"Most of my time is on carriers, skipper. Last fourteen months I've been an instructor down at Jax. I've done a lot of odd jobs, most of them with the Seahawk. I think you'll like my bird. The dipping sonar is the best I've ever worked with."
"What do you think about this contact report?"
O'Malley leaned back and puffed on his cigarette with a faraway look. "It's interesting. I remember seeing something on TV about the Doria. She sank on her starboard side. A lot of people have dived to look at the wreck. It's about two hundred feet of water, just shallow enough for amateurs to try. And there's a million cables draped over her."
"Cables?" Morris asked.
"Trawls. Lot of commercial fishing goes on there. They tangle their nets on the wreck. It looks like Gulliver on the beach at Lilliput."
"You're right! I remember that", Morris said. "That explains the noise. It's the tide, or currents whistling through all those cables."
O'Malley nodded. "Yep, that could explain it. I still want to give it a look."
"Why?"
"All the traffic coming out of New York has to pass right overtop the place for one thing. Ivan knows we got a big convoy forming up in New York-he has to know unless the KGB has gone out of business. That's one hell of a good place to park a submarine if they want to put a trailer on the convoy. Think about it. If you get a NLAD contact there, you write it off. The noise from a reactor plant at low power probably won't be louder than the flow noise over the wreck if they get in close enough. If I was a real nervy sub-driver, I'd think hard about using a place like that to belly-up."
"You really do think like them", Morris observed. "Okay, let's see how we should handle this..."
0230 hours. Morris watched the takeoff procedures from the control tower, then walked forward to CIC. The frigate was at battle stations, doing eight knots, her Prairie/Masker systems operating. If there were a Russian sub out there, fifteen or so miles away, there was no way she'd suspect a frigate was nearby. In CIC the radar plot showed the helo moving into position.
"Romeo, this is Hammer. Radio check, over," O'Malley said. The helicopter's on-board data link also transmitted a test message to the frigate. The petty officer on the helicopter communications panel checked it out, and grunted with satisfaction. What was that expression he'd heard? Yeah, right-they had a "sweet lock on momma's gadget." He grinned.
The helo began its search two miles from the grave of Andrea Doria. O'Malley halted his aircraft and hovered fifty feet above the rolling surface.
"Down dome, Willy."
In the back, the petty officer unlocked the hoist controls and lowered the dipping sonar transducer down a hole in the belly of the helicopter. The Seahawk carried over a thousand feet of cable, enough to reach below the deepest of thermocline layers. It was only two hundred feet to the bottom here, and they had to be careful not to let the transducer come near the bottom for risk of damage. The petty officer paid close attention to the cable and halted the winch when the transducer was a hundred feet down. As with surface ships, the sonar readout was both visual and aural. A TV-type tube began to show frequency lines while the sailor listened in on his headphones.
This was the hard part, O'Malley reminded himself. Hovering a helicopter in these wind conditions required constant attention-there was no autopilot-and hunting for a submarine was always an exercise in patience. It would take several minutes for the passive sonar to tell them anything, and they could not use their active sonar systems. The pinging would only serve to alert a target.
After five minutes they had detected nothing but random noise. They recovered the sonar and moved east. Again there was nothing. Patience, the pilot told himself He hated being patient. Another move east and another wait.
"I got something at zero-four-eight. Not sure what it is, a whistle or something in the high-frequency range." They waited another two minutes to make sure it wasn't a spurious signal.
"Up dome." O'Malley brought the helicopter up and moved off northeast for three thousand yards. Three minutes later the sonar went down again. Nothing this time. O'Malley changed positions again. If I ever write a song about hunting submarines, he thought, I'll call it "Again, and Again, and AGAIN!" This time a signal came back-two signals, in fact.
"That's interesting", the ASW officer aboard Reuben James observed. "How close is this to the wreck?"
"Very close," Morris answered. "Just about the same bearing, too."
"Could be flow noise", Willy told O'Malley. "Very faint, just like the last time."
The pilot reached up to flip a switch to feed the sonar signal into his headset. We're looking for a very faint signal, O'Malley reminded himself. "Could be steam noise, too. Prepare to raise dome, I'm gonna go east to triangulate."
