Fogarty glanced at the chart. "The new one," he said.
"Yeah. We don't know much about these Viktors. They can go deep, but they make a lot of noise."
Springfield and Pisaro were alarmed by the Russian's unexpected appearance in the Mediterranean. How did it get through the Strait of Gibraltar without being detected and tracked? They studied the repeater and sipped coffee. Pisaro chain-smoked.
The Russian was running parallel to Barracuda's original course. The Russian commander was announcing that the Mediterranean was no longer an American lake.
"Leo," Springfield said quietly, "move in on her. Crowd her. All ahead half."
"Aye aye, Skipper. All ahead half."
"Go right three degrees, course one two zero."
"Right three degrees, course one two zero, aye."
As Barracuda began to accelerate, the Russian went into a steep dive, machinery roaring like breaking surf. The Russian accelerated, the blip leaped across Sorensen's screen at a fantastic rate. Barracuda, the fastest submarine in the U.S. Navy, was being left behind.
Abruptly Sorensen snatched off his earphones and reached over to yank Fogarty's away from his ears. He was too late. The high pitch of a powerful Feniks target-seeking sonar erupted in the young sonarman's ears. He winced in pain and swore. It was his first sonar lashing.
"Welcome to the wonderful world of sub wars," Sorensen said to him.
Fogarty poked at his ears, his face contorted with pain. "Goddamn. Why did they do that?"
"Hey, Third Class, didn't they teach you anything in sonar school?"
"They didn't do that."
"When Ivan stings your ears like that, it means he could have put a torpedo up your ass. Bang bang, you're dead. Our friend heard us a long time before we heard him."
The Russian descended to twenty-one hundred feet and the sound abruptly ceased. The sub disappeared.
Sorensen stared at his blank screen. "Jeez, I don't believe it. She vanished below a deep thermal. Sonar to control. We lost her."
"Control to sonar. Say again."
"We lost her. Captain. She's gone."
"Good God."
There was shocked silence in the control room. A deep thermal layer deflected the down-searching sonars at twenty-one hundred feet, but no one wanted to admit that a Soviet sub could go beyond that depth. In 1963 Thresher had imploded at two thousand feet.
Springfield was shaken. The Viktor had revealed herself as a far more formidable opponent than American naval officers had been taught to expect.
For three hours they searched in a spiral pattern, totally mystified. Finally, Springfield gave up.
"Unload torpedo."
"Unload torpedo, aye."
"Send up a buoy, Leo. Report the contact, then resume course for Naples."
"Aye aye. Skipper."
Sorensen was intrigued. In the grand game of Cowboys and Cossacks the Viktor was a new challenge. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. "Score one for Ivan," he said. "We lost this round."
Fogarty was still poking at his ears. "That was a slap in the face. I didn't like it."
"Well, Fogarty, nobody likes it, so you can brood about it for a while. In the control room of that sub there's a guy sitting right now at his Feniks console, watching an obsolete oscilloscope, and he's probably feeling right pleased with himself, but don't take it personally. Sooner or later you'll get to do it to him, or to one of his pals. The only thing that bothers me is that he got away. That son of a bitch went pretty deep. And fast. A regular Maserati."
"You really like this, don't you?" Fogarty said.
"Sure I do. There's nothing else like it in the world. This is what it's all about. We chase the Russians around the ocean, then they chase us, then we chase them some more. Shit, one hot sub doesn't mean anything. They get one, then we get one, the guys at Electric Boat keep busy and all the admirals are happy. After all, kid, it's just a game, isn't it?"
"It may be just a game, Sorensen, but the stakes seem pretty high."
"So who wants to play penny-ante? That's no fun." Sorensen's voice remained lighthearted, but his eyes were dead serious. "Listen, Fogarty, down here we jam it to the max. We take it right to the edge. There's no other way."
"It seems dangerous to me, Sorensen. If it gets out of hand we could have a war."
"You afraid of a war, Fogarty?"
"Shit, yes."
"Well, try to remember the other guys have just as much to lose as we do. If we get nuked we'll never know what hit us. What's with you, Fogarty? Are you some kind of peacenik? Ban the bomb, is that it? Or are you just chickenshit?"
Fogarty shrugged and looked away.
"Lighten up, kid," Sorensen said. "I'm not going to bug you about what you believe or don't. You do your job, you keep your ears sharp, you play the fucking game and you're going to be all right. I think maybe you've got a conscience, and that's okay."
Fogarty looked into Sorensen's eyes and could almost feel a psychic probe rooting around in his mind. "We can have a lot of fun in here," Sorensen was saying, "or it can be a real drag. You're a straight midwestern kid with smarts. All you really need is a sense of humor. We're the cowboys. They're the cossacks. So goddammit, start acting like a cowboy. Let me ask you something, Fogarty" — Sorensen's mouth twisted into a devilish smile—"how did you feel when you first heard that Russian sub? Were you afraid?"
"No," Fogarty admitted.
"Damned right. I was watching you. You were too excited to be scared. You got a big charge out of it. That's nothing to be ashamed of. When you see that Russian on the screen and listen to him growling like a goddamn nuclear shark, nothing else matters. It's you and him. That's where the action is. It's a big rush. Adrenaline maybe, or something even deeper. It's the ultimate drug. Underwater, what you believe doesn't count, only what you do, how you react. The rest of the world doesn't exist. Not your girlfriend, not your mother, not your god if you got one. Just you and Ivan."
"Leave your mind behind."
"You got it."
A shy smile crossed Fogarty's face. "I admit it was pretty exciting," he said, "Until my ears got blasted."
"Think of what it did to the fish." He jumped out of his seat and waved his arms around. "Imagine a school of deaf tuna swimming upside down. Along comes a Great Barracuda. Zap, zap, he cuts 'em to ribbons, eats about twenty, and swims away upside down."
Fogarty shook his head. "Christ, Sorensen. That was terrible."
They were both laughing when Lt. Hoek opened the door. He was disappointed at having missed the original contact with the Russian sub and wanted to listen to the recording of the Viktor's signature. Sorensen surrendered the supervisor's console and started the tape.
They changed the watch. Sorensen and Fogarty were in the control room when they heard Lt. Hoek howling in pain.
Springfield looked around and locked eyes with his senior sonarman. They both smiled. Hoek had a lot to learn.
The next morning Springfield prepared to take his ship into the Bay of Naples. Surfacing near a crowded harbor was always undertaken with great caution.
Fogarty was at the operator's console as the ship made a slow 360-degree turn, echo-ranging 360 degrees to make certain the surface was clear of shipping before raising the periscope. He picked up two freighters, a small tanker and a car ferry, all at a safe distance, but missed a flotilla of yachts in a restricted area.
"Up periscope."
When Springfield put his eyes to the binocular lenses of the periscope he found himself staring into the startled face of a man in evening dress at the wheel of his boat fifty feet away. A naked woman lay on the deck. Several more people, drinks in hand, gawked at the periscope. Springfield could read the registration number painted on the hull. He swung the scope around and saw three more wooden and fiberglass sailboats within a hundred yards, impossible to detect on sonar.