In the control room, an ebullient Danilov continued, “Sergoff, I’ve spent far too much time picking on you about your work on the charts. I apologize. In front of everyone here.” His hand swept about the small compartment. “I apologize for my impatience.” Waving for Sergoff to join him, he bent over the chart table. “I need your effort now more than ever. It’s time to locate Imperator. Sergoff looked into Danilov’s face. The broad smile was still evident. “What may I do, Admiral?” he inquired cautiously.
“You’ve plotted Imperator’s position each time we have been able to receive satellite confirmation?”
“Yes, sir.” Sergoff’s index finger stabbed at the neat notations he’d made on the larger chart.
“You have a fairly accurate concept of her speed of advance depending on her position, depth of water… that sort of thing?”
Sergoff nodded. “It’s sketchy. But more could be done… to analyze her progress… determine any patterns, I suppose.”
“Exactly. That’s exactly what I mean.” Danilov’s expression remained animated. “It’s foolish to sit here waiting to identify a certain sound through that madhouse noise, as you call it, that Admiral Reed has created for us. You’ve laid out a prospective track for Imperator.” Danilov ran his finger across the course Sergoff had carefully penciled onto the chart. “So, we know where she was earlier today until she ran into deeper water.” Seratov had sent up a radio buoy through a polynya to receive message traffic a few hours before.
“She was right here, give or take a few kilometers.” Though Danilov’s smile seemed to animate his entire face, Sergoff remained serious. He understood exactly what Danilov was coming to, but he would let the admiral announce it.
“Lay out her likely position every thirty minutes on the chart. Sonar will concentrate on a sector in the probable location you indicate. Sooner or later they have to pick her up. The noisemakers must keep drifting.” There were pronounced underwater currents sweeping from the north down toward the Alaskan coast, then west into the Chukchi Sea. They would carry the drifting noisemakers with them. Logically, they should pass across any bearing that sonar was keying on. With that sort of movement, it seemed probable to Danilov that sound from Imperator would eventually have to be isolated since it would not be moving with the current.
Painstakingly, Captain Sergoff studied Imperator’s progress over the past few days. There was a pattern. It would be impossible to determine whether it was the result of Captain Snow’s systematic planning, or Admiral Reed’s, or even the consortium that controlled them both. Nevertheless, a pattern existed, and he laid out prospective positions for the American submarine every thirty minutes.
From these, Danilov provided a probable bearing from Seratov for his sonarmen. They were to concentrate on a three-degree sector. The arc would widen considerably by the time it crossed Imperator’s likely track. As Danilov had predicted, the movement of the noisemakers followed the current from east to west. Computer assistance was required in most instances to confirm this motion. The next job was even more demanding — to isolate and track a sound beyond the noisemakers.
It was the old needle-in-the-haystack problem, except this time the only sense they could employ was auditory.
They were blindly groping for a sound they had never heard before. What encouraged the sonarmen on Seratov more than anything else was the fact that Admiral Danilov remained beside them. He listened just as intently as each one of his men, conversing with them on occasion whenever the possibility of an alien sound attracted their attention.
With only a few hours remaining on the fifth day, the most junior of Danilov’s sonarmen was the one to identify a vague sound that pierced through the torrent generated by the noisemakers. It was distant but steady. Fed into the computer, it was identified as a propulsor system. Nothing in their vast audio collection of identifiable submarines compared to it.
Over the next fifteen minutes there was an increase in pitch detected only by the computer. It was possible the contact could be drawing closer to the Soviet boat, which remained stationary. Sergoff found the general direction coincided with his projected track of Imperator.
“Sergoff, search the sectors to either side of that for her screen, Then X want you to run everything we have heard back through the computer. Make a separate recording for a radio beacon and release it when you have an opening above us. We don’t have a great deal to go on, but I want to make sure that it’s relayed to Novgorod when she sends up a listening buoy.” Then he turned to the man standing patiently behind him. “Captain Lozak, now all we have to do is find her escorts. What would you do if you knew we were waiting out here?”
Until now, Seratov’s captain, Stevan Lozak, had been a mere figurehead aboard his own command. Danilov’s presence overwhelmed everyone around him, and Sergoff remained the admiral’s right hand. Lozak, having sailed with Danilov before, was accustomed to the situation and content to accept his position until he was invited to participate.
Lozak was a superb mariner. Before he had been given command of Seratov, he had worked in the tactical research section of the Leninsky Komsomol. This prestigious school of submarine warfare in Leningrad was charged with developing original antisubmarine tactics for the emerging breed of high-speed attack submarines designed to protect Russia’s ballistic-missile force. Lozak had cataloged American submarine tactics, collating them into data for computer projections, the objective of which was to teach Soviet captains what to anticipate from their opposite number in actual combat. He had taken his work one step further by actually devising tactics to meet whatever the Americans might do. After reading about Lozak’s work, there was no doubt in Abe Danilov’s mind who would command his next flagship.
Lozak responded now without hesitation. “I’m sure Admiral Reed realizes we are waiting somewhere in this vicinity. He’s thoughtful, cautious almost to a fault until he is certain of his quarry. I expect he will keep his boats spread out. They’ll stay within communication range but he’s going to maintain a screen to the north of Imperator. He’ll want to sanitize her path.” He looked thoughtfully at Danilov. “I’d say there was every chance they could sweep this area in the next six hours.”
“Would you care to presume where they might be now?” Danilov’s smile had faded, but his eyes remained bright and alert. The action was about to start and he was enjoying himself.
Lozak signaled to the quartermaster to get out another chart of the area. “Bring it into the wardroom,” he ordered as he beckoned Danilov to join him. The dining table in the wardroom provided the only other unencumbered, flat surface they could use.
When the chart was spread out, the comers secured with salt and pepper shakers, Lozak used a red pencil to show Danilov what he anticipated. “These arctic waters will continue colder and more saline, and I think sound propagation will remain excellent. That’s good or bad depending on who is the hunter or the hunted at any given moment. I’d like to have some sound velocity profiles to be sure, but if I were Admiral Reed I’d separate my submarines by about seventy-five miles.” He made three imaginary points on the chart. Using a set of dividers, he traced the imaginary path toward the pole of two screening submarines going well beyond Seratov’s current position. Then he swung the path of the one closest to the land in an arc until it became a straight line paralleling Imperator two hundred miles to the east.