To Kill the Potemkin (13 page)

"All
ahead slow, aye."

"Left
full rudder, aye."

The
ship banked left and quickly corrected her trim. Fogarty watched the
fathometer as the shoals fell behind.
Barracuda
moved out of the Strait
and into the open sea.

Sorensen
spoke into his intercom. "Sonar to control. Receiving
message from
Sirène
."
He scribbled on his notepad and handed the message to the captain as he
came
through the door.

Five
minutes later Springfield had the position and order of battle for
the fleet.

For
three
days and nights Admiral Horning, commodore of the carrier group, had
directed
the search for the elusive
Barracuda. Mako
had
vanished, obviously
"sunk." From the operations center on
Kitty Hawk
Horning
had
plumbed the depths with sonars and magnometers, crossed and
crisscrossed the
surface with frigates and destroyers, and sortied into the air hundreds
of
times with helicopters and antisubmarine airplanes. Five of his own
submarines
prowled under and around his armada, hydrophones open to every gurgle,
yet
Barracuda
remained underwater and undetected.

Springfield
had eluded the trap set by
Mako
and had disappeared.
Admiral Horning's
remaining submarines were having trouble operating in close proximity
to one
another, and his aircraft kept finding them instead of
Barracuda.
Alarms
would scream, sonar officers would shout, "Contact! Contact!" All for
nothing.

And
if
that weren't enough. Horning had Netts gloating in the wardroom.

On
the morning of the fourth day, after a sleepless
night during which he had demanded a report every fifteen minutes
from the operations center, Horning shaved, showered and dressed in
fresh tans.

It
had been
twenty-five years since he had
felt so rotten. During World War Two, as commander of a destroyer, he
had
escorted convoys of merchant ships across the North Atlantic through
deadly
wolfpacks of German U-boats. In that war an enemy submarine presented a
terrible menace, but one he could deal with. Diesel-electric subs spent
most of
their time on the surface, wallowing in heavy seas, full of seasick
sailors,
submerging only to hide, attack or escape intolerable weather.
Underwater, they
were slow and at the mercy of short supplies of air, water and battery
power.

A
nuclear-propelled attack submarine was
another matter entirely. A true submarine ship, rather than a
submersible boat, a nuke remained
underwater virtually all the time, sending a periscope above the
surface only
to communicate or to take a satellite fix for navigation. It made fresh
water
by desalinating seawater, and oxygen by electrolysis of the fresh
water. As for
power, sheer power, it was incomparable. The reactor core in
Barracuda
was good for one hundred thousand miles, and she could outrun any ship
in the
fleet.

Staring
in the
mirror at his
fifty-six-year-old face, with its deep creases and silver brush.
Admiral
Horning accepted the simple, humbling truth: if this were a shooting
war,
Kitty Hawk
, and
probably
the entire fleet, would already have been vaporized in a nuclear blast.

On
entering the
operations center he stood
quietly to one side, observing the anxious, strained faces of his
officers. In
the eerie glow of electronic instruments they looked haunted. For an
instant he
looked directly at Captain Lewis, commander of the carrier. The
haggard,
unshaven man shook his head. No luck, no change, no
Barracuda
.

Netts
was there,
out of uniform, a bug on the
wall, silently watching.

"Good
morning,"
Horning said to
him.

"Good
morning,
Admiral. Sleep
well?" Netts made no effort to keep sarcasm out of his voice.

"Well,
where's
your pet submarine, Mr.
Netts? I haven't seen any torpedo wakes streaking through these waters."

"Perhaps
we
should contact the
manufacturer. Faulty torpedoes are a terrible thing."

Horning
bit his
lip. "Perhaps we should
wait until we see Commander Billings's report."

"Fine,"
said
Netts, who turned his
attention to the dawn breaking in pink streaks off the flight deck.

In
rapid
succession four antisubmarine
airplanes were catapulted off the flight deck. They would drop sonar
buoys into
the water and listen to them via radio as they circled overhead. Only
half the
buoys would work. Some would sink. In others the transducers would fail
and in
many the radio gear would not transmit.

From
another part
of the flight deck a trio
of ASW helicopters took off, dangling sonar arrays beneath them like
weird parasites.
More reliable than radio buoys, the helicopter-borne sonars could
detect a
local contact, but the operators could barely hear over the clamor of
the
rotors. If a sub were lying quietly, they would never hear it. Should
it be
moving rapidly and making enough noise for them to hear, they could not
get an
accurate fix without a second chopper. Even then it was dicey.

No
other ship was
visible.
Barracuda
's
mission was to simulate a nuclear
attack. To avoid having a ship damaged or sunk by a blast that
destroyed
another, Horning had spread his perimeters to the maximum, with no ship
within
five miles of another. This dispersal also allowed him to search the
widest
possible area.

A
communications
officer handed Captain Lewis
a message. "It's from
Badger
,"
Lewis said to Admiral Horning. "She's tracking
Swordfish
,
which is entering the perimeter
between
Badger
and
Bainesworth
."

"All
right, if
they can hear
Swordfish
, so can
Barracuda.
Concentrate the search in the other three quadrants. When are we
scheduled to
signal
Swordfish?
"

"Not
for another
two hours," said
the communications officer.

"Damn."
Horning
looked at Netts,
who shrugged and looked back.

On
the bulkhead a
large screen displayed the
order of battle for the fleet. Each ship was an electronic silhouette.
The
screen was kept up-to-date by a constant flow of data from radar,
sonar,
satellite sensors, aircraft and even, occasionally, the word of a
sailor on
deck with a pair of binoculars. Netts thought it was a pretty picture
and
imagined that the picture on
Barracuda
's sonar
screen was much the same.

While
the
location of each surface ship was
shown with precision, the whereabouts of each submarine could only be
estimated. A technician punched buttons on a control panel, and
Swordfish
appeared on the screen between the destroyers
Badger
and
Bainesworth
.

The
fleet had
received messages from neither
the French nor the Italians, and Horning had not guessed that
Barracuda
had run the Strait of Bonifacio and was preparing an attack from the
north. Two
of the fleet's subs were on station fifty miles south, hoping to
intercept
Barracuda
's approach
from
that direction.
Swordfish
,
Stingray
and
Dragonfish
were roving under and around the
armada.

Netts
knew that
Springfield's plan was to
position
Barracuda
in front of the fleet, lie
quietly at depth and wait
for the advance ships to pass directly over her. If the advance ships
made
contact, she would try to outrun them and attack the carrier before
they got a
fix.

Netts
stared
impatiently out to sea hoping
that at any minute now a pair of torpedoes would streak out of the
north, slam
into the hulking
Kitty Hawk
,
and Netts's Folly would be history.

There
was a stillness in the ship.

The
captain had slipped under a thermal layer
of warm water that deflected sonar pulses searching from above, and for
twelve
hours
Barracuda
had hovered a thousand feet down.

She
was rigged for quiet. The noisy
air-conditioning system was reduced to the minimum and the temperature
had
risen to eighty-three degrees. The fresh water still, which made a
terrible
racket, was shut down, so no one could shower. The ship was rank.

In
the sonar room Willie Joe was on watch.
Every few minutes he heard propellers and engine noises as one of the
ships of
the fleet passed over a convergence zone. Fifteen miles away
Kitty Hawk
was steaming north, directly toward
Barracuda
.

In
the forward crew quarters Fogarty was
reading a battered copy of
Catch-22
. In the bunks
beneath him two sailors played a silent game of
chess.

In
the tier opposite, Sorensen cradled his
tape recorder on his chest, listening to whale talk. Through the haze
of
cetacean whistles he heard someone softly call his name. He opened his
curtain
and saw Davic standing in the passageway.

"Sorensen—"

"Be
quiet."

"I
want to apologize to you,
please."

"What
are you talking about? Apologize
for what?"

"For
demanding that the Russian
submarine be credited to me. I am ashamed."

"That's
all right, Davic. I don't keep
score."

Looking
remorseful, Davic paced and muttered
to himself in the small confined space. From somewhere in the darkness
a rubber
shoe flew out of a bunk and struck him in the back. A voice grumbled,
"Shut up, Davic. Let a man beat off in peace."

Davic stopped
pacing and whispered,
"Sorensen, I want to be on the first watch."

"I
have to qualify Fogarty. You know
that."

"Well,
when is he going to
qualify?"

Across
the passageway Fogarty drew open his
curtain and stared in the dim light at the back of Davic's head.

"It
took you three months to qualify, Davic," Sorensen said evenly.
"Fogarty hasn't been on the ship three
weeks."

"Hey,"
a voice pleaded in the
darkness, "let us get some
sleep
." Angry faces
appeared up and down the tiers of bunks. Davic opened his mouth to
speak again, but thinking better of it, padded off in
the direction of the mess.

"What's
the trouble with him?"
Fogarty whispered to Sorensen.

"He
wants your job."

"He's
a strange bird."

"Fogarty,
after you've been down here a while you'll find that everybody is
strange. You
never know the
real
reason a guy wants to live
cooped up in a steel tube
with a hundred other guys. Like you. I can't really figure out what
you're
doing here, no matter what you say." Without waiting for a reply.
Sorensen
replaced his headphones and returned to the whales.

In
the sonar room
Willie Joe watched two ragged blips move slowly onto his screen, a pair
of
destroyers on the outer perimeter of the fleet. Five miles apart, the
closest a
mile from
Barracuda
, they
were steaming at an oblique angle across the bow.

In
the control room
Captain Springfield, Pisaro, Billings, and Hoek watched the repeater
and
listened through headphones to the muffled sound of the nearest
destroyer,
distorted by the thermal.

Then
there was
another, more ominous sound, much closer.

"Sorensen!"

The
high, brittle
voice belonged to Lt. Hoek, who was standing in the hatch.

"Yes,
sir."

"You
and
Fogarty in the sonar room, on the double."

"Aye
aye,
sir."

Hoek
lowered his
voice to conspiratorial. "We have a sub," he said, eyes gleaming.
Hoek was hot to win the war game and earn a unit citation.

"No
kidding," said Sorensen, deadpan.

"It's
Swordfish.
We're going to get right on her tail and follow
her in."

"Well,
what do
you know. Lieutenant. Sounds like fun." He winked at Fogarty as they
followed Hoek through the hatch and up a ladder.

Throughout
the ship
loudspeakers whispered, "General Quarters. General Quarters. All hands
man
battle stations, nuclear."

In
the
control room of
Potemkin
nine men were crowded into
a space designed for
six. After seventy-three days at sea, every minute of which had been
spent
submerged,
Potemkin
's moment of truth was at hand.

Standing
behind the sonar operator, his arm draped over the young officer's
shoulders.
Captain Nikolai Federov calmly gave the orders to maneuver
Potemkin
under
the perimeter of ships that surrounded
Kitty Hawk
.

All
eyes
were on the sonar screen, where a splendid array of blips represented
the U.S.
Sixth Fleet.

"Quite
a sight, eh, Popov?"

"Yes,
sir," Popov whispered, his face gone white.

"Steady
as he goes," said the captain quietly.

"Steady
as he goes," repeated the helmsman.

Potemkin
was an Alpha-class experimental submarine. Her sleek,
orca-shaped hull was constructed of an alloy of titanium, a rare,
strong,
lightweight metal. The use of titanium in place of steel enabled
Potemkin
to
cruise at fifty knots, a speed that had been thought impossible, and at
a depth
below four thousand feet. No other sub in the world could go that deep.

Potemkin
was the most secret ship in the
Soviet Navy. Only those in the highest echelons of command were aware
of her
presence in the Mediterranean. She was not officially attached to the
Black Sea
Fleet, whose bailiwick included the "Med."
Potemkin
was a
fleet unto herself.