The Circle

by David Poyer

  “Twenty-eight thousand yards.”

  “Chief Pedersen?”

  Pedersen was working a plastic disc, a manual computer. He nodded. “Concur.”

  Packer said quietly, “Okay, let’s think about this a minute. Does he know we’re here? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Not making that much noise of his own. But where’s he going?”

  “He’s holding the bearing, and getting louder, not fainter. That makes it something like two-four-zero,” said Evlin. He put his finger where the red rays of the passive sonar bearings converged. Dan saw suddenly how it revealed something moving, not a point, but an area of probability. “That’ll take him between Iceland and the Faeroes, and pop him out into the North Atlantic.”

  “He’s not a scheduled deployer.”

  Evlin said nothing. Dan saw their eyes meet, the captain’s and the operations officer. There was some meaning exchanged, but he couldn’t guess what it was.

  He suddenly wondered whether he should be doing something. He switched nervously from circuit to circuit, but heard only a hissing seethe, like the dream roar of the sea in a shell found on the beach.

  “Tell Ed to go silent,” said Packer.

  “Aye, sir.… Main Control, Evaluator: Shut down all nonessential machinery.”

  The chief engineer’s heavy voice rogered. Dan wondered what good that would do. What with the creak and strain of the hull as Ryan worked, anybody within a hundred miles ought to be able to hear them loud and clear. On the other hand, the sea was noisy, too. Maybe the storm would mask their presence.

  “Put a track on him, sir?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Arm’s length? Or close hold?”

  “Let him get a little closer, then I’ll decide. If he can’t hear us, we can—”

  The intercom said, “Evaluator, Sonar. Goblin’s turn count dropping.”

  Packer reached instantly for the intercom. “Main control, Captain. Ed, secure your pumps. We’ve got a Russki nuke transiting south, and he’s slowing for a listen.”

  “He’ll hear our screws a lot farther away than our machinery, Captain.”

  “Shit. You’re right.” Packer punched buttons. “Bridge, Captain; drop speed as much as you can, Rich. Bring her back to one-eight-zero, then use just enough power to keep her head to the seas. We got a bear sniffing the bait down here.”

  As Norden acknowledged, Dan understood suddenly how it was. The transiting submarine slowed down from time to time to reduce its own noise and check for hunters. If Ryan could avoid detection during those periods, they could trail him for a long time without his suspecting it. Despite his fatigue, his bruises, and his soaked, itching feet, he felt a tingle of excitement.

  Nothing much happened for the next half hour, though. The plotters plotted. Evlin rubbed his eyes. The captain’s face flared yellow as he sucked flame into the bowl of his pipe. He muttered around the stem, “Al, let’s get a message off to Fleet reporting this guy. Classify ‘probable Soviet.’ Ask them to assign a track number. Make estimated course and speed two-four-zero at fifteen. Say we’re holding contact and ask if there’re any P-threes out of Iceland want to come out and play.”

  As the lieutenant jotted on a message pad, Dan went over in his head everything he knew about antisubmarine work.

  Sonar was nothing but sound in the water. Passive, you just listened. The ship’s transducers, either hull-mounted or towed like the fish, turned sound into electricity, amplified it, and gave you its intensity, frequency, and bearing. Sometimes you could identify a contact by the noise of its screws, pumps, generators, and other rotating machinery. But the fact that you couldn’t get a direct range made passive sonar less useful at short distances, and if the target was quiet enough, then of course it wouldn’t give you any data at all.

  Active sonar was what you heard in the movies pinging on the sub’s hull. The echo gave you the target’s bearing and the elapsed time gave you the range. Active sonar didn’t give you much of an idea what you were pinging on, whether whale, bubble, or sub. It also had the disadvantage that the submarine could hear you pinging for it twice as far away as you could hear its echo.

  He knew sound was affected by the temperature and salinity of the water, and that in shallow water, or when there were layers of different temperatures, sometimes you couldn’t pick up a sub when it was right under your keel.

  But he had a feeling that he was going to learn a lot more, and soon. From the way everybody was acting, you didn’t get to play with a Soviet very often.

  The intercom said, “Evaluator, Sonar: Target’s speeding up again.”

  Packer: “Okay. Watch him close now. Any sign of a turn?”

  “Not yet, sir. Wait … wait … maybe a little to starboard.”

  “Tell me when you’re sure,” muttered Evlin. He stared at the lighted circle, his hand on the button of his mouthpiece.

  “Datum’s turning to starboard.”

  The captain puffed rapidly. The smoke hung in hazy, slowly mixing layers above the flat white paper surface. “Shit, he heard us,” muttered Silver.

  “Come right, sir?”

  “You’re the evaluator, Al.”

  “Bridge, Evaluator: Come right, increase speed to fifteen knots, steady up on—we’ll give you the course in a minute.”

  “Combat, Bridge: That’ll put us beam to these seas as we’re coming around.”

  “She still turning?” Packer asked through the pulled-open curtain. Dan saw the pallid, startled faces of the sonarmen turned from the emerald cascades on their screens.

  “Hard to tell, sir.”

  “Al, let’s come all the way around to two-seven-zero. That’ll put the sea on the quarter.”

  Evlin acknowledged. “Mark, oh-four-thirty,” said Pedersen. Dan glanced at the clock, startled. They’d been here for an hour already. Five minutes on the bridge had seemed far longer.

  “Now hear this. All hands stand by for heavy rolls while coming about,” said Pettus’s voice, unnaturally strained and amplified over the general announcing system. If anyone was asleep down below, Dan thought, which was doubtful, that should interrupt their dreams.

  “Hang on,” said Pedersen. He tucked the slipstick under his belt and reached up, gripping a voice tube with both hands. Dan wedged himself between the repeater and the plotter, eyeing the gyrocompass.

  This time the deck slanted almost instantly, and kept going over. He saw too late that his position held him only fore and aft. His wet boots began sliding. Above him, the strained faces of the plotters looked down at him. Clinging by one arm, they were reaching out with the other to mark the 0434 positions. The north plotter added a little circle with a K inside it. Past Evlin, hanging from the overhead, he caught a glimpse of the sonarmen. Facing outboard, they stared almost straight up into their screens.

  Ryan hesitated, then snapped back. “Ger her around,” Packer was muttering. As if in answer, the rudder-angle indicator swung to right full. A bell pinged through the bulkhead. The engine-order needles jerked to ahead full on the port engine, back one-third on the starboard. The compass card, which had halted momentarily during the roll, gathered itself and spun right again, flickering as a sea crashed into the port side.

  Reynolds Ryan rolled again, not quite as far, and the bell dinged again and the needles quivered and both went back to Standard.

  “CIC, Bridge: Steady on two-seven-zero. Think we carried away something on the port side, though. Sending a man out to check it.”

  “Negative,” snapped Packer. “Everyone stays inside the skin of the ship. Whatever it is, it’s not worth losing a guy.”

  “Bridge, aye.”

  The old destroyer seemed to ride better on a westerly heading. There wasn’t much to prefer between the insane pitching and the crazy rolls. With the sea on the port quarter, though, she danced a stately minuet, lifting her stern like a dowager’s skirts, skipping heavily to starboard; rolling back a few degrees as her nose dipped, then lifting her stern again.

>   “Evaluator, Sonar: Datum has increased speed,” said the intercom suddenly.

  “Estimate course and speed.”

  “Course, same as before. She’s making a hell of a racket, though. Sounds like a fleet of dump trucks down there.”

  “What is he doing?” muttered Packer. “Al, any bright ideas about this son of a bitch? He’s not on the Northern Fleet missile-boat deployment schedule. And nobody would go to sea in an attack boat that sounded like that. Obviously he’s damaged. Why isn’t he heading for home?”

  “That sounds like good reasoning to me, sir.” Evlin’s round lenses flashed as he turned from the clock to the plotting table. The white paper glowed under the light. “Maybe it isn’t Soviet. Maybe it’s one of ours, a covert penetrator, coming back hurt.”

  “You think so?”

  “That’d explain the course.”

  Packer bent, put a hand to the medical locker to steady himself, and disappeared through the curtain. Dan heard them talking back there. He took advantage of the break to ask Evlin, “Sir, am I supposed to be doing anything on these circuits?”

  “Didn’t Mark tell you? You’ve got the weapons stations … torpedoes, antisubmarine rockets, and guns. You’re supposed to feed them bearings and firing orders. Till then, just follow the action.”

  He nodded, relieved. That cleared things up a little.

  Packer came back from Sonar. “Well, Orris’s got me convinced it’s got twin screws. Nobody else has a twin-screwed nuke. So it’s Soviet. The noise spectra almost match for a Yankee-class missile boat. Anyway, it’s hurting.”

  “And going south.”

  After a moment, Packer said, “Yeah. Southwest, actually—maybe even west by southwest?”

  “Evaluator, Sonar,” the intercom broke in. “Datum increasing speed again.”

  “Look at that,” said Pedersen, leaning forward.

  Between the last two bearings, the red diamond Matt sketched at their intersection had jumped forward an inch.

  “Oh, yeah,” muttered Packer.

  “Chief, give me a speed,” said Evlin.

  Pedersen slid dials on the computer. “Twenty knots? And course looks like two-seven-zero, two-eight-zero now.”

  “He’s trying to outrun us, sir.”

  “Beautiful,” said Packer. “Can he tell what it’s like up here?”

  “Well, he’ll hear wave noise. He’ll know it’s rough. But I don’t see how he can tell what sea direction is.”

  “And he’s jogged west. The one direction I can run in as fast as he can.”

  “It heads us closer to the track of the storm, though, sir.”

  “I’ll worry about that later. Okay, come right twenty degrees, get us a following sea, go to twenty.”

  “We won’t be able to hear him at that speed, Captain.”

  “Not normally, Al, but I’m betting he’s putting out so much racket, Reed can track through the ambient noise. If we can’t, we’ll slow down once in a while to listen, just like he does.”

  Evlin relayed the orders to the bridge. Dan hung on, expecting more rolling, but as Ryan’s head came around, the motion gentled even more. The room still rose and fell, making his headache worse, but the rolling all but stopped.

  The seas were from dead astern.

  “Combat, Bridge; I’m going to indicate twenty-two knots; keep us kind of in between these swell lines.”

  “Evaluator, aye. Maneuver as necessary to minimize motion.”

  The intercom clicked twice. Dan took a deep breath that turned into a yawn. He stretched and glanced at the clock, and was startled again: 0756.

  “Sir, how about a ping?” said Evlin. He put his hands to the small of his back and stretched, too. “He knows we’re here now. Let’s go active and get a solid range.”

  “Does he?”

  “He changed course. Slowed down to listen, then when he heard us, changed course.”

  “He knows there’s a ship here. He doesn’t know who we are.”

  “He’s got us figured for a hostile. If he thought we were a merchant, he’d have gone right underneath us.”

  “Maybe so,” said Packer. “But hold off on pinging him. I got a funny feeling about this guy.”

  “Coffee, captain?” asked one of the radarmen. Packer nodded thanks and grabbed the Styrofoam cup.

  “Coffee, sir?” Dan took his gratefully. It burned his tongue, but he drank half at the first gulp. He adjusted his earphones, wishing the headache would quit. He wondered how much longer this would go on. It didn’t seem as exciting as it had at first. The plotters muttered as they jotted down another round of bearings. Between the crash of waves and the creak of the superstructure, he could hear the grinding of the gears inside the plotting table, inching the lighted rosette that represented Ryan slowly but steadily west.

  * * *

  HE came back from a waking dream some interminable time later. Hours had passed, but the faces were the same, the dim lights the same. The ship was still rising and falling. Then he remembered the words that had brought him back.

  “Lost contact, eh?” repeated the captain. Evlin sucked his lip. His eyes moved to Dan.

  “Mr. Lenson, see what’s going on in Sonar.”

  He shucked his earphones and hung them on a switch handle. His ears felt like a cut when you take a three-day-old Band-Aid off.

  Past the curtains, the little sonar “room,” actually a nook the size of three phone booths, was as good as dark. A blue overhead light had been taped over till only a faint radiance leaked out. Aaron Reed stood behind the two stack operators, looking over their shoulders. Behind him, dials glimmered with the shapes of ships, rows of switches marked MK 43 TORP INIT DEPTH SELECT and P/S 1, 2, 3. A pen traced a wavering line on a graphed scroll. A card beside it read, NO COFFEE ON THE SONAR STACK DESKS. VIOLATORS WILL LICK THE SPILLS OFF THE GEAR. SIGNED, THE CHIEF.

  “Uh, captain wants to know what’s the story, sir.”

  Reed didn’t answer. Instead one of the sonar techs turned his head. “He’s gone quiet. First the screws slowed down, then the circulation pumps in his reactors went off. All I get’s a faint hum once in a while around five hundred hertz. There.”

  He pointed to the screen. Dan had expected something like a radar picture, a sweep of light and a pip. But this looked like an emerald waterfall, speckled light, with here and there a faintly traced bar. He felt stupid again. It was getting to be a familiar feeling.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Well, it comes and it goes, but it ain’t the kind of thing I can give you a bearing on.”

  “Okay.” He remembered the argument over identification. “Do you know yet what kind of sub it is? What class?”

  Reed reached forward, past Dan. The loose-leaf book was bound in red. When Dan took it, his hands sagged.

  “There’s a lead insert in the spine. That’s identification spectra. Flip to page three-thirteen. That’s a Yankee, a Russki boomer, a missile boat. Like our Poseidon submarines.”

  He stared at the diagram. Along the ordinate was frequency. The abscissa was intensity, in decibels. Black lines of varying length stretched from the left side.

  Meanwhile, the first sonarman screwed himself around in his seat and began pushing buttons. Two big tape reels whipped backward, slowed, then began turning forward. More buttons clicked, and one of the screens flickered. It was the same display shown in the book. He flipped the cover back. WARSAW PACT SUBMARINE IDENTIFICATION, it read. TOP SECRET.

  “So it’s a Yankee?”

  “Look at the screen. That look like what you got in your hand?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Not exactly, it don’t, Ensign. Look here, and here. A big spike at twelve hundred cycles a second. That’s some kind of damage in his shaft, or his gears. And then these other machinery bands—”

  “These two are the same.”

  “That’s his air-conditioning plant.”

  “Oh. Well—do they always run their machinery th
e same? Can’t they speed it up, slow it down, vary the tones that way?”

  “Smart question, Ensign. Yeah, they do that, to throw us off. But this one’s different. It might be something new. Like a Yankee, but different. But I’m just hairy-ass guessing, there.”

  Dan thanked him and went back out through the curtain. CIC seemed very bright after Sonar. He told Evlin and Packer, “He’s slowed and gone silent, sir. The sonarmen think he’s either a Yankee or some new kind of Soviet missile sub.”

  “That so?” said Packer. “Are they getting tapes?”

  “Yes, sir, they showed me one.”

  “Do they think they can regain track on him passive?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it, sir.”

  “All right, Al. Ping his ass. Use the VDS; we’re getting too much quenching on the twenty-three.”

  “Sonar, Evaluator: Go active on the fish.”

  They must have had their hand on the switch, because almost immediately he heard the deep, strong song of the sonar. It lasted for about two seconds, three falling notes, then trailed off. One of the sonarmen must have turned on a speaker, because behind the curtain he could hear it going on and on, echoing, reverberating, in an eerie ringing whine like a siren in a great cavern.

  The Sonar Contact light went on. The little dials above his head spun and clicked. “Zero-five-zero, eighty-five hundred yards,” said Pedersen. “Close! He’s quiet when he slows down.”

  “This sea’s making a lot of noise,” said Packer, but he, too, looked worried. “Plot it, quick. Al, let’s drop to five knots.”

  When Ryan slowed, her motion changed, from a gentle tipping to a violent fore-and-aft slamming. The officers bent over the trace. “She’s slowed way down,” said Evlin. “And turned toward us, looks like. If we’d waited a little longer to ping, he’d have been in our baffles astern, home free.”

  “Well, now he knows what we are,” said Packer. “Don’t react to what he does; try to predict what he’ll do next. Your bet?”

  “Speed up again.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “Match speeds, turn to parallel him. If the seas let us.”