World in Flames

Captain. Spitzbergen Trench is all ours.”

“Then he must be American or British,” said Yanov. “Could it be,” he asked Sonar Operator Petrov, “they’ve found a soft patch in the ice? Run out their trailing antenna and taken in a VLF signal from their headquarters? Or possibly a location check to headquarters? A transmit? Or a noise short from the surface. Maybe not a sub at all. One of their ASW choppers smashing through the ice to dunk a listening buoy?”

“No,” said the sonar operator, doing his best to contain his amusement at the captain’s hypothesizing. Yanov was undoubtedly a great captain — the sonar operator had no doubt of this, otherwise he would not be commander of an Alfa — but the control room officers never understood the nuances of the passive arrays. “No sir,” he repeated. “Nothing from the surface — besides, radio muster for all Allied ships is 0800 hours, sir. It’s 0500 now. Given the frequency, I think someone dropped a wrench or something.”

“What would he do?” mused the Soviet captain. “If he knows he’s given off a noise short?” He turned to the sonar operator. “Petrov, you think he knows?”

“If he doesn’t, Captain, his sonar man was asleep.”

“I’d go deep,” said OOD Ivashko.

“Yes, of course,” concurred Captain Yanov. “But will he hover? Or keep going? It’s too deep to sit on the bottom.”

“If he hovers, Captain,” answered the OOD, “and he thinks he might have been heard, then he must expect his pursuer to reach him sooner or later — if he stays on the same heading. If I were him, I’d keep moving, slowly, zigzagging, backtracking.”

“Which direction?” asked the captain.

“It’s an east-west trench,” said Ivashko, thinking aloud. “If he runs south or north, he’s going into shallow water. No one likes that.”

“Ah, but canyon walls would help him, eh, Number One? A lot of sound comes off canyon walls. Right, Sonar? Deep feeders, rock falls, noise from ice running down the cliff faces, scuttling, and bouncing off. A canyon wall can bury a lot of other sound.”

“Even so,” said Ivashko, “I’d shy away from the canyon walls, Captain. The racket from them could smother his passive arrays as well as hide him. He’d be running deafened by canyon noise.”

The captain conceded the point. “Yes. Personally I would go up closer to the ice, away from the canyon. There you have the ice noise, but can reel out your passive array well below you. You would still pick up the ice noise, but it’s much steadier than in a canyon. It’s a static you can recognize. Right, Petrov?”

Petrov gave a conditional nod, the kind that irritated Ivashko. Damn sonar men always thought they belonged to a higher priesthood to which mere mortals such as officers of the deck neither had access to, nor aptitude for.

“Then,” said Captain Yanov, “I think it’s time to release a Jonah.” This was a quiet, buoy-girded, tear-shaped container of approximately 156-liter capacity, about half the size of a 44-gallon drum but designed to create the least possible resistance as it quietly moved through the water. Inside, “Jonah” was intricately designed to contain microtape and speakers with a mechanical timer of ten minutes to two hours duration.

Once released from the hull, powered by a quiet battery-run plastic prop and preset to travel to a point approximately two-thirds along the bearing of a noise short, the tear-shaped container would rise until it was approximately three hundred feet below the surface. In this case, within three hundred feet of the ice.

Here, activated by its timer, it would emit a powerfully amplified sound — usually that of a whale. The sound waves racing out from the Jonah would deflect off the Russian submarine as well as off the American. But because the Alfa would be farther away from the Jonah, the noise source, Jonah’s sound, reflected off the American sub, would reach the Russian sub sooner than the sound from Jonah reflected off the Russian sub would reach the Americans. The Alfa would then not only have the American sub’s heading but also, because of the time lapse between the emission of the sound from the Jonah and its echoed return, the Alfa would now also know exactly how far away the American sub was.

It would be toward this position that the Alfa would now head, not at flank speed, lest its pumps be picked up, but at fifteen knots until it was within torpedo range. But this would only work if the enemy kept proceeding on its last known heading. To be absolutely sure where it was and to verify that it was still within the Alfa’s torpedo range, a second Jonah would be released. This noise box, again with a preset capacity of between ten minutes and two hours, would emit a much different noise, the sudden whoosh of a torpedo launch. Once this was picked up by the American captain, he would have to make a split-second decision either to make an evasive dive, hoping to shake off what he would believe to be an attack of metallic homing torpedoes, or to fire his own Mark-48 radar homing torpedoes to hopefully intercept the more quickly fired Russian torpedo.

Captain Yanov looked at his watch. The American could have increased speed, pulling away from the Jonah. He checked with Sonar. “Anything on screen?”

“Nothing but shrimp and ice, Captain.”

“Stand by to release the second Jonah,” ordered Yanov.

“Standing by to release second Jonah.”

“Release!”

“Released, sir.”

“Torpedo room ready?” said Yanov, bending low, his finger still on the intercom button.

“Ready, sir.”

It would be another fifteen to thirty minutes before the second Jonah would be far enough away from the Alfa. If the bait of the firing torpedo sound was taken by the Americans, the Alfa would be far enough back not to be caught in the pressure of the Americans’ exploding torpedoes, the Alfa nevertheless still in torpedo range itself. In any event, if the Americans fired, the Alfa would have an exact fix on them. Using the noise of the Americans’ torpedoes exploding around the torpedo-sounding Jonah, the Alfa would then race forward at full speed, approaching fifty miles an hour — slow, stop, fire its tubes. And wait.

“If he fires,” instructed Captain Yanov, “It will likely be one or two of his forty-eights. Range forty-six kilometers, twenty-five meters a second. Wire trailing until it’s radar homing takes over. And so if he fires, we go immediately to attack. Flank speed. Understood?”

“Understood,” confirmed the torpedo officer. “We’re ready, Captain.”

“Good,” said Yanov. He then turned to the officer of the deck. “If we fire — we’ll wait five seconds to clear, then go to maximum depth. Understood?”

“Understood, Captain.”

“Good.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The white cottages of Scotland were tiny dots far below, the weather outside the Hercules fine but windy. Inside, however, all David Brentwood and the other twenty-seven SAS trainee finalists were aware of was the thunderous roaring and vibration of the engines.

“Remember!” shouted the SAS sar’major. “You aren’t jumping to entertain the crowd at a county fair. Civilian jumpers don’t have full military kit on their back, so in order for you to maintain starfish posture, you must, I repeat must, control turns and cross tracking by keeping all extremities extended in starfish pattern until three thousand feet, when your chute will open automatically.

“Do not, repeat do not ‘grab air’ unless as a last resort. Wait until you are positive something is wrong with your automatic altimeter release before you attempt to open it by hand under your belly.”

The danger was that trying to grab air directly in front of the helmet in order to maintain stability while using the free hand to pull the reserve chute’s grip could send you into a “tumble,” like a plane out of control — during which arms and legs could become entangled by the chute’s cords.

There was a loud whine and the ramp was going down, yawning over the purplish blue of Scotland’s western Highlands, the glens between the hills no larger than the size of a penny from eleven thousand feet.

The red light went on.