Seas of Crisis

formats and protocols, so neither could detect or interfere with the other. The Ru-ling reconfigured his keyboard to represent the Cyrillic alphabet.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Torelli said from by the weapons systems consoles, “we have the overlay of hostile minefields and hydrophones uploaded now.”

“Perfect.” Jeffrey walked over to look at them on a fire-control technician’s console.

“I sure hope Russian spies haven’t stolen the specs to be able to detect and listen in on our comms link,” Bell said. “And that Germans didn’t nab the specs and hand them over to Russia.”

Jeffrey remembered the mole, still on the loose somewhere in America’s submarine warfighting personnel structure.

“Concur in the extreme…. And I better make damn sure I don’t mix up which link is which, and send the Russians a message I mean for Harley. Everybody hear that? Backstop me if I make a mistake.” Sessions and the Russian-speaking chief nodded.

Jeffrey studied the tactical plot. Challenger would reach the prearranged rendezvous point with Carter, from the old mission plan, only a few minutes before the Akula-IIs got within extreme torpedo range. They were all still over the shallow continental shelf, giving little room to maneuver or use fancy tactics. He had to work out a whole new doctrine for his strike group and convey it to Harley, all in a very short span of time.

“Sirs,” Meltzer asked from by the navigating table, “may I offer a suggestion?”

“Go ahead, Nav,” Bell said.

“Use one of the vertical wide-screen displays set up as a split screen.”

“Nav?” Jeffrey didn’t get it.

“Two tactical plots, sir. One labeled from the point of view of your combined task force with the Russians. The other from the point of view of the Challenger-Carter strike group. It’ll help you keep things straight and manage two sets of strategies if you have the proper visual aides.”

“Good thinking, Executive Assistant. The same four ships, except that on one display three are friendly and one is hostile, a German Amethyste-Two, and on the other two are friendly, us and Carter, while two are hostile, the Russians.”

“That’s what I meant, Commodore,” Meltzer said.

“Okay,” Jeffrey responded. “Captain, I need Lieutenant Meltzer’s help full time for the duration.”

“Of course, sir,” Bell said.

“Let your assistant navigator take over here,” Jeffrey told Meltzer. “You and I need to bone up ASAP on Akula-Two and Amethyste-Two strengths and weaknesses and their relevant antisubmarine weapons. We need some way to keep Carter alive for a thousand miles as she pretends to be an ex-French sub with half Carter’s real capabilities, while two Russky skippers do their very best to try to destroy her. Let’s use my office…. Captain Bell, have a messenger get me when we’re five minutes out from effective acoustic-link range to Harley.”

Jeffrey and Meltzer headed aft. Jeffrey stopped in his tracks. “Weps!”

“Commodore?”

“Get that Russian minefield overlay overlaid on both sides of the split screen.”

One of Torelli’s technicians typed keys, and more icons appeared on the display that showed two tactical plots.

This is gonna give me schizophrenia before we’re done.

“Captain!”

“Sir?”

“What’s in the tubes?”

“Four high-explosive ADCAPs, two high-explosive Mark Eighty-eights, and our two remaining Mark Three decoys.”

“Perfect, for the moment.” With the Russian sensor and minefield maps, Challenger didn’t need to send out off-board probes. “Get the outer doors open on all tubes, now, while we’re noisy. Prepare two ADCAPs for immediate firing at Carter.”

“Armed, Commodore?”

“Armed.”

Several hours later, Jeffrey had updated Harley and given him orders to head east toward the hulk of the real Amethyste, continuing to emit the proper false acoustic signature. After warning Harley of what he was about to do, Jeffrey ordered Bell to fire a pair of live ADCAPs at Carter, programmed and wire- guided to barely miss. This would establish Challenger’s credibility to the Russians, while creating a sonar disruption that would help Harley begin to evade.

Bell gave orders, firing ADCAPs. The near-misses made very satisfying, ear-splitting roars. Shattered bits of pack ice, thrown high into the air, pattered down for minutes afterward. Carter vanished through this impenetrable acoustic wall.

Jeffrey established contact with the two Russian captains, and worked out a scheme to pursue the Amethyste into a trap in the Canada Basin, meanwhile wearing the German skipper down. He told them not to open fire at all unless he gave them orders, so as not to foul a shot from Challenger with her superior capabilities. Wild Boar and Cheetah could dive below two thousand feet, almost twice an Amethyste’s crush depth, but not nearly as good as Challenger’s. Akula-IIs were very quiet, the best fast-attacks Russia had, quieter than a real Amethyste, but noisier than the real Carter.

And aside from being nearly immune to incoming high-explosive fire, the Akula-IIs were very heavily armed by Western standards. They had ten reloadable torpedo tubes forward, plus six more external single-shot tubes that were loaded at a pier. Their torpedo rooms could each hold forty weapons. The Akulas’ captains told Jeffrey via the link that they each carried twenty-five of the UGST torpedoes with new under-ice gravimeter homing sensors. All ten reloadable tubes were configured to fire these weapons. In a melee, the Akula-IIs could achieve an overwhelming rate of fire. Their weak spot was their sonars. Even the Russians admitted they were a fraction as sensitive as the ones on American subs. In the pursuit of the Amethyste, the Akulas would serve as Jeffrey’s arsenal ships.

Jeffrey and Meltzer figured out, fast, that the key to Carter’s survival was convincing the Russians to keep their distance from her in her guise as the German. The reasoning Jeffrey gave Wild Boar and Cheetah, with the digital link working in effect as a three-way chat room, was twofold. If the Amethyste felt too cornered too soon — and considering what her commandos had already done at Srednekolymsk — her captain would likely go nuclear, even near land. If so, wide separation was needed to be able to take adequate countermeasures. Otherwise, even though the Amethyste had only four torpedo tubes and fourteen torpedoes maximum, Jeffrey’s combined task force could suffer serious losses. The flip side was that, because the twenty-kiloton yields on the Russians’ own nukes were so large — U.S. nuclear torpedoes used yields of a single kiloton or less — the Akulas had to stay well back or they’d be severely damaged or sunk by their own exploding fission weapons.

Wild Boar’s and Cheetah’s captains, men seen only as disembodied responses in typed text on the chat, agreed with Jeffrey that, at least for the first stage of the pursuit, they’d all stay about fifteen nautical miles away from the German, half of maximum range for their UGST torpedoes. Plus, an Amethyste’s F 17 Mod 2 torpedoes had a range of just under fifteen miles. Secretly, Jeffrey knew, for Harley’s sake this was comfortably within the reach of the better American acoustic-link system.

The arrangement made even more sense from Jeffrey’s conflicted point of view because the need to keep within Russian acoustic-link range for constant coordination — and yet maintain that adequate separation from the German — precluded a pincer movement to surround the Amethyste using the higher speeds of the three-ship task force. The Akulas and Challenger would have to spread too far apart to form the pincers, losing touch and leaving big holes in their formation that the German could easily slip through. Agreement on this was essential to the specific battle scheme vaguely forming inside Jeffrey’s head. He held his breath. The Russian captains’ replies soon appeared as Cyrillic text on the Ru-ling’s console screen: they both concurred.