America

be used for depth, with less accurate results since the angles from the horizontal were so small.

'Another Los Angeles-ca.ss attack sub,' Eck reported.

'I've lost him completely,' Buck Brown said to the skipper of USS La Jolla, Junior Ryder. 'That gurgle wasn't much, and it's completely gone now, faded into the background noise.'

Ryder glanced at the tactical plot, then his watch. Nine and a half minutes. Allowing for the deceleration, the Russian was down to about two knots, slower than he thought. That meant the distance was opening quicker than he'd estimated. He was going to wait until the distance had opened to at least a mile and a half, giving the decoys sufficient time to deploy and the torpedoes more time to acquire their target. Still, it was going to be a minimum range, down-the-throat shot. Another fifteen minutes.

Sweet Jesus, into your hands I commit the lives of these men who sail with me.

'If La Jolla takes a crack at us, this new guy may decide to strap us on too,' Turchak said to Kolnikov. Both men knew that decoying and evading torpedoes was a noisy affair, sure to be heard for many, many miles, depending on the location of the temperature and salinity discontinuities. And like blood in the water, attract sharks.

'Port torpedo, from number two tube,' Kolnikov said, addressing Rothberg, 'target the newcomer. Starboard for La Jolla. Just in case.'

'Only one torpedo for each,' Turchak whispered hoarsely. 'What if one malfunctions?'

'We only have six. We may damn well need the last four.'

'I just want you to know that I'd be most unhappy dying with four torpedoes still aboard.'

Kolnikov resented Turchak's melodrama. 'You're not going to die,' he scoffed, 'unless food poisoning nails you.'

A sweating Rothberg was all thumbs changing the setting for the port torpedo. Kolnikov watched him, made sure he did it right.

Then he waited. Ten minutes came and went. Perhaps La folia's commander was waiting for the range to open.

The unbearable tension seemed to get even tighter.

Rothberg began sobbing.

'Shut up,' Heydrich snarled at him.

'They're going to kill all of us,' he whispered, barely audible. He glanced fearfully at the bulkheads. The other submarines were out there, listening.

'We must shoot now,' Turchak insisted. 'Before La Jolla tells this new contact of our presence.

Vladimir Kolnikov lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence.

The minutes ticked away in dead silence in La Jolla's control room. Everyone perspiring, everyone watching this and that, no one saying a word. Ten minutes since America passed the end of the towed array… eleven..

On the fourteenth minute, Buck Brown broke the silence. 'Contact! I have a subsurface contact. About fifteen degrees forward of our port beam.'

Junior began doing mental arithmetic. The range between La Jolla and America had opened to almost a mile and a half, which the torpedoes would traverse in about two minutes after they had made the turn.

'Los Angeles—class,' Brown said.

Shit! With her Revelation sonar, America must have heard the other boat. And there was no way in the world that boat would hear America. For whatever reason, that sub had just sailed unsuspectingly into the middle of a shootout.

Should he wait?

If he contacted the other boat on the acoustic circuit, Kolnikov might shoot at both boats. The American could fire back, down the bearing line of the incoming torpedo, but at short range would he have enough time to get his decoys out, accelerate, and evade? While

Junior weighed the problem, the oncoming victim was steadily closing the range.

'Okay,' he said, making up his mind. 'Let's do it. Right full rudder. Flood tubes one and two.'

'Kolnikov, La Jolla's making a funny noise.' Eck pressed his headphones tightly against his ears and watched the presentation on his scope. It took him all of five seconds. 'He's flooding tubes.'

Kolnikov's face was a mask. He took two steps to the torpedo control console, checked the presets going to each weapon one more time. Without knowing the range to the second sub, he was going to have to merely shoot down the bearing line and hope for the best. Not knowing how far the torpedo had to travel made that an iffy proposition. And with a limited number of torpedoes, he couldn't afford to miss.

'Target turning starboard,' Eck reported.

'Go active,' Kolnikov snapped at Eck. 'Give me exact range and bearing to La Jolla, then to the port-side submarine.'

Eck turned a knob on his console, selected a narrow beam width.

Ping! The needle jumped when the pulse went out.

Buck Brown heard the ping from America just after the first Mk-48 pump-jet torpedo swam from its tube and raced away, turning toward La Jolla's beam, in the direction that America had to be. As he sang out the news, he checked the PPI readout on the scope of the neighboring console, looking for the bearing. 'Starboard beam, Captain,' he roared.

'Fire two,' Junior Ryder ordered, although only seven seconds had passed since the first fish was launched. He couldn't afford to wait. He was counting on the second torpedo guiding automatically, because the fiber-optic wire would undoubtedly break as he accelerated.

'All ahead flank, launch the decoys.'

Four decoys were ejected from the housings in the sub's tail planes, two noisemakers and two bubble generators. Bubbles reflect sound, so they acted like chaff clouds that reflect radar energy. The noisemakers and generators would create an acoustic wall, Ryder hoped, which would defeat the active sonar in the nose of the torpedoes he knew Kolnikov would inevitably launch.

Eck sang out the range and bearings to the two submarines as they came up on his display, but the process now was strictly automatic. La Jolla was only twenty-four hundred yards away, a little over a mile, while the Johnny-come-lately was at twenty-six thousand yards, about thirteen miles. The information about each contact went to the torpedo data computer, which computed the proper course to those locations and the necessary firing angles, the presets, which were electrically sent to the torpedoes in the tubes. Then they were launched and Turchak slammed the power lever to flank speed ahead. They could feel the acceleration as the turbines accelerated and the prop pushed violently on the seawater. 'Watch the temperatures,' Turchak admonished the engine room crew.

Each succeeding sweep of the active sonar beam allowed the computer to determine a slightly different range and bearing to the targets. Subtracting the apparent movement of America, the computer then calculated the course and speed of both targets. The torpedo data computer updated the intercept bearings and fed that information to the appropriate torpedo via the fiber-optic wires. Meanwhile, the active seekers in the torpedoes were searching for their targets.

'Should I launch the decoys?' Boldt asked. Rothberg was curled in a chair, useless, staring at the Revelation panels. Heydrich was leaning against the aft bulkhead, a cup of coffee in his hand, discreetly bracing himself against the acceleration and any maneuvers Kolnikov ordered.

'No,' said Kolnikov. 'We'll use the antitorpedo weapons.' These were small defensive torpedoes that homed in on the sonars of the incoming ship killers, riding the beam to them and exploding them prematurely. The latest thing in submarine defense, they were going to sea for the first time on America, which was the only boat that had them. 'Enable two,' Kolnikov added, 'and I pray to heaven they work.'

Four of these missiles were mounted in the sail. When enabled, they would automatically fire in sequence when they received a sonar signal on the proper frequency.

'And the jammer,' he added, pointing at Eck, who nodded vigorously.

'Make notes,' Kolnikov said to Turchak, who was monitoring the boat's increasing speed and waiting for the