sail, damaging her periscopes or satellite-communication gear.
The gamble had paid off, however, when the torpedoes had stopped tracking the Typhoon and started homing on one of those ridges.
Probably, the lead torpedo had exploded on the ice, and the shock wave had thrown the second into the ice as well. In any case, Revolutsita was unharmed.
And now, Dobrynin had become the hunter, and the Americans the prey.
CHAPTER 19
Galveston's well-trained crew reacted with drilled efficiency and a complete lack of wasted motion. Rubber masks on hoses dropped from the overhead like the emergency apparatus aboard a 747 losing cabin pressure. The control room crew calmly strapped on the dangling masks and kept to their posts as men with fire extinguishers doused the small electrical fire. The compartment's blowers were still operational, and the air cleared rapidly.
'Mr. Paulson!' Montgomery yelled, his voice muffled somewhat by his mask.
'What's our damage?'
'Nothing too bad, Skipper! Dinged the sail, port side. Fire in the aux comm circuitry, under control. Minor casualties, bumps and bruises…'
'Okay! Sonar! This is the Captain. Can you hear anything yet?'
'Still awfully fuzzy, Captain,' Ekhart's voice came back. 'We've got echoes off the ice and bottom. Might be fifteen minutes before we get a clear sweep. And, sir…'
'Yes?'
'Captain, I think we've lost one flank array. We're deaf to port.'
'Okay. Stay on it. If anyone can hear that bastard through the crap, it's you!'
'Aye, sir.'
Think like the enemy! Montgomery told himself. And who was the enemy? A sub driver, like him. A captain first rank, most likely, for one of their biggest and finest vessels, or even an admiral.
No, not an admiral. That clever bastard had dived, turned away from the Mark 48s, then suckered them into the ice, as slippery-slick as sex. The guy had balls… and the maneuver suggested he did this for a living, not as a reward for years of faithful service to the Motherland.
Okay, so he was a working captain, and he knew how to use the ice as cover against torpedo attack. He also knew he would have to find and kill the American attack sub before the attack sub was able to take another shot. The Russian's sonars would be deafened for the moment; he wouldn't know how badly Galveston's ears had been singed, so he'd assume Galveston still had fully operational sonar.
He would turn onto a reciprocal course to the torpedoes, running straight down the track toward Galveston's position. He'd be coming fast, to cover the distance before Gal could recover her hearing, and he would be skimming as close to the ice as he dared just in case she could hear him, making use of the confused echoes still bouncing back and forth between ice and bottom to mask the noise of her engines. He might dump noisemakers too, just to keep things lively.
'Diving Officer!'
'Yes, sir!'
'Make our depth two hundred feet. Helm, come to zero-zero-five. Make our speed dead slow. Just enough to maintain way.'
'Two hundred feet, aye, aye, Captain.'
'Coming now to zero-zero-five, speed three knots.'
Montgomery took his place at the search periscope. 'Up scope!'
Where is he?
That question had been weighing on Dobrynin's mind for nearly half an hour now. If the American had continued his approach at five or ten knots, the Typhoon should have met it by now. The echoes in the water were dying away at last, and the sonar officer reported clear water.
But no American sub. The bastard couldn't simply make himself invisible!
'Slow to one third,' he said. 'Sonar! Anything?'
'No, Comrade Captain. It is possible the American turned away after his torpedoes went active, and left the area.'
'Hmm. Possible. But not likely. This American submarine captain, he is very good. He crept up on us like a wolf on a reindeer. I somehow doubt he went to so much trouble simply to loose two torpedoes, then run away again.'
But Dobrynin was faced with another decision, and as he made it, he was well aware of Strelbitski's eyes boring into the back of his head from across the attack center. The man had been silent since the attack, and sullen. His arm, dislocated during the momentary turbulence after the explosions, was now resting in a sling, and his face had the pasty look of a corpse.
By now, Moscow knew that the missile had not been launched on time, that Chelyabinsk had not been incinerated. No doubt, the air above the ice was thick with coded radio messages just now, demanding that he acknowledge and explain himself.
Should he assume the American sub had left, surface, and carry out his orders? Or continue the hunt?
'Slow to five knots!' he ordered. 'Ahead slow!'
Damn it, the American had to be here somewhere!
Montgomery's face was pressed against the periscope's eyepiece. Scanning forward and up, he could see the light filtering down from the surface through the ice, a white-hazy ripple of light and shadow, growing brighter as Galveston slipped beneath thin-ice leads, darker beneath the pressure ridges and thicker blocks.
There still was no sign of the enemy.
'Captain! Sonar!'
'Captain. Go ahead.'
'Sir, I'm getting very faint noises to starboard, on a heading of one-zero-two. Range… hard to make out, but I think it's pretty close. A mile. Maybe a bit more.'
'What kind of noises?'
'Hard to pick it out of the background, sir. We're still getting some low-frequency stuff, and the ice has been cracking apart ever since the explosion. But my guess would be something damned big on two screws.'
Bearing 102… that was almost abeam of the Galveston. Montgomery walked the periscope around to the right…
And there she was, no more than a blunt-nosed shadow against the brighter ice overhead, but unmistakable. He estimated the range off the reticle markings on the periscope image, using the Typhoon's length of 558 feet as a trigonometric key. The Typhoon was now about eighteen hundred yards to starboard, just over a mile. He'd never have seen her if he hadn't gone deeper to silhouette her against the light.
'Gently now,' Montgomery said, keeping the target in his sights. 'Helm, come right to a heading of one- seven-five. Dead slow.'
'Heading one-seven-five, dead slow, aye, sir.'
The minutes dragged as Galveston slowly turned, reversing her northbound course toward one heading
