To Kill the Potemkin

24

To Sorensen four miles away, Potemkin sounded like a tank division smashing through a forest. Alone, it was almost as noisy as the three subs that had passed through in the other direction.

"Listen up, Fogarty. Tell me what you hear."

"An earthquake? World War Two and a half?"

"You're such a clever boy… Is this Arkangel coming back?"

Fogarty took off his headset and turned on the overhead speakers.

"No more games, Sorensen. It's the Alpha."

"Right. Sonar to control, contact bearing zero niner two degrees, range seven five zero zero yards, course two seven zero, speed four four knots."

"Control to sonar, say speed again."

"Speed, four four knots, sir, and increasing. Four seven, four niner, five zero knots. Holding steady at five zero knots."

"Jesus," said Pisaro. "I should have joined the Air Force. We need afterburners to catch that thing."

"Control to sonar. Sorensen, do you have identification?"

"Yes, sir. It's our boy."

Pisaro said, "Well, what are we waiting for?"

"Quartermaster, run sonar through the intercom."

"Aye aye, sir."

A moment later every sailor on Barracuda could hear the roar of Potemkin.

"Attention all hands, this is the captain. Gentlemen, you all hear the sound of a submarine operating in close proximity to us. Listen good. That's the same submarine that collided with us. As you know, our orders are to track her, record every sound she makes and, if possible, surprise her on the surface and take her pretty picture. We're going to be up against subs like this one for the next twenty years, we need to know everything about her. She's fast, but we will have assistance from the SOSUS deep-submergence detection system which we tested during our transit from Norfolk to Gibraltar. That is all."

Springfield saw Hoek, looking like some fat bird of prey, poised over his weapons console, trying without success to track the fast-moving target. "Skipper," he said, "she's moving so fast the only way we could stop her would be to lay down a pattern of nukes in her path—"

"Secure intercom," ordered the captain. "Relax, Lieutenant. We're not going to nuke anyone, especially not in the Strait."

As Potemkin swept across Barracuda's bow, heading due west into the Atlantic, the roar.of her machinery was audible directly through the hull without benefit of hydrophones.

"Control to engineering."

"Engineering, aye."

"Chief, give me one hundred percent. Let her rip. All ahead flank, course two seven zero. Right full rudder."

Barracuda nosed into Potemkin's wake and accelerated after the speeding Russian. By the time Barracuda reached her flank speed of forty-seven knots, the distance between the subs had increased to nine miles.

At flank speed, every system in the ship was strained to the limit. In the engineering spaces the heat from the steam lines caused the temperature to rise to ninety degrees, but the sweating nucs hardly noticed until perspiration dripped onto their instruments. Stripped to the waist, Chief Wong methodically inspected every inch of every pipe, tested every gauge, checked every calculation to coax every ounce of power from the turbines. Potemkin still continued to pull away.

Hour after hour, the Alpha struck farther into the Atlantic, deepening the frustration of her pursuers. Sorensen stood in front of his console, arms folded, nodding as if in a trance. On the screen the Russian remained a solid blip in the west, a sun that refused to set. Finally he said, as much to himself as to Fogarty, "I used to have bad dreams about this sub. I used to wake up with the sound of her engines clanging in my ears. The mystery sub. Well, it ain't a mystery anymore. This nightmare is reality."

"You scared, Ace?"

"You're damned right. This Alpha is fast and goes deep, but maybe worst of all is if the Russians believe in it so much they'll think they can get over on us, and that it's worth anything to keep its secrets from us. That makes them doubly dangerous—"

"Control to sonar."

Fogarty answered, "Sonar, aye."

"You're going to have some visitors in there, boys."

One by one, the officers and chiefs found excuses to step inside the sonar room to listen. Chief Wong came up from engineering and sat for ten minutes with his chin in his hands, frowning. Finally he took off his earphones and said, "I don't hear reduction gears."

"That's right, Chief," Sorensen said, nodding. "I think she's got a direct electric drive. Very noisy turbogenerators and an unusual reactor. I don't hear ordinary high-pressure water pumps. I bet it's metal-cooled."

"That's a strange boat, Sorensen."

"She sure is. All power, no finesse but a bundle of acoustic tricks. I've got a question for you, Wong. How long can we run at flank speed before we shake something loose?"

"Forever."

"C'mon."

"Longer than any Russkie I ever heard of. 'Course, I never heard of these guys."

When Lopez sat down to take his turn at the console, he waved away the earphones and turned on the speakers.

"It sounds weird, like there's an echo," he said.

"That's because she's pulling away," Sorensen told him.

"She's going how fast?"

"Fifty point three knots."

"Holy Madonna, it'll outrun a Mark thirty-seven. You know what, Ace? I think this is a good time to retire. I've heard enough."

As Potemkin raced dead ahead, steadily increasing her lead, the solid blip on Barracuda's screens began to deteriorate. The thunder that came through the hydrophones started to fade.

After four hours, two hundred miles into the Atlantic, Potemkin began to descend. Without decreasing speed she went down to fifteen hundred feet, putting a thermal layer between herself and Barracuda.

"Sonar to control, contact is growing indistinct. He's going down, recommend descent to eight hundred feet."

"Very well, sonar, if you think it'll help. Stern planes down four degrees. Take us down to eight hundred feet."

Barracuda nosed over and descended another four hundred feet. Sorensen pursed his lips and watched his screen. When the ship leveled off, the resolution of the contact had not improved. "Damn," he swore. "We're going to lose her."

Fogarty asked, "How can we lose her if she's making this much noise?"

"She's twenty-one miles ahead of us now, and we're getting echoes, reverberations and a deteriorating signal. We may hear machinery noises, but we won't know exactly where the sounds are coming from. She can fire a decoy, go silent, go deep. If she continues at fifty knots she'll be completely out of range in four or five hours and we won't hear a damned thing except ourselves."

"But what about the bottom sonars?"

Sorensen nodded. "They'll track her all right, but they can only locate her within fifty miles. They can get an exact fix only when she passes over one of the cables."

"She has to stop and clear baffles, doesn't she?"

"Why?"

"For safety."

"Not a chance. She's hell-bent on running away from us. She isn't going to stop for anything, and I guess neither are we until we lose her. Sooner or later that Russian captain's going to learn that we are the boat he hit, and that, my friend, is going to put him right on the edge, if he isn't there already. Maybe we should let him take his Maserati submarine back to Murmansk. Where's Davic? He's supposed to be in here. I want to hit the beach."

"You're not giving up, are you. Ace?"

Sorensen snapped his sunglasses over his eyes. "What do you think we should do if we catch up with the son of a bitch? Make him say he's sorry?"

Potemkin continued west for another seven hours, during which time the distance between the two subs stretched to over forty miles. Davic stood his watch, eyes glued to the screen, then turned over the console to Willie Joe. During both watches enlisted men filed into the sonar room to listen to the Russian sub. The roar gradually deteriorated into a faint buzz, then an erratic hum. Finally, eleven hours and fifteen minutes after Potemkin broke into the Atlantic, she disappeared from the screens.

"Sonar to control," said Willie Joe. "She's gone."

"Control to sonar. Very well. Prepare for slow speed. Prepare to clear baffles. Prepare to send up a buoy."

"Aye aye."

Asleep in his bunk, Sorensen was having a nightmare. In a basin the size of a house, a pinhead of metal glowed blue in the dark. The basin was a giant aquarium. People stood outside, watching the bright blue speck as it shot off torpedoes and rockets. With a roar the water turned to fire, exploded the glass and showered the spectators with shards of uranium. In a thousand pieces the sub settled to the bottom and lobsters began to eat the debris. Just as one of the spindly monsters stepped on his face, he sensed the Barracuda's abrupt change of speed and woke up.

His sweat felt like burning seawater. He pushed open the curtain and leaned into the passageway. On the opposite tier Fogarty was reading The Art of War, by Sun Tzu.

"She's gone?" Sorensen said.

Fogarty looked up for a moment, nodded, then read aloud, "All warfare is based on deception. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Pretend inferiority and encourage your enemy's arrogance."

"Well, where'd you get that?"

"It was in the library. It's been around for a couple of thousand years."

"That's a lot of blood in the sea. Seems like we haven't learned too much. All you have to do is get mad, and be willing. Even you, Fogarty. The Russians got under your skin, didn't they?"

"It wasn't them, it was you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you and your little tape machine."

Barracuda slowly circled, cleared baffles and sent up a radio buoy. Springfield transmitted a position report and the last known location of Potemkin. A moment later Norfolk flashed a reply that Springfield and Pisaro took into the captain's cabin to decode.

The bottom sonars had successfully tracked both subs into the Atlantic. The Alpha was still heading due west at great speed, generating enough noise to make her easy to track as she passed over the sonar-seeded cables that radiated out from the Azores?

Springfield spread out a chart of the North Atlantic. A chain of marine mountains, the mid-Atlantic ridge, ran north and south, splitting the ocean in half. A deep-running submarine could hide indefinitely among the mountain peaks, and travel north and south through the deep valleys.

"This Russian skipper is heading straight for the ridge," Pisaro said. "He'll go north, try to break through the Iceland gap and go under the ice."

"I'm not so sure, Leo. If he were heading for the ice pack he'd already be making a northerly course. There's no way he could have escaped the collision with no damage at all. He's got to be hurt. He can't go under the ice. Plus he's been at sea a long time. A normal cruise for them is twenty-one days tops. Their sailors get too much radiation if they stay out any longer. The Soviets have never built a boat that's properly shielded. My guess is that he has a radiation problem. Maybe he's got sailors with radiation sickness. They're probably tired, anemic, less than alert. He needs a new crew."

Springfield tapped, the chart in the region of the Caribbean. "He isn't going north, Leo. He's going south. He's trying to make it to Cuba."

Pisaro shook his head. "Into their FBM base? They think we don't know about that. They have no idea that Havana harbor, the Caribbean and half the Atlantic Ocean are seeded with bottom sonars. He wouldn't lead us into it."

"I agree. But he might try to rendezvous at sea with their missile boat coming out of the Puerto Rican trench. A year ago, when we discovered what they were doing down there, we were looking at another Cuban missile crisis. That FBM base is a clear violation of the agreement. It could have meant war. Netts claimed it was best to let them be, track their FBM every minute and keep them under the gun. If worst came to worst, we could blow it out of the water. Point is, if we throw it up in their faces, we've got another Cuban missile crisis on our hands."

"Christ," Pisaro said. "Do you really think they would pull a missile sub off-station for a rendezvous?"

"This Alpha apparently means a great deal to them, and she's in trouble. They think they can bring the FBM out quietly, rendezvous with the Alpha and slip right back into the Puerto Rican trench. If we catch them red-handed, photograph the FBM on the surface and then follow it, it will never be able to return to the Caribbean. This way, we'll get them out of the Caribbean for good without provoking a crisis. The price will be that we'll have to reveal to them the new system in the Atlantic. Still, once they realize we can track them anywhere, maybe they'll pull back into their home waters. Whatever, I believe this Alpha is going to lead us right to the big boy. That's some bonus."