Rummel looked up sharply. Station One was a hold position for U.S. nuclear submarines directly off Severomorsk Naval Complex, intentionally inside Russia’s territorial waters, a dangerous place for an American sub.
“—Paragraph two: Allentown to maintain passive radio communication on VLF and ELF frequencies, on maximum wartime cruise-missile alert. Paragraph three: Javelin cruise-missile targeting shall be in accordance with the SIOP WARPLAN, Military and Naval Base Facilities Priority section. Paragraph four: Continuous alert to be maintained as a precaution against Russian aggression. Allentown shall be within three minutes of Javelin launch at all times. Paragraph five: Vital Allentown remain undetected. Paragraph six: Destroy this message immediately…”
It would not do to get captured by the Russians with a message onboard ordering them to violate Russia’s territorial waters. The contingency plan for capture included the immediate destruction of sensitive documents and war plans, but the most sensitive document contained orders to sail covertly inside the 12-mile territorial limit of another country.
“Paragraph seven: Our hope is that you will not be needed. Good luck. Hank. Paragraph eight: Admiral R. Donchez sends.”
The Duty Officer read it back. Donchez nodded and the Duty Officer hurried to the radio consoles. Rummel looked at Donchez, speechless. Donchez stared back at him for a moment.
“The best defense is a good offense. Captain.”
Pacino moved through the narrow aisle between the Ship’s Inertial Navigation System binnacle and the NAVSAT receiver cabinet to the navigation alcove in the aftport corner of the control room. The chart was taped to a table below a moveable fluorescent light. Pacino leaned over the table and toyed with a pencil, looking at their track-line heading northeast. Where was the OMEGA? Where exactly was Devilfish? He focused on the last fix, obtained by bottom-contour sonar. The BE sonar set pinged and listened to the return on the ocean bottom. Its computer matched the contour under them to a memory of the ocean bottom taken by survey vessels and other submarines. If the sea floor had rocks and valleys and peaks, the fix quality was excellent, putting the ship’s estimated position within a few yards of where it actually was. If the floor was sandy, the ship being tracked could be anywhere.
“We’re the Fuggawee Indians,” the navigator lan Christman said behind him. Which was to say. Where the fugg are we? An old joke. Pacino didn’t laugh.
“We need a decent fix. Captain,” Christman said. “The bottom’s been flat as a pancake for twelve hours.” The navigator drew a circle around the dot on the track corresponding to the Devilfish’s assumed present position. The circle was three inches in diameter. “That’s the fixerror circle. We could be anywhere within that. Right now it’s only forty miles across. But it’s getting bigger every minute without a fix. And going flank speed makes the circle get bigger that much faster. We need to come to periscope depth and get a GPS fix off the NAVSAT.”
The Global Positioning System satellite network gave any owner of a receiver his position to within tens of feet, but going to periscope depth, Pacino was thinking, required going dead slow to avoid ripping off a delicate periscope mast or radio antenna. But since there were no submerged mountains in the area, the risk of a navigation error was acceptable given the overwhelming need to get north and rendezvous with the OMEGA — and Novskoyy — before it headed back to Severomorsk.
“Can’t do it, nav,” Pacino said, shaking his head. “Going to PD means slowing down, clearing baffles to make sure there’s no surface vessels on top, going four knots until the fix is onboard. That’s forty minutes lost right there. And radio will want to catch the broadcast at the quarter-hour. And the Supply Officer will want to dump the trash out the TDU. The engineer’ll want to blowdown the steam generators. It’ll just take too god damned long. We’d be seventy miles behind track. No way. We’re due under the ice in a few days. We’ll come up to PD before we transit under the ice. Until then we’ll just have to live with an expanded fixerror circle. Any chance we can collapse the error circle with SINS?”
Christman shook his head. “The error curves on SINS are getting irregular. Northern latitude. We need an honest-to-God NAVSAT fix to settle out SINS.”
“Do the best you can, nav. This OP is urgent. We have to continue deep at flank. If we cut the hull open on a submerged mountain I’ll take the hit. You can put it in the ship’s log if it makes you feel better.”
As Pacino shouldered by Christman he could feel the navigator’s look. It wasn’t like Pacino to take risks like that on navigation — the navy was unforgiving when it came to navigation errors. But for Pacino, Devilfish was late for an appointment, an appointment overdue for more than twenty years.
The phone was buzzing as Pacino opened the door of his stateroom. It would be Stokes on the Conn. Instead of answering he turned around and walked back into the control room and stood next to the periscope stand. When he caught Stokes’ eye, Stokes put down the phone he’d been holding to his ear at the console aft of the periscopes.
“Cap’n, radio says we gotta come shallow. They’re getting an ELF call sign. Looks like ours. Request to slow and come up to 150 feet in preparation to go to PD.”
Pacino shook his head. “No, off sa’deck. Keep flanking it north. I’ll be in radio looking at the ELF message.”
Pacino walked out and aft down the centerline passageway past his stateroom and sonar. The door to radio had a combination lock. Pacino pushed the combination buttons and rotated the latch. The radio room was little more than an aisle between two tall rows of equipment racks. A small bench locker was the only seat. Beyond it a printer on a shelf rolled out from one of the racks, hummed, waiting for input. The radioman. Petty Officer Gerald, was older than Pacino, overweight, barely able to move in the space. Pacino had always liked him — he hustled and was a pro. He would have been a chief petty officer years before if not for a tendency to get drunk in port and throw the first punch.
Gerald looked up. “Afternoon, sir. We’re picking up a call sign on ELF I’ve got two letters on board already, BRAVO and DELTA. One more to go.”
Extremely-low-frequency radio waves were the only ones that could penetrate deep into the ocean. The cost was speed: It would take several minutes to receive a single letter with ELF. The transmitters out of Annapolis were mainly used to transmit a boat’s call sign as a signal for her to go shallow and get a burst communication from a satellite.
“What’s our call sign today?”
“BRAVO DELTA WHISKEY,” Gerald told him. “Here it comes now.” The printer spat out a row of W’s, the WHISKEY of the call sign.
“That’s us, sir. Someone sure wants to tell us something.”
CHAPTER 12
The control room of the USS Allentown would look roomy to any Piranha-class sailor. Its layout was planned, not like Captain Henry Duckett’s last Piranha-class boat, the Spadefish. The control room had the elevated periscope stand by itself in the center, the navigation chart immediately aft so the OOD could see the ship’s position without walking off the Conn. The Chief of the Watch’s panel seemed impossibly far away to port, and similarly far off to starboard was the long line of fire-control consoles. To a submariner the roominess of the space was like a breath of topside fresh air. The sonar room, the ESM room and radio all opened directly from the control room, not from an aft passageway like on the Piranha class. And this allowed face-to-face discussions with minimal disruptions to the critical combat centers.