To Kill the Potemkin

8

Six hours after leaving Naples, Barracuda raced through the Tyrrhenian Sea, heading for the Strait of Bonifacio.

"Attention all hands, attention all hands. Secure from general quarters. The movie this morning will be Bonnie and Clyde at zero nine hundred in the mess. That is all."

After eliminating Mako from the wargame, the crew was jubilant. In the galley Stanley was preparing cioppino from fresh fish taken on at Naples.

"What is it?" asked Cakes.

"Shark soup," Stanley replied with a grin.

In the torpedo room Lopez was feeding Zapata and smoking a huge stogie. Aft, even the nucs got cute and painted the profile of a sub on the casing of turbogenerator number one.

Coming off watch, Fogarty went to the movie, and Sorensen went looking for Eddie Luther, the corpsman. With a peek at the watch sheet in the control room he learned that Luther was taking his turn on Sorensen's Beach.

Luther, a dapper little man with a taste for jazz and no scruples whatsoever, sold amphetamines.

No one was on duty in the steering machinery room when Sorensen banged on the door to the Beach. When it opened, Sorensen heard Cal Tjader playing on his machine. Silently, Luther passed Sorensen a packet of ten Dexamyl tablets in exchange for a ten dollar bill, and Sorensen headed for the sonar room to test all the circuits in his console.

Two hours later, on his way to the mess. Sorensen felt the ship reduce speed. As he was munching a hamburger, it came to a complete stop.

"Attention all hands, this is the captain. We have entered French territorial waters approximately thirty miles off the coast of Corsica. We are attempting to contact a French submarine operating in this area. All hands to maneuvering stations. That is all."

Sorensen took up a cup of coffee and walked back to the sonar room.

The Strait of Bonifacio between the islands of Corsica and Sardinia was slightly over six miles wide at its narrowest point. Small islets guarded both sides of the eastern entrance, and dangerously shallow shoals surrounded the western exit into the Mediterranean.

There were three channels deep enough for submerged passage, two on the Italian side and one on the French. Each was a sonar trap. The bottom was seeded with fixed arrays of active and passive sonars impossible to elude. The echo rangers also served as submarine beacons to guide submerged ships through the Strait, which was frequently transited by submarines from all NATO navies, plus the French, but always with prior notice.

The Italians had extremely quiet diesel-electric subs and competent sonar operators. As part of NATO, the Italians would report Barracuda s presence to the fleet, and so the element of surprise would be lost. The French were less predictable, though generally inhospitable toward incursions into their territorial waters.

Springfield decided to gamble on the French. So soon after withdrawing from NATO, the French Navy was not inclined to cooperate with their former allies in small matters. The worst they could do was deny Barracuda passage through the Strait and send her back the way she came.

When it arrived, contact was with Sirène, a diesel-electric of the Daphné class. Davic, on duty in the sonar room, was not surprised to discover the French sub already on an interception course with Barracuda. Springfield ordered all stop, and they waited.

As soon as Sorensen arrived in the sonar room he could see the French sub moving slowly across his screen. The chop of her propellers came through the speakers.

"Get lost, Davic."

"The French are pigs," Davic, the linguist, muttered on his way out. "De Gaulle thinks he's Napoleon."

Fogarty came in and sat down.

"Practice your sonic codes," Sorensen said. "You're going to need them."

Maneuvering in close proximity to another submerged ship was a tricky business. Sorensen never enjoyed it. A collision underwater could rupture the pressure hulls of both ships and send their crews to the bottom.

Three quarters of an hour after the first contact, Sirène came to a full stop five hundred yards away, her echo-ranging sonar pinging every three seconds off Barracuda's hull with monotonous regularity. Sorensen didn't know how adept the French were at identification. They might mistake Barracuda for a Soviet sub, in which case there was no telling what her captain might do. While he was considering this possibility the pings ceased, were replaced by a standard NATO sonic code. The French sonar operator was tapping out an enciphered message in Morse over a gertrude, the underwater telephone. Sorensen transcribed the message onto a notepad, and the captain took it into the locked code room to decode it.

Captain Springfield composed his reply as a plea from one submariner to another.

While the French captain decoded Springfield's message, Sirène did not communicate with the surface. Her captain alone was deciding what to do.

"Well I'll be goddamned," said Pisaro. "Looks like Netts had it rigged all the time."

Springfield said nothing, studied a chart. Two nerve-racking hours were required to align both subs astride the beacon. Barracuda, on the right, was longer and broader of beam than Sirène, and the Italian operators of the fixed arrays would surely notice something peculiar about the passage. In order to resolve the anomaly they would go through channels, would inform their superiors, who would then query the French commander on Corsica. The French also would have both subs on their screens and yet be unsure of what was happening. By the time it was sorted out. Barracuda should be clear of the Strait, Captain Delongue would have explained the situation to his superiors and would receive either a pat on the back or a court-martial. The latter was a real possibility, and Springfield felt a certain distaste about requesting Delongue, a man he did not know, to take that risk.

Slowly the two subs moved into the Strait. The course marked by the beacons included three turns, the last of which curved around dangerous shoals off the Iles Lavezzi, a cluster of islets a mile off the tip of Corsica. Sorensen locked his side-to-side sweeping array to the left in order to report instantly any maneuvering by Sirène, and fed the data to the navigator in the control room. Fogarty monitored the bottom scanner to make sure the depth under the keel corresponded with the chart. The captain stood at the sonar repeater in the control room and kept his eyes on both screens while giving orders to the helm.

The first turn headed the ship on a southwesterly course that paralleled the Italian passage through the Strait. In the belly of the ship the inertial navigation gyros spun on their axes, sending the digital readouts of longitude and latitude on the navigator's console spinning dizzily until the turn ended.

They were at periscope depth, but no periscope from Barracuda broke the surface. Springfield navigated on gyros and sonar alone.

Sirène also ran without benefit of periscope, radar or communication gear. In his log Delongue cited sea conditions and the presence of merchant ships in the Strait. No submarine captain would ever risk damage to his precious surface gear, but Delongue's real reason was that he didn't want to answer any questions until he cleared the Strait.

The second turn, to the right, brought them within half a mile of the main Italian fixed-arrays. Pings echoed back and forth between the two subs, and off the bottom and the surface, sending a weird and confusing signal back to the Italian operators on Sardinia. Sorensen imagined them listening to this strange mix, scratching themselves and trying to puzzle it out. He was sure they could hear coolant pumps and they probably were asking themselves if the French had secretly developed a nuclear attack submarine.

As the ships eased into the final turn, the depth gauge on Fogarty's bottom scanner suddenly began to rise.

"Sorensen, look at this…?"

Sorensen twisted around to look at Fogarty's screen and recognized the rising pattern of bottom sand. He immediately unlocked the side-to-side sweepers from the French sub and started looking for obstructions. If there was anything big resting on the bottom, they were going to hit it, but the screen showed nothing but the rising shoal a half mile away.

Sorensen spoke into the intercom. "Sonar to control. Shoals bearing two nine seven, depth one two zero feet and rising. One one five feet."

"Control to sonar," said the captain, "we have it on the screen. Mr. Pisaro, take her up to sixty-five feet."

"Depth sixty-five feet, aye. Rig for steep angles."

The command rippled throughout the ship. Sailors in every compartment grabbed whatever was close and held on.

"Stern planes up twenty degrees."

"Up twenty degrees, aye."

"Pump forward trim tank number one to aft trim tank number two."

The bow rose sharply and the prop drove the sleek hydrodynamic hull toward the surface. Sirène began to rise alongside, but not nearly so quickly. The diesel-electric sub did not have the power to drive herself rapidly up or down in a state of neutral buoyancy.

The shoals continued to rise. Springfield realized he would have to surface or reduce speed, steer to the left and fall in behind the French sub in order to avoid grounding on the shoals.

"All stop," he said. "I'll be damned if I'm going to surface in the Strait."

From his diving console Pisaro said, "That French captain is covering his ass, protecting himself from a court-martial sure as hell."

"Sonar to control. Sirène is moving deeper into the channel. Range one one zero yards, one two zero yards, one three zero yards."

"He's giving us room to maneuver," said the XO. "He can tell them he tried to make us surface and then that he had to move to avoid a collision."

"All right," said the captain. "By now, the Italians know something funny is going on, but they'll want to talk to the French before they do anything else. Let's just get the hell out of here. All ahead slow. Left full rudder."

"All ahead slow, aye."

"Left full rudder, aye."

The ship banked left and quickly corrected her trim. Fogarty watched the fathometer as the shoals fell behind. Barracuda moved out of the Strait and into the open sea.

Sorensen spoke into his intercom. "Sonar to control. Receiving message from Sirène." He scribbled on his notepad and handed the message to the captain as he came through the door.

Five minutes later Springfield had the position and order of battle for the fleet.