Choosers of the Slain

30

"Damn, Lieutenant. This guy is good."

"Nothing, Gus?"

"Beyond the sound of the shrimp fucking, I'm not picking up a thing."

For a third time, Retainer Zero One held a low hover over the wave crests, the dome of her dunking sonar deployed down 350 feet into the depths at the end of its tether cable.

Arkady scowled as he fought to hold the helo on station with his pitch and collective. "Hell! Even the Swede boats can't be completely silent."

"I know, Lieutenant. If he was maneuvering, I'd at least hear some flow noise around his hull, and if he was station keeping, I'd hear his trim pumps as he maintained depth. Thing is, I'm not hearing anything at all. This guy couldn't have bottomed his boat, could he?"

Arkady considered for a moment and then gave his head a shake. "No way. We're beyond the continental shelf out here with a couple of thousand feet of water under us. All of the Kockums subs are Baltic designs. They don't have enough hull to go that deep."

"I can't figure where else he could have got to, then."

"Could he have found a thermocline down there to sit on?"

"I'll check it out, sir."

Grestovitch called up the sonar-control menu on one of his multimode telepanels and selected the "Extend" command. More dome tether, a light, braided Kevlar cable with an insulated coaxial core, peeled off the reel within the SQR/A1 pod, and the sensor head plunged deeper into the wet dark.

"At full extension… seven hundred feet… bathythermograph does not indicate a thermocline. There's nothing down here for him to hide under or sit on, and I'm still not hearing anything."

"Okay, Gus. Up dome. Let's try it again."

Arkady shifted Zero One a thousand yards west to the next station on the sonar line he was building between the Cunningham and the last known position of the Argentine. As he did so, he found his thoughts projecting past the mechanics of flying the weather-racked helicopter.

This guy's beating us, babe. I'm not sure how he's doing it, but he is. A wind burst snagged the helicopter, ripping away ten feet of its altitude and making its rotors flex to a dangerous extreme. The old-timers had it easy. If they wanted to impress a lady, all they had to do was to drag some damn old dinosaur back to their cave before dinner-time.

He grinned mirthlessly as he coaxed back the ten feet. It must be getting a little tight if he was turning his own warped sense of humor back on himself.

"On station and going to hover. Down dome to three fifty and resume passive search."

"Down dome to three fifty, aye, sir."

Using the autohover setting of the autopilot was out of the question. In fact, Zero One wasn't hovering at all as much as she was maintaining a forward flight that paced the wind. A very interesting way to make a living.

"Dome down. Commencing passive search."

Arkady fought the control grips and, as the minutes passed, tried to pretend that the turbulence wasn't getting worse.

"Come on, Gus! Let's not take all day about it here!"

"The fucker just isn't out here, sir."

"Repeat the sweep."

The SO leaned forward over his console again, feverishly using his accumulated skill to try to nurse a little more performance out of the system.

"Negative contact… negative contact… neg… Sonovabitch! There he is! Clear as a bell! He's descending out of the surface sound duct. Hull-popping noises and ballast tanks venting, bearing one six zero relative. I can't figure how I could have missed him before."

"To hell with that, Gus. We got 'im now! Go active and get us a range."

"Initiating active pinging… got a return! Target range five thousand yards, still bearing one six oh relative, bearing holding stable."

"Attack sequence!"

"Attack sequence start, sir. Master arm on! Torpedo select, position one! Torpedo is spinning up now!"

"Acknowledged," Arkady clipped back. "Set your preselects. Set fish for active homing. Set initial depth for one five zero. Set snake-pattern acquisition."

"Preselects set."

"Okay, coming around on bearing. We'll take the shot from here."

Arkady tried for a pedal turn and swore savagely as the helicopter fought him, trying to weather-vane back into the wind. From his station in the aft cockpit, Grestovitch continued to call out the track.

"Target is still holding on bearing, no lateral movement noted…. Wait a second, target is moving on vertical axis. He's blowing negative…. Target has gone active…. Target is pinging."

"Come on, you crank-tailed bitch! Get your ass around!"

"Target is changing depth…. Target is reentering surface sound duct…. Target has disappeared, sir."

"Damn!" Arkady let the helo back into the wind. "What happened, Gus?"

"I don't know, Lieutenant." The SO's voice carried his perplexity and frustration. "I had positive locks both active and passive and he just plain-ass disappeared. I'm not getting anything again."

"Did you lose him up in the weather slop?" Arkady demanded.

"I shouldn't have. I was lifting good active returns off of him. I shouldn't have lost the lock."

Arkady had flown with Grestovitch long enough to know that this likely wasn't operator failure. This particular Argentine was stacking the deck somehow.

"Gus, you said that this guy had gone active. Was it his attack system?"

"No, sir. It was a low-powered unit. He only ran a couple of pings off of it. Might have been a fathometer."

A fathometer?

"I've been thinking, Lieutenant," Grestovitch continued. "I heard this guy put a shot of air into his tanks just before he disappeared. Now, figuring that he knows that we've been running radar silent, and granting that he's a real ballsy dude, could he be lying doggo on the surface out there in that fog bank?"

Arkady looked out toward the ragged wall of mist off to starboard. "Yeah. That's how the U-boats used to evade the Brits during the early days of World War Two, back when they had asdic but no surface-search radars. You just may have something, old man. Up dome."

As the sonar transducer clicked into its mount under the Sea Comanche's snub wing, Arkady applied power and began a climbing turn. "Reconfigure for surface search and bring up the APG-65. Scan across the last sonar bearing we had."

"Aye, aye."

Grestovitch called up the radar display on his flatscreens and energized the system, watching intently as the sweep defined the surface.

"Negative! No surface contact. Not even a periscope return. Nothing."

"Damn, Gus. If he's not on top of the water and he's not under it, then where is he?"

"I dunno. There's nothing out there."

His own words suddenly made something click in the SO's mind.

"Hey, there really isn't anything out there."

Intently, Grestovitch ran the brightness gain up and down on his display screen.

"Lieutenant, you've heard guys talk about 'a hole in the water,' haven't you?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I'm looking at one right now. I'm getting traces of wave return all over the screen, except for right around where that Argy sub should be. There's nothing there at all, just a big dark area on the scope."

"I've never seen a black hole before, Gus. Let's go have us a look."

Retainer Zero One nosed gingerly into the fog bank. "Fog bank" was actually a misnomer, as it was more of a fast-flowing river of sea smoke, driven by the growing winds. Only a few moments' exposure to the wavering, misty streamers flowing around his cockpit made Arkady feel the potentially lethal tug of vertigo. Firmly, he fixed his eyes on his instruments and FLIR display.

"Walk me in, Gus."

"Continue to steer zero four zero true. Range to datum point, five hundred yards. Cross-referencing GPU positioning with datum point… and we're there."

"Okay. Hovering down. Keep your eyes open."

There was already something on the Forward Looking Infrared scanner, but the contrast was poor. As the altimeter steadied at one hundred feet, Arkady risked a look down over the cockpit rail.

White, not fog white, but ice white. They were holding over a great sheet of sea ice, more than half a square mile in area. It lay almost flush with the ocean's surface, riding too low to cause a radar return. But as the storm combers reached the edge of the floe, they collapsed in an explosion of spray and flattened out across its surface, causing Grestovitch's "hole in the water" effect.

"I will be damned. Hey, Gus. Could that funny-sounding ping the Argy produced have come from a vertical-scan sonar?"

"An ice machine? Maybe. But who ever heard of an ice machine on a diesel-electric boat?"

"Maybe the Argentines. This guy could be using it to position himself under this ice pan like a big old bass hiding under a log. Extend the MAD stinger."

Arkady circled wide to come at the floe from downwind, calling the readout from the Magnetic Abnormality Detector up onto his own repeater. Slowly he began to weave over the ice, seeking for a response.

One wasn't long in coming. The sensor pod began to react to the magnetic field being produced by a large mass of ferrous metal.

Arkady tightened the weave, maneuvering slowly until the readings maximized. Returning to a hover, he looked down on the frozen surface of the flow.

"Hello, fishie."

In the Cunningham's Combat Information Center, Vince Arkady's static-spattered voice issued from the radio link speakers. "Gray Lady, Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. We have a solid contact out here, but the setup is a little unusual. Breaking EMCON to request strike assist."

"Retainer Zero One, proceed," Commander Garrett responded coolly from topside.

"Roger. Zero One to TACCO, do you copy?"

Dix Beltrain toggled his own headset. "I'm here, Retainer. Whatcha all got, old buddy?"

"The reason we've been having such a tough time tracking this damn Argy sub. He's ice-picked to the bottom of a big free-floating ice pan out here. We can't get him on the passive arrays because he can power down completely, and we can't get him by active pinging because we lose his return against the floe."

Beltrain could readily visualize the setup. "Yeah, acknowledged. And whenever he wants to take a shot at us, all he has to do is to drop straight down out of the surface duct, take his bearing, and throw his fish."

"You got it, Gray Lady," Arkady replied. "I just spooked him back up into his hidey-hole again a few minutes ago. The problem is, our ASW torps won't work in this tactical situation. We can't acquire a targeting lock. We have to try something different."

"You have any ideas, Retainer?"

"Yeah, I want to go after this guy with a Sea SLAM."

Beltrain exchanged glances with some of the CIC team who had been listening in. The Sea SLAM was a marvelously versatile precision-guided munition, but no one present had ever heard of it being used for antisubmarine warfare.

"Please repeat that, Retainer?"

"Listen." Arkady's radio voice sounded aggravated. "I have this guy's position exactly fixed with my MAD gear. I'm hovering about fifty feet over him right now. I figure that this ice is about two or three feet thick and that he has the top of his conning tower butted right up against the bottom of the floe. If we can drop a SLAM in on him close enough, we should be able to give him a headache, or at least flush him out into open water."

Beltrain grinned as the concept came clear, and he snapped his fingers and pointed to the SLAM control station. A weapons technician dropped into the seat in front of the panel and began heating up the system.

"I got it now, Retainer. How do you want to work this?"

"We'll need the Captain's clearance to radiate with the fire-control radars for a few seconds—"

"Bridge to CIC, you've got it," Amanda Garrett cut in, the intentness of her voice indicating the way she had been following the exchange.

"— then I'll activate my IFF transponder and you get a lock on me for your initial targeting datum point. Once you've acquired that, I'll drop a smoke float onto the ice and get out of the way. You launch and bring your round in on the thermal flare of the float."

"We copy, Retainer! Captain, did you get all that?"

"Yes, Dix. You are authorized to proceed with the strike."

"Aye, aye. Aegis operator, energize your starboard arrays, prepare to scan the northern sector."

"Standing by to energize, sir."

"Retainer Zero One, we're ready for your transponder."

"Roger, Dix. Transponder is up for a ten count. Ten… nine… eight…"

"Aegis systems, execute your sweep and acquire locks on the helo."

"Aye, aye, sir. We have acquired locks and we have established the datum point."

"Right. Cease radiating and shut down."

Beltrain keyed back into the radio circuit. "Retainer, we've got the fix. Pop smoke and get the hell out of Dodge."

"Roger D, Roger D, smoke is down and we are outa here."

Beltrain took two fast steps across the deck of the CIC and peered over the shoulder of the SLAM operator.

"System is up, sir," the gunner's mate reported, her hand poised on her joystick controller. "Missile selected. Passive targeting interfaced with Aegis control and active guidance is ready to acquire. The launch cell is open and visually verified. Final-phase safeties are off and all pre-checks are green."

"Shoot."

From up forward came the thud-rumble of a cold-fire launch.

The SLAM (Standoff Land Attack Missile) had been one of those off-the-shelf improvisations that had turned out more successful than even its designers could have imagined. Intended to provide naval aviation with an interim, standoff PGM for striking at heavily defended targets, it was a bastard mating of two different missiles: the airframe, engine, and warhead of the Navy's antiship Harpoon, and the infrared guidance system of the Air Force's air-to-surface Maverick.

So effective did the air-launched weapon prove that the design turned full circle and a surface-to-surface variant was produced. Armed with the Sea SLAM, a destroyer or frigate could deliver the firepower of a battleship with the precision of a sniper's rifle.

As the missile came over the top of its booster arc, the thermographic television camera in its nose activated, scanning the sea below it, picking up the ice pan almost at one. On the targeting screen back in the Duke's C1C, it appeared as a dark, irregular mass of no-heat afloat on the slightly lighter backdrop of the sea. A single bright star blazed near the center of the floe, the thermal energy radiating from the burning smoke float.

The systems operator deftly centered the targeting reticle of the guidance system on the flare and squeezed the actuator trigger, committing the missile.

To the north, the SLAM blazed down out of the sky and the smoking star fixed in the crosshairs grew until it filled the screen. Abruptly, the television image broke up and went to static as the transmitter ceased to exist.

"Now, that looked about right," Beltrain said with some satisfaction.

From their position, station keeping just east of the floe, Arkady and Grestovitch couldn't see the spray of shattered ice lift into the sky, just a flash of blue light through the mist.

"Down dome, Gus. Set depth three-fifty."

The transducer hit the waves and Grestovitch watched his depth gauge as the tether paid out. Setting the reel lock, he listened intently for results.

The local acoustic environment was still reverberating from the explosion, and it took a couple of minutes before he could hear past the echoes: the slamming and creaking of metal, the bubbling of air, and the sush-sush-sush of a fast-turning screw, all suddenly undercut by an urgent, throbbing hum.

"I got him. Propellers bearing three five zero true and opening the range. Numerous metallic transitories, and he's just cut in a bilge pump. We hurt him, Lieutenant! We hurt him and he's running!"

"Yeah!" Arkady exclaimed fiercely. "Mark one up for the home team. Good work, my man!"

The aviator thumbed the transmit button on the end of the collective controller.

"Gray Lady, Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. The strike was effective. We confirm that the Argy has been damaged and is attempting to disengage to the northwest. Do you wish us to continue to prosecute the target?"

Amanda Garrett's answer crackled back almost instantly. "Negative, Retainer! I repeat, negative! Return to the ship for immediate recovery. Expedite!"

The Lady was sounding worried.