To Kill the Potemkin

4

The Strait of Gibraltar forms one of the great bottlenecks in the world ocean. Historically, control of the Strait has meant control of the Mediterranean. Since the end of World War Two the U.S. Navy has considered "the sea in the middle of the earth" an American lake.

Seven days after leaving Norfolk, Barracuda approached the Strait at slow speed.

"All right," said the captain. "Send up the buoy."

A jet of compressed air fired a capsule from the top of the sail toward the surface. A few seconds later a radio transmitter floated two hundred feet above the sub. Springfield beamed a position report to the naval station at Rota, Spain, and received an immediate reply.

In the sonar room Sorensen listened to the sonic beacon fixed to the bottom of the Strait, which guided submerged ships through the deep channel. He locked on and the ship slowly passed into the Mediterranean.

Presently they heard engine noise from another sub nearby. Before Sorensen could ask, Fogarty said, "British. HMS Valiant."

"Very good, very good, indeed. Be glad we're not a Russian or he'd blow our ears out."

"Full speed ahead," said the captain. "We're through."

Two days later Barracuda was 250 miles from Naples. Springfield and Pisaro studied the CRT in the navigation console, which displayed an electronic chart of the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Bay of Naples. A blip in the center of the screen represented the ship. A flickering digital readout reported the changing longitude and latitude. The quartermaster sat quietly at the console, eyes following the blip, the only visible evidence of Barracuda's progress.

Springfield had ordered a burst of flank speed. Driving Barracuda at forty-seven knots was like flying blind underwater. The noise rendered her listening sonars useless, and there was danger of colliding with another submerged vessel. Every fifty miles Springfield slowed the sub to a crawl and quieted all machinery to allow the sonar operators to "clear baffles." While the ship slowly turned 360 degrees, the sonarmen listened through the hydrophones, the passive sonars.

Pisaro blew cigarette smoke away from the console. "We're almost at the edge," he said, waving smoke out of his eyes. "Five minutes."

Springfield nodded and spoke into his microphone. "Control to engineering, prepare for slow speed. We're going to clear baffles."

"Engineering to control. Prepare for slow speed, aye."

Springfield glanced at the blank screen of the sonar repeater. Willie Joe had the repeater disassembled for Fogarty's edification.

"How long, Willie Joe?"

"Ten minutes. Captain."

"All right," Springfield said to Pisaro. "There's supposed to be a storm up above. If we're going to hear anything, we'd better get Sorensen up here."

"Aye aye, skipper." Pisaro spoke into the intercom. "Control to engineering. Listen, Chief. Send somebody aft to drag Sorensen's butt back into the real world. I want him in sonar in five minutes."

"Engineering to control. Aye aye. The ace will be in place."

In the sonar room Sonarman Second Class Emile Davic sat at his operator's console, apparently watching the CRT screen. He was alone.

Davic stared diligently at the screen, but there was little to see except the green fuzz of ambient noise — washed-out signals from the passive array.

Three hours into his watch, Davic sipped a sixth cup of coffee, devoured a second Hershey bar and daydreamed about food in Naples. Spaghetti putanesca, tortellini in broda. Davic hated Naples. It was dirty and reminded him of the worst parts of New York, but he relished the food.

As a boy of twelve Davic had emigrated from Budapest to Brooklyn, where he lived alone with his mother. Confused and frightened by New York, Davic tried to insulate himself from the city. Eventually he became naturalized, but he never became an American. He didn't know how to have fun, to relax, and devoted his life to the study of modern languages and the cultivation of a bitter hatred of the Russians. Anything else seemed frivolous.

He had joined the Submarine Service to get as close to the Soviets as possible. When World War Three started, Davic didn't want to miss it. To him, serving on the sub was a solemn obligation that he approached with deep seriousness. On a ship where most sailors barely spoke one language, Davic spoke five: Magyar, German, English, French and Russian. He considered himself a dedicated cold warrior and regarded anyone less fanatic than himself a fool. Naturally, he despised Sorensen, whose open irreverence Davic found intolerable. Sorensen acted as if Barracuda were his personal property, provided by the navy for his amusement. In spite of himself, Davic envied Sorensen his talent and was jealous of his privileges.

Davic was contemplating now the photo of Admiral Gorshkov, examining the stony face. He was the one who had taped the Russian's portrait to the bulkhead.

Gorshkov, architect of the modern Soviet Navy, was the officer who had dragged the Russian fleet out of the nineteenth century and transformed it into a blue-water force. And that frightened Davic, who as a young boy had witnessed Soviet tanks in Budapest. He kept the photograph of Sergei Gorshkov as a reminder.

Barracuda was following a standard NATO deep-water route off Sardinia, and her routine position reports had been forwarded to all NATO navies. The last time they had cleared baffles, the long-range sonar had shown nothing. Any moment now the captain would slow again. Davic felt that a contact was unlikely.

"Attention all hands. Prepare for slow speed."

He felt the ship begin to slow and listened to the turbulence as it washed over the hull and swirled around the hydrophones. He reached up and turned on a tape recorder.

Barnes banged on the door to Sorensen's Beach.

"Sorensen."

"Yo."

The door opened. Dripping sweat, Sorensen stuck his head out.

"What's up?"

"They want you in sonar."

"Where are we?"

"Hey, man, I'm back here making chips all damn day," Barnes said, flicking a shard of stainless steel off his chest. "I don't know. Switzerland?"

"Listen, Barnes, did you make my little box yet?"

"Your little watertight box? It's next. It's on the sheet."

"I gotta have it tomorrow in Naples. Skipper's orders."

"Like I say, it's on the sheet. Not to worry. What's it for, anyway?"

"You got me, sport." Sorensen took off his glasses and winked.

"Oh, yeah," Barnes said, flapping his arms and returning to his lathe. "Big time secrets. When the captain goes to the crapper, it's a secret. What's for lunch? It's a secret. A sonar beacon in a watertight stainless steel box. Big secret. Shit."

Sorensen shut the door. True enough, nothing stayed secret for long. He began collecting his stuff. A tape was still running. La Verne Baker belted out Jim Dandy on a submarine. Got a message from a mermaid queen. Jim Dandy didn't waste no time. Jim Dandy to the rescue. Go Jim Dandy. Go Jim Dandy.

He turned off the lights on the way out.

The door to the sonar room jerked open and Sorensen suddenly filled the tiny space. He sat down at the supervisor's console, logged in and adjusted a headset over his ears.

"Just carry on," he said to Davic. Sorensen didn't look at the screen. He closed his eyes and listened.

The deep waters of the Mediterranean constituted a notoriously fickle sonar environment. Sound waves were bounced up and down by thermal layers and distorted by seamounts and an uneven bottom. It was impossible to determine the range of a contact heard on a passive array unless it was moving.

"Control to sonar, prepare for three hundred sixty degree revolution."

"Sonar to control. Understand three hundred sixty degree revolution. Aye aye," Davic replied.

As the ship slowed, the machinery quieted and the screens gradually cleared. The ship banked slightly as it turned. Davic heard static. "There's signal interference from the storm," he said.

"The storm is dying," Sorensen told him. "Ignore it."

A third of the way through the turn, they clearly heard a propeller cavitating on the surface. Sorensen estimated the range as five miles.

"Sonar to control. Contact on the surface, bearing one one seven. Speed two knots."

"Control to helm. Make our course bearing one one seven."

"Course one one seven, aye."

The ship turned back to the left and once again the sonar operators heard the propeller.

"All stop," ordered the captain.

The sub drifted, listening. Sorensen heard a second propeller. Twin screws. A small ship was barely making way on the surface.

"It's your watch, Davic," Sorensen said. "What do you think it is?"

As Davic logged the contact into the computer he mumbled, "It could be anything, a coastal freighter, a fisherman."

Sorensen opened his eyes and began watching the screen, listening intently. NATO routes avoided commercial shipping lanes and fishing grounds. He had a hunch.

"Fee fie foe fum, I smell the blood of a Russian bum." He winked at Davic who stared wide-eyed at the screen, wondering what Sorensen heard that he didn't.

"Davic," Sorensen said, "that's a Soviet surveillance ship up there, a trawler, and he's got us pegged for sure."

"What makes you think so?"

"Tomorrow the Sixth Fleet is going to sail from Naples, right up this alley. Now, if I was your friend Admiral Gorshkov, I'd wait for Kitty Hawk right about here. Sonar to control. Is the repeater on line yet?"

Willie Joe's languid voice came back through the intercom. "Another minute, there, Ace. One more circuit."

Before Sorensen could reply, a streak flickered across the extreme edge of the sonar screen, a faint electronic shadow. Sorensen snapped to attention and began punching buttons on his console. The trawler had company.

Deftly, Sorensen locked his sonars on bearing one one seven and immediately heard the throb of a saltwater pump, the type of pump that circulated seawater around a steam condenser, the unmistakable signature of a nuclear reactor. A nuclear submarine was hovering under the trawler, listening to Barracuda. "Bingo," he said. "Sonar to control. We have another contact, bearing one one seven, range estimated ten thousand yards, speed zero zero. Contact is submerged. Repeat, contact is submerged."

"Control to sonar," said Pisaro's voice, "the repeater is coming on line now. We show nothing, sonar, nada." The XO paused for a moment. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's impossible. No goddamn Russkie sub has been reported in this sector of the Med. How in hell did he get in here?"

The faint streak returned at the same bearing. The contact was directly below the trawler. Pisaro swore. "The son of a bitch must have been listening to us for half an hour. Quartermaster, sound general quarters."

Throughout the ship loudspeakers drove one hundred men into furious but disciplined activity.

"General quarters, general quarters. All hands man battle stations. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Man battle stations."

Davic stood up and took off his headset. His battle station was forward as part of a damage-control team. He opened a cabinet and pulled on a white asbestos suit. Inside the plexiglas faceplate he looked like a chubby astronaut. "I would prefer to remain in the sonar room," he said into the microphone inside his helmet.

"Look, Davic, I don't assign the stations. Lopez does that," Sorensen told him.

"That's my Russian, Sorensen," Davic shouted in his electronic voice.

"Sure, he's all yours. He's in your log. Don't worry, you'll get your chance to go toe to toe with him."

Davic muttered a Hungarian curse and went out.

Sorensen called after him, "What's the matter? Don't you ever go to the movies?"

A moment later Fogarty rushed in, sat down and put on his earphones. He heard a deep throb, an unnatural predatory growl, and suddenly he was very alert.

In sonar school Fogarty had listened with detached interest to tapes of Soviet submarines, but the tapes had been disembodied noises in a void. The tapes that Sorensen had played for him had been frightening, but still remote. The immediacy of the real thing came as a shock. His first Russian.

"What's he doing?" he asked Sorensen.

"Our friend Ivan is just sitting there listening to us with big fat smile on his face. The joke's on us."

Fogarty settled into his seat and watched the resolution of the streak improve as the range closed.

Invisible to the rest of the world, the two subs drifted five miles apart, listening warily for the slightest hint of a wrong move.

"Well," Sorensen said, "the game is on. Let's see if we can come out a respectable second best."

"What game?" Fogarty asked.

"The game. The only game in town. The game we play with the Russians. Cowboys and Cossacks."

Fogarty stared at him.

"Call it practice for World War Three."

Sorensen switched on the overhead speakers and took off his earphones.

"Listen to that dirty racket," he said with a smile. "His weapons control system is locked right on your beating heart."

"Control to sonar. Prepare to lock on weapons control."

"Sonar to control. Prepare to lock on weapons control, aye. Now we're going to return the favor," Sorensen said. He pushed a sequence of buttons on his console and the sonar signals were ready to be fed into the weapons-guidance systems.

When Fogarty had practiced this drill it always made him nervous. Now faced with an actual adversary, he was surprised to discover how calm he felt.

"Control to weapons. Lock on sonar."

Hock's voice came through the intercom. "Weapons to control. Lock on sonar, aye."

"Very well."

Hoek looked up from his weapons console to face the captain in the conning station, wondering if Springfield was going to give the order to load a torpedo. Rachets in hand, the torpedo room crew was standing by.

"Load tube number one, Mark thirty-seven, conventional warhead, wire-guided."

"Load tube number one, aye."

Barracuda dipped slightly forward as the weight of a torpedo was shifted into a tube. A trim tank automatacally compensated and the ship leveled.

Fogarty shook his head. "This is like playing with a loaded gun."

"Indeed it is. That's the spice that makes it so tasty."

"What if someone screws up?"

Sorensen shrugged and lit a cigarette. "Who? The skipper? No way. Ivan? He's the same as us. Nobody wants to start a war. Not today. So they say…"

"We could have a war down here and nobody would ever know it."

"You're a bright boy, Fogarty. You noticed there aren't any TV cameras down here."

Fogarty still felt strangely calm and clearheaded. A torpedo could not be fired until the tube was flooded, a provocative act that would be heard by the Russian sonar operators.

Looking at the pictures on the wall, he tried to imagine the Russian sub. He had seen film of Russian subs on the surface. They looked mean, warlike. As for the men inside, he had only the residue of a lifetime of propaganda that pictured them as an enemy… We will bury you, and so forth. He wasn't sure if he believed all of it, some of it, or none of it.

"Well," Sorensen said, "what class of sub do you think it is?"

"I don't know. Most of their attack subs are November class."

"She's starting to move. Sonar to control, contact is moving. He's showing himself to us."

"Control to sonar." Springfield's voice replaced Leo Pisaro's. "Try and get a signature."

"Aye aye."

"Okay, Leo," Springfield said to the XO, "let's take a look. All ahead slow."

The ship shuddered as the propeller revolutions increased. The instant Barracuda moved the Russian took off, making a great deal of noise as his speed increased. The streak on the screen resolved into a blip. Sorensen heard the unmistakable sounds of Soviet machinery, noisy reduction gears and coolant pumps, the swish of a prop, but it was not the classic signature of a November. He switched on the signature program that compared the sounds of the contact sub with the recorded sounds of known Soviet submarines stored in the program.

"It's a Viktor," he said, a good fifteen seconds before the computer verified his judgement.

Fogarty glanced at the chart. "The new one," he said.

"Yeah. We don't know much about these Viktors. They can go deep, but they make a lot of noise."

Springfield and Pisaro were alarmed by the Russian's unexpected appearance in the Mediterranean. How did it get through the Strait of Gibraltar without being detected and tracked? They studied the repeater and sipped coffee. Pisaro chain-smoked.

The Russian was running parallel to Barracuda's original course. The Russian commander was announcing that the Mediterranean was no longer an American lake.

"Leo," Springfield said quietly, "move in on her. Crowd her. All ahead half."

"Aye aye, Skipper. All ahead half."

"Go right three degrees, course one two zero."

"Right three degrees, course one two zero, aye."

As Barracuda began to accelerate, the Russian went into a steep dive, machinery roaring like breaking surf. The Russian accelerated, the blip leaped across Sorensen's screen at a fantastic rate. Barracuda, the fastest submarine in the U.S. Navy, was being left behind.

Abruptly Sorensen snatched off his earphones and reached over to yank Fogarty's away from his ears. He was too late. The high pitch of a powerful Feniks target-seeking sonar erupted in the young sonarman's ears. He winced in pain and swore. It was his first sonar lashing.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of sub wars," Sorensen said to him.

Fogarty poked at his ears, his face contorted with pain. "Goddamn. Why did they do that?"

"Hey, Third Class, didn't they teach you anything in sonar school?"

"They didn't do that."

"When Ivan stings your ears like that, it means he could have put a torpedo up your ass. Bang bang, you're dead. Our friend heard us a long time before we heard him."

The Russian descended to twenty-one hundred feet and the sound abruptly ceased. The sub disappeared.

Sorensen stared at his blank screen. "Jeez, I don't believe it. She vanished below a deep thermal. Sonar to control. We lost her."

"Control to sonar. Say again."

"We lost her. Captain. She's gone."

"Good God."

There was shocked silence in the control room. A deep thermal layer deflected the down-searching sonars at twenty-one hundred feet, but no one wanted to admit that a Soviet sub could go beyond that depth. In 1963 Thresher had imploded at two thousand feet.

Springfield was shaken. The Viktor had revealed herself as a far more formidable opponent than American naval officers had been taught to expect.

For three hours they searched in a spiral pattern, totally mystified. Finally, Springfield gave up.

"Unload torpedo."

"Unload torpedo, aye."

"Send up a buoy, Leo. Report the contact, then resume course for Naples."

"Aye aye. Skipper."

Sorensen was intrigued. In the grand game of Cowboys and Cossacks the Viktor was a new challenge. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. "Score one for Ivan," he said. "We lost this round."

Fogarty was still poking at his ears. "That was a slap in the face. I didn't like it."

"Well, Fogarty, nobody likes it, so you can brood about it for a while. In the control room of that sub there's a guy sitting right now at his Feniks console, watching an obsolete oscilloscope, and he's probably feeling right pleased with himself, but don't take it personally. Sooner or later you'll get to do it to him, or to one of his pals. The only thing that bothers me is that he got away. That son of a bitch went pretty deep. And fast. A regular Maserati."

"You really like this, don't you?" Fogarty said.

"Sure I do. There's nothing else like it in the world. This is what it's all about. We chase the Russians around the ocean, then they chase us, then we chase them some more. Shit, one hot sub doesn't mean anything. They get one, then we get one, the guys at Electric Boat keep busy and all the admirals are happy. After all, kid, it's just a game, isn't it?"

"It may be just a game, Sorensen, but the stakes seem pretty high."

"So who wants to play penny-ante? That's no fun." Sorensen's voice remained lighthearted, but his eyes were dead serious. "Listen, Fogarty, down here we jam it to the max. We take it right to the edge. There's no other way."

"It seems dangerous to me, Sorensen. If it gets out of hand we could have a war."

"You afraid of a war, Fogarty?"

"Shit, yes."

"Well, try to remember the other guys have just as much to lose as we do. If we get nuked we'll never know what hit us. What's with you, Fogarty? Are you some kind of peacenik? Ban the bomb, is that it? Or are you just chickenshit?"

Fogarty shrugged and looked away.

"Lighten up, kid," Sorensen said. "I'm not going to bug you about what you believe or don't. You do your job, you keep your ears sharp, you play the fucking game and you're going to be all right. I think maybe you've got a conscience, and that's okay."

Fogarty looked into Sorensen's eyes and could almost feel a psychic probe rooting around in his mind. "We can have a lot of fun in here," Sorensen was saying, "or it can be a real drag. You're a straight midwestern kid with smarts. All you really need is a sense of humor. We're the cowboys. They're the cossacks. So goddammit, start acting like a cowboy. Let me ask you something, Fogarty" — Sorensen's mouth twisted into a devilish smile—"how did you feel when you first heard that Russian sub? Were you afraid?"

"No," Fogarty admitted.

"Damned right. I was watching you. You were too excited to be scared. You got a big charge out of it. That's nothing to be ashamed of. When you see that Russian on the screen and listen to him growling like a goddamn nuclear shark, nothing else matters. It's you and him. That's where the action is. It's a big rush. Adrenaline maybe, or something even deeper. It's the ultimate drug. Underwater, what you believe doesn't count, only what you do, how you react. The rest of the world doesn't exist. Not your girlfriend, not your mother, not your god if you got one. Just you and Ivan."

"Leave your mind behind."

"You got it."

A shy smile crossed Fogarty's face. "I admit it was pretty exciting," he said, "Until my ears got blasted."

"Think of what it did to the fish." He jumped out of his seat and waved his arms around. "Imagine a school of deaf tuna swimming upside down. Along comes a Great Barracuda. Zap, zap, he cuts 'em to ribbons, eats about twenty, and swims away upside down."

Fogarty shook his head. "Christ, Sorensen. That was terrible."

They were both laughing when Lt. Hoek opened the door. He was disappointed at having missed the original contact with the Russian sub and wanted to listen to the recording of the Viktor's signature. Sorensen surrendered the supervisor's console and started the tape.

They changed the watch. Sorensen and Fogarty were in the control room when they heard Lt. Hoek howling in pain.

Springfield looked around and locked eyes with his senior sonarman. They both smiled. Hoek had a lot to learn.

The next morning Springfield prepared to take his ship into the Bay of Naples. Surfacing near a crowded harbor was always undertaken with great caution.

Fogarty was at the operator's console as the ship made a slow 360-degree turn, echo-ranging 360 degrees to make certain the surface was clear of shipping before raising the periscope. He picked up two freighters, a small tanker and a car ferry, all at a safe distance, but missed a flotilla of yachts in a restricted area.

"Up periscope."

When Springfield put his eyes to the binocular lenses of the periscope he found himself staring into the startled face of a man in evening dress at the wheel of his boat fifty feet away. A naked woman lay on the deck. Several more people, drinks in hand, gawked at the periscope. Springfield could read the registration number painted on the hull. He swung the scope around and saw three more wooden and fiberglass sailboats within a hundred yards, impossible to detect on sonar.

"Control to sonar, you blew it. We've got sailboats."

Sorensen clucked. "Fogarty, you still can't navigate."

"Leo," Springfield said to the XO, "take a look."

Pisaro peered into the eyepiece and whistled.

When Springfield gave the order to surface. Barracuda surged out of the sea, a silent monster of the deep. The people on the sailboats lined the railings and watched the sub slip past. Her surface was a mottled black, like the skin of a whale. The only sound was the hiss of water breaking over her bow.

Barracuda steamed into the Bay of Naples and tied up outside the breakwater next to the sub tender Tallahatchie County. Nearby, Kitty Hawk, flagship of the Sixth Fleet, was preparing for departure later that afternoon.

From high up on the superstructure of the massive aircraft carrier, a sailor looked down at the tiny submarine. Compared to the manifest might of Kitty Hawk, the sub appeared insignificant. With a dorsal fin and a tail protruding from the water, Barracuda looked like a fish to him, at worst a harmless little shark.