Toynbee chuckled and tossed Queensly a wink. "You got it, Captain."
The warm feeling grew stronger.
And as the minutes passed, so too did the nonsounds of the hole in the water to port. Something, Queensly thought, was stalking them.
The hunter was on the point of becoming the hunted.
20
"Conn, Sonar," Toynbee's voice said over the intercom. "Updating Sierra One-eight-three. Redesignating contact Master Four-one." When sonar contacts, designated "sierra," were identified through more than one signal or set of sensor data, they were given "master" numbers.
"Definitely a Kilo-class diesel boat running submerged on snorkels," Toynbee continued. "Range now estimated at thirty thousand yards. Target heading two-six-niner."
"Very well." Garrett keyed the sound-activated ship's intercom. "Now battle stations torpedo, battle stations torpedo. All hands, man battle stations torpedo. Torpedo Room, Fire Control. Make Tubes One and Three ready in all respects, including opening outer tube doors."
"Make Tubes One and Three ready in all respects, open outer doors, aye," the weapons officer replied from the fire control console.
"Conn, Torpedo Room, loading Tubes One and Three, aye aye."
In fact, six of Seawolf's eight torpedo tubes had been warshot-loaded since Hong Kong — one through four with Mk 48 ADCAP torpedoes, and Tubes Five and Six with Tomahawk cruise missiles, in case they were called on to strike at a land target. It would take only a few moments to flood one and three and open the outer doors preparatory for firing.
But Garrett wanted to get closer, and he also had some tactical planning to do. He walked over to the starboard chart table, joining Lieutenant Simms and Master Chief Dougherty.
"How accurate are these charts, Lieutenant?" he asked.
Simms frowned. "Not as accurate as we'd like, though the Taiwanese have been pretty good about helping us update old charts. The bottom here's at about thirty meters."
"About isn't good enough. Not if we have to run. Where's Master Four-one?"
"Right here, sir." Simms pointed to a red grease pencil track, updated with new sonar reports every few minutes. The target was running almost due west several miles south of Kinmen Island.
"Kinmen," Garrett said, thoughtful. "That's Quemoy, isn't it? Nationalist Chinese?"
"Well, the Nationalists are out of power, sir," Dougherty said. "But it's Republic of China and not People's Republic."
"That's what I meant. The good guys." On his chart Kinmen was an inch-wide blob. "You have something that shows Kinmen up close?"
Simms pulled out a finer-scale map, showing a bow-tie-shaped island — Kinmen — with a smaller island— Liehyu — two kilometers to the west.
"Looks like it gets real shoal here," he said, pointing to the bite on the south side of the big island. Soundings there, in meters and in feet, showed water only a few meters deep in places.
"Yessir," Simms said. "That's Liaolo Bay, and we'll want to avoid it."
Garrett pointed to the strait between Kinmen and Liehyu. "This channel looks passable."
"Barely, sir. It's deep enough for the local shipping. Eighteen meters. We'd be broaching on the way through."
"But it gets deeper north of the island."
"Yessir. Twenty-five meters. And even deeper to the west, off Xiamen."
"Okay. Thank you."
"Yes, sir."
Garrett caught the glance Simms exchanged with the COB, a look that might have been translated as What the hell does he have in mind? And COB gave a slight shrug, as if to say, Beats the hell out of me. In fact, Garrett wasn't entirely sure himself what he planned to do, but he wanted to keep his options open.
His major decision at the moment was a tactical one: whether to spend one torpedo on Master Four-one, or two. The usual practice was two, just in case the guiding wire broke on one, and just in case the targeting and range data weren't as accurate as hoped. A careful skipper would slightly lead the target with one shot and slightly trail it with the other, to guarantee a good lock once the fish acquired the target.
But there was also the ghost contact off to port, Sierra One-eight-four. If that was a Chinese sub — and Garrett was willing to bet money that if it wasn't a Kilo, it was the Akula-class Nevolin—then things were going to get damned interesting as soon as he took his first shot. It might be wise to save a couple of fish for a snapshot reply. The worst aspect of the unfolding combat situation was the feeling that Seawolf was in a pocket. The target was now almost due north, just this side of Kinmen Island. West was the ghost contact. Garrett had already decided that if he were skipper of a Chinese boat out there, he would be working together with at least two other submarines to trap Seawolf against a hostile coast.
Yeah, if he was coordinating this hunt, he'd have one boat about where that ghost contact was…and another here, to the south, and another here to the east, neatly boxing the Seawolf against shore and shoal water.
And Garrett never assumed that his opposite number on an enemy sub was any poorer at tactics than he was. That kind of half-assed thinking could get you and your whole command dead, fast.
Returning to his station by the periscope stage, he hit the intercom switch again. "Sonar, Conn. Estimated range to Master Four-one."
"Conn, Sonar. Estimate Master Four-one now at twenty-eight thousand yards."
"Very well. Alert me when we're at twenty thousand yards."
He wanted to be at knife-fighting range for what he now had in mind.
"Twenty thousand yards?" Neimeyer said, eyebrows raised.
"I think the skipper wants to put our fish right down the guy's throat," Toynbee replied, not taking his eyes off his console screen. "Sir."
Craig Neimeyer swallowed. He was a thin, gangly kid from Kansas City, Missouri—"Misery," as he'd always called it, until he'd finally left home for good and joined the Navy. Seawolf was his first sea duty, and he was still in the process of finding his legs.
He knew that, and he knew he would have a year or so of paying his dues before he could wear the coveted submariner's dolphin on his uniform above his ribbon rack — before he was accepted as a real submariner. And he knew it would take that long to learn all of the boat's systems. At twenty-seven, he was quite a bit younger than many of the experienced hands, like Toynbee and Grossman, and only a handful of years older than the youngest newbies, like Queensly.
In fact, not counting his four years of Annapolis, Neimeyer had about the same level of experience as Queensly did. In other words, he was a raw kid, wet-behind-the-ears newbie, still fair game for orders to requisition a skyhook, a left-handed wrench, or a bucket of camouflage paint, or the old nuke-submariner hazing gag of Nair in the shampoo bottle.
The hell of it was, while he'd trained in sonar and associated electronics systems at New London after his graduation from Annapolis, he still wasn't entirely sure what he was supposed to be hearing when he actually stood a sonar watch. People with as much experience as Toynbee left him feeling completely inadequate, and a talent like Queensly's left him in awe. He knew how to swap out the circuit boards of a BSY-2(V), but sorting anything useful out of that colored-light cascade on the screen or, worse, from the hiss and gurgle and whoosh he heard over a set of sonar headphones, felt forever beyond him.