“Next — subsurface picture, Mr. Loomis.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have four submarines closing — a wolf-pack approach, I assume.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have them all tracked?”
“Three of them, sir. One has broken off. We still have him in the passive listening mode, but no course or speed.” He looked more confident than Clark. “I expect a second to break off soon. O’Bannon has orders to detach two frigates as soon as the second one goes.” Again, doctrine said a Russian wolf pack would do just that as they came in for attack. It also said that they never limited themselves to a frontal attack. There had to be one or more submarines coming in from another direction.
“Have you opened up your detection range in other directions?” Pratt asked.
“Yes, sir. No contacts out to fifty miles.” Fifty miles was nothing for a forty-knot submarine!
“Run a line of sonobuoys every twenty-five miles just like they taught you in school, Mr. Loomis. You’ll find them. Next!” Here his voice rose again. “I want you to put everything in the water you can think of that will make noise. I want those bastards so confused they won’t have the vaguest idea where this group is or what we’re going to do next. If we’re keeping their aircraft busy, those subs will become useless so fast…” His voice trailed off.
He saw recognition gradually spread over various faces, some that had been unsure of his intent only moments before. They would react instantaneously should there be any indication the Russians had orders to complete their missions. No longer would there be a chance of a lost moment, a lost moment that might mean the survival or loss of a carrier battle group.
“Kharkov — where is she now?” That was the Soviet carrier that had been patrolling the southeastern sector of the Med for the past week. Her Forger aircraft ranged to only three hundred miles, and Pratt was determined to haunt her as soon as she showed any interest in closing the battle group. Saratoga had been detached with full battle group escort to keep tabs on the Soviet carrier, but Pratt knew that when the time came Sara would be the first to bear the brunt of the first salvo. Kharkov and her escorts would then once again become his responsibility. Quite possibly the Soviet carrier Minsk would also be out of the Black Sea to bother Sara by then.
“Kharkov’s still hanging offshore of Alexandria, Admiral, covering pretty much the same area as yesterday. This morning’s satellite photos indicate that she’s expanded her screen to include two Udaloy-type destroyers and one ASW cruiser. I expect that means she’s getting ready to turn west.”
“What kind of tail do we have on her now?”
“Two attack subs, one either side of an east-west heading, and satellite recon, of course.”
Chin in hand, Pratt surveyed his display board. The screening force around Kharkov was above standard for a Soviet carrier group. That meant only one thing to him — they were planning to change from an antisubmarine group to an attack force. “Set up a scouting line, north-south orientation, running between Tobruk and Crete. They’ll have some attack subs leading the way, and I’d hate to see them get past there before we locate them.”
“Yes, sir. How about Saratoga? Won’t she have to worry about that group too? I should include her.”
“Message her, of course. But,” he included Loomis in his gaze, “they have Minsk up there also, and I expect that’s the one Sara’s going to have her hands full of, especially when they empty out of the Black Sea.”
“Nothing’s coming out, sir. The Turks have everything closed up,” offered Clark.
Pratt smiled grimly. “Wanna bet?”
“Pardon, sir?”
“You want to bet on that? I’m saying that within twenty-four hours the Russians have the Turkish straits completely under their control. So much so,” he grinned, “that they’ll probably be charging the Turks tolls to use their own waterways.”
Clark looked down at his shoes, then back at Pratt. “I don’t follow you, sir.”
“Don’t feel bad about that one. There was no way you could see the intelligence reports I got hold of the other day. That little skirmish with the Greeks was beautifully directed by our friends in Moscow just to put everybody a little off their feed. The outcome of the whole thing couldn’t have been better for them. The Turks and the Greeks were supposed to wear down each other’s military strength to the point that the Russians could waltz in long enough to drain the goddamned Black Sea if they wanted. The only things in their way are the choke points and the Greeks around the Aegean. They’re both quite a bit weaker today… just what keeps the Kremlin happy,” he concluded.
He turned back to his status boards again. “That’s John Hancock out in that screening line with O’Bannon, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Loomis responded.
“Designate Hancock as OTC (Officer in Tactical Command) for that little scouting line.” Now was the time for Nellie to try some of the new tactics they’d played with back in Newport.
“Sorry, sir, O’Bannon’s senior.” Loomis hit some buttons on the computer in front of him. “Commander Nelson is next in line, though.”
“What circuit are they on?” Pratt requested, his voice tired.
“Seventeen, sir.”
Pratt punched the button for 17 as he hefted the radiophone to his ear. He got through to O’Bannon immediately.
“This is Archer himself. Request that tactical command shift to Hanock for duration of this exercise to experiment with new tactics.” It was that simple. Give an order. It seemed, though, that he had to take over each time he wanted to convince his subordinates that he knew exactly what he was doing.
Pratt sat back in his chair to watch.
ABOARD U.S.S. JOHN HANCOCK
Wendell Nelson smiled inwardly when he heard Pratt’s voice. Without moving from his chair, he called to his OOD. “Expand ship intervals to fifteen miles. Alter base course to one three five. They’ve been hiding a bunch of subs off the Libyan coast and there’s no better time than now to set them loose.” He lit another of his never-ending string of cigarettes and puffed quietly as he prepared the geographic picture in his mind. Easing out of his chair, he called over his shoulder, “I’m going into combat for a few minutes to show them a new trick or two. Ask the XO to report to me there.”
It took Nelson just five minutes to show his executive officer what they were going to do, and not much more time for the watch to understand. It was another thirty minutes before the destroyers could launch their helos, and a bit more than an hour before the ASW aircraft from Kennedy were fused into the search pattern.
Nelson was back in his captain’s chair in the pilothouse soon after the search began, cigarette in hand, his legs calmly crossed. There was no need for him to supervise the three-pronged sweep. He knew what it should be and he could visualize in his mind’s eye how they were establishing it as he overheard the reports from combat.
The system had been initially developed under his direction, by a team of Naval War College students using a computer in Newport. It was a complex geometric pattern based on time sequences of various screen elements on station, combined with the ranges of their sound gear. Their movements were programmed. ASW planes would establish a barrier of sonobuoys covering a fixed line. To one side of that line were the widely spaced ships moving at high speed, sweeping fixed, cone-shaped areas before them. On the other side were helicopters dipping their sonar in a predetermined area.