Los Angeles Class

PROLOGUE

Descending….

Two hundred miles above the horsetail wisps of cirrus cloud decorating the rich cobalt of the approaching Siberian dawn, an American KH-12 reconnaissance satellite sailed southeast into the sudden, golden glare of the rising sun as it exploded above the purple-hazed curve of the Earth's horizon. Crossing the coast between the tiny fishing villages of Ul'ya and Mys Enken, the robot spy raced to greet the distant sunrise above dark waters still lost in night.

The satellite had originally been scheduled for a routine photo recon pass over the great port of Vladivostok, a thousand miles to the southwest, but hours earlier, a specially coded transmission with the electronic authorization of the National Reconnaissance Office itself had directed the satellite to use some of its dwindling stores of onboard fuel to shift its orbit farther north, in order to let it peer down on the drama unfolding in the predawn darkness below.

East, dawn touched the snow-locked peaks of the Sredinnyy Khrebet, the mountain spine of Poluostrov Kamchatka, a dazzling embrace of gold and ice silver. South, the long and ragged finger of Sakhalin pointed at Hokkaido, northernmost of Japan's home islands, just visible as a dark blur on the horizon. Ahead, southeast, like pearls on a string, the long-contested Kuril'skiy Ostrova, the Kuril islands, stretched across 650 miles of sea, from Mys Lopatka at Kamchatka's extreme southern tip all the way to the slender Nemuro Strait along Hokkaido's northeast coast.

Digital infrared cameras that could pierce even overcast skies peered down, searching the night-clad seas west of the Kurils. The resolving power of those electronic eyes on the KH-12—"KH" stood, appropriately enough, for "keyhole" — was highly classified, but was well under half a meter at orbital ranges. They could not, as was popularly supposed, read the newspaper headlines over the shoulder of a man in a Moscow street, but they had no trouble at all picking out the principle players in a rapidly unfolding drama on the surface far below….

Descending farther. Beneath the chill near-emptiness of low orbit, beneath the sun-gilt twists of the cirrus clouds and deep within the thin envelope of aira far beneath the satellite's keel, four aircraft, hounds to the surface-bound hunters below. Two Chaika ASW flying boats — they were known as "Mails" in the West — and a pair of IL-38 "May" subhunters were dropping patterns of sonobuoys, blunt white canisters drifting into the sea beneath small parachutes. As each splashed home, it began sending out piercing chirps of sound, seeking, seeking, seeking through the black waters beneath… and transmitting the results to the listening aircraft above.

Descending farther still. Beneath the probing aircraft, a dozen surface vessels converged on the same patch of sound-blasted ocean. Warships, lean and knife-prowed all, they ranged in size from the tiny Pauk class corvettes Komsomolets Moldavy and Kirovskiy Komsomolets to the 173-meter Kara class ASW cruiser Ochakov. Summoned by the baying aircraft, they approached from every point of the compass, feeling their way with their own sonar tapings, listening for their invisible prey.

And descending still farther… three… four… five hundred meters down, at depths where even at high noon the light of day never penetrated, the prey twisted silently through the black and the frigid cold. Long — almost 110 meters from rounded prow to cruciform tail — and as sleek as any sea creature evolved for speed and silence within its watery universe, the submarine encased a sliver of light and warmth and air, temporary home to twelve officers and 120 men assigned to her.

She was the USS Pittsburgh, SSN 720, a 688 Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine. Normally the hunter, designed as a killer, the Pittsburgh now was the hunted as the air and surface-naval forces above closed on her position. Shrill pings from sonobuoys and the blindly probing sonars of the surface ships chirped and jittered weirdly as they caressed the sub's hull, and every man aboard knew that the echoes, despite Pittsburgh's anechoic hull coating, were pinpointing the fleeing sub's position to her hunters.

With deepening dread, they listened now for the inevitable high-pitched whine of the approaching antisubmarine torpedoes….