Jack Ryan 4 - The Hunt for Red October (17 page)

“The Harrier's a fighter, sir,” Ryan commented.

“They have an experimental two-seat version set up for ASW patrolling. It's supposed to work reasonably well outside their helo perimeter. That's how they bagged one of our attack boats, caught her napping.” Painter finished off the last of his coffee.

“Okay, gentlemen, let's get ourselves down to ASW control and try and figure a way to run this circus act. CINCLANT will want to hear what I have in mind. I suppose I'd better decide for myself. We'll also call Invincible and have them send a bird back to ferry you out, Ryan.”

Ryan followed the two admirals out of the room. He spent two hours watching Painter move ships around the ocean like a chess master with his pieces.

The USS Dallas

Bart Mancuso had been on duty in the attack center for more than twenty hours. Only a few hours of sleep separated this stretch from the previous one. He had been eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, and two cups of soup had been thrown in by his cooks for variety's sake. He examined his latest cup of freeze-dried without affection.

“Cap'n?” He turned. It was Roger Thompson, his sonar officer.

“Yes, what is it?” Mancuso pulled himself away from the tactical display that had occupied his attention for several days. Thompson was standing at the rear of the compartment. Jones was standing beside him holding a clipboard and what looked like a tape machine. "

“Sir, Jonesy has something I think you ought to look at.”

Mancuso didn't want to be bothered—extended time on duty always taxed his patience. But Jones looked eager and excited. “Okay, come on over to the chart table.”

The
Dallas
' chart table was a new gadget wired into the BC-10 and projected onto a TV-type glass screen four feet square. The display moved as the
Dallas
moved. This made paper charts obsolete, though they were kept anyway. Charts can't break.

“Thanks, Skipper,” Jones said, more humbly than usual. “I know you're kinda busy, but I think I got something here. That anomalous contact we had the other day's been bothering me. I had to leave it after the ruckus the other Russkie subs kicked up, but I was able to come back to it three times to make sure it was still there. The fourth time it was gone, faded out. I want to show you what I worked up. Can you punch up our course track for back then on this baby, sir?”

The chart table was interfaced through the BC-10 into the ship's inertial navigation system, SINS. Mancuso punched the command in himself. It was getting so that they couldn't flush the head without a computer command . . .  The Dallas' course track showed up as a convoluted red line, with tick marks displayed at fifteen-minute intervals.

“Great!” Jones commented. “I've never seen it do that before. That's all right. Okay.” Jones pulled a handful of pencils from his back pocket. “Now, I got the contact first at 0915 or so, and the bearing was about two-six-nine.” He set a pencil down, eraser at
Dallas
' position, point directed west towards the target. “Then at 0930 it was bearing a two-six-zero. At 0948, it was two-five-zero. There's some error built into these, Cap'n. It was a tough signal to lock in on, but the errors should average out. Right about then we got all this other activity, and I had to go after them, but I came back to it about 1000, and the bearing was two-four-two.” Jones set down another pencil on the due-east line traced when the
Dallas
had moved away from the Icelandic coast. “At 1015 it was two-three-four, and at 1030 it was two-two-seven. These last two are shaky, sir. The signal was real faint, and I didn't have a very good lock on it.” Jones looked up. He appeared nervous.

“So far, so good. Relax, Jonesy. Light up if you want.”

“Thanks, Cap'n.” Jones fished out a cigarette and lit it with a butane lighter. He had never approached the captain quite this way. He knew Mancuso to be a tolerant, easygoing commander—if you had something to say. He was not a man who liked his time wasted, and it was sure as hell he wouldn't want it wasted now. “Okay, sir, we gotta figure he couldn't be too far away from us, right? I mean, he had to be between us and
Iceland
. So let's say he was about halfway between. That gives him a course about like this.” Jones set down some more pencils.

“Hold it, Jonesy. Where does the course come from?”

“Oh, yeah.” Jones flipped open his clipboard. “Yesterday morning, night, whatever it was, after I got off watch, it started bothering me, so I used the move we made offshore as a baseline to do a little course track for him. I know how, Skipper. I read the manual. It's easy, just like we used to do at Cal Tech to chart star motion. I took an astronomy course in my freshman year.”

Mancuso stifled a groan. It was the first time he had ever heard this called easy, but on looking at Jones' figures and diagrams, it appeared that he had done it right. “Go on.”

Jones pulled a Hewlett Packard scientific calculator from his pocket and what looked like a National Geographic map liberally coated with pencil marks and scribblings. “You want to check my figures, sir?”

“We will, but I'll trust you for now. What's the map?”

“Skipper, I know it's against the rules an' all, but I keep this as a personal record of the tracks the bad guys use. It doesn't leave the boat, sir, honest. I may be a little off, but all this translates to a course of about two-two-zero and a speed of ten knots. And that aims him right at the entrance of Route One. Okay?”

“Go on.” Mancuso had already figured that one. Jonesy was on to something.

“Well, I couldn't sleep after that, so I skipped back to sonar and pulled the tape on the contact. I had to run it through the computer a few times to filter out all the crap—sea sounds, the other subs, you know—then I rerecorded it at ten times normal speed.” He set his cassette recorder on the chart table. “Listen to this, Skipper.”

The tape was scratchy, but every few seconds there was a thrum. Two minutes of listening seemed to indicate a regular interval of about five seconds. By this time Lieutenant Mannion was looking over Thompson's shoulder, listening, and nodding speculatively.

“Skipper, that's gotta be a man-made sound. It's just too regular for anything else. At normal speed it didn't make much sense, but once I speeded it up, I had the sucker.”

“Okay, Jonesy, finish it,” Mancuso said.

“Captain, what you just heard was the acoustical signature of a Russian submarine. He was heading for Route One, taking the inshore track off the Icelandic coast. You can bet money on that, Skipper.”

“Roger?”

“He sold me, Captain,” Thompson replied.

Mancuso took another look at the course track, trying to figure an alternative. There wasn't any. “Me, too. Roger, Jonesy makes sonarman first class today. I want to see the paper work done by the turn of the next watch, along with a nice letter of commendation for my signature. Ron,” he poked the sonarman in the shoulder, “that's all right. Damned well done!”

“Thanks, Skipper.” Jones' smile stretched from ear to ear.

“Pat, please call Lieutenant Butler to the attack center.”

Mannion went to the phones to call the boat's chief engineer.

“Any idea what it is, Jonesy?” Mancuso turned back.

The sonarman shook his head. “It isn't screw sounds. I've never heard anything like it.” He ran the tape back and played it again.

Two minutes later, Lieutenant Earl Butler came into the attack center. “You rang, Skipper?”

“Listen to this, Earl.” Mancuso rewound the tape and played it a third time.

Butler
was a graduate of the
University
of
Texas
and every school the navy had for submarines and their engine systems. “What's that supposed to be?”

“Jonesy says it's a Russian sub. I think he's right.”

“Tell me about the tape,”
Butler
said to Jones.

“Sir, it's speeded up ten times, and I washed it through the BC-10 five times. At normal speed it doesn't sound like much of anything.” With uncharacteristic modesty, Jones did not point out that it had sounded like something to him.

“Some sort of harmonic? I mean, if it was a propeller, it'd have to be a hundred feet across, and we'd be hearing one blade at a time. The regular interval suggests some sort of harmonic.”
Butler
's face screwed up. “But a harmonic what?”

“Whatever it was, it was headed right here.” Mancuso tapped Thor's Twins with his pencil.

“That makes him a Russian, all right,”
Butler
agreed. “Then they're using something new. Again.”

“Mr. Butler's right,” Jones said. “It does sound like a harmonic rumble. The other funny thing is, well, there was this background noise, kinda like water going through a pipe. I don't know, it didn't pick up on this. I guess the computer filtered it off. It was real faint to start with—anyway, that's outside my field.”

“That's all right. You've done enough for one day. How do you feel?” Mancuso asked.

“A little tired, Skipper. I've been working on this for a while.”

“If we get close to this guy again, you think you can track him down?” Mancuso knew the answer.

“You bet, Cap'n! Now that we know what to listen for, you bet I'll bag the sucker!”

Mancuso looked at the chart table. “Okay, if he was heading for the Twins, and then ran the route at, say twenty-eight or thirty knots, and then settled down to his base course and speed of about ten or so . . .  that puts him about here now. Long ways off. Now, if we run at top speed . . .  forty-eight hours will put us here, and that'll put us in front of him. Pat?”

“That's about right, sir,” Lieutenant Mannion concurred. “You're figuring he ran the route at full speed, then settled down—makes sense. He wouldn't need the quiet drive in that damned maze. It gives him a free shot for four or five hundred miles, so why not uncrank his engines? That's what I'd do.”

“That's what we'll try and do, then. We'll radio in for permission to leave Toll Booth station and track this character down. Jonesy, running at max speed means you sonarmen will be out of work for a while. Set up the contact tape on the simulator and make sure the operators all know what this guy sounds like, but get some rest. All of you. I want you at a hundred percent when we try to reacquire this guy. Have yourself a shower. Make that a
Hollywood
shower—you've earned it—and rack out. When we do go after this character, it'll be a long, tough hunt.”

“No sweat, Captain. We'll get him for you. Bet on it. You want to keep my tape, sir?”

“Yeah.” Mancuso ejected the tape and looked up in surprise. “You sacrificed a Bach for this?”

“Not a good one, sir. I have a Christopher Hogwood of this piece that's much better.”

Mancuso pocketed the tape. “Dismissed, Jonesy. Nice work.”

“A pleasure, Cap'n.” Jones left the attack center counting the extra money for jumping a rate.

“Roger, make sure your people are well rested over the next two days. When we do go after this guy, it's going to be a bastard.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Pat, get us up to periscope depth. We're going to call this one into
Norfolk
right now. Earl, I want you thinking about what's making that noise.”

“Right, Captain.”

While Mancuso drafted his message, Lieutenant Mannion brought the
Dallas
to periscope-antenna depth with an upward angle on the diving planes. It took five minutes to get from five hundred feet to just below the stormy surface. The submarine was subject to wave action, and while it was very gentle by surface ship standards, the crew noted her rocking. Mannion raised the periscope and ESM (electronic support measures) antenna, the latter used for the broad-band receiver designed to detect possible radar emissions. There was nothing in view—he could see about five miles—and the ESM instruments showed nothing except for aircraft sets, which were too far away to matter. Next Mannion raised two more masts. One was a reed-like UHF (ultrahigh frequency) receiving antenna. The other was new, a laser transmitter. This rotated and locked onto the carrier wave signal of the Atlantic SSIX, the communications satellite used exclusively by submarines. With the laser, they could send high-density transmissions without giving away the sub's position.

“All ready, sir,” the duty radioman reported.

“Transmit.”

The radioman pressed a button. The signal, sent in a fraction of a second, was received by photovoltaic cells, read over to a UHF transmitter, and shot back down by a parabolic dish antenna towards Atlantic Fleet Communications headquarters. At
Norfolk
another radioman noted the reception and pressed a button that transmitted the same signal up to the satellite and back to the
Dallas
. It was a simple way to identify garbles.

The
Dallas
operator compared the received signal with the one he'd just sent. “Good copy, sir.”

Mancuso ordered Mannion to lower everything but the ESM and UHF antennae.

Atlantic Fleet Communications

In
Norfolk
the first line of the dispatch revealed the page and line of the one-time-pad cipher sequence, which was recorded on computer tape in the maximum security section of the communications complex. An officer typed the proper numbers into his computer terminal, and an instant later the machine generated a clear text. The officer checked it again for garbles. Satisfied there were none, he took the printout to the other side of the room where a yeoman was seated at a telex. The officer handed him the dispatch.

The yeoman keyed up the proper addressee and transmitted the message by dedicated landline to COMSUBLANT Operations, half a mile away. The landline was fiber optic, located in a steel conduit under a paved street. It was checked three times a week for security purposes. Not even the secrets of nuclear weapons performance were as closely guarded as day-to-day tactical communications.

COMSUBLANT Operations

A bell went off in the operations room as the message came up on the “hot” printer. It bore a Z prefix, which indicated F
LASH
-priority status.

Z090414ZDEC

TOP SECRET THEO

FM: USS DALLAS