“So, except for the crew, we’d keep her…”
“Yes, if we could hide her. And if a pig had wings, it could fly.”
“Lots of places to hide her, Admiral. I can think of a few right here on the Chesapeake, and if we could get her round the Horn, there’s a million little atolls we could use, and they all belong to us.”
“But the crew will know, and when we send them home, they’ll tell their bosses,” Greer explained patiently. “And Moscow will ask for her back. Oh, sure, we’ll have a week or so to conduct, uh, safety and quarantine inspections, to make sure they weren’t trying to smuggle cocaine into the country.” The admiral laughed. “A British admiral suggested we invoke the old slave-trading treaty. Somebody did that back in World War II, to put the grab on a German blockade runner right before we got into it. So, we’ll get a ton of intelligence regardless.”
“Better to keep her, and run her, and take her apart…” Tyler said quietly, staring into the orange-white flames on the oak logs. How do we keep her? he wondered. An idea began to rattle around in his head. “Admiral, what if we could get the crew off without them knowing that we have the submarine?”
“Your full name is Oliver Wendell Tyler? Well, son, if you were named after Harry Houdini instead of a justice of the Supreme Court, I—” Greer looked into the engineer’s face. “What do you have in mind?”
While Tyler explained Greer listened intently.
“To do this, sir, we’ll have to get the navy in on it right quick. Specifically, we’ll need the cooperation of Admiral Dodge, and if my speed figures for this boat are anything like accurate, we’ll have to move smartly.”
Greer rose and walked around the couch a few times to get his circulation going. “Interesting. The timing would be almost impossible, though.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy, sir, just that we could do it.”
“Call home, Tyler. Tell your wife you won’t be making it home. If I don’t get any sleep tonight, neither do you. There’s coffee behind my desk. First I have to call the judge, then we’ll talk to Sam Dodge.”
“Pogy, this is Black Gull 4. We’re getting low on fuel. Have to return to the barn,” the Orion’s tactical coordinator reported, stretching after ten hours at his control console. “Anything you want us to get you? Over.”
“Yeah, have a couple cases of beer sent out,” Commander Wood replied. It was the current joke between P-3C and submarine crews. “Thanks for the data. We’ll take it from here. Out.”
Overhead, the Lockheed Orion increased power and turned southwest. The crewmen aboard would each hoist an extra beer or two at dinner, saying it was for their friends on the submarine.
“Mr. Dyson, take her two hundred feet. One-third speed.”
The officer of the deck gave the proper orders as Commander Wood moved over to the plot.
The USS Pogy was three hundred miles northeast of Norfolk, awaiting the arrival of two Soviet Alfa-class submarines which several relays of antisubmarine patrol aircraft had tracked all the way from Iceland. The Pogy was named for a distinguished World War II fleet submarine, named in turn for an undistinguished game fish. She had been at sea for eighteen hours, and was fresh from an extended overhaul at the Newport News shipyard. Nearly everything aboard was either straight from manufacturers’ crates or had been completely worked over by the skilled shipfitters on the James River. This was not to say that everything worked properly. Many items had failed in one way or another on the post-overhaul shakedown the previous week, a fact less unusual than lamentable, Commander Wood thought. The Pogy’s crew was new, too. Wood was on his first deployment as a commanding officer after a year of desk duty in Washington, and too many of the enlisted men were green, just out of sub school at New London, still getting accustomed to their first cruise on a submarine. It takes time for men used to blue skies and fresh air to learn the regime inside a thirty-two-foot-diameter steel pipe. Even the experienced men were making adjustments to their new boat and officers.
The Pogy had met her top speed of thirty-three knots on post-overhaul trials. This was fast for a ship but slower than the speed of the Alfas she was listening to. Like all American submarines, her long suit was stealth. The Alfas had no way of knowing she was there and that they would be easy targets for her weapons, the more so since the patrolling Orion had fed the Pogy exact range information, something that ordinarily takes time to deduce from a passive sonar plot.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Reynolds, the executive officer and fire control coordinator, stood casually over the tactical plot. “Thirty-six miles to the near one, and forty on the far one.” On the display they were labeled Pogy-Bait 1 and 2. Everyone found the use of this service epithet amusing.
“Speed forty-two?” Wood asked.
“Yes, Captain.” Reynolds had handled the radio exchange until Black Gull 4 had announced its intention to return to base. “They’re driving those boats for all they’re worth. Right for us. We have hard solutions on both…zap! What do you suppose they’re up to?”
“The word from CINCLANT is that their ambassador says they’re on a SAR mission for a lost boat.” His voice indicated what he thought of that.
“Search and rescue, eh?” Reynolds shrugged. “Well, maybe they think they lost a boat off Point Comfort, ’cause if they don’t slow down real fast, that’s where they’ll end up. I’ve never heard of Alfas operating this close to our coast. Have you, sir?”
“Nope.” Wood frowned. The thing about the Alfas was that they were fast and noisy. Soviet tactical doctrine seemed to call for them mainly in defensive roles: as “interceptor submarines” they could protect their own missile subs, and with their high speed they could engage American attack submarines, then evade counterattack. Wood didn’t think the doctrine was sound, but that was all right with him.
“Maybe they want to blockade Norfolk,” Reynolds suggested.
“You might have a point there,” Wood said. “Well, in any case, we’ll just sit tight and let them burn right past us. They’ll have to slow as they cross the continental shelf line, and we’ll tag along behind them, nice and quiet.”
“Aye,” Reynolds said.
If they had to shoot, both men reflected, they’d find out just how tough the Alfa really was. There had been much talk about the strength of the titanium used for her hull, whether it really would withstand the force of several hundred pounds of high explosive in direct contact. A new shaped-charge warhead for the Mark 48 torpedo had been developed for just this purpose and for handling the equally tough Typhoon hull. Both officers set this thought aside. Their assigned mission was to track and shadow.
Pogy-Bait 2 was known to the Soviet Navy as the E. S. Politovskiy. This Alfa-class attack sub was named for the chief engineering officer of the Russian fleet who had sailed all the way around the world to meet his appointment with destiny in the Tsushima Straits. Evgeni Sigismondavich Politovskiy had served the czar’s navy with skill and a devotion to duty equal to that of any officer in history, but in his diary, which was discovered years later in Leningrad, the brilliant officer had decried in the most violent terms the corruption and excesses of the czarist regime, giving a grim counterpoint to the selfless patriotism he had shown as he sailed knowingly to his death. This made him a genuine hero for Soviet seamen to emulate, and the State had named its greatest engineering achievement in his memory. Unfortunately the Politovskiy had enjoyed no better luck than he had enjoyed in the face of Togo’s guns.