Then there were the imponderables. What sensing devices did the Soviets have in these waters? Might the water be clear enough that a circling helicopter or ASW aircraft could see them? Might there be a Tango-class diesel boat out there, moving slowly on her quiet, battery-powered electric motors? The only way they'd learn the answer to any of those questions was the metallic whine of a torpedo's high-speed propellers or the simple explosion of a falling depth-bomb. McCafferty considered all these things, and weighed the dangers against the priority of his Flash directive from COMSUBLANT:
Determine at once the operating areas of REDFLT SSBNs.
That sort of language gave him little leeway.
'How tight is the inertial fix?' McCafferty asked as casually as he could.
'Plus or minus two hundred yards.' The navigator didn't even look up.
The captain grunted, knowing what the navigator was thinking. They should have gotten a NAVSTAR satellite fix a few hours ago, but the risk of detection was too high in an area crawling with Soviet surface craft. Two hundred yards, plus or minus, was fine accuracy by any rational standard-but not while submerged in shallow water off a hostile coast. How accurate were his charts? Were there unmarked wrecks out there? Even if his navigational data were completely accurate, quarters would be so tight in another few miles that a goof of two hundred yards could ground them, damaging the submarine… and making noise. The captain shrugged to himself. The Chicago was the best platform in the world for this mission. He'd done this sort of thing before, and he couldn't worry about everything at the same time. McCafferty took a few steps forward and leaned into the sonar compartment.
'How's our friend doing?'
'Continuing as before, skipper. No changes at all in the target's radiated noise level. Just toolin' right along at fifteen knots, dead ahead, no more than two thousand yards off. Pleasure cruise, like,' the sonar chief concluded with no small irony.
Pleasure cruise. The Soviets were sortieing their ballistic missile submarines at intervals of one sub every four hours. Already a majority of them were at sea. They had never done that before. And all seemed to be heading east-not north and northeast as they usually did to cruise in the Barents or Kara seas, or most recently under the arctic ice cap itself. SACLANT had learned that piece of information from Norwegian P-3 aircraft patrolling Checkpoint Charlie, the spot fifty miles offshore where Soviet submarines always submerged. Chicago, the nearest sub to the area, had been sent to investigate.
They'd soon detected and gotten into trail position behind a Delta-III, a modem Soviet 'boomer,' as missile subs were known. Trailing her, they'd stayed within the hundred-fathom curve the whole way… until the target had turned southeast into shallow water toward Mys Svyatoy Nos, which led to the entrance to the White Sea-all of which was Soviet territorial water.
How far did they dare follow? And what was going on? McCafferty returned to control and went to the periscope pedestal.
'Look around,' he said. 'Up scope.' A petty officer turned the hydraulic ring control and the portside search periscope slid upward from its well. 'Hold!' McCafferty stooped at the conning station, catching the instrument as the quartermaster stopped it below the surface. From a position that was murderously uncomfortable, the skipper duck-walked the scope in a full circle. On the forward bulkhead was a television monitor which worked off a camera built into the scope. It was watched by the executive officer and a senior petty officer.
'No shadows,' McCafferty said. Nothing to make him suspect that something was there.
'Concur, skipper,' the XO agreed.
'Check with sonar.'
Forward, the sonar watch listened carefully. Circling aircraft made noise, and there was about an even chance that they'd heard it. But now they heard nothing-which didn't mean that nothing was there, like maybe a high-flying chopper or another Grisha laying to, her diesels shut down as she drifted, listening for someone like Chicago.
'Sonar says they don't have anything, skipper,' the XO reported.
'Two more feet,' McCafferty ordered.
The quartermaster worked the lever again, bringing the periscope up by twenty-three inches, just barely out of the water in the troughs of the waves.
'Skipper!' It was the senior ESM technician. The highest item on Chicago's periscope was a miniature antenna array which fed signals to a broadband receiver. The instant it projected above the surface, three lights flickered on the ESM tactical warning board. 'I read three-five, maybe six India-band search radars. Signature characteristics say ship and land-based search radars, sir, not, repeat not, aircraft sets. Nothing in the Juliet-band.' The technician started reading off the bearings.
McCafferty allowed himself to relax. There was no way a radar could detect so small a target as his periscope in these waves. He turned the periscope in a complete circle. 'I see no surface ships. No aircraft. Seas about five feet. Estimate the surface wind from the northwest at, oh, about twenty, twenty-five knots.' He snapped up the handles and stepped back. 'Down scope.' The oiled steel tube was heading down before he'd spoken the second word. The captain nodded approval at his quartermaster, who held out a stopwatch. The scope had been up above the surface for a total of 5.9 seconds. After fifteen years in submarines, it still amazed him how so many people could do so much in six seconds. When he'd gone through submarine school, the criterion had been a seven-second exposure.
The navigator examined his chart quickly, a quartermaster assisting him to plot the bearings to the signal sources.
'Captain.' The navigator looked up. 'Bearings are consistent with two known shore radar transmitters, and three Don-2 sets match the bearings of Sierra-2, -3, and -4.' He referred to the plotted positions of the three Soviet surface ships. 'We got one unknown, bearing zero-fourseven. What's that one look like, Harkins?'
'A land-based India-band surface search, one of those new 'Shore Cans,'' the technician responded, reading off frequency and pulse-width numbers. 'Weak signal and kinda fuzzy, sir. Lots of activity, though, and all the transmitters are dialed into different frequencies.' The technician meant that the radar searches were well coordinated, so that the radar transmitters would not interfere with one another.
An electrician rewound the videotape, allowing McCafferty to reexamine what he'd seen through the periscope. The only difference was that the periscope TV camera was black and white. The tape had to be run at slow speed to avoid blurring, so rapidly had the captain made his visual search.
'Amazing how good nothing can look, eh, Joe?' he asked his executive officer. The cloud ceiling was well below a thousand feet, and the wave action had rapidly coated the periscope lens with water droplets. No one had ever invented an efficient gadget for keeping that lens clear, McCafferty reflected, you'd think that after eighty-some years…
'Water looks a little murky, too,' Joe answered hopefully. A visual sighting by antisubmarine warfare aircraft is one of the nightmares all submariners share.
'Doesn't look like a nice day to fly, does it? I don't think we have to worry about somebody getting an eyeball sight on us.' The captain spoke loudly enough for the control room crew to hear.
'The water deepens out some for the next two miles,' the navigator reported.
'How much?'
'Five fathoms, skipper.
McCafferty looked over at the XO, who was conning the boat at the moment. 'Use it.' On the other hand, some helicopter jockey might get lucky…
'Aye. Diving officer, take her down another twenty feet. Gently.'
'Aye.' The chief gave the necessary orders to the planesmen and you could feel the sighs through the attack center.
McCafferty shook his head. When was the last time you saw your men look relieved over a twenty-foot change in depth? he asked himself. He went forward to sonar. He did not remember being there only four minutes earlier.
'How are our friends doing, chief?'
'The patrol boats are still faint, sir. They seem to be circling-the bearings are changing back and forth like they been doin'. The boomer's blade count is also constant, sir, he's just toolin' right along at fifteen knots. Not especially quiet, either. I mean, we still got plenty of mechanical transients, y'know? There's maintenance work-lot of it-going on in there, by the sound he's making. Want to listen in, skipper?' The chief held up a pair of earphones.
