He turned in his swivel chair to the Radioman First Class crowded into the cramped confines of the Spook Hut at his side. "Keep on 'em, Joe," he said. "I've gotta get this to the skipper."
"Aye, aye, sir," RM/1 Joseph McNally replied. He, too, wore a radio headset as he monitored the Soviet transmissions. "Maybe bring me some coffee, huh?"
"You got it." He shook his head as he squeezed out of the Spook Hut… which was in fact the Sturgeon class boat's torpedo room, redecorated for the occasion as an intelligence ESM listening suite. As with the Navy's submarine service, the SEALs, and a handful of other elite groups that prized professionalism above the formal hierarchies of rank and privilege, Naval Intelligence operatives — at least in the field — tended to accept casual fraternization between officers and enlisted men more than was possible within the regular naval service. You would never find a full commander fetching coffee for an enlisted man in the real Navy.
Ducking out of the cozy confines of the Spook Hut, he made his way aft along the main corridor, trotted up a companionway ladder, then entered the larger but still claustrophobic enclosure of the Parche's bridge and combat center, red-lit, now, to preserve the night sight of men whose duty schedules took scant notice of whether it was light or dark in the world above. Commander Richard Perrigrino, Parche's captain, stood at one of the two gleaming, silver tree trunks in the compartment's center, the housing for one of the boat's periscopes. With eye pressed against the rubber-cushioned ocular, his arm draped over one of the turning arms, he looked every inch the rugged U-boat skipper he sometimes pretended to be. Skip Jones, the boat's Exec, stood beside him.
"Whatcha got, Commander?" Jones asked, looking up from the clipboard and pen he held in his hands. "What brings you out of your cave and into the red light of day?"
"Something the captain might be interested in," Travers replied.
"Hang on just a sec, Commander," Perrigrino said. "Got a hot one here. Smile for the birdie…. "He touched a button on the side of the periscope housing, snapping a rapid-fire series of high-resolution photographs through the scope's lens. "Mark, Sierra Six-one, bearing three-three-four. Log it."
"Sierra Six-one, bearing three-three-four, aye, Captain," Jones said, noting the information on his clipboard.
Captain Perrigrino pulled back from the scope and grinned at Travers. "Hey! You want to see something damned cool?"
"Certainly, Captain." It wasn't every day that anyone other than the tight little coterie of senior submarine officers got to have a peek through the boat's periscope. He walked across the combat center to the periscope housing, leaned forward, and pressed his eyes up to the objective eyepiece.
The low-light image-intensifier system was on, flooding his eyes with a green-yellow glow. It took him a moment to begin to pick out shapes and meaning from the jumble he was seeing.
The water, for the most part, was a black swell low in the field of view. Against an equally black sky, mountains reared in shades of deep green and streaks of black, while closer blazed the whites and yellows of city lights, sparkling on the water.
Nearer still, he saw movement….
It took Travers long seconds to understand what it was… a long, low hull barely above the swell, supporting a rectangular sail above, all painted in yellow-green. Human shapes, tiny with distance, could be discerned in the vessel's weather bridge, high atop and forward on the conning tower. A submarine, definitely… but it didn't look like any Russian boat he'd ever seen. That long, low, and right-angled sail looked like the silhouette of an Oscar or a Papa, both cruise-missile subs… but the sliver of tail fin he could see above water was all wrong… as was the shape of the part of the hull he could see. He glanced at the range and bearing figures visible on the scope display. At a guess, the sub he was watching was three to four hundred feet in length… way too small for a monster Oscar, which measured a good 501 feet and some inches, and displaced 13,600 tons when submerged.
Besides, the Soviets only had one Papa class boat, a prototype test bed built at Gor'kiy in the late sixties to test cruise-missile concepts and later transferred to the Northern Fleet.
"What the hell is it?" he asked the captain. "If it's their one Papa, they're a hell of a long way off course."
"Ehhhh," Perrigrino said, making a sound like a game-show buzzer. "Wrong answer."
"Fair guess, though, Skipper," Jones said. "They look a bit alike."
"Fair but still a clean miss," Perrigrino said. He enjoyed needling the Naval Intelligence operative and liked to rub in the fact that there was an enormous gulf between books and think tanks and the inescapable realities of real-world experience. "So… would the gentleman from Maryland care to try for Double Jeopardy, where the cash prizes get really serious?"
Travers took another look. Those sleek lines on the hull… It had to be an attack boat, a hunter-killer, rather than a fat-pig SSGN or a Russian boomer. The most advanced H-K boats in the Soviet naval arsenal were the Alfa, which looked like a sleek cigar with a teardrop-shaped sail, low, mean, fast, and deadly; and the brand-new Akula, which looked like a big Alfa with a streamlined pod fixed atop the tail to house a towed array sonar.
"An attack boat," he said quietly. "But not one I know." He pulled back and looked Perrigrino in the eye. "Has to be a Mike."
Perrigrino's eyes widened, his bushy eyebrows climbing high. "Nice guess, Commander," he said, with just the slightest emphasis on the second word.
"But… that's not possible. They only have one Mike, and she was launched from Severodvinsk three years ago. She's still with the Northern Fleet."
"Well, either their lone Mike got a transfer," Perrigrino said, "or they have a second one." He picked up a microphone. "Sonar, Conn."
"Sonar, aye," a voice replied over the bridge speaker.
"You got a make on Sierra Six-one yet?"
"It's a Mike," the sonar watch replied. "But not the one in our library, the one recorded off Murmansk a couple of years ago. We're designating this one Mike Two."
"A new boat," Jones said. "This'll perk up the boys back at the Squirrel Cage."
Travers watched the Mike as it cruised slowly out of the Tauyskaya Guba, scattering the reflections of the lights of the port city of Magadan. It was moving quickly — he estimated fifteen knots or better — and a small flotilla of harbor craft and patrol boats escorting it clear of the port approaches were struggling to keep up. The figures on the weather bridge, he noticed, were gone, and in another moment, the lean, rounded hull began to slip beneath the rippling, light-smeared water.
"They're submerging," he said.
Perrigrino tapped his shoulder, cutting in. Travers stepped back as the Parche's captain took another look… and another round of photographs. "Going… going… and gone," Perrigrino said.
"Are they going after the Pittsburgh, you think?" Travers asked.
"Down scope," Perrigrino said. He stepped back, looked at Travers, and shrugged. "Only if our boys are real slow. Even at forty knots, that's a full day's cruise."
"I just overheard something broadcast in the clear. One of our Russian friends on the site was calling for more help, saying the American sub was making a break for the… " He stopped and glanced at the note in his hand. "The Proliv Yekateriny."
"Katherine's Straits, huh? Let's have a look."
He led the way to the chart table behind the periscope walk. Several charts lay open, and he thumbed through half a dozen before finding the one he wanted. "There," Perrigrino said. "Between Iturup to the north and Kunashir to the south. Both contested. The Soviets grabbed 'em from Japan in 1945 and never gave 'em back. Good, deep-water channel between them."