Countdown

CHAPTER 13

Two AS-6 Kingfish missiles streaked low across the water toward Jefferson's forward quarter. The carrier's number-one CIWS, released by the man in CIC, tracked on the nearer Kingfish and opened fire, sending a brief burst, correcting the angle of fire, then firing again. Nine hundred yards off Jefferson's starboard quarter, the missile's one-ton warhead detonated with a savage bang that scattered glittering metallic fragments across three thousand square feet of sea, lashing the water to white frenzy.

The second missile flashed across the intervening space in an instant; the CIWS slewed to meet it, fired, and uranium penetrators slashed into its body. Liquid fuel burst into flame, and the missile, tumbling now and furiously ablaze, hurtled low across Jefferson's flight deck, scant yards above a row of A-6 Intruders parked with wings folded along the starboard side. Deck personnel engaged in launching a Hornet and a KA-6D tanker off the bow catapults dropped flat; for one agonized moment, it appeared that the burning wreckage was going to slam into the tanker loaded with over 2 1,000 pounds of jet fuel.

Then the burning Kingfish had passed, hurtling into the sea off Jefferson's port beam, striking the water with a thunderous detonation that sent a geysering white pillar hundreds of feet into the air, lashing the flight deck with spray.

Flight deck operations continued without letup. Minutes later, the fully laden tanker slammed off Jefferson's catapult, climbing aloft to rendezvous with those of the carrier's Tomcats that were returning now low on fuel.

Meanwhile, with the immediate threat from enemy missiles ended, the carrier's air traffic control center went back on the air.

"Dickinson's been hit," Cat reported over the Tomcat's ICS. "Sounds like she's got a fire on her helo deck."

"Too damned many Russian leakers," Coyote replied. Glancing out his canopy to his left, he saw a black smudge against the horizon and knew with cold certainty it marked a burning ship.

"Coyote, our fuel state's getting critical."

"Affirmative, Cat. I see it. Give me the latest vector on our Texaco."

"Come right three-five degrees. Another twenty miles."

"Sounds good."

Throughout the battle, Jefferson had kept at least one KA-6D tanker orbiting north and astern of the carrier, available for returning aircraft that might need some extra fuel for the inevitable loiter time in the Marshall Stack before recovering on the flight deck. Popularly called a "Texaco" by naval fliers, the aircraft was a modified A-6 Intruder, fitted with five-hundred-gallon drop tanks and with some of its avionics pulled from the after fuselage to accommodate the refueling reel.

Minutes later, Coyote was slipping the F-14 in behind the tanker, holding back for a moment while a Hornet already hooked up to the refueling basket drank its fill. Then the Hornet detached from the KA-6D and dropped out of the way, and Coyote eased in closer. Flicking a switch on his console extended the Tomcat's refueling probe from a compartment just below and to the right of the cockpit. Ahead, his target dangled in midair, a metal-woven basket suspended on the end of a fifty-foot hose extruded from a protrusion beneath the tanker's tail.

"Gold Eagle Two-oh-one, Tango-Romeo One-two" sounded over his headset, a man's voice. "What can we fix you up with today?"

"Tango-Romeo One-two, Eagle Two-oh-one," Coyote replied. "Set us up, barkeep. We're running on fumes."

"Approach looking good, Two-oh-one. Come and take us, guys. Our legs are spread in a proper military fashion, and we're ready for some good ol' I&I."

The almost blatantly phallic imagery of an aircraft's fuel probe attempting to penetrate and lock into the tanker's basket had inevitably given rise to numerous lines of standard dialogue traded between pilots and tanker crewmen, ranging from the mildly ribald to the sexually explicit. I&I was a graphic replacement for the military's R&R, standing for "Intercourse and Intoxication."

"Ah, roger that, Tango-Romeo," Coyote said. "Here we come."

He felt mildly embarrassed. Until that moment, he'd actually forgotten that the officer in his back seat was a woman. The KA-6D operator's coarse banter had managed to remind him. He didn't know Cat that well yet, and he wondered what she thought of this.

Both aircraft, now separated by scant yards, were traveling at better than 370 knots. Creeping in now, with a closing rate of a foot per second, Coyote was attempting to slip the thread of his Tomcat's fuel probe into the eye of the tanker's basket. Since he needed to concentrate on his instrumentation, the looming presence of the tanker's tail just above and ahead of his cockpit, and his flying, he could not keep watching the relative positions of fuel probe and drogue basket only a few feet beyond the plastic of his canopy. That was his RIO's job, and Cat called second-to-second course adjustments to him over the ICS with clarity and precision.

"Come right one foot," she said. "That's good. You're four feet from contact, and a little low. Come up… more… more that's it. Hold that.

Forward now, easy… three feet two…" Coyote was battling the tanker's slipstream now, with no room for error. The drogue basket jittered ominously in the airflow just beyond the tip of the probe. He eased forward a bit more… "Contact," the tanker crewman called, and Coyote felt the thump of a solid connection, followed by a small jolt as locking catches snapped home.

"Ready to receive," Coyote said.

"Ohh… that feels soooo good, Two-oh-one."

"Tango-Romeo, be advised there's a lady aboard."

"Ah, copy that, Two-oh-one. Capture confirmed. Whatcha want?"

"Make it a thousand pounds of high-test," Coyote replied, trying to keep his voice light. "Check the oil, clean the windshield, and put it on my Visa."

"Here it comes."

For several moments there was silence, as the tanker transferred a thousand pounds of fuel to Coyote's tanks. Then: "That's a thousand, Two-oh-one."

"Roger, Tango-Romeo. Ready to disengage to starboard." He snapped the switches that closed off the probe.

"Clear to starboard."

"That was so very, very good for us," Cat said suddenly, breaking in on the frequency in a sultry, sexy voice that Coyote had never heard her use before. "Was it good for you too?"

There was a momentary silence from the tanker, a stunned silence, Coyote thought.

"Uh, roger, Two-oh-one," they replied finally. "Why don't you come on up and see us again some time?"

Coyote backed clear of the refueling drogue, then let the Tomcat slide gently to the right until it was out from beneath the tanker's tail.

"Coyote," Cat said over the ICS. "I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself."

"You certainly can, Cat. I stand corrected. Now, how about finding us a bird farm before we have to go through that again."

"You got it, Boss. Come right to one-nine-five. They've put CATCC back on the air now, so I guess the welcome mat is out."

Coyote could already see the Jefferson on the horizon, close alongside that smudge of fuzzy black. He began to line the Tomcat up for insertion into the carrier's Marshall Stack.

He noticed that the radio traffic between aircraft groups had died down quite a bit. It sounded as though the worst of the fighting might be over.

Batman and Malibu were already in the Marshall Stack, waiting for their turn to head back in for recovery. After launching, they'd taken up a reserve position south of the Jefferson for several minutes, then been vectored by a Hawkeye to a forward area from which they'd launched their six Phoenix missiles, one after another. After that, with all missiles expended and with plenty of fuel remaining, they'd been routed back to the carrier's Marshall Stack.

"I'm not sure I care for this modern warfare stuff," Batman told Striker, who'd been flying as his wingman in Tomcat 21 1. "Up, fire, and down again.

Whatever happened to the knights of the sky, jousting in mortal one-on-one combat?"

"Roger that," Striker replied. "This push-button crap is for the birds."

"How about that, Pogie?" Brewer Conway's voice broke in over the channel.

"Pogie" was Conway's RIO, Rose Damiano. "Sounds to me like the poor dears can't handle high-tech mayhem."

"Ah, you know how it is, Brewer," Pogie's voice replied. "They prefer to wade in with a club the old-fashioned way, mano-a-mano."

"What have we here?" Batman replied. "Kibitzing from the nuggets?

Definitely contra-regs. How many kills did you girls rack up today?"

"We girls did just fine, Batman," Brewer said. "Five for six, and another probable. How about you?"

"six up, six down. Hardly fair, though. The poor bastards never knew what hit 'em."

"Actually," Malibu interrupted, "we're only being credited with four kills. Two of our shots couldn't be confirmed."

"Hey, Malibu, whose side are you on anyway?" Batman said, sounding hurt.

"All in the interests of fair play and honesty in advertising, dude."

"I make it five to four then," Brewer said. "You guys buy the beer."

"This engagement isn't over yet, Brewer," Batman replied. "We'll see who buys the beer when it's over, right?"

"You got yourself a bet, XO. Only let's make it interesting… beer and dinner next time we're in port. Your crew against mine. Deal?"

"Hey, they're going big-time on us, Batman. I don't know if we can afford this."

"Ah, show some backbone, Malibu. We can't let these women think they've got us where we want 'em, right?"

"Two-oh-two," another voice cut in. "Home Plate. Charlie now."

"They're playing our song," Malibu said.

"Roger. See you back at the farm, Brewer."

He banked into his approach to the carrier.

The Los Angeles submarine Galveston continued to make her stealthy way along the muddy bottom at the mouth of the Kola Inlet. Since her first encounter with a Riga-class sub-hunter early that morning, four more surface ships had exited into the Barents Sea, each time pinging loudly with active sonar. Galveston, apparently, had not been spotted. Unlike their World War II predecessors, modern submarines cannot rest on the bottom, but Galveston was creeping just above the muddy and uneven surface that tended to confuse the echoes reflected back toward the listening warships.

She was further helped by a strong inversion layer that tended to trap sonar waves in a deep channel and carry them away from the skimmer hydrophones. The cities of Murmansk and Severomorsk poured quantities of industrial waste, cooling water from nuclear reactors, and raw sewage unimaginable in any Western country directly into the waters of the Tuloma River; this made the upper water layers much warmer than in the deep of the central shipping channel, creating a sharp-boundaried thermocline beneath which Galveston lurked. The situation was further aided by the huge quantities of organic and inorganic waste particles collecting along the boundary layer. Sound waves passed through from the surface, but they became trapped in the deep channel, unable to echo back to the surface and reveal Galveston's presence.

At least, that was Sonarman First Class Rudi Ekhart's theory. When he'd told Commander Montgomery his idea, the skipper had laughed and said, "So you're saying we're hiding under a layer of Russian shit?"

An inelegant way of putting it, but essentially true. Soon after that, Montgomery had taken Galveston even deeper into the inlet's mouth, taking advantage of this man-made sonar blind.

Safe, perhaps, from surface sonar, the U.S. attack sub was still running a fearful risk penetrating so far into Russian territorial waters. The seabed here was littered with hydrophones and compact undersea listening devices, not to mention encapsulated torpedoes set to fire at an electronic command from naval listening posts ashore. The slightest mistake ― a wrench dropped on the deck in engineering, a piece of gear adrift in a berthing compartment, or a loose pan in the galley ― would give away their presence to the listening Russians, calling down upon the American submarine a fusillade of deadly mine and torpedo fire. Every man aboard wore rubber shoes or went barefoot; the official order was "silence in the boat."

Rudi Ekhart remained at his post in Galveston's sonar compartment, a long, narrow room where several sonar operators sat side by side, heads embraced in padded earphones, their eyes on the cascades of flowing light on their displays where sound was made visible. There, the silence was dragging out in an ongoing and unendurable test of skill and will. Through his headphones, he could hear the susurration of the river's current flowing past Galveston's hull and across the uneven bottom, the far-off boom of some kind of heavy machinery, transmitted through the water. There were precious few "biologicals," the sounds made by sea life, here, for the Tuloma was dead, and in the process of poisoning the sea for scores of miles beyond the mouth of the inlet.

And he could also hear… something else, something very, very faint but definitely mechanical.

Ekhart was one of the best sonar technicians in the U.S. naval submarine service. Like many other sonarmen, he had a special love for classical music ― especially Baroque ― which he claimed sharpened the ear, and a complete disdain for rock, which could actually damage hearing. His shipmates found him distant sometimes, and a bit standoffish, and it was well known that he had a large ego.

But such character flaws could easily be overlooked, because he was very good at what he did. A Navy man for the past ten years, he would be going up for chief soon. His likeliest career option at that point would be to take a post as a sonar instructor at the Navy sub school at Groton, Connecticut.

He was also homosexual.

Rudi Ekhart was a man of strong will and strong purpose. He'd long ago decided that sex was not only a distraction aboard ship, it was a definite threat, Especially aboard a submarine, where a man's only privacy was the curtain he could draw to wall off his rack from the eight others stacked three-high in his tiny berthing compartment. Just getting into one of those backbreakers took a certain amount of gymnastic skill, and the headroom was so small it was all but impossible to turn over.

No, there was no room for sex aboard a submarine. Worse, because of the crowding and also because of constant occupational pressure that each man felt from the moment the boat first submerged, there was no tolerance for gays in the submarine service. Anyone in a sub crew who'd admitted openly to being homosexual would have been harassed unmercifully and might even have had some sort of "accident."

Perhaps the single saving grace there was that the victim could not fall overboard while the sub was submerged.

Those mechanical sounds were growing slowly louder. He concentrated a moment, closing his eyes, willing the sounds he was hearing to take shape in his mind. Yes… it was the throb-throb-throb of a ship's screws, two of them, turning slowly. Whatever it was was making revs for only a few knots at best.

"Control room, Sonar," he said, speaking barely above a whisper into the mike attached to his headset. All submarine ICS had been set to be barely audible at the other end. For a moment, he wondered if the skipper had heard him.

"Sonar, Captain. Whatcha got, Ekhart?"

"Definite submerged contact, Captain. Designate Sierra Nine. Sounds like something big coming out of the barns."

"Submerged, you said?"

"Yessir."

"You got a make and model yet?"

"Wait one." Ekhart adjusted the gain on his console, still listening.

On the screen inches in front of his face, he was getting the peaks and troughs of low-frequency sounds now. That thumping just behind the beat of the screws had to be a reactor pump. And there was a sharp, thuttering sound that puzzled him for several moments. Then he got it. There was some weed or a length of rope, possibly a ship's painter, trailing from the approaching vessel's deck.

He sensed a presence at his back. Captain Montgomery had stepped in behind him. "Let me hear, son." Montgomery was from south Texas, and in times of stress his accent and country mannerisms grew pronounced.

Ekhart passed Montgomery the headset, then leaned back to run the sound through Galveston's library. All American submarines maintained digitized collections of sounds from a staggeringly vast number of sources, everything from fish love-calls to the running sounds of specific submarines. Often, Galveston herself could identify not only a given class of submarine, but a specific individual. Ekhart liked to compete with the boat's library, coming up with an ID before it did.

This time, it was a tie. "My guess is a Typhoon, Captain," he told Montgomery. "Twin screws, and big as Godzilla. Can't tell you which one."

"That's what the Gal says, sir," Sonarman Second Class Harrington said, checking the computer display. "Typhoon, no ident."

"This must be one of the ones we haven't heard before," Montgomery said.

"Any guess on the range?"

While active sonar could give an exact range to target, the same was not true for passive listening. Still, a good sonar man could make a shrewd estimation, based on local conditions and a lot of experience.

"He's moving damned slow, Captain. Cautious like. Given the current, and the channeling effect of the sludge above us, I'd guess he's within ten or twelve miles."

"Good enough. I want you to stay on his ass, Ekhart. Stick tight like a tick on a hound dog's ear and don't let 'em go. Tell me the moment you pick up an aspect change."

"We're gonna tail him, Skipper?"

"You bet. That's what our orders say. We'll come about real nice and easy, until we're pointed out of this pocket, then wait. When Sierra Nine passes us, we'll just slip in behind him, right square in his baffles."

"What if he's heading straight for us, Captain?" Harrington asked.

"Then we try to get out of his way, son. I don't plan to ram the sumfabitch. You need any help, Ekhart?"

But Ekhart had taken back the headset and was already lost in the black, watery world beyond Galveston's double hull, his eyes closed, imaging the approaching monster in his mind.

He could almost see her.