Castillo started snapping pictures, enjoying himself immensely, right up until the moment Glazer stepped up to him and said, “Captain, Sonar needs you right away.”
The urgent tone of Glazer’s voice made Castillo look away from the scope. The young officer’s face was set into grave lines.
“What is it, Bob?”
“Sir, Busfield says he just picked up something coming out of Vladivostok. A CZ contact.”
There were places in the ocean where sound waves generated beneath the ocean’s surface bounced off a sound layer and were deflected upward. A CZ contact could be heard twenty or even thirty nautical miles away in a band only a few miles wide, called a convergence zone.
“So the Russians have a sub coming out,” prompted Castillo. The fact that a Russian submarine was transiting out of Vladivostok wasn’t exactly news.
Glazer frowned. “Sir, Jimmy says it’s not like anything he’s ever heard before.”
Now that was news. Petty Officer Second Class Jimmy Busfield was the best sonar tech on Pasadena. Castillo would have laid good money that he was the best in the Pacific.
If Busfield was spooked…
“Take the scope,” said Castillo. “If Kirishima makes a radical course change or the helo takes off take us down fast. Once we’re beneath the layer come to new course one nine three, full bell.” Castillo held up an index finger. “If you think they’ve found us.”
“Yessir,” said Glazer crisply.
Castillo squeezed the young man’s shoulder and stepped off the periscope stand. He stepped through Control’s forward hatch and leaned into the sonar shack which was immediately off the p-way leading out of Control.
Sonar was little bigger than a closet and just as dark. The space’s only lighting came from a row of BSY-1 consoles. A faint green static filled the screens, coloring the faces of the sonarmen hunched over them a pale green. A sharp emerald line sliced through Busfield’s screen.
“You got something for me, Watch Supervisor?” Castillo asked softly.
Busfield turned around to look at him. He was thin kid from the American southwest. Castillo heard the west Texas in his accent. “Yes, sir, that’s affirm.” The kid reached out and touched the green line cutting through his waterfall display. “She looks like a CZ contact to me, think we’re getting her on the second bounce, so that puts her fifty, sixty miles out.”
He reached for a pair of headphones and handed them to his captain. “Here, sir. I think she’s fixin’ to fade out. Better listen before she does.”
Castillo pressed one of the ear pieces to his right ear and listened carefully. He wasn’t as gifted as his sonar techs, but he stopped by sonar to listen nearly every time they got a contact. He listened to the thak-thak-thak of a pair of screws pumping noise into the water until the signal faded out.
Castillo put the phone set down and looked up. “Boomer,” he said.
Busfield beamed, grinning wide. “That’s right, skipper. I have a job for you in Sonar, if this captain thing doesn’t work out. Blade count and rate make her a Typhoon.”
“Which one?”
Busfield shook his head. “One we don’t have on record, skipper.”
“A Type IV,” Castillo whispered. One of the new Russian missile boats.
“There’s something else weird,” said Busfield.
Castillo frowned, remembering the sonorous beat of the submarine’s screws slicing through the ocean, the single emerald line cutting through the waterfall display.
The single emerald line.
“She came out alone,” said Castillo.
“Yessir, sure looks that way to me.”
A boomer by herself, especially a new one, ran counter to Russian doctrine. Typically Russian SSBN’s were escorted out by attack submarines to screen out enemy fast attacks.
Castillo patted Busfield on the shoulder. “Nice work, Petty Officer. Very nice. You have a bearing for me?”
“Yessir, three four two.”
Castillo nodded. “Very nice.”
He stepped out of Sonar, thinking furiously. His orders required him to stay in the box and play with Kirishima and Amagiri for another 28 hours and there wasn’t any give in those orders. If he ran after the Typhoon he’d be bringing SCARLET GOALPOST to a premature end. On the other hand, he had a golden opportunity to slip up to the Russians’ newest ballistic missile submarine and write the book on her.
American submarine commanders spent a lot of time beyond the reach of their chain of command and so they were trained to think for themselves. It was a trait Castillo had no trouble with. By the time he had stepped back into Control he had made up his mind.
“Officer of the Deck,” he said, “make your depth two hundred feet and come up to a two-thirds bell when you reach depth. Steer new course, three four two. Secure from Battlestations.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” snapped Glazer, who immediately repeated the orders for his control team. Once again, Control was filled with the sound of repeatbacks as Pasadena slipped silently beneath the waves.
The Japanese destroyer Kirishima never even knew she was there.
Castillo stepped into his tiny stateroom and shut the hatch behind him. There was room for a single, narrow rack up against the bulkhead opposite the hatch. Across from his rack was a gray storage unit that included a closet, four drawers, a fold-down desk, and a wall safe. Castillo had taped pictures of Dianne and the kids up over the little compartment that served as his work space. Inside the closet, behind his uniforms, he’d hung a crucifix. Sometimes he pulled aside his khakis and service dress blues to find the device hiding there, to remind himself that God was always present, whether he saw Him or not.
When Pasadena was on deployment, this small, Spartan space was his home.
Castillo tried to always remember that no matter how cramped and bare his stateroom was, every other man aboard Pasadena had less.
He realized he still had a coffee cup half-filled with Coke in his hand. (Castillo didn’t drink coffee.) He stepped over to the small, steel sink where he shaved and dumped it out. The last thing he needed was more caffeine.
Before departing the exercise op area he’d released a SLOT buoy, reporting that he was breaking off from SCARLET GOALPOST to pursue the Typhoon. He didn’t wait around for an answer. Castillo was certain that CINCPACFLT would validate his decision — if he actually found the Russian boomer.
And that would be a problem.
Because she had been a CZ contact, there was no way for Pasadena to continuously track the Typhoon. Instead, Castillo would have to run toward her last known posit and then reacquire the Russian boat. Because he had a bearing to the Typhoon and he knew she had to be coming out of Vladivostok, Castillo had a rough position on the boomer. But every second that ticked by carried the Typhoon farther and farther away from that posit. If Castillo took too long to reach the datum, the Typhoon would fade away like a ghost. On the other hand, if he ran in too fast, the boomer would hear him coming.
It was a difficult dilemma.
Castillo had ordered turns for twenty knots. He’d run for two hours toward the datum and then stop to listen. Castillo was betting that the Typhoon was moving north, either toward her op area in the Arctic or the Russian boomer base at Rybachiy.
Rybachiy was more likely. It was beyond strange for a Russian boomer to come out of Vladivostok. Russian ballistic missile boats were homeported out of the Kamchatka peninsula to the north. Castillo figured the Typhoon had some kind of engineering casualty that had forced her to make port in Vladivostok and she was now making her way back to Rybachiy.