Panic Switch полностью

“Opening a muzzle door — if he hears that — is like drawing down on him,” Seagraves said, looking down at the deck, his chin in his hand. “That might justify him shooting at us. Let’s not provoke him.”

“Can we at least spin up the torpedoes?” Quinnivan asked.

Seagraves nodded. “Spin up Mark 48 ADCAPs in countermeasure mode in tubes three and four and flood down and equalize. Spin up Mark 48 ADCAPs in offense mode in tubes one and two, and flood them down and equalize.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t pick up transients from us doing that,” Pacino said. “He’s still hovering in place, barely four or five hundred yards out. It’s been a couple of minutes since he pinged.”

“Recommend firing point procedures,” Quinnivan said. “Just in case.”

“Wait on that, XO.” Seagraves shook his head. “If he decided to launch a Magnum torpedo — I can’t bring myself to call it a ‘Gigantskiy’—he’d have to clear datum by miles before firing. Let’s just stand pat and wait here on the bottom. Everybody just calm down. No need to hit the panic switch. Let’s just hold our breath and see what he does.”

Lewinsky looked at Seagraves. “We could go to absolute sound quieting, Captain. We could scram the reactor.”

“Scramming the fookin’ reactor? Under ice? Have you lost your mind, Nav?” Quinnivan said, his eyebrows raised.

Seagraves shook his head, deep in thought. “What is he doing?” he asked, more to himself than to his officers.

“No further contact on Hostile One, Captain,” Sobol said to Alexeyev.

“What now, Captain?” Lebedev asked. “Are we still going to target the ice with a Gigantskiy?”

Alexeyev shrugged. “We pretty much have to. We got the order from Northern Fleet.”

“It’s not safe now, Captain,” Lebedev said. “Shooting that torpedo, if Hostile One is between us and the ice target, he could interpret that as us shooting at him. And then he’d have cause to shoot at us. Or the blast could destroy him unintentionally. If the American sinks, it should be because we targeted him.”

“Captain Alexeyev,” Sergei Kovalov said, speaking up for the first time since the sonar detection. “If I may be so bold as to make an observation.”

“Go ahead, Captain Kovalov,” Alexeyev said formally.

“It occurs to me,” Kovalov said, “that if we’ve been detected and trailed by a hostile American submarine, our stealth is gone. And evading American knowledge of our mission was the reason to go to the Pacific by way of the Arctic Ocean, yes? And if our secrecy is compromised, we no longer have to go all around North America and South America to get to the Status-6 placement points on the American east coast, right? Which means we can abandon this whole eastward path and just go westward past Great Britain and Iceland into the North Atlantic, their sonar trip wires be damned. It would shorten the mission by months.”

“He makes a good point, Captain,” Lebedev said.

Alexeyev thought for a long moment. “We could still lose him in the sonar blue-out from the nuclear detonation. He might lose contact on us.”

“And we’ll lose contact on him for the same reason, Captain,” Kovalov said. “Once you blow a one megaton hole in the ice, sonar will be useless for hours. We’ll have to wait hours for it to calm down enough to see if there’s a viable path through the ice, if we made a hole big enough.”

“True. Let’s do this for now,” Alexeyev said. “Let’s put on revolutions and keep driving west to establish a maximum straight line path to the ice target. Odds are, Hostile One will come off the bottom and follow us. When we’re at the maximum straight line distance from the ice target or ten miles, whichever comes first, we’ll hover and spin back to the east and prepare to fire the Gigantskiy at the ice wall. We’ll pulse active again and see if we can pick up Hostile One. We’ll attempt to get him to bottom out again. When he does, we’ll drive farther east until he’s behind us. Once we’re fairly certain he’s behind us, we can shoot the Gigantskiy at the ice target, and Hostile One won’t interpret it as an incoming torpedo. It’ll be outbound from both of us.”

“It will work if he behaves the way you think, Captain,” Lebedev said. “Why do you think he’ll do that?”

Alexeyev shrugged. “It’s what I’d do.”

“Master One has started up again,” Albanese reported from the sonar stack. “Increasing revolutions, speeding up.”

Pacino looked at the periscope display. It was at maximum elevation and the optronics could only look up to an eighty-degree angle from horizontal. He rotated the view, but Master One was not visible. He must be directly overhead, Pacino thought.

“Master One is at three zero RPM,” Albanese said. “I hold him at maximum D/E but D/E is decreasing. SNR is fading. I hold Master One at bearing two seven five.”

“Captain, I recommend we come off the bottom and follow him,” Pacino said.

“He could be messing with us,” Quinnivan said. “Seeing if we come back up. Then he spins around and hits us with active again.”

“Signal-to-noise is fading,” Albanese said.