They were now far inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by Russia as her territorial waters. The Kola Inlet was opening up directly ahead, and the small island called Ostrov Kildin was less than seven miles to starboard.
Their position was complicated by the fact that they were moving south down one of the busiest shipping channels of the former Soviet Union, the sole shipping lane to the busy ports of Murmansk, Severomorsk, and Polyamyy.
Attack subs were arguably the single most useful tool in the U.S. Navy's inventory… though aviators or skimmer crews would never have admitted the fact. When something went wrong with diplomacy anywhere in the world, sending a carrier battle group was a great way to send a message, a very loud message, to the offending party: 'Behave or we'll flatten you.' Time after time, as regional conflicts and brushfire wars had broken out across the face of the globe, the planners in Washington had repeated that time-honored phrase, 'Where are the carriers?'
But far more often it was necessary to take a more diplomatic tack ? or a more covert one ? and an aircraft carrier with ninety planes sitting off the coast in question was not exactly a comfortable statement in the language of diplomacy. If a CBG penetrated this far into foreign territorial waters, it was an act of war.
But a submarine, on the other hand… that was different. A Los Angeles attack sub could slip silently into enemy waters, listening to radio traffic, counting ships and radar sources and aircraft, then slip away without anyone knowing it'd been there. Throughout the Cold War, American attack subs had repeatedly penetrated such closely guarded Soviet fortresses as the Shelikhova Gulf, the Tatarskiy Strait, the White Sea, and the Gulf of Finland. The nature and specifics of those penetrations were all still highly classified.
'Control room, Sonar.'
'Control room. What is it, Ekhart?'
'I've got an ID on Sierra Two. Riga-class frigate. Still at one-seven-five. Estimate he's making turns for one- five knots.'
A Riga-class frigate, a sub-hunter for sure. She'd be a hair under three hundred feet long, with a displacement of about twelve hundred tons. Either a Herkules or a Pegas high-frequency sonar mounted in the hull. ASW weapons including RBU-2500 rocket launchers, depth charges, and 533mm torpedoes.
Ping!
Every man in Galveston's control room froze, eyes turning toward the overhead.
'Control room, Sonar. Sierra Two has gone active on sonar.'
There were two types of sonar, passive and active. With passive sonar, a ship or submarine simply listened for noise produced by the target ? the sound of its screws, the machinery in its engine room, the pumps circulating water through its nuclear reactor, the clang of a carelessly dropped tool. Active sonar, on the other hand, transmitted a pulse of sound, then listened for the echo from a solid target. Far more accurate than passive listening ? through pinging, a sonar operator could get an accurate measurement of the range to the target ? active sonar had the single disadvantage that it gave the transmitting vessel away. Submarines nearly always preferred to use passive sonar only.
Destroyers and other ASW surface ships, however, rarely cared whether their quarry heard them or not. This one was almost certainly sweeping the Kola channel, searching for intruders precisely like the Galveston.
Ping!
They were getting closer. Montgomery could hear the gentle chug-chug-chug of the ship's screws now, gradually growing louder.
Ping!
Just because Galveston's crew could hear the active sonar of the approaching surface ship, it didn't necessarily mean they'd been spotted.
Sonar was more complicated than simply making a noise and waiting for the echo; discontinuities in the temperature and salinity of the water could refract sound waves in odd ways, and a submarine as close to the bottom as Galveston was now could be lost in the background clutter. Shipping channels such as this were usually littered with wrecks or with debris dumped from surface ships, and near naval bases they were sown with undersea hydrophones, remotely activated mines, and various types of detection equipment. Even if the Russian sonar operators heard an echo, they might easily misinterpret it.
Getting any information at all out of a sonar return was an arcane and mysterious art.
Ping!
The throb of the ship's propellers sounded almost directly overhead. Had they spotted the American submarine, now lying directly beneath their keel?
Throughout the control room, every eye not focused on a specific readout or instrumentation was fastened on the compartment's overhead, as though trying to pierce the double hull and the darkness and the water, to see the looming presence of the Russian ship as it came closer… closer…
… and then the sound of the Riga's engines was dwindling… fading into the distance somewhere astern.
And it was gone.
Slowly, Montgomery let out a sigh of pent-up breath. Though the temperature throughout the boat was always maintained at a comfortable seventy degrees, Montgomery realized his khaki uniform shirt was sopping wet beneath his arms and down his spine. His left hand was gripping a handhold on the attack periscope mounting so tightly his hand had cramped.
'Just routine,' he said, letting go of the handhold and massaging his fingers. 'Cakewalk.' Several of the men in the control room chuckled nervously. 'Engineering Officer, Captain. Make turns for five knots.'
'Make turns for five knots, aye, sir.'
Galveston continued her creep toward the south, penetrating still deeper into the Kola Inlet.
Lieutenant j.g. Kathleen 'Cat' Garrity sat in the rear seat of the F-14 Tomcat, which was parked on the starboard side of Jefferson's flight deck.
The long pins, each tagged with a red flag, that safed her ejection seat mechanism had already been pulled. In front of her, the Viper Squadron Co, Commander Willis F. Grant, better known aboard Jefferson by his call sign 'Coyote,' was going through the last of his pre-flight.
'Canopy coming down,' Coyote told her over the Tomcat's intercom system, or ICS. The transparent plastic bubble descended slowly over her head, locking in place with a reassuring thump. 'Starting engines.'
Cat's heart was pounding beneath the tightness of her seat harness and G-suit, and she could hear the rasp of her own breathing, thick behind the rubber embrace of her oxygen mask, hissing in her ears. The Tomcat's twin F110-GE-400 engines spooled to life, their whine penetrating the cockpit like rolling, high-pitched thunder. She concentrated on finishing up her own pre-flight: WCS to STBY; wait for the Weapons Control System light to come on, then flip the liquid cooling switch from OFF to AWG-9. 'AWG-Nine light's Out,' she said. That was as it should be.
'Rog,' Coyote replied.
Next she flipped the Nav Mode switch left of the radar display from OFF to NAV, set IFF to STBY, and turned the radio knobs to BOTH and ON. On the console just above her left knee was a keypad. Carefully, reading from the penciled notations on a pad strapped to her thigh, she keyed in Jefferson's current longitude and latitude for the Tomcat's on-board computer: 22'05'15' East, 71'00'35' North ? which translated as about eighty miles off the northern coast of Norway. Finally she began checking circuit breakers, by eye for those on her side consoles, and by reaching up behind her head and feeling for the set behind the seat. None had popped. Good. 'Breakers all go.'
A loud thump from outside the aircraft startled her. The blue-shirted deck crewmen were beginning to break the Tomcat down, removing the chains and chocks that secured the thirty-ton aircraft to its place on the flight deck.
A plane director in a Mickey Mouse helmet and a stained, yellow jersey moved past the starboard wing, hands raised, signaling like a cop at a busy intersection. Every man in the deck crew wore a color-coded jersey that identified his section: yellow for plane directors, blue for aircraft handlers, green for maintenance personnel and for the hook-and-cat men, brown for plane captains, purple for fuel handlers, red for firefighters and ordnance men, white for safety monitors, black-and-white checks for inspectors and troubleshooters.
'Here we go,' Coyote said. 'Gold Eagle Two-oh-one, rolling.'
