The operations specialist rolled his eyes over the risque' remark.
'You need to talk to the USW module ? we're sweet and hot on number six, and I'm not hearing you talk to me about it.'
'Hot?' The operations specialist now sounded interested. I could picture him leaning forward over his console, picking up his white grease pencil, and preparing to scratch notes on his radar screen as he watched the symbol representing the aircraft he was controlling track across it.
'How hot?'
'How does positive acoustic contact on a Victor and an Akula strike you? That hot enough?' I could hear the undercurrent of cool amusement in Rabies's voice. Rabies might take the brunt of some good-humored teasing within the squadron, but unlike most pilots, he was no slouch when it came to USW. Most pilots left it to their TACCOS, but Rabies knew more about it than just the tactical implications of getting his aircraft from one spot to another, of positioning it to drop sonobuoys where the TACCO wanted them.
'How close are they?' It was the TAO's voice now, breaking in on the interchange.
'Look for yourself,' Rabies answered. 'You said the data link was good, didn't you?' He left unspoken the possibility that the TAO couldn't read. But implied it quite clearly.
The circuit fell silent for a few moments. I could imagine the panic that was starting in CDC, the squawking over the bitch box, the calls going out over the ship's internal telephone system. Within a few moments, the TAO would have talked to the flag TAO, who would call the admiral. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Admiral Wayne was a believer in intelligence. Any second now… The phone rang. I picked it up myself. 'Busby.'
'Get down here.' The admiral's sharp Boston voice was unmistakable.
As was his immediate reaction to new data on the missing Russian submarines. 'You have been listening, I take it? Judging from the speed at which you answered the telephone, one might even suspect you had anticipated my call.'
Admiral Wayne and I had been on three cruises together. If I could not anticipate his wants by now, I truly was a sorry intelligence officer.
'Of course I'm listening, Admiral.' I left unanswered the rest of his comment.
'Do you know anything about this? Anything more than we've discussed?'
Another odd question, coming from him. By now Admiral Wayne should have known that anything I knew, he knew.
But maybe not so odd, given what had happened before. After all, Admiral Wayne had known about the American submarines in the area. And he had not told me. It was a simple matter of mistrust breeding mistrust, and one of the reasons I prefer to have no secrets from my admiral.
But RHIP ? rank has its privileges. I hauled my skinny butt up out of my chair and headed for TFCC.
As soon as I stepped into the small compartment located immediately off of the admiral's conference room, I knew this situation had gotten worse in the few moments it had taken me to walk down there from CVIC. In addition to the normal watch standards, there were three submarine officers in TFCC. I knew one of them well, Commander Hank Fowler. He was attached to the admiral's staff as the submarine community representative. I had found him to be a normal type of submariner ? that is to say, extremely bright, lacking in social skills, and having a utterly odd, dry sense of humor.
Submarines have three rules I = E/R, P = MA, and
'You can't push a rope.' They are generally funny as hell, if you can get past the weirdness.
I stuck my head in SCIF, the Specially Compartmented Information module located immediately next to TFCC. I doubted that there was anything new to be learned there, but I wanted my people to know I was in the area.
That way, they could find me if they needed to.
Two seconds ? that's all it took. Then I stepped inside TFCC. I moved just barely inside the heavy steel hatch that separated the compartment from the conference room, which opened onto a small vestibule. I made eye contact with the admiral, then settled in to wait. He knew I was here and he would yell if he needed me.
Immediately, I knew we were in trouble. Not the carrier, but the submarine traveling with our battle group.
At the depths at which they operate in order to remain concealed, submarines have very few options for communication. They can launch a transmitter buoy, which will reach the surface and broadcast their message to anyone listening. Noisy, and it gives away the submarine's position.
If she's got time, the submarine can come shallow, send the message to the satellite, and back down to us directly. But there are disadvantages to giving up the protection of depth as well. Finally, there was the low- frequency option. The submarine carried an acoustic generator that could broadcast low-frequency tones. In addition to using her underwater telephone, code-named Gertrude, she could transmit a series of tonals that would pass a coded message to any platform with the appropriate receivers.
However, without the code book, the message could not be unscrambled.
Most USW assets now carry some form of recording equipment. While they may not be able to decode the signal immediately, they can transmit the frequency information to the aircraft carrier.
And we can decipher it. Oh yes, we can. And the chaos that I was seeing in the flag plot right now was evidence of that.
'How bad is it?' Admiral Wayne demanded. He was nose-to-nose with Commander Fowler.
'About as bad as it gets.' Hank was as worried as I'd ever seen him.
'There's triple redundancy built into every system, but even that sometimes isn't enough. If three reactor coolant pumps are down, she's got problems.' He shook his head, acknowledging the effect of Murphy on any sensitive military mission. 'If it had to happen, you have to figure it would be here.' 'How many does she have onboard?' the admiral asked.
'Four ? with a couple of emergency measures built in as well. There are things that they can do, Admiral, and they may be able to fix some of it. But I have to tell you, being at depth, I wouldn't want to try. Too much goes wrong, you have to shut a reactor down ? and there you are. You have to use your batteries to come shallow, then maybe you don't have enough power to restart the reactor later on. And there you are, stuck shallow in Russian waters.'
Finally, the admiral turned to me. 'Anything to add?'
I shook my head. There was no additional intelligence data I could provide, nothing that would matter in this situation. There were submarines in the area, nasty tough ones, and our boat had problems.
The admiral stared at the large-screen display as though he could will it to change. The geometry of the attack was perfectly clear there ? our submarine, theirs, and the carrier battle group. 'It's always a trade-off, isn't it?' He shook his head. 'We can provide some additional protection for our own ship by moving the destroyer in closer to her, but that's likely to tip our hand. They'll know that we know, and we will know that they know that we know. Oh, what a tangled web we weave…' 'When first we practice to deceive,' I said, finishing the quotation.
Between Murphy and Shakespeare, I figured we summed the situation up pretty well.
The submariner spoke then. 'There is one other possibility.'
Whatever it was, I could tell by his expression he didn't like it. 'They do carry a certain amount of spare parts, as well as some crackerjack mechanics and engineers. I've seen a submarine machinist's mate completely rebuild a main coolant pump while we were on a mission. It was amazing ? when we got back to port, the company that built it damn near cried. The tolerances were all off, he'd jury-rigged some gaskets, and it worked like a charm. And quiet ? quieter than the original. I think they offered him a ton of money to leave the Navy, but he didn't.'
The admiral looked skeptical. 'So you think they can fix it?'
The submariner nodded. 'Even if they can't, they can still operate with one pump. Not as fast, not as long. And no captain is going to like it, operating without triple redundancy. But they can do it for a while ? maybe long enough to get another pump fixed. If you want them to.'
Admiral Wayne stared at him for a moment. 'It always comes down to this, doesn't it?' he said softly. 'For the skipper on that sub and for me. How far are we willing to go to finish the mission? What do you think he's going to want?'
'I think he is going to want to finish the mission.' Fowler smiled a little, and I caught a glimpse of the kind of decisions he must have had to make during his command tour. 'The first thing they make sure of in sub school is that you're not afraid of the deep water. Or claustrophobic. If I were that skipper, knowing what my mission was, I'd want some peace and quiet so I could take a shot at fixing at least one of the pumps.
