by Mark Joseph
AMERICAN SUBMARINE: YOU ARE IN FRENCH
WATERS. IDENTIFY YOURSELF. SIRENE S 647,
DELONGUE COMMANDING.
Captain Springfield composed his reply as a plea from one submariner to another.
BARRACUDA SSN 593: SIRENE S 647: WARGAME TARGET
KITTYHAWK PLEASE ESCORT THROUGH STRAIT
ON PARALLEL COURSE SPRINGFIELD
COMMANDING.
While the French captain decoded Springfield's message, Sirène did not communicate with the surface. Her captain alone was deciding what to do.
SIRENE S 647: BARRACUDA SSN 593: FOLLOW SUB
BEACON 18 MINUTES N LONG 9 DEGREES 30 MINUTES
W AT 8 KNOTS DEPTH 35 M RUN PARALLEL AT l00
M TO STARBOARD. DITES BON CHANCE A L'AMIRAL
NETTS GOOD HUNTING. DELONGUE.
"Well I'll be goddamned," said Pisaro. "Looks like Netts had it rigged all the time."
Springfield said nothing, studied a chart. Two nerve-racking hours were required to align both subs astride the beacon. Barracuda, on the right, was longer and broader of beam than Sirène, and the Italian operators of the fixed arrays would surely notice something peculiar about the passage. In order to resolve the anomaly they would go through channels, would inform their superiors, who would then query the French commander on Corsica. The French also would have both subs on their screens and yet be unsure of what was happening. By the time it was sorted out. Barracuda should be clear of the Strait, Captain Delongue would have explained the situation to his superiors and would receive either a pat on the back or a court-martial. The latter was a real possibility, and Springfield felt a certain distaste about requesting Delongue, a man he did not know, to take that risk.
Slowly the two subs moved into the Strait. The course marked by the beacons included three turns, the last of which curved around dangerous shoals off the Iles Lavezzi, a cluster of islets a mile off the tip of Corsica. Sorensen locked his side-to-side sweeping array to the left in order to report instantly any maneuvering by Sirène, and fed the data to the navigator in the control room. Fogarty monitored the bottom scanner to make sure the depth under the keel corresponded with the chart. The captain stood at the sonar repeater in the control room and kept his eyes on both screens while giving orders to the helm.
The first turn headed the ship on a southwesterly course that paralleled the Italian passage through the Strait. In the belly of the ship the inertial navigation gyros spun on their axes, sending the digital readouts of longitude and latitude on the navigator's console spinning dizzily until the turn ended.
They were at periscope depth, but no periscope from Barracuda broke the surface. Springfield navigated on gyros and sonar alone.
Sirène also ran without benefit of periscope, radar or communication gear. In his log Delongue cited sea conditions and the presence of merchant ships in the Strait. No submarine captain would ever risk damage to his precious surface gear, but Delongue's real reason was that he didn't want to answer any questions until he cleared the Strait.
The second turn, to the right, brought them within half a mile of the main Italian fixed-arrays. Pings echoed back and forth between the two subs, and off the bottom and the surface, sending a weird and confusing signal back to the Italian operators on Sardinia. Sorensen imagined them listening to this strange mix, scratching themselves and trying to puzzle it out. He was sure they could hear coolant pumps and they probably were asking themselves if the French had secretly developed a nuclear attack submarine.
As the ships eased into the final turn, the depth gauge on Fogarty's bottom scanner suddenly began to rise.
"Sorensen, look at this...?"
Sorensen twisted around to look at Fogarty's screen and recognized the rising pattern of bottom sand. He immediately unlocked the side-to-side sweepers from the French sub and started looking for obstructions. If there was anything big resting on the bottom, they were going to hit it, but the screen showed nothing but the rising shoal a half mile away.
Sorensen spoke into the intercom. "Sonar to control. Shoals bearing two nine seven, depth one two zero feet and rising. One one five feet."
"Control to sonar," said the captain, "we have it on the screen. Mr. Pisaro, take her up to sixty-five feet."
"Depth sixty-five feet, aye. Rig for steep angles."
The command rippled throughout the ship. Sailors in every compartment grabbed whatever was close and held on.
"Stern planes up twenty degrees."
"Up twenty degrees, aye."
"Pump forward trim tank number one to aft trim tank number two."
The bow rose sharply and the prop drove the sleek hydrodynamic hull toward the surface. Sirène began to rise alongside, but not nearly so quickly. The diesel-electric sub did not have the power to drive herself rapidly up or down in a state of neutral buoyancy.
The shoals continued to rise. Springfield realized he would have to surface or reduce speed, steer to the left and fall in behind the French sub in order to avoid grounding on the shoals.
"All stop," he said. "I'll be damned if I'm going to surface in the Strait."
From his diving console Pisaro said, "That French captain is covering his ass, protecting himself from a court-martial sure as hell."
"Sonar to control. Sirène is moving deeper into the channel. Range one one zero yards, one two zero yards, one three zero yards."
"He's giving us room to maneuver," said the XO. "He can tell them he tried to make us surface and then that he had to move to avoid a collision."
"All right," said the captain. "By now, the Italians know something funny is going on, but they'll want to talk to the French before they do anything else. Let's just get the hell out of here. All ahead slow. Left full rudder."
"All ahead slow, aye."
"Left full rudder, aye."
The ship banked left and quickly corrected her trim. Fogarty watched the fathometer as the shoals fell behind. Barracuda moved out of the Strait and into the open sea.
Sorensen spoke into his intercom. "Sonar to control. Receiving message from Sirène." He scribbled on his notepad and handed the message to the captain as he came through the door.
Five minutes later Springfield had the position and order of battle for the fleet.
9
Kitty Hawk
For three days and nights Admiral Horning, commodore of the carrier group, had directed the search for the elusive Barracuda. Mako had vanished, obviously "sunk." From the operations center on Kitty Hawk Horning had plumbed the depths with sonars and magnometers, crossed and crisscrossed the surface with frigates and destroyers, and sortied into the air hundreds of times with helicopters and antisubmarine airplanes. Five of his own submarines prowled under and around his armada, hydrophones open to every gurgle, yet Barracuda remained underwater and undetected.
Springfield had eluded the trap set by Mako and had disappeared. Admiral Horning's remaining submarines were having trouble operating in close proximity to one another, and his aircraft kept finding them instead of Barracuda. Alarms would scream, sonar officers would shout, "Contact! Contact!" All for nothing.
And if that weren't enough. Horning had Netts gloating in the wardroom.
* * *
On the morning of the fourth day, after a sleepless night during which he had demanded a report every fifteen minutes from the operations center, Horning shaved, showered and dressed in fresh tans.
It had been twenty-five years since he had felt so rotten. During World War Two, as commander of a destroyer, he had escorted convoys of merchant ships across the North Atlantic through deadly wolfpacks of German U-boats. In that war an enemy submarine presented a terrible menace, but one he could deal with. Diesel-electric subs spent most of their time on the surface, wallowing in heavy seas, full of seasick sailors, submerging only to hide, attack or escape intolerable weather. Underwater, they were slow and at the mercy of short supplies of air, water and battery power.
A nuclear-propelled attack su
bmarine was another matter entirely. A true submarine ship, rather than a submersible boat, a nuke remained underwater virtually all the time, sending a periscope above the surface only to communicate or to take a satellite fix for navigation. It made fresh water by desalinating seawater, and oxygen by electrolysis of the fresh water. As for power, sheer power, it was incomparable. The reactor core in Barracuda was good for one hundred thousand miles, and she could outrun any ship in the fleet.
Staring in the mirror at his fifty-six-year-old face, with its deep creases and silver brush. Admiral Horning accepted the simple, humbling truth: if this were a shooting war, Kitty Hawk, and probably the entire fleet, would already have been vaporized in a nuclear blast.
On entering the operations center he stood quietly to one side, observing the anxious, strained faces of his officers. In the eerie glow of electronic instruments they looked haunted. For an instant he looked directly at Captain Lewis, commander of the carrier. The haggard, unshaven man shook his head. No luck, no change, no Barracuda.
Netts was there, out of uniform, a bug on the wall, silently watching.
"Good morning," Horning said to him.
"Good morning, Admiral. Sleep well?" Netts made no effort to keep sarcasm out of his voice.
"Well, where's your pet submarine, Mr. Netts? I haven't seen any torpedo wakes streaking through these waters."
"Perhaps we should contact the manufacturer. Faulty torpedoes are a terrible thing."
Horning bit his lip. "Perhaps we should wait until we see Commander Billings's report."
"Fine," said Netts, who turned his attention to the dawn breaking in pink streaks off the flight deck.
In rapid succession four antisubmarine airplanes were catapulted off the flight deck. They would drop sonar buoys into the water and listen to them via radio as they circled overhead. Only half the buoys would work. Some would sink. In others the transducers would fail and in many the radio gear would not transmit.
From another part of the flight deck a trio of ASW helicopters took off, dangling sonar arrays beneath them like weird parasites. More reliable than radio buoys, the helicopter-borne sonars could detect a local contact, but the operators could barely hear over the clamor of the rotors. If a sub were lying quietly, they would never hear it. Should it be moving rapidly and making enough noise for them to hear, they could not get an accurate fix without a second chopper. Even then it was dicey.
No other ship was visible. Barracuda's mission was to simulate a nuclear attack. To avoid having a ship damaged or sunk by a blast that destroyed another, Horning had spread his perimeters to the maximum, with no ship within five miles of another. This dispersal also allowed him to search the widest possible area.
A communications officer handed Captain Lewis a message. "It's from Badger," Lewis said to Admiral Horning. "She's tracking Swordfish, which is entering the perimeter between Badger and Bainesworth."
"All right, if they can hear Swordfish, so can Barracuda. Concentrate the search in the other three quadrants. When are we scheduled to signal Swordfish?"
"Not for another two hours," said the communications officer.
"Damn." Horning looked at Netts, who shrugged and looked back.
On the bulkhead a large screen displayed the order of battle for the fleet. Each ship was an electronic silhouette. The screen was kept up-to-date by a constant flow of data from radar, sonar, satellite sensors, aircraft and even, occasionally, the word of a sailor on deck with a pair of binoculars. Netts thought it was a pretty picture and imagined that the picture on Barracuda's sonar screen was much the same.
While the location of each surface ship was shown with precision, the whereabouts of each submarine could only be estimated. A technician punched buttons on a control panel, and Swordfish appeared on the screen between the destroyers Badger and Bainesworth.
The fleet had received messages from neither the French nor the Italians, and Horning had not guessed that Barracuda had run the Strait of Bonifacio and was preparing an attack from the north. Two of the fleet's subs were on station fifty miles south, hoping to intercept Barracuda's approach from that direction. Swordfish, Stingray and Dragonfish were roving under and around the armada.
Netts knew that Springfield's plan was to position Barracuda in front of the fleet, lie quietly at depth and wait for the advance ships to pass directly over her. If the advance ships made contact, she would try to outrun them and attack the carrier before they got a fix.
Netts stared impatiently out to sea hoping that at any minute now a pair of torpedoes would streak out of the north, slam into the hulking Kitty Hawk, and Netts's Folly would be history.
10
Battle Stations, Nuclear
There was a stillness in the ship.
The captain had slipped under a thermal layer of warm water that deflected sonar pulses searching from above, and for twelve hours Barracuda had hovered a thousand feet down.
She was rigged for quiet. The noisy air-conditioning system was reduced to the minimum and the temperature had risen to eighty-three degrees. The fresh water still, which made a terrible racket, was shut down, so no one could shower. The ship was rank.
* * *
In the sonar room Willie Joe was on watch. Every few minutes he heard propellers and engine noises as one of the ships of the fleet passed over a convergence zone. Fifteen miles away Kitty Hawk was steaming north, directly toward Barracuda.
In the forward crew quarters Fogarty was reading a battered copy of Catch-22. In the bunks beneath him two sailors played a silent game of chess.
In the tier opposite, Sorensen cradled his tape recorder on his chest, listening to whale talk. Through the haze of cetacean whistles he heard someone softly call his name. He opened his curtain and saw Davic standing in the passageway.
"Sorensen—"
"Be quiet."
"I want to apologize to you, please."
"What are you talking about? Apologize for what?"
"For demanding that the Russian submarine be credited to me. I am ashamed."
"That's all right, Davic. I don't keep score."
Looking remorseful, Davic paced and muttered to himself in the small confined space. From somewhere in the darkness a rubber shoe flew out of a bunk and struck him in the back. A voice grumbled, "Shut up, Davic. Let a man beat off in peace."
Davic stopped pacing and whispered, "Sorensen, I want to be on the first watch."
"I have to qualify Fogarty. You know that."
"Well, when is he going to qualify?"
Across the passageway Fogarty drew open his curtain and stared in the dim light at the back of Davic's head.
"It took you three months to qualify, Davic," Sorensen said evenly. "Fogarty hasn't been on the ship three weeks."
"Hey," a voice pleaded in the darkness, "let us get some sleep." Angry faces appeared up and down the tiers of bunks. Davic opened his mouth to speak again, but thinking better of it, padded off in the direction of the mess.
"What's the trouble with him?" Fogarty whispered to Sorensen.
"He wants your job."
"He's a strange bird."
"Fogarty, after you've been down here a while you'll find that everybody is strange. You never know the real reason a guy wants to live cooped up in a steel tube with a hundred other guys. Like you. I can't really figure out what you're doing here, no matter what you say." Without waiting for a reply. Sorensen replaced his headphones and returned to the whales.
In the sonar room Willie Joe watched two ragged blips move slowly onto his screen, a pair of destroyers on the outer perimeter of the fleet. Five miles apart, the closest a mile from Barracuda, they were steaming at an oblique angle across the bow.
In the control room Captain Springfield, Pisaro, Billings, and Hoek watched the repeater and listened through headphones to the muffled sound of the nearest destroyer, distorted by the thermal.
Then there was another, more ominous sound, much closer.
"Sorensen!"
The high, brittle voice belonged to Lt. Hoek, who was standing in the hatch.
"Yes, sir."
"You and Fogarty in the sonar room, on the double."
"Aye aye, sir."
Hoek lowered his voice to conspiratorial. "We have a sub," he said, eyes gleaming. Hoek was hot to win the war game and earn a unit citation.
"No kidding," said Sorensen, deadpan.
"It's Swordfish. We're going to get right on her tail and follow her in."
"Well, what do you know. Lieutenant. Sounds like fun." He winked at Fogarty as they followed Hoek through the hatch and up a ladder.
Throughout the ship loudspeakers whispered, "General Quarters. General Quarters. All hands man battle stations, nuclear."
11
Potemkin
In the control room of Potemkin nine men were crowded into a space designed for six. After seventy-three days at sea, every minute of which had been spent submerged, Potemkin's moment of truth was at hand.
Standing behind the sonar operator, his arm draped over the young officer's shoulders. Captain Nikolai Federov calmly gave the orders to maneuver Potemkin under the perimeter of ships that surrounded Kitty Hawk.
All eyes were on the sonar screen, where a splendid array of blips represented the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
"Quite a sight, eh, Popov?"
"Yes, sir," Popov whispered, his face gone white.
"Steady as he goes," said the captain quietly.
"Steady as he goes," repeated the helmsman.
Potemkin was an Alpha-class experimental submarine. Her sleek, orca-shaped hull was constructed of an alloy of titanium, a rare, strong, lightweight metal. The use of titanium in place of steel enabled Potemkin to cruise at fifty knots, a speed that had been thought impossible, and at a depth below four thousand feet. No other sub in the world could go that deep.