And on none more than Mike Chase. Hearing the orders called back to him allowed him to close his eyes and visualize the tactical situation developing around them, allowed him to enter a mental zone where the Pittsburgh was an extension of his body, of where he was the Pittsburgh, carrying out her dance on a dark and three-dimensional stage.
"Diving Officer, make depth one-five-zero feet."
"Depth to one-one-zero, aye, sir. Planesman, up forward planes ten degrees. Make our depth one-one-zero feet."
"Up forward planes one-zero feet, aye, sir. Make depth one-five-zero, aye, sir."
The deck tilted up as the planesman brought back his yoke. For long seconds, the command center was silent save for the recitation of depth figures. "Passing three-five-zero feet. Three-two-zero feet. Now passing three-zero-zero feet, sir…. "
"Sonar, Conn. Rodriguez, tell me the moment you detect any aspect change on Sierra One-niner."
"Will do, Captain. He's still coming straight for us. No active sonar. He's following us on the sonobuoys."
"Watch him. He's your priority target right now."
"Aye aye, sir."
At last, the Pittsburgh leveled off, still traveling directly toward the Kresta, bow-on. As the range narrowed to less than a thousand yards, the men in the combat center could actually hear the oncoming Soviet warship, an urgent, pounding thrash muffled by the sea, but quite distinct, and growing louder moment by moment. Faces throughout the compartment looked up toward the overhead; Chase was cutting this one pretty close, given that the Pittsburgh measured just over fifty feet from keel to the top of her sail, not counting her periscopes, and that a Kresta II typically drew about twenty feet of water. Chase was "dusting off the keel" of the warship above, allowing something like forty feet clearance.
A dangerous ploy. And also his best chance for eluding the enemy's sonar net.
The Kresta's screws churned directly overhead now. The helmsman and the planesman kept their eyes rigidly on the readouts above their yokes, but every other man in the combat center looked up, as though waiting for the deadly crunch of a steel-on-steel impact.
"Mr. Daly, come right sixty degrees… now!"
There was only the briefest of hesitations as Daly looked back at his board. "Come right sixty degrees, to bearing zero-five-eight, aye, sir!"
As the Kresta rumbled overhead and aft, chugging like a slow-moving locomotive, the Pittsburgh swung to the right. They could all feel the vibration of the cruiser's passing, as her twin screws thrashed through the water. "On new heading, zero-five-eight, sir," Daly announced.
"Hard left rudder. Bring us back around to a heading of two-three-eight. Planesman, watch our depth. I don't want us popping up and broaching."
"Hard left, to two-three-eight, aye, sir…. "
"Son of a bitch!" an enlisted man, Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Benson, his station at the combat center plot board, exclaimed. "He's pulling a Wilkinson!"
"Belay that chatter, Benson," Master Chief Warren, the Chief of the Boat, snapped from his post at the ballast controls.
Chase said nothing. He didn't mind Benson's outburst, but he would not interfere in the COB's disciplining of one of the men… not in front of the crew, at any rate. Maybe later….
If there is a later, he thought. As the sound of the passing ASW cruiser dwindled, the Pittsburgh continued her turn to port, ending up on a reciprocal heading from the previous course. She was now behind the Kresta, and following her, hidden from Russian listeners in the froth of white noise churned by the cruiser's screws.
Even the pings of active sonars, from other ships and from the line of sonobuoys dropped by ASW aircraft, faded as they dogged the Kresta's wake. For a moment, at least, Pittsburgh had just rendered herself invisible.
"Sonar, Conn," Chase said into his microphone. "Let me know the instant you get any aspect change on Sierra One-niner… or any change in his revs."
"Will do, Captain. Right now, he's just charging straight ahead, blasting away with sonar. Don't think he knows we just disappeared into his baffles."
"Good." Russian sonar operators — their people were all officers, as opposed to the American Navy which used highly trained enlisted sonar men — were not as well trained as their American counterparts, and originality and imagination were not encouraged in any part of the Soviet military.
It was one thing to listen to a target and know it was dead ahead… but something different, and more difficult, to determine which way it was going. Kresta's sonar operators had known the Pittsburgh was in front of them and that they were closing, but they could not have been sure whether the American sub was running away from them, or charging them head-on. Chances were, they hadn't been expecting Pittsburgh's sudden Wilkinson turn right under their fantail, and since other ships in the area hadn't picked up the American boat coming out from behind the Kresta, the Americans must still be ahead, possibly trying to hide in the bottom clutter of the rapidly shoaling water. The depth, now, was down to less than three hundred feet.
Moments crawled past. The Kresta slowed, and Pittsburgh slowed with her. With her engines turning over slowly, the white noise from her wake was lessened, but the American sub continued to lurk in the Kresta's blind spot, pulling in a bit closer, until her sail was somewhere just abaft of the Russian warship's turning screws.
After a time, the Kresta swung due north, Pittsburgh continuing to follow her. "Nuts to butts," the COB said quietly, apparently forgetting his earlier injunction to silence as he intoned an old and crude litany from boot camp, addressed to recruits required to line up close behind one another. "Make the guy in front of you smile." Sierra One-niner began sprinting again, and Pittsburgh stuck with her. Their contact with the American sub lost, the other sonar contacts began scattering over a wider and wider area, casting sonobuoy and active sonar nets farther and farther abroad as they searched for the missing target.
And as the Kresta moved north at twenty-five knots, she and her unseen shadow came abreast of Proliv Yekateriny, north of Kunashir Island. "All stop," Chase ordered. "Let her drift. Down planes five degrees. Level off at one hundred eighty feet."
"All stop, aye, sir. Down planes five degrees. Level off at one-eight-zero feet, aye."
Drifting silently, now, the 6,927-ton boat continued moving forward on sheer inertia, but the Kresta, still pinging ahead, swiftly outpaced the slowing Pittsburgh, racing for the northern horizon. Pittsburgh fell out of the Soviet warship's baffles, but her departure went unnoticed as she drifted gently toward 180 feet, slowing to a near stop, her neutral buoyancy holding her suspended between surface and seabed.
"All ahead one-third," Chase said. "Make revolutions for seven knots. Helm, come to course zero-nine-five. What's our depth below keel?"
"Depth below keel now eight hundred twelve feet, Captain."
"Diving officer, take us down to seven hundred feet."
The orders echoed back at him in confirmation and the steel deck tilted sharply as the Pittsburgh dove for deeper, safer water. The passages between the Kurils were narrow, but tended to be quite deep. Chase had ordered them to make the transit at a crawl, however. Those passages were almost certainly strung with the Soviet equivalent of a SOSUS net, sensitive underwater microphones designed to pick up the sounds made by a passing submarine. By remaining quiet, however, and keeping her speed well below ten knots, Pittsburgh was nearly as silent as it was possible to be… a "hole in the water," as her crew liked to describe her.