Pisaro, passing through the galley, had overheard some of the exchange, then pushed through the hatch.
"Attention!" Sorensen ordered.
Pisaro smiled and rubbed his hands over his scalp. "Gentlemen, let's try to keep it cool. You too, Davic."
"Yes, sir. Aye aye, sir."
"World War Three hasn't started yet. Our job is to see that it doesn't," and he left the mess, shaking his head.
In sonar Willie Joe was chatting over the intercom with Hoek. "How many is that, Lieutenant?"
"Let's see. That makes one eight eight. That's hulls, not tonnage. The last one was a big one."
"When's the next sub scheduled to come through?"
"We've got an Italian due in three hours."
"Okay, I've got a tanker on the screen. Big sucker. Let's take it."
"My treat," said the lieutenant, and three minutes later enough hypothetical crude was spilled to pollute the Strait for a hundred years.
As the noise from the tanker faded away, a bright streak flashed across Willie Joe's screen. He blinked and rechecked the list of submarines scheduled to pass through the Strait. Through his earphones he heard distinct propulsion noises. An unscheduled submarine was approaching the Strait from the west at high speed.
"Do you see him, Lieutenant?"
"I do."
"That's not our Italian."
"Agreed."
"Sonar to control, we have a contact. Bearing two five five, course one two one, speed three zero knots, range ten miles and closing."
"Control to sonar. Do you have identification?"
"Sonar to control. Soviet November class. It's Arkangel."
"Control to sonar, we have him on the repeater. Attention all hands. Attention all hands. General quarters. general quarters. Man battle stations, man battle stations. Control to radio, send up a buoy."
In ten seconds the mess was empty. Sorensen and Fogarty were in the sonar room.
Willie Joe stood up. "She's all yours, Ace."
"Who is it?" Sorensen asked, sitting down.
"Who else? Arkangel," said Willie Joe on his way out. "If she's after Vallejo, she's three days late."
As Sorensen sat down, a second streak appeared on the screen, diverging at a slight angle.
"Sonar to control, we have another contact. Same bearing, same course, same speed."
Then a third streak appeared. The sound of the three subs together was as loud as Niagara Falls.
Sorensen had never heard anything like it. "This is a wolfpack assault on the Strait," he said to Fogarty. "The Russians are storming into the Mediterranean like—"
"Like Cossacks?" Said with a straight face.
"Yeah. Sonar to control."
"Sonar, this is the captain, we see her. Thank you. We see all of them."
The Russians were following the eastbound NATO beacon through the Strait, the lead ship, Arkangel, directly astride it, the others following on either side.
Sorensen sat back in his chair, staring at the screen as the subs passed from right to left three miles south. The Russians blew through the Strait and into the Mediterranean in a remarkable display of arrogance and power.
Fogarty hunched over and watched his screen. "If this were chess," he said, "I'd say this looks like a sacrifice."
"Could be, Fogarty. Could be. But this ain't chess. It's boys playing with boats. I don't know what's worse, Davic or these maniacs."
They heard Valiant start her turbines and take off in pursuit.
Springfield sent up a radio buoy and made his report. Thirty seconds after it was received in Rota, the alarm sounded in the helicopter hangar on the Spanish carrier, Dédalo. An instant later the message was relayed to Gibraltar, and British ASW helicopters were in the air.
The helicopters quickly outdistanced the Russian subs. At one hundred fifty miles per hour, six British choppers raced over the sea and dropped a cordon of sonar buoys in their path. The hydrophones, dangling two hundred feet below the buoys, easily picked up the loud sound of the three subs. Arkangel plowed right through. The helicopters leapfrogged ahead, dropped a second cordon, located Odessa, and dropped two-dozen sonic depth charges. Within the hour the antisubmarine forces of the Sixth Fleet, still in Naples and still smarting from the humiliation by Barracuda, were brought to bear on the noisy Russian subs.
Barracuda remained on station west of the Strait.
"I'm no Davic," Fogarty said, "but I don't see why we don't track them instead of just sitting here and letting the blood pressure build."
"If this is a sacrifice, as you say," Sorensen said, "there's no reason to make it. These old Russian subs are so noisy they won't be able to hide. The Brits will take care of tracking them, seeing they behave. We don't give a shit about Arkangel or these other boats. We want the Alpha, and we're going to sit here until she comes through."
23
The interior of Potemkin smelled like Lubyanka prison. Running slow and quiet since the collision, the freshwater still had been shut down so no one could shave or bathe. Despite snorkeling twice and flushing out the carbon dioxide, the problem with the scrubbers had resulted in an epidemic of headaches.
Potemkin now had been at sea eighty-four days, the longest submerged cruise in Soviet naval history. The men looked like shaggy, grimy albinos. Twelve days of running slow and deep, breathing poisoned air, had rubbed them raw. In the engineering compartment the reactor operators were decimated by virulent colds. Federov knew that their resistance to infection was crumbling because they were suffering from the first symptoms of radiation sickness. Only Federov's outward calm kept them under control.
Weeks before, when Potemkin had passed eastbound through the Strait, Federov had taken advantage of tide and current conditions, plus the fortuitous passing of a huge tanker, and drifted in silence over the bottom-mounted sonars and past the British picket sub.
No such combination of circumstances would aid Potemkin's escape into the Atlantic. The predominant currents were against her, and she would have to use her engines in the Strait. Any bottom sonars were certain to pick up her passage. Operators on shore would alert the ASW forces, and picket subs at either end of the Strait would tail her into the Atlantic.
Before Potemkin sailed from Murmansk, Admiral Gorshkov had foreseen the difficulty of Potemkin's exit from the Mediterranean and had ordered the three subs, Murmansk, Odessa and Arkangel, to pass through the Strait at a prearranged time as a diversion to draw off the pickets. But who knew if it would work?
From time to time the ship's surgeon changed Kurnachov's bandage and emptied his chamber pot. Federov brought him meals, but no one spoke to him. Even in his own mind Kurnachov had become a nonperson. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a dead man.
The ship moved slowly, making wide turns and stopping frequently. Twice it seemed to rise almost to the surface, remain there for half an hour, then slide back down to a great depth. Each time the air improved, at least for a while. Noise was kept to a minimum. Kurnachov assumed that they were on course for Gibraltar and home.
After ten or eleven days — Kurnachov wasn't sure of the exact number — the ship halted and remained stationary for several hours.