merely made it official, and a lot more ominous.
“What else?” Ricks asked communications.
“That's it, sir.”
“Any news come in, any threat warning?”
“Sir, we got the usual news broadcast yesterday. I was planning to get the next one in about five hours — you know, so we'd have the Superbowl score.” The lieutenant paused. “Sir, there was nothing in the news, and nothing official about any crisis.”
“So what the hell is going on?” Ricks asked rhetorically. “Well, that doesn't really matter, does it?”
“Captain,” Claggett said, “for starters, I think we need to break off from our friend at two-seven-zero.”
“Yeah. Bring her around northeast, X. He's not due for another turn soon, and that'll open the range pretty fast, then we'll head north to open further.”
Claggett looked at the chart, mainly as a matter of habit to see that the water was deep. It was. They were, in fact, astride the great-circle route from Seattle to Japan. On command, USS Maine turned to port. A right turn would have been just as easy, but this way they would immediately start opening the range on the Akula which they'd been tracking for several days. In a minute, this put the submarine broadside to the thirty-footers rolling just a few feet over their heads and made the submarine's sail almost exactly that, a target for the natural forces at work. The boat took a forty-degree roll. All over the submarine, men braced and grabbed for loose gear.
“Take her down a little, Captain?” Claggett asked.
“In a few minutes. Let's see if there's any followup on the satellite channel.”
Three pieces of what had once been one of the most magnificent evergreen trees in Oregon had now been in the North Pacific for several weeks. The logs had still been green and heavy when they'd fallen off the MV George McReady. Since becoming just another entry in the flotsam on the sea, they'd soaked in more water, and the heavy steel chain that held them together changed what should have been a slightly positive buoyancy into neutral buoyancy. They could not quite get to the surface, at least not in these weather conditions. The pounding of the seas defeated every attempt at rising to the sunlight — of which there was none at the moment — and they hovered like blimps, turning slowly as the sea struggled mightily to break their chains.
A junior sonarman aboard Maine heard something, something at zero-four-one, almost dead ahead. It was an odd sound, he thought, metallic, like a tinkle but deeper. Not a ship, he thought, not a biologic. It was almost lost in the surface noise, and wouldn't settle down on bearing…
“Shit!” He keyed his microphone. “ Conn, sonar — sonar contact close aboard!”
“What?” Ricks dashed into sonar.
“Don't know what, but it's close, sir!”
“Where?”
“Can't tell, like both sides of the bow — not a ship, I don't know what the hell it is, sir!” The petty officer checked off the pip on his screen while his ears strained to identify the sound. “Not a point source — it's close, sir!”
“But—” Ricks stopped, turned, and shouted on reflex: “Emergency dive!” He knew it was too late for that.
The entire length of USS Maine reverberated like a bass drum as one of the logs struck the fiberglass dome over the bow sonar array.
There were three sections of what had once been a single tree. The first hit axially just on the edge of the sonar dome, doing very little damage because the submarine was only doing a few knots, and everything about her hull was built for strength. The noise was bad enough. The first log was shunted aside, but there were two more, and the center one tapped the hull once just outside the control room.
The helmsman responded at once to the captain's command, pushing his control yoke all the way to the stops. The stern of the submarine rose at once, into the path of the logs. Maine had a cruciform stern. There was a rudder both above and below the propeller shaft. To the left and right were the stern planes, which operated like the stabilizers of an aircraft. On the outer surface of each was another vertical structure that looked like an auxiliary rudder, but was in fact a fitting for sonar sensors. The chain between two of the logs fouled on that. Two logs were outboard, and one inboard. The inboard one was just long enough to reach the spinning propeller. The resulting noise was the worst anyone had ever heard. Maine 's seven-bladed screw was made of manganese-bronze alloy that had been shaped into its nearly perfect configuration over a period of seven months. It was immensely strong, but not this strong. Its scimitar-shaped blades struck the log one after another, like a slow, inefficient saw. Each impact gouged or dented the outboard edges. The officer in the maneuvering room, aft, had already decided to stop the shaft before the order to do so arrived. Outside the hull, not a hundred feet from his post, he heard the screams of abused metal as the sonar fitting was wrenched off the starboard stern plane, along with it went the additional fitting that held the submarine's towed array sonar. At that point, the logs, one of them now badly splintered, fell off into the submarine's wake, and the worst of the noise stopped.
“What the fuck was that?” Ricks nearly screamed.
“Tail's gone, sir. We just lost the tail,” a sonarman said. “Right side lateral array is damaged, sir.” Ricks was already out of the room. The petty officer was talking to himself.
“ Conn, maneuvering room,” a speaker was saying. “Something just pounded the hell out of our screw. I'm checking for damage to the shaft now.”
“Stern planes are damaged, sir. Very sluggish on the controls,” the helmsman said. The Chief of the Boat pulled the youngster off the seat and took his place. Slowly and carefully, the Master Chief worked the control wheel.
“Damaged hydraulics, feels like. The trim tabs”—these were electrically powered—“look okay.” He worked the wheel left and right. “Rudder is okay, sir.”
“Lock the stern planes in neutral. Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.” This order came from the XO.
“Aye.”
“So, what was it?” Dubinin asked.
“Metallic — an enormous mechanical transient, bearing zero-five-one.” The officer tapped the blazing mark on his screen. “Low frequency as you see, like a drum… but this noise here, much higher pitch. I heard that on my phones, sounded like a machinegun. Wait a minute…” Senior Lieutenant Rykov said, thinking rapidly. “The frequency — I mean the interval of the impulses — that was a blade-rate, that was a propeller… only thing it could be.. ”
“And now?” the captain asked.
“Gone completely.”
“I want the entire sonar crew on duty.” Captain Dubinin returned to control. “Come about, new course zero- four-zero. Speed ten.”
Getting a Soviet Army truck was simplicity itself. They'd stolen it, along with a staff car. It was just after midnight in Berlin, and since it was a Sunday night, the streets were empty. Berlin is as lively a city as any in the world, but Monday there is a workday, and work is something that Germans take seriously. What little traffic there was came from people late to leave their local Gasthaus, or perhaps a few workers whose jobs required round-the- clock manning. What mattered was that traffic was agreeably light, allowing them to get to their destination right on time.
There used to be a wall, Gunther Bock thought. On one side was the American Berlin detachment, and on the other a Soviet detachment, each with a small but heavily used exercise area adjacent to their barracks. The wall was gone now, leaving nothing but grass between two mechanized forces. The staff car pulled up to the Soviet gate. The sentry there was a senior sergeant of twenty years with pimples on his face and an untidy uniform. His eyes went a little wide when he saw the three stars on Keitel's shoulder boards.
“Stand at attention!” Keitel roared in perfect Russian. The boy complied at once. “I am here from Army Command to conduct an unannounced readiness inspection. You will not report our arrival to anyone. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Colonel!”
“Carry on — and clean up that filthy uniform before I come back through here or you'll find yourself on the Chinese border! Move!” Keitel ordered Bock, who was sitting at the wheel.
