Los Angeles Class

18

"Up scope."

Gordon peered into the periscope eyepiece again, walking the scope in a slow, steady circle. There was no sign of the SEALs and their charges, no trace of their black raft against the dark sea. Under IR, though, they should have been visible if they were still close by. Human body temperature, even muffled by wet suits and combat gear, contrasted sharply with the cold water.

But there was nothing, which meant that they were on their way. In the distance, still at a bearing of two-zero-four, was the phantom shape of Sierra Two-seven, dimly marked by a light on her stern.

He still wondered at the possibility of a trap. Like most Navy men, Gordon had a less-than-perfect respect for the capabilities of the various intelligence agencies, at least at the gold-braid level. They tended to be self-sustaining, self-

justifying, and self-serving, unwilling to admit mistakes, accept oversight, or acknowledge responsibility when things went wrong. The eighties had brought forward one spy scandal in the American intelligence services after another, making the ancient joke about "military intelligence" being an oxymoron more apt than ever. The Walker family in the Navy, Aldrich Ames in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, Ronald Pelton in the National Security Agency… what other moles or agents still operated unnoticed within the inner sanctums of the CIA, NSA, or in sensitive positions with the military? "Down scope."

Latham looked a question at him, his face bathed in the red glow of the control room. "They're away," Gordon told him. "Mr. Carver, what's the depth beneath our keel?"

"Depth beneath keel forty-eight feet, sir."

He exchanged a glance with Latham.

"The waiting's always the hardest part, sir."

"Yeah. I just don't like sitting here feeling like a whale in a bathtub. Helm, bring us around to three-five-five, ahead dead slow."

"Helm to course three-five-five, ahead dead slow, aye, sir."

"I want us pointed in the right direction," he told Latham, "in case we have to scoot."

"Good plan, sir."

"Sonar, Conn. Any further contacts?"

"Conn, Sonar. Negative on new contacts, sir."

"Okay. Then we wait."

The port side of the trawler loomed up out of the night, a gray wall of peeling paint, splinters, draped nets, and tires tied to the gunwales as fenders. The name, in large Cyrillic lettering on her stern, was Katarina. Randall cut the IBS's engine, letting the boat drift free, coming broadside to.

The SEALs already had their H&Ks out and ready, the first round chambered. There didn't seem to be any activity aboard the fishing boat, which didn't speak well for their watchkeeping abilities.

"Yuri?" Sergei called softly. "Padahyedeete!"

Several dark shapes materialized along the gunwale, AK-47s in hand. Randall heard the snick of bolts being drawn, and breathed a deep and death-cold oh, shit….

"Ktah eedyat!" a deep voice called from the fishing boat's bridge.

A demand that they identify themselves.

"Yanvehr l'yahd," Sergei called back. January ice.

"Vesna ottepel' " the voice on deck replied, giving the countersign. Spring thaw.

Then the AKs were being raised, and a line flicked down out of the night, splashing in the water alongside the IBS. The SEALs grabbed the line and hauled the boat alongside the trawler, as helping hands reached down to help the men on board.

Fitch and McCluskey stayed in the IBS, while Randall and Nelson went on board. Randall hadn't been sure what to expect… but the five men waiting on board, except for their weapons, looked like fairly typical fishermen anywhere in the world, in jeans and pullovers, T-shirts, and slickers. Most were bearded. One wore an odd-looking white sailor's beret with a blue pom on the top, a relic, apparently, of earlier days in the Russian Navy. Another wore a heavy leather apron, the sort worn by butchers or fishmongers.

All in all, they didn't look much like KGB types… or Russian military, for that matter. A pile of fish on the after-deck, and the associated stink, added to the reassurance of the scene.

"Dobre vecher" Sergei said, smiling. " Vih Stenki?"

"Da," the biggest of the sailors said. Then, in grinning English, he added, "Welcome aboard!"

Johnson turned to Randall. "You can go now."

"They are welcome too!" the boat's captain boomed. "We show good time, da?"

"We have work to do," Johnson replied. "And so do they."

"Da, da. Well, we are on our way, then. Before the patrols come, da?"

"You're sure everything is all right?" Randall asked Johnson.

Johnson lowered his voice. "Russian underground," he said, quietly so only Randall could hear. "Antisoviet, but you can't always pick the quality of your friends, if you know what I mean. But we'll be okay."

"We'll be here in forty-eight hours," he told the Katarina's captain.

"Da! Da skaravah!" See you soon.

"Da v'danya" Randall replied. The captain's eyes lit up and he guffawed. "Your Russian is being good like mine

English, da?"

Randall followed Nelson back down the side of the trawler and clambered into the raft, much roomier now that four of its passengers were gone. Together, the SEALs helped pass the rest of the agents' equipment up to the trawler's deck. Then with a final round of das v'danyas, the trawler's diesel engine fired to life, the SEALs engaged their outboard, and the two craft parted, the Russian trawler toward the invisible coast to the south, and the IBS for the place where they'd left the Pittsburgh.

The friendly calls in the night, he found, were not all that reassuring. He was pretty sure they were legitimate, despite his earlier concerns; if they were part of some kind of Soviet antiespionage sting operation, their chance to bag four SEALs was slipping away right now. But he was less than impressed with his glimpse of the underground, if that's what these fishermen were. The loud, overly friendly, overly exuberant attitude of the captain had been such an obvious put-on, especially when contrasted against the taciturn, almost surly glares of the other four. If he'd had to guess, he'd have classified those five as dockworkers. Or as common thugs, rather than fishermen.

He hoped Johnson and the others knew what they were doing.

Now, though, came the tough part of the operation… finding a submarine that was going out of its way to remain invisible in all this ocean. They motored back along their outbound course, but there was no way to retrace their course precisely, not with the vagaries of wind, wave, and current.

The SEALs had brought a small piece of technology, however, to help them in the search. After reaching what was probably the approximate location of the submerged boat, he broke open a plastic case stowed in the IBS's stern and produced a device the size and shape of a yo-yo, complete with an electrical cord for a string. Attached at the other end was a box with a button. McCluskey took the yo-yo and lowered it over the side. Randall pressed the key—click, click-click, click … repeating the sequence at irregular intervals, and stopping after five times.

Sound, of course, traveled quite well underwater, and sound was a submarine's worst enemy. If Pittsburgh's sonar could pick up Randall's signals, it was a sure bet that any Soviet underwater listening devices would as well.

The signal, though, was deliberately simple, the Morse letters E-I-E. To the uninitiated, they might sound like random noise, would probably be overlooked entirely.

Rodriguez aboard the Pittsburgh, however, would be listening for exactly that signal, and his computer could be set to sort the clicks out of any background garbage more precisely than even the best-trained human ear.

With luck, Pittsburgh was already very near, and getting closer.

It would have been simpler, of course, to have secured the float by a safety line to Pittsburgh's conning tower and homed in on that … but if a Russian ASW patrol had shown up and Pittsburgh had been forced to run, float and line vibrating in the conning tower's wake would have created an unmistakable and easily tracked sonic signature.

And so they had to do it the hard way.

After perhaps five minutes had passed, he pressed the button again. Click, click-click, click. And repeat. And wait a longer period of time, and repeat.

McCluskey touched his elbow. "There, sir."

Dimly seen in the overcast darkness, but very faintly luminescent in the oily waters, a single periscope rose from the swell, its surface dappled a camouflage dark gray on medium gray. They motored closer, and Nelson rolled over the side, taking a line with him which he secured to the boat's sail just beneath the surface. The others began donning their rebreather gear and making ready to collapse and secure the IBS.

It was going to be damned good to be safely home once more.

"Divers are aboard, Captain," Latham reported.

"Let's get her out of here," Gordon told the XO. "I want a bit more space between keel and bottom."

"That'll feel damned good, sir. It's pretty tight in here."

"Maneuvering, Conn. I want turns for twelve knots."

"Conn, Maneuvering. Turns for twelve knots, aye aye."

The four SEALs entered the Control Room from aft, wet, and looking both tired and a bit bedraggled. Gordon caught Randall's eye as the other three filed past, heading forward and down to the torpedo room. "How did it go, Mr. Randall?"

"Well enough, I guess, sir," Randall replied. "They looked like a pretty rough bunch. Streetfighters and brawlers, rather than fishermen, is my guess." He shrugged. "But everything seemed up and up. They knew the passwords."

"I suppose the spooks know what they're doing."

"You don't sound all that sure, sir."

"This vessel is at stake, Mr. Randall."

"I understand, sir."

"It's 0040, Mr. Randall," Gordon said, glancing at the big time readout on the forward bulkhead. "It'll be tight getting you in to do any useful work at your AO tonight, and still have time to get clear before daylight."

"Frankly, sir, I think we need some downtime. We did our swimming thing for tonight."

"Understood." What Randall and the other SEALs had just done — locking out, deploying an IBS, making contact with Stenki, returning to the "Burgh, and locking back aboard — and all with the possibility of combat or missing the pickup hanging over them — was enough stress for anyone for one night, even a SEAL. "Get some sleep. We'll plan an approach to Objective Mongol tomorrow."

"Thank you, sir."

"Conn, Sonar," sounded over the intercom. "Sonar, Conn. Go ahead."

"Multiple contacts, sir, bearing two-nine-five through three-three-zero. I have three… no, make that four contacts. Designating Sierra Two-eight and Sierra Two-nine. The other two are old friends, Captain. Sierra Two-one and Sierra Two-four. I make them as light ASW assets, frigates or large patrol boats. On a southerly heading… making turns for about fifteen knots."

"How far?"

"I'm picking this up through a CZ, Captain. Hard to say, but my guess is thirty to thirty-five miles." A convergence zone.

Sound waves propagated well through water, but the colder the water, the slower the wave. Cold water tended to bend the moving sound wave downward, refracting it the same way a lens refracted light.

Increasing water pressure, however, tended to refract the wave back up… though at a much lesser rate than the decreasing temperature. Eventually, though, the wave headed back toward the surface… to be bent downward once more when the pressure was low and the temperature dropping.

The result was a kind of a sine wave through the ocean, between the warm surface layers of the water and the ice-cold depths. A listening sonar could detect undersea sounds from astonishing distances, if that sonar was in the convergence zone of the sound, with the wave passing through that depth at that point. If the listener was a little ahead of the wave, or a little behind it, in the empty trough between crests, the sound would pass by and never be detected.

The oncoming Soviet vessels posed no immediate threat. They were an hour away or more, at least, and Pittsburgh would be long gone from the area by the time they could arrive. In any case, their due-south heading was not directly toward the Pittsburgh, but toward a point some miles to the west. Nor could they hear the American boat. While convergence zones worked both ways, the Russians were moving too fast to be able to hear much, if anything, through their sonars.

But Gordon couldn't help wondering what they were doing, and why. Light ASW assets… on routine patrol? Unlikely. A patrol would be conducted at speeds low enough to allow them to use sonar.

Moving into position for an ambush, perhaps, an ambush directed at the Pittsburgh? Or — disquieting thought — at the resistance fishing trawler, and the CIUA men aboard her?

Whatever they were, they were not good news.

"Engineering!" Captain First Rank Anatoli Vesilevich Vetrov shouted into the microphone. "More power!"

"Sir," Filatev, the Engineering Officer replied, "we are at one hundred ten percent now, and I can hold it here for only a short time. The cooling assembly…

"I want one hundred fifteen percent on the reactor now, damn you, or I'll see you in Hell!.. "

The Krasnoyarskiy's captain was aware of the silence on the control deck, of the eyes fixed on him as he leaned against the housing of the vessel's Number 1 periscope. He sensed the fear there. Good….

"One… one hundred fifteen percent on the reactor, Captain. I will require the order in writing."

"It's logged," Vetrov spat, and he clicked off the intercom.

"Stations!" he bellowed at the watching bridge crew. "We will not catch the American dogs with you gawking like schoolchildren! There are still billets within the Gulag for men who shirk their duty!"

He caught the hard gaze of Starpom Felix Nikolaevich Salekhov, his Executive Officer, and watched the other man's mouth harden into a thin line. No matter. Vetrov required no man's approval. He required only obedience… and results.

Vetrov closed his eyes and felt the rising throb in the Krasnoyarskiy's steel decking, felt the silent shudder through his hull as his pace through the depths increased. It required daring to command one of the State's newest and most deadly attack submarines, and he would show the old men at Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok that he had the daring it took.

Anatoli Vesilevich had been in the Navy for twenty-five years, nearly all of them in submarines. He was, as they said,

well connected in the service. His uncle on his mother's side was none other than the now-legendary Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union S.G. Gorshkov, the man who'd single-handedly dragged the Soviet Navy out of the Dark Ages during his tenure from 1967 until his retirement just two years ago.

Vetrov allowed himself a wolfish grin. One of old Uncle Sasha's personal crusades had been the elimination of the nepotism and favoritism corrupting the entire Navy from top to bottom. He'd made an issue of not helping those of his relatives who were also in the service, especially those who, like Anatoli, were on the fast command track.

Small matter. Gorshkov might have been a full member of the Central Committee, a deputy minister of defense, and the Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, but there were some facts of life in Russia that not even he could change, not completely. Anatoli Vesilevich was ambitious, and he had a keen eye for politics… and for power, which was much the same thing. He'd fought for command within the State's submarine service, and his family connections had prised open tightly locked doors more than once. One did not need to call God in order to invoke His power. The mere knowledge that a quiet word in a certain quarter could end a career, ruin a reputation, or result in transfer to coastal patrol duties in Novaya Zemlya was more than sufficient.

Even so, it had not been easy. Diplomacy had never been one of Vetrov's stronger points — with his family connections, why should he need it? — and he'd made more than a few enemies in his climb up the ladder of rank and command. That unfortunate incident in '77 with that base commander's young, pretty, and very bored wife at Severodvinsk, for instance, had come close to leaving him beached, and his first command the following year had been a creaking rustbucket of an SK, a conventionally powered boat of the type the Americans called Foxtrot.

He'd needed to pull quite a few strings after that to get transferred beyond that bastard's reach, to the Soviet Red Banner Pacific Fleet, and the headquarters station at Vladivostok. His next command had been of a Kal'mar class PLARB — the West called them Delta Is — first of the Soviet Union's true ICBM missile boats and the largest submarine in the world when it was first launched in 1972.

There was enormous prestige in being commander of a doomsday machine, one of the Rodina's PLARB missile boats, which could incinerate western cities within a few hours' notice. But Vetrov had hungered for more. PLARBs were vastly powerful and their command carried with it considerable prestige, but Soviet strategic and tactical doctrine limited them to the closely guarded bastions in Okhotsk, the Barents and Kara Seas, and beneath the Arctic ice. A PLARB skipper was hemmed in by regulations and the prying of his zampolit, his political officer. In fact, he was little more than a deliveryman, a truck driver at the wheel of an extraordinarily expensive and dangerous vehicle almost entirely directed by others.

It was the difference between the pilot of a Tupelov Tu-26 strategic bomber, and the pilot of a high-performance MiG-29 interceptor. Vetrov was, by nature, a hunter, a predator… and one did not exercise such instincts cowering in a bastion, shielded by ice and protected by others.

Still using his web of connections throughout the Fleet, connections that would have been impossible without the mere existence of his powerful uncle, he'd managed a transfer to the hunters. In 1983, he'd won command of the 50 Let SSR — the name translated as "Fifty Years of the Soviet Union," and under his captaincy the vessel had garnered an impressive list of efficiency awards and honors, including one awarded personally by none other than Uncle Sasha himself.

He'd commanded two more attack boats since… including one of the hot little interceptors NATO called Alfas — the Zolotaya Ryba, or "Golden Fish" as Russian submariners called him, because of his incredible development costs. He'd nearly ended his career then, as well, when an American Los Angeles submarine had picked him up on sonar and dogged his baffles once when he'd been on patrol guarding a PLARB bastion in the Chukchi Sea. He'd tried every trick he knew to shake the Yankee… and nothing had worked until, at last, he'd been forced to outrun it, which, of course, meant he'd had to leave his assigned patrol station.

The matter had been satisfactorily covered up, however. And now, finally, he was captain of the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets.

The Americans, he been told, called the vessel Mike. He was the largest and most deadly hunter-killer submarine in the world — displacing 9,700m tons submerged, and with a 122-meter length that dwarfed the Americans' Los Angeles boats. Slower than an Alfa, which could make forty-five-knot dashes submerged, he was still able to manage a respectable thirty-eight knots, faster than any Western submarine. He was better armed, too, with both 533mm and 650mm torpedo tubes forward, and launch tubes for the SS-N-21 cruise missile, equivalent to the American Tomahawk, as well.

Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets and his brothers were still experimental, technically test platforms for a whole array of new technologies and design elements. Privately, many captains believed the boat to represent design elements stolen from the Americans, but Vetrov ridiculed that idea publicly with every opportunity he found. The Soviet Union was capable of creating dazzling new weapons on her own, without recourse to theft or dealings with traitors.

And if, as the whispers claimed, Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets had been stolen from American Los Angeles class vessel plans and specifications… why had he been deployed on this mission, to track, cripple, and capture one of their Los Angeles boats?…

A boat that was, he was confident, in every way inferior to his own.

It was difficult sometimes to read between the lines of one's orders, but these had been clear enough. An American SSN had been tracked entering the Sea of Okhotsk, and was now operating off the northern mouth of the Tatar Straits, in the vicinity of Litke and Puir, and uncomfortably close to the big shipbuilding base and naval port up the Amur at Nikolayevsk. His orders were extremely specific: The American intruder was to be forced to the surface, trapped against the Far Eastern coast, and captured at all costs — captured, not destroyed.

There might well be technological secrets to be gleaned from such a prize, but Vetrov knew that the real prize here would be the political humiliation of the old enemy, the United States, and the final vindication and triumph in the Soviet Navy's long struggle with the American foe.

And for Vetrov, personally, there would be revenge for the affair in the Chukchi Sea. There were men in the high command—those old men in Vladivostok—who felt he owed his current position entirely to the influence of his famous uncle. He'd been called incompetent, lickboot, climber, and worse.

He would show them. He would show them all….

"Captain! Reactor now at one hundred fifteen percent," his Executive Officer informed him. "We are making turns for thirty-eight knots!"

"Excellent," he replied. "We are going hunting, Felix Nikolaevich. We are going hunting after the most deadly game of all!"

O'Brien glanced at his watch and, for the first time during the cruise, had to stop and think hard about whether it was almost three in the afternoon… or three in the morning. He'd not been through the control room for a number of watches, now — his duties simply hadn't taken him up to the deck immediately above this one in longer than he could remember.

He had a feeling it was morning. He had that hollow-behind-the-eyes feeling he always got when he was up in the middle of the night, standing the mid-watch, or staying up all night during his school years. With his rhythms now regulated by Pittsburgh's eighteen-hour day, he tended to feel a bit log-headed all the time.

He hoped the condition was temporary. He felt like he was tired all the time these days, but wasn't sure whether that was because of having to adapt to the shorter day-night cycle, or because with his regular duties, his watch schedule, and the studying he was doing for his torpedo-room quals, he simply wasn't getting enough sleep.

"Hey, Ben? Is it day or night?" he asked, still staring at his watch.

Benson looked up from his coffee. "What does it matter?"

"C'mon, you've got one of those number watch thingies…. "

"It's called digital, Baldy. You have numbers on your wrist, too. It's just that they're old-fashioned analog, and don't come in nice, discrete packets like mine." He looked at his wrist. "At the tone, the time will be… 0250 hours … and thirty seconds… ahhnnn."

"Zero-dark-thirty, right." He nodded, glad to have his inner clock vindicated. "Thanks."

"Why do you want to know?"

"Oh, I don't know. I still remember sunlight once in a while. I like to imagine that it's up there, shining right now, even if I can't see it."

"Still shining on the other side of the planet, Doug. Not that it makes a bit of difference."

"What's the matter, Ben? You sound down."

Benson shrugged. "Ahh. I just get to wondering why I put up with this shit."

"Life in the boats?"

"That ain't so bad. You get used to it."

"The people?"

"Most of them are pretty good guys." He managed a small grin. "Most of 'em."

"Doershner?"

"Ahh, Doershner's a jerk. He gets on your nerves, sure, but he's mostly harmless."

O'Brien chuckled. Most of the men on board had been reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an oddball, comic science fiction book almost as popular among the crew as the usual collection of crotch novels. There was something about the work's quirky, off-the-bulkhead humor that appealed to the men. "Mostly harmless" was one of the book's happily memorable lines.

"So what's the problem, man?"

"Nothing." His face revealed the lie behind the blunt-spoken word. "It's just, well, the usual shit, I suppose."

"What are we doing here, and all that?"

"Don't you wonder about it sometimes, Doug? Why they put us out here in the Russians' backyard?"

"Hey, it's what we do! It's why we're here."

"Is it?" He shook his head. "I'm not so sure. I've been thinking about this a long time. A long time. And it gets worse each time I go out. I think I'm gonna get out."

"What, out of the Navy?" O'Brien asked, puzzled.

"How?"

"No, out of the Service. This is a volunteer outfit, you know. You don't have to stay if you can't take it."

"Aw, man! You can't do that!" Of all the men aboard, O'Brien probably felt closest to Benson.

Benson looked at him coldly. "Just watch me, Doug. Just watch me."

"But you can take it. I've seen you. You get on board a boat better than I ever could!"

"That's not the point. If I was aboard a destroyer, I wouldn't be sneaking around in the USSR's territorial waters, and maybe starting a war or something."

"The Old Man said we were outside of their waters. We only recognize the international twelve-mile limit, and he said we were, like, thirty miles or so offshore."

"We've had this talk before. That's not the point." He folded his arms. "It's this damned back-and-forth with the other guys, like it was some kind of obscene game. It's not enough that both sides have nuclear arsenals that could wipe out the whole human race several times over. It's not enough that a fucking computer error or a burned-out twenty-nine-cent transistor could blow us all up someday. No, we have to go stand eyeball-to-eyeball with them and rattle their cage. Well, I've had it. Next time we put into port, I'm outta here."

O'Brien felt as though Benson were attacking him somehow. Because he didn't feel the same way? Because he was supporting a position Benson felt was morally wrong? He was uncomfortable with the thought, and wasn't sure why.

"Well, I'll miss you, Ben."

Benson sighed, eyes closed. "I'll miss you. Hell, I'll miss this life. It's pretty good, in a lot of ways. The people are good to work with. I'm not sure how well I'd fit in aboard a target."

"Kind of strange, thinking of holding exercises with you trying to find us."

"That's the way of it, kid. Set a fox to catch a fox. That's how they recycle sub drivers, you know."

"Yeah. What time you going on duty?"

"Sixteen hundred hours." He gestured with the coffee. "This is breakfast."

"Me too. Think we'll get used to it?"

"Me, I'm thinking about getting used to a real, solid, twenty-four-in-a-day day, y'know what I mean? Aboard ship, or at a duty station ashore, somewhere. That'll be the life, man."

"You'll hate it."

"Don't tell me that. Let me enjoy my fantasies." He looked hard at O'Brien. "You should come with me."

"Nah."

"Why not? You were pretty miserable when this cruise started out, as I recall."

"Same's any other nub, I guess. I don't know. I feel like I'm starting to fit in."

"A whole year before you get your dolphins. That's a long time."

"I don't want to go this far, and back out. Besides, I feel like I have a lot more in common with the guys, now."

"Well, let me know if you change your mind."

"Sure."

The conversation lapsed after that.

O'Brien already felt as though he had less in common with his friend than he'd had before, a sense that Benson was a them, like the SEALs on board or the spooks, as opposed to an us.

The feeling was more than a little unsettling.