"Or?"
"Or it could be routine maneuvers. We don't know, and I dislike paranoia as much as the next man. But we're not taking chances."
"I'm with you there, Skipper."
"Down scope!" The periscope slid with an oily silver gleam into the well. "Take us down to two hundred feet."
"Two hundred feet, aye aye, Captain."
"Make our course one-eight-five."
"Helm to course one-eight-five, aye, sir."
Latham grinned at Gordon. "Captain's choice, sir?"
"What's the fun in being captain if you don't have it?"
"Damned if I know. But our passengers are going to be pissed."
"Mr. Johnson might be, at any rate. But even he wouldn't want us charging right through a cordon of Soviet ASW ships."
"He is a stickler for following the book, sir."
"Well, we'll worry about him if we have to later." He turned, checking each station in the control room, studying the intent gazes of the personnel at the controls. "I'm going to my quarters," he told Latham. "Call me if there's any change."
"Aye, sir."
Making his way forward, he opened the door to his cabin and stepped inside. He took his seat behind his desk, pausing a moment to look at the small photo of his wife and daughters in its plastic frame. They seemed so hellishly far away just now.
On a normal voyage, he would have been allowed to send and receive personal messages — at least the 150 words of a Familygram. He wondered how Becca was doing.
The notion that command was a lonely life was hopelessly cliched, but true nonetheless. He was terribly worried about his wife, but saw no way to help her short of leaving the service… and command. And this was what he was born for. He could live his own life, or how she wanted him to, with a normal job, a normal career, with normal hours.
Which way to go? Which way could he go, and stay true to himself?
Surfaced at last, the Ivan Rogov made his way into the main approach channel to Tauyskaya Guba, with small, wooded Zav'yalova Island sliding aft along his port side. It was hot and humid — the Maritime Provinces could swelter during midsummer — but the breeze coming off the submarine's bow was cool, and Captain First Rank Dubrynin leaned into it, savoring the salt taste and freshness after over a month locked away in the ocean's depths. It was like being released from prison… and with the promise of a return to Katarina's arms.
They'd moved to Magadan from the military suburbs of Leningrad almost a year ago. Dubrynin had embraced the transfer, of course, since it had meant promotion, and a literally once-in-a-lifetime chance to command an attack submarine, the Rogov. Katarina, however, had been miserable at first, forced to leave friends and family for a land as alien to her as the far side of the moon. There'd been talk of her staying in Leningrad, perhaps of her moving back into that tiny apartment with her mother, father, and younger brothers.
He'd convinced her at last to come, however, and he was sure now that the decision had been the right one. She was making friends among the other navy wives at the Magadan base, learning to love the stark beauty of the mountains behind the city, so different from the flat horizon beyond Lake Lagoda.
At his side, Starpom Vladimir Tupov, his Executive Officer, pointed north across the water. "It appears, Comrade Captain, that the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets is making ready to depart."
Dubrynin raised his binoculars and studied the dockside of the submarine base. Sure enough, he could see the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets, mooring lines cast off fore and aft, and a naval tug positioned abeam, ready to move him out into the channel.
"It seems soon after Anatoli Vesilevich's last excursion," Dubrynin said. "I wonder if he's been ordered to the chase?"
"It seems likely, Captain. The Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets is a fine ship. Our very best… excepting the Ivan Rogov, of course."
"Of course." Dubrynin chuckled. "Although the State might withhold him from the battle, for that very reason."
"That hardly seems likely, does it? The alert was for a single American submarine this time, not a wolf pack, as they deployed against us last time."
"Ah, Vladimir Ivanovich, there is no accounting for some of the decisions of our leaders. The State moves in mysterious ways…. "
The starpom remained silent at this near blasphemy. He was a stolid and unimaginative sort, unable to accept the possibility that the Rogovs leaders might be as fallible or as venal as the next man. Most Russians took the vast and often cruel clumsiness of the government for granted — that acceptance was a part of the Russian character long preceding the October Revolution — but a few, Vladimir Ivanovich among them, maintained a fanatical blindness to the State's failings.
But the starpom was young. He would learn, as Dubrynin had.
"Captain, this is Pavlenko," crackled over the weather-bridge speaker.
"Go ahead." Boris Pavlenko was Rogov's senior communications officer.
"Sir! Radio message from headquarters! We have new orders!"
Dubrynin exchanged bemused glances with Tupov. "We're not even back to port yet!" Tupov exclaimed.
"It was to be expected, Vladimir Ivanovich. Let's get below."
The two submariners clambered back down through the sail access into the control room.
Within minutes, the Ivan Rogov was coming about, heading once again for the open Sea of Okhotsk.
"Up scope."
The Type 18 periscope slid into the overhead well as Gordon rode the optics up. As the periscope head broke the surface, the IR optics picked up the image and relayed it not only to Gordon's eye, but to TV monitors in various quarters of the control room. Under infrared, the sky was featureless black, the waves a thick and nearly featureless gray. Slowly, he walked the scope about, watching the compass readout numbers at the top of the scope readout. The control room was rigged for red, a dim and eerie darkroom illumination that gave a faintly satanic cast to the officers and men working there.
They'd turned south and run parallel to the Kurils at thirty knots, turning west at last at a point 120 miles south of Paramusir Island, a place where the island chain thinned to a straggle of tiny, barren and uninhabited rocks, Shiaskokan, Matua, and tiny Raykoke. Slowing again to ten knots to reduce their sound signature, they slipped through the passage just north of Raykoke, ever conscious of the fact that the Russians had probably seeded all of the channels with sonar listening devices similar to the U.S. SOSUS net.
They encountered no major surface activity, though twice they heard the distant throb of a ship — the first slow and ponderous, almost certainly a freighter, the second higher-pitched and faster, possibly a Grisha I light ASW frigate.
Then came the long, exposed run northwest across the Sea of Okhotsk itself, 650 miles to Mys Yalizavety at the northern tip of Sakhalin, then slowed to a crawl as they rounded the cape and slipped through rapidly shoaling water into the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv — Sakhalin Bay.