“Twelve more hours, then we must break contact and turn for home.”
“Too bad,” Ryskov observed, not meaning it. Six weeks at sea was enough for him.
“Make your depth six-zero feet,” the Officer of the Deck said.
“Make my depth six-zero feet, aye,” the Driving Officer replied. “Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.”
The missile-firing drill had just begun. A regular occurrence, it was intended both to ensure the competence of the crew and desensitize them to their primary war-fighting mission, the launch of twenty-four UGM-93 Trident-II D-5 missiles, each with ten Mark 5 re-entry vehicles of 400 kilotons nominal yield. A total of two hundred forty warheads with a total net yield of 96 megatons. But there was more to it than that, since nuclear weapons depended on the interlocking logic of several physical laws. Small weapons employed their yield with greater efficiencies than larger ones. Most important of all, the Mark 5 RV had a demonstrated accuracy of ±50 meters CEP (“Circular Error Probable”), meaning that after a flight of over four thousand nautical miles, half the warheads would land within 164.041 feet of their targets, and nearly all the rest within 300 feet. The “miss” distance was far smaller than the crater to be expected from such a warhead, as a result of which the D-5 missile was the first sea-launched ballistic missile with counter-force capability. It was designed for a disarming first-strike. Given the normal two-at- one targeting, Maine could eliminate 120 Soviet missiles and/or missile-control bunkers, roughly ten percent of the current Soviet ICBM force, which was itself configured for a counter-force mission.
In the missile-control center — MCC — aft of the cavernous missile room, a senior chief petty officer lit up his panel. All twenty-four birds were on line. On-board navigation equipment fed data into each missile-guidance system. It would be updated in a few minutes from orbiting navigation satellites. To hit a target, the missile had to know not only where the target was, but also where the missile itself was starting from. The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System could do that with a tolerance of less than five meters. The senior chief watched status lights change as missiles were interrogated by his computers and reported their readiness.
Around the submarine, water pressure on the hull diminished at a rate of 2.2 tons per square foot for every 100 feet of rise towards the surface. Maine's hull expanded slightly as the pressure was relieved, and there was a tiny amount of noise as steel relaxed from the compression.
It was only a groan, scarcely audible even over the sonar systems and seductively close to the call of a whale. Ryskov was so drunk with fatigue that had it come a few minutes later he would have missed it, but though his daydreams were getting the best of him, his mind retained enough of its sharpness to take note of the sound.
“Captain… hull-popping noise… right there!” His finger stabbed the screen, just at the bottom of the shadow he and Dubinin had been examining. “He's coming shallow.”
Dubinin raced into the control room. “Stand by to change depth.” He put on a headset that connected him to Lieutenant Rykov.
“Yevgeniy Nikolay’ch, this must be done well, and done quickly. I will drop below the layer just as the American goes over it.”
“No, Captain, you can wait. His array will hang below briefly, as ours would do!”
“Damn!” Dubinin almost laughed. “Forgive me, Lieutenant. For that, a bottle of Starka.” Which was the best Russian-made vodka.
“My wife and I will drink your health… I'm getting an angle reading… Estimate target five degrees depression from our array… Captain, if I can hold him, the moment we lose him through the layer…”
“Yes, a quick range estimate!” It would be crude, but it would be something. Dubinin rasped quick orders to his tracking officer.
“Two degrees… hull noises are gone… this is very hard to hold, but he's occulting the background a little more now — GONE! He's through the layer now!”
“One, two, three…” Dubinin counted. The American must be doing a missile drill, or coming up to receive communications, in any case he'd go to twenty meters depth, and his towed array… five hundred meters long… speed five knots, and… Now!
“Helm, down five degrees on the bow planes. We're going just below the layer. Starpom, make note of outside water temperature. Gently, helm, gently…”
Admiral Lunin dipped her bow and slid below the undulating border that marked the difference between relatively warm surface water and colder deep water.
“Range?” Dubinin asked his tracking officer.
“Estimate between five and nine thousand meters, Captain! Best I can do with the data.”
“Well done, Kolya! Splendid.”
“We're below the layer now, water temperature down five degrees!” the Starpom called.
“Bow planes to zero, level out.”
“Planes to zero, Captain… zero angle on the boat.”
Had there been enough overhead room, Dubinin would have leaped off his feet. He'd just done what no other Soviet submarine commander — and if his intelligence information was right, only a handful of Americans — had ever done. He'd established contact with and tracked an American Ohio-class fleet ballistic-missile submarine. In a war situation, he'd be able to fire off ranging pings with his active sonar and launch torpedoes. He'd stalked the world's most elusive game, and was close enough for a killing shot. His skin tingled from the excitement of the moment. Nothing in the world could match this feeling. Nothing at all.
“Ryl nepravo,” he said next. “Right rudder, new course three-zero-zero. Increase speed slowly to ten knots.”
“But, Captain…” his Starpom — executive officer — said.
“We're breaking contact. He'll continue this drill for at least thirty minutes. It is very unlikely that we can evade counter-detection when he concludes it. Better to leave now. We do not want him to know what we have done. We will meet this one again. In any case, our mission is accomplished. We have tracked him, and we got close enough to launch our attack. At Petropavlovsk, men, there will be much drinking, and your captain will do the buying! Now, let's clear the area quietly so that he will not know that we were ever here.”
Captain Robert Jefferson Jackson wished he was younger, wished that his hair was still completely black, that he could again be a young “nugget” fresh from Pensacola, ready to take his first hop in one of the forbidding fighter aircraft that sat like enormous birds of prey along the flight line at Oceana Naval Air Station. That all twenty-four of the F-14D Tomcats in the immediate area were his was not as satisfying as the knowledge that one was his and his alone. Instead, as Commander Air Group, he “owned” two Tomcat squadrons, two more of F/A-18 Hornets, one of A-6E Intruder medium-attack aircraft, another of S-3 submarine hunters, and finally the less glamorous tankers, electronic-warfare Prowlers, and rescue/ASW helicopters. A total of seventy-eight birds with an aggregate value of… what? A billion dollars? Much more if you considered replacement cost. Then there were the three thousand men who flew and serviced the aircraft, each of whom was beyond price, of course. He was responsible for all of it. It was much more fun to be a new fighter pilot who drove his personal airplane and left the worrying to management. Robby was now management, the guy the kids talked about in their cabins on the ship. They didn't want to be called into his office, because that was like going to see the Principal. They didn't really like flying with him, because (A) he was too old to be good at it any more (they thought), and (B) he'd tell them whatever he thought they were doing wrong (fighter pilots do not often admit mistakes, except among themselves).
There was a certain irony to it. His previous job had been in the Pentagon, pushing papers. He'd prayed and lusted for release from that job, whose main excitement every day was finding a decent parking spot. Then he'd gotten his command of his air wing — and been stuck with more admin crap than he'd ever faced in his life. At least he got to fly twice a week… if he were lucky. Today was such a day. His command master chief petty officer gave him a grin on the way out the door.
“Mind the store, Master Chief.”
“Roger that, skipper. It'll be here when you get back.”
Jackson stopped in his tracks. “You can have someone steal all the paperwork.”
“I'll see what I can do, sir.”
A staff car took him to the flight line. Jackson was already in his Nomex flight suit, an old smelly one whose olive-drab color was faded from many washings, and threadbare at the elbows and seat from years of use. He could and should have gotten a new one, but pilots are superstitious creatures; Robby and this flight suit had been
