“Close enough so that we do not miss. Be patient, Mr. First. We will get to a range of forty kilometers, then launch.”
Sharef and al-Kunis moved to the chart table, watching the bearing to the target plot out on the chart, the flashing dot indicating the target over ninety kilometers away at the northwest mouth of the strait. Sharef ran his hands through his hair, wondering how many more submarines he would have to find before he could make good the escape from the Mediterranean.
“Status of the weapons?” Sharef called to the deck officer.
“Large-bore tubes two through six are equalized to sea pressure, bow cap doors open, Nagasaki torpedoes spinning up now,” Tawkidi reported, glancing at the weapons status display. “We’ll be ready to launch in less than one minute.”
“Very good. Equalize and open bow cap doors to tube eleven and spin up the Dash Five.”
“Tawkidi gave the orders to the officers seated at the weapon panels, then looked at Sharef. “You think we should use our only evasion device?”
At that moment Ahmed and General Sihoud walked into the room.
“Warm up the Dash Five evasion unit,” Sharef said, looking at the visitors. “We need it.”
Daminski concentrated on bearing one one zero, the selected spherical array broadband beam. The sounds of white noise were piped into his earphones, the sounds of the ocean a slushy mix of rushing sounds from the waves, distant schools of dolphins, hissing from shrimp, the rumble of ocean floor and perhaps Daminski’s inner ear itself, the noise from the sea much like the inside of a conch shell held to the skull. He was about to rip the earphones off for a few moments when his shoulder was tapped.
The radioman of the watch stood behind Daminski’s high-backed seat holding a clipboard. “Your draft contact message, Captain. O.O.D said you wanted to load a message into a slot buoy.” slot was shorthand for submarine-launched one-way transmitter, a baseball-bat-sized buoy that could be put out of a signal ejector, float to the surface and transmit a UHF message to the satellite without requiring the sub to come up to periscope depth.
Daminski knew this was cheating but so be it. He had been ordered to send a detailed contact report when he detected the Destiny. Before the encounter the Pentagon wanted to know that Destiny’s location had been pinpointed and reported so that if anything went wrong, they would know where to send the next unit to sink the UIF submarine.
Orders to transmit were an incredible burden on a submarine trying to sneak up on an adversarial contact. Transmitting a contact report meant going up to periscope depth in the middle of a shipping lane, putting up the bigmouth antenna, and transmitting a message that might take five minutes to write, confirming the position of contact and all the other bullshit data the sidelines officers wanted: signal-to-noise ratio, first detected frequency, target bearing and range, target course and speed, on and on. The ship would take needless minutes and make unnecessary noise ascending to periscope depth, transmitting, and descending again before the attack could be started.
But then, orders were orders, which was why Daminski had decided to cheat, writing a contact report in advance, anticipating contact and preloading the message in a slot buoy that he could launch from test depth with no more interruption of the attack business than the push of a button, then get on with sinking the UIF submarine. After all, the only thing the topside sailors really needed was the information that Augusta had contact at the approximate position and that the attack was underway. Anything else they could find out when it was over.
Daminski scratched a few lines on the clipboard:
DATE/TIME: TRANSMISSION LOG AT DETECTION OF UHF BUOY
FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH PLASH FLASH
FM USS AUGUSTA SSN-763
TO CINCNAVFORCEMED
SUBJ CONTACT REPORT
SCI/TOP SECRET — EARLY RETIREMENT
//BT//
1. CONTACT REPORT FOLLOWS.
2. POSITION APPROXIMATE IN STRAIT OF SICILY LATITUDE NOVEMBER THREE SEVEN DEGREES ONE THREE MINUTES LONGITUDE ECHO ONE ONE DEGREES TWO ONE MINUTES, MODIFIED BY POSITION OF UHF BUOY.
3. COMMENCING ATTACK.
4. FURTHER DETAILS TO FOLLOW.
//BT//
Daminski reread the message. He especially liked “commencing attack.”
“Show it to the officer of the deck, then code it into the slot buoy. I want that buoy loaded in the signal ejector in five minutes.”
“Aye, sir.” The radioman took the clipboard and vanished.
Daminski strapped his earphones back on and turned to the console. He was interrupted again, this time by Chief Hillsworth.
“Captain, I think you’d better check this,” he said, punching keys on Daminski’s touch pad. The lower waterfall display of the broadband spectrum blinked out, replaced by several graphs of sound intensity against frequency. The graph with 154 hertz in the center looked like a child’s sketch of twin peaks.
“A doublet,” Daminski said, “right where the old SPL said it would be, minus one cycle. Good thing we opened the gates, right. Chief?”
“We’d have found it anyway, Cap’n.”
As the men watched, the twin hills on the graph grew in height, the hills becoming mountains, then columns, then spikes. No fish or natural phenomena made frequencies that pure. The tonals were manmade. It was a machine. A submarine.
“Nice nipple erections on that freak bucket, eh. Chief?” Daminski asked, not averse to bugging the proper Hillsworth. “Can I make the report?” Hillsworth nodded. Daminski pulled the boom microphone to his mouth.
“Conn, Sonar. New narrowband contact, designate Sierra Four, showing a double frequency at one five four hertz, approximate bearing one three zero. Contact is a submerged warship.”
“Sonar, Conn, aye. Captain to control.”
“On the way,” Daminski replied to his boom mike. “Meanwhile designate Sierra Four as Target One. Launch the contact message radio buoy and man silent battle stations, spin up all four Mark 50s and open two torpedo tube outer doors.”
“Captain, Conn, aye.”
Daminski handed Hillsworth the earphones, stood up and clapped the chief on the shoulder, then left the sonar room, shutting the door quietly behind him.
Chapter 10
Friday, 27 December
The baseball-bat-sized slot buoy rested inside a tight tube on the flank of the forward part of the ship. It had not waited long when the tube’s insides filled with seawater, the pressure increasing until it matched the outside sea pressure of the Mediterranean. A few seconds later the muzzle door opened; there was no more light in the tube than there had been before. Another moment, and the lower end of the tube pressurized with flowing seawater at a higher pressure than the seawater outside. The slot buoy was launched from the tube, the force of the ejection and its own buoyancy carrying it to the surface over 500 feet above. For several minutes the buoy rose in the dark seawater, the pressure around it easing as it drifted upward. The buoy breached the surface, the upper few inches of the unit drying out in the sea air, open-circuiting a sensor that eventually caused a whip antenna to flip up into the moonlit sky. The transmitter inside began sending Daminski’s contact message to the UHF communications satellite above, repeating the message over and over until an hour later the battery was exhausted and the buoy shut down, flooded, and sank back into the depths of the sea.
High overhead, in a geosynchronous orbit, the Navy’s Commstar communications satellite received the message the first time it was transmitted, logged in the time, and seeing the message priority as flash, interrupted its other tasks and retransmitted the message to the commsat in orbit in mid-Atlantic, which then relayed the message to the U.S. Navy communications facility deep inside the Pentagon. There in the special compartmented communications center, an annunciator alarm went off on a computer console, alerting the watchstander of the flash message. Immediately after the message printed out the senior chief radioman made a call on a top-secret cleared phone to the office of the commander in chief of naval forces Mediterranean, Admiral John Traeps. Traeps’s aide, a lieutenant commander, ordered the message taken to Flag Plot, where Traeps was conferring with the C.N.O. The printout was hand-carried to Admiral Traeps and Admiral Richard Donchez in Flag Plot. Traeps read it, initialed it, passed it to Donchez, who commanded the position be plotted on the electronic wall chart. Within thirty seconds a flashing blue dot appeared on the chart’s Strait of Sicily, the dot labeled uss augusta ssn—763 submerged operations; beside it a flashing orange dot’s label announced uif destiny unit one.