Ghost Sub полностью

“Sir? The special procedure is complete.”

The captain continued staring at the dots. “No reaction at all,” he said with a sigh. “Stay on course until it stops.”

They stayed behind her for another ten minutes until the pinging stopped, at precisely 0630, and the reliable, straight stack of green dots abruptly stopped growing.

“Ok,” said the captain. “Let’s go active. One ping.”

It was an option Danny hadn’t had on the Alabama, where their active sonar had been crude and almost useless. The BQQ-5 sonar on the Louisville, designed to use against a very quiet foe, was both sophisticated and powerful.

On the captain’s order, the same sphere they used for listening emitted a burst of sound so powerful that it actually boiled some of the seawater in contact with it. The sound travelled to the Boise, bounced against its hull, and returned to them.

“Conn, sonar, Sierra One detected on active.”

Danny and the captain huddled around the CODC screen to see the display. The signal was a smear that vaguely correlated with the solution they’d been building.

“Again,” said the captain. Sonar complied, sending out another active pulse. Again, the return stacked up, but the precision was bad, not nearly as solid as the sound the Boise had emitted on her own.

“It’s fuzzy,” said Danny.

“The tiles,” said the captain. “I’ve operated against a coated boat before, and it looked just like this.” The captain was referring to the anechoic tiles that covered the Boise. (The Louisville, not an “improved” 688, was not covered by the tiles.) The soft, rubbery surface was specifically designed to absorb and degrade an active sonar signal.

“Again?” asked Danny.

“No,” said the captain. “That’s enough. It won’t get any better. Break contact. Let’s go to periscope depth and tell them we’ve found her.”

“Do it,” said Jabo, turning to V-12.

“Dive make your depth one-five-zero feet.”

“Make my depth one-five-zero, aye sir.”

At the shallow depth they cleared baffles, turning to starboard to make sure no one was behind them, in their acoustic blind spot. With that accomplished, they were ready to go all the way up.

V-12 puts his hands on the ring for the number two periscope, and turned it. The cylinder smoothly rose until he could flip down the handles and put his eye to the eyepiece. He turned around completely once before giving the order.

“Dive, make your depth seven-five feet.”

“Make my depth seven-five feet, aye sir.” The control room went silent as the ship started coming shallow. V-12 slowly spun with the scope, ensuring their path to the surface was clear with his own eyes.

“Scope is breaking….scope is clear,” he said, continuing to spin around deliberately, searching the seas.

“No close contacts,” he said. The control room began talking again, giving orders, receiving reports. V-12 kept his eye on the scope. Jabo leaned over to him and whispered in his ear as he spun.

“So you didn’t see her on the way up?”

“No,” V-12 whispered back. “And I was looking.”

“Raise the mast,” said the captain.

The Chief of the Watch flipped a toggle switch that raised one of their multi-function antennas. They started receiving traffic immediately, routine messages that had been waiting for them.

“Are we ready with our outgoing message?” asked the captain.

“We’ve got the draft prepared,” said V-12, his eye still on the scope. “Just need to fill in our course and speed for the Boise, her exact position, and her response to the special procedure.”

The leading petty officer for radio had appeared, clipboard in hand, with the draft message. Jabo looked over the shoulder of the fire control operator and wrote down their best estimate of the Boise’s speed, course, and range, in ballpoint pen on the palm of his hand. He then took the clipboard and transferred that information to the blanks on the message template.

“It’s ready, captain.”

The captain took it, read it over carefully, and then handed it over the XO for review.

“I think we can all agree she didn’t respond, correct?” he said. His voice was uncharacteristically serious.

“Yes sir,” they all said in turn.

The captain initialed it and handed it back to the radioman. “Transmit,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for this.”

“Transmit, aye sir,” he said.

Jabo gave a quick look at the depth indicator to make sure they were staying on depth; this would not be a good time for the mast to dip below the surface and screw up the transmission. He tapped V-12 on the shoulder. “Take a break,” he said. “Let me take a look.”

“Sure.”

Jabo leaned over and put his eye to the scope, adjusted to the daylight in front of him. The sea was calm, but not glassy, about a sea state one. Pillowy clouds piled up on the horizon. He completed a complete rotation in slow, and then turned to what he knew was the bearing of the Boise, just a half mile in front of them, but below the surface. There was no sign of her, of course, just an endless plane of water.

“See anything?” said V-12.

“Lots of water,” said Danny.