“Capture confirmed,” the tanker pilot said. “Here it comes.” Fuel rushed down the narrow hose, greedily devoured by the Tomcat. Tombstone kept his mind on maintaining the interval between the two aircraft.
Mercifully, both CAG and Batman kept their silence. Shit, Tombstone thought. Sooner or later the odds are going to catch up to me. And when they do …
“We read you full, Two-oh-one.”
“Roger, Tango X-ray.” He snapped the switches closed. “Ready to disengage to port.”
“We’re clear.” Tombstone backed clear of the drogue, then broke left.
The two Tomcats flew in formation with the KA-6D for a moment. Then the tanker began dropping away toward the sea, angling into a turn that would take him back toward the Jefferson. “It’s been grand, guys. Look me up again when you feel the need.”
“Thanks,” Batman radioed. “Just put it on Tombstone’s Mastercard, okay?”
Tombstone’s hand was no longer shaking. He flexed it a couple of times, then grasped the stick firmly. Pamela’s last letters. What was he going to do about them? They’d arrived only three days earlier, both of them on the same COD flight in from Diego Garcia, and they were eating away at him. He’d not answered them because he didn’t know how, didn’t know the answer to what Pam was asking. Pamela was as sharp as she was attractive. Was she right? Was it time for him to leave the Navy and find a saner job? He wondered if he’d lost the edge. It wasn’t the problem spearing the basket. Hell, there was nothing wrong with his two-time failure to engage the tanker’s drogue. That sort of thing happened all the time in the day-in, day-out routine of Navy aviation.
Danger, as the aviators said, went with the territory, was as much a part of their issue gear as flight suit and helmet. But that was just it. That sort of thing did happen routinely. There were so many ways to screw up in the cockpit … most of them deadly. Navy aviators needed an incredible blend of skill, training, reflexes, and luck to make tasks like snagging a fuel drogue in flight or making a night trap on a pitching carrier deck seem routine, to do them again and again and again as though there was nothing to them.
It wasn’t that Tombstone was afraid, but he was tired. Every man on board the Jefferson was tired, with eight months of the CBG’s nine-month deployment down.
And tired men make mistakes.
Tombstone said nothing as he took up the Tomcat’s patrol zone and throttled back for a long orbit. Sooner or later, something had to give.
The question was whether or not to get out now, before it did.
Captain Edward Farrel turned in his high-backed chair to take the phone handset from one of the bridge watch-standers. “Captain speaking.”
“CIC Officer, Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Mason’s voice replied. “We have a passive sonar contact, towed array, bearing zero-five-four to zero-five-six.”
Farrel’s eyes shifted toward the windscreens on the bridge’s starboard wing. The U.S.S. Biddle, one of Carrier Battle Group 14’s two Perry-class guided-missile frigates, was scouting far ahead of the Jefferson. Her primary duty was as part of the carrier’s ASW screen, searching for submarines that could pose a threat to the CBG. The horizon was empty under a brassy, tropical sky. The impulse to keep looking, to try to see something out there against the featureless skyline, was irresistible. “Can you manage an ID yet?”
“Chase thinks it sounds like a Foxtrot, sir, but not one he’s heard before. They’re running it through the library now.”
Antisubmarine ships and aircraft either carried or had access to a tape library of underwater sounds, everything from the grunts and squeaks of fish and other marine life to the characteristic noises made by various undersea vessels. It was often possible to match a particular set of sounds not only with a general class of submarine, but with the acoustical profile of a particular boat. Good Navy sonarmen could sometimes pick out old friends by ear alone, and Sonarman First Class Chase was one of the best.
Farrel came to a quick decision. “Ping him. I want to know if we’re on top of him.”
“We’ll give it our best shot, sir. Conditions aren’t very good below, though.”
“Understood. Call me when you have him nailed.” He handed the phone back to the waiting sailor.
Passive sonar was listening only, using sensitive underwater listening devices to locate a submarine by the sounds of its engines, pumps, and the rush of water across its hull. Biddle’s SQR-19 was a towed array, hydrophones trailing behind the ship that could pick up underwater noises as much as thirty nautical miles from the ship.
Biddle also mounted sonar equipment in her keel. Designated SQS-56, it could either listen passively or broadcast sharp pings of sound, then pick up the echoes from any subsurface targets. Unfortunately, passive sonar could give direction — at least to within a few degrees — but not distance. Active sonar gave distance but was limited both in range and by conditions in the water. The SQS-56 could pick up a submarine if it was within perhaps six nautical miles of the ship … but the range could be sharply reduced by shallow, warm, or highly salty waters, and all three of those conditions applied to this part of the Indian Ocean.
Worse from a tactical point of view, active sonar would alert the submarine to the fact that it had been spotted.
Farrel would feel a lot better knowing just where that sub was and where it was going. Peacetime or not, international waters or not, tensions were running hot in the Arabian Sea just now. Since early that morning, war had engulfed the India-Pakistan border, and these waters could become a shit-hot war zone any time now. Every man in the CBG knew how easy it would be for an attack to be launched by accident — the missile strike against another Perry-class frigate, the U.S.S. Stark in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, was a case in point — and one hell of an expensive target was trailing Biddle a hundred miles astern.
Foxtrot was the NATO code name for a class of diesel-powered attack subs first produced by the Soviets in the 1960s. Three hundred feet long, with a complement of seventy-eight men, it was designed to hunt and intercept hostile task forces. The Russians had built sixty of them between 1958 and 1962, and most were still active, though some had been reported lost at sea. During the ‘70s, the Soviets had manufactured nineteen for export: three for Cuba, eight for Libya … and eight for India.
In these waters, the contact could be either Soviet or Indian. Either way, the battle group’s new admiral was not going to care for potentially hostile subs getting too close to his command.
Minutes dragged by. Farrel was beginning to wonder what Mason was playing at when the CIC Officer called again.
“No joy on the pinging, Captain,” Mason said. “He may be out of range.”
Farrel scowled. “Understood. Alert the Air Officer. I want a LAMPS up ASAP. Maybe we can peg the contact with sonobuoys. And have the comm shack raise Jefferson. Admiral Vaughn’s going to want to know about this.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Farrel replaced the telephone handset, then walked to the starboard wing. He raised his binoculars and scanned the horizon toward the northeast. There was nothing there, no periscope wake, no oil slick, only endless blue water under a cloudless sky.
Submarines these days could launch homing torpedos from ten miles away … or pop a sea-skimming cruise missile from three hundred miles out. A Foxtrot would not be carrying SSMS, thank God, but the threat was serious nonetheless.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” the shipboard loudspeaker brayed from the afterdeck. “Stand by to launch helo. Stand by to launch helo.”
Farrel heard the thutter of the LAMPS III helicopter as its engines revved to takeoff rpms. Then the SH-60 Seahawk lifted from Biddle’s fantail with a roar, its shadow momentarily flicking across the bridge.
He turned his binoculars on the gray insect shape as it angled off toward the northwest, low above the water.
Biddle’s two Sikorsky SH-60B Seahawks were LAMPS III helos designed for ASW. The LAMPS designation stood for Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System, a computer and sensor array that integrated surface ships and helicopters to extend the reach and effectiveness of antisubmarine warfare. Each Seahawk was equipped with dipping sonar and air-dropped sonobuoys. Foxtrots were antiquated diesel-electric submarines, neither quiet nor nuclear-powered. Whoever this one belonged to, it should be easy enough to pinpoint by checking along the general
