Lukashenko stared at the weapons officer of the Novosibirsk. Irina Trusov was a stunning platinum blonde, her coveralls trying but failing to conceal her expansive breasts. Lukashenko suddenly felt reminded of how long it had been since he was with a beautiful woman. Or any woman, for that matter.
“This is First Officer Anastasia Isakova,” Novikov said, “and Navigator Leonid Lukashenko. And Captain Lieutenant Pyotr Alexandrov is our weapons officer. So Boris, why have you called us here? You have news?”
“Good news and bad news, Yuri,” Novikov said. “At zero three twenty Moscow time, our MGK detected a very loud submerged contact at bearing two-nine-five. The signal continued for twenty-five minutes, then faded. We believe it to be the Panther.”
“For God’s sake,” Orlov said, his voice loud, “that was two hours ago! What have you been doing since?”
Novikov bit his lip in frustration. “The AI system didn’t alert us to it until well after the contact’s noise shut down. By then, the contact was gone. There was zero bearing rate on the contact — he was far distant. We did a full spectrum sonar scan, but there was nothing. The contact, we believe, was doing thirty knots.”
“Wait,” Orlov said. “For Panther to be going that fast and that loud, he would have had to light off his fast reactor.”
“Yes, we believe Panther was under nuclear power. The captured and analyzed signal showed steam flow transients and turbine noises. But when we slowed it down, the AI believed it to be a Kilo-class.”
“Well, where is he now? What’s the data package?”
By data package, Orlov meant the combination of the contact’s distance, his speed and the direction of his travel — data that would allow a torpedo hit, since torpedo combat required precision. For a torpedo to inflict damage, it had to get close, and to do that, one would have to put it in the same exact spot in the sea that the enemy would be at a precise moment in the future. It was like trying to hit a flying soccer ball with a tennis ball. You couldn’t just throw the ball the at the bearing of the moving soccer ball or you’d miss; you’d have to aim to put the tennis ball at a point in space where the soccer ball would be in the future after the tennis ball had time to travel there. And the only way to know where the soccer ball would be in that future moment was to know its data package. There had been much leaked to the media that the new Futlyar torpedoes were so smart that they didn’t need a data package, and that they could be launched only knowing the target bearing, yet would still hit the target, but that was disinformation, intentionally injected into the world’s open-source information sphere to frighten and deter the Americans. The cold, hard reality was, without a data package, even an advanced Futlyar torpedo would miss.
“We have no data package,” Novikov said, his jaw tightening. “Only the bearing and the sound signature. And the sound pressure level.”
“No bearing rate?” Orlov frowned. This made no sense. A submarine blasting through the sea, loud and clanking, at thirty knots, would move across the compass bearings as it soared by.
“Constant bearing and very, very distant. Perhaps hundreds of kilometers,” Novikov confessed. “And no way to understand where he’ll be in the future.”
“You’re wrong, Boris.” Orlov bit his lip, as if he’d wanted to say more, but had stopped himself. “You have a wealth of data to calculate the future position of the Panther.”
“No we don’t,” Novikov said, sadly. “It could have been hundreds of kilometers away. Who knows where it is now? All we know is it didn’t come down the Indian coastline as we expected. So, we have no idea where it is now.”
“Yes you do.” Orlov shook his head as if in frustration that he had to deal with fools. “Send us all your second captain’s data from the half hour before the detection to a half hour after. I want it all.”
“Fine,” Novikov said, grabbing the phone handset from under the table surface to call the communications officer. He said a few terse words into the phone, no doubt ordering Communications Officer Kovalyov to order the AI system’s history module data packaged up for uplink to the satellite and retransmission back to the Novosibirsk so that Orlov’s crew could further analyze it. “While we wait, you tell me why you think you can come up with a probable data package.”
“Listen, Boris, I’m only going to say this once.” Orlov’s voice was biting, as if having to explain something simple to a hated and slow-witted ex-wife. “You know the location of Panther when it left its base at Bandar Abbas and the time it departed. You know its speed as it sailed east-southeast to the mouth of the Gulf of Oman. You know approximately where it was when it got hijacked. From that point, you need to get into the minds of the adversary. The Americans were stealing the Kilo submarine.” At the mention of the Americans, the Novosibirsk’s pretty blonde weapons officer’s face grew dark with some hidden fury. Somehow, for her, Lukashenko thought, this was personal. “They mean to escape the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean and sail it back to the Western Hemisphere.”
Orlov looked up as the communications officer, TK Sukolov came into the room and whispered in Orlov’s ear. Orlov nodded and Sukolov withdrew.
“The data stream is aboard for us to analyze now,” Orlov said. “As I was saying, the Americans mean to get back to the United States. They may not follow exactly a great-circle route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but their approximate path will get them there. Even if they steam slightly eastward, their predominant vector is southward.”
Novikov frowned. “They might be going to the Pacific, Yuri, to bring the Panther to their Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii. Or their base on Guam.”
“No, Boris,” Orlov said, shaking his head. “The only way out of the Arabian Sea for someone headed to the Pacific is southeast down the India coastline. We’ve already proved that incorrect. And even if they were headed to the Pacific and decided to avoid breaking eastward until they reached the equator in order to confuse us, their vector would still be predominantly southward.”
Novikov pursed his lips in thought. “Fine. If they are headed to Africa’s southern tip, we should steam at maximum speed to the Cape of Good Hope and catch them there when they transit from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.”
“Forget that, Boris,” Orlov said, still in a tone of lecturing a dullard pupil. “The South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and the Antarctic coast is bigger than the Arabian Sea by five hundred percent. It’s just another haystack for you to cry about losing your needle in. No, we must catch these thieves now, here, here in the Arabian Sea.” Orlov looked at his navigator, Dobryvnik. “Misha, pair your screen to the videolink and bring up the second captain’s command screen.”
Onboard the Novosibirsk, Navigator Misha Dobryvnik operated his pad computer, seeing the data that had come in from Voronezh, the second captain standing by for Orlov to give it commands. The flatpanel video screen split into two displays, the main one the text-entry commands for the onboard AI system, the second a small window showing the videolink and the crew of the Novosibirsk. Dobryvnik slid his pad computer over to Orlov. Orlov began typing.
Captain to Second Captain: Analyze data stream to calculate a probability of location, course and speed-of-advance of contact with the following assumptions: