But kill there would be. By the evening watch, two submarines would lie broken and bleeding on the bottom of the Arabian Sea, and Novikov was absolutely certain that his submarine would not be one of those two.
26
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino found Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff in the central command post, reclining in the command seat outboard of the forward part of control, nestled securely aft of the number two periscope
“What’s up, Patch?” Dankleff asked, yawning. “You’re up early. Someone swim over your watery grave again?”
Pacino shook his head. “Just making sure you’re awake, U-Boat. I’m going to do a tour, see how everyone’s doing. But one thing is on my mind.”
“Let me guess, the state of the battery charge? We’re at sixty percent, with the reactor cooking away. Although that bitch has to be noisy. I looked at raising charging voltage to charge the battery bank faster, but it would generate a lot more hydrogen, and hydrogen is not healthy for children and other living things. Think Hindenburg. Think Challenger. Not a good thing in a confined space filled with electrical equipment and sparks.”
“And with Alexie chain-smoking. He must have brought enough cartons of cigarettes to burn through three packs a day for a month.” Abakumov would be standing watch aft in the nuclear control room, hopefully sober.
“And enough vodka as well.”
“That won’t last as long, since now he has to share.”
“Damned shame,” Dankleff grinned.
“So, U-Boat. All okay here?”
“Hey. Officer-in-Charge U-Boat has the bubble. You’re as safe as in Mommy’s arms.”
“Good to know,” Pacino said, knocking his academy ring twice on the periscope pole. “I’ll relieve you at oh-six,” he said, turning and walking aft.
He stepped into the navigation alcove and turned on the desk lamp above the chart, which was taped down to the table surface, a drafting machine arm laid pointing north-south. Pacino glanced at the readout of the Panther’s inertial navigation display, the primitive system the equivalent of what the U.S. Navy had used in the 1970s. Crude, but effective enough to pinpoint their distance within a few thousand meters. If corrected daily with a navigation fix from the Russian GPS satellite constellation, it could collapse the fix error circle down to perhaps a hundred meters. Good enough to avoid submerged sea mountains, but not good enough to approach a port submerged. Pacino plotted the inertial nav’s position on the chart, then laid a pencil line down on it pointing south, dialing their present course in the drafting machine’s protractor to course 177, almost due south, their latitude roughly twenty degrees, thirty minutes north, 350 nautical miles west of India’s Gulf of Khambht and the city of Surat, their longitude almost in the middle of the triangle of the Arabian Sea, due south of Karachi, Pakistan, which was 280 nautical miles west of their previously planned track down the west coastline of India.
They were making excellent time now, what with kicking up their speed to eighteen knots during the midwatch battery charge. Pacino, the unofficial navigator of the journey, had been considering executing a zig to drive farther east, to confuse any opponent of their intent to drive to the Cape of Good Hope and into the Atlantic, but instinct was whispering in his ear to keep driving south and escape the Arabian Sea. Leaving the scene of the crime was definitely the best course for the moment. He looked down at the chart’s depiction of the Arabian Sea, thinking, where are you, Vermont? It was the midwatch, and on the Vermont, his friend the chief engineer, Elvis Lewinsky, would be on the conn, hopefully tracking Panther, keeping her safe. It bothered Pacino that there was no easy way to communicate with her, but submarines were designed to prowl alone, not in wolfpacks. World War II tactics hadn’t survived into the nuclear age.
Although, the Iranian captain, Resa Ahmadi, had shown Pacino and sonar chief Albanese a feature of the ship’s MGK-400 sonar system, which could be tied into the MG-519 Arfa mine-detection and under-ice sonar to broadcast rapid high frequency pulses. But the system was essentially useless, as the language was encrypted. It would be like trying to communicate by generating a note consisting of a barcode. The receiver would have no idea what had been sent, just a string of long and short pulses. Useless.
With that thought, Pacino wandered into the doorway of the sonar enclosure and found Chief Albanese deep in thought, rotating a circular knob, his other hand on one of the ears of his headset. The console’s buttons, knobs and the single large hand-crank in the center had all been recently labeled by Albanese with masking tape and permanent marker in English.
“Hey, Chief,” Pacino said. “Any progress figuring this thing out?”
Albanese removed his headset and tossed it to the side in frustration. “It’s from the stone age, Mr. Patch. No towed array, just a hull flank array for high frequency narrowband, which is rendered fucking useless when we operate the reactor. Steaming on batteries, it’s a bit improved, but not good enough to detect Vermont, even though I know all her emitted tonal frequencies.”
“Vermont is still a needle in a haystack, no matter how much you know about the shape and color of the needle,” Pacino offered. “Was Captain Ahmadi any help getting you into the sonar system?”
“He knows squat about it, sir. I had him translate some of the tech manual, but it’s all knobology, not tactical employment. Apparently the Iranian Navy trains their sonar techs with tribal knowledge, passed down from one generation to the next. Nothing written down.”
Pacino nodded. “Not all that different from us. I never could find anything on the Q-10’s tactical employment. I had to suffer through checkouts from you with miserable dozens of lookups every time it came to tactics.”
Albanese smiled mischievously. “But you learned it all the better that way, didn’t you, sir?”
“That I did, Chief. That I did. Well, the only comfort I can give you is to keep plugging away at it. If anyone can figure this bitch out, it’s you, Whale.”
“Thanks, Mr. Patch. You taking the zero six hundred watch?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d do an extended pre-watch tour and grab a bucket of that Iranian coffee first.”
“Oh yeah, rocket fuel. Do me a favor, L-T, bring me up a cup when you brew the pot.”
“Sure thing, Chief.” Pacino knocked his ring on the doorjamb twice and walked aft to the ladderway to the middle level, turning forward along the passageway leading to the forward compartment, passing the wardroom. He went in and found it empty. Not surprising, he thought, with it being the midwatch. He decided to continue forward to the torpedo room, along the passageway until he reached the round hatch, ducked through it and stepped up the short ladderway to the upper level, which was absolutely crammed with shiny green torpedoes, a small catwalk running down the center between rack-stored weapons and the six torpedo tubes. At the forward end, at a port-side console, he found Lieutenant Muhammad Varney deep in conversation with the Iranian captain, Ahmadi.