'Here it comes.'
For several moments there was silence, as the tanker transferred a thousand pounds of fuel to Coyote's tanks. Then: 'That's a thousand, Two-oh-one.'
'Roger, Tango-Romeo. Ready to disengage to starboard.' He snapped the switches that closed off the probe.
'Clear to starboard.'
'That was so very, very good for us,' Cat said suddenly, breaking in on the frequency in a sultry, sexy voice that Coyote had never heard her use before. 'Was it good for you too?'
There was a momentary silence from the tanker, a stunned silence, Coyote thought.
'Uh, roger, Two-oh-one,' they replied finally. 'Why don't you come on up and see us again some time?'
Coyote backed clear of the refueling drogue, then let the Tomcat slide gently to the right until it was out from beneath the tanker's tail.
'Coyote,' Cat said over the ICS. 'I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself.'
'You certainly can, Cat. I stand corrected. Now, how about finding us a bird farm before we have to go through that again.'
'You got it, Boss. Come right to one-nine-five. They've put CATCC back on the air now, so I guess the welcome mat is out.'
Coyote could already see the Jefferson on the horizon, close alongside that smudge of fuzzy black. He began to line the Tomcat up for insertion into the carrier's Marshall Stack.
He noticed that the radio traffic between aircraft groups had died down quite a bit. It sounded as though the worst of the fighting might be over.
Batman and Malibu were already in the Marshall Stack, waiting for their turn to head back in for recovery. After launching, they'd taken up a reserve position south of the Jefferson for several minutes, then been vectored by a Hawkeye to a forward area from which they'd launched their six Phoenix missiles, one after another. After that, with all missiles expended and with plenty of fuel remaining, they'd been routed back to the carrier's Marshall Stack.
'I'm not sure I care for this modern warfare stuff,' Batman told Striker, who'd been flying as his wingman in Tomcat 21 1. 'Up, fire, and down again.
Whatever happened to the knights of the sky, jousting in mortal one-on-one combat?'
'Roger that,' Striker replied. 'This push-button crap is for the birds.'
'How about that, Pogie?' Brewer Conway's voice broke in over the channel.
'Pogie' was Conway's RIO, Rose Damiano. 'Sounds to me like the poor dears can't handle high-tech mayhem.'
'Ah, you know how it is, Brewer,' Pogie's voice replied. 'They prefer to wade in with a club the old-fashioned way, mano-a-mano.'
'What have we here?' Batman replied. 'Kibitzing from the nuggets?
Definitely contra-regs. How many kills did you girls rack up today?'
'We girls did just fine, Batman,' Brewer said. 'Five for six, and another probable. How about you?'
'six up, six down. Hardly fair, though. The poor bastards never knew what hit 'em.'
'Actually,' Malibu interrupted, 'we're only being credited with four kills. Two of our shots couldn't be confirmed.'
'Hey, Malibu, whose side are you on anyway?' Batman said, sounding hurt.
'All in the interests of fair play and honesty in advertising, dude.'
'I make it five to four then,' Brewer said. 'You guys buy the beer.'
'This engagement isn't over yet, Brewer,' Batman replied. 'We'll see who buys the beer when it's over, right?'
'You got yourself a bet, XO. Only let's make it interesting… beer and dinner next time we're in port. Your crew against mine. Deal?'
'Hey, they're going big-time on us, Batman. I don't know if we can afford this.'
'Ah, show some backbone, Malibu. We can't let these women think they've got us where we want 'em, right?'
'Two-oh-two,' another voice cut in. 'Home Plate. Charlie now.'
'They're playing our song,' Malibu said.
'Roger. See you back at the farm, Brewer.'
He banked into his approach to the carrier.
The Los Angeles submarine Galveston continued to make her stealthy way along the muddy bottom at the mouth of the Kola Inlet. Since her first encounter with a Riga-class sub-hunter early that morning, four more surface ships had exited into the Barents Sea, each time pinging loudly with active sonar. Galveston, apparently, had not been spotted. Unlike their World War II predecessors, modern submarines cannot rest on the bottom, but Galveston was creeping just above the muddy and uneven surface that tended to confuse the echoes reflected back toward the listening warships.
She was further helped by a strong inversion layer that tended to trap sonar waves in a deep channel and carry them away from the skimmer hydrophones. The cities of Murmansk and Severomorsk poured quantities of industrial waste, cooling water from nuclear reactors, and raw sewage unimaginable in any Western country directly into the waters of the Tuloma River; this made the upper water layers much warmer than in the deep of the central shipping channel, creating a sharp-boundaried thermocline beneath which Galveston lurked. The situation was further aided by the huge quantities of organic and inorganic waste particles collecting along the boundary layer. Sound waves passed through from the surface, but they became trapped in the deep channel, unable to echo back to the surface and reveal Galveston's presence.
At least, that was Sonarman First Class Rudi Ekhart's theory. When he'd told Commander Montgomery his idea, the skipper had laughed and said, 'So you're saying we're hiding under a layer of Russian shit?'
An inelegant way of putting it, but essentially true. Soon after that, Montgomery had taken Galveston even deeper into the inlet's mouth, taking advantage of this man-made sonar blind.
Safe, perhaps, from surface sonar, the U.S. attack sub was still running a fearful risk penetrating so far into Russian territorial waters. The seabed here was littered with hydrophones and compact undersea listening devices, not to mention encapsulated torpedoes set to fire at an electronic command from naval listening posts ashore. The slightest mistake ? a wrench dropped on the deck in engineering, a piece of gear adrift in a berthing compartment, or a loose pan in the galley ? would give away their presence to the listening Russians, calling down upon the American submarine a fusillade of deadly mine and torpedo fire. Every man aboard wore rubber shoes or went barefoot; the official order was 'silence in the boat.'
Rudi Ekhart remained at his post in Galveston's sonar compartment, a long, narrow room where several sonar operators sat side by side, heads embraced in padded earphones, their eyes on the cascades of flowing light on their displays where sound was made visible. There, the silence was dragging out in an ongoing and unendurable test of skill and will. Through his headphones, he could hear the susurration of the river's current flowing past Galveston's hull and across the uneven bottom, the far-off boom of some kind of heavy machinery, transmitted through the water. There were precious few 'biologicals,' the sounds made by sea life, here, for the Tuloma was dead, and in the process of poisoning the sea for scores of miles beyond the mouth of the inlet.
And he could also hear… something else, something very, very faint but definitely mechanical.
Ekhart was one of the best sonar technicians in the U.S. naval submarine service. Like many other sonarmen, he had a special love for classical music ? especially Baroque ? which he claimed sharpened the ear, and a complete disdain for rock, which could actually damage hearing. His shipmates found him distant sometimes, and a bit standoffish, and it was well known that he had a large ego.
But such character flaws could easily be overlooked, because he was very good at what he did. A Navy man
