Captain Ricks appeared a minute later, wearing sneakers and his blue overalls. His first stop was to control, to check course, speed, and depth. Then he went into sonar.
“Let's see it.”
“Damn thing just faded on me again, sir,” the sonarman said sheepishly. He used a piece of toilet paper — there was a roll over each scope — to erase the previous mark, and penciled in another. “I think we have something here, sir.”
“I hope you didn't interrupt my sleep for nothing,” Ricks noted. Lieutenant Pitney caught the look the two other sonarmen exchanged at that.
“Coming back, sir. You know, if this is an Akula, we should be getting a little pump noise in this spectrum over here…”
“Intelligence says he's coming out of overhaul. Ivan is learning how to make them quieter,” Ricks said.
“Guess so… slow drift to the north, call the current bearing two-nine-seven.” Both men knew that figure could be off by ten degrees either way. Even with the enormously expensive system on Maine, really longdistance bearings were pretty vague.
“Anybody else around?” Pitney asked.
“ Omaha is supposed to be around somewhere south of Kodiak. Wrong direction. It's not her. Sure it's not a surface contact?”
“No way, Cap'n. If it was diesel, I'd know it, and if it was steam, I'd know that, too. There's no pounding from surface noise. Has to be a submerged contact, Cap'n. Only thing makes sense.”
“Pitney, we're on two-eight-one?”
“Yessir.”
“Come left to two-six-five. We'll set up a better baseline for the target-motion analysis, try to get a range estimate before we turn in.”
Turn in, Pitney thought. Jesus, boomers aren't supposed to do this stuff. He gave the order anyway, of course.
“Where's the layer?”
“One-five-zero feet, sir. Judging by the surface noise, there's twenty-five-footers up there,” the sonarman added.
“So he's probably staying deep to smooth the ride out.”
“Damn, lost him again… we'll see what happens when the tail straightens back out… ”
Ricks leaned his head out of the sonar room and spoke a single word: “Coffee.” It never occurred to him that the sonarmen might like some, too.
It took five more minutes of waiting before the dots started appearing again in the right place.
“Okay, he's back. I think,” the sonarman added. “Bearing looks like three-zero-two now.”
Ricks walked out to the plotting table. Ensign Shaw was doing his calculations along with a quartermaster. “Has to be a hundred-thousand-plus yards. I'm assuming a north-easterly course from the bearing drift, speed of less than ten. Has to be a hundred-K yards or more.” That was good, fast work, Shaw and the petty officer thought.
Ricks nodded curtly and went back to sonar.
“Firming up, getting some stuff on the fifty-herz line now. Starting to smell like Mr. Akula, maybe.”
“You must have a pretty good channel.”
“Right, Captain, pretty good and improving a little. That storm's gonna change it when the turbulence gets down to our depth, sir.”
Ricks went into control again: “Mr. Shaw?”
“Best estimate is one-one-five-K yards, course northeasterly, speed five knots, maybe one or two more, sir. If his speed's much higher than that, the range is awfully far.”
“Okay, I want us to come around very gently, come right to zero-eight-zero.”
“Aye aye, sir. Helm, right five degrees rudder, come to new course zero-eight-zero.”
“Right five degrees rudder, aye. Sir, my rudder is right five degrees, coming to new course zero-eight-zero.”
“Very well.”
Slowly, so as not to make too great a bend in the towed array, USS Maine reversed course. It took three minutes before she settled down on the new course, doing something no US fleet ballistic-missile submarine had ever done before. Lieutenant-Commander Claggett appeared in the control room soon thereafter.
“How long you figure he's going to hold this course?” he asked Ricks.
“What would you do?”
“I think I'd troll along in a ladder pattern,” Dutch answered, “and my drift would be south instead of north, reverse of how we do it in the Barents Sea, right? Interval between sweeps will be determined by the performance of his tail. That's one hard piece of intel we can develop, but depending on how that number looks, we'll have to be real careful how we trail him, won't we?”
“Well, I can't approach to less than thirty thousand yards under any circumstances. So… we'll close to fifty-K until we have a better feel for him, then ease it in as circumstances permit. One of us should be in here at all times as long as he's in the neighborhood.”
“Agreed.” Claggett nodded. He paused for a beat before going on. “How the hell,” the XO asked very quietly indeed, “did OP-O2 ever agree to this?”
“Safer world now, isn't it?”
“I s'pose, sir.”
“You're jealous that boomers can do a fast-attack job?”
“Sir, I think that OP-O2 slipped a gear, either that or they're trying to impress some folks with our flexibility or something.”
“You don't like this?”
“No, Captain, I don't. I know we can do it, but I don't think we should.”
“Is that what you talked to Mancuso about?”
“What?” Claggett shook his head. “No, sir. Well, he did ask me that, and I said we could do it. Not my place to enter into that yet.”
Then what did you talk to him about! Ricks wanted to ask. He couldn't, of course.
The Americans were a great disappointment to Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev. The whole reason they'd recruited him was to get good inside information on the Soviet government, and he'd delivered precisely that for years. He'd seen the sweeping political changes coming for his country, seen them early because he'd known Andrey Il'ych Narmonov for what he was. And for what he was not. The President of his country was a man of stunning political gifts. He had the courage of a lion and the tactical agility of a mongoose. It was a plan that he lacked. Narmonov had no idea where he was going, and that was his weakness. He had destroyed the old political order, eliminated the Warsaw Pact through inaction, merely by saying out loud, only once, that the Soviet Union would not interfere with the political integrity of other countries, and had done so in the knowledge that the only thing that kept Marxism in place was the threat of Soviet force. The Eastern European communists had foolishly played along, actually thinking themselves secure in the love and respect of their people in one of history's most colossal and least understood acts of lunacy. But what made the irony sublime was that Narmonov could not see the same thing in his own country, to which was added one more, fatal, variable.
The Soviet people — a term that never had any meaning, of course — were held together only by the threat of force. Only the guns of the Red Army guaranteed that Moldavians, and Latvians, and Tadzhiks and so many others would follow the Moscow line. They loved the communist leadership even less than the greatgrandfathers had loved the czars. And so while Narmonov had dismantled the Party's central role in managing the country, he'd eliminated his ability to control his people, but left himself no ethos with which to supplant what had gone before. The plan — in a nation which for over eighty years had always had The Plan — simply did not exist. So, necessarily, when turmoil began to replace order, there was nothing to do, nothing to point to, no goal to strive for. Narmonov's dazzling political maneuvers were ultimately pointless. Kadishev saw that. Why didn't the Americans, who had gambled everything on the survival of “their man” in Moscow?