“Sir,” Kovalyov whispered, “I think you need to come to central.”
“On my way.” Novikov clicked off.
Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff leaned over the chart table in the navigation chart room, walking dividers down a line drawn south from where they’d started the reactor and increased speed to thirty-one knots a half hour ago. The deck shook and trembled violently from the speed of their transit.
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino walked in and handed Dankleff a cup of coffee. “Something’s bothering me.”
“Dammit, again? And shouldn’t you be in the control room if we’re going flank?”
“Central command post, you mean? I’m not the one who laid out this submarine. Who puts the navigation chart in a closet outside the central command post? How can the officer of the deck figure out where the hell he is?”
“Who’s got the wheel?”
“Grip Aquatong. He’s good. He’s alert. Maybe a little scared.”
Dankleff laughed. “What, a big tough-guy armed-to-the-teeth SEAL commando is scared?”
“I told him all the things that can go wrong on a maximum speed run. A jam dive, for instance, that takes us below crush depth before he could recover.”
“That poor kid. You’re going to give him nightmares.”
“Better scared and alert than complacent and sleepy.”
“You said something was bothering you, Lipstick.”
Pacino half sat on a stool with a red leather cushion. “We have to slow back down.”
“What? You’re the one who wanted to get the hell out of Dodge and flank it out of here.”
“It’s not right,” Pacino said. “It’s not smart. We’re probably making more noise than a freight train on loose rails. This reactor system wasn’t sound-mounted. It wasn’t designed for stealth, it’s just a big test rig. We proved what we had to prove, that the Panther can haul ass if it absolutely has to. Now it’s time to get quiet again.”
“What happened to the Russians bragging that their Kilo-class was a quote, black hole in the ocean, unquote?”
“Yeah, a new one, the improved class. This thing is old. Hell, we were in grade school when this hull was laid down. And Kilos are quiet on the batteries, even this one. But blasting through the sea at thirty-one knots with a gigantic feed pump and a steam turbine bigger than a moving truck? We’re probably waking people up on either coastline of the entire damned Arabian Sea. Not to mention, Vermont’s top speed is just a little over the same speed we’re going right now. Which means all she can do is trail us with fast speed main coolant pumps, so even she’s not stealthy. The original plan had Vermont out in front of us, so any weapon she’d shoot wouldn’t home in on us. Now she’s behind us after we left her in the dust a half hour ago, in a tail chase.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Shut down the plant and cruise deep on batteries, six knots. Vermont can get back out ahead of us. We can use our rudimentary sonar to search, but it won’t see much, and we don’t know how to use it even if it did. The Q-10 on the Vermont can scout the sea around us. When we get to the point the battery bank is depleted, instead of snorkeling, we restart the fast reactor, speed up to say, fifteen knots and charge the batteries. Once the batteries are back at a hundred percent, we shut down and cruise on the batteries again.”
“Now we’re back on the hundred-day transit. Maybe a little less. But still. And although we won’t run out of diesel, we will still need a rendezvous with one of those CIA tramp steamers or else we run out of food.”
“We’ll figure out the food situation later.”
“Got it. Understood. Shut down the reactor plant and take her to six knots, then. Hurry up.”
Pacino vanished back into the central command post, and soon the buzzing, rattling, trembling deck at their maximum speed run settled back down. Somehow, Dankleff had felt safer at thirty-one knots than he did at six, even if this speed on batteries were much quieter.
“OIC?” Chief Goreliki said from the door to the navigation room.
“Yeah?” Dankleff said, sipping his broiling hot coffee. “What is it, Chief?”
“With the radio passing self-checks, I’m thinking we should take it up to periscope depth and put up an antenna. Now that we’ve slowed, we won’t lose time by going to PD. We need to get a precise NavSat fix. And if I can grab the CommStar broadcast, anything from Vermont or ComSubFor will be in our messages. There might be intelligence we need to read. And if you feel like you can risk transmitting, you can tell Vermont about the two inbound Yasen-M submarines that Abakumov reported.”
Dankleff nodded. “Go tell Pacino that. See what he thinks.”
Dankleff recalculated their average speed. Sixteen hours at six knots, then eight hours at fifteen. Dammit, he thought, a speed-of-advance of only nine knots. He sighed, realizing he’d be losing his entire summer.
After twenty minutes on the batteries, Pacino came back in and plopped a notepad on the table. “Assuming we can transmit, I recommend we transmit that.” Chief Goreliki stood outside the room, waiting for Dankleff’s decision.
Dankleff read the draft message and nodded, adding a sentence at the end.
“Let’s take her to PD. First let’s try to receive the broadcast and get a NavSat fix. Then we’ll go through any messages for us. Scout the intelligence updates. Then if there’s nothing new, we’ll transmit this.”
“Periscope depth, aye, and grab the broadcast and a fix.”
Dankleff shook his head at the chart again as the deck inclined upward, the slight swaying of the deck a sign of rough seas topside. There was a thump as hydraulics raised the radio antenna. He walked into the central command post, where Pacino was doing slow circles on the aft periscope.
“Any contacts?”
“Two. Distant merchant ships by the look of their lights. Want to look?”
“Sure.”
“Low power, on the horizon, relative zero zero zero,” Pacino said, turning over the periscope.
Dankleff put his eye to the warm rubber of the eyepiece and scanned the dark horizon, lit weakly by moonlight that came down through an overcast sky. To the right, there was a surface ship, a supertanker, showing a green, starboard running light, with white lights aft. He was distant. Dankleff found the control to magnify the view, the magnification done with the left periscope grip. He clicked it up twice, and the merchant ship became larger, jumping in the view. He went back to low power and scanned the horizon again, seeing another merchant, this one far distant, barely showing up even in maximum magnification. He returned the periscope to point forward and handed it back to Pacino. “Low power, on the horizon, relative triple zero.”
Pacino took back the scope and continued slow sweeps of the horizon. Dankleff walked aft to the radio room, a small enclosure opposite the navigation room.
“Anything?” he asked Goreliki.
“Nothing for us.”
“We get a fix?”
Goreliki handed Dankleff a printout. He stepped across the passageway to the navigation alcove and plotted the fix, making a dot with a small circle around it and the time of the fix, then plotted their course leading from the dot. His dead reckoning had been off by over thirty miles. He went back to the radio room.
“Can you transmit?”
“We won’t really know until we get a reply,” Goreliki said. “But your message is coded in and ready to send.”