Bell took the left seat of the two-man desk-high command console at the center of Control. Sessions assumed the right seat. Metallic snicks sounded throughout the space, men buckling their seat belts, which reminded Jeffrey to do the same.
He set up one more small window on his lower screen, so he could instant-message with Meltzer through the LAN. This way they could converse, commodore and executive assistant, without distracting Bell and Sessions as they fought the ship.
Lieutenant Torelli hurried in and stood in the aisle overseeing his first team at the four target tracking and weapons consoles that lined Control’s starboard bulkhead. A nondescript lieutenant (j.g.), the new sonar officer — Alan Finch, from Peoria, Illinois — stood in the opposite aisle. The forwardmost of his seven consoles, lining the port bulkhead, was taken by the most seasoned sonar supervisor, Senior Chief Brendan O’Hanlon.
Meltzer entered and stood at the navigation plotting table with the assistant navigator and several of their people.
The phone talker, wearing his heavy sound-powered intercom rig, listened on his big headphones. He answered on the bulky mike that made its own electricity from the vibrations as he spoke, then looked up. “Captain, Phone Talker. All compartments report manned and ready.”
“Very well, Phone Talker,” Bell said. “Chief of the Watch, rig ship for red.”
COB acknowledged. The lighting switched from bright white to a subdued ruby glow. It gave the control room an intimate feel, and helped remind people in some other spaces to maintain ultraquiet. Men blinked to help their eyes adjust to the dimness. Several small pocket flashlights were brought out, to frequently check pipes and fittings for flaws that might otherwise go unobserved. All hunched more closely over their consoles. Their voices became more restrained.
“Chief of the Watch, secure ventilation fans.”
“Secure ventilation fans, aye.” COB worked switches. The air circulation vents ceased their hushing sound; the gentle cool breezes stopped. The change was portentous, eerie. Challenger, like a living thing, was hunkering down for maximum stealth.
The control room slowly began to grow stuffy, from the heat and tense breathing of two dozen men and the warmth of electronics—Challenger’s acoustic and thermal insulation kept the chill of the water outside well away from her innards. The crew was used to this, but no one liked it. If it went on for too long, personnel performance would be degraded, and eventually some important part of the combat systems might fail. Jeffrey knew that this was just one of many unpleasant trade-offs an SSN’s captain faced. Peering forward, he could see people shifting in their seats, flexing their shoulder blades, moving their heads back and forth, to loosen cramping muscles. The excitement of new mission orders had worn off. It wasn’t a game anymore.
“Helm,” Bell ordered in a low but firm voice, “slow to ahead one third and make turns for five knots.”
The helmsman, Patel, acknowledged, then gingerly touched icons on one of his screen menus. His arm movement was jerky, and Jeffrey thought he could see his hand shaking. In a moment, Patel reported in a near-whisper, “Maneuvering answers, ahead one-third, turns for five knots, sir.” Jeffrey heard the strain in his voice. Meltzer would have been handling the stress much better, but he’d been promoted to navigator.
“Very well, Helm. Left five degrees rudder, make your course three-four-zero.”
Again Patel acknowledged Bell, twisting his joystick.
Feeling strangely detached, almost as if he’d been plunged back in time to the height of the Cold War, Jeffrey saw the own-ship heading’s readout on his console change as Challenger swung gently left. Who am I kidding? We’re in a second Cold War with Russia right now that could quickly turn hot.
He envied the men who had assigned stations they could fixate on. With nothing concrete at the moment to keep him preoccupied, he found his mind beginning to dart from one item to the next. His gravimeter display, set in forward-looking mode, showed rugged Little Diomede and Big Diomede Islands a short distance ahead, slowly drifting rightward on the 3-D picture as Challenger continued her turn. He could see the ocean floor, the parts of the islands that rose steeply from the bottom, plus a notional transparent plain that marked the ocean’s surface, and the terrain of the islands exposed in the air. The sea floor was almost perfectly flat, at a depth of only one-hundred-sixty feet.
On the left edge of the image, a mountainous knob three miles wide rose suddenly from the ocean floor to altitudes of over six thousand feet above sea leveclass="underline" the beginning of mainland Russia. On the right edge, on both the gravimeter and the navigation chart, Cape Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales Shoal were visible. This jutting part of the Alaskan mainland was tipped by a mountain, too, though only half as tall as the Russian ones.
Jeffrey eyed the tactical plot. All merchant shipping had been left behind, and none was detected in front. Every one of the handful of contacts held on the display, surface or airborne, was denoted by an icon that meant it was military, and Russian. If something submerged was lurking in ambush, a submarine or an unannounced minefield, Challenger’s sensors and technicians hadn’t spotted it yet. Not that they weren’t trying. A few of the sonarmen and fire-control specialists were already wiping sweat off their foreheads.
Rules of engagement for neutrals were words on paper, Jeffrey reminded himself. Russia didn’t have a stellar record putting them into practice in the field. In 1983, when local commanders ordered Korean Airlines Flight 007, from JFK to Seoul, be shot down by a fighter — without properly verifying the 747’s identity first — the Kremlin was humiliated before an angry world. Hundreds of innocent civilians were killed. The blunder helped bring down the Soviet Union. Though that was almost thirty years ago, the newest Russian Federation regime was autocratic, and talked very tough about self-defense, with rising investments in hardware to back up the talk. It was unclear if local forces would open fire on an unidentified undersea contact.
Jeffrey was second-guessing his own decision, too late. The navigation plot showed Challenger miles beyond the treaty line already.
Bell ordered several more course changes to get the ship into position to transit the Bering Strait. Jeffrey’s displays showed Challenger nearing the mouth of the Russian-side channel. The constricted part, the strait itself, was only three miles long from start to finish before widening out again, so depending on Bell’s tactics they could be through it very quickly. He’d chosen to aim for a path about two-thirds of the way from Big Diomede to the protruding knob at the tip of Siberia. Closer to the mainland, the water should be cloudier from soil erosion and thaw runoff. The Russian side was also more nutrient-rich — more productive biologically — and phytoplankton could turn the surface yellow-brown or milky white; even droppings from numerous sea birds helped obscure submerged visibility.
This would make it harder to detect Challenger via optical sensors: dipping blue-green lasers called LIDAR, or airborne cameras linked to supercomputer software — called LASH — able to notice anomalous color gradations and shapes deep underwater.
Out of curiosity, and to audit the proper preparedness of Challenger’s brand-new command team, Jeffrey called up a copy of the main weapons status page. He saw that Bell had four tubes loaded with high-explosive Mark 48 Improved ADCAP torpedoes, the standard heavyweight fish of the U.S. submarine fleet. The other four tubes held Mark II brilliant decoys, which could be programmed to imitate Challenger, or another sub, by giving off an acoustic signature meant to be noticed by the enemy.