“Down dome! Full extension! Two hundred and fifty meters!”
“Dome deploying, sir!”
“Five Niner, this is Retainer Zero One. Advise you wave off until we verify this bogey. There’s something wrong here!”
“Retainer, the bogey is approaching the box perimeter. If we don’t drop now we could lose our firing solution! We are dropping!”
The sun gleamed off the windscreen of the ASW jet as it circled back to set up its approach.
“Lieutenant,” Grestovitch interjected. “We have full extension.
Bathythermograph does not record a thermocline.
We have no variance in the target’s sound level.”
“Aw, Jesus! Gus, go active on the sonar! Full power!
Attack ranging!”
“Yes, sir!”
“And override Yancy Five Niner’s control on the sonobuoy lines! Bring them active too. All of them!”
“Aye, aye!”
In an instant, the submarine sound environment exploded. A dozen different sonar transponders snapped on, lashing half a hundred square sea miles with interlocking waves of ultrasonic energy. The inhabitants of those sea miles, natural and manmade, panicked.
“Retainer Zero One!” the Viking’s S.O. roared. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“Saving your ass, Yancy. Stand by!”
“Target is accelerating,” Gus reported. “Aspect change, target is turning … Target is diving! Audio spike on passive channels. Data annex now identifying target as a Block Akula attack submarine. Russian Pacific Fleet. I say again, the target is Russian!”
“Son of a bitch,” a shaken voice whispered over the radio link.
“Roger that, Yancy. I advise you remember that we aren’t the only kids playing on this block.”
“Losing target through the thermocline, Lieutenant,” Grestovitch reported. “He’s really taking off. I think we scared him.”
“Not only him, of’ buddy.” Arkady closed his eyes for a moment and emptied his lungs in a sigh of relief.
44
… ASW sweep operations continue. Enroute to new patrol sector. Maintaining war cruise mode. As before, no contacts.
No comments.
Garrett, Commanding.
45
There was so little there, just the faintest widening in one frequency band of the cascade display. And just the faintest, the very faintest of whispers beyond the sea sounds in the audio output coming over the speakers. God! Was it really there at all?
For the thousandth time, Lieutenant Charles Foster wondered if he was making a fool of himself. The Cunningham had been working this frustrating almost-contact for the past two hours, and for the past one, Foster had been riding the main console in Sonar Alley himself. Again, he reached out and tapped in the “Target Identification Analysis” command into the sonar array data annex.
**NO I.D. INSUFFICIENT DATA GATE FOR ANALYSIS**
“Shit!”
“Easy, Lieutenant. Like they used to say out this way, ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey.’”
Captain Garrett had been standing at his shoulder for the past hour as well, silent for the most part, observing, waiting, disregarding her own loss of rest and time.
“Any change in aspect?” she inquired quietly.
“No, it’s still just hanging out there in the surface sound duct. Bearing between oh ninety-five and one hundred degrees true. Can’t narrow it down beyond that. There’s just not enough to pinpoint.”
“Any new thoughts on range?”
“No, he could be somebody running just ahead of us at good quiet, or he could be some distance away hauling ass. There is just no way of telling.”
“Well, we’ve got an Orion quartering out ahead of us now. We’ll keep running down this bearing toward the contact until we hear what he has to say.”
Foster nodded, his throat suddenly dry. He swallowed twice and forced the words out, speaking to the slim silhouette beside him in the semidarkness of the CIC.
“Captain, I’m sorry, but I think that this is a dead end.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, ma’am. The contact has remained consistently in the surface duct. The contact has not appreciably shifted bearing; it’s either not moving or moving very slowly. The contact is intermittent and transitory. I haven’t been able to pick up a repetitive mechanical pattern off it like a blade count.”
The sonarman swallowed again and finished. “I’m really sorry, but I think I’ve had us chasing a biological, maybe a pack of dolphins or something.”
His captain nodded slowly. “I agree, this is probably a biological. It’s shown every sign of it for the past half hour. But I’m not absolutely sure yet. Are you?”
“No, not absolutely, ma’am.”
“Then let’s stay on it until we are sure.”
Foster felt a small, strong hand rest on his shoulder for a moment. “We don’t have anything better to be doing just now.”
46
The Mapats launcher had twelve kill rings painted around its stubby, charred barrel. The counterpoint was that it was the last surviving firing unit of the antitank section. The young Nationalist army officer didn’t feel young. He felt as old as the land itself. The land that had claimed the hopes and dreams of his people and that had now claimed three-quarters of his men.
“Activity on the front!” The call was relayed down the line of raw-earth battalion emplacements. Weary soldiers slid back down into foxholes and bunkers, nestling close to rifle stocks. Machinegun bolts ratcheted back and slammed forward.
Breathing grew ragged.
Automatonlike, the survivors of his crew dragged themselves into position on the dug-in launcher vehicle. Sprawling down at the lip of the emplacement, the Nationalist officer lifted his battered binoculars to his eyes once more.
“All positions, fire only on order!” Another relay came down the line. “Only on order! Watch for the yellow!”
Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe today would be the day. There had been gunfire out along the front all morning, but not aimed inward at the beachhead perimeter.
For the past hour, though, all had been silent.
“Lieutenant, I see smoke. Two o’clock,” the gunner reported hoarsely from the launcher station.
The officer shifted his glasses. A plume of yellow smoke was rising from beyond a paddy dike, growing rapidly in volume.
A second plume from a second marker grenade, a third.
“Hold your fire!” The command came down the line more emphatically, striving to overcome the instincts ingrained into the battle-battered Nationalist troops over the last grim weeks.
There was movement on the road that snaked in toward the Nationalist position. Men, soldiers as weary-looking as the Nationalists, clad in a patchwork of PLA uniform parts and civilian clothing. An assault rifle or a grenade launcher held at the ready, each had a strip of yellow cloth bound around his forehead, their sole touch of true uniformity.
They did not look like men who were about to make history.
The Nationalist officer watched as the column drew closer.
Then he was on his feet, scrambling out of the emplacement and striding down toward the road. He couldn’t say why.
At the point of the UDFC column there was a man of the Nationalist officer’s age, if such a thing as age could be assessed anymore. The burned-out eyes were the same, though, and the rebel warrior also had lieutenant’s bars stitched to the collar of his combat jacket.