“Send it.”
Goreliki operated her screen, a modified, hardened laptop connected by cables to a temporary panel she’d duct-taped to the submarine’s radio equipment rack in a space once occupied by Iranian equipment that now lay on the deck.
“Okay, it’s transmitted, OIC.”
“Great,” Dankleff said, returning to the central command post.
“Message is out. Lower the antenna. Let’s take her back down, Patch.”
“Helm,” Pacino called to Grip Aquatong as he operated the hydraulic lever to lower the radio antenna, “make your depth one five zero meters.”
“One five zero meters, Helm, aye,” Grip answered, pushing his control yoke forward. The deck inclined down.
“Scope’s awash,” Pacino said. “Lowering number two scope.” He hit the hydraulic control lever to lower the periscope.
At a hundred meters, the hull popped from the pressure, a booming roar overhead in control.
“Is it just me, Lipstick, or are those sounds louder on this boat than on the Vermont?”
“Seems that way to me, too,” Pacino said.
“Leveling out at one five zero meters,” Grip called.
“Very well, Helm,” Pacino said.
“You know, he’s more like the diving officer than the helmsman.”
“I feel strange calling him ‘diving officer’ if he’s got the rudder and planes. And ‘pilot’ isn’t right, not on an ancient setup like this.”
“Yeah. Well. I’m going to try to catch a few hours. I’ll be back at zero six.”
“I’ve got the bubble, OIC. Get some rack,” Pacino said, taking a seat at the pos two console.
“Got a curve on this leg, Officer of the Deck,” Firecontrolman First Class Ralston, the firecontrolman of the watch, reported, only turning his head enough from the attack center to allow the engineer to hear his voice.
“Pilot, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course west,” Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky ordered from the command console.
“Right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course west, Pilot, aye,” Senior Chief Nygard acknowledged from the ship control station.
“What are they doing?” Lewinsky wondered to himself. Forty minutes before, after the transients were detected coming from the Panther, she’d sped up and screeched southward, and had ended up going so fast that Lewinsky had to order fast speed main coolant pumps started and kick the reactor plant up to a hundred percent power to follow her, keeping up, but in a blind tail chase, the clanking and loud Kilo submarine a dark streak of broadband noise on the Q-10’s spherical array. And then, ten minutes ago, just as suddenly as she’d sped up, Panther shut down her reactor and went dead quiet again, going slow on her batteries.
“Steady course west, sir,” Nygard called.
“FTOW, get a leg.” Lewinsky dialed his display to the same output that Ralston was looking at, a vertical dot stack of fixed interval data units sent from sonar to the battlecontrol system, each data package combining twenty seconds of passive sonar data into a smoothed out best bearing to the target. Lewinsky checked his watch for the third time in two minutes, waiting impatiently to see what the target solution came out to be. As the new sonar data came in, it skewed off to the right. He could see what Ralston was doing to the dot stack. By dialing in assumed ranges and speeds of the contact, the dot stack after two “legs” of data — one bearing rate from driving Vermont east, the second from driving her west — could generate only one target range, course and speed based on how the bearings to the target changed with the parallax maneuver.
“Petty Officer Mercer, what’s your best guess on speed?”
The sonarman of the watch, Mercer, turned to look over at Lewinsky. “She’s back on batteries, Eng. Most probable is six knots. But you’d better close on her, I’m losing SNR.” If the signal-to-noise ratio sank too low, the target would vanish into the loud background noise of the sea.
“What speed are you using, FTOW?”
“Speed six, OOD,” Ralston said. “This is about as good as we’re going to get without a third leg, sir. Panther’s solution — range, six thousand one hundred yards, speed six, course one nine five.”
“Pilot, left ten degrees rudder, steady course one nine five, make turns for twelve knots.” Slowing down three knots was not what Lewinsky wanted, because at the fifteen knots he’d been going, he’d catch up to Panther faster, but twelve gave him less own-ship generated noise, which would help sonar with its struggling signal-to-noise ratio. Anything he could do to improve the sonar equation, he’d do it.
“Pilot, aye, my rudder’s left ten, passing one zero zero to the left, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead two thirds, turns for twelve knots. Passing one two zero to the left.”
“Belay headings, Pilot.”
The dot stack on the display diverged again and became meaningless, the previous data no longer useful. Lewinsky dialed his display back to the navigation chart, zooming out to show the entire Arabian Sea, then zooming in to show own-ship’s position, then the position of the Panther. For the fourth time in ten minutes, he muttered to himself, what is that boat doing?
“Officer of the Deck, steady course one nine five.”
“How’s your signal now, Mercer?”
“Better,” Mercer replied from the number one sonar stack. “No, wait, I lied. He’s fading, with a high D-E.” D/E was deflection/elevation, or the sonar’s way of saying the angle to the target had changed so that the Q-10 sphere was now looking upward. “I’ve got transients too, sounds like hull pops.”
“He’s going shallow,” Lewinsky said. “Maybe going to periscope depth to grab a fix, or maybe he got his radio working. Pilot, all stop, make your depth one five zero feet, report speed seven.” Lewinsky picked up the phone and buzzed the XO’s stateroom as the deck started tilting dramatically upward, Lewinsky grabbing the handhold bar on the command console. A loud groaning sound came from the overhead, quiet at first, then louder, as the hull expanded from the lower pressure as they came shallow.
“Command Duty Officer,” Quinnivan said on the phone.
“He’s popping up to PD, XO. I’ve closed range from six thousand to maybe four. Request permission to proceed to periscope depth, no baffle clear.”
“Take her up to PD, OOD, no baffle clear,” Quinnivan said. “I’m coming to control.”
“Aye sir, PD, no baffle clear.” Lewinsky put the phone down. He hated the idea of going shallow above the thermal layer without looking around to see what was going on in the radically different sonar environment near the surface, where the water was stirred by the waves and wind, the tremendous thermal power of the sun heating this upper layer of a hundred or so feet of water to bathtub warmth, where back deep, it was barely above freezing temperature, and the interface between warm and cold was often stark, almost like the surface of a mirror. A submariner could think he had the whole tactical picture when deep, then when ascending through the layer, there could be a dozen ships up there, some of them close enough to risk being rammed. And a submarine hull was built to take the even pressure of the deep, not a puncture force of a supertanker hull collision. There were dozens of incident reports of submarines being run into up above the layer. Photos of destroyed sails and huge dents in hulls came to mind. Submarines had even caused surface ships to sink after a collision. The classified after-action report from the Bo Hai Bay rescue mission came to mind, when the Seawolf, under the command of Lipstick’s dad, had run out of torpedoes and decided to use her sail to ram a Chinese destroyer. She’d cut the destroyer cleanly in half, and both halves sank. The force of the ramming had mostly sheared off Seawolf’s sail, but she’d bought herself a few hours’ time.