"Control to sonar."
Fogarty answered, "Sonar, aye."
"You're going to have some visitors in there, boys."
One by one, the officers and chiefs found excuses to step inside the sonar room to listen. Chief Wong came up from engineering and sat for ten minutes with his chin in his hands, frowning. Finally he took off his earphones and said, "I don't hear reduction gears."
"That's right, Chief," Sorensen said, nodding. "I think she's got a direct electric drive. Very noisy turbogenerators and an unusual reactor. I don't hear ordinary high-pressure water pumps. I bet it's metal-cooled."
"That's a strange boat, Sorensen."
"She sure is. All power, no finesse but a bundle of acoustic tricks. I've got a question for you, Wong. How long can we run at flank speed before we shake something loose?"
"Forever."
"C'mon."
"Longer than any Russkie I ever heard of. 'Course, I never heard of these guys."
When Lopez sat down to take his turn at the console, he waved away the earphones and turned on the speakers.
"It sounds weird, like there's an echo," he said.
"That's because she's pulling away," Sorensen told him.
"She's going how fast?"
"Fifty point three knots."
"Holy Madonna, it'll outrun a Mark thirty-seven. You know what, Ace? I think this is a good time to retire. I've heard enough."
As Potemkin raced dead ahead, steadily increasing her lead, the solid blip on Barracuda's screens began to deteriorate. The thunder that came through the hydrophones started to fade.
After four hours, two hundred miles into the Atlantic, Potemkin began to descend. Without decreasing speed she went down to fifteen hundred feet, putting a thermal layer between herself and Barracuda.
"Sonar to control, contact is growing indistinct. He's going down, recommend descent to eight hundred feet."
"Very well, sonar, if you think it'll help. Stern planes down four degrees. Take us down to eight hundred feet."
Barracuda nosed over and descended another four hundred feet. Sorensen pursed his lips and watched his screen. When the ship leveled off, the resolution of the contact had not improved. "Damn," he swore. "We're going to lose her."
Fogarty asked, "How can we lose her if she's making this much noise?"
"She's twenty-one miles ahead of us now, and we're getting echoes, reverberations and a deteriorating signal. We may hear machinery noises, but we won't know exactly where the sounds are coming from. She can fire a decoy, go silent, go deep. If she continues at fifty knots she'll be completely out of range in four or five hours and we won't hear a damned thing except ourselves."
"But what about the bottom sonars?"
Sorensen nodded. "They'll track her all right, but they can only locate her within fifty miles. They can get an exact fix only when she passes over one of the cables."
"She has to stop and clear baffles, doesn't she?"
"Why?"
"For safety."
"Not a chance. She's hell-bent on running away from us. She isn't going to stop for anything, and I guess neither are we until we lose her. Sooner or later that Russian captain's going to learn that we are the boat he hit, and that, my friend, is going to put him right on the edge, if he isn't there already. Maybe we should let him take his Maserati submarine back to Murmansk. Where's Davic? He's supposed to be in here. I want to hit the beach."
"You're not giving up, are you. Ace?"
Sorensen snapped his sunglasses over his eyes. "What do you think we should do if we catch up with the son of a bitch? Make him say he's sorry?"
Potemkin continued west for another seven hours, during which time the distance between the two subs stretched to over forty miles. Davic stood his watch, eyes glued to the screen, then turned over the console to Willie Joe. During both watches enlisted men filed into the sonar room to listen to the Russian sub. The roar gradually deteriorated into a faint buzz, then an erratic hum. Finally, eleven hours and fifteen minutes after Potemkin broke into the Atlantic, she disappeared from the screens.
"Sonar to control," said Willie Joe. "She's gone."
"Control to sonar. Very well. Prepare for slow speed. Prepare to clear baffles. Prepare to send up a buoy."
"Aye aye."
Asleep in his bunk, Sorensen was having a nightmare. In a basin the size of a house, a pinhead of metal glowed blue in the dark. The basin was a giant aquarium. People stood outside, watching the bright blue speck as it shot off torpedoes and rockets. With a roar the water turned to fire, exploded the glass and showered the spectators with shards of uranium. In a thousand pieces the sub settled to the bottom and lobsters began to eat the debris. Just as one of the spindly monsters stepped on his face, he sensed the Barracuda's abrupt change of speed and woke up.
His sweat felt like burning seawater. He pushed open the curtain and leaned into the passageway. On the opposite tier Fogarty was reading The Art of War, by Sun Tzu.
"She's gone?" Sorensen said.
Fogarty looked up for a moment, nodded, then read aloud, "All warfare is based on deception. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Pretend inferiority and encourage your enemy's arrogance."
"Well, where'd you get that?"
"It was in the library. It's been around for a couple of thousand years."
"That's a lot of blood in the sea. Seems like we haven't learned too much. All you have to do is get mad, and be willing. Even you, Fogarty. The Russians got under your skin, didn't they?"
"It wasn't them, it was you."
"Me?"
"Yeah, you and your little tape machine."
Barracuda slowly circled, cleared baffles and sent up a radio buoy. Springfield transmitted a position report and the last known location of Potemkin. A moment later Norfolk flashed a reply that Springfield and Pisaro took into the captain's cabin to decode.
The bottom sonars had successfully tracked both subs into the Atlantic. The Alpha was still heading due west at great speed, generating enough noise to make her easy to track as she passed over the sonar-seeded cables that radiated out from the Azores?
Springfield spread out a chart of the North Atlantic. A chain of marine mountains, the mid-Atlantic ridge, ran north and south, splitting the ocean in half. A deep-running submarine could hide indefinitely among the mountain peaks, and travel north and south through the deep valleys.
"This Russian skipper is heading straight for the ridge," Pisaro said. "He'll go north, try to break through the Iceland gap and go under the ice."
"I'm not so sure, Leo. If he were heading for the ice pack he'd already be making a northerly course. There's no way he could have escaped the collision with no damage at all. He's got to be hurt. He can't go under the ice. Plus he's been at sea a long time. A normal cruise for them is twenty-one days tops. Their sailors get too much radiation if they stay out any longer. The Soviets have never built a boat that's properly shielded. My guess is that he has a radiation problem. Maybe he's got sailors with radiation sickness. They're probably tired, anemic, less than alert. He needs a new crew."
Springfield tapped, the chart in the region of the Caribbean. "He isn't going north, Leo. He's going south. He's trying to make it to Cuba."
Pisaro shook his head. "Into their FBM base? They think we don't know about that. They have no idea that Havana harbor, the Caribbean and half the Atlantic Ocean are seeded with bottom sonars. He wouldn't lead us into it."