but it, like all the other things Jones had notated, was dead aft of Maine's course.
“Now, if I was a betting man, which I'm not, of course, I'd give you two-to-one that while you were underneath the layer, someone might have been tooling along just over top, letting his tail hang under it. He caught your hull transient, saw you were going shallow, and ducked under the layer just as you came over it. Cute move, but your big up-angle meant that your tail stayed down longer than it should have, and that's where this signature came from.”
“But there's nothing after that.”
“Nothing at all,” Jones admitted. “It never came back. From there on to the end of the tapes, nothing but random noise and otherwise-identified contacts.”
“It's pretty thin, Ron,” Mancuso said, standing up to straighten his back.
“I know. That's why I flew out. In writing it would never sell.”
“What do you know about Russian sonar that we don't?”
“Getting better… approaching where we were, oh, ten or twelve years ago. They pay more attention to broad-band than we do — that's changing now. I sold the Pentagon on taking another look at the broad-band integration system Texas Instruments' have been working on. Commander, what you said before about being a black hole. It cuts both ways. You can't see a black hole, but you can detect it. What if you track an Ohio by what should be there but isn't?”
“Background noise?”
“Yep.” Jones nodded. “You make a hole in it. You make a black spot where there's no noise. If he can really isolate a line of bearing on his gear, and if he's got really good filters, and one dynamite sonar operator, I think it's possible — if something else cues you in.”
“That's real thin.”
Jones granted that observation. “But it's not impossible. I ran the numbers. It's not good, but it's not impossible. Moreover, we can track below ambient now. Maybe they can, too. I'm hearing they've started turning out a new large-aperture tail — the one designed by the guys outside Murmansk. Good as a BQR-15 used to be.”
“I don't believe it,” Mancuso said.
“I do, skipper. It's not new technology. What do we know about Lunin?”
“She's in overhaul right now. Let's see.” Mancuso turned to look at the polar-projection chart on his office wall. “If that was him, then if he headed straight back to base… it's possible, technically speaking, but you're assuming a hell of a lot.”
“I'm saying that this bird was just in the neighborhood when you fired that water slug, that you headed south, and so did he, that you gave him a hull transient which he reacted to, and then he broke contact on his own. The data is thin, but it fits — maybe, I grant you, maybe. That's what they pay me for, guys.”
“I commended Ricks for rattling Omaha's cage like that,” Mancuso said, after a moment. “I want aggressive skippers.”
Jones chuckled to break the tension in the room. “I wonder why, Bart?”
“Dutch knows about that job we had on the beach, that pickup we did.”
“That was a little exciting,” Jones admitted.
“One chance in three…”
“The probability increases if you assume the other skipper is smart. Dubinin had a great teacher.”
“What are you two talking about?” Lieutenant Commander Claggett asked in some exasperation.
“You know we have all sorts of data on the Russian Typhoon class, lots more on their torpedoes. Ever wonder how we got all that data, Commander?”
“Ron, God damn it!”
“I didn't break any rules, skipper, and besides, he needs to know.”
“I can't do that and you know it.”
“Fine, Bart.” Jones paused. “Commander, you may speculate on how we got all that information in one great big lump. You might even guess right.”
Claggett had heard a few rumbles, like why the Eight-Ten dock at Norfolk had been closed so long a few years before. There was a story floated about, spoken only in submarine wardrooms far at sea and well below the surface, that somehow the U.S. Navy had gotten its hands on a Russian missile sub, how a very strange reactor had turned up at the Navy's nuclear-power school in Idaho for tests and then had disappeared, how complete drawings and some hardware from Soviet torpedoes had magically appeared in Groton, and how two night missile shots out of Vandenberg Air Force Base had not appeared to be American missiles at all. Lots of operational intelligence had come into the fleet, very good stuff, stuff that sounded like it had come from someone who knew what the hell he was talking about — not always the case with intelligence information — on Soviet submarine tactics and training. Claggett needed only to look at Mancuso's uniform to see the ribbon that denoted a Distinguished Service Medal, America's highest peace-time decoration. The ribbon had a star on it, indicating a second such award. Mancuso was rather young for a squadron command, and very young indeed to be selected for Rear Admiral (Lower Half). And here was a former enlisted man who'd sailed with Mancuso, and now called him Bart. He nodded to Dr. Jones.
“I get the picture. Thanks.”
“You're saying operator error?”
Jones frowned. He didn't know all that much about Harry Ricks. “Mainly bad luck. Call it good luck, even. Nothing bad happened, and we've learned something. We know more about the Akula than we used to. A weird set of circumstances came together. Won't happen again in a hundred years, maybe. Your skipper was a victim of circumstance, and the other guy — if there was another guy there — was very damned sharp. Hey, the important thing about mistakes is that you learn from them, right?”
“Harry gets back in ten days,” Mancuso said. “Can you be back here then?”
“Sorry,” Jones said with a shake of the head. “I'm going to be in England. I'm going out on HMS Turbulent for a few days of hide 'n' seek. The Brits have a new processor that we need to look at, and I drew the duty.”
“You're not going to ask me to present this to the CO, are you, sir?” Claggett asked after a minute's reflection.
“No, Dutch… you trying to tell me something?”
It was Claggett's turn to look unhappy. “Sir, he's my boss, and he's not a bad boss, but he is a little positive in his thinking.”
That was artfully done, Jones thought. Not a bad boss… a little positive. He just called his skipper an idiot in a way that no one could ever call disloyal. Ron wondered what sort of hyper-nuc-engineer this Ricks was. The good news was that this XO had his act together. And a smart skipper listened to his XO.
“Skipper, how's Mr. Chambers doing?”
“Just took over Key West. Got a kid you trained as his leading sonarman. Billy Zerwinski, just made chief, I hear.”
“Oh, yeah? Good for him. I figured Mr. Chambers was going places, but Billy Z as a chief? What is my Navy coming to?”
“This is taking forever,” Qati observed sourly. His skin was pasty white. The man was suffering again from his drug treatment.
“That is false,” Fromm replied sternly. “I told you several months, and it will be several months. The first time this was done, it took three years and the resources of the world's richest nation. I will do it for you in an eighth of that time, and on a shoestring budget. In a few days we'll start to work on the rhodium. That will be much easier.”
“And the plutonium?” Ghosn asked.
“That will be the last metal work — you know why, of course.”
“Yes, Herr Fromm, and we must be extremely careful, since when you work with a critical mass you must be careful that it does not become critical while you are forming it,” Ghosn replied, allowing his exacerbation to show for a change. He was tired. He'd been at work for eighteen hours now, supervising the workers. “And the tritium?”
“Last of all. Again, the obvious reason. It is relatively unstable, and we want the tritium we use to be as pure as possible.”
“Quite so.” Ghosn yawned, barely having heard the answer to his question, and not troubling himself to
