coffee and built a sandwich. O'Malley opted for a fruit drink from the cooler on the after bulkhead. The official Navy term for it was bug juice.
'No coffee?' Morris asked. O'Malley shook his head.
'Too much makes me jumpy. You don't want shaky hands when you're landing a helo in the dark.' He smiled. 'I really am getting too old for this crap.'
'Kids?'
'Three boys, and ain't none of them gonna be a sailor if I have anything to say about it. You?'
'Boy and a girl. They're back in Kansas with their mother.' Morris went after his sandwich. The bread was a little stale and the cold cuts weren't cold, but he needed to eat. This was the first meal in three days he hadn't eaten alone. O'Malley pushed the potato chips over.
'Get all your carbohydrates, Captain.'
'That bug juice'll kill you.' Morris nodded at the fruit drink.
'It's been tried before. I flew two years over 'Nam. Mostly search-and-rescue stuff. Got shot down twice. Never got scratched, though. Just scared to death.'
Was he that old? Morris wondered. He had to have been passed over for promotion a few times. The captain made a mental note to check O'Malley's date of rank.
'How come you were in CIC?' the captain asked.
'I wasn't very sleepy and I wanted to see how the towed array was working.'
Morris was surprised. Aviators didn't generally show this much interest in the ship's equipment.
'The word is you did pretty well with Pharris.
'Not good enough.'
'That happens, too.' O'Malley watched his skipper very closely. The only man aboard with extended combat experience, O'Malley recognized something in Morris that he hadn't seen since Vietnam. The flyer shrugged. It wasn't his problem. He fished in his flight suit and came out with a pack of cigarettes. 'Mind if I smoke?'
'I just restarted myself.'
'Thank God!' O'Malley raised his voice. 'With all these virtuous children in the wardroom, I thought I was the only dirty old man here!' The two young lieutenants smiled at that, without taking their eyes from the television screen.
'How much experience you have on figs?'
'Most of my time is on carriers, skipper. Last fourteen months I've been an instructor down at Jax. I've done a lot of odd jobs, most of them with the Seahawk. I think you'll like my bird. The dipping sonar is the best I've ever worked with.'
'What do you think about this contact report?'
O'Malley leaned back and puffed on his cigarette with a faraway look. 'It's interesting. I remember seeing something on TV about the Doria. She sank on her starboard side. A lot of people have dived to look at the wreck. It's about two hundred feet of water, just shallow enough for amateurs to try. And there's a million cables draped over her.'
'Cables?' Morris asked.
'Trawls. Lot of commercial fishing goes on there. They tangle their nets on the wreck. It looks like Gulliver on the beach at Lilliput.'
'You're right! I remember that', Morris said. 'That explains the noise. It's the tide, or currents whistling through all those cables.'
O'Malley nodded. 'Yep, that could explain it. I still want to give it a look.'
'Why?'
'All the traffic coming out of New York has to pass right overtop the place for one thing. Ivan knows we got a big convoy forming up in New York-he has to know unless the KGB has gone out of business. That's one hell of a good place to park a submarine if they want to put a trailer on the convoy. Think about it. If you get a NLAD contact there, you write it off. The noise from a reactor plant at low power probably won't be louder than the flow noise over the wreck if they get in close enough. If I was a real nervy sub-driver, I'd think hard about using a place like that to belly-up.'
'You really do think like them', Morris observed. 'Okay, let's see how we should handle this…'
0230 hours. Morris watched the takeoff procedures from the control tower, then walked forward to CIC. The frigate was at battle stations, doing eight knots, her Prairie/Masker systems operating. If there were a Russian sub out there, fifteen or so miles away, there was no way she'd suspect a frigate was nearby. In CIC the radar plot showed the helo moving into position.
'Romeo, this is Hammer. Radio check, over,' O'Malley said. The helicopter's on-board data link also transmitted a test message to the frigate. The petty officer on the helicopter communications panel checked it out, and grunted with satisfaction. What was that expression he'd heard? Yeah, right-they had a 'sweet lock on momma's gadget.' He grinned.
The helo began its search two miles from the grave of Andrea Doria. O'Malley halted his aircraft and hovered fifty feet above the rolling surface.
'Down dome, Willy.'
In the back, the petty officer unlocked the hoist controls and lowered the dipping sonar transducer down a hole in the belly of the helicopter. The Seahawk carried over a thousand feet of cable, enough to reach below the deepest of thermocline layers. It was only two hundred feet to the bottom here, and they had to be careful not to let the transducer come near the bottom for risk of damage. The petty officer paid close attention to the cable and halted the winch when the transducer was a hundred feet down. As with surface ships, the sonar readout was both visual and aural. A TV-type tube began to show frequency lines while the sailor listened in on his headphones.
This was the hard part, O'Malley reminded himself. Hovering a helicopter in these wind conditions required constant attention-there was no autopilot-and hunting for a submarine was always an exercise in patience. It would take several minutes for the passive sonar to tell them anything, and they could not use their active sonar systems. The pinging would only serve to alert a target.
After five minutes they had detected nothing but random noise. They recovered the sonar and moved east. Again there was nothing. Patience, the pilot told himself He hated being patient. Another move east and another wait.
'I got something at zero-four-eight. Not sure what it is, a whistle or something in the high-frequency range.' They waited another two minutes to make sure it wasn't a spurious signal.
'Up dome.' O'Malley brought the helicopter up and moved off northeast for three thousand yards. Three minutes later the sonar went down again. Nothing this time. O'Malley changed positions again. If I ever write a song about hunting submarines, he thought, I'll call it 'Again, and Again, and AGAIN!' This time a signal came back-two signals, in fact.
'That's interesting', the ASW officer aboard Reuben James observed. 'How close is this to the wreck?'
'Very close,' Morris answered. 'Just about the same bearing, too.'
'Could be flow noise', Willy told O'Malley. 'Very faint, just like the last time.'
The pilot reached up to flip a switch to feed the sonar signal into his headset. We're looking for a very faint signal, O'Malley reminded himself. 'Could be steam noise, too. Prepare to raise dome, I'm gonna go east to triangulate.'
Two minutes later, the sonar transducer went into the water for a sixth time. The contact was now plotted on the helicopter's on-board tactical display that sat on the control panel between pilot and copilot.
'We got two signals here,' Ralston said. 'About six hundred yards apart.'
'Looks that way to me. Let's go see the near one. Willy―''
'Cable within limits, ready to raise, skipper.'
'Up dome. Romeo, Hammer. You got what we got?'
'Affirmative, Hammer,' Morris answered. 'Check out the southern one.'
'Doing that right now. Stand by.' O'Malley paid close attention to his instruments as he flew toward the nearer of the two contacts. Again he halted the aircraft. 'Down dome.'
'Contact!' the petty officer said a minute later. He examined the tone lines on his display and mentally compared them with data he had on Soviet submarines. 'Evaluate this contact as steam and plant noises from a nuclear submarine, bearing two-six-two.'
