Echo Class

by David E. Meadows

  “CONTACT status?” MacDonald asked from the bridge, his mouth about a foot from the 12MC speaker. The clock read zero three fifty-nine. A deep sigh escaped as he straightened.

  “No change, sir. Contact remains on course two-two-zero, estimated speed four knots.”

  Time for the second ping, he thought.

  “Lieutenant Burnham, it’s that time. Where is my pulse?” His finger rested on the toggle that switched the voice box from listen to speak. Looking out the port side of the bridge, he could detect the approaching dawn against the silhouette of the hills to the east.

  He turned to Goldstein. “Remind the topside watches to keep alert for signs of a periscope.” What would he do if they spotted it? Photograph it? Speed up and run over it?

  “Aye, sir,” the officer of the deck replied before relaying the order to the sound-powered phone talker positioned near the boatswain mate of the watch to the left of the helm.

  “Sir, Admiral Green said permission granted.”

  His finger pushed the toggle downward. “Very well, Lieutenant Burnham, tell Sonar they can transmit a single pulse at this time.”

  On the bulkhead behind the helmsman the black second hand touched the twelve on the clock.

  “Aye, sir.”

  BOCHARKOV looked at the clock. Anytime now.

  He still jumped when the second pulse hit the K-122, but he was ready. “Right full rudder! All ahead full!”

  The nuclear-powered engines kicked in almost immediately. The K-122 leaped, tilting left as the submarine surged forward like a wild stallion released from its stall. From barely making way, to foam roiling the water less than twenty meters above them. Everyone grabbed hold of something to steady themselves. Bocharkov grabbed a nearby railing that separated his periscope position from the main control room.

  “Passing two-three-zero!” Orlov announced, then continued to rattle off the turn degree by degree.

  Ignatova was on the intercom. He would be ordering the outer torpedo doors opened. Bocharkov neither felt the vibration of the doors opening nor heard the grind of the hydraulics that should have accompanied the act.

  “Passing two-five-two! Passing sixteen knots.”

  Bocharkov waited. The deck and bulkheads vibrated with the strain of the tight turn as K-122 continued to increase speed. The helmsman leaned into the helm, keeping the K-122 fighting the urge of the boat to steady up on a course—any course.

  “SHE’S coming around!” Oliver shouted. “The contact is increasing speed and bringing her bow around.”

  Green stuck his head into the sonar room. “What!”

  Chief Stalzer grabbed the extra headset and pressed them against his ears. “The contact is turning. It’s in a fast turn. Its bow is turning toward us!”

  Green’s head disappeared.

  “BRIDGE! This is Combat!”

  MacDonald pressed the toggle switch. “Captain here.”

  “Danny, this is the admiral. The submarine is moving into attack position; it’s in a right-hand turn at high speed, bringing its bow around!”

  MacDonald’s throat tightened. This is what he was trained to do. He shook his head slightly at the thought. He turned toward Goldstein. “All ahead flank! Steady as she goes!”

  This should offset the turn of the contact, causing Dale and the contact to be starboard to starboard as if passing each other. If the submarine did do something stupid and launch a torpedo, the wire guiding it would break before it could be guided to the Dale. Additionally, closing the contact meant getting the destroyer inside the range of the Soviet torpedoes, where they would be unable to lock on them. He thought of the “ring around the rosy” song girls in grammar school sang.

  He pushed the toggle switch. “Combat, prepare to fire torpedoes at my command; starboard-side over-the-sides.”

  “Roger!” came Burnham’s reply.

  For a moment he wondered if Green would step in. He hoped not. This was his ship and his battle, but Green was the admiral in charge and as the commander Task Force Seventy, he could do anything he fucking well pleased. “Just not now,” MacDonald mumbled to himself.

  “RELEASE decoy!” Bocharkov shouted. “Left full rudder, maintain speed.”

  It took several seconds for the submarine to respond to the new orders.

  “I have lost the contacts,” the sonar operator reported.

  Orlov did not bother repeating the announcement. Bocharkov had heard it and ignored it. They were passing eighteen knots in shallow water. All his passive detection capability was gone.

  He thought he felt the slight vibration of the decoy as it was launched, but the K-122 was shaking so bad he wondered for a moment if it was just his imagination.

  STALZER lifted his headset. “That son of a bitch has his torpedo tube doors opened.”

  “You hear them?” Green asked.

  Stalzer bit his lip and nodded. “I heard something. It was definitely a torpedo tube door opening or closing.”

  Green pulled his head back from the doorway to Sonar, looked around, and grabbed a nearby sound-powered phone talker. “You got comms with the bridge?”

  “Yes, sir,” the young sailor stuttered, his eyes glancing down at the admiral’s hand holding his arm.

  “Good. You stand here at Sonar and start passing everything they say up to the bridge.” Then Green released him and hurried forward toward Burnham.

  “It’s turning! The submarine is in a hard left turn . . .” Both Stalzer and Oliver pressed their headsets against their ears. “It’s gone! I got noise in the water, but it’s gone.”

  Green turned. “What do you mean it’s gone?”

  Stalzer and Oliver relaxed the pressure.

  “It’s back. We got it.” Oliver reached up and moved the pointer on the display slightly. “Wow! It’s bearing dead ahead again; no bearing drift.”

  Stalzer’s eyes squinted for a moment and then opened wide. “We have a decoy in the water! That’s no submarine; that noise I heard was it launching a decoy.”

  “STEADY on course two-four-zero, reduce speed to eight knots.” Bocharkov then turned to Tverdokhleb. “Time to deep water?”

  Tverdokhleb flipped his ruler along the chart, running a pencil line down it. His tongue protruded slightly from between clinched lips.

  “I said, how long until deep water?” Bocharkov repeated.

  The vibration of the earlier maneuver and speed was slacking off as the K-122 slowed and steadied up on a new course.

  The navigator looked up. “Maybe seven minutes on this course at speed eight knots.”

  “REDUCE speed to six knots!” MacDonald shouted.

  The Dale vibrated as the speed rapidly decreased. It would take a minute or so for the destroyer to come down to six knots.

  Motion to his right caught MacDonald’s attention. It was the running lights on the Coghlan and they were on a constant bearing. He pressed the toggle. “Combat, Skipper. What is the Coghlan doing?”

  A second passed before Burnham’s voice came back. “Last report showed two-seven-zero at ten knots, sir. That was ten minutes ago.”

  “I hold him constant bearing.”

  More valuable time passed before Burnham replied. “Sir, we are calling him. The radar repeater shows he has changed course and is closing us.”

  MacDonald grabbed the bridge-to-bridge radio handset. The bridge-to-bridge was the opened radio that every ship in the world carried that allowed them to communicate not only with one another when their paths crossed, but with Harbor Control when they approached a port, and the tugs that many times helped guide them into and out of ports.

  “Coghlan, this is Dale. I hold you on constant bearing. Request you change course-speed.”

  “Dale, this is Coghlan. We have had to change to course two-zero-zero to maneuver through a mess of fishing boats. Will be maneuvering back to base course two-seven-zero in a few minutes.”

  “Coghlan, we are engaged in serious maneuvering and you are constricting my—”


  “Sir,” the quartermaster called from the navigator’s table. Lieutenant Goldstein was walking toward the table. The quartermaster of the watch bent over the chart, dragging a pencil down the line of a ruler. “Coghlan is less than three miles and is CBDR. Unless she changes course in the next fifty seconds, we are going to be in extremis.”

  FOURTEEN

  Monday, June 5, 19 67

  “STEADY on course two-two-zero! Speed eight knots,” Orlov announced.

  The aft hatch opened. The zampolit Lieutenant Golovastov and the GRU Spetsnaz Dolinski entered together. Bocharkov saw the neatly folded message in Golovastov’s hand. Now was not the time for this.

  “Depth?” Bocharkov asked.

  “Sixteen meters.”

  That was good. They had just done some high-speed turns and the planesman expertise—under the chief of the boat’s close supervision—had kept the K-122 at the same depth. He was happy they had not breached the boat or hit the bottom.

  Ignatova motioned to Golovastov, who glared back, but continued toward Bocharkov. Dolinski ambled quietly behind the zampolit, ignoring the XO’s motions. The time for politics was before the battle, not in the middle of it.

  The two men marched right up to where Bocharkov stood.

  “Lieutenant Tverdokhleb! What is my depth? Where am I?” Bocharkov shouted, his eyes burning into Golovastov, who now stood in front of him, Dolinski slightly behind the zampolit.

  “Sir, we are two kilometers off Cubi Point. Charts show fifty meters of water beneath the keel.”

  Bocharkov nodded, his eyes never leaving the zampolit. Fifty meters was twenty more than he’d had minutes ago. “Time to deep water?” he asked aloud.

  “Five minutes,” Tverdokhleb answered.

  “Five minutes,” Orlov repeated.

  “Is it light above me yet?”

  “Fourteen minutes until dawn,” Tverdokhleb said.

  Bocharkov glanced at the clock.

  Ignatova put the weapons console handset in its cradle and started toward Bocharkov. He saw the movement. “XO, tell Engineering my intentions are to stay on course and speed for the time being. Once the Americans have regained contact, we will conduct a similar maneuver again along with decoys. We’ll need power to do it.”

  It was a meaningless order. Ignatova stopped and glanced for a second at the two junior officers standing in front of Bocharkov, before returning to his position.

  Bocharkov was surprised to see Orlov move closer to his position, away from the center of the control room where the office of the deck normally stood when the boat was at general quarters.

  Finally, Golovastov cleared his throat.

  Bocharkov ignored it. “Raise periscope,” he said. He’d take a quick look around and then lower it before some alert topside watch on the destroyers saw the wake that eight knots would create around the tube.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Golovastov said.

  The noise of the hydraulics raising the periscope masked Golovastov, so Bocharkov ignored him as he bent to unfold the handles on the scope. He pressed his eyes against the eyepiece and rode the scope up. Let the two junior officers stand there. Let them wait on display for everyone to see. He was trying to save the ship, not read some Party-political message from Moscow. If it were important, it would be from the commander Pacific Fleet.

  “Sir, Contact Two has changed course,” Lieutenant Yakovitch, the assistant weapons officer, said, sticking his head inside the control room from the sonar space. “It is CBDR—constant bearing, decreasing range.”

  “Bearing?” Bocharkov asked as he spun the periscope toward his starboard side.

  “Bearing three-zero-zero true, sir.”

  “Speed?” Bocharkov asked as he aligned the scope with the compass bearing.

  A slight pause occurred before Yakovitch replied, “Contact is at twelve knots.”

  “Twelve knots?”

  Yakovitch acknowledged the speed of the contact.

  Bocharkov grunted, but his eyes never left the periscope as he focused on the running lights. Twelve knots was too fast for most destroyers to have passive contact. The American sonar pulses were coming from Contact One, the combatant behind them. The lights blurred into focus. It took him only a couple of seconds to tell he was looking at the port bow of the destroyer. Bocharkov glanced at the compass. Same bearing.

  “Our contact behind us?”

  “On course two-zero-zero, sir, slight left-bearing drift.”

  If the two destroyers continued on their courses, he would have a narrow window in which to escape. He grunted again. How could he—

  “Captain, I must insist you acknowledge Moscow’s message.”

  Bocharkov stepped back quickly. “Lower periscope.”

  As the hydraulics kicked in, he jerked the message from Golovastov and quickly scanned it. Then he handed it back. “Are you satisfied?”

  “Sir, Moscow is ordering you to abandon this mission.”

  “What the hell do you think I am doing, Lieutenant? And you,” he said, pointing at Dolinski. “Didn’t I tell you to get the hell out of my control room?”

  Dolinski’s head jumped slightly as Bocharkov caught the Spetsnaz lieutenant off guard. Bocharkov knew what Dolinski wanted to see. He wanted to witness the zampolit taking him down a notch so he could go back and make his own report through his channels.

  Dolinski snapped to attention. “Comrade Captain, I need to fully test the installation. To see if it works.”

  “And you want me to run up the periscope? Stick an antenna in the air?”

  “It would not take many minutes, sir.”

  Bocharkov grunted. “It either works or it doesn’t. It is too late to be concerned about it, don’t you think?”

  “But, it is part—”

  “Look, we will test it later.”

  “I need to test it now, sir.”

  Bocharkov held up his hand. He looked at the two men. “Now, listen to me, you two. I am trying to save the boat. That message is useless to me right now. Your intelligence apparatus—whatever it was—is something we have no control over now. It is too late. And you are endangering our lives. Now, both of you get the hell out of my control room, and I don’t want to see you again until I call for you!” Bocharkov punctuated his words with his index finger jabbing at the men. He was unaware he was also stepping toward them.

  Golovastov bumped into Dolinski as he stumbled backward, catching the Spetsnaz off balance. Dolinski pushed the zampolit forward, causing Golovastov to nearly bump into Bocharkov.

  Without warning, Golovastov dashed toward the forward hatch. Dolinski nodded at Bocharkov with no expression across his face. Then the Spetsnaz lieutenant turned and casually followed the fleeing zampolit out the forward hatch.

  Chief Ship Starshina Kostas Uvarova stepped over to the hatch and checked the watertight seal before nodding at Bocharkov. “It is sealed,” he said.

  Bocharkov took a deep breath. This wasn’t over. The two zampolits would make trouble for him through their separate pipelines. But he had to survive this before he could worry about his future.

  “Give me status on the contacts,” he ordered. While he listened to the same status from a minute earlier, he envisioned how events might unfold with the two American destroyers. What could he do and when could he do it to give the K-122 more breathing room toward the deep water?

  “Four minutes to one hundred meters,” Tverdokhleb announced.

  One hundred meters was better than fifty, but it still wasn’t enough to lose the Americans. He needed three hundred, then a thousand, then unlimited depth to escape and evade the clumsy destroyers. What would he do if he were the captain of one of the destroyers? Helicopters? The Americans had been experimenting with these unmanned DASH helicopters that seemed to take off and disappear over the horizon to never be seen again.

  No, if he were the Americans, he would keep his forces in position for an attack and, once ready, sprint forward to try to drive the K-122 to
the surface. He needed time, and he needed a sound layer of water between him and the surface to mask the noises being generated by the K-122. Two sound layers would be manna from heaven.

  The isothermal layers of water would bounce his passive noise downward and send the American sonar pulses upward. Give him those conditions and he would lose the Americans in minutes.

  “Water beneath my keel?”

  Tverdokhleb shrugged. It was never good when a navigator shrugged.

  “Do you know?”

  “Sir, these charts are old. They indicate less than seventy-five meters. If we could do a depth—”

  “It would tell the Americans where we are,” Bocharkov snapped. He should have thought of that while the Americans were pinging, when he might have been able to mask a single ping downward to find the bottom.

  DOLINSKI grabbed Golovastov outside the control room. “We have a problem, comrade.”

  Sweat poured from the brow of the K-122’s zampolit. The man nodded, taking in a deep breath, his chest shaking with the effort.

  Dolinski pulled his handkerchief from his pocket. “Here, wipe the sweat from your face.”

  “I think the captain is dangerous,” Golovastov muttered.

  Dolinski gave a slow nod in agreement. “We need to tell Moscow.”

  “We can’t,” Golovastov objected.

  Dolinski smiled. “We are the representatives of the Party. We can do anything we want when we feel our nation is endangered.”

  “What can we do?”

  Dolinski quickly explained his plan. A minute later the two men were walking toward Communications. Golovastov had a worried look on his face. He also knew the incident in the control room had injured his prestige in front of the crew. By the time the two of them reached the communications compartment, he had regained some of composure. Here the communicators would not know of the confrontation in the control room.