The pulls on the pipe grew irregular. His right hand reached forward to the control panel and switched off the signal processors so that he could get the sound without computerized interference. But it was no good. There was too much background noise. He switched the filters back on. Next he tried some changes in his azimuth controls. The SOSUS sensors were designed to give bearing checks through the selective use of individual receptors, which he could manipulate electronically, first getting one bearing, then using a neighbouring gang to triangulate for a fix. The contact was very faint, but not too far from the line, he judged. Franklin queried his computer terminal. The USS Dallas was up there. Gotcha! he said with a thin smile. Another noise came through, a low-frequency rumble that only lasted a few seconds before fading out. Not all that quiet, though. Why hadn’t he heard it before switching the reception azimuth? He set his pipe down and began making adjustments on his control board.
‘Chief?’ A voice came over his headphones. It was the senior duty officer.
‘Yes, Commander?’
‘Can you come back to control? I have something I want you to hear.’
‘On the way, sir.’ Franklin rose quietly. Commander Quentin was a former destroyer skipper on a limited duty after a winning battle with cancer. Almost a winning battle, Franklin corrected himself. Chemotherapy had killed the cancer – at the cost of nearly all his hair, and turning his skin into a sort of transparent parchment. Too bad, he thought, Quentin was a pretty good man.
The control room was elevated a few feet from the rest of the floor so that its occupants could see over the whole crew of duty operators and the main tactical display on the far wall. It was separated from the floor by glass, which allowed them to speak to one another without disturbing the operators. Franklin found Quentin at his command station, where he could tap into any console on the floor.
‘Howdy, Commander.’ Franklin noted that the officer was gaining some weight back. It was about time. ‘What do you have for me, sir?’
‘On the Barents Sea net.’ Quentin handed him a pair of phones. Franklin listened for several minutes, but he didn’t sit down. Like many people he had a gut suspicion that cancer was contagious.
‘Damned if they ain’t pretty busy up there. I read of a pair of Alfas, a Charlie, a Tango, and a few surface ships. What gives, sir?’
‘There’s a Delta there, too, but she just surfaced and killed her engines.’
‘Surfaced, Skipper?’
‘Yep. They were lashing her pretty hard with active sonar, then a ’can queried her on a gertrude.’
‘Uh-huh. Acquisition game, and the sub lost.’
‘Maybe.’ Quentin rubbed his eyes. The man looked tired. He was pushing himself too hard, and his stamina wasn’t half what it should have been. ‘But the Alfas are still pinging, and now they’re headed west, as you heard.’
‘Oh.’ Franklin pondered that for a moment. ‘They’re looking for another boat, then. The Typhoon that was supposed to have sailed the other day, maybe?’
‘That’s what I thought – except she headed west, and the exercise area is northeast of the fjord. We lost her the other day on SOSUS. Bremerton’s up sniffing around for her now.’
‘Cagey skipper,’ Franklin decided. ‘Cut his plant all the way back and just drifting.’
‘Yeah,’ Quentin agreed. ‘I want you to move down to the North Cape barrier supervisory board and see if you can find her, Chief. She’ll still have her reactor working, and she’ll be making some noise. The operators we have on that sector are a little young. I’ll take one and switch him to your board for a while.’
‘Right, Skipper.’ Franklin nodded. That part of the team was still green, used to working on ships. SOSUS required more finesse. Quentin didn’t have to say that he expected Franklin to check in on the whole North Cape team’s boards and maybe drop a few small lessons as he listened in on their channels.
‘Did you pick up on Dallas?’
‘Yes, sir. Real faint, but I think I got her crossing my sector, headed northwest for Toll Booth. If we get an Orion down there, we might just get her locked in. Can we rattle their cage a little?’
Quentin chuckled. He didn’t much care for submariners either. ‘No, NIFTY DOLPHIN is over, Chief. We’ll just log it and let the skipper know when he comes back home. Nice work, though. You know her reputation. We’re not supposed to hear her at all.’
‘That’ll be the day!’ Franklin snorted.
‘Let me know what you find, Deke.’
‘Aye aye, Skipper. You take care of yourself, hear?’
MOSCOW
It was not the grandest office in the Kremlin, but it suited his needs. Admiral Yuri Ilych Padorin showed up for work at his customary seven o’clock after the drive from his six-room apartment in the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt. The large office windows overlooked the Kremlin walls; except for those he would have had a view of the Moscow River, now frozen solid. Padorin did not miss the view, though he had won his spurs commanding river gunboats forty years before, running supplies across the Volga into Stalingrad. Padorin was now the chief political officer of the Soviet Navy. His job was men, not ships.
On the way in he nodded curtly to his secretary, a man of forty. The yeoman leaped to his feet and followed his admiral into the inner office to help him off with his greatcoat. Padorin’s navy-blue jacket was ablaze with ribbons and the gold star medal of the most coveted award in the Soviet military, Hero of the Soviet Union. He had won that in combat as a freckled boy of twenty, shuttling back and forth on the Volga. Those were good days, he told himself, dodging bombs from the German Stukas and the more random artillery fire with which the Fascists had tried to interdict his squadron … Like most men he was unable to remember the stark terror of combat.
It was a Tuesday morning, and Padorin had a pile of mail waiting on his desk. His yeoman got him a pot of tea and a cup – the usual Russian glass cup set in a metal holder, sterling silver in this case. Padorin had worked long and hard for the perks that came with this office. He settled in his chair and read first through the intelligence dispatches, information copies of data sent each morning and evening to the operational commands of the Soviet Navy. A political officer had to keep current, to know what the imperialists were up to so that he could brief his men on the threat.
Next came the official mail from within the People’s Commissariat of the Navy and the Ministry of Defence. He had access to all of the correspondence from the former, while that from the latter had been carefully vetted since the Soviet armed services share as little information as possible. There wasn’t too much mail from either place today. The usual Monday afternoon meeting had covered most of what had to be done that week, and nearly everything Padorin was concerned with was now in the hands of his staff for disposition. He poured a second cup of tea and opened a new pack of unfiltered cigarettes, a habit he’d been unable to break despite a mild heart attack three years earlier. He checked his desk calendar – good,
