The breakfast he consumed in the wardroom was huge, and he ate it with a gusto none aboard Seratov had seen since he boarded. His ebullience spread through the submarine. The same atmosphere had developed on other submarines Danilov had ridden in the past. His enthusiasm was infectious.
Sergoff was delighted with the change in the admiral as he entered the wardroom that morning. He had been awake a good deal of the time Danilov was sleeping, and his mood, he knew, would be based that day on how the admiral felt.
Seratov was now meandering through the ice pack, keeping no more than fifty feet between the top of the sail and the bottom of the ice. The forward-looking sonar was activated to warn of imminent danger ahead. The upward-looking sonar charted the thickness of the ice above, care; fully recording those areas that were suitable for surfacing in an emergency. Speed was kept at a minimum to avoid noise. There was no longer a need to outdistance their enemy. Instead they were waiting… waiting for the Americans to give themselves away.
“Contact!” The red light winked on above the fire control board. “Relative bearing two one six.”
Danilov nodded pleasantly to the fire control officer, who glanced over in his direction. “That’s right. That’s close to where they should be coming from.” He relaxed as they maneuvered to get an accurate plot on their contact.
“Contact appears to be moving east to west. Speed about eighteen knots. Classified as probable American Los Angeles-class…”
More details followed. As he listened, Danilov’s smile disappeared. They should be coming toward him… they should be hugging the ice when they knew he was ahead of them, and they shouldn’t be radiating all that noise. He sent Sergoff into sonar to have them go through the identification process again. He was sure the Americans — Reed — wouldn’t come charging right at him.
“Contact… bearing one seven one.” Again, the process was the same as the first. Another Los Angeles-class! Impossible, Danilov surmised. There was no way the one off to the east could have come back this close so quickly. This contact moved more slowly and was making a zigzag path, according to the sonar officer. It didn’t make sense.
A half hour later, another contact was reported — another Los Angeles-class! The strategy became obvious to Danilov. The Americans weren’t going to come to him waving a red flag, and to have expected that possibility would have been foolish. The first contact fooled him, the second planted the seed, the third confirmed that they were toying with him. Sonar insisted that their classifications were accurate and there was no way he would dispute their analysis. It would take an expert to sort out the difference between the noisemaker and the real thing. He was sure Houston wasn’t equipped with such a device, nor could it move about so agilely to release them without being located herself. No… this had to be Imperator coming directly toward him!
Danilov turned to Stevan Lozak and said softly, “Captain, that submarine of theirs may well hear us before we can sense it. Stop your engines.”
“All stop.” Lozak turned expectantly. “Secure the active sonar, sir?”
Danilov nodded, appreciating a man who anticipated him. “Let’s have a look at that chart of the ice we’ve been developing.”
Properly laid out, the portion of the ice pack under which a submarine had passed should read like a map. In addition to the thickness of the ice, they also recorded obstacles, especially the pressure ridges, which could easily sink a submarine. However, the ice pack is an unstable element that can be affected by the weather above. Wind and current can push the ice together, forcing pressure ridges as much as a hundred feet below the surface. A submarine drawing not much more than thirty feet of water can hide behind such a deep pressure ridge.
Danilov studied the sonar chart carefully. Finally, he selected a spot with his finger. “Right here.” He tapped the spot repeatedly. “Bring her here, Captain. I don’t mind if it takes a couple of hours. Just don’t make a sound while you do it, I want to hide behind this ridge as long as we can. If it disappears, so what? By then he may have given himself away.” He turned to Sergoff. “See if you can find any consistency to those decoys he’s using. Perhaps we can locate him through his efforts to confuse us.”
The warning light on the sound-powered phone caught Snow’s attention before the buzzer sounded. “Captain here.”
“Caesar picked up something dead ahead of us — very faint. Hard to classify but it appears to be man-made.” Carol Petersen’s voice was hesitant.
“Sonar didn’t report a thing.”
“I know that. I already checked with them. That’s not their fault. This is apparently below the threshold of even your best sonarman. Captain. Caesar can pick up a lot that he can’t identify, a lot that the human ear wouldn’t know was there. That’s what this was. It was only there for thirty seconds, and for some reason it stopped.”
“Probably the ice.”
“Negative. This was man-made,” she insisted. “Caesar can differentiate that much.”
Snow was ready to dispute her comment without thinking. “What the hell—” But then he remembered how many times the engineers back in the fishbowl had extolled the superhuman features of their computer — and one of the items that had been repeated was its ability to distinguish sound, even if it could not classify what it heard. One of them even went on to say it could save his life some day.
“Captain, it was on a bearing dead ahead… right where you expect them. I’d—”
“Sorry,” Snow interrupted. “I didn’t mean to discourage you. Call your bearing up to sonar and have them work it too. The only man-made thing in front of us is that Russian submarine.”
“Wait a minute, Captain. We’ve got something again dead ahead… very faint—”
“Does sonar hold it?” Snow shouted impatiently across the control room.
“Negative.”
“Whatever it is, it’s very faint. Caesar’s barely holding it. If it’s a submarine, it’s either a hell of a long way off or dead slow.”
“Is it man-made?”
“No doubt about it… but we can’t classify it.”
“Roger… see if you can get a track on it.”
Snow closed his eyes tightly, imagining what he might do if he were in Danilov’s shoes. The man knew his Alfas made a great deal of noise, and that Imperator’s sonar ranged beyond the human state of the art. No doubt about it — go silent, as silent as possible, and wait. Imperator also possessed exceptionally long-range torpedoes. She could take the chance of using active sonar to obtain the Russian submarine’s range. Then fire before Danilov’s torpedoes would be effective.
The Russian admiral was known for his brilliance; he wouldn’t leave himself out in the open. More likely he would hide behind a pressure ridge. Snow kept his eyes tightly shut as he contemplated Danilov’s options. They were limited. It was probable the Russian would fire first if he could hide successfully. Get wire-guided torpedoes in the water—then steer them, Snow realized. He gave the order to stand by the evasion devices forward. Caesar would fire them automatically if the ship appeared to be in danger.