the surface, where her diesel engines could usually be coaxed into life. And none of the sailors had come down with radiation sickness. Two years ago the Libyans almost bought her, then elected to take a boat from the Black Sea fleet instead. That had been a close call. The communications officer interrupted Saratov’s reverie with a radio dispatch from Moscow. It was highly classified and marked with the highest urgency classification, so it had been decoded immediately and brought to him. He read the paper by the light of the red flashlight he carried. A Japanese attack on Vladivostok?
He went below and read the message again under the good light in the control room. The message directed him to take his boat to Vladivostok and attack any Japanese ships he encountered. First priority, according to the message, were warships; second, troop transports. Presumably, the troops would be on deck waving Rising Sun flags, which would be visible in the periscope, so he wouldn’t waste a torpedo on a ship laden with bags of cement or rubber monster toys. The navigator was at his station in the control room. Saratov handed the message to him to read as he examined the chart on the navigator’s table. The navigator started whispering excitedly with the officer of the deck.
Saratov was measuring distances when he heard the michman of the watch say in a normal tone of voice, “P-3 radar signals.” This would be the fourth P-3 flyover in the last three days. “Where?” Saratov asked sharply. “Bearing one one five, estimated range fifteen.”
“Dive, dive, dive! Emergency dive!” Pavel Saratov shouted, and personally pushed the dive alarm.
The P-3 Orion was a large four-engine turboprop airplane with a crew of twelve. Made by Lockheed for the U.s. NAVY and periodically updated as electronic technology evolved, P-3’s were military versions of the old Electra airframe. They were a much bigger success as anti-submarine patrol planes than they ever were as airliners. The Japanese Self-Defense Force had operated them for decades. The crew of the P-3 that found Admiral Kolchak knew that the submarine had been operating on the surface near the port of Nemuro. Tonight they had been overflying radar contacts and positively identifying them with their 100-million-candlepower searchlight. Then one of the contacts ahead began to fade. The radar operator sang out enthusiastically, “Sinker, sinker, sinker. Thirteen miles, bearing three five zero relative.”
“Estimated course and speed?” That was the TACCO, the tactical coordinator, exasperated that the radar operator had to be asked. “About zero nine zero magnetic, speed six knots. He’s definitely a submarine, going down, down, down.”
The operator was brimming with excitement. This was war. After all those years of training, this was the real thing. Ahead was a Russian submarine, diving for the thermal layer; the crew of this airplane, which most certainly included the radar operator, was going to destroy it. The TACCO, Koki Hirota, was working hard. The submarine had undoubtedly detected the P-3’s radar, then dived for safety. Hokkaido was eight miles south; the sub had been cruising eastward on the surface. Once submerged, the submarine would probably turn to complicate the tactical problem. Which direction was it likely that the skipper would pick? Certainly not south, or a course that would take him back into the restricted waters of the strait. But then again … No, no, no. No shortcuts tonight. Let’s do it by the book, get this submarine. We’ll start a general search, pull the net tighter and tighter, then kill him with a Mk-46 homing torpedo.
The pilot, Masataka Yonai, had finished restarting the number one and four engines. He had been cruising on just two engines as they conducted a general search. With all engines running, he put the plane into a gentle descent. He leveled at two hundred feet above the water and engaged the autopilot. Doctrine called for night searches to be carried out at five hundred feet, day searches at two hundred, but the magnetic anomaly detector, or MAD gear, was slightly more sensitive at the lower altitude. Yonai had his share of the samurai spirit: he wanted this submarine, so the book be damned — he would fly at two hundred feet. Tension was high in the aircraft as the crew laid a general search pattern of sonobuoys. Some were set to listen above the thermal layer, which should be about 350 feet deep here, and others were set to listen below. It would take several minutes for the deep listeners to get their microphones down. The northernmost shallow sonobuoy picked up faint screw noises. “Contact, contact,” the operator sang out. Koki Hirota flipped switches so he, too, could listen. He concentrated very hard. Yes, he could just hear it: a sub. Thank heavens this is a Russian boat, Koki Hirota thought. If it had been an American submarine — the quietest kind — one plane would have a poor chance of pinning it. In his ten years in patrol planes, Hirota had only found one American boat, and that time, he freely admitted, he had been very lucky. Russian or not, if this skipper down under us is any good, we’ll need luck to get him, too. Hirota ordered a four- thousand-yard barrier pattern to the north of the northernmost sonobuoy. Yonai complied immediately. He had complete confidence in Hirota, whom he believed to be the best TACCO alive. Yonai now had the airplane thundering along at two hundred knots indicated airspeed, two hundred feet above the water. He and his copilot concentrated fiercely on the flight instruments. There was no margin for error, not at two hundred feet. The P-3 was a big plane; they were flying it right against the surface of the sea. The sonobuoys went out of the bay with split-second precision. Hir-ota selected the ones he wanted from among the sixty-four buoys in the bay and the order in which he wanted them dropped; then the computer spit them out. Forty of the buoys were the cheap LOFAR, or low-frequency, buoys. Eighteen were DIFAR, or directional, buoys used in tight search patterns. And six were the new doppler-ranging buoys that had been developed in secret by Japanese industry. Should the crew need them, more buoys were stowed in the plane and could be dropped manually by the ordnance technician. The crew had good tools, which they knew how to use. They spent their professional lives practicing. A murmur went through the plane each time a sonobuoy was dropped. The tension on a contact always racheted to violin-string tautness, which was why most of these men did this for a living. Hunting submarines was the ultimate team sport. With the string down, the operators pressed their headphones against their ears and listened intently for the slightest stirring in the ocean below, the tiniest hint of screws pushing a man-made leviathan. “I have it,” shrieked the number-one sensor operator. “Third and fourth buoys. He’s still above the layer.”
Koki Hirota flipped switches and listened intently. He closed his eyes, concentrating with all the power of his being. The TACCO got just the subtlest of hints, the most exquisite nuance amid the cacophony of the noisy ocean. There was the noise of sea life, rhythmic surf sounds from Hokkaido, and the hum of at least ten ships. Amid all that noise, the submarine was there, definitely there. The sound seemed to be part screw noise, part deck-plate gurgle, maybe a hint of a loose bearing. The submarine was fading now, perhaps slipping down below the thermal layer, trying to hide. Hirota switched to the deeper buoys. Yes, he was quite audible on this buoy. Hirota checked another. Louder still. Hirota’s fingers danced on the computer keys in front of him, and a blip appeared amid the search pattern on the screen. The submarine skipper was turning, coming back to an easterly heading. Still, he was moving very slowly to minimize his noise signature, maybe three knots. Four at the most. Should he drop a two- thousand-yard pattern, or a thousand-yard one? Hirota had only a limited number of sonobuoys, so he couldn’t afford to dither. He was chewing a fingernail on his left hand as he flipped back and forth between the channels, listening alternately on different buoys. He checked the computer, which agreed with his assessment. There was,the track, turning back to the east.
They had caught this Ivan in shallow water, and he was trying for deeper. The TACCO lined the pilot up for another buoy run — keyed the computer for a tight string, a thousand yards between buoys, a bit north of east. He elected to put a DIFAR at each end of the string and a doppler buoy in the middle. He wanted to wait, to drop the string after the sub steadied out on a new heading, but that was not going to be possible since the sub was fading from buoys already in the water. Hirota thought the sub skipper’s most probable new course would be about 090. The shortest route to deep water was in this direction. Still, Hirota was merely making an educated guess. Or perhaps he sensed the Russian captain’s thoughts. Masataka Yonai turned the P-3 using the autopilot heading selector. Level on the new heading, he corrected his altitude — the autopilot had lost twenty feet in the turn — and reengaged the thing. When he was a new aircraft commander he had insisted on flying all these patterns manually; and he had stopped that nonsense only after Hirota convinced him the autopilot could do the job better than any human could. “Be alert, men. We are tightening the net,” Yonai said over the intercom. The tension was palpable. Out went the sonobuoys, like the ticking of a clock. The last two buoys in the string were still in the airplane when the operator screamed over the intercom, “I’ve got him.”
Hirota checked. Yes. The computer was plotting There Heading 085, speed four knots. “Yonai, do a slow two-hundred-seventy-degree turn to the left and roll out heading zero eight five degrees for a MAD run. I will direct your turn. We will fly right up his wake.”
Yonai twisted the autopilot heading selector as the flight engineer ‘nudged the throttles forward a smidgen. The extra power would help hold airspeed in the turn. The airplane’s altitude was down to 150 feet above the sea. Yonai disconnected the autopilot, concentrated fiercely on the instruments as he coaxed the airplane back to two
