Beneath him was the curved, rusty, silt-coated surface of a thirty-inch oil pipe. The pipe had been laid across the seabed at the northern end of the strait to carry oil from the fields at Okha in northern Sakhalin across to the mainland, then up the banks of the Amur River. He checked his watch. Twenty-one minutes at depth. They were okay so far.
During the late afternoon, Pittsburgh had left the deep waters in which she'd been lurking, to the north, creeping down mile by inching mile into the southernmost reaches of the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv. While Captain Gordon had been scrupulously careful not to violate Russian national waters the previous night, when they'd made contact with Stenki, such niceties had not been possible this time. The mission plan called for the SEAL divers to survey the northernmost reaches of the slender strait between Sakhalin Island and the mainland… including checking on the location of an oil pipeline, locating Russian sea-floor listening devices and photographing and mapping them, and doing some other basic UDT survey work.
But the SEAL swimmers' range was sharply limited without an SDV, a SEAL Delivery Vehicle which could extend the range and reach of divers underwater. The Pittsburgh was hovering now just a couple miles north of this point, in waters uncomfortably less than eighty feet deep.
Randall and Nelson had taken the first survey run; Fitch and McCluskey would come out later, after they returned. Their bottom time was limited, and there was only so much they could do in their allotted hour.
He was using a Mark VI semi-closed-circuit SCUBA rig, equipment that matched the advantages of rebreathers — the bubble disperser all but eliminated the telltale cloud of bubbles associated with open-circuit units — with the deep-diving capabilities of straight SCUBA gear. With the Mark VI he could dive to a maximum working depth of 180 feet,
not that he'd be trying anything close to that on this op; working for half an hour at 180 feet required a total of fifty-three minutes of decompression time, divided among three stops along the way up… and the Pittsburgh didn't have a decompression chamber.
Best of all, it was quiet—not just an advantage but an outright necessity when working around enemy sonar equipment.
He checked his depth gauge. Sixty feet. According to the Navy dive tables, he could stay at this depth for a full hour without having to decompress. Stretch the bottom time to an hour ten, and he would need a two-minute stop at ten feet before going on.
In fact, he wouldn't be going to the surface, since Pittsburgh's forward escape trunk would never be shallower than about forty feet, thanks to the height of the sail. For short decompression times, or to simulate a wait at depth on the way to the surface, he and Nelson could endure the escape lock.
But if ever there was a guaranteed way to give a guy claustrophobia, locking him into that coffin-sized pipe face-to-face with another six-foot, two-hundred-pound guy was it.
The depth reading verified that there was a shallow ridge stretched across the channel at this point. Surface vessels could make the passage all right, but submarines would have to transit on the surface… and there was no way that an American boat could pull that off.
Randall felt two sharp tugs on the line, insistent this time, and deliberate. They were wearing the same full-face masks they'd had in Alaska, with the radio transmitters, but were not wearing receivers or battery packs this time out. There was too much chance that their transmissions would be picked up by all of the Soviet electronics in the area.
He stopped, then moved toward his swim buddy, playing his light on the bottom.
There. Planted on the seabed a few feet from the oil pipeline, almost obscured by drifting muck, was a device rising from the bottom that almost looked like part of the construction. It was separated from the pipe, however, and appeared to be mounted on a concrete block, visible in the mud only because of its squared-off, obviously artificial shape.
The device itself appeared to be a polished aluminum sphere held clear of the sea bottom by a slender pipe. At the base were some canisters, boxes, and wiring, all of it heavily coated with silt. Nelson pointed with his light. A heavy cable, thick as a man's arm, was just visible running in one side of the object's base, and out the other.
They came in many sizes and shapes and could be hard to identify, but it was pretty clear what this one was for. It was a small sonar pickup, something akin to the American SOSUS arrays that tracked Soviet submarine movements in and out through the choke points into the world's oceans.
Hovering in place, taking care not to disturb the silt, Randall pulled out his camera, a tiny thing packed into a transparent plastic box the size of a hardback book, and fitted with mechanical controls so that the whir of a motor wouldn't trigger an alarm. He began taking photos from several angles, while Nelson made notes on a slate.
Idiots. Randall grinned as he took the pictures. They'd planted the damned thing in the shadow of the pipeline, effectively crippling its sonar "view" toward the north.
Not that American submarines were ever likely to work their way this far into the Tatar Straits again. The waters here were simply too shallow, too restricted, the possible rewards nonexistent. U.S. subs trying to hunt down Soviet vessels exiting Nikolayevsk in wartime would be far better off lying in wait for them among the Kuril passages, or in the Sea of Japan. With the possible exception of a SEAL raid to sabotage the oil pipeline with a few well-placed limpet mines, Randall couldn't think of any good reason for an American submarine to be here.
He thought about that as he took the last photograph, then reattached the camera to his harness. Damn… why had the Pittsburgh been sent here? Oh, poking around submerged pipelines, photographing and mapping seabed sonar arrays, and surveying approaches to a major shipping lane were all very SEALie things to do, all pumped full of the warrior's spirit and fairly dripping with adrenaline. But there was no hard, military or intelligence reason that this survey had to be carried out.
Certainly not one requiring the risk of a Los Angeles class submarine.
The two SEALs resumed their silent swim along the pipeline. Visibility was clearing slightly as they moved deeper into the center of the strait, where the current was stronger. Before long, the shaft of illumination from Randall's lamp pierced eight or ten feet into the murky snowstorm before being swallowed by night.
Randall was under no illusions about the necessity for military intelligence — or of commando operations such as this one. He wouldn't have been a SEAL if he had been.
Kenneth Randall's father, a Marine, had been killed in Vietnam, a casualty of the assault outside the Citadel in Hue during the Tet Offensive. A six-year-old's desperate attempts to understand why Daddy wasn't coming home again had led, inevitably, it seemed now, to a lifelong search for answers, first in the history of a war few of his friends even knew existed, then in the determined study of global politics.
Throughout the seventies and the early eighties, it had seemed genuinely possible that Russia, the "Evil Empire" as President Reagan had recently named it, was on the way to dominating the world — politically and militarily, if not by outright conquest. A staunchly conservative Ohio Republican, Randall knew, with absolute conviction, the danger to his country presented by Communism. He'd considered becoming a Marine, like his father, but ultimately decided that the Navy SEALs — the Navy's premier commando outfit that had first proven itself in Vietnam — offered him the chance of taking an active role in the ongoing, largely behind-the-scenes quasi-war against the Soviets.