for the past ten years, he would be going up for chief soon. His likeliest career option at that point would be to take a post as a sonar instructor at the Navy sub school at Groton, Connecticut.
He was also homosexual.
Rudi Ekhart was a man of strong will and strong purpose. He'd long ago decided that sex was not only a distraction aboard ship, it was a definite threat, Especially aboard a submarine, where a man's only privacy was the curtain he could draw to wall off his rack from the eight others stacked three-high in his tiny berthing compartment. Just getting into one of those backbreakers took a certain amount of gymnastic skill, and the headroom was so small it was all but impossible to turn over.
No, there was no room for sex aboard a submarine. Worse, because of the crowding and also because of constant occupational pressure that each man felt from the moment the boat first submerged, there was no tolerance for gays in the submarine service. Anyone in a sub crew who'd admitted openly to being homosexual would have been harassed unmercifully and might even have had some sort of 'accident.'
Perhaps the single saving grace there was that the victim could not fall overboard while the sub was submerged.
Those mechanical sounds were growing slowly louder. He concentrated a moment, closing his eyes, willing the sounds he was hearing to take shape in his mind. Yes… it was the throb-throb-throb of a ship's screws, two of them, turning slowly. Whatever it was was making revs for only a few knots at best.
'Control room, Sonar,' he said, speaking barely above a whisper into the mike attached to his headset. All submarine ICS had been set to be barely audible at the other end. For a moment, he wondered if the skipper had heard him.
'Sonar, Captain. Whatcha got, Ekhart?'
'Definite submerged contact, Captain. Designate Sierra Nine. Sounds like something big coming out of the barns.'
'Submerged, you said?'
'Yessir.'
'You got a make and model yet?'
'Wait one.' Ekhart adjusted the gain on his console, still listening.
On the screen inches in front of his face, he was getting the peaks and troughs of low-frequency sounds now. That thumping just behind the beat of the screws had to be a reactor pump. And there was a sharp, thuttering sound that puzzled him for several moments. Then he got it. There was some weed or a length of rope, possibly a ship's painter, trailing from the approaching vessel's deck.
He sensed a presence at his back. Captain Montgomery had stepped in behind him. 'Let me hear, son.' Montgomery was from south Texas, and in times of stress his accent and country mannerisms grew pronounced.
Ekhart passed Montgomery the headset, then leaned back to run the sound through Galveston's library. All American submarines maintained digitized collections of sounds from a staggeringly vast number of sources, everything from fish love-calls to the running sounds of specific submarines. Often, Galveston herself could identify not only a given class of submarine, but a specific individual. Ekhart liked to compete with the boat's library, coming up with an ID before it did.
This time, it was a tie. 'My guess is a Typhoon, Captain,' he told Montgomery. 'Twin screws, and big as Godzilla. Can't tell you which one.'
'That's what the Gal says, sir,' Sonarman Second Class Harrington said, checking the computer display. 'Typhoon, no ident.'
'This must be one of the ones we haven't heard before,' Montgomery said.
'Any guess on the range?'
While active sonar could give an exact range to target, the same was not true for passive listening. Still, a good sonar man could make a shrewd estimation, based on local conditions and a lot of experience.
'He's moving damned slow, Captain. Cautious like. Given the current, and the channeling effect of the sludge above us, I'd guess he's within ten or twelve miles.'
'Good enough. I want you to stay on his ass, Ekhart. Stick tight like a tick on a hound dog's ear and don't let 'em go. Tell me the moment you pick up an aspect change.'
'We're gonna tail him, Skipper?'
'You bet. That's what our orders say. We'll come about real nice and easy, until we're pointed out of this pocket, then wait. When Sierra Nine passes us, we'll just slip in behind him, right square in his baffles.'
'What if he's heading straight for us, Captain?' Harrington asked.
'Then we try to get out of his way, son. I don't plan to ram the sumfabitch. You need any help, Ekhart?'
But Ekhart had taken back the headset and was already lost in the black, watery world beyond Galveston's double hull, his eyes closed, imaging the approaching monster in his mind.
He could almost see her.
CHAPTER 14
Captain First Rank Anatoli Chelyag was furious. 'Idiots! I can have you shot for this! I should have you shot for this, this blatant and irresponsible destruction of the State's property!'
The eight seamen standing on the Pravda's mess hall deck glanced uneasily at one another, each looking as though he expected someone else to step forward and accept the blame.
'Get below!' Chelyag concluded. 'I will deal with you later, when I have the time!'
The sailors filed from the mess hall, but Chelyag had the feeling he'd not made that much of an impression. While they all shared the responsibility for the accident ? himself included, he was quick to admit ? it was virtually impossible to make rankers accept the responsibility for their own actions.
It was, Chelyag thought, one of the flaws in the Soviet system, though he knew better than to admit that to anyone less trustworthy than himself. Russian submarine crewmen were usually assigned rather than being volunteers, and they tended to be indifferent seamen. Mistakes were inevitable, especially when the men were under pressure.
But could Russia's most modern, most deadly high-tech instrument of war actually be crippled by a thirty- meter length of ten-centimeter wire rope?
The two great Typhoon ballistic-missile submarines, his own Leninskiy Nesokrushimyy Pravda and Captain First Rank Dobrynin's Slavnyy Oktyabrskaya Revolutsita, had been lying side by side at their subterranean moorings, ready for sea, awaiting only the order from Admiral Karelin before proceeding with Derzkiy Plamya, Operation Audacious Flame. Save for the ground-line communications link with Kandalaksha, the cavern was cut off from the outside world. Chelyag had no way of knowing whether or not the diversionary operation Ognevoy had gone off as planned, whether or not the American carriers had been destroyed or damaged, whether or not American ASW aircraft or submarines might be waiting in the area off the Kola Inlet.
Then at 0740 hours, the awaited word had come. American and neo-Soviet aircraft were engaged over the Barents Sea off North Cape; the Yankee carriers were on the point of being overwhelmed by waves of Russian aircraft and missiles.
Pravda and Revolutsita were to leave their shelter at once, make their way north from the Kola Inlet to their assigned strategic bastion beneath the Arctic ice, and await final orders via ELF communications from Kandalaksha.
The Glorious October Revolution had pulled away from her moorings almost at once, the line-handling parties on her fore-and afterdecks cheering and waving as the great submarine slowly chugged past Lenin's Invincible Truth.
Chelyag had bellowed at his own line-handling parties. 'Cast off astern!
