engine doesn’t quite prove it. I’ll get you closer.”
“How close? Remember that you’re on a hybrid ship that’s not the type of hunter we’re used to working on in the old navy.”
“But the Kilo’s badly wounded. I just want to get you close enough to hear it bleeding.”
The supervisor frowned.
“We’re not quite in a tail chase, but it’s opening from us on a shallow angle. We can only get two knots of closure at our best submerged speed, and we’d be abnormally loud with our damage to the port weapons bay. Plus, its sonar techs know where we are since we were just shooting at their colleagues. This could easily backfire.”
“You’re right. I’m thinking of this like the captain of the Rankin, when I need to think like the captain of the Goliath. I’m going to the surface and see what’s on our surface radar.”
Five minutes later, his commercial search radar saw nothing where his sonar team heard the suspected submarine. With the tactics shifted above the waves, Walker became vocal.
“We could send a few rounds that way and see if we can force an error,” he said.
“No, that would reveal the secret that we know where the Kilo is. Let’s share that secret with Pierre while it’s still a secret.”
“You’re not going to let it get away, though, are you?”
Cahill looked at the displays that showed the incoming radar and infrared data on the Russian surface fleet. His former targets had pushed beyond railgun range, escaping at a speed equal to that of his ship’s maximum sprint.
He toyed with the idea of giving chase, but he opted to stay on the Kilo that headed towards Jake.
“No,” he said. “We have the Goliath’s first chance to trail an advanced Russian submarine. I’d find that worthy of bragging about if I pulled it off while commanding the Rankin. Doing it in this beautiful beast will make it all the more sweet.”
CHAPTER 16
Jake sent the Specter’s periscope into a circular sweep of the Turkish waters off the coast of the northern city of Amarsa. As servomotors whirred and retracted the optical mast into the conning tower, he looked at his display to see the panorama of the seas above him.
“I count six visual contacts,” he said.
Remy joined him on the conning platform and leaned by his shoulder.
“These all correlate to sonar contacts except that one,” he said. “But you can’t blame me for missing it. It looks like a small fishing boat. It’s probably just drifting.”
“Let’s risk the time for a download,” Jake said.
“Fair enough.”
As Remy returned to his seat, Jake saw Henri glance at him.
“I’m ready for the radio download,” the Frenchman said.
“Raise the radio mast and download the satellite broadcast.”
Far from Russian jamming interference, Jake expected clean reception. Five minutes after giving the order, he had his data.
“Let’s get below this mess of traffic. Henri, make your depth fifty meters.”
During the slow descent, he played his mentor’s video. The Frenchman’s face sagged with fatigue and concern.
“I’ll start with the bad news, which is sadly the bulk of this video report,” Renard said. “I’ve run into bad luck finding you safe harbors. No country has agreed to take you in. I fear that the urgency of our timing has placed me in a weak negotiating position, but I promise to keep working on it.”
The news irked Jake, and he shifted his weight in his seat.
“The Russians have developed sound tactics against Terry’s cannons,” Renard said. “He could cripple only one Kashin, one Nanuchka, and two Grishas. This is reflected in my update to your tactical data feed. If you’re trying to determine what’s consistent among those four ships and different from the others, don’t bother. The link is imperfect, since the Kashin and the Grishas lack Vympel defense systems, but the Nanuncka has one.”