Ron, how sure—”
“I did the analysis myself. One of my people looked it over and caught a whiff. I spent fifty hours massaging the data. One chance in three, maybe more, that she was being trailed.”
Bart Mancuso set his coffee cup down. “That's really hard to believe.”
“I know. That very fact may be skewing my analysis. It is kinda incredible.”
It was an article of faith in the United States navy that its fleet ballistic-missile submarines had never, not ever, not once been tracked while on deterrence patrol. As with most articles of faith, however, it had caveats.
The location of American missile-sub bases was not a secret. Even the United Parcel Service deliverymen who dropped off packages knew what to look for. In its quest for cost-efficiency, the Navy mainly used civilian security officers—“rentacops”—at its bases. Except that Marines were used wherever there were nuclear weapons. Wherever you saw Marines, there were nukes about. That was called a security measure. The missile boats themselves were unmistakably different from the smaller fast-attack subs. The ship names were on the Navy register, and the sailors of those ships wore ballcaps identifying them by name and hull number. With knowledge available to anyone, the Soviets knew where to station their own fast-attack boats to catch the American “boomers” on the way out to sea.
At first this had not been a problem. The first classes of Soviet fast-attack submarines had been equipped with “Helen Keller” sonars that could neither see nor hear, and the boats themselves had been noisier than unmuffled automobiles. All that had changed with the advent of the Victor-III class, which approximated a late American 594-class in radiated noise levels, and began to approach adequacy in sonar performance. Victor-IIIs had occasionally turned up at the Juan de Fuca Strait — and elsewhere — waiting for a U.S. missile sub to deploy, and in some cases, since harbor entrances are typically restricted waters, they had established contact and held on tight. That occasionally had included active sonar-lashing, both unnerving and annoying to American sub crews. As a result, U.S. fast-attack subs often accompanied missile submarines to sea. Their mission was to force the Soviet subs off. This was accomplished by the simple expedient of offering an additional target for sonar, confusing the tactical situation, or sometimes by forcing the Russian submarine off-track by ramming — called “shouldering,” to defuse that most obscene of marine terms. In fact, American boomers had been tracked, only in shallow water, only near well-known harbors, and only for brief periods of time. As soon as the American subs reached deep water, their tactics were to increase speed to degrade the trailing sub's sonar performance, to maneuver evasively, and then go quiet. At that point — every time — the American submarine broke contact. The Soviet sub lost its track, and became the prey instead of the hunter. Missile submarines typically had highly-drilled torpedo departments, and the more aggressive skippers would have all four of their tubes loaded with Mark 48 torpedoes with solutions set on the now-blinded Soviet sub as they watched it wander away in vulnerable befuddlement.
The simple fact was that American missile submarines were invulnerable in their patrol areas. When fast- attack boats were sent in to hunt them, care had to be given to operating depths — much like traffic control for commercial aircraft — lest an inadvertent ramming occur. American fast-attack boats, even the most advanced 688 -class, had rarely tracked missile submarines, and the cases where Ohios had been tracked could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Nearly all involved a grievous mistake made by the missile-boat skippers, the ultimate “black mark in the copybook,” and even then only a very good and very lucky fast-attack skipper had managed to pull it off — and never ever without being counter-detected. Omaha had one of the best drivers in the Pacific Fleet, and he had failed to find Maine despite having some good intelligence data provided — better than anything a Soviet commander would ever get.
“Good morning, sir,” Dutch Claggett said on his way through the door. “I was right down the hall at personnel.”
“Commander, this is Dr. Ron Jones.”
“This the Jonesy you like to brag on, sir?” Claggett took the civilian's hand.
“None of those stories are true,” Jones said.
Claggett stopped cold when he saw the looks. “Somebody die or something?”
“Grab a seat,” Mancuso said. “Ron thinks you might have been tracked on your last patrol.”
“Bullshit,” Claggett observed. “Excuse me, sir.”
“You're pretty confident,” Jones said.
“Maine is the best submarine we own, Dr. Jones. We are a black hole. We don't radiate sound, we suck it in from around us.”
“You know the party line, Commander. Now, can we talk business?” Ron unlocked his briefcase and pulled out a heavy sheaf of computer printouts. “Right around the half-way point in your patrol.”
“Okay, yeah, that's when we snuck up behind Omaha.”
“I'm not talking about that. Omaha was in front of you,” Jones said, flipping to the right page.
“I still don't believe it, but I'll look at what you got.”
The computer pages were essentially a graphic printout of two “waterfall” sonar displays. They bore time and true-bearing references. A separate set showed environmental data, mainly water temperature.
“You had a lot of clutter to worry about,” Jones said, pointing to notations on the pages. “Fourteen fishing boats, half a dozen deep-draft merchant ships, and I see the humpbacks were up to thin out the krill. So, your sonar crew was busy, maybe a little overloaded. You also had a pretty hard layer.”
“All that's right,” Claggett allowed.
“What's this?” Jones pointed to a blossom of noise on the display.
“Well, we were tracking Omaha, and the captain decided to rattle their cage with a water slug.”
“No shit?” Jones asked. “Well, that explains his reaction. I guess they changed their underwear and headed north. You never would have pulled that off on me, by the way.”
“Think so?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Jones replied. “I always paid real good attention to what was aft of us. I've been out on Ohios, Commander, okay? You can be tracked. Anybody can. It isn't just the platform. Now, look here.”
The printout was a computer-generated cacophony of dots that seemed for the most part to show nothing but random noise, as though a convention of ants had walked across the pages for hours. As with all truly random events, this one had irregularities, places where for one reason or another the ants had never trod, or places where a large number had congregated and then dispersed.
“This line of bearing,” Jones said. “This pattern comes back eight times, and it comes back only when the layer thins out.”
Commander Claggett frowned. “Eight, you say? These two could be reverbs from the fishing boats, or really distant CZ-contacts.” He flipped through the pages. Claggett knew his sonar. This is thin.'
“That's why your people didn't catch it, either aboard or here. But that's why I got the contract to back-check your people,” Jones said. “Who was out there?”
“Commodore?” Claggett asked, and got a nod. “There was an Akula-class out there somewhere. The P-3s lost him south of Kodiak, so he was within maybe six hundred miles of us. That doesn't mean this is him.”
“Which one?”
“Admiral Lunin,” Claggett answered.
“Captain Dubinin?”
“Jesus, you are cleared pretty good,” Mancuso noted. “They say he's very good.”
“Ought to be, we have a mutual friend. Is Commander Claggett cleared for that?”
“No. Sorry, Dutch, but that is really black.”
“He ought to be cleared for that,” Jones said. “This secrecy crap goes way too far, Bart.”
“Rules are rules.”
“Yeah, sure. Anyway, this is the one that twigged me. Last page.” Ron flipped through to the end. “You were coming up to antenna depth…”
“Yeah, practice on the missiles.”
“You made some hull noises.”
“We came up fast, and the hull's made of steel, not elastic,” Claggett said in some annoyance. “So?”
“So, your hull went up through the layer faster than your 'tail' did. Your towed array caught this.”
Claggett and Mancuso both went very quiet. What they saw was a fuzzy vertical line, but the line was in a frequency range that denoted a Soviet submarine's acoustical signature. It was by no means conclusive evidence,
