from her center line. 'Solution?'
'Set!'
'Open outer door.' The petty officer on the torpedo board pushed the proper button and waited for the status light to change.
'Outer door is open, sir.'
'Match bearings and shoot!' The seven thousand tons of USS Chicago shuddered again with the torpedo launch.
'One fired, sir.'
McCafferty gave orders to change course and depth, increasing speed to ten knots.
Another exercise in patience. How soon will he hear the fish coming in? This one ran in at shallow depth. McCafferty hoped that its propulsion sounds might be lost in the surface noise. How good is Victor's sonar? he wondered.
'One minute.' The weapons officer held a stopwatch. The Mark-48 ran thirteen hundred yards per minute at this speed setting. About ten minutes to go. It was like watching some perverse sports event, McCafferty thought, a two-minute drill in a football game, two minutes of playing time that could stretch to half an hour if the quarterback knew his stuff. Except that they weren't trying to score points. 'Three minutes. Seven minutes to go.'
Chicago leveled out at one thousand feet and the captain ordered speed cut back to six knots again. Already he had fire-control solutions set on the other two targets. But they'd have to wait.
'Five minutes. Five to go.'
'Conn, sonar, target Sierra-2 has just increased power. Cavitation sounds, blade count shows twenty knots and increasing.'
'Kick the fish to full speed,' McCafferty ordered. The Mark-48 accelerated to a speed of forty-eight knots: sixteen hundred yards per minute.
'Target is turning east, her blade count shows thirty-one knots. Sir, I'm getting a funny signal slightly aft of the target. Target bearing is now three-five-eight. The new signal is three-five-six.'
'Noisemaker?'
'Doesn't sound like that. Sounds like something different… not a nixie, but something like that, sir. Target is continuing to turn, sir, bearing now three-five-seven. I believe she may be reversing course.'
'Take her up to two hundred feet,' the captain said.
'What the hell's he doing?' the exec wondered as the submarine rose again.
'Sir, that new signal has masked the target,' sonar announced.
'The fish is now pinging, sir.'
'If he has a decoy deployed-he put it between himself and the fish,' the captain said quietly. 'Fire-control, I want another fish on target Sierra-2, and update the solution for Sierra-l.'
Range and bearing figures were re-input into the computer.
'Set for tube three on target Sierra-2 and tube two for target Sierra-I.' The submarine passed through three hundred feet.
'Match bearings and shoot.' McCafferty gave the order quietly, then took his submarine down again. 'That pod on the Victor-III that we thought was a towed-array housing, what if it's a decoy like our nixie?' We don't use them on submarines, McCafferty thought, but Ivan does things his own way.
'The fish might still ignore it.'
'He doesn't think so. He thinks it'll work-then he can turn behind the noise of the explosion and get one off at us.' McCafferty walked over to the plot. The other new fish was running toward what was probably another Victor- class. The second target was maneuvering east now. The Alfa was also. The obvious tactical move: clear the danger area, turn, and begin your own stalk. While both were turned away, their sonar would be ineffective along the route of the advancing torpedo. Sonar called out.
'Captain, I have an explosion bearing three-five-four. We have lost contact with target Sierra-2. I don't know if the fish hit her or not. The other two fish seem to be running normally.'
'Patience,' the captain breathed.
'Conn, sonar, we show some sonobuoys dropping aft.' The bearings were plotted. They were in a north-south line two miles aft of Chicago.
'One of the other boats got a message out to his friends,' the exec suggested.
'Good bet. These cooperative tactics'll be a cast-iron bitch if they ever figure out how to do it right.'
'Sierra-2 is back, sir. I have a Type-2 machinery signature at three-four-nine. Some possible hull-popping noises. Sierra-2 is changing depth.'
The weapons officer commanded one of the running torpedoes to turn left a few degrees. McCafferty picked up a pen and started chewing on it.
'Okay, probably his sonar is a little messed up. I'll bet he's trying to get an antenna up to tell his friends where we fired from. All ahead two-thirds.'
'Torpedoes in the water bearing zero-three-one!'
'Do we have anything else on that bearing?'
'No, sir, I show nothing else.'
McCafferty checked his plot. It was working, by God. He'd spooked the Russians into moving east toward Todd Simms in the Boston!
'Conn, sonar, torpedo in the water aft, bearing two-eight-six!'
'Make your depth twelve hundred feet,' the captain said instantly. 'Right full rudder, come to new course one-six-five. Our friend the Victor got word out to his airedale friends.'
'Sir, we lost the wires to both fish,' Weapons reported.
'Estimated range to Sierra-2
'The fish should be about six thousand yards out; it's programmed to start pinging in another minute.'
'Mr. Victor made a mistake this time. He should have covered his ass before he went topside to radio the airplanes. Sonar, what's the position of the torpedo on our stem?'
'Bearing changing―sir, I'm losing sonar performance due to flow noise. Last bearing on the Russian fish is two-seven-eight.'
'All ahead one-third!' McCafferty brought his submarine back to slow, quiet speed. In two minutes they realized that the air-dropped torpedo was well clear of them, and that their second shot at the Victor was close to its target.
By this time the sonar display was totally confused. Target Sierra-2 had picked up the incoming fish late, but was racing directly away from it at full speed now. Their shot at the other Victor was still running, but that target was maneuvering to avoid another fish from Boston. The Alfa was at full power heading due north, another Mark-48 in pursuit. Two more Russian torpedoes were in the water to the east, probably heading after Boston, but Chicago didn't have her sister ship on sonar. Five submarines were racing around, four of them chased by smart- weapons.
'Sir, I have another decoy deployed on Sierra-2. Sierra-I has one deployed also. Our fish is pinging on -2. Somebody's fish is pinging on -1, and one of the Russian fish is pinging at zero-three-five-sir, I have an explosion at bearing three-three-nine.'
Dad wanted me to be an accountant, McCafferty thought. Maybe then I could keep all these damned numbers straight. He walked over to the plot.
The paper plot wasn't much clearer. The pencil lines that designated sonar contacts and running torpedoes looked like electrical wire dropped at random on the chart.
'Captain, I have very loud machinery noises at bearing three-three-nine. Sounds like something's broke, sir, lots of metallic noise. Getting some air noise now, he's blowing tanks. No breakup noises yet.'
'Left full rudder, come to new course zero-one-zero.'
'We didn't kill the Victor?'
'I'll settle for a small piece of him, if it sends him home. We'll score that one as a damage. What's going on with the other two?'
'The fish after Sierra- I is pinging, and so's Boston's-I guess it's from Boston. '
The slight abatement of the confusion lasted ten minutes. The second target put her stem on both torpedoes and ran northwest. More sonobuoy lines appeared across Chicago's path. Another air-dropped torpedo was
