“Why?” Barnes asked again.
“We’re committed to helping in the search. If we find their boat, they’re close enough to find out, acquire, localize, and shoot — and what can we do about it? Not a thing.
“Like I said, they figure to locate and shoot with their submarines. A surface acquisition would be pure luck, and you don’t plan for luck. So, the primary objective of the surface fleet is to ride shotgun for, and draw our forces away from, their subs. Secondarily they can act as beaters, driving the game to the shooters — and again, since we’re pinging, we’re helping them. We’re providing an additional stalking horse.” Harris shook his head in grudging admiration. “Not too shabby, is it? If Red October hears them coming, she runs a little harder for whatever port the skipper wants, right into a nice, tight trap. Dan, what are the chances they can bag her coming into Norfolk, say?”
Foster looked down at the chart. Russian submarines were staked out on every port from Maine to Florida. “They have more subs than we have ports. Now we know that this guy can be picked up, and there’s only so much area to cover off each port, even outside the territorial limit…You’re right, Eddie. They have too good a chance of making the kill. Our surface groups are too far away to do anything about it. Our subs don’t know what’s happening, we have orders not to tell them, and even if we could, how could they interfere? Fire at the Russian subs before they could shoot — and start a war?” Foster let out a long breath. “We gotta warn him off.”
“How?” Hilton asked.
“Sonar, a gertrude message maybe,” Harris suggested.
Admiral Dodge shook his head. “You can hear that through the hull. If we continue to assume that only the officers are in on this, well, the crew might figure out what’s happening, and there’s no predicting the consequences. Think we can use Nimitz and America to force them off the coast? They’ll be close enough to enter the operation soon. Damn! I don’t want this guy to get this close, then get blown away right off our coast.”
“Not a chance,” Harris said. “Ever since the raid on Kirov they’ve been acting too docile. That’s pretty cute, too. I bet they had that figured out. They know that having so many of their ships operating off our coast is bound to provoke us, so they make the first move, we up the ante, and they just plain fold — so now if we keep leaning on them, we’re the bad guys. They’re just doing a rescue operation, not threatening anybody. The Post reported this morning that we have a Russian survivor in the Norfolk naval hospital. Anyway, the good news is that they’ve miscalculated October’s speed. These two groups will pass her left and right, and with their seven-knot speed advantage they’ll just pass her by.”
“Disregard the surface groups entirely?” Maxwell asked.
“No,” Hilton said, “that tells them we are no longer buying the cover story. They’d wonder why — and we still have to cover their surface groups. They’re a threat whether they’re acting like honest merchants or not.”
“What we can do is pretend to release Invincible. With Nimitz and America ready to enter the game, we can send her home. As they pass October we can use that to our advantage. We put Invincible to seaward of their surface groups as though she’s heading home and interpose her on October’s course. We still have to figure out a way to communicate with her, though. I can see how to get the assets in place, but that hurdle remains, gentlemen. For the moment, are we agreed to position Invincible and Pogy for the intercept?”
“How far is she from us?” Ryan asked.
“Two hundred miles. We can be there in ten hours.” Captain Hunter marked the position on the chart. “USS Pogy is coming east, and she ought to be able to rendezvous with Dallas an hour or so after we do. This will put us about a hundred miles east of this surface group when October arrives. Bloody hell, Kiev and Kirov are a hundred miles east and west of her.”
“You suppose her captain knows it?” Ryan looked at the chart, measuring the distances with his eyes.
“Unlikely. He’s deep, and their passive sonars are not as good as ours. Sea conditions are against it also. A twenty-knot surface wind can play havoc with sonar, even that deep.”
“We have to warn him off.” Admiral White looked at the ops dispatch. “‘Without using acoustical devices.’”
“How the hell do you do that? You can’t reach down that far with a radio,” Ryan noted. “Even I know that. My God, this guy’s come four thousand miles, and he’s going to get killed within sight of his objective.”
“How to communicate with a submarine?”
Commander Barclay straightened up. “Gentlemen, we are not trying to communicate with a submarine, we are trying to communicate with a man.”
“What are you thinking?” Hunter asked.
“What do we know about Marko Ramius?” Barclay’s eyes narrowed.
“He’s a cowboy, typical submarine commander, thinks he can walk on water,” Captain Carstairs said.
“Who spent most of his time in attack submarines,” Barclay added. “Marko’s bet his life that he could sneak into an American port undetected by anyone. We have to shake that confidence to warn him off.”
“We have to talk to him first,” Ryan said sharply.
“And so we shall,” Barclay smiled, the thought now fully formed in his mind. “He’s a former attack submarine commander. He’ll still be thinking about how to attack his enemies, and how does a sub commander do that?”
“Well?” Ryan demanded.
Barclay’s answer was the obvious one. They discussed his idea for another hour, then Ryan transmitted it to Washington for approval. A rapid exchange of technical information followed. The Invincible would have to make the rendezvous in daylight, and there was not time for that. The operation was set back twelve hours. The Pogy joined formation with the Invincible, standing as sonar sentry twenty miles to her east. An hour before midnight, the ELF transmitter in northern Michigan transmitted a message: “G.” Twenty minutes later, the Dallas approached the surface to get her orders.
THE THIRTEENTH DAY
“Crazy Ivan,” Jones called out again, “turning to port!”
“Okay, all stop,” Mancuso ordered, holding a dispatch in his hand which he had been rereading for hours. He was not pleased with it.
“All stop, sir,” the helmsman responded.
“All back full.”
“All back full, sir.” The helmsman dialed in the command and turned, his face a question.
Throughout the Dallas the crew heard noise, too much noise as poppet valves opened to vent steam onto the reverse turbine blades, trying to spin the propeller the wrong way. It made for instant vibration and cavitation noises aft.