A half an hour later the Dallas radioed her message.
Z140925ZDEC
TOP SECRET THEO
FR: USS DALLAS
TO: COMSUBLANT
INFO: CINCLANTFLT
A. USS DALLAS Z090414ZDEC
1. ANOMALOUS CONTACT REACQUIRED 0538Z 13DEC. CURRENT POSITION LAT 42° 35$$$ LONG 49° 12$$$. COURSE 194 SPEED 13 DEPTH 600. HAVE TRACKED 24 HOURS WITHOUT COUNTERDETECTION. CONTACT EVALUATED AS REDFLEET SSBN GROSS SIZE, ENGINE CHARACTERISTICS INDICATIVE TYPHOON CLASS. HOWEVER CONTACT USING NEW DRIVE SYSTEM NOT REPEAT NOT PROPELLERS. HAVE ESTABLISHED DETAILED SIGNATURE PROFILE.
2. RETURNING TO TRACKING OPERATIONS. REQUEST ADDITIONAL OPAREA ASSIGNMENTS. AWAIT REPLY 1030Z.
“Bingo!” Gallery said to himself. He walked back to his office, careful to close the door before lifting the scrambled line to Washington.
“Sam, this is Vince. Listen up: Dallas reports she is tracking a Russian boomer with a new kind of quiet drive system, about six hundred miles southwest of the Grand Banks, course one-nine-four, speed thirteen knots.”
“All right! That’s Mancuso?” Dodge said.
“Bartolomeo Vito Mancuso, my favorite Guinea,” Gallery confirmed. Getting him this command had not been easy because of his age. Gallery had gone the distance for him. “I told you the kid was good, Sam.”
“Jesus, you see how close they are to the Kiev group?” Dodge was looking at his tactical display.
“They are cutting it close,” Gallery agreed. “Invincible’s not too far away, though, and I have Pogy out there, too. We moved her off the shelf when we called Scamp back in. I figure Dallas will need help. The question is how obvious do we want to be.”
“Not very. Look, Vince, I have to talk to Dan Foster about this.”
“Okay. I have to reply to Dallas in, hell, in fifty-five minutes. You know the score. He has to break contact to reach us, then sneak back. Hustle, Sam.”
“Right, Vince.” Dodge switched buttons on his phone. “This is Admiral Dodge. I need to talk to Admiral Foster right now.”
“Ouch. Between Kiev and Kirov. Nice.” Lieutenant General Harris took a marker from his pocket to represent the Red October. It was a sub-shaped piece of wood with a Jolly Roger attached. Harris had an odd sense of humor. “The president says we can try and keep her?” he asked.
“If we can get her to the place we want at the time we want,” General Hilton said. “Can Dallas signal her?”
“Good trick, General.” Foster shook his head. “First things first. Let’s get Pogy and Invincible there for starters, then we figure out how to warn him. From this course track, Christ, he’s heading right for Norfolk. You believe the balls on this guy? If worse comes to worse, we can always try to escort him in.”
“Then we’d have to give the boat back,” Admiral Dodge objected.
“We have to have a fall-back position, Sam. If we can’t warn him off, we can try and run a bunch of ships through with him to keep Ivan from shooting.”
“The law of the sea is your bailiwick, not mine,” General Barnes, the air force chief of staff, commented. “But from where I sit doing that could be called anything from piracy to an overt act of war. Isn’t this exercise complicated enough already?”
“Good point, General,” Foster said.
“Gentlemen, I think we need time to consider this. Okay, we still have time, but right now let’s tell Dallas to sit tight and track the bugger,” Harris said. “And report any changes in course or speed. I figure we have about fifteen minutes to do that. Next we can get Pogy and Invincible staked out on their path.”
“Right, Eddie.” Hilton turned to Admiral Foster. “If you agree, let’s do that right now.”
“Send the message, Sam,” Foster ordered.
“Aye aye.” Dodge went to the phone and ordered Admiral Gallery to send the reply.
Z141030ZDEC
TOP SECRET
FR: COMSUBLANT
TO: USS DALLAS
A. USS DALLAS Z140925ZDEC
1. CONTINUE TRACKING. REPORT ANY CHANGES IN COURSE OR SPEED. HELP ON THE WAY.
2. ELF TRANSMISSION “G” DESIGNATES FLASH OPS DIRECTIVE READY FOR YOU.
3. YOUR OPAREA UNRESTRICTED BRAVO ZULU DALLAS KEEP IT UP. VADM GALLERY SENDS.
“Okay, let’s look at this,” Harris said. “What the Russians are up to never has figured, has it?”
“What do you mean, Eddie?” Hilton asked.
“Their force composition for one thing. Half these surface platforms are antiair and antisurface, not primary ASW assets. And why bring Kirov along at all? Granted she makes a nice force flag, but they could do the same thing with Kiev.”
“We talked about that already,” Foster observed. “They ran down the list of what they had that could travel this far at a high speed of advance and took everything that would steam. Same with the subs they sent, half of them are antisurface SSGNs with limited utility against submarines. The reason, Eddie, is that Gorshkov wants every platform here he can get. A half-capable ship is better than nothing. Even one of the old Echoes might get lucky, and Sergey is probably hitting the knees every night praying for luck.”
“Even so, they’ve split their surface groups into three forces, each with antiair and antisurface elements, and they’re kind of thin on ASW hulls. Nor have they sent their ASW aircraft to stage out of Cuba. Now that is curious,” Harris pointed out.
“It would blow their cover story. You don’t look for a dead sub with aircraft — well, they might, but if they started using a wing of Bears out of Cuba, the president would go ape,” Foster said. “We’d harass them so much they’d never accomplish anything. For us this would be a technical operation, but they factor politics into everything they do.”
“Fine, but that still doesn’t explain it. What ASW ships and choppers they do have are pinging away like mad. You might look for a dead sub that way, but October ain’t dead, is she?”
“I don’t understand, Eddie,” Hilton said.
“How would you look for a stray sub, given these circumstances?” Harris asked Foster.
“Not like this,” Foster said after a moment. “Using surface, active sonar would warn the boat off long before they could get a hard contact. Boomers are fat on passive sonar. She’d hear them coming and skedaddle out of the way. You’re right, Eddie. It’s a sham.”
“So what the hell are their surface ships up to?” Barnes asked, puzzled.
“Soviet naval doctrine is to use surface ships to support submarine operations,” Harris explained. “Gorshkov is a decent tactical theoretician, and occasionally a very innovative gent. He said years ago that for submarines to operate effectively they have to have outside help, air or surface assets in direct or proximate support. They can’t use air this far from home without staging out of Cuba, and at best finding a boat in open ocean that doesn’t want to be found would be a difficult assignment.
“On the other hand, they know where she’s heading, a limited number of discrete areas, and those are staked out with fifty-eight submarines. The purpose of the surface forces, therefore, is not to participate in the hunt itself — though if they got lucky, they wouldn’t mind. The purpose of the surface forces is to keep us from interfering with their submarines. They can do that by staking out the areas we’re likely to be with their surface assets and watching what we’re doing.” Harris paused for a moment. “That’s smart. We have to cover them, right? And since they’re on a ‘rescue’ mission, we have to do more or less what they’re doing, so we ping away also, and they can use our own ASW expertise against us for their own purposes. We play right into their hands.”