'What are the dangers of this approach?'
Kolnikov had maintained control of his face, though his shoulders twitched. 'Submarining is not chess,' he said coolly. 'Mistakes can be fatal. We must pray the boat functions as it should. We have had a limited time to prepare, we haven't seen the real ship. We will be unable to properly deal with malfunctions or emergencies until we discover exactly how the boat is laid out, how the control systems work.'
'And the reactor?'
'The operation of the reactor is mostly automatic. All the critical parameters are automatically monitored by a computer, which will shut down the reactor if anything goes wrong. People monitor the parameters to back up the computer — we will have to forgo that luxury. If the computer shuts down the reactor, we will abandon ship. That is our only option.'
'And if the Americans come hunting for you?'
'I have no doubt that they will,' Kolnikov had replied. 'We must ensure that they are unable to find us until we are ready for them.'
The man in Paris had looked at him as if he had lost his sanity. Perhaps he had.
Yet Turchak had believed, for the man was here. A former boomer skipper himself, Turchak had been the hardest sell. When he agreed to come, the others did too.
Now, as Kolnikov stared at the horizontal and vertical large-screen displays and the keyboards on the consoles surrounding him, the cold truth hit him like a hammer. They had been damn fools to attempt to sail this thing. It would take hours to work through the options of the weapons program; their only option just now was to run and pray that no one shoots.
Still, this was Vladimir Kolnikov's big chance, as it was for Turchak and the other Russians. On the beach, with no money or prospect for earning any, stranded in the midst of an absolutely corrupt third-world country — yes, Turchak and the others welcomed a chance to steal a submarine. Whether they would ever see any money for their efforts remained to be seen, but the Russians had nothing to lose.
Nothing to lose but their lives, and after all, what were they worth?
And if Kolnikov and Turchak and the others died trying for the gold… well, submariners risked their lives every time they went to sea.
The Germans were also here for the money. None of them had experience in nuclear submarines, but they were computer and sonar experts. Heydrich was neither. He was here because the man in Paris demanded that he be included.
How willing we are to volunteer for unknown risks when we are broke and hungry, standing on dry land.
Kolnikov turned to his most pressing problem, the American destroyer. Everything depended on what the skipper of the destroyer decided to do. 'What is the destroyer doing now?' Kolnikov asked.
Eck, one of the German computer men, had a tactical display on the large-screen vertical display in the forward port corner of the compartment. Boldt, the other, worked on the ship's main system computer. Rothberg ran from one to the other, coaching them, reaching over their shoulders and pushing buttons when required. Eck's display showed tactical information from the main combat system computer, information derived from radar and photonic data. In fact, the image from the light sensor in the photonics mast, the tip of which was raised several feet above its housing, was presented on a large-screen vertical display that formed the centerpiece of the control room. The destroyer was about a thousand yards away, closing. Five more vertical displays hung on the port bulkhead, four on the starboard, and one each in the forward corners of the compartment. At the forward end of the space were two ship-control consoles, with vertical displays above them. Seven consoles to manage the integrated sonar suite lined the port side of the room. Four combat control station consoles were on the starboard side; the navigation engineering stations were behind the ship-control consoles and in front of the horizontal tactical display. A momentary twinge of panic gripped Kolnikov. Operating these systems with just five men — only one of whom, Rothberg, knew the systems cold — was idiocy, he thought.
'Close the main hatch and report when it is accomplished,' Kolnikov ordered. 'Have Steeckt ready the sail cockpit for diving.'
At the starboard ship-control console, Turchak examined the information displays. He pushed buttons, tentatively at first, then with more confidence as he recalled the long conversations he had preparing for this day. The joystick that controlled the boat was there before him, waiting for his hand. He caressed it, then ran his fingers along the power lever. The rudder, he knew, was tied in with the joystick, so the boat would always slide through the water with minimum resistance. However, in the unlikely event there was a control computer, failure, they would shift to manual controls to move the hydraulic valves that controlled the rudders and planes.
Digital images of the undersea world constructed from sonar data could be displayed on any of the vertical screens in the room. These images presented a three-dimensional picture of the undersea space around the submarine. The images could be rotated to display the situation in any direction from the submarine, or indeed, put the sub in the middle of a three-dimensional world, but for now the displays showed only the sea ahead, below and on each flank.
The displays were divided into two halves, both of which were transparent, by a wriggling line. The line was the water's surface. Above the line, the images were derived from data from the photonics mast, below the line from the sonar.
The sonar was the top-secret black magic of which Kolnikov, Turchak, and the others had heard rumors but had little specific information. Revelation, the Americans called the gear — or multi-
static passive sonar, MSPS — because it made the sea transparent, revealing all. Using only the noise present in the sea from every natural and man-made source, listening from acoustic arrays in the bow, chin, sail, flanks, and stern of the submarine, the computers processed the data into a three-dimensional presentation that was awe- inspiring. The acoustic sensors themselves produced data at the rate of about thirty million bytes per second, which was processed by a system capable of handling twenty-five gigabytes per second. The sonar-processing system had more capacity than the computer systems of all the other U.S. submarines combined.
Magic!
Kolnikov stood looking, dumbstruck. The sea appeared clear as glass. He could see hulls of other boats, buoys, the bottom of the sound, the shards of a sunken ship…. The ocean was a tough, nonlinear medium. Temperature and salinity variations led to speed of sound changes that refracted and reflected sound waves, causing ducting, 'mirrors,' and other effects that required real-time modeling on board to predict what in- and outbound sound was going to do as a function of depth, direction, and distance. Submarines changed depth periodically to measure actual conditions, to provide input to the computer models.
The pictures that Revelation generated, Kolnikov realized, were going to be only as good as the computer model. If the model were wrong, the pictures would be dangerous fiction. He would have to keep that fact firmly in mind.
'Nine hundred yards, Captain, bearing zero nine zero relative, speed five knots,' reported Heinrich Eck, referring of course to the destroyer. 'We are steady on course one two zero degrees, making two knots. The destroyer is flashing us with an Aldis lamp.' Of course none of them knew what the Aldis lamp message was about, but Kolnikov thought it was probably an order to heave to.
'When the hatches are closed, we will accelerate,' he said.
Kolnikov found a chair and settled in. Behind him four Russian and German technicians stood watching the horizontal tactical display and fidgeting nervously. Leon Rothberg sat at a terminal checking automated defaults. Heydrich stood together behind the tactical display.
With studied casualness, Kolnikov removed a pack of unfiltered
Pall Mall cigarettes from a trouser pocket. He extracted one from the pack, tapped it gently on a thumbnail to seat the tobacco, then lit it. He inhaled deeply, then blew out the smoke with a sigh.
'Smoke will foul the air filters and trigger the smoke alarms,' Rothberg said irritably.
'Turn off the smoke alarms,' Kolnikov said and took another drag.
'What will the destroyer do?' asked Gordin, one of the Russians.
'I don't know,' Kolnikov replied curtly. Gordin was another former submariner, a veteran of the Arctic icepack — he should know to keep his mouth shut.
'Hatches shut, Captain,' Boldt reported. He was working feverishly on the computer displays and now had one up that showed every orifice in the hull. All were now sealed.
'Obtain verbal confirmation, please,' said Kolnikov, refusing to hurry.
