There were two types of sonar, passive and active. With passive sonar, a ship or submarine simply listened for noise produced by the target ― the sound of its screws, the machinery in its engine room, the pumps circulating water through its nuclear reactor, the clang of a carelessly dropped tool. Active sonar, on the other hand, transmitted a pulse of sound, then listened for the echo from a solid target. Far more accurate than passive listening ― through pinging, a sonar operator could get an accurate measurement of the range to the target ― active sonar had the single disadvantage that it gave the transmitting vessel away. Submarines nearly always preferred to use passive sonar only.
Destroyers and other ASW surface ships, however, rarely cared whether their quarry heard them or not. This one was almost certainly sweeping the Kola channel, searching for intruders precisely like the Galveston.
Ping!
They were getting closer. Montgomery could hear the gentle chug-chug-chug of the ship's screws now, gradually growing louder.
Ping!
Just because Galveston's crew could hear the active sonar of the approaching surface ship, it didn't necessarily mean they'd been spotted.
Sonar was more complicated than simply making a noise and waiting for the echo; discontinuities in the temperature and salinity of the water could refract sound waves in odd ways, and a submarine as close to the bottom as Galveston was now could be lost in the background clutter. Shipping channels such as this were usually littered with wrecks or with debris dumped from surface ships, and near naval bases they were sown with undersea hydrophones, remotely activated mines, and various types of detection equipment. Even if the Russian sonar operators heard an echo, they might easily misinterpret it.
Getting any information at all out of a sonar return was an arcane and mysterious art.
Ping!
The throb of the ship's propellers sounded almost directly overhead. Had they spotted the American submarine, now lying directly beneath their keel?
Throughout the control room, every eye not focused on a specific readout or instrumentation was fastened on the compartment's overhead, as though trying to pierce the double hull and the darkness and the water, to see the looming presence of the Russian ship as it came closer… closer…
… and then the sound of the Riga's engines was dwindling… fading into the distance somewhere astern.
And it was gone.
Slowly, Montgomery let out a sigh of pent-up breath. Though the temperature throughout the boat was always maintained at a comfortable seventy degrees, Montgomery realized his khaki uniform shirt was sopping wet beneath his arms and down his spine. His left hand was gripping a handhold on the attack periscope mounting so tightly his hand had cramped.
"Just routine," he said, letting go of the handhold and massaging his fingers. "Cakewalk." Several of the men in the control room chuckled nervously. "Engineering Officer, Captain. Make turns for five knots."
"Make turns for five knots, aye, sir."
Galveston continued her creep toward the south, penetrating still deeper into the Kola Inlet.
Lieutenant j.g. Kathleen "Cat" Garrity sat in the rear seat of the F-14 Tomcat, which was parked on the starboard side of Jefferson's flight deck.
The long pins, each tagged with a red flag, that safed her ejection seat mechanism had already been pulled. In front of her, the Viper Squadron Co, Commander Willis F. Grant, better known aboard Jefferson by his call sign "Coyote," was going through the last of his pre-flight.
"Canopy coming down," Coyote told her over the Tomcat's intercom system, or ICS. The transparent plastic bubble descended slowly over her head, locking in place with a reassuring thump. "Starting engines."
Cat's heart was pounding beneath the tightness of her seat harness and G-suit, and she could hear the rasp of her own breathing, thick behind the rubber embrace of her oxygen mask, hissing in her ears. The Tomcat's twin F110-GE-400 engines spooled to life, their whine penetrating the cockpit like rolling, high-pitched thunder. She concentrated on finishing up her own pre-flight: WCS to STBY; wait for the Weapons Control System light to come on, then flip the liquid cooling switch from OFF to AWG-9. "AWG-Nine light's Out," she said. That was as it should be.
"Rog," Coyote replied.
Next she flipped the Nav Mode switch left of the radar display from OFF to NAV, set IFF to STBY, and turned the radio knobs to BOTH and ON. On the console just above her left knee was a keypad. Carefully, reading from the penciled notations on a pad strapped to her thigh, she keyed in Jefferson's current longitude and latitude for the Tomcat's on-board computer: 22'05'15' East, 71'00'35' North ― which translated as about eighty miles off the northern coast of Norway. Finally she began checking circuit breakers, by eye for those on her side consoles, and by reaching up behind her head and feeling for the set behind the seat. None had popped. Good. "Breakers all go."
A loud thump from outside the aircraft startled her. The blue-shirted deck crewmen were beginning to break the Tomcat down, removing the chains and chocks that secured the thirty-ton aircraft to its place on the flight deck.
A plane director in a Mickey Mouse helmet and a stained, yellow jersey moved past the starboard wing, hands raised, signaling like a cop at a busy intersection. Every man in the deck crew wore a color-coded jersey that identified his section: yellow for plane directors, blue for aircraft handlers, green for maintenance personnel and for the hook-and-cat men, brown for plane captains, purple for fuel handlers, red for firefighters and ordnance men, white for safety monitors, black-and-white checks for inspectors and troubleshooters.
"Here we go," Coyote said. "Gold Eagle Two-oh-one, rolling."
Guided by the Yellow Shirt, the Tomcat rolled smoothly across the flight deck, nosing up behind the vertical wall of a jet-blast deflector raised from the deck. Forward of the JBD, another Tomcat had just screamed off the bow and into the sky, and steam was swirling past the deck like low-flying clouds.
The JBD dropped into its recess in the deck, and Coyote guided the Tomcat forward, aligning it with precision along the rail-straight slash of the starboard bow catapult.
From her vantage point high up off the steel deck, Cat had a glorious view of the sea and sky around her. It was minutes before dawn, which came at 0640 hours at this latitude and this time of year. The sky was completely clear save for a rim of purple clouds along the horizon. Aft and to port the sky was still a deep, midnight blue; ahead and to starboard, toward the east, it had already lightened to a dazzling blend of cerulean and gold, and the tops of the clouds were catching the first orange touch of the hidden sun. A dazzlingly bright star ― actually the planet Venus ― gleamed like a beacon low in the southeast. In every direction, the sea was a deep, deep blue-green shadowed to near-invisibility by the last remnants of night.
With a thunderous, shuddering roar, the engines of Tomcat 206 on the catapult to her left rose to a shrieking crescendo, the aircraft trembling against that twin-mouthed fury. The launch officer performed his ballet of movement, swinging his arm up to point off the carrier's bow, then dropping to touch the deck. At the signal, the catapult officer in his enclosed cockpit on the deck off to one side pressed his button. Tomcat 206, Lieutenant Bruce "Mustang" Davis at the stick, whooshed down the catapult and off the bow, its engines glowing like twin orange eyes in the twilight. Steam fumed from the catapult track as deck crewmen dashed from their standby positions, preparing to receive the next Tomcat in line.
Other crewmen, meanwhile, were making the final preparations on 201.