Morris walked to the corner and poured himself a cup of coffee. So, they had just helped to kill a pair of Soviet submarines.
The TAO was less enthusiastic. "We got a noisy old Foxtrot and a November who did something dumb. You suppose he had orders to trail and report, and that's why we got him?"
"Maybe," Morris nodded. "if Ivan's making his skippers do things like that-well, they like central control, but that can change if they find out ifs costing them boats. We learned that lesson ourselves once."
McCafferty had his own contact. They had been tracking it for over an hour now, the sonar operators struggling to discern random noise from discrete signal on their visual displays. Their data was passed to the firecontrol tracking party, four men hovering over the chart table in the after comer of the attack center.
Already the crew was whispering, McCafferty knew. First the yard fire before they were commissioned. Then being pulled out of the Barents Sea at the wrong time. Then being attacked by a friendly aircraft... was Chicago an unlucky boat? they wondered. The chiefs and officers would work to dispel that thought, but the chiefs and officers held it, too, since all sailors believed in luck, an institutional faith among submarines. If you're not lucky, we can't use you, a famous submarine admiral once said. McCafferty had heard that story often enough. He had so far been devoid of luck.
The captain moved back to the chart table. "What's happening?"
"Not much in the way of a bearing change. He has to be way out there, skipper, like the third convergence zone. Maybe eighty miles. He can't be closing us. We would have lost the signal as he passed out of the zone." The executive officer was showing the strain of the past week's operations, too. "Captain, if I had to guess, I'd say we're tracking a nuclear sub. Probably a noisy one. Acoustical conditions are pretty good, so we have three CZs to play with. And I'd bet he is doing the same thing we are, patrolling a set position. Hell, he could be running back and forth on a racetrack pattern, same as us. That would account for the minimal bearing changes."
The captain frowned. This was the only real contact he'd had since the war started. He was close to the northern border of his patrol area, and the target was probably just on the other side of it. Going after it meant leaving the bulk of his assigned sector unprotected
"Let's go after him," McCafferty ordered. "Left ten degrees rudder, come left to new course three-five-one. All ahead two thirds."
Chicago rapidly turned to a northerly heading, accelerating to fifteen knots, her maximum "silent" speed. At fifteen knots the submarine radiated only a small amount of noise. The risk of counterdetection was slight, since even at this speed her sonars could detect a target five to ten miles off. Her four tubes were loaded with a pair of Mk-48 torpedoes and two Harpoon antiship missiles. If the target was a submarine or a surface ship, Chicago could handle it.
"You're early, Beagle," Doghouse replied.
Edwards was sitting between two rocks and leaning back against a third, the antenna resting on his knee. He hoped it was pointing in a safe direction. The Russians, he figured, were strung mostly along the coast from Keflavik to Reykjavik, well to the west of the direction to the satellite. But there were houses and factories below him, and if they had a listening post down there...
"We had to get here before it got too light," the lieutenant explained. They had run the last kilometer with the rising sun behind them. Edwards took some small comfort in the fact that the Marines were puffing harder than he was.
"How secure are you?"
"There is some movement on the road below us, but that's a good ways off, maybe a mile."
"Okay, you see the electrical switching station southwest of you?"
Edwards got out his binoculars with one hand to check. The map called the place Artun. It held the main electrical transformers for the power grid on this part of the island. The high-voltage lines came in from the east, and the feeder cables radiated out from this point.
"Yeah, I see it."
"How are things going, Beagle?"
Edwards almost said they were going great, but stopped himself. "Lousy. Things are going lousy."
"Roger that, Beagle. You keep an eye on that power station. Anything around it?"
"Stand by." Edwards set down the antenna and gave the place a closer look. Aha! "Okay, I got one armored vehicle, just visible around the comer on the west side. Three-no, four armed men are in the open. Nothing else that I can see."
"Very good, Beagle. Now you keep watch on that place. Let us know if any SAMs show up. We also want data if you see any more fighters. Start keeping records of how many trucks and troops you see, where they're heading. Be sure to write things down. Got that?"
"Okay. We write it all down and report in."
