"Ah, he'll get over it. Mission jitters."
"I got 'em too," O'Brien said as he stood. "I'd better go get some rack time while I can. If I'm lucky, I can get three hours in before I have to go on duty."
"Grab a few Zs for us, while you're at it," Douglas said.
"And don't worry about the hair," Scobey added. "I'm sure it's perfectly normal."
The others burst out laughing, and O'Brien hurried away faster, embarrassed. And scared….
"So what do you have, Rodriguez?" Gordon asked.
He was standing in the sonar compartment forward of the control room. Two sonar techs, Rodriguez and Kellerman, were seated at the long console with its monitors, each displaying arcane scryings painted on black in green light. Gordon could read the waterfall, as the main cascade was called, but it took a real expert, one with a master's ears, to pick faint patterns of repetition or artificial noise out of the sea of hissing, popping static all around them.
"Something, Skipper," Rodriguez said. He held up a finger as he listened intently to his headset. "There." He whipped off the headset and handed it to Gordon, who pressed it to his ear. "Listen to that."
What Gordon could hear quite easily was a loud, throbbing rumble overlying a steady whooshing noise, but he had the feeling that Rodriguez hadn't called him in here to listen to the noise made by his own boat. "I hear our own prop wash," he said. "What—"
"Not the wash, Captain," Rodriguez said. "Listen past that, deeper. See if you hear something else behind the hissing noise."
Gordon closed his eyes and stretched, trying to feel the sound as much as hear it. He could almost catch something… there!
"Kind of a fast chirping or popping sound," he said. "Not very loud, but it's regular. Like something mechanical squeaking…. "
"Very good, sir!" Rodriguez said, eyes opening wide.
"With ears like that, you should have been a sonar man."
"So what am I listening to?"
"Cavitation, sir. Not ours. Somebody else."
"A Russian boat?"
"Unless you think we're being stalked by one of ours, sir."
"No war games scheduled for this cruise." Gordon handed the headset back. "What's the cavitation from? At ten knots it's not like he's going too fast."
"My best guess? His screw is just a little bit off center. It's wobbling. That, or one of the blades is bent a little bit, and causing the screw to turn unevenly. Whichever it is, it's causing little pockets of vacuum to pop just ahead of the screw."
"How far aft?"
"That I can't tell you, sir. My guess would be five hundred to a thousand yards, but it's only a guess. We're streaming our BQR-15 at eight hundred feet, and that's where we're picking this up. What I'm hoping to do is get a side profile on the bastard. As it is, we've got him bow-on, and I only pick up the cavitation once in a while, when he falls off a little bit and I can 'see' his stern."
"You want a better look at him?"
"If we can manage that, yes, sir."
"I'll see what we can arrange. Our first job, though, is going to be to lose this bozo. I don't want him tailing us all the way to our objective."
"That would definitely be a bummer, sir."
"Where'd you pick him up? Or, rather, where'd he pick us up?"
Rodriguez glanced at the big clock on the bulkhead above the sonar screens. "I logged him as Sierra-one at 1120 hours, sir. That's when I first notified you."
Gordon nodded.
"But it's a damned big ocean. My money would be on this guy sitting right outside the Golden Gate waiting for us. We came cruising by, happy as clams, rigging for angles and dangles, and he picked us up."
"My guess too, Rodriguez."
"Sorry I didn't get him sooner, sir."
"Hey, the rule book says you guys are completely deaf astern. It's a miracle you picked him up at all out of all that hash. Well done!"
"Thank you, sir."
Gordon ducked through the curtain and walked back to the control room. Latham watched him with a shuttered expression. "Something, Captain?"
"We definitely have a tail. I'm going to look for a way to scrape him off."
"Do we have any other boats out here? They could scrape him off for us."
"No, damn it. I wish we did." Standard tactical doctrine— employed especially in the case of boomers going out on patrol, was to scrape off any Soviet tails using a second boat. Acting as decoy, or simply running interference, it would cut between the Soviet boat and its quarry, making enough noise that the tailed boat could quietly slip away.
Unfortunately, another Los Angeles wasn't available, not this time. Gordon had discussed the possibility with Cabot and with Hartwell the previous week. "Needless security risk," Cabot had said bluntly. "We don't want everyone in the Navy to know you're going out on this mission."
Great, Gordon thought. Just great! We'll keep our mission so secret no one will know about it except the Russian Navy! …
He wondered if his counterparts in the Russian submarine fleet had the same sorts of frustrations as he.
"Diving Officer! What's the depth below keel?"
"Seven-seven-five feet, Captain, and dropping. We're over the edge of the shelf."
The waters here overlay an interesting topology. At this point along the California coast, the continental shelf was narrow, and quite steep. This close to the San Andreas Fault, the shelf dropped away as steeply as the contorted mountainsides above San Francisco itself. The Pittsburgh had been traveling northwest, on a heading of 310 degrees sixty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge when the shadow had been discovered.
During the past half hour, the bottom had dropped away suddenly, from less than two hundred feet to over a thousand, a plunge into the cold blackness nearly as precipitous as a sheer cliff.
Two hundred feet, a bit more than half of Pittsburgh's length, gave a boat as long as a Los Angeles almost no depth-maneuvering room at all. But a thousand — that was different.
He picked up a microphone and keyed it. "Sonar, Conn."
"Sonar. Go ahead, Conn."
"Hold on to your ears, boys, and reel in our tail. We're going to do some maneuvering, here."
"Thank you for the advance notice, sir."
"My pleasure. Don't start taking it for granted."
He walked over to the Diving Officer, who stood just behind the helmsman and planesman. "Okay, gentlemen. This is what we're going to do….
His name was Ivan Rogov, after a man who was a former wartime kommisar and later Chief of the Russian Navy's Central Political Department. Designated as Projeckt 945B within the Soviet Admiralty, he was third of the new Barrakuda class of attack submarines, vessels known to NATO and the West as the Sierra II. Within Russian nomenclature and tradition, a ship or submarine was always a he, never a she.
The Ivan Rogovs commanding officer was Captain First Rank Viktor Dubrynin, an eager up-and-coming officer from
Odessa who knew the sea well. For almost two weeks, he'd been lurking at the ambush point just off the entrance to San Francisco Bay, hoping for just such an encounter as this. According to GRU intelligence reports, many American intelligence missions, those fielded by submarine, originated at the Mare Island facility tucked away in the northeast corner of the bay. Penetrating those crowded, shallow, and undoubtedly well-protected waters was not a sane mission, not with American ASW technology as good as it was… though Dubrynin could dream. Once, indeed, he'd trailed an oil tanker up the Chesapeake Bay, penetrating the Americans' East Coast inland waterway as far as the mouth of the Potomac River. He'd taken numerous periscope photographs of shipping and navigational landmarks in the area and brought his boat safely out and home. For that daring feat, he'd been proclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union.