19
DEVELOPMENT
“Commodore, I have real trouble believing that,” Ricks said as evenly as he could manage. He was tanned and refreshed from his trip to Hawaii. He'd stopped in at Pearl Harbor while there, of course, to look over the sub base and dream about having command of Submarine Squadron One. That was a fast-attack squadron, but if a fast-attack guy like Mancuso could take over a boomer squadron, then surely turn-about was fair play.
“Dr. Jones is a really good man,” Bart Mancuso replied.
“I don't doubt it, but our own people have been over the tapes.” It was normal operating procedure and had been so for more than thirty years. Tapes from missile-sub patrols were always examined by a team of experts on shore as a back-check to the sub's crew. They wanted to make sure that no one might have been trailing a missile boat. “This Jones guy was one hell of a sonar operator, but now he's a contractor, and he has to justify his fees somehow, doesn't he? I'm not saying he's dishonest. It's his job to look for anomalies, and in this case what he did was to string a bunch of coincidences into a hypothesis. That's all there is here. The data is equivocal — hell, the data is almost entirely speculative — but the bottom line is that for this to be true, you have to assume that the same crewmen who tracked a 688 were unable to detect a Russian boat at all. Is that plausible?”
“That's a good point, Harry. Jones doesn't say that it's certain. He gives it a one-in-three chance.”
Ricks shook his head. “I'd say one in a thousand, and that's being generous.”
“For what it's worth, Group agrees with you, and I had some people from OP-02, here three days ago who said the same thing.”
So, why are we having this conversation? Ricks wanted to ask, but couldn't. “The boat was checked for noise on the way out, right?”
Mancuso nodded. “Yep, by a 688 right out of overhaul, all the bells and whistles.”
“And?”
“And she's still a black hole. The attack boat lost her at a range of three thousand yards at five knots.”
“So how are we writing it up?” Ricks asked, as casually as he could manage. This was going into his record, and that made it important.
It was Mancuso's turn to squirm. He hadn't decided. The bureaucrat part of him said that he'd done everything right. He'd listened to the contractor, booted the data up the chain of command to Group, to Force, and to the Pentagon experts. Their analysis had all been negative: Dr. Jones was being overly paranoid. The problem was that Mancuso had sailed with Jones for three very good years in USS Dallas, and had never known him to make a bad call. Never. Not once. That Akula had been somewhere out there in the Gulf of Alaska. From the time the P-3 patrol aircraft had lost her to the moment she'd appeared outside her base, the Admiral Lunin had just fallen off the planet. Where had she been? Well, if you drew speed/time circles, it was possible that she'd been in Maine's patrol area, possible that she'd left Maine at the proper time and made homeport at the proper time. But it was also possible — and very damned likely — that she'd never been in the same area as the American missile sub. Maine hadn't detected her, and neither had Omaha. How likely was it that a Russian sub could have evaded detection by both top-of-the-line warships?
Not very.
“You know what worries me?” Mancuso asked.
“What's that?”
“We've been in the missile-sub business for over thirty years. We've never been tracked in deep water. When I was XO on Hammerhead, we ran exercises against Georgia and had our heads handed to us. I never tried tracking an Ohio when I had Dallas, and the one exercise I ran against Pulaski was the toughest thing I ever did. But I've tracked Deltas, Typhoons, everything the Russians put in the water. I've taken hull shots of Victors. We're so good at this business…” The squadron commander frowned. “Harry, we're used to being the best.”
Ricks continued to speak reasonably. “Bart, we are the best. The only people close to us are the Brits, and I think we have them faded. Nobody else is in the same ballpark. I got an idea.”
“What's that?”
“You're worried about Mr. Akula. Okay, I can understand that. It's a good boat, like a late 637-class even, for damned sure the best thing they've ever put in the water. Okay, we have standing orders to evade everything that comes our way — but you gave Rosselli a nice write-up for tracking this same Akula. You probably got a little heat from Group for that.”
“Good guess, Harry. A couple of noses went decidedly out of joint, but if they don't like the way I run my squadron, they can always pick a new squadron boss.”
“What do we know about Admiral Lunin?”
“She's in the yard for overhaul now, due out late January.”
“Going by past performance, it'll come out a little quieter.”
“Probably. Word is that she'll have a new sonar suite, say about ten years behind us,” Mancuso added.
“And that doesn't allow for the operators. It's still not a match for us, not even close to one. We can prove that.”
“How?”
“Why not recommend to Group that any boat that comes across an Akula is supposed to track him aggressively. Let the fast-attack guys really try to get in close. But if a boomer gets close enough to track without risk of counter-detection, let's go for that, too. I think we need better data on this bird. If he's a threat, let's upgrade what information we have on him.”
“Harry, that will really put Group into the overhead. They're not going to like this idea at all.” But Mancuso already did, and Harry could see it.
Ricks snorted. “So? We're the best, Bart. You know it. I know it. They know it. We set some reasonable guidelines.”
“Like what?”
The farthest anyone has ever tracked an Ohio is — what?'
“Four thousand yards, Mike Heimbach on Scranton against Frank Kemeny on Tennessee. Kemeny detected Heimbach first — difference was about one minute on detection. Everything closer than that was a pre-arranged test.”
“Okay, we multiply that by a factor of… five, say. That's more than safe, Bart. Mike Heimbach had a brand- new boat, the first rendition of the new sonar integration system, and three extra sonarmen out of Group Six, as I recall.”
Mancuso nodded. “Right, it was a deliberate test, and they worst-cased everything to see if anyone could detect an Ohio. Isothermal water, below the layer, everything.”
And still Tennessee won,“ Ricks pointed out. ”Frank was under orders to make it easy, and he still detected first, and as I recall he had a solution three minutes before Mike did.'
“True.” Mancuso thought for a moment. “Make it twenty-five thousand yards separation. No closer than that.”
“Fine. I know I can track an Akula at that range. I have a very good sonar department — hell, we all do. If I stumble across this guy, I hover out there and gather all the signature data I can. I draw a twenty-five-thousand- yard circle around him and keep outside of it. There is no chance in hell that I'll get counter-detected.”
“Five years ago, Group would have shot both of us even for talking like this,” Mancuso observed.
“The world's changed. Look, Bart, you can run a 688 in close, but what does it prove? If we're really worried about boomer vulnerability, why dick around?”
“You're sure you can handle this?”
“Hell, yes! I'll write up the proposal for your operations staff, and you can send it up the flagpole to Group.”
“This'll end up in Washington, you know that.”
“Yeah, no more 'We hide with pride,' eh? What are we, a bunch of little old ladies? Damn it, Bart, I'm the commanding officer of a warship. Somebody wants to tell me I'm vulnerable, well, I'm going to prove that's a load
