To Kill the Potemkin (7 page)

"I
gotta have it
tomorrow in Naples.
Skipper's orders."

"Like
I say, it's
on the sheet. Not to
worry. What's it for, anyway?"

"You
got me,
sport." Sorensen took
off his glasses and winked.

"Oh,
yeah,"
Barnes said, flapping
his arms and returning to his lathe. "Big time secrets. When the
captain
goes to the crapper, it's a secret. What's for lunch? It's a secret. A
sonar
beacon in a watertight stainless steel box. Big secret. Shit."

Sorensen
shut the
door. True enough, nothing
stayed secret for long. He began collecting his stuff. A tape was still
running. La Verne Baker belted out
Jim Dandy on a submarine.
Got a message
from a mermaid queen. Jim Dandy didn't waste no time. Jim Dandy to the
rescue.
Go Jim Dandy. Go Jim Dandy.

He
turned off the
lights on the way out.

The
door to the
sonar room jerked open and
Sorensen suddenly filled the tiny space. He sat down at the
supervisor's
console, logged in and adjusted a headset over his ears.

"Just
carry on,"
he said to Davic.
Sorensen didn't look at the screen. He closed his eyes and listened.

The
deep waters
of the Mediterranean
constituted a notoriously fickle sonar environment. Sound waves were
bounced up
and down by thermal layers and distorted by seamounts and an uneven
bottom. It
was impossible to determine the range of a contact heard on a passive
array
unless it was moving.

"Control
to
sonar, prepare for three
hundred sixty degree revolution."

"Sonar
to
control. Understand three
hundred sixty degree revolution. Aye aye," Davic replied.

As
the ship
slowed, the machinery quieted and
the screens gradually cleared. The ship banked slightly as it turned.
Davic
heard static. "There's signal interference from the storm," he said.

"The
storm is
dying," Sorensen told
him. "Ignore it."

A
third of the
way through the turn, they
clearly heard a propeller cavitating on the surface. Sorensen estimated
the
range as five miles.

"Sonar
to
control. Contact on the
surface, bearing one one seven. Speed two knots."

"Control
to helm.
Make our course
bearing one one seven."

"Course
one one
seven, aye."

The
ship turned
back to the left and once
again the sonar operators heard the propeller.

"All
stop,"
ordered the captain.

The
sub drifted,
listening. Sorensen heard a
second propeller. Twin screws. A small ship was barely making way on
the
surface.

"It's
your watch, Davic," Sorensen
said. "What do you think it is?"

As
Davic logged
the contact into the computer
he mumbled, "It could be anything, a coastal freighter, a fisherman."

Sorensen
opened
his eyes and began watching
the screen, listening intently. NATO routes avoided commercial shipping
lanes
and fishing grounds. He had a hunch.

"Fee
fie foe fum,
I smell the blood of a
Russian bum." He winked at Davic who stared wide-eyed at the screen,
wondering what Sorensen heard that he didn't.

"Davic,"
Sorensen
said,
"that's a Soviet surveillance ship up there, a trawler, and he's got us
pegged for sure."

"What
makes you
think so?"

"Tomorrow
the
Sixth Fleet is going to
sail from Naples, right up this alley. Now, if I was your friend
Admiral
Gorshkov, I'd wait for
Kitty Hawk
right about here.
Sonar to control. Is
the repeater on line yet?"

Willie
Joe's
languid voice came back through
the intercom. "Another minute, there, Ace. One more circuit."

Before
Sorensen
could reply, a streak
flickered across the extreme edge of the sonar screen, a faint
electronic
shadow. Sorensen snapped to attention and began punching buttons on his
console. The trawler had company.

Deftly,
Sorensen
locked his sonars on bearing
one one seven and immediately heard the throb of a saltwater pump, the
type of
pump that circulated seawater around a steam condenser, the
unmistakable
signature of a nuclear reactor. A nuclear submarine was hovering under
the
trawler, listening to
Barracuda
. "Bingo," he said.
"Sonar
to control. We have another contact, bearing one one seven, range
estimated ten
thousand yards, speed zero zero. Contact is submerged. Repeat, contact
is submerged."

"Control
to
sonar," said Pisaro's
voice, "the repeater is coming on line now. We show nothing, sonar,
nada
." The XO paused
for a moment. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's impossible. No
goddamn
Russkie sub has been reported in this sector of the Med. How in hell
did he get
in here?"

The
faint streak
returned at the same
bearing. The contact was directly below the trawler. Pisaro swore. "The
son of a bitch must have been listening to us for half an hour.
Quartermaster,
sound general quarters."

Throughout
the
ship loudspeakers drove one
hundred men into furious but disciplined activity.

"General
quarters, general quarters. All
hands man battle stations. This is not a drill. This is not a drill.
Man battle
stations."

Davic stood
up
and took off his headset. His
battle station was forward as part of a damage-control team. He opened
a
cabinet and pulled on a white asbestos suit. Inside the plexiglas
faceplate
he looked like a chubby astronaut. "I would prefer to remain in the
sonar
room," he said into the microphone inside his helmet.

"Look,
Davic, I
don't assign the
stations. Lopez does that," Sorensen told him.

"That's
my
Russian,
Sorensen," Davic shouted in his electronic voice.

"Sure,
he's all
yours. He's in your log.
Don't worry, you'll get your chance to go toe to toe with him."

Davic muttered
a
Hungarian curse and went
out.

Sorensen
called
after him, "What's the
matter? Don't you ever go to the movies?"

A
moment later
Fogarty rushed in, sat down
and put on his earphones. He heard a deep throb, an unnatural predatory
growl,
and suddenly he was very alert.

In
sonar school
Fogarty had listened with
detached interest to tapes of Soviet submarines, but the tapes had been
disembodied noises in a void. The tapes that Sorensen had played for
him had
been frightening, but still remote. The immediacy of the real thing
came as a
shock. His first Russian.

"What's
he
doing?" he asked
Sorensen.

"Our
friend Ivan
is just sitting there
listening to us with big fat smile on his face. The joke's on us."

Fogarty
settled
into his seat and watched the
resolution of the streak improve as the range closed.

Invisible
to the
rest of the world, the two
subs drifted five miles apart, listening warily for the slightest hint
of a
wrong move.

"Well,"
Sorensen
said, "the
game is on. Let's see if we can come out a respectable second best."

"What
game?"
Fogarty asked.

"
The
game. The only game in town.
The game we play with the Russians. Cowboys and Cossacks."

Fogarty
stared at
him.

"Call
it practice
for World War
Three."

Sorensen
switched
on the overhead speakers
and took off his earphones.

"Listen
to that
dirty racket," he
said with a smile. "His weapons control system is locked right on your
beating heart."

"Control
to
sonar. Prepare to lock on
weapons control."

"Sonar
to
control. Prepare to lock on
weapons control, aye. Now we're going to return the favor," Sorensen
said.
He pushed a sequence of buttons on his console and the sonar signals
were ready
to be fed into the weapons-guidance systems.

When
Fogarty had
practiced this drill it
always made him nervous. Now faced with an actual adversary, he was
surprised
to discover how calm he felt.

"Control
to
weapons. Lock on
sonar."

Hock's
voice came
through the intercom.
"Weapons to control. Lock on sonar, aye."

"Very
well."

Hoek
looked up from his weapons console to face the captain in the conning
station,
wondering if Springfield was going to give the order to load a torpedo.
Rachets
in hand, the torpedo room crew was standing by.

"Load
tube number one, Mark thirty-seven, conventional warhead, wire-guided."

"Load
tube number one, aye."

Barracuda
dipped slightly forward as the weight of a torpedo was
shifted into a tube. A trim tank automatacally compensated and the ship
leveled.

Fogarty
shook his head. "This is like playing with
a loaded gun."

"Indeed
it is. That's the spice that makes it so tasty."

"What
if someone screws up?"

Sorensen
shrugged and lit a cigarette. "Who? The skipper? No way. Ivan? He's the
same as us. Nobody wants to start a war. Not today. So they say..."

"We
could have a war down here and nobody would ever know it."

"You're
a bright boy, Fogarty. You noticed there aren't any TV cameras down
here."

Fogarty
still felt strangely calm and clearheaded. A torpedo could not be fired
until
the tube was flooded, a provocative act that would be heard by the
Russian
sonar operators.

Looking
at
the pictures on the wall, he tried to imagine the Russian sub. He had
seen film
of Russian subs on the surface. They looked mean, warlike. As for the
men
inside, he had only the residue of a lifetime of propaganda that
pictured them
as an enemy... We will bury you, and so forth. He wasn't sure if he
believed
all of it, some of it, or none of it.

"Well,"
Sorensen
said, "what
class of sub do you think it is?"

"I
don't know.
Most of their attack subs
are November class."

"She's
starting
to move. Sonar to
control, contact is moving. He's showing himself to us."

"Control
to
sonar." Springfield's
voice replaced Leo Pisaro's. "Try and get a signature."

"Aye
aye."

"Okay,
Leo,"
Springfield said to
the XO, "let's take a look. All ahead slow."

The
ship
shuddered as the propeller
revolutions increased. The instant
Barracuda
moved
the Russian took off,
making a great deal of noise as his speed increased. The streak on the
screen
resolved into a blip. Sorensen heard the unmistakable sounds of Soviet
machinery, noisy reduction gears and coolant pumps, the swish of a
prop, but it
was not the classic signature of a November. He switched on the
signature
program that compared the sounds of the contact sub with the recorded
sounds of
known Soviet submarines stored in the program.

"It's
a Viktor,"
he said, a good
fifteen seconds before the computer verified his judgement.

Fogarty
glanced
at the chart. "The new
one," he said.

"Yeah.
We don't
know much about these
Viktors. They can go deep, but they make a lot of noise."

Springfield
and
Pisaro were alarmed by the
Russian's unexpected appearance in the Mediterranean. How did it get
through
the Strait of Gibraltar without being detected and tracked? They
studied the
repeater and sipped coffee. Pisaro chain-smoked.

The
Russian was
running parallel to
Barracuda'
s original course. The Russian commander was
announcing that the
Mediterranean was no longer an American lake.

"Leo,"
Springfield said quietly,
"move in on her. Crowd her. All ahead half."

"Aye
aye,
Skipper. All ahead half."

"Go
right three
degrees, course one two
zero."

"Right
three
degrees, course one two
zero, aye."

As
Barracuda
began to accelerate, the
Russian went into a steep dive, machinery roaring like breaking surf.
The
Russian accelerated, the blip leaped across Sorensen's screen at a
fantastic
rate.
Barracuda
,
the
fastest submarine in the U.S. Navy, was being left behind.

Abruptly
Sorensen
snatched off his earphones
and reached over to yank Fogarty's away from his ears. He was too late.
The
high pitch of a powerful Feniks target-seeking sonar erupted in the
young
sonarman's ears. He winced in pain and swore. It was his first sonar
lashing.

"Welcome
to the
wonderful world of sub
wars," Sorensen said to him.

Fogarty
poked at
his ears, his face contorted
with pain. "Goddamn. Why did they do that?"

"Hey,
Third
Class, didn't they teach you
anything in sonar school?"

"They
didn't do
that."

"When
Ivan stings
your ears like that,
it means he could have put a torpedo up your ass. Bang bang, you're
dead. Our
friend heard us a long time before we heard him."

The
Russian
descended to twenty-one hundred
feet and the sound abruptly ceased. The sub disappeared.

Sorensen
stared
at his blank screen.
"Jeez, I don't believe it. She vanished below a deep thermal. Sonar to
control. We lost her."

"Control
to
sonar. Say again."

"We
lost her.
Captain. She's gone."

"Good
God."

There
was shocked
silence in the control
room. A deep thermal layer deflected the down-searching sonars at
twenty-one
hundred feet, but no one wanted to admit that a Soviet sub could go
beyond that
depth. In 1963
Thresher
had imploded at two thousand
feet.

Springfield
was
shaken. The Viktor had
revealed herself as a far more formidable opponent than American naval
officers
had been taught to expect.