Los Angeles Class

13

"Man, O'Brien," Archie Douglas said, setting his tray down opposite his. "You look terrible! What's the matter, you didn't get enough sleep last night?"

"He had the duty topside, oh-four hundred to oh-six hundred this morning," Scobey explained. "He's just running a little short on rack time, is all."

"No, guys," O'Brien said. He looked at his tray, a hamburger and fries and red bug juice, and his stomach twisted ominously. He didn't think he was going to be able to eat. "Look, I don't want to scare anybody, or anything—"

"Hey! That's mighty nice of the nub," Scobey exclaimed. "He doesn't want to scare us!" The others at the table laughed.

"No, listen! I think… well… "Reaching up, he grabbed a tuft of hair on his scalp and tugged. Some remained in place, but some came away in his clenched fingers, too, pulling free with a brittle, itchy feel. "I think I've been exposed to radiation?"

"You had your dosimeter checked?" Douglas asked, all trace of levity gone now from his voice. Every crewman carried a small plastic badge, worn or carried in a pocket, in which a strip of film was kept. Periodically, the medical department collected the film and developed it, making certain that no one aboard had received more than the legally allowed dosage of background radiation.

"Uh, not yet. I figured I'd go to sick bay and talk to the doc—"

"Sick call is at zero-eight-hundred hours, son," Douglas said. "And you've got things to do today. Like your qual studies?"

"But I thought this was serious…. "

Douglas reached over and cupped O'Brien's forehead in one hand, peeling his left eyelid up and peering into his eye. He repeated the exercise on the right eye. "Don't see no jaundice. A little bloodshot. What do you think, Big C?"

Scobey looked at O'Brien's eyes as well. "Hard to tell… you feeling sick any other way, kid?"

"Uh, sick at my stomach…. "

"Vomiting?"

"No…. "

"Well, you might just have a touch of mal de mer."

"Huh?"

"Seasickness, son, seasickness. It'll pass."

Douglas grinned. "You probably just got your insides jolted around during angles and dangles this morning!"

"I… I'd forgotten about that. I was feeling pretty sick at first. Then I remembered hearing about how the skipper puts the boat through all sorts of maneuvers to shake stuff loose. But I was already feeling queasy then. I really think I ought to go to the doc."

"Nerves, son," Scobey said. "Just nerves. And if you have quals to do, you'd best get yourself at 'em, right? If you fall behind on your study schedule, it's a real bitch, let me tell you!"

"But I haven't had time!" O'Brien wailed. "They keep putting me on watches and special duty and stuff. And I really think I'm sick!.. "

"You're not sick," Scobey said gruffly. "Just nerves. First time at sea, first time locked up in a sewer pipe a hundred feet under the surface. You'll get over it."

"But what about my hair!.. "

Scobey shrugged. "Did your dad lose his hair?"

"Huh?"

"Was your dad bald?"

"Well, yeah…. "

"There you go, then. It happens. You can always get a hair transplant."

"My dad didn't go bald until he was in his fifties! What about the radiation?"

"Hey, what did they teach you in Sub School?" Douglas asked him reasonably. "We've got unscheduled ORSE checks every so often, right? We had one two weeks ago, as soon as we came into port. If there'd been any radiation danger, any leaks, they'd have picked it up, right?"

"Well… yeah… "

"If there was a leak," Scobey said, "there would be alarms going off. You hear any alarms?"

"No…. "

"There you are, then. This boat is sound and solid. I don't know about your hair problems, but it's not a radiation leak… and you'd better belay that kind of talk if you don't want to get into trouble as a rumormonger. You have any idea what the Old Man'd do to someone who was spreading wild stories about radiation leaks on this submarine?"

O'Brien shook his head.

"Well, I just hate to think what he'd do. So… learn to trust your shipmates, okay?"

"Yeah, Big C. Okay."

"Right," Douglas said. "We'll tell you if you're dying or not!"

"That's real reassuring, Archie," Jablonski said, joining them. "What kind of stories are you telling the nub, anyway?"

"Ahh, first-time-out jitters. O'Brien here thinks he's losing his hair."

Benson sat down as well, eyeing him critically. "Well, he looks like he's got a bad case of the mange, but I don't know that he's losing all of it."

They continued discussing his condition… and the dangers of spreading unfounded rumors about radiation leaks on the boat… a federal offense, according to Jablonski.

O'Brien decided that he didn't want any food, and gave his tray to Douglas. "Let's just drop it, okay fellas?"

"Suits me," Scobey said. "Hey! Benson! You look like the proverbial cat that ate the proverbial canary. What gives?"

"Well, I know where we're headed."

Douglas shrugged. "Who doesn't? Siberia, right?"

"Yeah!" Benson said. "How'd you know?"

"I was in the control room this morning. All the charts at the chart station are places on the eastern Siberian coast. Magadan. Sakhalin. The coastline between the Amur and the Uda Rivers. I think we're going back to Oshkosh for another try."

"What'd you hear, Benson?" Scobey wanted to know.

"Chief Allison and I were with the packages during angles and dangles," Benson replied. "I think they were a little shook-up, you know? Anyway, one of 'em blurted out something he probably wasn't supposed to. He asked, 'Is it gonna be like this all the way to fucking Siberia?'"

The others chuckled.

"Well, we all knew we were probably headed east again anyway," Douglas pointed out. The word was that we were dropping our 'packages' off somewhere over there, and they don't look like they're intended for delivery to Beijing. It had to be either Oshkosh or Petro."

"Could've been Chukotskiy," Benson said, referring to the peninsula that marked the easternmost tip of Siberia, close up by Alaska.

"Doubt it," Douglas said, shaking his head. "Nothing much up there in the way of naval assets except Anadyr, and there's not much there but coastal-defense stuff. No, I'd bet on Magadan, or maybe the mouth of the Amur. There's a lot of shit going on there."

"Damned tight and shallow at the Amur," Boyce said, scowling. "Shallow water, lots of seabed sonar, and a lot of Red Banner Fleet ships and subs, in a lot of bases. Don't know if I like the sound of that."

"You guys sound like you've done this before," O'Brien said. The discussion had taken his mind off the fear. He found that his mind was wonderfully focused, sharp and clear, fastening on each word they said.

"Oh, we play this game all the time," Douglas said. "You have no idea."

"It's not the sort of thing to talk about," Scobey warned. "Know what I mean?"

"Sure. 'Silent Service.' But… you guys don't mean we might actually go inside Russian territorial waters?"

Scobey laughed. "Kid, one time, in the Baltic, we were so fucking close to the beach, the skipper let some of us take turns lookin' through the periscope, y'know? We could see girls sunbathing half-nekkid on the rocks west of Kaliningrad."

"C'mon, Big C! You're making that up!"

"Got pictures to prove it."

"What, periscope shots? From the scope camera?" Douglas laughed. "Now I know you're full of shit!"

"Can we see the pictures?" Benson asked. "Sure, but it'll cost ya."

"Cost us! How come?"

"What, for a peek at nekkid broads? Especially Russian nekkid broads? Five bucks."

"Shit. Playboy costs half that!"

"Playboy isn't Russian nekkid broads."

"Yeah," Douglas said. "They're American. Which means no mustaches and tits that don't sag to their knees."

O'Brien looked at Benson. He looked thoughtful, and perhaps a bit worried. "Benson? What's the matter?"

"Ah, nothing. Nothing, really. It's just, well, I keep wondering at the ethics of what we're doing."

"What do you mean, ethics?" Scobey asked. "We're protecting our country. Right boys?"

Douglas gave him a high five. "Fuckin'-A, Big C."

"Are we? Are we really? I mean, yeah, it's one thing to follow their submarines and make sure they're not trailing our boomers. If a war started, we'd have to nail their boomers and their hunter-killers real fast. I understand that.

"But what do we get by going all the way in to their coast, inside their territorial waters? I mean, well, how would we react if a Russian Victor III snuck up the Chesapeake and parked itself off Baltimore Harbor? That sort of thing would really piss us off, you know?"

"What makes you think they haven't?" Scobey said ominously.

"Well, if they have," Benson said, "then I'm pissed!" He spread his hands, his voice earnest. "They have no right to do that… any more than we have the right to play games in their waters!"

"Right?" Douglas asked. "Who said anything about 'right'? The Cold War is still a war, my man. Casualty lists aren't as high, but people do die, battles are fought, and casualties are taken!"

"It's almost a sure bet," Scobey said, "that the Russians had a hunter parked off San Francisco Bay, just waiting to pick up a boat coming out of Mare Island. If they did, then you can bet they're following us right this moment, nice and cozy in our baffles, just a few hundred yards off our screw."

O'Brien looked at Douglas. "Is that true?"

"It's possible. And if they're there, don't worry. The skipper'll lose 'em."

"But facts is facts, Benson," Scobey went on. "They do it. We do it. Nobody likes it, but it's part of the way the game is played."

"Damn it, it's not a game. Not if people get killed. Not if a mistake, by us or them, could bring somebody's finger down on the firing button and light off World War III!"

"You sound like you've thought a lot about this," Douglas said.

"Yeah. I have."

"Maybe you should think about going up on the roof."

"Yeah," Scobey said. "Service in the boats is for volunteers only. You don't like it, you can ship out."

"I didn't say I wanted that," Benson replied. "I just wonder sometimes if what we're doing is right."

"Sometimes," Scobey replied, "it's just possible that right has a lot less to do with this thing than survival does. Know what I mean?"

"I know. And what if the people playing this game, as you call it… the politicians, the generals, the Joint Chiefs, whoever else is sitting back there in Washington moving little plastic game pieces around on a big map of the world… what if they really do think it's a game and miscalculate? Our survival is still on the line.

"And, damn it… I trust you guys with my life. But do I trust those armchair strategists in Washington? The White House? The State Department? Some vodka-sodden jerk at a desk in the Kremlin? Some scared punk of a kid from some Soviet Socialist Republic none of us has ever heard of, sitting at the fire-control system for an RBU-6000 ASW rocket launcher aboard one of their sub hunters?

"Do you trust them with your lives? 'Cause that's what it comes down to. And I'm not sure I do trust 'em. Any of 'em."

Benson stood suddenly, picked up his tray, and returned it to the galley. Douglas and Scobey watched him go. "You think he's okay?" Douglas asked.

"Ah, he'll get over it. Mission jitters."

"I got 'em too," O'Brien said as he stood. "I'd better go get some rack time while I can. If I'm lucky, I can get three hours in before I have to go on duty."

"Grab a few Zs for us, while you're at it," Douglas said.

"And don't worry about the hair," Scobey added. "I'm sure it's perfectly normal."

The others burst out laughing, and O'Brien hurried away faster, embarrassed. And scared….

"So what do you have, Rodriguez?" Gordon asked.

He was standing in the sonar compartment forward of the control room. Two sonar techs, Rodriguez and Kellerman, were seated at the long console with its monitors, each displaying arcane scryings painted on black in green light. Gordon could read the waterfall, as the main cascade was called, but it took a real expert, one with a master's ears, to pick faint patterns of repetition or artificial noise out of the sea of hissing, popping static all around them.

"Something, Skipper," Rodriguez said. He held up a finger as he listened intently to his headset. "There." He whipped off the headset and handed it to Gordon, who pressed it to his ear. "Listen to that."

What Gordon could hear quite easily was a loud, throbbing rumble overlying a steady whooshing noise, but he had the feeling that Rodriguez hadn't called him in here to listen to the noise made by his own boat. "I hear our own prop wash," he said. "What—"

"Not the wash, Captain," Rodriguez said. "Listen past that, deeper. See if you hear something else behind the hissing noise."

Gordon closed his eyes and stretched, trying to feel the sound as much as hear it. He could almost catch something… there!

"Kind of a fast chirping or popping sound," he said. "Not very loud, but it's regular. Like something mechanical squeaking…. "

"Very good, sir!" Rodriguez said, eyes opening wide.

"With ears like that, you should have been a sonar man."

"So what am I listening to?"

"Cavitation, sir. Not ours. Somebody else."

"A Russian boat?"

"Unless you think we're being stalked by one of ours, sir."

"No war games scheduled for this cruise." Gordon handed the headset back. "What's the cavitation from? At ten knots it's not like he's going too fast."

"My best guess? His screw is just a little bit off center. It's wobbling. That, or one of the blades is bent a little bit, and causing the screw to turn unevenly. Whichever it is, it's causing little pockets of vacuum to pop just ahead of the screw."

"How far aft?"

"That I can't tell you, sir. My guess would be five hundred to a thousand yards, but it's only a guess. We're streaming our BQR-15 at eight hundred feet, and that's where we're picking this up. What I'm hoping to do is get a side profile on the bastard. As it is, we've got him bow-on, and I only pick up the cavitation once in a while, when he falls off a little bit and I can 'see' his stern."

"You want a better look at him?"

"If we can manage that, yes, sir."

"I'll see what we can arrange. Our first job, though, is going to be to lose this bozo. I don't want him tailing us all the way to our objective."

"That would definitely be a bummer, sir."

"Where'd you pick him up? Or, rather, where'd he pick us up?"

Rodriguez glanced at the big clock on the bulkhead above the sonar screens. "I logged him as Sierra-one at 1120 hours, sir. That's when I first notified you."

Gordon nodded.

"But it's a damned big ocean. My money would be on this guy sitting right outside the Golden Gate waiting for us. We came cruising by, happy as clams, rigging for angles and dangles, and he picked us up."

"My guess too, Rodriguez."

"Sorry I didn't get him sooner, sir."

"Hey, the rule book says you guys are completely deaf astern. It's a miracle you picked him up at all out of all that hash. Well done!"

"Thank you, sir."

Gordon ducked through the curtain and walked back to the control room. Latham watched him with a shuttered expression. "Something, Captain?"

"We definitely have a tail. I'm going to look for a way to scrape him off."

"Do we have any other boats out here? They could scrape him off for us."

"No, damn it. I wish we did." Standard tactical doctrine— employed especially in the case of boomers going out on patrol, was to scrape off any Soviet tails using a second boat. Acting as decoy, or simply running interference, it would cut between the Soviet boat and its quarry, making enough noise that the tailed boat could quietly slip away.

Unfortunately, another Los Angeles wasn't available, not this time. Gordon had discussed the possibility with Cabot and with Hartwell the previous week. "Needless security risk," Cabot had said bluntly. "We don't want everyone in the Navy to know you're going out on this mission."

Great, Gordon thought. Just great! We'll keep our mission so secret no one will know about it except the Russian Navy! …

He wondered if his counterparts in the Russian submarine fleet had the same sorts of frustrations as he.

"Diving Officer! What's the depth below keel?"

"Seven-seven-five feet, Captain, and dropping. We're over the edge of the shelf."

The waters here overlay an interesting topology. At this point along the California coast, the continental shelf was narrow, and quite steep. This close to the San Andreas Fault, the shelf dropped away as steeply as the contorted mountainsides above San Francisco itself. The Pittsburgh had been traveling northwest, on a heading of 310 degrees sixty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge when the shadow had been discovered.

During the past half hour, the bottom had dropped away suddenly, from less than two hundred feet to over a thousand, a plunge into the cold blackness nearly as precipitous as a sheer cliff.

Two hundred feet, a bit more than half of Pittsburgh's length, gave a boat as long as a Los Angeles almost no depth-maneuvering room at all. But a thousand — that was different.

He picked up a microphone and keyed it. "Sonar, Conn."

"Sonar. Go ahead, Conn."

"Hold on to your ears, boys, and reel in our tail. We're going to do some maneuvering, here."

"Thank you for the advance notice, sir."

"My pleasure. Don't start taking it for granted."

He walked over to the Diving Officer, who stood just behind the helmsman and planesman. "Okay, gentlemen. This is what we're going to do….

His name was Ivan Rogov, after a man who was a former wartime kommisar and later Chief of the Russian Navy's Central Political Department. Designated as Projeckt 945B within the Soviet Admiralty, he was third of the new Barrakuda class of attack submarines, vessels known to NATO and the West as the Sierra II. Within Russian nomenclature and tradition, a ship or submarine was always a he, never a she.

The Ivan Rogovs commanding officer was Captain First Rank Viktor Dubrynin, an eager up-and-coming officer from

Odessa who knew the sea well. For almost two weeks, he'd been lurking at the ambush point just off the entrance to San Francisco Bay, hoping for just such an encounter as this. According to GRU intelligence reports, many American intelligence missions, those fielded by submarine, originated at the Mare Island facility tucked away in the northeast corner of the bay. Penetrating those crowded, shallow, and undoubtedly well-protected waters was not a sane mission, not with American ASW technology as good as it was… though Dubrynin could dream. Once, indeed, he'd trailed an oil tanker up the Chesapeake Bay, penetrating the Americans' East Coast inland waterway as far as the mouth of the Potomac River. He'd taken numerous periscope photographs of shipping and navigational landmarks in the area and brought his boat safely out and home. For that daring feat, he'd been proclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Viktor Dubrynin was, without question, one of the best of the Russian submarine commanders, best of an elite brotherhood. He took extreme pride in everything he did, in each mission, in each deployment.

His orders this time were passing strange, almost bewildering, in fact, though he was a good enough naval officer and a good enough communist to know that orders, even strange ones — perhaps even especially strange ones — were to be obeyed without question. And these orders came direct from the headquarters of the Red Banner Fleet itself, bearing the name of none other than Admiral of the Fleet V.N. Chernavin, the Union's Deputy Minister of Defense and Commander in Chief of the Navy, and it was countersigned by Admiral of the Fleet V.V. Sidorov, commander of the Pacific Fleet.

The orders, when boiled free of the flowery language, were to intercept any American submarines exiting San Francisco Bay and follow them without revealing Ivan Rogov's presence. The American submarine was expected to cross the Pacific Ocean by a great circle route and attempt to enter Soviet waters somewhere along the Kuril Islands.

Dubrynin was to maintain surveillance contact with the American sub, to report its position at periodic intervals, and to assist in the vessel's capture when it was forced to the surface.

Assist in its capture!..

He wondered, of course, where the intelligence came from behind this mission. Someone had a pretty clear picture, it seemed, of at least part of current American submarine espionage activities, clear enough to know that a penetration of the Sea of Okhotsk was being planned. Dubrynin had heard about the debacle a few weeks ago when an American submarine, a Los Angeles class and just possibly the very submarine he was now trailing, had entered the Sea of Okhotsk, been spotted by regional fleet elements, and somehow managed to escape just as ASW units were closing in for the kill. An embarrassing situation all around, and not one promising long or honored naval careers for some.

So far, the mission had been almost absurdly easy. The two weeks of waiting had been tediously boring, of course, but most submarine deployments were like that … endless tedium capped, sometimes, by a few minutes of stark terror.

"Captain, Sonar!" The Sonar Officer was a young leytenant, Vladimir Krychkov, reputed to be one of the best sonar listeners in the Fleet.

"What is it, Krychkov?"

"Aspect change on target, Captain. He appears to be turning to port."

"Da. Clearing his baffles, then." Or… "Sonar! Is there any indication that he has spotted us?"

"Negative, Captain. Not at this time. The maneuver is being carried out slowly, almost leisurely. There are no sounds of torpedo doors being opened, or of machinery."

"Helm. All stop."

"Da, Comrade Captain. All stop." Both Russian and American submarines went through the routine, every so often, of "clearing the baffles," turning in a large circle and taking a careful listen with hull and bow sonars for any unwanted guests in the area, especially astern, in the baffles, where a vessel's sonar was notoriously hard of hearing.

But the Ivan Rogov was an unusually quiet boat, for a Russian. Using quieting technology only recently obtained through intelligence sources, the Barrakuda class boats were widely regarded as the most silent submarines yet launched by the Soviet Navy, at least the equivalent of their Sturgeon class… and quite possibly as silent as their early Los Angeles boats.

With his engines off, with all machinery that might communicate vibrations to the surrounding ocean off or isolated on special, insulated pallets, the Rogov drifted in near-perfect silence, a "hole in the water," as his American playmates sometimes called it.

"Sonar, Captain. Report on target."

"Target aspect continues to change. He is now forty degrees to port of original bearing, still turning. Now forty-five … fifty degrees."

"Range to target!"

"Estimate six hundred meters, Captain. Captain… he is turning very sharply. Engine now making turns for twenty knots… no… twenty-five. Sir! He is accelerating!"

"Helm! Come left forty-five degrees!" He would turn into the American's turn, positioning himself so that he could remain bow-on to the target. This would keep his own sonar profile narrow… and would give him the edge if torpedoes began to swim.

Dubrynin was torn. He wanted to be in sonar, listening to the American's antics for himself… yet he had to stay here, when the situation could turn deadly at any instant.

"Captain! Sonar! The target… "

"What is it Krychkov? Sonar! Report!"

"The target appears to be bow-on and coming straight toward us, making turns now for twenty knots! Target may be descending…. "

"May be? Tell me!"

"Target appears to be descending. Making turns for thirty-three knots. Range now estimated at three hundred yards… and closing!.. "

"Great God…. "

He hoped Rogovs political officer hadn't heard that peculiarly uncommunist exclamation. Then he decided it didn't matter. The American captain must be crazy, deliberately risking a high-speed collision at sea.

"Helm! Come hard left! Up diving planes fifteen degrees!"

The Rogov responded, but slowly … slowly….

What the hell was the American doing?

This wasn't the way the game was supposed to be played….

"Sonar, Conn! Can you hear him?"

"Negative, Captain! We're deaf at this speed!"

"Stand by, then."

What Gordon was trying to do was dangerous, though not, he thought, excessively so. While it was always a bit hairy with more than one boat making unexpected maneuvers in the same area, it was a big ocean, and five hundred yards was over four times Pittsburgh's length overall. Lots of room…

"Passing one-five-zero feet!" the planesman called out. Moments before, Gordon had ordered the diving planes set to eighteen degrees down bubble, and the deck was canting beneath his feet. They needed to go deep….

The scary part about playing chicken was not knowing what the Russian captain would do. If he zigged when the Pittsburgh zagged — or dove when she dove — there could be a very expensive debris field scattered across this part of the Pacific seabed.

Stepping up onto the stage beneath the two side-by-side periscope housings, Gordon moved to the starboard scope and hit the control that activated its low-light optics.

The port-side periscope was a Type 2 attack scope, capable only of daylight optical resolution. The starboard scope, however, was a Mark 18 search scope, a wonder of optical and electronic technology capable of a wide variety of tasks. It included low-light settings that could be projected onto TV monitors throughout the boat, and a 20mm camera for taking either still or motion pictures through the scope.

The Mark 18's head could be angled up, allowing either air searches or, when submerged, it could be used to watch the bottom of the ice when the boat was maneuvering in Arctic waters. At times, it had been used to film the bottoms of Soviet warships at close range, and even inspect the hulls of Russian submarines.

"Passing two-zero-zero feet, Captain."

Periscopes normally were useless underwater; below a very few hundred feet, no light at all penetrated the depths. Even at the Pittsburgh's current depth and using low-light optics the surface was little more than a featureless, green glow. Gordon pressed his eyes against the plastic shield, however, watching for…

There! A shadow fell across the Mark 18's field of view, just for an instant. Briefly, Gordon cursed himself for not engaging the camera … but the other boat was far enough above that any pictures he'd gotten would have been uselessly fuzzy and distance-blurred.

Catching a glimpse of the other boat was sheer luck, but proved his instincts as to where the Russian would be were accurate. He could also tell from the angle of the other boat as Pittsburgh slid beneath its keel that the Russian skipper was now turned hard to port, trying to meet the 'Burgh's sudden turn and sprint.

"Helm! Hard right rudder! Come to zero-zero-five degrees. Continue descent to six hundred feet!"

"Hard right rudder to zero-zero-five degrees, aye. Make depth six-zero-zero feet, aye."

He grabbed the periscope housing as the hull groaned in protest.