Jeffrey knew exactly how he would do this.
“Captain Bell, load a Mark Three brilliant decoy in tube eight.” The new Mark III design was a programmable decoy that, unlike the Mark IIs, could operate down to Challenger’s crush depth. Thus it could mimic the ship in every respect. Mark IIs would implode at about three thousand feet — much too shallow.
Bell issued orders to Torelli.
Jeffrey leaned against the side of Bell’s console. “Call up the large-scale tactical plot and let’s look at the predicted track of K-Three-three-five.”
Jeffrey began to issue instructions. “I want you to have the Mark Three programmed to sound and act like Challenger. You can work out the details on course waypoints and timing with the Nav. But basically this is what I want it to do.”
Jeffrey pointed with his index finger as he spoke. “Have the decoy proceed at stealth speed off of the continental shelf and on an intercept course with K-Three-three-five’s projected position over the Polar Abyssal Plain. Run it at a depth of eight thousand feet, to avoid any risk of collision and give a clearer acoustic path. When within six thousand yards of where we think the Akula-Two will be, have the decoy accelerate to fifty knots and turn sharply north. One of the Akula’s passive arrays should pick up the contact. Here, have the decoy go quiet, veer west, and gently bury itself in the bottom. It’ll have outrun and outdived K-Three-three-five before she can even get off a shot. We’ll put the Akula’s captain in a tizzy that he detected USS Challenger dashing into the middle of their boomer bastion at a speed and depth that only this ship can make.”
Bell broke into a grin. “You’ll light up every radar from here to Anadyr, and every switchboard from here to Polyarny.”
“And, I hope, once the Akula’s laser-buoy report hits the Kremlin via Russian Navy headquarters in Moscow, we also trigger a higher alert by their ground-based Strategic Rocket Forces.”
“How does that last part help us, sir?” Sessions asked. “It sounds destabilizing.”
“They’ll un-destabilize, for a while, when they see they lost contact with Challenger and nothing bad occurred to their boomers. Before then, we listen to them freak out over the fiber-optic cable. If we’re lucky, some important things will come through in plain text, or an encryption clerk will make a mistake and we’ll read a useful message in code we can break. This will hopefully aid Kurzin’s people to do their job. When I surface as Challenger’s captain in a different place, they’ll figure I used a decoy to evade one of their fast-attacks while on my way to blockade the Eight-six-eight-U. God willing, they won’t realize I’m playing a game on a much, much higher level.”
Bell’s people programmed and launched the Mark III decoy.
In ninety minutes, things did begin to happen. First, a higher-level naval antisubmarine alert was sounded. All sorts of radars and radios, on ships, on planes, at bases, and on satellites, that weren’t already radiating gave themselves and their technical specifications away. An invaluable charting of threats and spoofing strategies and gaps in Russian defensive coverage resulted. Several previously unidentified coastal supersonic antiship cruise missile installations were also plotted; these might have turned out to be fatal traps, given the way Harley intended to bring Carter close inshore.
Messages at the local Russian Navy level were caught and translated from the fiber-optic cable tap. The organization chart of units, tactical boundaries, and lines of authority — previously almost opaque to Allied intelligence — revealed itself in crisp detail. The coding-decoding abilities in this military district were swamped by the clarion call from K-Three-three-five, and some people talked in the clear.
Amazingly, Jeffrey was able to hear Rear Admiral Elmar Meredov telling the leader of a regiment of maritime patrol bombers to get everything that could fly airborne. Meredov sounded confident, not cocky, fierce and direct, and on excellent personal terms with his subordinate. Then came an even bigger, unpleasant surprise.
“Remember my cardinal rule of sub hunting. Aircrews must assume that the first antisubmarine contact they make will not be the last. If one contact is actually held, you need to allocate forces between harassing that American sub and searching for another.”
“Understood, sir,” the regimental commander said.
“Don’t forget to have them look in the least likely places, Aleksei, including our continental shelf and especially the noisy water near the islands.”
This was useful to know for future reference, but Jeffrey grew extremely concerned. Meredov was, and would be, a formidable adversary, one who left nothing to chance and who knew that as far back as the Cold War, U.S. spy subs did sometimes work in pairs in Russian waters. If Carter is exposed…
Jeffrey intended to listen to the recording over and over, sifting and absorbing every syllable and nuance.
It took longer to see how the Russian strategic rocket forces reacted. Jeffrey, and everyone else in his strike group who understood what was happening, hated every minute ticking by. O’Hanlon kept reporting sniffs of snowmobiles and helos, fading in and out of his passive sonar detection range. So far as Torelli could figure, they were quartering the area between and around their pair of small islands. It also seemed as if they were examining the route of the undersea cable, wherever polynyas or flat-enough ice made the route practical to reach. If the two Seahorses still assigned to signals-intercept duty heard on their own passive sonars that someone was coming too close, they’d have to dip down beneath the ice and the task group would lose their vital electronic surveillance at the worst possible time.
Jeffrey gritted his teeth as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft roared overhead nearby, its slow speed of two hundred knots showing that it was on active patrol. It sounded different from previous ones, more of a throbbing whine than a growl. O’Hanlon said the engines were turbofans, making it a militarized version of the Tupolev-204, Russia’s newest, most numerous model of antisubmarine plane.
Besides magnetic anomaly detection, with a mental jolt Jeffrey saw a whole other reason to worry: His two ships had been in one place long enough that the warmed seawater exiting their steam condensor cooling pipes might be noticeable on infrared scanners aimed at polynyas downcurrent from the cable tapping site — where Challenger and Carter had no choice but to loiter, motionless, hooked up to the fiber-optic lines.
His heart missed a beat at an even worse thought.
An airborne gravimetric gradiometer, at close enough range, would see our reactor compartments, dead to rights.
Such airborne gravimeters did exist, used by civilian geologists. Jeffrey hoped that the Tupolev’s speed, its engine vibrations, and air turbulence near the sea would impair the resolution if the aircraft actually carried one. Again Jeffrey felt like a fly stuck to flypaper. He was annoyed at himself for not realizing these dangers sooner, but there was nothing he could do to avoid them anyway.
The Tu-204 went away and nothing unpleasant happened.
But after ten hours of waiting on excruciating tenterhooks, it became obvious that the Strategic Rocket Forces never would react to Jeffrey’s scheme with the Mark III decoy. The generals in charge, apparently, didn’t see what an American fast-attack by the North Pole near some missile subs had to do with their ICBM silos far inland. They were too smart — or too paranoid — to generate extra signals traffic, only to have it intercepted somehow, somewhere, by spies. Jeffrey, disappointed beyond words, couldn’t argue with their logic. In retrospect, this aspect of the intel grab was a long shot from the start.