“Make her a little light, Pat. Enough that it takes a degree of down to hold her level,” Mancuso said.
“Uh-huh.” Mannion frowned, checking the depth gauge. The ballast tanks were now fully flooded, and the balancing act would have to be done with the much smaller trim tanks. It took him five minutes to get the balance exactly right.
“Sorry, gentlemen. I’m afraid she’s too big to dial in quick,” he said, embarrassed with himself.
Ramius was impressed but too annoyed to show it. He had expected the American captain to take longer than this to do it himself. Trimming a strange sub so expertly on his first try…
“Okay, now we can come around north,” Mancuso said. They were two miles past the last charted bar. “Recommend new course zero-zero-eight, Captain.”
“Ryan, rudder left ten degrees,” Ramius ordered. “Come to zero-zero-eight.”
“Okay, rudder left ten degrees,” Ryan responded, keeping one eye on the rudder indicator, the other on the gyro compass repeater. “Come to oh-oh-eight.”
“Caution, Ryan. He turns slowly, but once turning you must use much backward—”
“Opposite,” Mancuso corrected politely.
“Yes, opposite rudder to stop him on proper course.”
“Right.”
“Captain, do you have rudder problems?” Mancuso asked. “From tracking you it seemed that your turning circle was rather large.”
“With the caterpillar it is. The flow from the tunnels strikes the rudder very hard, and it flutters if you use too much rudder. On our first sea trials, we had damage from this. It comes from — how do you say — the come-together of the two caterpillar tunnels.”
“Does this affect operations with the propellers?” Mannion asked.
“No, only with the caterpillar.”
Mancuso didn’t like that. It didn’t really matter. The plan was a simple, direct one. The three boats would make a straight dash to Norfolk. The two American attack boats would leapfrog forward at thirty knots to sniff out the areas ahead while the October plodded along at a constant twenty.
Ryan began to ease his rudder as the bow came around. He waited too long. Despite five degrees of right rudder, the bow swung right past the intended course, and the gyro repeater clicked accusingly on every third degree until it stopped at zero-zero-one. It took another two minutes to get back on the proper course.
“Sorry about that. Steady on zero-zero-eight,” he finally reported.
Ramius was forgiving. “You learn fast, Ryan. Perhaps one day you will be a true sailor.”
“No thanks! The one thing I’ve learned on this trip is that you guys earn every nickel you get.”
“Don’t like subs?” Mannion chuckled.
“No place to jog.”
“True. Unless you still need me, Captain, I’m ready to go aft. The engine room’s awful shorthanded,” Mannion said.
Ramius nodded. Was he from the ruling class? the captain wondered.
Tupolev was heading back west. The fleet order had instructed everyone but his Alfa and one other to return home at twenty knots. Tupolev was to move west for two and half hours. Now he was on a reciprocal heading at five knots, about the top speed the Alfa could travel without making much noise. The idea was that his sub would be lost in the shuffle. So, an Ohio was heading for Norfolk — or Charleston more probably. In any case, Tupolev would circle quietly and observe. The Red October was destroyed. That much he knew from the ops order. Tupolev shook his head. How could Marko have done such a thing? Whatever the answer, he had paid for his treason with his life.
“I’d feel better if we had some more air cover,” Admiral Foster said, leaning against the wall.
“Agreed, sir, but we can’t be so obvious, can we?” General Harris asked.
A pair of P-3Bs was now sweeping the track from Hatteras to the Virginia Capes as though on a routine training mission. Most of the other Orions were far out at sea. The Soviet fleet was already four hundred miles offshore. The three surface groups had rejoined and were now ringed by their submarines. The Kennedy, America, and Nimitz were five hundred miles to their east, and the New Jersey was dropping back. The Russians would be watched all the way home. The carrier battle groups would be following them all the way to Iceland, keeping a discreet distance and maintaining air groups at the fringe of their radar coverage continuously, just to let them know that the United States still cared. Aircraft based in Iceland would track them the rest of the way home.
HMS Invincible was now out of operation and about halfway home. American attack subs were returning to normal patrol patterns, and all Soviet subs were reported to be off the coast, though this data was sketchy. They were traveling in loose packs and the noise generated made tracking difficult for the patrolling Orions, which were short of sonobuoys. Still and all, the operation was about over, the J-3 judged.
“You heading for Norfolk, Admiral?” Harris asked.
“Thought I might get together with CINCLANT, a post-action conference, you understand,” Foster said.
“Aye aye, sir,” Harris said.
She was traveling at twelve knots, with a destroyer fueling on either beam. Commodore Eaton was in the flag plot. It was all over and nothing had happened, thank God. The Soviets were now a hundred miles ahead, within Tomahawk range but well beyond everything else. All in all, he was satisfied. His force had operated successfully with the Tarawa, which was now headed south to Mayport, Florida. He hoped they’d be able to do this again soon. It had been a long time since a flag officer on a battleship had had a carrier respond to his command. They had kept the Kirov force under continuous surveillance. If there had been a battle, Eaton was convinced that they’d have handled Ivan. More importantly, he was certain that Ivan knew it. All they awaited now was the order to return to Norfolk. It would be nice to be back home for Christmas. He figured his men had earned it. Many of the battleship’s men were oldtimers, and nearly everyone had a family.
Ping. Jones noted the time on his pad and called out, “Captain, just got a ping from Pogy.”
The Pogy was now ten miles ahead of the October and Dallas. The idea was that after she got ahead and listened for ten minutes, a single ping from her active sonar would signal that the ten miles to the Pogy and the twenty or more miles beyond her were clear. The Pogy would drift slowly to confirm this, and a mile to the October’s east the Dallas went to full speed to leapfrog ten miles beyond the other attack sub.
Jones was experimenting with the Russian sonar. The active gear, he’d found, was not too bad. The passive systems he didn’t want to think about. When the Red October had been lying still in Pamlico Sound, he’d been unable to track in on the American subs. They had also been still, with their reactors only turning generators, but they had been no more than a mile away. He was disappointed that he’d not been able to locate them.
The officer with him, Bugayev, was a friendly enough guy. At first he’d been a little standoffish — as if he were a lord and I were a serf, Jones thought — until he’d seen how the skipper treated him. This surprised Jones. From what little he knew of Communism, he had expected everyone to be fairly equal. Well, he decided, that’s what I get from reading Das Kapital in a freshman poli-sci course. It made a lot more sense to look at what Communism built. Garbage, mostly. The enlisted men didn’t even have their own mess room. Wasn’t that some crap! Eating your meals in your bunk rooms!