Los Angeles Class

22

"I don't think we're going to work our way in any closer," Gordon said, face pressed up close against the Number 18 periscope's eye guard. "That place is way too lively for my blood."

He slowly panned the scope, studying the town. In infrared, the clapboard-and-shingle walls of the houses were plainly visible in shades of green and yellow. The heat signatures of people were brighter yellow, while the engine blocks of automobiles and several Zil trucks shone white.

Latham, Randall, and Master Chief Warren were watching the video feed from the periscope on one of the control-room monitors. "I like it better when you can get shots of girls sunbathing on the beach," Warren said.

"Not this time, COB," Gordon said. "We'll see what we can do back in California."

"Make it a nude beach, sir," Scobey said from the chart table, and several of the men in the control room chuckled.

"Request noted, Big C," Gordon said. "Fill out the forms and send them through channels."

"Those trucks," Randall said, breaking the mood, "they look military."

"Hard to tell with this resolution," Gordon said. "Those people on the beach might be soldiers, though."

"Who else is going to be running around on a beach at zero-dark-thirty?" Warren asked.

Gordon continued walking the scope. The town wasn't very large — a small huddle of ramshackle-looking houses and a few larger buildings, with a lot of clutter that gave the place a run-down and ill-kempt look. The waterfront consisted of a few tottering piers and pilings, with some decrepit fishing smacks and trawlers moored alongside. At least there were no military vessels — none that he could see, at any rate. Rodriguez had tracked several small ASW craft through this area two nights ago, but they appeared to have moved on.

There was no sign of the fishing craft code-named "Stenki." The craft moored at Vlasjevo's waterfront were all too small.

If the activity concentrated in the southern part of the Zaliv was indeed part of a tap aimed at the Pittsburgh, it was almost certain that Johnson and his confederates had been captured.

But Gordon didn't want to abandon them without at least an attempt to find out what had happened… or bring them back off the beach.

During the past fifteen hours, they'd worked the boat slowly up the coast, moving out into deeper water for the dangerous, daylight hours, then slipping in to the rendezvous point after dark. When Stenki failed to show at 2200 and again at 2300, Gordon had ordered maneuvering and helm to inch the submarine in toward the coast closer still, edging along a slowly shoaling bottom until they were just off the fishing village of Vlasjevo. In water so shallow that the top of Pittsburgh's sail was just beneath the surface, Gordon brought the vessel to a silent hover and watched through the periscope, searching for some trace of the missing trawler.

With no trace of the boat to be seen in the village itself, he gave the necessary orders to set the Pittsburgh in motion, moving slowly west, parallel to the coast.

Two miles west of the town, he walked the scope around, centering at last on something glowing. "Mr. Randall? What do you make of that?"

Randall studied the object on the monitor closely. "Hard to say, sir. It looks like the Stenki… about the right size, anyway. But it looks like she was burned."

"That yellow glow on the screen means there are pieces that are still pretty hot," Gordon explained. "Up forward… that looks like a mast or a boom that fell across her deck, and most of the superstructure has been burned."

"Funny angle," Warren said. "Is she aground?"

"Looks like. I think there must be a sandbar or something there, and she was run aground… maybe deliberately."

"They could have gotten off," Latham said, but he didn't sound hopeful. "If a patrol boat or something was chasing them, set them afire, maybe, they might've run aground deliberately, jumped overboard, and made it to shore."

"A lot of maybes, there," Randall said. He looked at Gordon. "I'd still like to check it out, sir."

Gordon gave him a humorless smile. "Feeling responsible for the packages, Lieutenant?"

"Well, yes, sir. I am. It was my responsibility to get them to Stenki… and my responsibility to get the Americans back off again."

"I suggest you detail your two men. I can give them a couple of hours, no more. We're dangerously exposed here, and I want to be gone well before daylight."

"I'd like to go myself, sir."

"Negative. You've still got two broken ribs."

"Easy swim, sir. I've done worse."

"Not off of my boat, you won't. Or shall I call Doc Pyter up here?"

"That… won't be necessary." He obviously knew he would lose that encounter.

"Wise choice. Doc told me you might want to go swimming again, and threatened to have your hide off if you did. You need a full twenty-four hours out of decompression before you go in again."

"This is a shallow swim, sir. I wouldn't need decompress time…. "

"The answer is still negative. You want to call your people up here?"

"Aye aye. Sir."

Gordon returned to the periscope. It didn't look like there was any activity around the beached wreck of the trawler, but he wasn't going to bet money on the possibility of it being unguarded. "Down scope."

He met with McCluskey, Fitch, and Randall ten minutes later in front of the inner hatch for the forward escape trunk. "You both understand," Randall was telling them, "that the skipper can't hang around more than two hours. You get back before then, or you might need to hitchhike home."

"I'll hold the boat here as long as I can," Gordon added. "But there's a hell of a lot of ASW activity north and east of us, and we cannot afford to be in water this shallow when the sun comes up. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sure do, sir."

"Okay. Good luck."

"Thank you, sir," McCluskey said, opening the hatch. He grinned at Randall. "Don't you worry, sir. We'll be back in two shakes."

"You'd better be, Chief. I don't want you guys leaving me alone on this tub with all these submariners."

"They seem like a pretty decent group," McCluskey said. "I don't think you'll have a problem."

When the hatch clanged shut, and they could hear the hiss of the blow and flood valves filling the chamber, Gordon lightly touched Randall on the shoulder. "It's hard sending others out to do your bidding, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir. I didn't quite realize how hard."

"Been there," Gordon said simply. "Done that. And bought the damned T-shirt."

"At least you were able to look over my shoulder, sir," Randall replied. "When I was in Lebanon? It's hell just watching them go, and not knowing if you'll see them again."

"I know how you feel. C'mon. The coffee's on me."

McCluskey swam the last hundred yards.

The two SEALs had locked out of the sub without incident, retrieving their rubber duck from a storage compartment atop the sail. With the IBS inflated, and an extra set of semi-closed-circuit SCUBA gear stowed aboard, they set off toward the coast, two miles distant.

With the outboard muffled, they were able to come in fairly close to the wreck without being heard, but McCluskey didn't want to give any sentries aboard a chance of seeing them, especially if they were equipped with low-light optics or IR. He left Fitch in the raft and rolled silently over the side, scarcely raising a ripple as he hit the water.

Swimming just beneath the surface, he kept kicking through the darkness, relying on his wrist compass to maintain his course. After covering an estimated sixty yards, he poked his head above the surface long enough to get his bearings. The night was clear, the waning moon not yet risen, but there was light enough from the sky and stars to dimly illuminate the wrecked trawler's silhouette. The offshore current had swept him a bit to the east; he adjusted his heading and kept swimming.

When he surfaced next, the bottom was shoaling rapidly, and the wreck of the trawler lay just ahead, the hull heeled over at a twenty-degree angle, and most of the superstructure charred and blasted. Carefully, he swam around the stern. His name, in Cyrillic lettering across the transom, was Katarina. It was Stenki, beyond a doubt.

It was also clear that he'd died fighting. Up close, his wooden freeboard was stitched with bullet holes and splintered gouges. It looked as though larger-caliber weapons had been used as well… 20mm cannon shells, or larger, had slammed into the deck housing and exploded.

Carefully, he pulled himself up out of the water and rolled over the gunwale.

The stink of smoke still clung to the wreck, and some of the blackened timbers forward were still smoldering, hot enough to light up the IR scope aboard the Pittsburgh. The afterdeck was completely trashed, a tangle of torn and partly burned netting, wreckage from a collapsed mast, smashed-open crates, and even some dead fish, adding considerably to the aroma of the wreck. He broke out a flashlight to give the deck a closer inspection… and to keep from stumbling over wreckage in the dark.

There was no sign of the occupants, save, possibly, one. All the way astern, just inboard of the transom, the sharply tilted deck was marred by two black stains the size of dinner plates. Under the light, the black residue turned rusty; it was almost certainly blood.

Johnson and Smith might be alive yet… but they would not be making their rendezvous. Switching off the light, McCluskey pulled his mask down and slipped once more into the cold, black water.

"We've done all we can do," Gordon said. "I'm declaring this op a wash and heading back for the barn."

Gordon, Randall, and Latham were in the control room, standing at one of the two chart tables aft of the periscopes. The current chart showed the bowl-shaped curve of the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv, and Pittsburgh's current position.

The Hollywood image of a nuclear submarine's combat center/control room tended to stress electronics, computers, and high-tech gadgetry. Gordon had seen at least one recent movie which showed a submarine's computer-display chart table, complete with blinking lights marking the vessel's course.

The truth was a lot less dramatic, more practical, and less failure-prone. A standard navigational chart had been spread out and clipped down to the glass-topped light table, and the Quartermaster of the Watch had then spread a sheet of tracing paper over the chart and used grease pens of various colors to mark the current estimated plots for the sonar contacts, as well as Pittsburgh's position and course. Decidedly low-tech… but it got the job done.

"It would be nice to know exactly what happened," Randall said, thoughtful.

"Nice, yes. But not nice enough to further jeopardize this vessel." He pointed to the blue, time-noted line curving west, then northwest along the Russian coast, leaving Vlasjevo to the southeast. "I intend to hug the coast until we're clear of this party down here at the mouth of the Tatar Strait. They don't know we've left, yet, but they're going to figure that out soon enough, and then they'll be baying at our heels. I want to get far enough away quietly that we can risk opening up on the throttle and making a bit of speed."

"That means creeping along at five knots or so for quite a while," Latham said.

"Exactly. I want quiet routine throughout the boat. The Russians probably have at least some seabed sonar pickups in this area, and there could also be submarines — maybe those tracked minisubs — just sitting and waiting for tourist season. I don't want any unnecessary noise to give us away."

"Yes, sir. The crew has been on quiet routine since we entered this area."

"I know. I just don't want anyone thinking that they can sneeze, now that we're moving again. We have a long way to go before we're out of the woods."

"Or the Sea of Okhotsk," Latham added. "I'll pass the word, sir."

"Good." He continued to study the chart and its overlay for several moments, trying to think ahead. He had to take the initiative, and be at least three jumps of the Russians at each step along the way. If he simply reacted to their actions, pretty soon they would have the 'Burgh dancing around like a puppet, going exactly where they wanted her to go.

From the look of things, they still thought the Pittsburgh was in the bottom of the bowl, down near the opening to the Tatar Strait. The line of active-sonar craft were still moving south, now less than three miles north of the coastline and ten miles east of Vlasjevo.

Interesting. That was just about exactly where the Pittsburgh had been at this time yesterday, when Randall and Nelson had done their swim to check for seabed sonar arrays and the Sakhalin oil pipeline.

Was it possible, he wondered, that the Russian timetable was off? Suppose — just for the sake of argument — that a traitor had given away Pittsburgh's timetable. Suppose he'd counted off the hours and days of the voyage … and then forgotten to take into account the change in date, due to crossing the international date line from east to west?

Damn, it almost made sense. Jules Verne had used the

Date Line to his heroes' advantage in Around the World in Eighty Days, allowing them to gain a day in their race when they crossed from west to east. This would be working the opposite way… but it might answer several questions… like why the Soviet ASW vessels had started scouring the southern part of the Zaliv just as Pittsburgh was getting ready to leave, and why the crawler sub had just been moving into position, and been idling on her diesels, breathing through a snorkel, instead of relying on quieter — and shorter-lived-batteries.

The suspected spy or CIA mole might have added up the days and told his KGB controller that Pittsburgh would be checking out that pipeline on Saturday, when in fact it had been Friday.

Wait… that was backwards. Had the spy simply gotten confused?

Well, the date line had confused more than one person in the past. And the fact that they'd caught the Katarina and the packages suggested that some members of the opposition, at least, knew what they were doing.

Whatever the cause, the Russians appeared to be just a little behind the Pittsburgh, closing their trap after the American sub had left the area. They were not stupid, however. They would figure out soon enough that one of their crawler subs had been compromised, and its crew killed. They might have the testimony of Katarina's crew as well; any survivors would have been ruthlessly interrogated.

They knew the ' Burgh was in this general area even if they were mistaken about her exact location, and they would have backup forces in place to stop, if possible, the vessel's escape through the net.

It was a case of blind man's bluff … but one where hunters and prey both were blindfolded, and able to locate one another only by sound.

The nearest sierras were a pair of Komar class patrol boats about two miles to the east, apparently searching the approaches to Vlasjevo. Most of the rest of the hunters were considerably farther off, concentrating their search just north of the Tatar Strait, perhaps ten to fifteen miles away. If there were any other hunters out there, they were … "Conn, Sonar!"

It was ST3 Kellerman. "Sonar, Conn. Go ahead."

"Sir, we're getting noises almost on top of us. Sounds like a helicopter."

"Maneuvering, all stop!"

"Maneuvering, all stop, aye."

"Sonar, let us hear it."

"Aye aye, sir."

The sound coming over the 1MC speaker was muffled, muted almost to the point of inaudibility, but it was distinct, just behind the hissing rush of background noise… a faint, fluttering rhythm like the riffling of the pages of a book.

For the sound of the helicopter to be picked up by the Pittsburgh's sonar, the aircraft had to be hovering just above the surface of the water. Why? What had it spotted? The sea was so shallow, and Pittsburgh was running so close to the surface that it was entirely possible that the periscopes or even the top of the sail had breached a little. Even at night, an aircraft might have spotted the wake and flown in to investigate… or the breach could have been picked up on radar. If they had seen something, the next step would be to lower a dipping sonar and try to detect the 'Burgh directly. And after that …

For a long, long moment, as tension grew to unbearable levels in the control room, the Pittsburgh drifted silently just beneath the surface, slowing with the water's friction until she came to a dead stop. The helicopter hovering just overhead might be plying the surface with searchlight beams. Even fully submerged, something as large as a Los Angeles submarine could leave a telltale wake on the surface, a roiling of the water suggesting something large moving just beneath. By going motionless, the wake could be killed.

But had they been in time?

A submarine's deadliest enemy was another sub… but a close second was a helicopter outfitted for ASW search and warfare. A helicopter was fast and could cover an enormous search area. It could use dipping sonar to actively ping any suspected target, or to lay down a search pattern alone or as part of a larger effort.

And they could carry air-dropped 406mm torpedoes, the same kind Randall had seen mounted on the crawler, and they could put them down by parachute almost directly alongside the target sub. A torpedo fired by another submarine or by a surface warship was set to arm itself after it had traveled a safe distance from the launch tube… and the target boat had a chance to outmaneuver or even outrun a torpedo coming from some distance away.

But an ASW torpedo dropped from a helicopter could go hot and active as soon as it hit the water, and the target would have almost no time at all to maneuver clear.

Minutes passed… and more minutes. The thuttering sound was fainter now, almost swallowed by the vaster sounds of the ocean around them.

"Conn, Sonar. Air contact is moving off."

Gordon released the lungful of air he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Very well, Sonar. Thank you."

The hunters had missed them, this time.

But the Pittsburgh might not be that lucky the next.

Chief Allison laid his hand against the hull, and smiled. "Okay, gents. We're under way again. I'd guess about five knots."

O'Brien laid his own hand on the bulkhead, but couldn't convince himself that he felt anything other than cold, slightly damp, thickly painted metal.

"So… what was it, you think?" Benson asked. "Why did we stop?"

"Could be the skipper was checking to see if he'd forgotten anything back on the beach," Scobey said, grinning. "You know, car keys, wallet… "

The deck under their feet tipped slightly, angling down toward the bow. "Ah!" Allison added. "And we just went down-planes about five degrees. That means the water is getting deeper. Pretty soon, we'll be out of the amphibious Navy and back where we belong, in the Deep."

O'Brien by this time was beginning to get a feel for how his more experienced shipmates felt about such basic aspects of the universe as land and ocean. Submarines actually operated only within the uppermost skin of the ocean; a Los Angeles boat's operational depth of fifteen hundred feet— just a bit over four times her own length — was a tiny fraction of the typical depth of any ocean. The Okhotsk Deep east of northern Sakhalin reached a depth of over ten thousand feet, and Okhotsk was one of the shallower, more confining of the world's seas.

But submariners thought in terms of the freedom offered by the ocean's great depths. There was at least the illusion of three-dimensional movement through a three-dimensional world, and waters shallower than a couple of hundred feet were prisons, restricting the boat to a two-dimensional plane that made it far easier for the enemy to find and track her.

Everyone in the crew had seemed tense, ill at ease, while Pittsburgh had lurked within the shallows off the Russian east coast. Now, their mood was beginning to lighten as the submarine nosed her way north once more, and into deeper water. It was as though a palpable weight had been lifted from the shoulders of every man on board.

"So… do you think that's it?" O'Brien asked. "Are we going home?"

"Once we're in deep water, son, we are home."

"Amen to that," Randall said from his rack. "SEALs always think of the water as a friend. A place to hide, where the enemy can't find you."

"I've heard about drownproofing in SEAL training," Benson said. "That's where they tie your hands and feet and toss you into the deep end, right?"

"That's right, man," Fitch said. "You got to go all the way to the bottom — twenty feet, I think it is. Then push off and come to the surface again. Then let yourself sink. And they work you up to the fancy stuff, like finding a face mask on the bottom. You have to push your face into it, and clear it by blowing out through your nose while pressing it tight against your face, and all while your hands are tied behind your back! Yeah, by the time you're done with that, either you ain't afraid of the water anymore, or… "

"Or what?" O'Brien asked.

"Or else you're dead, man!"

"Kind of like sink or swim, is that it?" Allison said, laughing.

"That's the idea."

"So… how do I become a SEAL?" O'Brien asked.

"Why?" Randall asked. "You want to join the Teams?"

"I don't know. I'd like to explore the options, though."

"I thought you wanted to earn your dolphins, nub," Allison said. He sounded mock-hurt. "Not that goddamn piece of junk SEALs wear all the time."

"That's our Budweiser," McCluskey said. " 'Cause it looks like the Bud logo. And I'll thank you not to call it a goddamn piece of junk."

"Don't join the SEALs, son," Allison said, grinning. "You wade around in the mud all day. You jump out of a perfectly good airplane, hike forty miles, sit around in one position all day so your legs hurt bad enough to keep you from falling asleep, then do your SEAL thing and hike forty miles back. Man, that's a drag!"

"Yeah?" Fitch said. "It's better'n what you guys do, sit-

ting around all the time in a sewer pipe so small it makes a closet look like the great outdoors. Man, I wouldn't trade my mud for your sewer pipe for any money in the world!"

"To each his own," Randall said. "Go easy on them, Fitch. Remember, we need the truck drivers sometimes."

"I guess they're okay, sir," Fitch said, nodding. "But you still couldn't pay me to live in one of these things permanent, like …"

"Tell you what you do, son," Randall told O'Brien. "Soon as we get back to the world, you talk to your CO, and ask—"

"Fuck you, sir," Allison said. "The boy's a born submariner. And he goddamn is gonna finish his goddamn quals and win his dolphins before he thinks about crazy shit like being a SEAL!"

"Behold," Scobey said. "The battle of the marine mammals, SEALs versus dolphins!"

"Fuck you too," Allison said. "I have a half a mind to—"

"All hands! All hands!" snapped from the 1MC speaker on the bulkhead. "Torpedo in the water! Rig for collision!"

And then the deck tilted sharply to starboard.