“Do it.”
Pacino punched the flatpanel at the indication of the main feed pump, one eye on the boiler level, now at 4 centimeters. The pump had better start on the first try, he thought. The pump was the size of a refrigerator and drew more current than anything on board. As it started, all the lights throughout the ship dimmed and blinked, the electrical transient causing alarms to go off in central command. Pacino watched. The pump indicated at max RPM and boiler levels were climbing from 2 centimeters, back on their way to 80. He breathed a sigh of relief. It had worked.
“You are obviously man, not boy,” Abakumov said, slapping Pacino on the back and smiling.
“Good to know,” Pacino said. “I suspected, but confirmation is important. Now, for the propulsion turbine.”
This was easier, similar to starting the ship’s service turbine, but this unit was five times the size of the SSTG, its screaming to full revolutions ear-piercing. Hard to imagine that this much noise wouldn’t blast out into the sea and be detected by someone out there, but there was nothing they could do about it.
Finally, the battery breaker to the main motor was open and the propulsion turbine was powering the main motor. The ship was underway on nuclear power.
“Start the battery charge,” Abakumov said.
Pacino lined up the breakers to put the SSTG onto the battery and push current into it to restore its state of charge. As the amp-hour meter began to climb, he stepped back from the panel and looked at the status of the equipment. It was all nominal. No alarms, no red flashing annunciators. He’d done it. He found the phone.
“Central, OIC.”
“Nuclear control, AOIC. Propulsion shifted to nuclear power, battery charge in progress.”
“Very well. Now get up here and take back over your watch, ya non-qual slacker.”
Pacino smiled, turned over the propulsion plant watch to Abakumov and walked forward.
34
Captain Third Rank Svetka Maksimov had the senior supervisory watch in the central command post, sitting at the command console’s far portside position one, her display showing the broadband sonar screen to the left and the transient detector to the right. The broadband display was a mess, with dozens of strong traces from the merchant shipping in the shipping lane directly overhead.
The transient detector would be somewhat more revealing, she thought, the display a three-dimensional graph of time on the bottom axis extending right along the screen. The vertical axis was frequency, although most useful transients were low frequency, but not all. A dropped wrench made a low frequency transient, as would a slammed hatch or a torpedo tube door closing, but steam at a high flowrate through a steam pipe would make a high frequency noise, as would a steam turbine startup. High frequencies were somewhat useless, Maksimov thought, since they attenuated and disappeared quickly with distance through the ocean. So they’d only detect a high frequency if it were extremely close. The third axis was intensity, this axis pointing into the screen. A faint sound would hug the axis, but a louder one would zoom out into what looked like the depth of the screen’s depiction.
The transient noises were filtered by the MGK-600’s signal processor, in an effort to exclude displaying biologics such as the moaning of whales and the clicking of shrimp. Biologics usually made the ocean loud with useless noise. With the biologics screened out, the system could strain for detections of dropped wrenches, missile doors opening or shutting, or a launched torpedo. Even footsteps or loud voices. Although, the problem with the biologics filter was that it would screen out music, which meant a target could be blasting rock ’n roll on a stereo but avoid detection. For that, the only remedy was the use of the human ear. But so far, the transient plot was quiet and all that came over the headset were clicking shrimp, wave noise, and the propellers of dozens of merchant ships up above. Maksimov bit her lip and looked around the room.
On position three of the command console to her right was Senior Lieutenant Anatoly Blackbeard Pavlovsky, the electrical officer, standing duty as watch officer. His concentration was momentarily on the chart, zooming in, then back out, shaking his head at the enormous size of the fix error circle. Maksimov, as navigator, had even contemplated donning a wetsuit, locking out of the forward airlock and swimming to the surface taking a sextant and a chronometer with her and shooting the sun at noon to get a navigation fix. Anything was better than relying on ship’s inertial nav, which was getting buggier every minute without a navsat fix. Pavlovsky rotated his display back to the same sonar screen that Maksimov herself was seeing.
Maksimov got up and paced the room, checking that the ship control petty officers, the boatswains, were taking care of ship’s depth, speed and buoyancy, then walking to the port side to the sonar-and-sensor console, where Sonar Officer Ilia Kovalev stood his watch, his headset on, concentrating on a large display of the transient detector.
“What bearing are you checking?” Maksimov asked Kovalev.
“Southeast for eighty percent of the time,” he said. “Northwest for twenty percent. Just in case the target subs somehow slipped past us and are heading up the great circle route to North America. Right now, it’s southeast.”
As he was speaking, a bright red transient lit up at high frequency, a blotch at medium intensity, covering several of the higher frequency buckets, and climbing in intensity.
“I’ll be damned, ma’am,” Kovalev breathed. “High freq contact.”
Maksimov picked up a headset at the console beside Kovalev, pulled up the transient display and tuned the cursor to the sound. It was a rushing, blasting noise. She turned to Pavlovsky. “Call the captain,” she barked. “We’ve got something.” She sat at the console and brought up the transient monitor on the lower screen and the broadband display on the upper display. On the console to her left, she brought up the narrowband graphics from the towed array, but so far, they were just full of noise.
It only took half a minute for Captain Alexeyev to step into the central command post. He stood behind Maksimov and took a third headset from the console and listened to the transient, which was now fading, but a new transient was growing on the screen, coming out of the low frequencies and rolling into the high frequencies.
Kovalev looked back at the navigator and the captain. “Steam turbine startup, for sure.”
“Any correlation on broadband?” Alexeyev asked. They couldn’t get a track on transients, just a momentary general bearing. But a loud, sustained transient should show up as a broadband sonar trace with a sustained, precise bearing. And that they could get a parallax range on. If it kept up for a few minutes, they could get a firing data package. In a hard spot, they could hit it with an active sonar pulse and get a firecontrol data package in a heartbeat, at the expensive cost of losing their stealth, which was vital given that this loud contact was being escorted by a quiet attack submarine.
Maksimov stood back up and stepped over to the navigation chart, manipulating the keyboard to punch in the suspected position of the transient. Pavlovsky joined her at the table, stroking his too-long scraggly beard. “That’s got to be the Panther,” he said.
“Transient frequency stable and intensity fading,” Kovalev reported. “But I have another transient, this one much higher in intensity, low frequency and becoming higher pitched. This is another steam turbine startup, and this one is much bigger.”