by Ian Slater
“Then we can’t wait thirty hours?”
Chernko knew bureaucratic immovability when he saw it. And Suzlov wouldn’t move until he got unanimous support. “Yes, Mr. President. We can wait thirty hours.”
“Good. Then notify all members we’ll meet here tomorrow. Twenty-four hundred hours.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Suzlov nodded and walked back to his desk.
“Do you think we’ll get unanimous support tomorrow night?” asked Marchenko. “That’s if we can get a forum.”
Chernko’s smile was like that of an alcoholic asked if he could manage another drink. It was a smile that told Marchenko all the KGB’s IOUs and power would be used to make sure that everyone who should vote, would. He wondered how much pressure the KGB chief at Khabarovsk, Colonel Nefski, was applying to his son, who apparently was persisting in his liaison with the Jewish woman.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Sonar man Emerson wasn’t sure he liked the blue glow of the sonar room forward of Roosevelt’s control. He was used to working in the redded-out subs, and in his view, the argument that blue light around the sonar consoles made it easier for the operators to see the blips on the digitized display screen was debatable. “Different strokes for different folks,” as he had told the chief of the boat. The chief suspected, however, that Emerson’s quandary over the light was really a cover for a much larger concern — namely that this was Emerson’s first trip under the ice.
It was, for operators, like moving to a different neighborhood. Lying in bed at night, you knew it was traffic outside, but familiarity with the different sounds took time to get used to. Unfortunately, the war didn’t allow you much time to learn — especially given the rate of sub sinkings and “sonar operator stress syndrome,” or “SOS,” as it was known among the operators. Many had spent up to sixteen hours at a stretch on seventy-five-day war patrols as the Soviet subs lay in wait in the deep ocean ravines of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was these ravines, sounded and plotted by prewar Soviet oceanographic “research” ships, that had proved such a boon to the new Soviet sub offensive. No matter how good the NATO warships’ depth and profile sounders were, many of the ravines’ profiles were so jagged, often near upwellings and other thermoclines, that probing sonar signals were merely scrambled. Such sonar profiles revealed nothing more than the tops of the mountain ranges that formed the Atlantic range.
Despite the hours off watch that he had devoted sitting listening to the Roosevelt’s “library”—tapes of enemy noise signatures and the types of sea noise — to fine-tune his ability to distinguish between background sea clutter and heavy concentrations of Arctic phytoplankton, Emerson still felt uneasy about this, his first long war patrol in the high Arctic.
While the rest of the crew actually felt safer below the roof of frozen sea, the constant grinding of the pack ice was particularly disconcerting for a sonar operator, the noise having a tendency to “bully” out all other sounds — a fact that Soviet subs had taken advantage of, using their big cargo ships’ prop noise to drown out that of their subs as they broke out of their home ports just before war had officially broken out.
Adding to Emerson’s apprehension was Roosevelt’s mission to remain as an undetected submarine launch platform for the forty-two warheads atop the six Trident missiles—”the weapons of last resort.” Roosevelt’s greatest defense, its silence, meant eschewing its active sonar, whose outgoing noise pulses would give its position away as well as pinpointing the enemy’s.
This meant that unless Emerson received a specific release order from either Captain Brentwood or the officer of the deck to go “active,” all he could do was to stay in the passive mode. However, in passive there was no time/space ratio during the duration between an active sonar’s pulse and the return of its echo.
In short, it would be impossible for him to tell accurately how far away a noise source was, or in any ice-free zone, whether it was on the surface or submerged.
Experienced sub hands often made fairly accurate guesstimates of the distance, but this was based purely on experience, not formula. The fact that survival at sea was as much art as science had been brought home to Emerson during the Russian cruiser attacks against the American subs early in the war. Captain Brentwood’s advice to a colleague had once saved that man’s sub and his crew when, acting quickly in an evasive maneuver, he had simultaneously ordered that the bodies of two men who had died due to flooding caused by a previous depth charge attack be cut up and blown to the surface in several of the torpedo tubes along with diesel oil and assorted garbage, convincing the Russian sub chaser that they’d done their job.
Emerson’s sense of responsibility, the knowledge that he could mistake a “biological” noise, such as the sudden turn of a tightly bunched school of fish, for an attacking sub, weighed heavily on him. It would mean life or death for the entire crew, for if he didn’t identify an enemy sub quickly enough, there’d be no time for Brentwood to get a fish off. And yet if he mistakenly identified a noise as a sub when it wasn’t and Brentwood fired, then at that very moment of the torpedo’s release, any enemy sub listening would hear the high-pressure ejection and the cavitation of the torpedo’s propeller and would know exactly where the Roosevelt was.
The responsibility on Emerson was made worse by the crew’s well-intentioned assurances to him that now they were under the ice, he wouldn’t have to worry about CVs — surface vessels. Oh no? Emerson thought — what if he heard a sudden crackling noise? Would it be the sound of a Soviet sub “ice-picking” through the twelve-foot-thick ice cap to fire a cruise missile? Or would it be simply the ice pressure sounding off as great bergs, calved off one section of the ice pack, came up against another ice sheet? If you got too close to the sound layer, next thing you might hear could be a “triple”: three enemy torpedoes vectoring you even as you dived.
Emerson devoutly wished they were back in the good old plain dangerous North Atlantic and not up here in the depths of the Greenland Sea.
To make matters worse, Emerson could hear a crew member, a new planesman, being reminded by one of the chiefs that beneath the sea, sound traveled in excess of 3,000 miles per hour, compared to the mere 760 miles per hour in air, the sound in the seas racing through the more tightly bunched molecules of water.
But now at least the Roosevelt was traveling at ten miles per hour, and quietly — courtesy of her anechoic sound-absorbing paint and her antivibration quotient engines. Furthermore, Emerson took some comfort in knowing that because of the slow speed, it would be more difficult for the enemy to pick up even the noise of her pumps, which had to be kept on constantly in order to cool the sub’s nuclear reactor, which provided not only the superheated steam for generators to drive the prop, but power for everything else aboard the sub.
It was at that moment, two hours into the dogwatch, that Emerson, while watching normal “pop bottle fizz,” electronic panicles jumping in uniform sine waves on his sonar computer, heard the sound of what he thought must be massive schools of shrimp “clacking,” bearing one six three degrees.
From the size of the blip and the direction, he guessed it was about ten miles from Molloy Deep, and worked back the vectors. It was also at this moment that Able Seaman Arthur G. Leach, a steward, was changing the bed linen on the executive officer’s bunk in the relatively tiny stateroom. Seeing a Walkman on the bed, he bent over, picked it up, and for a moment, seeing no one was around, slipped on the earphones and pressed the button — some old pop singer called Buddy Holly was singing a peppy song called “Peggy Sue.” Leach hadn’t heard the song before, but it had a nice, peppy beat to it, ‘bout some guy head over heels in love. Kinda mushy but catchy, reminding him of his high school dates.
After finishing the linen change, emptying the wastepaper basket, and putting the Walkman back on the captain’s bed, Leach headed down toward the galley for a coffee break. He walked behind the serving counter, took a mug out of its anti-roll hole, and lifted the three-quarter-full Silex po
t of coffee out of its antiroll cradle.
Then it happened.
Whether the thing that started it was Leach still moving to the beat of the song he’d just heard, or, as he was to claim later, there’d been an alteration made in the trim of the ship which had caused the ship to yaw slightly, the fact was it happened. Some said it was a spot of butter on the galley’s decking that had probably caused him to lose his footing.
Other than Leach, the first to hear, or rather to “see,” it was Emerson in the blue glow of the sonar room one deck above. Suddenly he saw the steady hiccuping of “ice grind” and shrimp clacking interrupted by a burp: a rounded sine wave on the trace at zero seconds — which told him immediately that it had come from within the sub. He pressed the button for officer of the deck in Control.
“Zeldman, OOD.” Emerson could tell from Zeldman’s relaxed tone that they hadn’t heard it in Control, but even now he knew that the low-frequency thud in the one-hundred- to six-hundred-hertz range was radiating out from the hull at over three thousand miles per hour.
“What have you got?” asked Zeldman easily.
“Noise short, sir. From the sub.”
“Christ! How long?”
Emerson had already run back the tape. “It was one point two two seven seconds duration, sir.”
“Where in the sub — any ideas?”
“Galley maybe — short in one of the pumps. Insulation shot — I dunno for sure.”
“Hold on!” Zeldman said, pressing the intercom for the chief of the boat. “Chief — we’ve got a noise short. Take a party of six quickly — quietly — for a visual check. I’m calling all compartments now.”
“We’re on our way, sir,” said the chief. Next Zeldman pressed the engine room intercom. They reported nothing wrong. He went to the next most likely possibility, the galley, a bread mixer or some other piece of equipment that may have shorted out or not been seated properly before someone had had a chance to switch it off.
“Galley, Seaman Leach.”
“We’ve had a noise short — any of those mixers been on?”
“No, sir — ah, sir…”
“Yes?”
“Uh, sorry, sir. I dropped the coffeepot. Sort of busted against the bulkhead, I guess.”
“Busted! Must have exploded for sonar to pick it up on the passive. Now, tell me straight, sailor, and don’t frig around. Did it kind of bust or did it explode? Was it full or empty?”
“Uh…it was kind of full, sir.”
“Don’t you touch another thing. Stay right where you are.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry…”
Zeldman had already turned to the diving officer. “Take her to two thousand feet.” It was approaching their crush depth.
“Two thousand, sir,” said the officer of the deck, the order repeated again by the planesman, who gently pushed the control column forward as a pilot would in a shallow-angled dive. They’d been running near the surface, hiding in the ice clutter, and if the angle of dive was too acute, too fast, the stern of the 360-foot sub was in danger of slamming hard up against the ice, creating an even bigger noise short.
“Watch the bubble,” Zeldman heard the diving officer caution calmly in the background. Zeldman shot a quick glance at the chart, at the same time instructing the diving officer to call the depth.
“Three hundred feet… three fifty… four hundred…”
Zeldman quickly computed a new course away from their original tack, and the moment the diving officer informed him they were at two thousand, he ordered, “Change of course. Steer zero five two.”
“Change in course. Zero five two.”
“Speed ten knots.”
“Speed ten knots.”
“And if any other son of a bitch makes a noise, I’ll have his guts for garters.” No one spoke until Zeldman, leaving the redded-out Control, walked forward into the more comforting blue glow of the sonar room. But he knew the psychological effect of the color change was merely an illusion. “Pray to God, Emerson, no one heard us.”
“Yes, sir.”
But praying was no good. One point two two seven seconds was an age for someone whose digitized innards registered a noise lasting only milliseconds. The Russian Alfa had seen the ikota—”hiccup”—clearly on its sonar screen, and in any case, even if the operator had not actually seen it, a tone alarm on the console would have alerted him to the incoming noise short cutting into the otherwise steady pattern of incoming sine waves.
Captain Yanov ordered the Alfa to alter course, heading straight along the noise source bearing, and ordered all torpedo tubes, which were situated forward, ready for action. He did not want to switch on his active pinger, for this would alert the other sub, nor did he wish to increase speed too quickly, for even though his was the quietest class of Soviet submarine, his cooling pumps did not make him inaudible, and all they had was a heading, a bearing on the noise, no measure of distance. Yet he had no intention of losing the sub, whose distance, despite the lack of any accurate electronic means of measuring it without using an active pinger, was estimated by Yegor Petrov, his best sonar operator, purely on the basis of his long experience in the Arctic, as being probably plus or minus fifteen kilometers — nine miles — from them.
Yanov looked down at his chart overlay covering the Spitzbergen Fracture zone. “Any of our subs in the area?” he asked his OOD. “Apart from us, that is?”
Officer of the deck, Ivashko, had already anticipated the captain’s question, checking their position against the colored strips of the other Russian Hunter/Killer patrol routes. “Should be no interdiction with any of ours, Captain. Spitzbergen Trench is all ours.”
“Then he must be American or British,” said Yanov. “Could it be,” he asked Sonar Operator Petrov, “they’ve found a soft patch in the ice? Run out their trailing antenna and taken in a VLF signal from their headquarters? Or possibly a location check to headquarters? A transmit? Or a noise short from the surface. Maybe not a sub at all. One of their ASW choppers smashing through the ice to dunk a listening buoy?”
“No,” said the sonar operator, doing his best to contain his amusement at the captain’s hypothesizing. Yanov was undoubtedly a great captain — the sonar operator had no doubt of this, otherwise he would not be commander of an Alfa — but the control room officers never understood the nuances of the passive arrays. “No sir,” he repeated. “Nothing from the surface — besides, radio muster for all Allied ships is 0800 hours, sir. It’s 0500 now. Given the frequency, I think someone dropped a wrench or something.”
“What would he do?” mused the Soviet captain. “If he knows he’s given off a noise short?” He turned to the sonar operator. “Petrov, you think he knows?”
“If he doesn’t, Captain, his sonar man was asleep.”
“I’d go deep,” said OOD Ivashko.
“Yes, of course,” concurred Captain Yanov. “But will he hover? Or keep going? It’s too deep to sit on the bottom.”
“If he hovers, Captain,” answered the OOD, “and he thinks he might have been heard, then he must expect his pursuer to reach him sooner or later — if he stays on the same heading. If I were him, I’d keep moving, slowly, zigzagging, backtracking.”
“Which direction?” asked the captain.
“It’s an east-west trench,” said Ivashko, thinking aloud. “If he runs south or north, he’s going into shallow water. No one likes that.”
“Ah, but canyon walls would help him, eh, Number One? A lot of sound comes off canyon walls. Right, Sonar? Deep feeders, rock falls, noise from ice running down the cliff faces, scuttling, and bouncing off. A canyon wall can bury a lot of other sound.”
“Even so,” said Ivashko, “I’d shy away from the canyon walls, Captain. The racket from them could smother his passive arrays as well as hide him. He’d be running deafened by canyon noise.”
The captain conceded the point. “Yes. Personally I would go up closer to the ice, away from the canyon. There you have the ice noise, but can
reel out your passive array well below you. You would still pick up the ice noise, but it’s much steadier than in a canyon. It’s a static you can recognize. Right, Petrov?”
Petrov gave a conditional nod, the kind that irritated Ivashko. Damn sonar men always thought they belonged to a higher priesthood to which mere mortals such as officers of the deck neither had access to, nor aptitude for.
“Then,” said Captain Yanov, “I think it’s time to release a Jonah.” This was a quiet, buoy-girded, tear-shaped container of approximately 156-liter capacity, about half the size of a 44-gallon drum but designed to create the least possible resistance as it quietly moved through the water. Inside, “Jonah” was intricately designed to contain microtape and speakers with a mechanical timer of ten minutes to two hours duration.
Once released from the hull, powered by a quiet battery-run plastic prop and preset to travel to a point approximately two-thirds along the bearing of a noise short, the tear-shaped container would rise until it was approximately three hundred feet below the surface. In this case, within three hundred feet of the ice.
Here, activated by its timer, it would emit a powerfully amplified sound — usually that of a whale. The sound waves racing out from the Jonah would deflect off the Russian submarine as well as off the American. But because the Alfa would be farther away from the Jonah, the noise source, Jonah’s sound, reflected off the American sub, would reach the Russian sub sooner than the sound from Jonah reflected off the Russian sub would reach the Americans. The Alfa would then not only have the American sub’s heading but also, because of the time lapse between the emission of the sound from the Jonah and its echoed return, the Alfa would now also know exactly how far away the American sub was.
It would be toward this position that the Alfa would now head, not at flank speed, lest its pumps be picked up, but at fifteen knots until it was within torpedo range. But this would only work if the enemy kept proceeding on its last known heading. To be absolutely sure where it was and to verify that it was still within the Alfa’s torpedo range, a second Jonah would be released. This noise box, again with a preset capacity of between ten minutes and two hours, would emit a much different noise, the sudden whoosh of a torpedo launch. Once this was picked up by the American captain, he would have to make a split-second decision either to make an evasive dive, hoping to shake off what he would believe to be an attack of metallic homing torpedoes, or to fire his own Mark-48 radar homing torpedoes to hopefully intercept the more quickly fired Russian torpedo.