Seas of Crisis

suppressing outer sheath.

This configuration would minimize their water drag and flow noise, and make it very hard to get a return with any obstacle-avoidance sonar ping — which Bell dared not use for fear of destroying their stealth. No wonder we didn’t hear them on passive sonar. Jeffrey’s heart was racing, his breathing ragged and short. The spires’ tops bore rounded fairings that probably housed hydrophones, or sensors to measure unusual turbulence or vibrations, or all three. He badly wanted to bark out instructions, but this was Bell’s battle, not his.

“Sir,” Patel called to his captain, “my depth is one hundred feet and decreasing rapidly.”

Reported ship’s depth always meant at the keel. Challenger’s hull was forty feet in diameter, and her sail projected twenty feet higher than that. The top of the sail was barely forty feet under the surface now, less so by the second.

Bell needed to make some very fast decisions.

“Helm, maintain depth one hundred feet on autohover. Chief of the Watch, flood variable ballast to restore neutral buoyancy. Helm, all stop. On auxiliary maneuvering thrusters, rotate our heading to westward, then translate the ship sideways north.”

Patel acknowledged, his words slurred. COB leaned over to give him help with one hand while he did things on his own console with the other.

Jeffrey watched his displays. The ship’s depth had risen dangerously to eighty-four feet before her upward motion came off. The small thrusters at bow and stern were swinging the ship parallel to the line of spires, and those thrusters and the current were moving Challenger over and past the spires.

An antisubmarine booby trap. Simple and fiendishly clever. We barely missed hitting it… but these movements, cavitation noise, and mechanical transients can’t go unnoticed.

Now Jeffrey understood with horrible clarity how the Russians intended to block their channel to foreign submerged submarines: they wanted unfriendly captains to think it was safest to stay deep. Who’d built this peculiar snare of a fence? Jeffrey answered his own question. Russian saturation divers. It had to be recent, since its surfaces were so clean. Why wasn’t this in the intel reports he’d been given? He definitely had a need to know. The U.S. must not be aware of it. Construction could have been achieved unobserved, given how short the acoustic detection ranges were locally, especially with Big Diomede totally blocking any hydrophones near Little Diomede.

Challenger was past the fence, slowly moving sideways further north into the strait; Bell was making the most of the current to drift quietly out of the area.

“Aspect change on Masters Nine-Five, Nine-Six, and Nine-Seven,” O’Hanlon stated. The Udaloy, the Grisha-V, and the May bomber. “Blade rate increase on Masters Nine-Five and Nine-Six. Bearings to contacts now constant, range decreasing.” The destroyer and the corvette were steering toward Challenger and speeding up. The bomber was headed their way, too.

“Helm,” Bell ordered, “on autohover, make your depth one-five feet from the bottom. On auxiliary thrusters, maintain distance four-zero feet upcurrent from bases of spires.”

Patel acknowledged more calmly. The pictures from outside showed no end to the line of spires to east or west. They were spaced evenly, twelve or fifteen feet apart, the gaps too narrow for even a small diesel boat to slip through. Challenger began to descend. Soon she hugged the sea floor, and hugged the backs of the spires from inside the strait, as closely as Bell dared.

“Overflight, north to south!” a sonarman shouted.

“Quiet in Control,” Bell snapped. People were too agitated.

“Master Nine-Seven passed almost directly overhead,” the same sonarman stated with a mix of sheepishness and fright.

The whole control room became deathly quiet. If Jeffrey had miscalculated about Russian attitudes, then an air-dropped torpedo — impact with the sea cushioned by a parachute — might have already left the Il-38’s bomb bay. An eternity passed, but Sonar announced no noise of a weapon hitting the water.

“Let’s hope these spires have some steel in their cores,” Jeffrey said. “It might confuse their MAD.”

The Grisha-V was charging toward Challenger at thirty knots, her top speed. The Udaloy, further off when Challenger hit the booby trap, was coming their way just as quickly.

“New passive sonar contacts on the bow sphere,” O’Hanlon reported. “Airborne, bearing three-five-five, range is short, closing rapidly…. Turbine engines and helicopter rotor noise. Assess as two Helix-As, scrambled from the Udaloy.”

“Very well,” Bell responded. “Activate sonar speakers.” The noise of the helos filled the control room, in surround-sound quadraphonic, giving a three-dimensional sense of the location of the contacts. Engine turbines roared and whined, the helicopters’ transmissions screamed, and their twin counterrotating main rotors, mounted one above the other on each aircraft, made steady throbbing, thudding beats. “Stand by to suppress active sonars with out-of-phase return emissions.” Challenger’s sonar arrays, mounted in different places at her bow and along her sides and on her sail, could actively cancel enemy pinging — if the enemy systems weren’t too powerful or too sophisticated.

Jeffrey heard sharp smacking sounds. He almost jumped out of his seat.

“Surface impacts!” O’Hanlon continued his running commentary.

People ducked, as if cowering from a depth charge.

“Assess as sonobuoys!”

The sonobuoys went active, making musical bleeps, taunting, high-pitched, nerve-shattering. They used small hydrophones to pick up echoes, relayed back to the Helix-As by radio. The helicopters in turn might be relaying the data to the Udaloy’s computers for thorough analysis. The only good thing Jeffrey could say about them was that because they had to be small and battery-powered, sonobuoys were not the most dangerous threat.

A deeper tone sounded. “Contact on acoustic intercept!” a different sonarman called out. “Grisha-V hull- mounted Bull Horn system.” Bull Horn was another NATO code name.

“Helicopters departing,” Sessions, as Fire Control Coordinator, said to Bell, sounding hopeful.

“Too easy,” Bell retorted.

A new bright line appeared on Jeffrey’s waterfall display, streaking across it diagonally like a comet.

“Overflight!” came from O’Hanlon. “South to north!”

This time, on the sonar speakers, the droning rumble and roar of a four-engine turboprop fixed-wing aircraft punished everyone’s ears, then receded.

Sonar made formal reports, belaboring the obvious.

“The helos backed off so the May could get a better MAD fix,” Bell said. Jeffrey knew he was right.

“Helos returning!” Sessions was too overwrought not to shout.

Turbines, transmissions, and rotor noises increased in intensity, almost drowning out the plop and bleep as more active sonobuoys fell and switched themselves on.

“They’re keeping us pinned until the ships get here.” Now Bell was giving his own running commentary. “Sonar, are they getting solid echoes off us?”

“Negative,” O’Hanlon said. “Am able to suppress.”

So far. The control room had begun to feel roasting hot, like an oven. Sweat dripped from Jeffrey’s chin, and his underarms were drenched with it. The atmosphere tasted foul, and smelled rancid — the stench of two dozen men’s fear.

Challenger had Polyphem antiaircraft missiles, which could knock down helicopters and maritime patrol planes. They were loaded and fired four at a time through a torpedo tube. Using them now was entirely forbidden by U.S. ROEs — and they’d merely prove Challenger’s exact location to the corvette and destroyer getting closer by the minute. Torpedoing those ships was absolutely not an option, and useless besides since the Russians would only send more.

Another deep tone filled the air, followed by a weaker, higher-pitched one.

“Bull Horn from the Grisha-V again. Udaloy has gone active with hull-mounted Horse Jaw.” The Udaloy’s sonar was more powerful than the Grisha-V’s, but the Udaloy was further away.

Jeffrey watched the tactical plot and listened to the sonar speakers. The helicopters began to circle,