Amanda lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you both for sharing that with me, gentlemen.”
“Captain,” the Aegis systems manager called. “We’ve just lost the skin track on the Nationalist frigate. She’s gone down, ma’am.”
Instinctively, the little group of officers looked up at the monitors of the Mast Mounted Sighting System. A heavy smudge of grayish smoke was lined out along the southern horizon.
“CIC, this is Air One. Retainer Zero One now taking departure.”
A droning roar came from overhead, and a Sea Comanche helo appeared on the television screens. Nose down and gaining speed, it pulled away toward the dissipating smoke cloud.
“Talk to me, Gus. What do we have out here?”
“Multiple static surface contacts, Lieutenant. They look like life-raft radar reflectors. No transitories. No moving targets. Nothing I’d call a periscope contact. We’ve also got Zero Two out there at about our nine o’clock.”
Looking to port, Arkady caught the strobe flash of the Cunningham’s second LAMPS helo. He thumbed the transmitter key on the end of his collective controller. “Two, this is Zero One. We are airborne and inbound to the target area. You got a copy on me, Nancy?”
“I read you, Lieutenant,” Lieutenant (j. g.) Nancy Delany replied. “How do you want to play this, sir?”
Even with her recent promotion, the Duke’s number-two pilot still couldn’t manage to be casual with her Air Group Leader.
“I want to put a four-buoy box around the area. We’ll use our last fix on the sunken frigate as our central datum point. I want buoy placement two miles out from the CDP with a four-mile separation. Buoy coding will be clockwise relative, Alpha, Bravo, Charley, Delta. Passive search. Read back.”
As his wingwoman repeated the mission outline, Arkady looked ahead, beyond Zero One’s nose. He could make out a stain on the vivid blue of the ocean, the dark shimmer of a considerable oil slick. Also, a cluster of Day-Glo specks in its center.
“Okay, Zero Two. That’s the mission package. I’ll put down buoy Delta, then check out the survivors. You circle the box perimeter and set Alpha, Bravo, and Charley. Do you verify that you have a dunking sonar on board?”
“Roger, Zero One. I verify.”
“Okay. Once you get those buoys drilled in, drop another click south and run a deep listening line. I want these suckers kicked out of the brush.”
“Better come right to bearing two zero zero to line up on drop point Bravo, Lieutenant,” Grestovitch cut in from the rear cockpit.
“Doin’ it, Gus.”
To the airborne submarine-hunter, the sonobuoy is the equivalent of the fisherman’s glass-bottomed bucket. It gives an ASW aircraft the ability to peer beneath the surface of the sea. A miniaturized sonar system sealed in a watertight casing, it is dropped to the surface of the ocean. There, it lowers a sound head into the depths and lifts a radio antenna into the sky, broadcasting its findings back to a mother station aboard a friendly ship or aircraft.
“Buoy Alpha is down. Buoy Bravo is down. We’ve got positive datalinks.”
“Good enough, Gus. Start working‘. I’m moving in on the survivors.”
Arkady had flown a good number of search-and-rescue missions in his time, but he had never before orbited over the grave of a newly killed warship.
Heavy oil and air bubbled steadily to the surface, the black blood of the fallen vessel. The smell of it flooded the cockpit.
Wreckage drifted within the slick. Human forms as well, some that moved and some that didn’t. Survivors clustered around a scattering of life rafts, staring up at the hovering helicopter as the inmates of hell might stare at an angel.
Arkady sidled his aircraft near a group of weakly struggling men at the edge of the debris drift and dropped the raft pod he carried. It was the only aid he could give. With its narrow fuselage and two-place fore-and-aft cockpit, the Sea Comanche was incapable of doing conventional rescue and recovery work.
“Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. I am holding over sinking site now. It looks like we may have about a hundred and fifty men in the water. Maybe a few more. A lot of wounded.”
“Acknowledged, Zero One,” Amanda Garrett’s filtered voice replied. “We’re ten minutes out.”
Arkady lifted his eyes and scanned the horizon. The Cunningham’s camouflage paint rendered the ship invisible against the distant haze, but her bow wave flashed white against the blue of the sea.
In Sea Comanche’s rear cockpit, Gus Grestovitch plied his trade. Of all the skills of the maritime warrior, sub hunting is still infused with the largest share of black magic. The systems operator was now focusing past the cascade display in front of his eyes and the audio input in his earphones and was feeling for the submarine with his soul.
He wasn’t having much luck. The sea itself was damaged here. The wreck, trailing away beneath them, was scrambling the local acoustic environment. Escaping air churned upward. Fire-heated metals sizzled and cracked. Fittings tore loose from the hulk and tumbled away into the deepwater night.
Maybe there was even life left inside that hull. Someone who hadn’t been able to get clear before the water closed over the decks. Someone whose last seconds of existence were flickering away in the blackness of some lost air pocket.
Grestovitch closed his eyes and shook the image out of his head. He sure as shit didn’t need that just now. He tried to refocus on his instrumentation. As he did so, he noticed something on a secondary readout. He shifted the displays on his multimode telepanel, then shifted them again.
“Hey, Lieutenant?”
Arkady glanced back over his shoulder. “Yeah, Gus?”
“We should have a couple of thousand feet of water under us here, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Then how come the wreck of the frigate is still sitting just under the surface?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Check the Magnetic Abnormality Detector. We’ve got a big hunk of metal right underneath us.”
Arkady goggled over the cockpit rail for an instant and then called up the MAD board onto his own screen.
“Ah, shit! Gray Lady! This is Zero One! We’ve got a Red sub station keeping right under the survivors! It’s an ambush!”
“Helm, hard about one hundred and eighty degrees!”
Amanda’s voice rang in the Combat Information Center.
“All engines ahead emergency!”
The duty helmswoman spun her rudder controller and firewalled the throttles and power levers. The engine song rose into a keen and the hull framing groaned. The deck tilted beneath their feet as the Duke began to fight her way into the commanded turn.
“Sonar, how the hell did we miss this guy?” Dix Beltrain demanded from the tactical officer’s console.
“His plant noise was masked by the audio clutter from the wreck,” Foster called back from Sonar Alley. “Getting transitories on the bearing now. Sounds like he’s flooding tubes.”
“Shit, he’s taking a shot! Captain, we have a firing solution. Ready for a snap shot with the V-ROCs.”
“Negative! Check fire!” Amanda shook her head vehemently. “He’s holding right under the survivors. We drop a torpedo on him and we could kill dozens of those men in the water.”
“Then what do we do, Captain?”
“We run!”
“Fish swim out!” Foster’s voice had risen an octave. “Captain, we’ve got torpedoes coming our way!”
Two decks down, in Main Engine Control, the state of the world was gauged by two parameters. One was the all pervasive, steady-state howl of the power-room turbogenerator sets. The other was the faint but equally pervasive vibration that radiated up the support pylons from the huge, radial-gap electric motors in the propulsor pods.