The chopper was below any radar now, skimming the surface of the Gulf. Anyone monitoring it would have assumed Churcher had landed on the drilling platform; and of course, the roughnecks assumed its destination another of the Churchco platforms sprinkled over the thousands of square miles of ocean. Churcher counted on that whenever he made this run.
The previous afternoon in Moscow, a TU-144 supersonic jetliner — a civilian version of the Soviet mach 2.3, 9,600-mile-range Blackjack bomber — left Ogarkhov Air Force Base. Six hours later, at 3:35 A.M. EST, it touched down at Castro International in Havana, and taxied to a secured area away from the terminal.
Soviet Minister of Culture Aleksei Deschin and Vladimir Uzykin, his KGB bodyguard, were the only passengers. They hurried down a mobile boarding ramp to a Russian-made limousine parked on the tarmac.
The chauffeur-driven Chaika took the two men to the Soviet Naval Base at Cienfuegos on Cuba’s southern shore. They boarded a Soviet Foxtrot class submarine, and went directly to the officer’s mess, where Gorodin and Beyalev were waiting.
At precisely 5 A.M., as scheduled, while the four men breakfasted, the Foxtrot slipped from its berth into the main ship channel.
The captain ordered his executive officer to set a southwest course into the Caribbean.
Almost immediately, two hundred and fifty miles out in space, a United States intelligence gathering satellite detected the sub’s movement. The KH-11 Ferret was the cutting edge of surveillance technology. Circling the planet in Polar orbit, the Ferret took advantage of the earth’s rotation, and scrutinized the surface twice every twenty-four hours, performing heretofore unimaginable feats of surveillance; its sensitive electronic interceptors monitored up to a hundred telephone conversations simultaneously; its high-resolution camera read the numbers on the license plates of moving vehicles; and its lightning-fast central processor recorded and/or transmited the ferreted data to ground stations — the top-secret, mission-control-like rooms where technicians and analysts sat at consoles monitoring space-, land-, and sea-based surveillance devices.
The photographic data on the Soviet submarine was instantly transmitted to Anti-Submarine Warfare Headquarters at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. ASW intelligence personnel evaluated the information, identified the ship as an enemy vessel, and initiated an alert.
Chapter Seven
The digital clock in Pensacola’s ASW Duty Room read 05:23 hours.
Navy First Lieutenant Jon Lowell was the airborne tactical coordination officer on duty. The tall sandy-haired Californian was leaning over the pool table about to put away a game of eight ball when the alert sounded. The other members of the crew scrambled immediately. Lowell coolly stroked the winning shot before hurrying after them.
Last to leave, last to arrive, never pressured, Lowell had a patient, methodical nature that made him well suited to ASW. His resting pulse of forty-eight came from running the equivalent of a 10-K each morning in under thirty minutes. He’d grown up in a rambling Santa Barbara beach house, and inherited his exceptional hand-eye coordination from his mother — a talented graphic artist — and honed it in the video arcade on State Street, where, as a teenager, he spent after-school hours destroying alien starships that flew across his video screen.
Within minutes of the alert, Lowell and his crew had collected mission data, and were sprinting across the tarmac to their Lockheed Viking S-3A. The two-engine plane — pilot and copilot side by side on the flight deck, TACCO and sensor operator in aft cabin — was designed to locate and track submarines, and equipped with armaments to destroy them. Primarily carrier based, the Viking’s small crew, and maneuverability enabled it to respond quickly to ASW alerts from land bases as well.
The Viking’s pilot, Navy Lt. Commander Keith Arnsbarger, was a tall red-faced Georgian. The first thing he put on each morning was the mirror-lensed sunglasses he claimed to be wearing at birth. He had done two carrier-based tours in Nam piloting reconnaissance aircraft, and assignment to ASW was a natural.
Arnsbarger had gone straight from Annapolis to war, and had been living in the fast lane ever since. The endless chain of one-night stands and hangovers ended the day he started dating Cissy Tate, the widow of a fellow pilot whose F-14 vanished during a training mission over the Gulf. Arnsbarger had been living with Cissy and her eleven-year-old son for three years now. Lately, he’d been thinking of the boy more and more as his own, and though he hadn’t told anyone yet, for the first time in his life he was considering marriage.
He was imagining what Cissy’s reaction to the idea might be, imagining her gentle face coming to life when he got a priority ASW clearance from Pensacola Tower and started the Viking down the north/south runway. Twenty seconds later, the silver and sky-blue bird rose from the tarmac and, wheels still retracting, headed due south over the Gulf of Mexico.
When the Soviet submarine left Cienfuegos harbor, she remained on the surface and headed for open sea. The sounds of her screws pushing water were picked up by SOSUS.
The Sound Surveillance System was a global network of hydrophones anchored to the ocean floor. These submerged listening posts ringed Soviet Naval bases and shipping channels throughout the world. The Caribbean net that covered Central American and Cuban ports detected the sounds of the Foxtrot’s cavitation.
This noise — the whine of a spinning propeller creating a vortex, a whirling mass of water with a vacuum at its center — was transmitted by cable to ASW Headquarters in Pensacola.
Within minutes, these sounds were recorded, computer analyzed, and matched against a library of previously recorded acoustic signatures of the Soviet fleet. The submarine’s “ac-sig” identified the target vessel as a Soviet Foxtrot.
This data — along with location coordinates, also determined from the hydrophone contact — was immediately transmitted to the Viking in flight.
In the compartment aft of the cockpit, Lieutenant Lowell sat at the plane’s electronics-packed surveillance console. The unit is folded vertically about the TACCO’s center of vision, presenting him with three equidistant data planes: flashing banks of SOSUS status indicators above, combination radarscope and graphic tracking monitor with attendant controls in the center, computer and communications apparatus below.
Lowell entered the newly transmitted positional coordinates for the submarine.
The computerized tracking system reconciled the data from the satellite and hydrophone contacts, and recalculated the Fly To Point, the estimated position of the Soviet submarine, which had been previously determined from the satellite data only. Lowell had just initiated a process of refinement that would continue automatically.
The blip of the Soviet Foxtrot started pinging across the radarscope.
Lowell’s pulse quickened; his eyes narrowed; he straightened in the chair.
“Target up,” he announced while encoding again.
Three rows of numbers flashed across the screen.
“Range — three point six five miles. Heading — six zero five five. Speed — twenty-five knots,” Lowell reported in crisp cadence.
The first light was just bending over the horizon as Arnsbarger repeated the data and dipped a wing, adjusting the Viking’s course to the new FTP. The Soviet submarine was still on the surface when Arnsbarger leaned forward in the cockpit and spotted it. A plume of water arched behind the conning tower as it sliced upright through the sea.