America

accelerating, knew that he wouldn't hear much, but he wanted to stay busy. America was out there, the quietest, stealthiest submarine in the world, and it was manned by a group of ex — Russian submariners. According to the scuttlebutt, those guys knew their shit.

Anyway you cut it, Buck Brown thought, we're in for a gunfight with real bullets.

He wiped his forehead, then wiped his hands on his trousers.

The skipper seemed to read his thoughts. He leaned over, whispered, 'I want you to stay on the panel. If you need to take a head break, do it now, before things get interesting. Do your job, tell us what's out there, and let me do the rest.'

'Yes, sir.'

Ryder slapped one of those big hands on Brown's shoulder, then went to the back of the compartment where a sailor kept a manual running plot on a maneuvering board. Like America, La Jolla had a computerized tactical presentation, but Ryder merely used it to back up the manual plot. The computer could crap out — and when it was desperately needed, probably would — but the manual plot could be kept with dead reckoning, if nothing else, and would be there when all else failed.

Ryder was well aware that he was rushing to a position that would be more than an hour old when he arrived. Worse, he was just following a bearing, not going to a known location. In all likelihood, America was leaving the launch site at a good clip right now. But where was she going?

He was thinking that problem through when the com officer brought him a flimsy of an ELF message. It consisted of a single letter of the alphabet. Without consulting the code book, Ryder knew what it meant. The message was an order to ascend to periscope depth to receive an encrypted UHF message transmitted via satellite.

He was tempted. The UHF message would probably give him the exact location of the missile launch. Yet he would have to slow to rise and receive it, and even if he knew the exact location, the basic problem remained: He was rushing to a position where America had been, not where she would be when he arrived. So where was the stolen submarine?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

An air force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft on patrol two hundred miles east of Atlantic City, New Jersey, was the first to spot the Tomahawk missiles after launch. The crew picked up the first missile on radar just seconds after it came out of the water, then the second and third as they rose from the sea. The coordinates of the launch site and a rough intercept heading were broadcast to a navy P-3 Orion patrol aircraft, which was approximately a hundred miles to the south.

The Orion commander turned as soon as he heard the heading over the radio. In the back of the Orion, the tactical coordinator, or TACCO, typed the coordinates into the computer and called out a new bearing. The pilot made the correction, three degrees, and set the bug on his horizontal situation indicator (HSI).

At his console in the main compartment of the plane, the TACCO began planning his search and programming the sonobuoy panel. While the TACCO worked, the pilot and copilot restarted the number one and four engines, which they had secured earlier to save fuel. Only when both engines were developing cruise power and the temperatures were stabilized in the normal range did the pilot key his intercom mike. 'How long until we get there?' At the time he was level at 200 feet above the water, making 250 knots.

'Twenty-three minutes,' the TACCO told him.

The pilot was Duke Dolan, a graduate of Purdue University. His ambition had been to fly fighter planes from aircraft carriers, but the needs of the navy and his standing in his flight school class had conspired to put him in P- 3s. There were worse fates, he often told his wife. 'At least I don't have to go on a cruise on the big gray boat.'

So now he was hunting one. USS America. She had gotten the name, he recalled, after the Kitty HawJ(-cass carrier named America had been scrapped. Rumored to be the quietest thing in the ocean, America would take some finding. The way to do it, he thought, was to actively echo-range, or ping, the sonobuoys.

But wasn't there another submarine out here someplace? No doubt the TACCO knew where it was, so the pilot didn't need to worry about it.

Indeed, the TACCO did know about La Jolla. He didn't know her exact position, of course, but he knew she was in this operating area. Which frosted him more than a little. With a friendly boat down there, he would need absolutely certain identification before he strapped on the pirate ship with a Mk-48 torpedo. Finding the damned boat was going to be tough enough, but an ironclad positive ID? And he wasn't going to be able to use active sonar because he might illuminate La Jolla for the bad guys. Hoo boy!

'Where did they say those missiles were going?' the copilot asked Duke.

'Probably don't know yet.'

'Didya see the White House on TV after the bastards whacked it? Smoking hole, man.'

'Yeah. I saw it.'

'I hope they don't hit the O-Club, anything like that.'

The copilot was an idiot, no question. How in the hell did he get in the navy, anyway? And by what twist of evil fate, the pilot wondered, did he wind up in my right seat on what is probably the only day of my naval career that I will hunt a submarine for real? Why me, God?

Five minutes after the first missile was launched, a pair of F-16 fighters, which had been on alert status at the end of the Dover Air Force Base runway, with their pilots in the cockpits, lit their afterburners and rolled. They made a section takeoff, raised their gear together, and punched into the overcast that blanketed the East Coast of the United States at about twenty-three hundred feet. Two minutes after takeoff they switched to the operational frequency of the E-3 Sentry aircraft, which was a Boeing 707 with a thirty-foot radar rotodome mounted atop the fuselage.

'We have three Tomahawks in the air,' the mission commander aboard the Boeing told the F-16 section leader, whose name was Rebecca Allison. 'Your vector to intercept is zero six zero. Estimated distance to intercept is four hundred twelve miles, recommend you use a max range profile.'

'Roger that,' Rebecca Allison said and noted the info on her knee board. She dialed the heading bug on her horizontal situation indicator (HSI) to the recommended heading and engaged the autopilot, which could keep the fighter in a smooth, steady climb while she punched the intercept data into her computer and checked the sym- bology on the heads-up display, or HUD. Each plane was carrying two six-hundred-gallon aux tanks, one under each wing, and each had a Sidewinder on each wingtip missile station.

The planes were climbing through cloud. Allison checked her wingman, Stanley Schottenheimer, who was tucked in nicely on her right wing.

They topped the clouds at ten thousand feet and continued their climb. Schottenheimer increased the distance between the planes so that he too could attend to cockpit chores.

'Anvil One, Eagle Four Two,' Allison called on the secure UHF radio. 'Do you have a projected destination for the bogies?'

'Looks like New York. Unfortunately, all three are on different flight paths. We'll put you down on the closest one.'

'Do you have any other interceptors, over?'

'None that can intercept prior to the target area. You two are it.'

'Why don't you split us up, give us each a target, over?'

'Okay. Wingman, state your call sign.'

'Eagle Four Seven,' Schottenheimer replied.

'Both of you stay together for now. We'll separate you in a bit, try to give you each a missile.'

Three missiles, two planes. Uh-oh. And the missiles were Tomahawks, which flew right in the weeds. Allison tightened her harness straps and reached for her master armament switch. She would try for a Sidewinder shot, if she could get a lock on the missile's exhaust. If not, she would have to use the gun.