on the gas.’
Jones was the sonar watch supervisor. The other two watchstanders noted the new signal, and Jones switched his phones to the towed array jack while the two officers kept out of the way. He took a scratch pad and noted the time before working on his individual controls. The BQR-15 was the most sensitive sonar rig on the boat, but its sensitivity was not needed for this contact.
‘Damn,’ Jones muttered quietly.
‘Charlie,’ said the junior technician.
Jones shook his head. ‘Victor. Victor class for sure. Doing turns for thirty knots – burst of cavitation noise, he’s digging big holes in the water, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Bearing zero-five-zero. Skipper, we got good water around us, and the signal is real faint. He’s not close.’ It was the closest thing to a range estimate Jones could come up with. Not close meant anything over ten miles. He went back to working his controls. ‘I think we know this guy. This is the one with a bent blade on his screw, sounds like he’s got a chain wrapped around it.’
‘Put it on speaker,’ Mancuso told Thompson. He didn’t want to disturb the operators. The lieutenant was already keying the signal into the BC-10.
The bulkhead-mounted speaker would have commanded a four-figure price in any stereo shop for its clarity and dynamic perfection; like everything else on the 688-class sub, it was the very best that money could buy. As Jones worked on the sound controls they heard the whining chirp of propeller cavitation, the thin screech associated with a bent propeller blade, and the deeper rumble of a Victor’s reactor plant at full power. The next thing Mancuso heard was the printer.
‘Victor I-class, number six,’ Thompson announced.
‘Right,’ Jones nodded. ‘Vic-six, bearing still zero-five-zero.’ He plugged the mouthpiece into his headphones. ‘Conn, sonar, we have a contact. A Victor class, bearing zero-five-zero, estimated target speed thirty knots.’
Mancuso leaned out into the passageway to address Lieutenant Pat Mannion, officer of the deck. ‘Pat, man the fire-control tracking party.’
‘Aye, Cap’n.’
‘Wait a minute!’ Jones’ hand went up. ‘Got another one!’ He twiddled some knobs. ‘This one’s a Charlie class. Damned if he ain’t digging holes, too. More easterly, bearing zero-seven-three, doing turns for about twenty-eight knots. We know this guy, too. Yeah, Charlie II, number eleven.’ Jones slipped a phone off one ear and looked at Mancuso. ‘Skipper, the Russkies have sub races scheduled for today?’
‘Not that they told me about. Of course, we don’t get the sports page out here,’ Mancuso chuckled, swirling the coffee around in his cup and hiding his real thoughts. What the hell was going on? ‘I suppose I’ll go forward and take a look at this. Good work, guys.’
He went a few steps forward into the attack centre. The normal steaming watch was set. Mannion had the conn, with a junior officer of the deck and seven enlisted men. A first-class firecontrolman was entering data from the target motion analyser into the Mark 117 fire control computer. Another officer was entering control to take charge of the tracking exercise. There was nothing unusual about this. The whole watch went about its work alertly but with the relaxed demeanour that came with years of training and experience. While the other armed services routinely had their components run exercises against allies or themselves in emulation of Eastern Bloc tactics, the navy had its attack submarines play their games against the real thing – and constantly. Submariners typically operated on what was effectively an at-war footing.
‘So we have company,’ Mannion observed.
‘Not that close,’ Lieutenant Charles Goodman noted. ‘These bearings haven’t changed a whisker.’
‘Conn, sonar.’ It was Jones’ voice. Mancuso took it.
‘Conn, aye. What is it, Jonesy?’
‘We got another one, sir. Alfa 3, bearing zero-five-five. Running flat out. Sounds like an earthquake, but faint, sir.’
‘Alfa 3? Our old friend, the Politovskiy. Haven’t run across her in a while. Anything else you can tell me?’
‘A guess, sir. The sound on this one warbled, then settled down, like she was making a turn. I think she’s heading this way – that’s a little shaky. And we have some more noise to the northeast. Too confused to make any sense of just now. We’re working on it.’
‘Okay, nice work, Jonesy. Keep at it.’
‘Sure thing, Captain.’
Mancuso smiled as he set the phone down, looking over at Mannion. ‘You know, Pat, sometimes I wonder if Jonesy isn’t part witch.’
Mannion looked at the paper tracks that Goodman was drawing to back up the computerized targeting process. ‘He’s pretty good. Problem is, he thinks we work for him.’
‘Right now we are working for him.’ Jones was their eyes and ears, and Mancuso was damned glad to have him.
‘Chuck?’ Mancuso asked Lieutenant Goodman.
‘Bearing still constant on all three contacts, sir.’ Which probably meant they were heading for the Dallas. It also meant that they could not develop the range data necessary for a fire control solution. Not that anyone wanted to shoot, but this was the point of the exercise.
‘Pat, let’s get some sea room. Move us about ten miles east,’ Mancuso ordered casually. There were two reasons for this. First, it would establish a base line from which to compute probable target range. Second, the deeper water would make for better acoustical conditions, opening up to them the distant sonar convergence zones. The captain studied the chart as his navigator gave the necessary orders, evaluating the tactical situation.
Bartolomeo Mancuso was the son of a barber who closed his shop in Cicero, Illinois, every fall to hunt deer on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Bart had accompanied his father on these hunts, shot his first deer at the age of twelve and every year thereafter until entering the Naval Academy. He had never bothered after that. Since becoming an officer on nuclear submarines he had learned a much more diverting game. Now he hunted people.
Two hours later an alarm bell went off on the ELF radio in the sub’s communications room. Like all nuclear submarines, the Dallas was trailing a lengthy wire antenna attuned to the extremely low-frequency transmitter in the central United States. The channel had a frustratingly narrow data band width. Unlike a TV channel, which transmitted thousands of bits of data per frame, thirty frames per second, the ELF radio passed on data slowly, about one character every thirty seconds. The duty radioman waited patiently while the information was recorded on tape. When the message was finished, he ran the tape at high speed and transcribed the message, handing it to the communications officer who was waiting with his code book.
The signal was actually not a code but a ‘one-time-pad’ cipher. A book, published every six months and distributed to every nuclear submarine, was filled with randomly generated transpositions for each letter of the signal. Each scrambled three-letter group in this book corresponded to a pre-selected word or phrase in another book. Deciphering the message by hand took under three minutes, and when that was completed it was carried to the captain in the attack centre.
NHG JPR YTR
FROM COMSUBLANT TO LANTSUBS AT SEA STANDBY
OPY TBD QEQ GER
POSSIBLE MAJOR REDEPLOYMENT ORDER LARGE-SCALE
MAL ASF NME
UNEXPECTED REDFLEET OPERATION IN PROGRESS
TYQ ORV
NATURE UNKNOWN NEXT ELF MESSAGE
HWZ
COMMUNICATE SSIX
COMSUBLANT – commander of the Submarine Force in the Atlantic – was Mancuso’s big boss, Vice Admiral Vincent Gallery. The old man was evidently