Seas of Crisis

“What’s our speed over the ground?” Jeffrey asked.

Bell pointed at his console display. The window indicated 0.3 knots. They were moving with the current, but not by much.

“Is that fast enough?”

“To not be detected, sir?”

Jeffrey nodded.

“With Russian equipment? I’m not aware of intel on that. With U.S. equipment, it’d be touch and go. Two miles, resolution is sharp. They might see us both. At best we’d have one heck of a lot of explaining to do. At worst…” Bell didn’t need to say it aloud. The mission would be doomed before it began.

“Have Challenger put on one-half knot of speed translating downcurrent on auxiliary maneuvering units. Break acoustic-link silence and instruct Carter how to mimic our movements.”

Bell told Patel what actions to take at the helm. Sessions, distressed, typed gingerly, as if the sonarmen on K-335 might hear him touching the keys.

The motion put on to hide from gravimeter detection meant mechanical transients, flow noise, and turbulence. They’d be subtle, minimal, but this was an extremely high-risk situation.

Patel sounded nervous acknowledging Bell’s commands. When Sessions reported that Carter acknowledged, he sounded nervous.

K-335 was almost at her closest point of approach. Thinking of her out there gave Jeffrey the creeps. He locked his eyes on the sonarmen. If the Russian detected the strike group and reacted, they’d be first to know, by hearing telltale noise.

Noise from tubes flooding, or if she’s patrolling with weapons wet, then noise from torpedoes in the water. If that happens I go down fighting, to give Carter a chance to escape.

“Range to Master One increasing,” O’Hanlon murmured. K-335 had crossed Challenger’s and Carter’s bows, and was continuing on course, west. But no one relaxed. It might take time for K-335’s computers to process fresh incoming data. There could be a lag before her captain realized he’d passed so near two intruding submarines. The uncomfortable wait continued. People began to squirm and sweat. K-335 receded, at a rate a bit under five hundred yards per minute — faster than a gold-medal Olympic marathon runner, but in Challenger’s control room it felt like a leaden crawl.

At last O’Hanlon reported that he’d definitely lost the contact. Jeffrey knew the crewmen around him wished that they could cheer.

“Signal Carter,” Jeffrey ordered, “ ‘Rise on autohover, five-zero feet per minute, make your depth one-six-five feet. Make your heading one-eight-zero.’ ” Due south.

The slow rise should help avoid hull popping.

“Captain Bell, ditto for Challenger.” Nonstandard terminology, but Jeffrey was feeling something like glee after outwitting K-335. It gave him a new level of confidence, to have tested his strike group’s stealth at such close quarters against a first-class opponent.

Both ships finished rotating to face south, and Carter put herself behind Jeffrey and off Challenger’s starboard side. They rose vertically, toward the ice cap looming above. On the gravimeter, the continental slope — showing missing chunks and fissures such as scars from old earthquakes — slid progressively beneath them, until the shelf itself stretched out in front. The water ahead was sandwiched between the ice cap and the shelf. Clearance between, two hundred feet maximum, was tight.

Conspicuous on the gravimeter display, as two small lumps on an otherwise featureless plain, were Genrietty Island, fifteen miles off, and, thirty miles further southwest, at the extreme range of the gravimeter’s field of view, Zannetty Island. Both jutted barely one hundred fifty feet above the sea.

It was time to deploy remote-controlled unmanned vehicles from Challenger and Carter. Harley’s were larger and more capable, because his garage space sported arrangements to hold and release several Seahorse IIIs. Bell had to make do with smaller, older probes that were launched and retrieved through Challenger’s torpedo tubes.

The seemingly bland plain of Siberia’s silty continental shelf, and the hard lid of the ice cap so close above it, held unknown man-made hazards as well as ice keels that could endanger the strike group and ruin the mission. But the continental shelf also held an invaluable, indispensable prize. Jeffrey opened his mouth to issue an order.

“New passive contact on the starboard wide-aperture array!” O’Hanlon broke in. “Broadband contact, submerged, bearing two-seven-five!” Just north of due west. “Range uncertain! Designate the contact Master Two.”

“Sir,” Torelli told Bell, “timing is not inconsistent with K-335 having turned back this way.”

“Range? Estimate?” Jeffrey demanded.

“Insufficient data,” O’Hanlon said flatly.

“Suppose Master Two is Master One,” Jeffrey said. “Suppose it’s the same situation but he’s coming at us from the other direction. What can anyone tell me?”

“He’s further away from the shelf,” Torelli said, “by a couple of miles. Conjecture he’s following an oval track, a possible barrier patrol.”

“A barrier patrol against what?” Jeffrey snapped.

“Protecting the islands, sir?” Jeffrey could hear a shrug implied in how Torelli answered.

“Protecting them from what? From us?”

For a minute no one said anything, cowed by their strike group commander’s raw anger. Jeffrey made himself cool down. “Or are we looking at it backwards, assuming the world revolves around our mission when it doesn’t yet?”

“Sir?” Bell was confused.

“A Russian boomer bastion. I bet they have one north of us, in the Wrangel Abyssal Plain. Think about it.”

Bell nodded. “K-335 isn’t protecting the islands. The islands are outposts to help protect the bastion.”

“Sir,” Sessions said, “Carter holds new submerged passive sonar contact, west. They conjecture K-335 is reexamining this area after finding signs of us in their sensor data.”

What if I’m wrong and Harley’s right? His mind-set, his intuition, perspective, judgment, would be different from Jeffrey’s — and possibly better. He’d gotten clobbered on his previous mission, whereas Jeffrey didn’t know firsthand what that was like: he might become a victim of his own prior unbroken successes, by making the incorrect call.

“Sonar, Weps, what’s K-335’s speed now?”

“No data,” O’Hanlon repeated in frustration, edgy, irritable, taking his wrestling match with the bad local acoustic conditions very personally.

“No reason from bearing rate to believe speed has changed,” Torelli said. “But I can’t say for sure that speed hasn’t changed, either, sir.”

“What’s the contact’s CPA?” The closest point of approach.

“Four miles, sir. Maybe.”

“You said that last pass, and it was only two.”

“Understood, sir.” Torelli sounded as if he felt he was letting his commodore down. The tactical plot showed a wide error zone in Master Two’s position.

“If he were after us,” Jeffrey said, “I think he’d either go noticeably faster or slower than before.” Shit. “We don’t have time to deploy our probes and scout ahead enough that we can get safely up onto the continental shelf and out of his way.”

“Same tactics?” Bell asked tentatively.

“Affirmative. Bows north, translate east a half-knot faster than the current, keep real quiet, wait for the threat to go by.”