Los Angeles Class

17

Gordon stared overhead as a second ping rang through the Pittsburgh's hull. The waiting, as always, was nerve-wracking to the point of insanity. If he's going to nail us, he thought, now's the time.

Lowering his eyes, he caught Latham's steady gaze from forward… no fear, but, possibly, a slender touch of recognition, as though he'd been here before, as though he were somehow measuring Gordon's performance. The measurement was neither intrusive nor challenging, merely… curious.

Gordon winked. Latham's mouth pulled back in the slightest of smiles.

And then the churning throb of the vessel overhead— Sierra One-three, the thirteenth sonar logged thus far on Pittsburgh's voyage — was receding astern, unhurried, unchanging.

Missed us again, you bastards, Gordon thought, a bit fiercely. Long, strained moments followed, as Pittsburgh's control-room watch strained, motionless, listening to silence.

"Conn, Sonar," Kellerman's voice called over the IC. "Contact is fading. No change in aspect." There was a hesitation. "I think he missed us, Captain."

"Sonar, Conn. Keep your ears peeled, Kellerman. He could have a tail-end Charlie keeping him company." Sometimes, a large Soviet ASW vessel would be followed at a distance by a smaller vessel, or an ASW aircraft, listening for possible targets that might have thought themselves safe once the loud and obvious threat had passed. It was an old trick, one used by the Americans and British as well.

Minute followed minute, however, with no further contacts.

"Mr. Carver, bring us to periscope depth."

"Periscope depth, aye, Captain."

Pittsburgh was lurking near the bottom in shoaling water, three hundred feet down, just south of the island of Paramusir, one of the northernmost of the Kuril group. Gliding silently ahead, she rose from the depths toward the dappling, shifting light of day.

In fact, notions of day and night were largely immaterial and unnoticed aboard a submarine, which might go for weeks or months without rising even to periscope depth. Watches aboard submarines were deliberately set to an artificial eighteen hour day as soon as the vessel left port, allowing for a six-hour-on, twelve-hour-off routine for the watches. At any given moment on board, the best way to tell whether it was day or night above the eternal night of the ocean depths was to take a look at the control room. If it was "rigged for red," with red lighting to preserve the night vision of men who might need to peer through the periscope, then it was night.

The information scarcely mattered. Submariners prided themselves in living in their own little world, cut off from the world above.

"Leveling off at periscope depth, Captain."

"Very well." Gordon stepped up onto the periscope dais, taking his place at the port-side scope, the Number 18. "Sonar, Conn. Any contacts?"

"Conn, Sonar. Negative contacts close by, sir. But it's pretty shallow, here. I'm getting lots of scatter. And we're picking up a fair amount of confused noise at extreme range, bearing two-one-zero through three-one-zero. Might be commercial traffic, sir."

"Not out here, it isn't," Gordon replied. "Up scope."

The Number 18 was called that because it had a magnification factor of eighteen times… far better than that of its predecessors. The improvement allowed a submarine to see surface targets in detail at ranges impossible for earlier systems. Leaning on the handles, he rode the scope column as it slid upward from its deck housing, walking the scope in a slow circle as it broke the surface. Midday sunlight glared and scattered off a smooth but rolling sea.

No aircraft… no silently waiting surface predator positioned to pounce on an unwary intruder. To the west, however, right on the horizon, Gordon could make out a clutter of tiny silhouettes. "Mark," he said, centering on the first.

"Bearing two-one-five," Latham said, reading the bearing off the scope compass.

"Krivak class, southerly heading, range ten miles. New target, mark."

"Bearing two-two-one."

"Kresta class, southerly heading, range ten miles. New target,mark… "

They continued the observation, Gordon picking out and identifying targets while Latham noted each contact and checked the bearing. Gordon had the camera running, making a visual record.

"Down scope," he said at last. He looked at Latham. "Southern route," he said.

"Sounds like they're waiting for us."

"It's possible." Stepping down off the dais, Gordon walked to one of the navigational tables aft of the periscope walk. One of Garrison's charts was spread out on the light table, with Pittsburgh's zigzagging course and hourly positions plotted in blue grease pencil, with contacts and bearing lines noted in red. He pointed. "That flotilla up there appears to be coming down along the west side of Paramusir Island… about here. They could be lying in wait, hiding behind the island. Or… "

"Or?"

"Or it could be routine maneuvers. We don't know, and I dislike paranoia as much as the next man. But we're not taking chances."

"I'm with you there, Skipper."

"Down scope!" The periscope slid with an oily silver gleam into the well. "Take us down to two hundred feet."

"Two hundred feet, aye aye, Captain."

"Make our course one-eight-five."

"Helm to course one-eight-five, aye, sir."

Latham grinned at Gordon. "Captain's choice, sir?"

"What's the fun in being captain if you don't have it?"

"Damned if I know. But our passengers are going to be pissed."

"Mr. Johnson might be, at any rate. But even he wouldn't want us charging right through a cordon of Soviet ASW ships."

"He is a stickler for following the book, sir."

"Well, we'll worry about him if we have to later." He turned, checking each station in the control room, studying the intent gazes of the personnel at the controls. "I'm going to my quarters," he told Latham. "Call me if there's any change."

"Aye, sir."

Making his way forward, he opened the door to his cabin and stepped inside. He took his seat behind his desk, pausing a moment to look at the small photo of his wife and daughters in its plastic frame. They seemed so hellishly far away just now.

On a normal voyage, he would have been allowed to send and receive personal messages — at least the 150 words of a Familygram. He wondered how Becca was doing.

The notion that command was a lonely life was hopelessly cliched, but true nonetheless. He was terribly worried about his wife, but saw no way to help her short of leaving the service… and command. And this was what he was born for. He could live his own life, or how she wanted him to, with a normal job, a normal career, with normal hours.

Which way to go? Which way could he go, and stay true to himself?

Surfaced at last, the Ivan Rogov made his way into the main approach channel to Tauyskaya Guba, with small, wooded Zav'yalova Island sliding aft along his port side. It was hot and humid — the Maritime Provinces could swelter during midsummer — but the breeze coming off the submarine's bow was cool, and Captain First Rank Dubrynin leaned into it, savoring the salt taste and freshness after over a month locked away in the ocean's depths. It was like being released from prison… and with the promise of a return to Katarina's arms.

They'd moved to Magadan from the military suburbs of Leningrad almost a year ago. Dubrynin had embraced the transfer, of course, since it had meant promotion, and a literally once-in-a-lifetime chance to command an attack submarine, the Rogov. Katarina, however, had been miserable at first, forced to leave friends and family for a land as alien to her as the far side of the moon. There'd been talk of her staying in Leningrad, perhaps of her moving back into that tiny apartment with her mother, father, and younger brothers.

He'd convinced her at last to come, however, and he was sure now that the decision had been the right one. She was making friends among the other navy wives at the Magadan base, learning to love the stark beauty of the mountains behind the city, so different from the flat horizon beyond Lake Lagoda.

At his side, Starpom Vladimir Tupov, his Executive Officer, pointed north across the water. "It appears, Comrade Captain, that the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets is making ready to depart."

Dubrynin raised his binoculars and studied the dockside of the submarine base. Sure enough, he could see the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets, mooring lines cast off fore and aft, and a naval tug positioned abeam, ready to move him out into the channel.

"It seems soon after Anatoli Vesilevich's last excursion," Dubrynin said. "I wonder if he's been ordered to the chase?"

"It seems likely, Captain. The Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets is a fine ship. Our very best… excepting the Ivan Rogov, of course."

"Of course." Dubrynin chuckled. "Although the State might withhold him from the battle, for that very reason."

"That hardly seems likely, does it? The alert was for a single American submarine this time, not a wolf pack, as they deployed against us last time."

"Ah, Vladimir Ivanovich, there is no accounting for some of the decisions of our leaders. The State moves in mysterious ways…. "

The starpom remained silent at this near blasphemy. He was a stolid and unimaginative sort, unable to accept the possibility that the Rogovs leaders might be as fallible or as venal as the next man. Most Russians took the vast and often cruel clumsiness of the government for granted — that acceptance was a part of the Russian character long preceding the October Revolution — but a few, Vladimir Ivanovich among them, maintained a fanatical blindness to the State's failings.

But the starpom was young. He would learn, as Dubrynin had.

"Captain, this is Pavlenko," crackled over the weather-bridge speaker.

"Go ahead." Boris Pavlenko was Rogov's senior communications officer.

"Sir! Radio message from headquarters! We have new orders!"

Dubrynin exchanged bemused glances with Tupov. "We're not even back to port yet!" Tupov exclaimed.

"It was to be expected, Vladimir Ivanovich. Let's get below."

The two submariners clambered back down through the sail access into the control room.

Within minutes, the Ivan Rogov was coming about, heading once again for the open Sea of Okhotsk.

"Up scope."

The Type 18 periscope slid into the overhead well as Gordon rode the optics up. As the periscope head broke the surface, the IR optics picked up the image and relayed it not only to Gordon's eye, but to TV monitors in various quarters of the control room. Under infrared, the sky was featureless black, the waves a thick and nearly featureless gray. Slowly, he walked the scope about, watching the compass readout numbers at the top of the scope readout. The control room was rigged for red, a dim and eerie darkroom illumination that gave a faintly satanic cast to the officers and men working there.

They'd turned south and run parallel to the Kurils at thirty knots, turning west at last at a point 120 miles south of Paramusir Island, a place where the island chain thinned to a straggle of tiny, barren and uninhabited rocks, Shiaskokan, Matua, and tiny Raykoke. Slowing again to ten knots to reduce their sound signature, they slipped through the passage just north of Raykoke, ever conscious of the fact that the Russians had probably seeded all of the channels with sonar listening devices similar to the U.S. SOSUS net.

They encountered no major surface activity, though twice they heard the distant throb of a ship — the first slow and ponderous, almost certainly a freighter, the second higher-pitched and faster, possibly a Grisha I light ASW frigate.

Then came the long, exposed run northwest across the Sea of Okhotsk itself, 650 miles to Mys Yalizavety at the northern tip of Sakhalin, then slowed to a crawl as they rounded the cape and slipped through rapidly shoaling water into the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv — Sakhalin Bay.

They'd averaged twenty knots for the crossing, sometimes dashing at Pittsburgh's full underwater speed of thirty-five knots, but stopping frequently to listen… and sometimes crawling at a painful five knots to avoid the notice of hunters above. In all, it had taken almost thirty-five hours, but the timing had let them slip into the shallow waters of the bay well after dark.

It seemed as though the Sea of Okhotsk was unusually busy. Sonar had racked up another twelve contacts since entering the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the boat's log, her last mission in these waters only a few weeks ago had encountered relatively little traffic until she'd deliberately surfaced to attract Soviet attention. Perhaps the heavy patrols were simply a reaction to the American sub's penetration so recently. Or perhaps the Soviets were engaged in fleet maneuvers.

"Sonar, Conn," he said. "What's the bearing on Sierra Two-seven?"

"Conn, Sonar," Rodriguez's voice came back. "Sierra Two-seven now bearing two-zero-four. Estimated range, six to eight thousand yards."

Gordon leaned into the periscope eyepiece again, trying to pierce the darkness. This was the spot where they were supposed to meet their Russian contact. Sonar had reported a contact in the area — Sierra Two-seven — and reported that it sounded like a trawler or fishing boat, with a single screw making turns for five knots.

But… was it the contact, code-named "Stenki" after a historical Cossack leader? Or a KGB or MVD border patrol boat? Pittsburgh was now prowling southeast along the Siberian coast, barely thirty miles offshore. Technically, they were still in international waters, but that technicality was so slender Gordon wasn't going to hang a wish upon it, much less a 6,900-ton submarine. The Sea of Okhotsk was a Soviet sea, open only to their military traffic and a few — a very few — commercial vessels operating close inshore. It was known that the Sea of Okhotsk was one of the Soviet Navy's bastion areas, heavily guarded regions where their Typhoons and Deltas and other SSBN boomers lurked, under the watchful protection of surface fleet elements and attack SSNs. It was also the downrange target area for Soviet missile tests for launches from central Asia. It was no wonder Moscow didn't like American intruders in these waters.

And here, within the shallow Sakhalinskiy Zaliv, was close aboard one of their most sensitive shipping channels, the marine highway leading from one of their most secret ports at Nikolayevsk, down the Amur Estuary, then north into the Sea of Okhotsk.

Gordon wondered again if the highly secret operation involving his four packages was somehow targeted against Nikolayevsk. It seemed likely. Most other ports and shipbuilding facilities were close enough to the open sea that U.S. submarines could come very close indeed, in some cases entering the harbors themselves to identify and photograph Russian subs and warships.

There … a fleck of green-yellow brightness, momentarily visible between the rolling surge of the waves. Something was giving off a lot of heat, visible as a fleck of brightness against the blacks and grays of the night.

"Down scope. Helm, come to two-zero-four. Make turns for eight knots."

"Helm to two-zero-four, aye. Making turns for eight knots."

Minutes dragged past. When Gordon again ordered "Up scope," and leaned into the eyepiece, he could make out the ghostly shape of the trawler ahead, a cluttered relic of a fishing boat, its diesel engine glowing brightly in the infrared. It appeared to be loitering, its engines barely turning over, less than five thousand yards away.

He still needed to verify that it wasn't a Soviet AGI trawler, one of their vast fleet of slow and decrepit-looking former commercial craft outfitted with the electronics allowing them to serve in a reconnaissance and electronic surveillance role. AGI trawlers were stationed worldwide, hanging about missile test ranges and major ports and bases, shadowing U.S. ships during fleet maneuvers and training exercises, carrying out, in fact, many of the surveillance missions American submarines had been tasked with during the past thirty years.

He checked the time… 0255 hours. It was time….

A bright light winked on from the trawler's bridge, flashing rapidly in Morse. "He's signaling," Gordon said. "K… V… R… N."

"Message confirmed," Latham said. "That's our man."

"Log it," Gordon said. "Aye, sir."

He continued studying the other vessel for another several moments, searching for something, anything amiss or suspicious. There wouldn't be, of course. He had to trust his orders, which had told him in exacting detail that he would meet a small commercial craft like this one at this spot, transmitting the code characters K-V-R-N every half hour, at five till and twenty-five after the hour.

"What's the depth under keel?"

"Eighty-nine feet, Captain," Carver replied.

He felt like he was sitting in a box. A very small box. "Okay. Let's get this over with and get the hell out. Alert the divers and tell them they're good to go."

"Aye aye, sir."

The sooner they delivered the packages and got out of there, the happier Gordon would be.

Randall leaned back against the cold, green-painted steel of the escape trunk. He was packed in with Mr. Johnson so tightly it was nearly a lover's embrace. "You ready?"

Johnson nodded, a bit nervously, Randall thought. Both wore wet suits, masks, and flippers. They wore Draeger LAR V closed-circuit rebreathers over their chests, the twenty-four-pound units almost touching as they faced each other in the trunk.

"Okay," Randall said. "Remember to breathe out on your way up."

Again a short, jerky nod for an answer.

Randall reached up for the WRT valve and turned it, then opened the vent that regulated the pressure inside the escape trunk. He kept his eyes on Johnson's face the whole time. As he understood it, the four operatives had gone through a thorough class in rebreather and submarine lock-out procedures at Camp Perry, Virginia, the CIA's training camp for field-ops agents.

But a few weeks of training was no substitute for experience… or SEAL training, which emphasized long hours of practice in tight quarters underwater, and in the infamous SEAL drownproofing, which was designed to reduce or eliminate a man's normal fear of drowning. Escape trunks on submarines were so tiny that even SEALs sometimes felt a touch of claustrophobia when they were locked inside, and the water started rising.

The water was gushing in, now, swirling about their feet… and on up their legs. Johnson was breathing in short, hard gasps, now, as he lowered his mask across his eyes and placed his mouthpiece between clenched teeth.

"Relax, Mr. Johnson," Randall told him. He tried to reach up and reassuringly pat the man's shoulder, but the space inside the escape trunk was too restricted. "Just a walk in the park."

Another nod.

"Slow your breathing. Long, slow breaths." Again the nod… but Johnson's breathing did steady a bit.

SEALs were sometimes tapped for this sort of mission— "baby-sitting," they called it, helping field operatives of any of several intelligence services to get from the submarine to the shore. Each SEAL on this op was responsible for one of the CIA men; and Johnson belonged to Randall.

The escape trunk was two-thirds full now, and Randall closed the vent. The water kept rising, however, the pressure building, until at last it churned and bubbled up past their chins. Reaching high, Randall hit the blow valve, then opened the outer hatch. Water surged over their heads, and Randall squeezed his mask tight on his face, then cleared it. Working more by feel than by sight in the dark water — the light in the escape trunk hardly seemed to penetrate the water at all — he guided Johnson up the trunk and out into the open water.

Emerging from the thirty-inch hatch was like escaping from prison. Suddenly, the ocean yawned about him, black and empty. Don McCluskey had already locked out, along with Sergei. Randall could sense the other men as shadows above the deck forward, just behind the looming black cliff of Pittsburgh's sail.

He closed and dogged the deck hatch. Nelson and Smith would be coming through next, followed by Fitch and

Grigor. Touching Johnson lightly on the leg, he started up, kicking slowly, making sure the CIA operative was coming along.

This was the riskiest part of the procedure. Draeger re-breathers had been chosen over standard SCUBA gear for the obvious reason that they didn't make as much noise — a critical consideration in this area that might well be crisscrossed by Soviet sonar and sound detectors. But Draeger units were dangerous at depths much below thirty-five feet, and Pittsburgh's deck was that deep or deeper than that when the submarine was at periscope depth. If the sub moved any higher at all, its sail would break the surface, and instantly register on a dozen Soviet search radars blanketing the entire region.

Together, Randall and Johnson rose for the surface, visible as a kind of rippling, ultramarine movement in the darkness straight overhead, contrasted against the black, wedge-narrow cliff of the submarine's conning tower. He could sense Johnson beginning to tighten up, and moved closer. A common panic reaction to the claustrophobia of working underwater at night — not to mention the claustrophobic hell of being locked into a submarine escape trunk— was for the swimmer to hold his breath as he kicked wildly for the surface.

But at thirty-five feet, the human body was being squeezed by the pressure of all of the water piled up above him, and the air in his lungs was compressed as well. Strike out for the surface without breathing out, and that air would expand… violently….

Johnson started to kick, stroking for the surface. Randall grabbed hold, pulled him close, and drove the rigid fingers of his right hand into Johnson's side, just to the left of the small oxygen bottle riding below his Draeger chest pack.

The blow couldn't carry much force underwater, but it was hard enough to startle Johnson, who lost his mouthpiece and expelled a large belch of air bubbling toward the surface. He thrashed for a moment, until Randall placed the mouthpiece back between his teeth and he began breathing again. He nodded, and the two resumed their ascent, more slowly this time.

This, Randall thought, amused, is why they have us babysit. I hope he's better at spy stuff than he is at diving!

Moments later, their heads broke the surface. McCluskey and Sergei were nearby, illuminated by the faint green glow from a chemical light stick, and clinging to the lifelines on a beach-ball-sized float bobbing in the swell.

No words were spoken, though the chances of being overheard were remote. The sky was overcast except for a few thin patches through which a few stars and the silver glow of a setting moon in the west were just visible. A bell was ringing somewhere in the distance at irregular intervals — the bell atop a navigation buoy, most likely. The water was oily, chill, and carried a faint industrial stink with the normal smells of salt and seaweed.

And he could also hear the throb of a diesel engine to his left. Turning in the water, he could just make out a shape, slightly less dark than its surroundings, moving with the swell of the waves. A single white navigational light gleamed at one end, casting pale reflections on the water. That would be Stenki, their destination.

McCluskey was already unshipping the IBS, "Inflatable Boat, Small" in the Navy lexicon, which had been stored as a tightly wrapped package raised to the surface by the float, but which was expanding now as it inflated from its attached CO₂ bottle. As the rubber boat flopped open, the two SEALs released the last of the lines keeping it folded up, then held on to it as it reached full size. They helped Johnson and Sergei roll into the raft, then clung to the safety lines on the side to keep it from drifting away. Nelson surfaced with Smith a few moments later, as the SEALs unshipped the small, 7.5-horsepower outboard motor and fastened it on the stern mount.

Working in the swell, with no anchor or safety lines, was a tricky operation. If a sudden surge caught them unprepared and the outboard motor went to the bottom, they and the mission would be screwed — an inglorious end to this exercise in daring and wet darkness. They secured it with lanyards, just in case, and worked carefully to bolt it down tight on the mounting brackets.

Nelson and Smith had surfaced with another bundle of equipment, this one a waterproof satchel holding weapons and the CIA team's special gear. This was transferred to the raft, while Randall began bundling the swim gear and re-breathers together and securing them in the bottom of the boat, then breaking out their weapons. The SEALs were packing H&K MP5 submachine guns, specially modified to operate reliably despite immersion in seawater.

Randall glanced up into the dark sky. This time out, there was no spy aircraft recording his every movement for transmission back to some Pentagon basement. He imagined the REMFs and chair-warmers would be peeking in via satellite — there were a number of military reconnaissance satellites aloft that could give fair resolution even through light cloud cover.

But whether they could see him or not, at least there would be no micromanagement this time. Randall smiled, and suppressed the wry urge to flip a middle finger at the sky. Even the best spysats couldn't resolve that much detail.

By the time Fitch and the second Russian, Grigor, surfaced, they were ready to cast off.

The whole operation had been practiced again and again before the team had been flown to Adak. Still without words, the SEALs fired up the motor, which was carefully muffled to give off only the softest of purrs, then cast off the last line securing the IBS to the float, pulled the valve on the float to collapse and sink it, and swung the tiller about until the heavily laden IBS was nosing across the waves toward the waiting trawler. The IBS was normally rated as a seven-man raft; it was jam-packed with eight and their gear.

Randall couldn't shake a certain darkness of spirit. It was an unsettling feeling, motoring into the empty night this way. When they'd practiced this maneuver at the amphibious base at Coronado, the float had been attached by a safety line to a mock-up of a submarine conning tower. This time, though, there was no lifeline, and the terrible risk that if anything went wrong, they were going to have a damned hard time finding their way back to the Pittsburgh.

More unsettling, though, were the human factors. Johnson and his comrades, so precise, so methodical, so melodramatic in a low-keyed way. They might have been playing some sort of involved and preposterous game.

He tried not to let himself think about the might-bes, concentrating instead on the mission as it had been planned out and rehearsed. The Pittsburgh would be waiting for them when—when—they returned.

At least they'd damned well better be. The four SEALs were a hell of a long way from home, in a place — the kid Benson was right about this — where they had no right to be. The submarine was their only ticket out of here, the only thing between them and death or a cell in Moscow's dread Lubyanka Prison — or a slave camp in the Siberian Gulag.

That waiting trawler up ahead could so easily be a trap for the CIA agents.

But, of course, that possibility was one reason the babysitters were here. The packages needed the extra bit of experienced help getting to the surface… and they just might need some firepower at the contact point. SEALs were very, very good at providing firepower, in large and devastating doses.

He just hoped that it wasn't going to be necessary.