Red Storm Rising

15. The Bastion Gambit

"What's the sounding?" McCafferty asked quietly.

"Fifty feet under the keel," the navigator answered at once. "We're still well outside Russian territorial waters, but we start approaching real shoals in twenty miles, skipper." It was the eighth time in half an hour that he had commented on what lay ahead.

McCafferty nodded, not wanting to speak, not wanting to make any unnecessary sound at all. The tension hung in the attack center of the Chicago like the cigarette smoke that the ventilators would not entirely remove. Looking around, he caught his crewmen furtively disclosing their states of mind with a raised eyebrow or a slightly shaken head.

The navigator was the most nervous of all. There were all sorts of good reasons not to be here. Chicago might or might not have been in Soviet territorial water, itself a legal question of no small complexity. To the northeast was Cape Kanin; to the northwest, Cape Svyatoy. The Soviets claimed the entire region as an "historic bay," while the United States chose to recognize the international twenty-four-mile closure rule. Everyone aboard knew that the Russians were more likely to shoot today than request a decision under the International Law of the Sea Convention. Would the Russians find them?

They were in a bare thirty fathoms of water-and, like the great pelagic sharks, nuclear attack submarines are creatures of the deep, not the shallows. The tactical plot showed bearings to three Soviet patrol craft, two Grisha-class frigates and a Poti-class corvette, all specialized antisubmarine ships. All were miles away, but they were still a very real threat.

The only good news was a storm overhead. The twenty-knot surface wind and sheets of falling rain made noise that interfered with sonar performance-but that included their own sonar, and sonar was their only safe means for getting information.

Then there were the imponderables. What sensing devices did the Soviets have in these waters? Might the water be clear enough that a circling helicopter or ASW aircraft could see them? Might there be a Tango-class diesel boat out there, moving slowly on her quiet, battery-powered electric motors? The only way they'd learn the answer to any of those questions was the metallic whine of a torpedo's high-speed propellers or the simple explosion of a falling depth-bomb. McCafferty considered all these things, and weighed the dangers against the priority of his Flash directive from COMSUBLANT:

Determine at once the operating areas of REDFLT SSBNs.

That sort of language gave him little leeway.

"How tight is the inertial fix?" McCafferty asked as casually as he could.

"Plus or minus two hundred yards." The navigator didn't even look up.

The captain grunted, knowing what the navigator was thinking. They should have gotten a NAVSTAR satellite fix a few hours ago, but the risk of detection was too high in an area crawling with Soviet surface craft. Two hundred yards, plus or minus, was fine accuracy by any rational standard-but not while submerged in shallow water off a hostile coast. How accurate were his charts? Were there unmarked wrecks out there? Even if his navigational data were completely accurate, quarters would be so tight in another few miles that a goof of two hundred yards could ground them, damaging the submarine… and making noise. The captain shrugged to himself. The Chicago was the best platform in the world for this mission. He'd done this sort of thing before, and he couldn't worry about everything at the same time. McCafferty took a few steps forward and leaned into the sonar compartment.

"How's our friend doing?"

"Continuing as before, skipper. No changes at all in the target's radiated noise level. Just toolin' right along at fifteen knots, dead ahead, no more than two thousand yards off. Pleasure cruise, like," the sonar chief concluded with no small irony.

Pleasure cruise. The Soviets were sortieing their ballistic missile submarines at intervals of one sub every four hours. Already a majority of them were at sea. They had never done that before. And all seemed to be heading east-not north and northeast as they usually did to cruise in the Barents or Kara seas, or most recently under the arctic ice cap itself. SACLANT had learned that piece of information from Norwegian P-3 aircraft patrolling Checkpoint Charlie, the spot fifty miles offshore where Soviet submarines always submerged. Chicago, the nearest sub to the area, had been sent to investigate.

They'd soon detected and gotten into trail position behind a Delta-III, a modem Soviet "boomer," as missile subs were known. Trailing her, they'd stayed within the hundred-fathom curve the whole way… until the target had turned southeast into shallow water toward Mys Svyatoy Nos, which led to the entrance to the White Sea-all of which was Soviet territorial water.

How far did they dare follow? And what was going on? McCafferty returned to control and went to the periscope pedestal.

"Look around," he said. "Up scope." A petty officer turned the hydraulic ring control and the portside search periscope slid upward from its well. "Hold!" McCafferty stooped at the conning station, catching the instrument as the quartermaster stopped it below the surface. From a position that was murderously uncomfortable, the skipper duck-walked the scope in a full circle. On the forward bulkhead was a television monitor which worked off a camera built into the scope. It was watched by the executive officer and a senior petty officer.

"No shadows," McCafferty said. Nothing to make him suspect that something was there.

"Concur, skipper," the XO agreed.

"Check with sonar."

Forward, the sonar watch listened carefully. Circling aircraft made noise, and there was about an even chance that they'd heard it. But now they heard nothing-which didn't mean that nothing was there, like maybe a high-flying chopper or another Grisha laying to, her diesels shut down as she drifted, listening for someone like Chicago.

"Sonar says they don't have anything, skipper," the XO reported.

"Two more feet," McCafferty ordered.

The quartermaster worked the lever again, bringing the periscope up by twenty-three inches, just barely out of the water in the troughs of the waves.

"Skipper!" It was the senior ESM technician. The highest item on Chicago's periscope was a miniature antenna array which fed signals to a broadband receiver. The instant it projected above the surface, three lights flickered on the ESM tactical warning board. "I read three-five, maybe six India-band search radars. Signature characteristics say ship and land-based search radars, sir, not, repeat not, aircraft sets. Nothing in the Juliet-band." The technician started reading off the bearings.

McCafferty allowed himself to relax. There was no way a radar could detect so small a target as his periscope in these waves. He turned the periscope in a complete circle. "I see no surface ships. No aircraft. Seas about five feet. Estimate the surface wind from the northwest at, oh, about twenty, twenty-five knots." He snapped up the handles and stepped back. "Down scope." The oiled steel tube was heading down before he'd spoken the second word. The captain nodded approval at his quartermaster, who held out a stopwatch. The scope had been up above the surface for a total of 5.9 seconds. After fifteen years in submarines, it still amazed him how so many people could do so much in six seconds. When he'd gone through submarine school, the criterion had been a seven-second exposure.

The navigator examined his chart quickly, a quartermaster assisting him to plot the bearings to the signal sources.

"Captain." The navigator looked up. "Bearings are consistent with two known shore radar transmitters, and three Don-2 sets match the bearings of Sierra-2, -3, and -4." He referred to the plotted positions of the three Soviet surface ships. "We got one unknown, bearing zero-fourseven. What's that one look like, Harkins?"

"A land-based India-band surface search, one of those new 'Shore Cans,"' the technician responded, reading off frequency and pulse-width numbers. "Weak signal and kinda fuzzy, sir. Lots of activity, though, and all the transmitters are dialed into different frequencies." The technician meant that the radar searches were well coordinated, so that the radar transmitters would not interfere with one another.

An electrician rewound the videotape, allowing McCafferty to reexamine what he'd seen through the periscope. The only difference was that the periscope TV camera was black and white. The tape had to be run at slow speed to avoid blurring, so rapidly had the captain made his visual search.

"Amazing how good nothing can look, eh, Joe?" he asked his executive officer. The cloud ceiling was well below a thousand feet, and the wave action had rapidly coated the periscope lens with water droplets. No one had ever invented an efficient gadget for keeping that lens clear, McCafferty reflected, you'd think that after eighty-some years…

"Water looks a little murky, too," Joe answered hopefully. A visual sighting by antisubmarine warfare aircraft is one of the nightmares all submariners share.

"Doesn't look like a nice day to fly, does it? I don't think we have to worry about somebody getting an eyeball sight on us." The captain spoke loudly enough for the control room crew to hear.

"The water deepens out some for the next two miles," the navigator reported.

"How much?"

"Five fathoms, skipper.

McCafferty looked over at the XO, who was conning the boat at the moment. "Use it." On the other hand, some helicopter jockey might get lucky…

"Aye. Diving officer, take her down another twenty feet. Gently."

"Aye." The chief gave the necessary orders to the planesmen and you could feel the sighs through the attack center.

McCafferty shook his head. When was the last time you saw your men look relieved over a twenty-foot change in depth? he asked himself. He went forward to sonar. He did not remember being there only four minutes earlier.

"How are our friends doing, chief?"

"The patrol boats are still faint, sir. They seem to be circling-the bearings are changing back and forth like they been doin'. The boomer's blade count is also constant, sir, he's just toolin' right along at fifteen knots. Not especially quiet, either. I mean, we still got plenty of mechanical transients, y'know? There's maintenance work-lot of it-going on in there, by the sound he's making. Want to listen in, skipper?" The chief held up a pair of earphones. Most sonar scanning was done visually-the on-board computers converted acoustical signals into a display on TV type tubes that looked most of all like some sort of arcade game. But there was still no real substitute for listening in. McCafferty took the phones.

First he heard the Delta's whirring reactor pumps. They were running at medium speed, driving water out of the reactor vessel into the steam generator. Next he concentrated on the screw sounds. The Russian boomer had a pair of five-bladed screws, and he tried to make his own count of the chuga-chuga noise made as each blade made its circuit. No good, he'd have to take the chief's word, as he usually did… klang!

"What was that?"

The chief turned to another senior operator. "Hatch slammin'?''

The first-class sonarman shook his head judiciously. "More like somebody dropped a wrench. Close, though, pretty close."

The captain had to smile. Everybody aboard was trying to affect a casual manner that had to be outrageously faked. Certainly everyone was as tense as he was, and McCafferty wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of this miserable lake. Of course he couldn't act in such a way as to allow his crew to become overly concerned; the captain must be in total control at all times-what fucking games we play! he told himself. What are we doing here? What is going on in this crazy world? I don't want to fight a fucking war!

He leaned against the doorframe, just forward of the control room, only a few feet from his own stateroom, wanting to go in, just to lie down for a minute or two, to take a few deep breaths, maybe go to his sink and splash a little cold water… but then he might accidentally look in the mirror. None of that, he knew. Command of a submarine was one of the last truly godlike jobs left in the world, and at times it required a truly godlike demeanor. Like now. Play the game, Danny, he told himself. The captain withdrew a handkerchief from his back pocket and rubbed his nose with it, his face locked into a neutral, almost bored expression as his eyes traced over the sonar displays. The cool captain…

McCafferty returned to the attack center a moment later, telling himself that he'd spent just enough time to inspire his sonar crewmen without pressuring them with too much attention from the CO. A fine balance. He looked around casually. The room was as crowded as an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day. His men's outwardly cool faces were sweating, despite the nuclear-powered air conditioning. The planesmen especially were concentrating on their instruments, guiding the submarine down an electronically defined display, with the diving officer-Chicago's most senior chief-right behind them.

In the center of the control room, the two side-by-side attack periscopes were fully retracted, with a quartermaster's mate poised to raise them. The XO paced as much as he could, looking at the chart every twenty seconds or so as he turned at the rear of the compartment. Not much here to complain about. Everybody was tense, but all the work was getting done.

"All things considered," McCafferty said for all to hear, "things are going pretty good. Surface conditions are working against them detecting us."

"Conn, sonar."

"Conn, aye." The captain took the phone.

"Hull-popping noises. He seems blowing tanks, skipper."

"Understood. Keep us posted, chief " McCafferty put the phone back. He took three steps back to the chart table. "Why surface now?"

The navigator stole a cigarette from an enlisted man and lit it. McCafferty knew he didn't smoke. The lieutenant nearly gagged on it, drawing a brief smirk from a second-class quartermaster the navigator. He looked over at the captain.

"Sir, something is wrong about this," the lieutenant said quietly.

"Just one thing," the captain asked. "Why did he surface here?"

"Conn, sonar." McCafferty went forward and took the phone again. "Skipper, the boomer's doing a long blow, really blowing his tanks out like, sir."

"Anything else unusual?"

"No, sir, but he must've just used a lot of his reserve air, sir."

"Okay, chief, thank you." McCafferty hung up and wondered if that meant anything.

"Sir, you ever done this before?" the navigator asked.

"I've trailed a lot of Russian boats, but no, never in here."

'The target has to surface eventually, only sixty feet of water down here along Terskiy Bereg." The navigator traced his finger along the chart.

"And we have to break off the trail," McCafferty agreed. "But that's another forty miles."

"Yeah." The navigator nodded agreement. "But starting five miles back, this gulf starts to narrow down like a funnel, and for a submerged sub, it eventually closes down to two, then only one safe passage. Jeez, I don't know." McCafferty came aft again to examine the chart.

"He was content to run fifteen knots at periscope depth all this way down from Kola. The usable depth has been about the same for the past five hours-just bottomed out some-and figures to be the same for another hour or two… but he surfaces anyway. So," McCafferty said, "the only change in environmental conditions is the width of the channel, and that's still over twenty miles. -." The captain mulled this over, staring down at the chart. The sonar room called yet again.

"Conn, aye. What is it, chief?"

"New contact, sir, bearing one-nine-two. Designate target Sierra-5. Twin-screw surface ship, diesel engines. They just came on all at once, sir. Sounds like a Natya-class. Bearing changing right to left slowly, seems to be converging with the boomer. Blade count puts her speed at about twelve knots."

"What's the boomer doing?"

"Speed and bearing are unchanged, skipper. The blow has ended. She's on the surface, sir, we're starting to get pounding and some racing on her screws-wait a minute… an active sonar just started up, we're getting reverbs, bearing seems to be about one-nine-zero, probably from the Natya. It's a very high frequency sonar, above aural range it twenty-two-thousand hertz."

An icy ball suddenly materialized in McCafferty's stomach.

"XO, I'm taking the conn."

"Aye, Captain, you have the conn."

"Diving officer: get her up to sixty feet, high as you can without broaching her. Observation! Up scope!" The search scope came up and McCafferty met it as he had before and quickly checked the surface of the sea for shadows. "Three more feet. Okay, still nothing. What's the ESM reading?"

"Now seven active radar sources, skipper. Plot out about the same as before, plus the new one at one-nine-one, another India-band, looks like another Don-2."

McCafferty turned the periscope handle to twelve-power, its highest setting. The Soviet missile submarine was sitting extremely high in the water.

"Joe, tell me what you see." McCafferty asked, wanting a quick second opinion.

"That's a Delta-III, all right. Looks like she's blown dry, Cap'n, they come out pretty far, and that looks like about three or four feet higher than they usually do. He just used up a lot of his air… That might be the Natya's mast ahead of her, hard to be sure."

McCafferty could feel that his own Chicago was rolling. His hands tingled with the transmitted wave-slaps against the periscope. The seas were crashing against the Delta, too, and he could see water splashing in and out of the limber holes that lined the boomer's flanks.

"ESM board says that signal strengths are approaching detection values," the technician warned.

"His periscopes are both up," McCafferty said, knowing that his scope had already been up too long. He squeezed the trigger to double the magnification. It cost optical detail, but the picture zoomed in on the Delta's conning tower. "The control station atop his sail is fully manned. Everyone has glasses… not looking aft, though. Down scope. Diving officer, take her down ten feet. Nice work, planesmen. Let's see that tape, Joe." The picture returned to the TV monitor in a few seconds.

They were two thousand yards behind the Delta. Beyond her by about half a mile was a spherical radar dome, probably the Natya, rolling noticeably with the beam seas. To house her sixteen SS-18 missiles, the Russian sub had a sloped turtleneck, and from directly aft it looked like a highway ramp. An ungainly design, the Delta, but she had to survive only long enough to launch her missiles, and the Americans had no doubt that her missiles worked just fine.

"Look at that, they blew her so high half her screws are clear," the XO pointed.

"Navigator, how far to shallow water?"

"Along this channel, a minimum of twenty-four fathoms for ten miles."

Why did the Delta surface this far out?

McCafferty lifted the phone. "Sonar, tell me about the Natya."

"Skipper, he's pinging away like mad. Not toward us, but we're getting lots of reflections and reverberations off the bottom."

The Natya was a specialized mine-hunter… also used, to be sure, as an escort for submarines in and out of safe areas. But her minehunting VHF sonar was operating… dear God!

"Left full rudder!" McCafferty shouted.

"Left full rudder, aye!" The helmsman would have hit the overhead but for the seatbelt. He instantly snapped his wheel to port. "Sir, my rudder is left full!"

"Minefield," the navigator breathed. Heads all over the room turned around.

"That's a good bet." McCafferty nodded grimly. "How far are we from the point where the boomer rendezvoused with the Natya?"

The navigator examined the plot closely. "Stopped about four hundred yards short of it, sir."

"All stop."

"All stop, aye." The helmsman dialed the annunciator handle. "Engine room answers all stop, sir. Passing left through one-eight-zero, sir."

"Very well. We ought to be safe enough here. You have to figure the Delta'd rendezvous with the sweeper a few miles clear of the field, right? Anybody here think Ivan would gamble with a boomer?" It was a rhetorical question. Nobody ever gambled with boomers.

Everyone in the control room took a deep breath at the same moment. The Chicago slowed rapidly, her turn taking her broadside to her previous course.

"Rudder amidships." McCafferty ordered one-third speed and lifted the phone for sonar. "The boomer doing anything different?"

"No, sir. Bearing is still constant at one-nine-zero. Speed still fifteen knots. We can still hear the Natya pinging, nearing one-eight-six, and her blade count is now about fifteen knots, too."

"Navigator, start figuring a way for us to get out of here. We want to keep well clear of all those patrol boats and report this news in as quick as we can."

"Aye. Three-five-eight looks pretty good for the moment, sir." The navigator had been updating that course continuously for two hours.

"Sir, if Ivan really has laid out a minefield, part of it's in international waters," the exec noted. "Cute."

"Yeah. Of course, to them it's territorial waters, so anybody bumps into a mine, it's just too damned bad-"

"And maybe an international incident?" Joe observed.

"But why did they ping at all?", the communications officer asked. "If they got a clear channel they can navigate visually."

"What if there's no channel at all?" the exec answered. "What if they set ground mines, and moored mines strung, say, at a uniform depth of fifty feet. You have to figure they'd be a little nervous that a mine or two might have too long a mooring cable. So they're playing it safe, just like we'd do. What's all that tell you?"

"Nobody can trail their boomers without surfacing the lieutenant understood.

"And we sure as hell aren't going to do that. Nobody ever said that Ivan was dumb. They got a perfect system here. They're putting all their missile boats where we can't get at them," McCafferty went on. "Even SUBROC can't make it from where we are into the White Sea. Final point, if they have to scatter the boats, they don't have to screw around in a single channel, they can all surface, spread out, and run for daylight.

"What this means, gentlemen, is that instead of detailing an attack boat to guard every boomer against somebody like us, they can put all the missile boats into one nice, safe basket and release their attack boats to other missions. Let's get the hell out of here."

"Ship in view, this is U.S. Navy aircraft on your port beam. Please identify, over." Captain Kherov handed the bridge-to-bridge phone to a Red Army major.

"Navy, this is the Doctor Lykes. How are y'all?" Kherov spoke halting English. The major's Mississippi accent might as well have been Kurdish for all he understood of it. They could barely make out the haze-gray patrol aircraft that was now circling their ship-circling, they noted, at a five-mile distance and certainly inspecting them through binoculars.

"Amplify, Doctor Lykes, " the voice ordered tersely.

"We're out of New Orleans, bound for Oslo with general cargo, Navy. What's the big deal?"

"You're well north of a course to Norway. Please explain, over."

"Y'all read the damned papers, Navy? It's liable to get dangerous out here, and this big ole ship costs money. We got orders from the home office to keep close to some friendly folks. Hell, we're glad to see ya', boy. Y'all want to escort us a ways?"

"Roger, copy. Doctor Lykes, be advised no submarines known to be in this area."

"Y'all guarantee that?"

This drew a laugh. "Not hardly, Doc."

"That's about what I thought, Navy. Well, if it's all right with you, we'll keep heading north a ways and try to stay under your air cover, over."

"We can't detail an aircraft to escort you."

"Understood, but you will come if we call you-right?"

"That's a roger," agreed Penguin 8.

"Okay, we'll continue north, then turn east for the Faroes. Will you warn us if any bad guys show up, over."

"If we find any, Doc, the idea is we'll try an' sink 'em first," the pilot exaggerated.

"Fair enough. Good huntin', boy. Out."

"God, do people really talk like that?" the pilot of the Orion wondered aloud.

"Never heard about Lykes Lines?" his copilot chuckled. "They used to say they wouldn't hire a guy 'less he had a Southern accent. I never believed it until now. Nothing like tradition. He is kinda off the beaten track, though."

"Yeah, but until the convoys form up, hell, I'd try to bounce from one protected area to another. Anyway, let's finish the visual." The pilot increased power and headed in closer while his copilot lifted the recognition book.

"Okay, we have an all-black hull with 'Lykes Lines' on the side, midships. White superstructure with black diamond, a block L inside the diamond." He lifted his binoculars. "Lookout mast forward of the superstructure. Check. Superstructure is nicely raked. Electronics mast is not. Proper ensign and house flag. Black funnels. Winches aft by the barge elevator-doesn't say how many winches. Damn, she's carrying a full load of barges, isn't she? Paintwork looks a little shabby. Anyway, it all checks with the book; that's a friendly."

"Okay, let's give her a wave." The pilot turned the yoke to the left, taking the Orion directly over the barge-carrier. He waggled his wings slightly as he passed overhead, and two men on the bridge waved back at them. The flyers couldn't pick out the two men tracking them with handheld SAMs. "Good luck, fella. You might need it."

"The new paint scheme will make visual spotting difficult, Comrade General," the air-defense officer said quietly. "I saw no air-to-surface missiles attached."

"That will change quickly enough. As soon as our fleet puts to sea, they will load them. Besides, if they identify us as enemy, how far can we run while they call up other aircraft, or simply fly to their base to rearm?" The General watched the aircraft depart. His heart had been in his throat for the whole episode, but now he could walk out to where Kherov stood on the open bridge wing. Only the ship's officers had been issued American-style khaki uniforms.

"My compliments to your language officer. I presume he was speaking English?"

Andreyev laughed jovially, now that the danger was past. "So I am told. The Navy requested a man with his particular skills. He's an intelligence officer, served in America."

"In any case, he succeeded. Now we may approach our objective safely," Kherov said, using the last word relatively.

"It will be good to be on land again, Comrade Captain." The General didn't like being on such a large, unprotected target and would not feel safe until he had solid ground under his feet. At least as an infantryman you had a rifle with which to defend yourself, usually a hole to hide in, and always two legs to run away. Not so on a ship, he had learned. A ship was one large target, and this one was virtually unprotected. Amazing, he thought, that anything would feel worse than being on a transport aircraft. But here he had a parachute. He had no illusions about his ability to swim to land.

"There goes another one," the chief master sergeant said.

It was almost boring now. Never in the colonel's memory had the Soviets had more than six photographic reconnaissance satellites in orbit. There were now ten, plus ten electronic-intelligence gatherers, some launched from the Baikonor Cosmodrome outside Leninsk in the Kazakh S.S.R., the other half from Plesetsk in northern Russia.

"That's an F-type booster, Colonel. Burn time is wrong for the A-type," the sergeant said, looking up from his watch.

This Russian booster was a derivation of the old SS-9 ICBM, and it had only two functions-to launch radar ocean reconnaissance satellites, called RORSATS, that monitored ships at sea and to loft the Soviet antisatellite system. The Americans were watching the launch from a newly launched KH-11 reconnaissance satellite of their own, sweeping over the central region of the USSR. The colonel lifted the phone to Cheyenne Mountain.

I should be sleeping, Morris told himself. I should stockpile sleep, bank it away against the time when I can't have any. But he was too keyed up to sleep.

USS PHARRIS was steaming figure eights off the mouth of the Delaware River. Thirty miles north, at the piers of Philadelphia, Chester, and Camden, ships of the National Reserve Defense Fleet that had been held in readiness for years were getting ready to sail. Cargo holds were loading with tanks, guns, and crates of explosive ordnance. His air-search radar showed the tracks of numerous troop transports lifting out of Dover Air Force Base. The Military Airlift Command's huge aircraft could ferry the troops across to Germany where they would be mated with their prepositioned equipment, but when their unit loads of munitions ran out, the resupply would have to be ferried across the way it had always been, in ugly, fat, slow merchant ships-targets. Maybe the merchies weren't so slow anymore, and were larger than before, but there were fewer of them. During his naval career, the American merchant fleet had fallen sharply, even supplemented by these federally funded vessels. Now a submarine could sink one ship and get the benefit it would have achieved in World War Il by sinking four or five.

The merchant crews were another problem. Traditionally held in contempt by Navy sailors-a truism in the U.S. Navy was to steer well clear of any merchantman, lest he decide to liven up his day by ramming you — the average age of the crews running the ships was about fifty, more than double that in any American naval vessel. How would those grandfathers take the stress of combat operations? Morris wondered. They were quite well paid-some of the senior seamen made as much as he did-but would their comfortable, union-negotiated salaries devalue in the face of missiles and torpedoes? He had to erase the thought from his mind. These old men with kids in high school and college were his flock. He was the shepherd, and there were wolves hiding under the gray surface of the Atlantic.

Not a large flock. He had seen the figures only a year ago: the total number of privately owned cargo ships in operation under the American flag was 170 and averaged about eighteen thousand tons apiece. Of those, a mere 103 were routinely engaged in overseas trade. The supplemental National Defense Reserve Fleet consisted of only 172 cargo ships. To call the situation a disgrace was to describe gang rape as a mild social deviation.

They couldn't allow even one to be lost.

Morris wandered over to the bridge radarscope and looked down into the rubber eyeshield to watch the aircraft lifting out of Dover. Each blip contained three to five hundred men. What would happen when they ran out of shells?

"Another merchie, skipper." The officer of the dock pointed to a dot on the horizon. "She's a Dutch container boat. I expect she's inbound for military cargo."

Morris grunted. "We need all the help we can get."

"It's definite, sir," the colonel said. "That's a Soviet ASAT-bird, seventy-three nautical miles behind one of ours."

The colonel had ordered his satellite to turn in space and point its cameras at its new companion. The light wasn't all that good, but the shape of the Soviet killer satellite was unmistakable: a cylinder nearly a hundred feet long, with a rocket motor at one end and a radar seeker antenna at the other.

"What's your recommendation, Colonel?"

"Sir, I am requesting unlimited authority to maneuver my birds at will. As soon as anything with a red star on it gets within fifty miles, I'm going to do a series of delta-V maneuvers to screw up their intercept solution."

"That will cost you a lot of fuel, son," CINC-NORAD warned.

"What we have here, General, is a binary solution set." The colonel responded like a true mathematician. "Choice one, we maneuver the birds and risk the fuel loss. Choice two, we don't maneuver the birds and risk having them taken out. Once they close to fifty miles, they can achieve intercept and negate our bird in as little as five minutes. Maybe faster. Five minutes is only the best we've observed them to do. Sir, you have my recommendation." The colonel had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois, but that was not where he'd learned to back generals into corners.

"Okay. This one goes to Washington, but I'll forward your recommendation with my endorsement."

"Admiral, we've just had a disturbing report from the Barents Sea." Toland read the dispatch from CINCLANTFLT.

"How many more subs can they throw at us now?"

"Perhaps as many as thirty additional boats, Admiral."

"Thirty?" Baker hadn't liked anything he'd been told for a week now. He especially didn't like this.

The NIMITZ battle group, in company with Sarotoga and the French carrier Foch, was escorting a marine amphibious unit, called a MAU, to reinforce the ground defenses on Iceland. A three-day run. If the war started soon after they made their delivery, their next mission would be to support the GIUK barrier defense plan, the critically important link that covered the ocean between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Carrier Task Force 21 was a powerful force. But would it be powerful enough? Doctrine required a four-carrier group to fight and survive up here, but the fleet had not yet been fully assembled. Toland was getting reports on frantic diplomatic activity aimed at averting the war that appeared about to start, much as everyone hoped it wouldn't. How would the Soviets react to four or more carriers in the Norwegian Sea? It seemed that no one in Washington wanted to find out, but Toland was wondering if it would matter at all. As it was, Iceland had approved the reinforcements they were escorting only twelve hours before, and this NATO outpost needed immediate reinforcement.

McCafferty was thirty miles north of the entrance to the Kola Fjord. The crew was relatively happy to be here after a tense sixteen-hour run from Cape Svyatoy. Though the Barents Sea was alive with antisubmarine ships, immediately after making their report they had been withdrawn from the entrance to the White Sea for fear of fomenting a major incident. Here there was a hundred thirty fathoms of water and room to maneuver, and they were confident in their ability to keep out of trouble. There was supposed to be a pair of American subs within fifty miles of Chicago, plus a Brit and two Norwegian diesel boats. His sonarmen couldn't hear any of them, though they could hear a quartet of Grisha-class frigates pinging away at something to the southeast. The allied submarines here were assigned to watch and listen. It was a nearly ideal mission for them, since they only had to creep along, avoiding contact with surface ships, which they could detect from a good, long distance.

There was no hiding it now. McCafferty didn't even consider not telling his men the significance of what they had learned about the Russian boomers. Submarines have no long-lived secrets. It looked like they were about to fight a war. The politicians in Washington and the strategists in Norfolk and elsewhere might still have their doubts, but there, at the sharp end of the lance, the officers and men aboard Chicago discussed the way the Soviets were using their ships and came up with a single answer. The submarine's torpedo tubes were loaded with MK-48 torpedoes and Harpoon missiles. Her vertical missile tubes forward of the pressure hull held twelve Tomahawks, three nuclear-tipped land-attack missiles, and nine conventional antiship models. When a shipboard machine showed the first suggestion of a fault, a technician immediately tore it down to fix it. McCafferty was pleased and not a little surprised by his crew. So young they were-the average age on his submarine was twenty-one-to have to adapt to this.

He stood in the sonar room, forward and to starboard of the attack center. A few feet from him, a massive computer system sifted through an avalanche of waterborne sound, analyzing individual frequency bands known from experience to mark the acoustical signature of a Soviet vessel. The signals were displayed on a visual screen called a waterfall display, a monocolor curtain of yellow whose brighter lines indicated the bearing to a sound that might be a source of interest. Four lines indicated the Grishas, and offset dots marked the pings from their active sonars. McCafferty wondered what they were after. His interest was mainly academic. They weren't pinging his ship, but there was always something to learn from how the enemy did his job. A team of officers in the attack center was plotting the movement of the Soviet patrol ships, carefully noting their information patterns and hunting technique for later comparison with intelligence estimates.

A new series of dots appeared at the bottom of the screen. A sonarman punched a button for a more selective frequency setting, altering the display slightly, then plugged in a pair of microphones. The display was on fast-speed image generation, and McCafferty saw the dots grow to lines around bearing one-nine-eight, the direction to the Kola channel.

"Lots of confused noise, skipper," the sonarman reported. "I read Alfas and Charlies coming out, with other stuff behind them. Blade count on one Alfa is something like thirty knots. Lots of noise behind them, sir."

The visual display confirmed it a minute later. The frequency- or tonelines were in the areas known to depict specific classes of submarines, all moving at high speed to clear the harbor. The bearing-to-contact lines spread apart as the boats fanned out. The boats had already dived, he noted. Usually Soviet submarines didn't dive until they were well offshore.

"Ship count is over twenty, sir," the chief sonarman said quietly. "We have a major sortie here."

"Sure looks like it." McCafferty moved back to the attack center. His men were already entering the contact positions into the fire-control computer, and sketching paper tracks on the chart table. The war hadn't started yet, and though it appeared it could come at any time, McCafferty's orders were to keep clear of any Soviet formation until the Word came. He didn't like it-better to get his blows in quick-but Washington had made it clear they wanted no one to cause an incident that might prevent some kind of diplomatic settlement. That made sense, the captain admitted to himself. Maybe the lace-panty folks could still get things under control. A faint hope, but a real one. Real enough to overcome his tactical desire to hold an attack position.

He ordered his submarine moved farther offshore. In half an hour, things were clearer still, and the captain had a SLOT-buoy launched. The buoy was programmed to allow Chicago thirty minutes to clear the area, then it started sending a series of burst transmissions on a UHF satellite band. From ten miles away, he listened to Soviet ships going beserk around the radio buoy, doubtlessly thinking it was the location of the submarine. The game was becoming all too real.

The buoy operated for over an hour, continuously sending its data to a NATO communications satellite. By nightfall the data was being broadcast to all NATO units at sea. The Russians are coming.