“You want the good news or the bad news?” Jack asked.
“Good first,” Cathy said.
“They're asking me to resign my position.”
“What's the bad news?”
“Well, you never really leave. They'll want me to come back occasionally. To consult, stuff like that.”
“Is that what you want?”
“This work does get in your blood, Cathy. Would you like to leave Hopkins and just be a doc with an office and patients and glasses to prescribe?”
“How much?”
“Couple times a year, probably. Special areas I happen to know a lot about. Nothing regular.”
“Okay, that's fair — and, no, I couldn't give up teaching young docs. How soon?”
“Well, I have two things I have to finish up with. Then we have to pick someone for the job…” How about the Foleys, Jack thought. But which one…?
“ Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye,” the navigator answered.
“Sir, I got a possible contact bearing two-nine-five, very faint, but it keeps coming back.”
“On the way.” It was a short five steps into the sonar room. “Show me.”
“Right here, sir.” The sonarman pointed to a line on the display. Though it looked fuzzy, it was in fact composed of discrete yellow dots in a specific frequency range, and as the time-scale moved vertically upward, more dots kept appearing, regular only in that they seemed to form a vague and fuzzy line. The only change in the line was a slight drift in direction. “I can't tell you what it is yet.”
“Tell me what it isn't.”
“It ain't no surface contact, and I don't think it's random noise either, sir.” The petty officer traced it all the way to the top of the tube with a grease pencil. “Right about here, I decided it might actually be something.”
“What else you got?”
“Sierra-15 over here is a merchant, heading southeast and way the hell away from us — that's a third-CZ contact we been trackin' since before turn of the last watch, and that's about it, Mr. Pitney. I guess it's too bumpy topside for the fishermen to be out this far.”
Lieutenant Pitney tapped the screen. “Call it Sierra-16, and I'll get a track started. How's the water?”
“Deep channel seems very good today, sir. Surface noise is a little tough, though. This one's tough to hold.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
“Aye aye.” The sonarman turned back to his scope.
Lieutenant Jeff Pitney returned to the control room, lifted the growler phone, and punched the button for the Captain's cabin. “Gator here, Cap'n. We have a possible sonar contact bearing two-nine-five, very faint. Our friend might be back, sir… Yes, sir.” Pitney hung up and hit the 1-MC speaker system. “Man the fire-control tracking party.”
Captain Ricks appeared a minute later, wearing sneakers and his blue overalls. His first stop was to control, to check course, speed, and depth. Then he went into sonar.
“Let's see it.”
“Damn thing just faded on me again, sir,” the sonarman said sheepishly. He used a piece of toilet paper — there was a roll over each scope — to erase the previous mark, and penciled in another. “I think we have something here, sir.”
“I hope you didn't interrupt my sleep for nothing,” Ricks noted. Lieutenant Pitney caught the look the two other sonarmen exchanged at that.
“Coming back, sir. You know, if this is an Akula, we should be getting a little pump noise in this spectrum over here…”
“Intelligence says he's coming out of overhaul. Ivan is learning how to make them quieter,” Ricks said.
“Guess so… slow drift to the north, call the current bearing two-nine-seven.” Both men knew that figure could be off by ten degrees either way. Even with the enormously expensive system on Maine, really longdistance bearings were pretty vague.
“Anybody else around?” Pitney asked.
“ Omaha is supposed to be around somewhere south of Kodiak. Wrong direction. It's not her. Sure it's not a surface contact?”
“No way, Cap'n. If it was diesel, I'd know it, and if it was steam, I'd know that, too. There's no pounding from surface noise. Has to be a submerged contact, Cap'n. Only thing makes sense.”
“Pitney, we're on two-eight-one?”
“Yessir.”
“Come left to two-six-five. We'll set up a better baseline for the target-motion analysis, try to get a range estimate before we turn in.”
Turn in, Pitney thought. Jesus, boomers aren't supposed to do this stuff. He gave the order anyway, of course.
“Where's the layer?”
“One-five-zero feet, sir. Judging by the surface noise, there's twenty-five-footers up there,” the sonarman added.
“So he's probably staying deep to smooth the ride out.”
“Damn, lost him again… we'll see what happens when the tail straightens back out… ”
Ricks leaned his head out of the sonar room and spoke a single word: “Coffee.” It never occurred to him that the sonarmen might like some, too.
It took five more minutes of waiting before the dots started appearing again in the right place.
“Okay, he's back. I think,” the sonarman added. “Bearing looks like three-zero-two now.”
Ricks walked out to the plotting table. Ensign Shaw was doing his calculations along with a quartermaster. “Has to be a hundred-thousand-plus yards. I'm assuming a north-easterly course from the bearing drift, speed of less than ten. Has to be a hundred-K yards or more.” That was good, fast work, Shaw and the petty officer thought.
Ricks nodded curtly and went back to sonar.
“Firming up, getting some stuff on the fifty-herz line now. Starting to smell like Mr. Akula, maybe.”
“You must have a pretty good channel.”
“Right, Captain, pretty good and improving a little. That storm's gonna change it when the turbulence gets down to our depth, sir.”
Ricks went into control again: “Mr. Shaw?”
“Best estimate is one-one-five-K yards, course northeasterly, speed five knots, maybe one or two more, sir. If his speed's much higher than that, the range is awfully far.”
“Okay, I want us to come around very gently, come right to zero-eight-zero.”
“Aye aye, sir. Helm, right five degrees rudder, come to new course zero-eight-zero.”
“Right five degrees rudder, aye. Sir, my rudder is right five degrees, coming to new course zero-eight- zero.”
“Very well.”
Slowly, so as not to make too great a bend in the towed array, USS Maine reversed course. It took three minutes before she settled down on the new course, doing something no US fleet ballistic-missile submarine had ever done before. Lieutenant-Commander Claggett appeared in the control room soon thereafter.
“How long you figure he's going to hold this course?” he asked Ricks.
“What would you do?”
“I think I'd troll along in a ladder pattern,” Dutch answered, “and my drift would be south instead of north, reverse of how we do it in the Barents Sea, right? Interval between sweeps will be determined by the performance of his tail. That's one hard piece of intel we can develop, but depending on how that number looks, we'll have to be real careful how we trail him, won't we?”
