Sea of Shadows

He began scanning his screen for the telltale echo that a submarine would produce. “We are active, sir.”

The copilot keyed his radio circuit and waited a half-second for the crypto burst, a short string of garbled tones that the UHF transmitter used to synchronize its encrypted signal with the secure communications satellite. “Strike Group Command, this is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. My dome is wet. I am active at this time, over.”

The voice that answered a few seconds later had a strange warble to it.

“Wolfhound Eight-Seven, this is Strike Group Command. Roger. Good hunting, out.”

The cartoonish voice modulation and the short delay caused by the crypto burst were unavoidable by- products of the encryption-decryption algorithm that scrambled the signal at the transmitting end and decoded it on the receiving end. Ensign Dillon liked to pretend that his voice came out of the speakers on the other end as a masculine baritone, but deep down he knew that he probably sounded just as silly over the secure satellite circuits as everyone else did. It was a small price to pay for secure voice communication.

At the rear of the aircraft, the Sensor Operator watched his screen carefully. Every time the sonar transmitted, a bright green line appeared at the bottom of the search display and began tracking upward. In its wake, the search raster left random scatterings of green dots in varying shades and intensities: ambient noise in the ocean caused by everything from fish, to wave action, to distant shipping. A contact would appear as a bright cluster of dots, generally accompanied by an audible echo in the operator’s headphones.

After about fifteen sweeps, the Sensor Operator said, “No joy, sir.

Want to pull her up some and see what’s above the layer?”

The copilot paused for a second. As a general rule, submarines liked to approach surface ships from below the layer, where they would be shielded from the powerful hull-mounted sonars carried by most warships.

Still, it didn’t hurt to check both sides of the fence. He shrugged. “It’s worth a shot,” he said. “Bring her up to about a hundred feet.”

The Sensor Operator pressed a soft-key and the floor rumbled again as the winch began retrieving cable. “One hundred feet, coming up, sir.”

Less than two minutes later, the Sensor Operator sang out, “Active sonar contact! Bearing zero-five-five, range three thousand eight hundred yards.” He watched the screen for another sweep. “No supporting data yet, but it’s a clear bearing. Could be a sub, sir!”

The copilot grinned. “Good job! Now stay on it!”

He keyed his radio circuit and waited for the crypto-burst. “Strike Group Command, this is Wolfhound Eight- Seven. I have active sonar contact, bearing zero-five-five, range three thousand eight hundred yards.

Initial classification — POSS-SUB low, over.”

The reply came a few seconds later. “Wolfhound Eight-Seven, this is Strike Group Command. Copy your active contact. We are vectoring Wolfhound Nine-Three in to assist. Get ready to play leapfrog, out!”

The pilot and copilot both grinned. Helicopters were a lot faster than submarines. With two dipping sonars working together, a submarine’s chance of escape was virtually zero. One of the dippers could maintain the track, while the other one repositioned closer to the submarine. By alternating their dip cycles, they could maintain contact indefinitely.

Dipping helicopters were every submariner’s worst nightmare, because — apart from their speed and tracking abilities — they could carry torpedoes.

A skillful air crew could put a torpedo within yards of a submarine’s bow — much too close to evade.

Suddenly, the Sensor Operator shouted. “Launch transient! I’m getting some kind of launch transient! Same bearing as the POSS-SUB!”

“It’s probably a hydraulic transient,” the pilot said. “Our active pinging scared them, and they’re diving for the layer.”

“No, sir,” the Sensor Operator said. “This is definitely not hydraulic.

This is … oh shit!” He began pointing emphatically toward the window.

“It’s coming out of the water! We have missile emergence, bearing zero-five-five!”

All three men watched in disbelief as the missile erupted from the ocean in a fountain of salt water and fire.

“Cruise missile!” the copilot shouted. “It’s gotta be aimed for the carrier!”

The pilot shook his head. “That’s a SAM, and it’s coming after us!”

He pulled back on the control stick, breaking the helo out of its hover. The helicopter climbed steeply, snatching the sonar transducer out of the water where it swung crazily at the end of its cable.

Lieutenant Forester threw his aircraft into a violent series of banks and turns that were the closest thing to evasive maneuvering that a 22,000-pound helicopter could manage. “Launch chaff!”

Ensign Dillon flipped up a row of red protective covers and stabbed at two of the buttons underneath. The helo shuddered slightly as two chaff projectiles blasted clear of the airframe.

Before the chaff pods had even blossomed, Dillon was on the radio.

“Sub-SAM! We’ve got a sub-SAM! This is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. I say again: we have a submarine-launched surface-to-air missile inbound, over!”

The Sensor Operator watched the missile blow through the expanding cloud of aluminum dust without slowing. “It’s not going for the chaff, sir!” he yelled.

“Heat-seeker!” the pilot said. “Launch a flare!”

The radio warbled with the crypto burst of an incoming message; no one had time to pay attention to it.

Ensign Dillon reached above his head and flipped up the covers for another row of protected switches. His finger jabbed toward a button, but he never made it.

The missile’s infrared seeker rode the heat plumes off the helicopter’s engines like a railroad track. A fraction of a second before Dillon’s finger touched the button, the sub-SAM slipped into the exhaust chamber for the starboard engine as neatly as a key sliding into a lock.

The warhead detonated, blowing the General Electric T700 turbine into a thousand fragments, each one blasting through the helicopter like a machine gun bullet. The flight crew was cut to shreds even before the secondary explosion hit the fuel tanks.

Bits of flaming wreckage fell out of the sky like meteors, and Wolfhound Eight-Seven ceased to exist.

* * *

USS Kitty Hawk:

Commander Ortiz stared at the tactical display. Wolfhound Eight-Seven’s tracking symbol flashed several times and then converted itself to a last-known-position symbol. They were gone. They were really gone.

How in the hell could this happen?

He shook his head once and then blinked several times. “Get the admiral up here! And get on the radio to Wolfhound Nine-Three. Tell them to get a torpedo in the water now! I don’t give a damn if it hits anything. We’ve got to put that sub on the defensive before it gets a bead on them.”

Even as he spoke, he saw that his order had come too late. A hostile-missile symbol popped up on the tactical display and began homing in on Wolfhound Nine-Three’s position.

“Goddamn it!” Ortiz shouted. He grabbed a red radio-telephone handset. “USS Wallingford, this is Strike Group Command. Lock on to hostile missile track zero-zero-two and kill that son of a bitch!” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Break — Wolfhound Nine-Three, this is Strike Group Command. Forget the torpedo! Get the hell out of there, over!”

A friendly-missile symbol appeared on the tactical display next to USS Wallingford. It began to close rapidly on the hostile-missile symbol. The hostile-missile symbol continued to race toward the helicopter.

“It’s too far away,” somebody behind Commander Ortiz said.

“Wallingford’s missile is never going to get there in time.”

Ortiz knew instantly that the speaker, whoever he was, was right.

Ten seconds later, the hostile-missile symbol merged with the helicopter symbol, and Wolfhound Nine-Three was gone.

Ortiz was amazed at how clean it looked from the tactical display. No blood. No fire. No screams of terror as burnt bodies fell from the sky.