To Kill the Potemkin

9

For three days and nights Admiral Horning, commodore of the carrier group, had directed the search for the elusive Barracuda. Mako had vanished, obviously "sunk." From the operations center on Kitty Hawk Horning had plumbed the depths with sonars and magnometers, crossed and crisscrossed the surface with frigates and destroyers, and sortied into the air hundreds of times with helicopters and antisubmarine airplanes. Five of his own submarines prowled under and around his armada, hydrophones open to every gurgle, yet Barracuda remained underwater and undetected.

Springfield had eluded the trap set by Mako and had disappeared. Admiral Horning's remaining submarines were having trouble operating in close proximity to one another, and his aircraft kept finding them instead of Barracuda. Alarms would scream, sonar officers would shout, "Contact! Contact!" All for nothing.

And if that weren't enough. Horning had Netts gloating in the wardroom.

On the morning of the fourth day, after a sleepless night during which he had demanded a report every fifteen minutes from the operations center, Horning shaved, showered and dressed in fresh tans.

It had been twenty-five years since he had felt so rotten. During World War Two, as commander of a destroyer, he had escorted convoys of merchant ships across the North Atlantic through deadly wolfpacks of German U-boats. In that war an enemy submarine presented a terrible menace, but one he could deal with. Diesel-electric subs spent most of their time on the surface, wallowing in heavy seas, full of seasick sailors, submerging only to hide, attack or escape intolerable weather. Underwater, they were slow and at the mercy of short supplies of air, water and battery power.

A nuclear-propelled attack submarine was another matter entirely. A true submarine ship, rather than a submersible boat, a nuke remained underwater virtually all the time, sending a periscope above the surface only to communicate or to take a satellite fix for navigation. It made fresh water by desalinating seawater, and oxygen by electrolysis of the fresh water. As for power, sheer power, it was incomparable. The reactor core in Barracuda was good for one hundred thousand miles, and she could outrun any ship in the fleet.

Staring in the mirror at his fifty-six-year-old face, with its deep creases and silver brush. Admiral Horning accepted the simple, humbling truth: if this were a shooting war, Kitty Hawk, and probably the entire fleet, would already have been vaporized in a nuclear blast.

On entering the operations center he stood quietly to one side, observing the anxious, strained faces of his officers. In the eerie glow of electronic instruments they looked haunted. For an instant he looked directly at Captain Lewis, commander of the carrier. The haggard, unshaven man shook his head. No luck, no change, no Barracuda.

Netts was there, out of uniform, a bug on the wall, silently watching.

"Good morning," Horning said to him.

"Good morning, Admiral. Sleep well?" Netts made no effort to keep sarcasm out of his voice.

"Well, where's your pet submarine, Mr. Netts? I haven't seen any torpedo wakes streaking through these waters."

"Perhaps we should contact the manufacturer. Faulty torpedoes are a terrible thing."

Horning bit his lip. "Perhaps we should wait until we see Commander Billings's report."

"Fine," said Netts, who turned his attention to the dawn breaking in pink streaks off the flight deck.

In rapid succession four antisubmarine airplanes were catapulted off the flight deck. They would drop sonar buoys into the water and listen to them via radio as they circled overhead. Only half the buoys would work. Some would sink. In others the transducers would fail and in many the radio gear would not transmit.

From another part of the flight deck a trio of ASW helicopters took off, dangling sonar arrays beneath them like weird parasites. More reliable than radio buoys, the helicopter-borne sonars could detect a local contact, but the operators could barely hear over the clamor of the rotors. If a sub were lying quietly, they would never hear it. Should it be moving rapidly and making enough noise for them to hear, they could not get an accurate fix without a second chopper. Even then it was dicey.

No other ship was visible. Barracuda's mission was to simulate a nuclear attack. To avoid having a ship damaged or sunk by a blast that destroyed another, Horning had spread his perimeters to the maximum, with no ship within five miles of another. This dispersal also allowed him to search the widest possible area.

A communications officer handed Captain Lewis a message. "It's from Badger," Lewis said to Admiral Horning. "She's tracking Swordfish, which is entering the perimeter between Badger and Bainesworth."

"All right, if they can hear Swordfish, so can Barracuda. Concentrate the search in the other three quadrants. When are we scheduled to signal Swordfish?"

"Not for another two hours," said the communications officer.

"Damn." Horning looked at Netts, who shrugged and looked back.

On the bulkhead a large screen displayed the order of battle for the fleet. Each ship was an electronic silhouette. The screen was kept up-to-date by a constant flow of data from radar, sonar, satellite sensors, aircraft and even, occasionally, the word of a sailor on deck with a pair of binoculars. Netts thought it was a pretty picture and imagined that the picture on Barracuda's sonar screen was much the same.

While the location of each surface ship was shown with precision, the whereabouts of each submarine could only be estimated. A technician punched buttons on a control panel, and Swordfish appeared on the screen between the destroyers Badger and Bainesworth.

The fleet had received messages from neither the French nor the Italians, and Horning had not guessed that Barracuda had run the Strait of Bonifacio and was preparing an attack from the north. Two of the fleet's subs were on station fifty miles south, hoping to intercept Barracuda's approach from that direction. Swordfish, Stingray and Dragonfish were roving under and around the armada.

Netts knew that Springfield's plan was to position Barracuda in front of the fleet, lie quietly at depth and wait for the advance ships to pass directly over her. If the advance ships made contact, she would try to outrun them and attack the carrier before they got a fix.

Netts stared impatiently out to sea hoping that at any minute now a pair of torpedoes would streak out of the north, slam into the hulking Kitty Hawk, and Netts's Folly would be history.