"Anything else unusual?"
"No, sir, but he must've just used a lot of his reserve air, sir."
"Okay, chief, thank you." McCafferty hung up and wondered if that meant anything.
"Sir, you ever done this before?" the navigator asked.
"I've trailed a lot of Russian boats, but no, never in here."
'The target has to surface eventually, only sixty feet of water down here along Terskiy Bereg." The navigator traced his finger along the chart.
"And we have to break off the trail," McCafferty agreed. "But that's another forty miles."
"Yeah." The navigator nodded agreement. "But starting five miles back, this gulf starts to narrow down like a funnel, and for a submerged sub, it eventually closes down to two, then only one safe passage. Jeez, I don't know." McCafferty came aft again to examine the chart.
"He was content to run fifteen knots at periscope depth all this way down from Kola. The usable depth has been about the same for the past five hours-just bottomed out some-and figures to be the same for another hour or two... but he surfaces anyway. So," McCafferty said, "the only change in environmental conditions is the width of the channel, and that's still over twenty miles. -." The captain mulled this over, staring down at the chart. The sonar room called yet again.
"Conn, aye. What is it, chief?"
"New contact, sir, bearing one-nine-two. Designate target Sierra-5. Twin-screw surface ship, diesel engines. They just came on all at once, sir. Sounds like a Natya-class. Bearing changing right to left slowly, seems to be converging with the boomer. Blade count puts her speed at about twelve knots."
"What's the boomer doing?"
"Speed and bearing are unchanged, skipper. The blow has ended. She's on the surface, sir, we're starting to get pounding and some racing on her screws-wait a minute... an active sonar just started up, we're getting reverbs, bearing seems to be about one-nine-zero, probably from the Natya. It's a very high frequency sonar, above aural range it twenty-two-thousand hertz."
An icy ball suddenly materialized in McCafferty's stomach.
"XO, I'm taking the conn."
"Aye, Captain, you have the conn."
"Diving officer: get her up to sixty feet, high as you can without broaching her. Observation! Up scope!" The search scope came up and McCafferty met it as he had before and quickly checked the surface of the sea for shadows. "Three more feet. Okay, still nothing. What's the ESM reading?"
"Now seven active radar sources, skipper. Plot out about the same as before, plus the new one at one-nine-one, another India-band, looks like another Don-2."
McCafferty turned the periscope handle to twelve-power, its highest setting. The Soviet missile submarine was sitting extremely high in the water.
"Joe, tell me what you see." McCafferty asked, wanting a quick second opinion.
"That's a Delta-III, all right. Looks like she's blown dry, Cap'n, they come out pretty far, and that looks like about three or four feet higher than they usually do. He just used up a lot of his air... That might be the Natya's mast ahead of her, hard to be sure."
McCafferty could feel that his own Chicago was rolling. His hands tingled with the transmitted wave-slaps against the periscope. The seas were crashing against the Delta, too, and he could see water splashing in and out of the limber holes that lined the boomer's flanks.
"ESM board says that signal strengths are approaching detection values," the technician warned.
"His periscopes are both up," McCafferty said, knowing that his scope had already been up too long. He squeezed the trigger to double the magnification. It cost optical detail, but the picture zoomed in on the Delta's conning tower. "The control station atop his sail is fully manned. Everyone has glasses... not looking aft, though. Down scope. Diving officer, take her down ten feet. Nice work, planesmen. Let's see that tape, Joe." The picture returned to the TV monitor in a few seconds.
They were two thousand yards behind the Delta. Beyond her by about half a mile was a spherical radar dome, probably the Natya, rolling noticeably with the beam seas. To house her sixteen SS-18 missiles, the Russian sub had a sloped turtleneck, and from directly aft it looked like a highway ramp. An ungainly design, the Delta, but she had to survive only long enough to launch her missiles, and the Americans had no doubt that her missiles worked just fine.
"Look at that, they blew her so high half her screws are clear," the XO pointed.
"Navigator, how far to shallow water?"
"Along this channel, a minimum of twenty-four fathoms for ten miles."
Why did the Delta surface this far out?
McCafferty lifted the phone. "Sonar, tell me about the Natya."
"Skipper, he's pinging away like mad. Not toward us, but we're getting lots of reflections and reverberations off the bottom."
The Natya was a specialized mine-hunter... also used, to be sure, as an escort for submarines in and out of safe areas. But her minehunting VHF sonar was operating... dear God!
"Left full rudder!" McCafferty shouted.
