“Offsa’deck, clear baffles,” Pacino ordered. “And don’t go more than two hours without a baffle clear. I don’t want to be surprised out here.”
“Clear baffles, Offsa’deck, aye. Helm, right five degrees rudder, steady course one three zero.” Christman picked up a microphone at the underice sonar console. “Sonar, Conn, clearing baffles to the right.”
“CONN, SONAR, AYE.”
Pacino climbed back up to the periscope stand and stared at the short-duration waterfall display, thinking of the Russian that came out of the Stingray’s baffles decades before.
Admiral Donchez stared up at 120 flashing red X’s. The sons of bitches had arrived, he thought. The subs were lining up from off the coast of Maine down to the Carolinas. The southernmost portions of the coast were still clear, the last Russians still on the way to these more distant stations. His attack submarines were in force off the coast, but 67 boats against 120 … not good odds for a face-off, if it came to that. His message to his submarines had been carefully worded to be as vague as possible yet still give their commanders some leeway to engage… if necessary.
1. RUSSIAN SUBMARINE ATTACK UNITS EXPECTED TO TAKE STATION OFF U.S. EAST COAST IN WESTLANT BY 182000ZDEC.
2. ALL UNITS SHALL DO UTMOST REPEAT UTMOST TO GET IN TRAIL OF RUSSIAN UNITS. ESTABLISH TRAIL WITH MAXIMUM TRAIL RANGE FIVE THOUSAND (5000) YARDS. MINIMUM TRAIL RANGE AT DISCRETION OF INDIVIDUAL COMMANDING OFFICER, WITH MISSION DIRECTIVE TO REMAIN UNDETECTED IF POSSIBLE.
3. RUSSIAN INTENT UNKNOWN.
4. COMMANDERS SHALL USE BEST JUDGMENT. SUBLANT RULES OF ENGAGEMENT APPLY, BUT SHALL BE INTERPRETED SO AS TO MAXIMIZE SAFETY OF U.S. AND U.S. INTERESTS.
5. ON DETECTION OF ANY HOSTILE FIRE, UNITS ARE AUTHORIZED TO ATTACK TARGETS.
6. ADM.R.DONCHEZ SENDS.
It was the best he could do. No one could shoot unless one of the Russian attack boats shot first. But why would they be deploying? To test American nerves?
Donchez walked to the elevator to go to his office and watch the construction on the Stingray monument. For all the good he was doing in Flag Plot, he might as well walk out to the site and help them pour concrete. As he left Flag Plot he looked at the charts and promised himself he would not come back to the room until the Russians turned around and abandoned their game of chicken, or war of nerves, or whatever the hell they thought it was.
Admiral Alexi Novskoyy sat at the communications console in the control compartment and watched the laser printer reel off page after page of papers from the computer’s storage memory. Only five minutes after the hour Novskoyy had appointed for the boats to be onstation, he had 120 messages from his submarines. He picked up the ream of messages and took them to the ladder to the upper level of the second compartment below, nodded to the Deck Officer, Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, the only other occupant of the space.
“Good night, Ivanov.”
“Good night, sir.”
Novskoyy continued down the ladder and through the passageway to his stateroom, where he turned on a small stereo and sat down at the desk. It took over an hour to decrypt the messages, but when he was done he stared down at the checklist with satisfaction. Each of the 120 attack submarines was in position along the coast of the U.S., and none had encountered any harassment. The Americans seemed to be giving them a wide berth. He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes unfocus. He had expected at least a dozen reports of bumps and collisions with the U.S. attack submarines in the Atlantic, perhaps lines of frigates and destroyers filling the water with sonar pings, aircraft doing low flyovers and dropping sonobuoys, squadrons of helicopters chopping over the waves dipping sonar receivers on long cables. But nothing. The Atlantic was deserted. Not even a sniff of the American attack submarines Dretzski had reported. Something had to be wrong. It was too perfect. Novskoyy took off his reading glasses and shut his eyes. It had to be Agent Fishhook coming through. That and the U.N. inspection. The plan had worked.
He sat back to listen to the sounds of the symphony music washing over him, but the nagging thought kept intruding… why had the fleet achieved positions without opposition?
The USS Billfish cruised slowly northeast at four knots, bare steerage way, at a depth of 658 feet. The ship was rigged for ultraquiet. All offwatch personnel were ordered to their bunks. Lights throughout the ship were off or switched to a dim red setting. The P.A. Circuit One speakers were disabled, an announcement on them might be detected outside the hull. In each space men stood with headphones and boom microphones, linked on a single ship wide phone circuit, ready to pass urgent orders by voice. Every running pump or piece of equipment in the ship had redundancy; the equipment selected to be running was the one in a set that was the quietest. All maintenance activity was halted. Non-essential gear such as galley equipment was turned off — the crew would eat cold meals for the duration of ultraquiet. Hard-soled shoes were prohibited, the crew had switched to sneakers and slippers. Stereos, radios, televisions were turned off. The spare gyro was shut down, as well as the Bomb, the oxygen generator. Reactor main coolant pumps were in slow speed. The ship was dead quiet. In the torpedo room all four tubes had signs on the inner doors reading WARSHOT LOADED. Tubes three and four were flooded, sea pressure equalized to the outside pressure, outer doors open and weapons powered up, their gyros spinning rapidly, their computers activated, ready for a fire-control solution. In the control room only the whine of the gyro and the humming of the fire-control computer were audible. The watchsection fire-control team was ready to track and, on orders, shoot any contact.
Lieutenant Culverson, the Officer of the Deck, stood on the Conn and stared at the sonar-repeater console, a television screen covered with red filter glass. A heavily built Texan with a string tie around the collar of his blue poopy suit, Culverson wore a pair of blue Hush Puppies loafers. After all, the rig for ultraquiet had deprived him of his usual cowboy boots. Culverson, wearing red goggles to preserve his night vision in case the ship needed to come to periscope depth, stared at the sonar screen, straining to find a submarine in the mass of stringlike indications of random ocean noises and biologies. Twenty feet aft the sonar space was rigged for black, with only the six sonar console screens showing light in the room. Sonarman Chief Dawson sat at the central console of the sonar panel, the space silent except for a faint high pitched whine from the video screens. The center lower screen was tuned to the athwartships beam of the towed sonar array, a set of hydrophones towed astern on a mile long cable. The beam examined a thin slice of ocean, looking for specific frequency tonals from an AKULA-class attack sub that COMSUBLANT Intelligence had predicted would come into the Billfish’s patrol area. The central console graphs were displaying the frequencies surrounding the anticipated 314-hertz tonal of the AKULA’s turbine generators.