Ghost Sub полностью

The submarine continued westward at five knots, at a depth of 460 feet. Occasionally, natural forces tried to alter her depth. For three days, a huge tropical rainstorm raged above her, torrents of fresh rainwater diluting the ocean, making it less salty. A seagoing vessel’s buoyancy is determined by the mass of the water she displaces. Salty water is denser than freshwater, which is why it’s easier for a swimmer to float in the ocean than in a lake, and easier still in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the rain diluted the sea, the ocean around her became less dense; the boat started to sink.

When the rain ended, the same cold front that had carried the storm cooled the ocean, and cold water is more dense than hot. The boat displaced a higher mass of water, became more buoyant, and wanted to rise.

In both cases, the ship’s autopilot sensed the acceleration and efficiently adjusted the planes of the ship to maintain her programmed depth. Her destination, too, was programmed into the computer, along with an algorithm that randomly inserted maneuvers to make tracking her harder, even as she maintained her overall course.

She was a very quiet ship, by design. Her keel was laid in 1988 and she was commissioned in 1992, her construction straddling the end of the Cold War. So it was a Soviet enemy she was designed to fight, an enemy with sophisticated sonar and tactics, and the quest for silence influenced the design of every system. It was something the crews of these boats were drilled on constantly, that their machinery would not give them away; they were far more likely to be discovered by noise they created: a toilet seat dropped, a hatch slammed, a wrench dropped carelessly in the bilge. A sound like that was called a ‘transient,’ and could travel for miles underwater. Under the right conditions, when temperature layers in the ocean created sound channels, the sound could travel hundreds of miles. Anyone who was trained to track American submarines learned to listen for these random, careless noises as they were often the only audible sound a submarine made.

But no one walked the passageways of this boat, or maintained her machines, or watched television, so that innate, stubborn tendency of men to make noise didn’t give her away. Especially at such a slow speed, she was nearly silent.

At precisely 6:00AM (Hawaii-Aleutian time zone), in the Chiefs’ Quarters, a digital alarm clock began bleating. It was generally regarded as poor shipboard etiquette to have an alarm clock, because it would wake up everyone around you, and no one had the same schedule onboard a ship that had to run day and night. The beginning of your work day was undoubtedly the middle of the night for the person sleeping next to you. Courtesy dictated that you leave a wake up request with the messenger of the watch who would wake you up at the requested time without waking up those around you. But this alarm clock belonged to the Chief of the Boat, the senior enlisted man on the entire crew, and no one begrudged him his clock. Besides, he was surrounded by other chief petty officers, men who’d been at sea for decades, and who could sleep through anything. The COB had been a machinist for twenty years before becoming a master chief. His hearing had been dulled by years of engine room noise, and he had the alarm’s volume turned to the maximum setting.

With no one to silence it, the alarm bleated, its sound echoing through the passageways of the forward compartment and off the steel bulkheads that separated them from the sea. After thirty minutes, it shut itself off.

Twenty-three hours and thirty minutes later, it did it again.

Master Chief Cote was in his office at Tripler, finishing up his paperwork for the day. Never far from his mind… he was also finishing up his last tour of duty in a thirty-year career. It was time to conclude, he recognized, a journey that had started in Vietnam and culminated, just two years before, on Alabama, a submarine he loved even though at times it seemed determined to kill him. He’d had a longer, more exciting career than any recruiter had ever promised him. His mind went back for the first time in years to the grinning Chief Petty Officer who had recruited him, in an office above the Seymour, Indiana, post office that reeked of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, a garish framed print of the Constitution adorning the wall. His phone rang and the memory disappeared.

“Master Chief Cote.”

“Master Chief, it’s Petty Officer Wills. Can you come down to D-3? We’ve got a sailor here who needs a medical DQ from his next patrol. Ship sent him here late last night.”