Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “Come to 270 and make revolutions for three knots.”

  “270 and three knots. Aye.”

  “Status?”

  “He’s gone.”

  The captain rolled his head slowly to the right and left, banished all thought of angry response from his mind, and settled slowly into his command chair.

  “He’s drifting. He will complete the turn as a clearing turn before running the Unimak channel.” The captain didn’t feel anything like the certainty he projected, but it was a skill that came with command.

  “270 and three knots, Captain.”

  “All engines stop.”

  Two of the sonarmen played with the bow sonar, a much weaker engine than the powerful towed array behind them. The tail could be deployed only at low speeds, and certain maneuvers like rapid turns were not possible while it was deployed, but it was their only tool for following the American. The bow sonar had intermittent contact at best. He could hear the two murmuring to each other about the noise that the ocean was making, pounding on the island due north of them. Background noise, a white noise that would cross most of the spectrum, all of the “lines.” They were murmuring because sonarmen had a superstitious respect for their opposite numbers, afraid that loud conversation would be heard by the opposing specialists. No one knew how good the American sonars really were, but four days had taught the captain that they were not as good as his worst fears, and their tactics showed that they were cocky.

  That still left a lot of room for them to be very, very good.

  “350 relative! Range 3500 meters and closing!”

  It was eerie, having his prediction fulfilled like that. He had tossed it off, based, yes, on some experience. But mostly to steady the bridge crew. The bastard was coming around toward them, and quite fast now that his engines were driving him again.

  “Take us down to 255 meters, bow up.”

  “255 meters, bow up, aye.” The Admiral Po began a very slow dive, aiming to get her metal bulk through the deep isothermic layer that would reflect most sonar and greatly hamper passive detection. The captain looked down at his knuckles on the collision bar in front of his command seat and gradually willed his hands to relax.

  In the darkened ballroom, there are long, velvet curtains that hide sound if you can get behind them.

  “000 relative, 3000 meters and closing. Speed five knots. Vector 190.”

  The boomer suddenly appeared as a digital symbol on the command screen, with her course and speed displayed next to her. The distance between the Admiral Po and her quarry seemed very short, and the captain wondered if they were about to change roles.

  “255 meters.”

  “Try to put the bow sonar up in the layer.”

  “Bow up, aye.”

  This was a tricky maneuver and one that couldn’t really be accurately gauged for success. It required that the planesman adjust the pitch of the submarine so that her bow sonar was actually above the acoustic layer, allowing that sonar to listen to the enemy while the rest of the submarine’s metal hide was hidden below the temperature gradient of the layer. The problem was that you never knew for sure that you had it exactly right; the acoustic layer was simply a metaphor for the invisible line where two different layers of water with different temperatures met. It couldn’t be seen, only sensed, and only sensed as a relative gradient. The bow might be in the layer or meters above it, depending on luck and skill and local variations.

  He’s bow on to us right now. The American, with his infinitely superior equipment, was in the best position he could ask to detect Admiral Po.

  “Nothing on the tail.”

  “Bow sonar has contact, 010 relative, 2500 meters and closing. Speed five knots. Vector 180.”

  He has us. Or he will turn away.

  The captain turned to the planesman.

  “Well done. Very well done.” The bow sonar report indicated that the bow was, indeed, above the layer. But how far? And how reflective was the layer?

  He watched the symbol on the bridge screen, the only visual input that mattered, willing it to continue its turn to port.

  “020 relative, 2700 meters. Speed six knots. Vector 160.”

  Deep breath, long exhalation.

  “Make revolutions for three knots. Hold us at 255 meters and pitch for normal.”

  “Aye, aye.” That pulled the bow back under the layer, making them blind, but he had to move or the American would get too far away. Simply avoiding detection was only half the game.

  “Three knots.”

  “Helmsman, three knots for the center of the channel.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  He cast an eye at the chart and decided he had a safe amount of water under his keel, even in these treacherous seas.

  “Depthfinder off.”

  “Depthfinder off, aye.”

  Ahead, perhaps well ahead if he stuck to his six knots, the American would be entering the channel already. The captain calculated quickly; the American would be well over six thousand meters ahead when they were back in the deep water on the other side of the channel, but the captain thought that the risk was worthwhile, and he was a little distracted by the obvious adulation of the bridge crew and his own internal buzz of triumph. He had outguessed an American boomer captain. His crew had reacted well. He was worthy.

  “Center of the channel.”

  He waited patiently, following the channel on his chart while thinking over the last set of moves, trying to guess the next. His eyes actually closed twice. Minutes trickled by. He hated letting the American have so much time undetected, but he couldn’t risk anything in the narrow channel.

  “Bow sonar has possible contact, range 7000 meters, bearing 000 relative.”

  He snapped fully awake.

  “Speed?”

  The man looked anguished. The data were too sketchy. He needed a longer hit, or a second and third hit in quick succession to get a vector and speed.

  Seven thousand meters was too far ahead, and too far for the bow sonar to make contact. Unless he was going very fast. It had to be a false contact—a seamount, or a boat. Or another submarine. He struggled with the possibilities as his own boat continued to creep down the channel.

  “All engines stop. Planesman, bow above the layer.”

  The Admiral Po seemed to hold its breath.

  “Possible contact, range 7000 meters, bearing 000 relative.”

  The image returned on the command screen.

  “Vector 000. Speed twelve knots.”

  The American was racing away. He would be clear of the channel in moments; indeed, given the vagaries of passive sonar, he might be free now, and increasing speed.

  “Make revolutions for four knots. Retrieve the tail.” It was useless in the channel, anyway. The American was surely too far away to hear its telltale 44dB line as the bad bearing in the towed array winch screamed.

  Were they detected? He didn’t think so, couldn’t think so. This had the smell of a standard operating procedure, a routine to lose hypothetical pursuit. If so, it was crushingly effective.

  “Towed array housed, sir.”

  “Very well. Make revolutions for six knots.”

  At six knots, the Admiral Po was one of the loudest leviathans in the deep. Her second-generation reactor could not be made really quiet by the addition (and in some cases, the slipshod addition) of the best Russian quieting materials from the third generation—isolation mounts, for instance. The captain hated to go above four knots in an operational patrol. He felt naked.

  They roared along the channel, a painful compromise, too loud to avoid detection, too slow to catch the American if he was determined to go fast.

  “How did we miss him going so fast? I make no accusation, understand. I need to know.”

  “Captain, he is not much noisier at twelve knots than at six. Even the cavitation noise is, well, muffled. He is very quiet.”

  No submarine should be so quiet at twelve knots.

  In Severomorsk, they
had told him about the “steel Sierra,” the Russian submarine that would do these things. That had been twelve years ago, before the Soviet Union rolled over and sank. Clearly the American boats could do the same. His antiquated attack boat had just fallen even farther behind, because the ability to run fast without cavitation, the designer’s dream since the 1960s, placed the new American boomer in the fourth generation.

  He timed out the channel’s length on his own watch. The second he was sure he had depth under his keel, his voice rang out.

  “Make our depth 300. Turn to port heading 270. Make our speed two knots.”

  Turning gradually broadside to the expected vector of the target, exposing the length of the towed array to get the maximum signal, diving to avoid an unexpected ambush.

  Time gurgled by down the hull.

  “All stop.”

  Nothing.

  “Sonar?”

  “No contact.”

  The captain was a thorough professional and he didn’t quit. He searched in ever-increasing spirals for twelve hours, sprinting and drifting, risking detection and flirting with disaster if the American sub was lurking in the deep water just north of the channel. But he took such risks only because he already knew the answer: His opponent had raced down the channel and into the deep water and had vanished to the north.

  Sleepless, grimy, sweat-stained, he rose from his command chair and addressed the bridge crew.

  “This is not a total loss, comrades. We have unprecedented sonograms on the American; we know that he was headed north. We know more about their patrol routes and procedures than any boat in Chinese history. And they have no idea that we’re here.”

  “Do we go north, then, Captain?” asked his first officer.

  “No. No, we return to our patrol area, study our sonograms, and wait.”

  Until Jewel gives us the next one, he thought. But Jewel was too precious, and he couldn’t say that to the crew.

  The submarine set a course for the waters off Seattle.

  Suburban Virginia.

  The gleaming new S-3 sagged a little, turning on final for the carrier; his break had been weak, and he knew that no self-respecting LSO would give him an okay on any part of this trap so far. Now he was in the groove but chasing his lineup like a nugget, all of his motor coordination sluggish and unresponsive, like a bad hydraulics system in an old airplane. His brain knew where his hands should go, but his injured hand lagged and the signals seemed to move too slowly, too jerkily, and the plane, like a horse that knows that the hand at the reins is weak, seemed to fight him.

  He eyeballed the lineup, called the ball in his head, and tried to recapture the flawless rhythm that he had once had at this game. One mile, six hundred feet, one hundred and forty knots. He knew the numbers, but the response seemed to lag and he wanted to blame the equipment, wanted to suddenly press a button and have all of those reaction times and skills come flooding back, and then he jerked physically to realize that he was there, the deck was THERE. . . .

  His angle of attack was too steep, tending to sag at the very end and fighting his near-stall speed for altitude; the plane had nothing to give him; his correction was too late, and the immovable laws of physics and mathematics grabbed his plane and flung it into the back of the ship, just a few feet above the neat, white lettering that said “USS Thomas Jefferson.” A brilliant orange-and-white explosion obliterated his control screen—

  —and he picked up the joystick in his good, strong right hand and smashed it through the wallboard of the living room, screaming his frustration at the top of his lungs.

  “Fuck! FUUUCK! Jesus FUCKING Christ!” He was roaring with anger, sweat and failure dripping from him, and the shards of a piece of expensive computer equipment broken by his own stupid rage prodded him to a sicker, meaner level, as he thought of what he had become with one wound—two fingers shot off his left hand in Pakistan and he was half what he had been. Less than half.

  There was a small irregular hole in their rented living-room wall. “Fucking stupid JERK!” he shouted. His face left no doubt whom he meant. He threw the shattered remnants of the joystick across the room, where they left a nick in the paint on the wall under the stairs. He clenched his hands, savoring the awful feeling of the missing fingers. A noise distracted him.

  Crying.

  His son was standing on the stairs, terrified by a side of his father he had never seen, never should have seen.

  “Oh, my God, Mikey!” Alan said, his voice bruised from shouting.

  Mikey stood, whimpering, looking afraid. Afraid of his father, the hero. Alan took a step toward the stairs and Mikey bolted for his room, and the front door opened, and there was Rose, beautiful and healthy in her flight suit, the poster child for women in naval aviation. She stopped as soon as the door opened; he could see in a heartbeat that she saw it all, knew it all.

  He threw himself into an armchair he didn’t like, facing a television he hated. He hated the room and he hated the house. It might have been better if it had been his own house, but this was merely a place they had found in the hectic last days of the Shreed business, when Rose had been temporarily attached to the Chief of Naval Operations, and then he had got hurt. The house was too small and too mean, but it was what she could find in one day. And he hated it.

  Now, she came into the room, trying, he knew, to mute her own joy at feeling good about herself and her life, going down to Pax River to fly every day, preparing to get her heart’s desire by going to Houston.

  She kissed him lightly on the top of the head and went into the kitchen, and seconds later she was back.

  “You know”—and she kept her voice light—“you could have done something about dinner.”

  “Because I don’t do anything but sit here on my ass all day? Right!” He shot up and headed for the kitchen. Upstairs, the baby started to cry. “And shut that kid up!” he shouted.

  It was as if he hated her, too. As if hurting her, the thing he valued most in the world, was the only way to express his rage. She wouldn’t have it, however; she had a ferocious temper of her own, and she could be sweet Rose, forgiving Rose, good-wife Rose for only so long. Grabbing his arm from behind, she spun him halfway around and shouted, just as loudly as he had, “That’s your kid up there! If you don’t like him or me or us, get the hell out!”

  “I might do just that!”

  “Well, do it! We’re all sick of tiptoeing around so you can feel sorry for yourself and stare at your wounded hand and think how bad the Navy’s treated you. Get a grip or get out!”

  And he raised his hand.

  Washington.

  Mike Dukas came out of his shower, his heavy, hairy body pink except for the livid red scars along his collarbone. Seeing it in the bathroom mirror, he made a face—the first bullet he had ever taken, and it had been a doozy. He still couldn’t lift his hands above his shoulders, and drying himself made him wince, and when he went out into the world he still had to wear a plastic harness that held his hands up in front of him so that he looked like the Easter bunny.

  “Fucking George Shreed,” he muttered.

  George Shreed dominated his life now: He had taken the bullet capturing Shreed, and now he was paying for it in the paperwork that waited at his office—reports and explanations and assessments. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” he said aloud and thought, Well, at least I don’t feel as bad as Al Craik. Craik, he knew, was in a deep depression.

  He needed a change, Dukas thought. God knows, he needed something.

  Time was, he would have thought he needed to fall in love. He fell in love easily, hard, usually badly. This time, however, he didn’t have the urge, as if scraping death’s fender had warned him off the risk. Even now, there was a call on his answering machine that he had started to listen to last night and had switched off because he had recognized the woman’s voice. “Hi, Mike,” she had said, the voice a little breathy and too bright. “Hi, this is—” and he had turned it off because he knew who
it was.

  Sally Baranowski. CIA analyst, incipient alcoholic just out of rehab, nice, nice woman. They had almost had something going, and then he had got himself shot and she had got herself rehabilitated, and now, what the hell, what good was any of it? Half-dry, his back still covered with water, he wrapped the wet towel around his gut and stalked out of the bathroom as if he meant to punch somebody out, went to the answering machine and stabbed it with a stiff finger and said to himself, Don’t be a schmuck.

  “Hi, Mike— Hi, this is Sally!” A small laugh. “Baranowski. Remember me? Uh—I just thought I’d call— This is awkward as hell; I thought you’d be there. Goddam machines, you can’t—”

  He switched it off. She must be just out of rehab. How long did rehab take, anyway? Thirty days? He didn’t want to get involved, was the truth. What he wanted was real work, a case, relief from the mind-numbing reports that filled his days. So far, his boss at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service wouldn’t give him a thing; he’d been going into the office for a week, pounding out paperwork, kept out of action. Because he was “awaiting a clean bill of health,” his boss said, which had nothing to do with his health and everything to do with the fact that he’d gone into a foreign country (Pakistan) without a country clearance and without adequate authorization, his boss said, and got himself shot up and had needed to be flown out by a Navy aircraft that was also there illegally. And, what the hell, the fact that they’d caught a major spy seemed to make no difference. And now Kasser, his boss’s boss, wanted to know where the Chinese case officer was. Dukas could see himself spending the rest of his life writing reports related to his trip to Pakistan.

  So, Dukas had said, let me go back to the War Crimes Tribunal, from which he was supposedly on six months’ leave of absence as a favor to NCIS, but his boss had negatived that as “dodging the issue,” whatever the issue was.

  “Shit,” Dukas said.