Zhigunov thought. “The area is still too big. And if our units are facing each other, there is risk that a weapon from one homes in on and blows up the other friendly unit. No, Aleksandr, your plan won’t work. All we will do is sink each other, at best. Our ships must face the incoming vector of the Panther and her escort together. Then our weapons will leave from our torpedo tubes and go the same general direction, with no friendly submarine in the seeker cones of our torpedoes.”
“You make a good point,” Andreyushkin said.
“Let us look at this from another point of view,” Zhigunov said. “First, are we in agreement that it was the Americans who took the Panther?”
Andreyushkin nodded.
“Who else?” Zhigunov asked.
“The British, perhaps. The Chinese.”
“What possible motive would they have, Aleksandr?” Zhigunov asked.
“I can’t see one. But what is the motive for the Americans to steal the Panther?”
“They want the reactor technology,” Zhigunov said, “and they want to keep it out of the hands of the Iranians. This ongoing conflict between the Iranians and Americans makes it obvious. It had to be the Americans.”
“Very well,” Andreyushkin said. “But what difference does that make?”
“It determines their destination, Aleksandr. If the Americans took this submarine, they aim to bring it back to the Atlantic, and they would avoid the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. That means a transit through the Indian Ocean and going around Africa into the Atlantic.”
“I’m with you, Gennady.”
“Allow me to control the display,” Zhigunov said. He zoomed the display outward until the entire globe was visible, the eastern Africa coast on the west, the Arabian peninsula on the north, India to the east. He drew a bold yellow line extending from the mouth of the Gulf of Oman along the east coast of Africa and extending west at the southern tip of Africa. “This is the great circle route from the point of their taking the Panther.” Zhigunov drew a second line, this one green, extending due south from the Gulf of Oman into the Arabian Sea, then into the Indian Ocean, then a third line in red, from the hijacking point southeast, hugging the west coast of India. “Now, Aleksandr, if we had taken Panther and aimed to get it to America without being intercepted, which route would we take?”
“The shortest one,” Andreyushkin said. “The great circle route along the east coast of Africa.”
Zhigunov made the bold yellow line fade into a dull, weak yellow. “I don’t think so, Aleksandr. You are correct that it is the shortest route, but we are hunting down a burglar, and a burglar won’t take an obvious escape route. All we would have to do would be to set up in the narrows between Mozambique and Madagascar, in the Mozambique Channel, using it as a choke point, and the Panther would steam right through it at six knots. We’d find it and sink it easily.”
“You’re saying that’s too obvious, and that the Americans are going to try something sneakier?”
“Of course,” Zhigunov said. “They were sneaky enough to steal the submarine in the first place. And they won’t just go due south, since that was the way to the test area, and they would suppose we would have support ships in that direction to monitor the reactor test. We didn’t, by the way, but they don’t know that, and they would want to avoid being detected by one of our destroyers or our patrol aircraft — and we should assume they don’t know about the worm that has paralyzed our air assets and surface ships. That leaves the red route, extending southeast, close to the shores of India. This is perfect, it takes them far away from the great circle route to their destination and from the test route. Plus, the western coast of India is absolutely rotten with shipping. There’s more sonar noise in that part of the world than anywhere other than the approaches to the Suez Canal, Panama Canal or Cape of Good Hope. And a submarine can hide in that ambient noise. That, Aleksandr, is the escape route.”
Andreyushkin nodded. “I see your point, Gennady. I agree. So how should we deploy our forces?”
“This gets easy. The red route extends here. It will take us, let’s see.” Zhigunov manipulated his pad computer. “Thirty hours for Novosibirsk at maximum speed, forty for Voronezh, to reach this point here, approximately halfway down the Indian coastline, west of this town of Marmagao. If we start promptly, Novosibirsk arrives on-station June 4 at 2000 Moscow time and Voronezh June 5 at 0600 hours. Our submarines rendezvous there, in contact with other using underwater encrypted Bolshoi-Feniks sonar, and they will proceed northward together until Panther and the American escort sub drive into them. They should probably have twenty or thirty or even forty kilometers between them, but search slowly north-northwestward at best search speed of six knots after their rendezvous. At the six-knot transit speed of Panther, it will take her days to drive into the search sector of our sonars. With her southward speed of six knots and our northward speed of six knots, we’ll intercept her about five days after the rendezvous. That would put detection on or about June 10, Friday, plus or minus a day.”
“Heavens, Gennady, that’s a week from now. A long time to wait to tell Stanislav the good news we’ve found and put down the Panther and the American submarine.”
“Like we both know, Aleksandr, it is a gigantic ocean out there.”
“We could shorten this up. Have our boats rendezvous much farther north along the Indian coastline.”
“No, Aleksandr, we risk arriving at a point that the Panther has already passed by. We have to make sure we intercept them. We will scour the route from the coast of India all the way north to the shores of Pakistan. We’ll find her, if we are smart and patient.”
Andreyushkin thought for a moment. “We double our chances of detecting her if one boat goes to the northernmost point of the Pakistan-India coastline and the other begins from Point Marmagao, Gennady. They would converge on the targets. With an ocean this big, only one of our units will have the enemy in detection range at one time. The chances of going down from friendly fire are not that great.”
“Are you willing to risk that, Aleksandr? Risk your men’s lives, risk one of the most expensive weapons systems Russia has ever built? And risk that you’ll find yourself explaining to Admiral Stanislav that you lost a submarine to American torpedoes, or worse, from your own force’s torpedoes?”
Andreyushkin sighed. “I suppose you’re right, Gennady. Still, it seems overly conservative. And, what if the Americans actually do decide to take the great circle route?”
“Why would they do that?”
“They might think we’d reject that as a tactic, since, as you said, it is too obvious. They’d expect us to head to the other escape route, the Indian coastline. So, by hugging the coast of Africa, they’ve fooled us. They get away with their operation.”
Zhigunov thought for a long time. “There is no way that Americans think like that, Aleksandr. They are sneaky thieves. They are cowards. They will skulk along the Indian coastline. If we go with my proposal, yes, it will take longer. The longer the Americans go from having stolen the Panther, the more overconfident they will be, and the greater the chance of them making a mistake. We know the sound signature of the Kilo-class, Aleksandr. We will find them. We will sink them. We will report to Stanislav a successful mission.”