War Plan Red (30 page)

“In that case we’ll see what our Swedish colleagues have to say.”

“I have the message traffic you wanted from Captain Bayer, sir,” the watch commander said. “We’ve also seen an increase in U.S. P-3 overflights.”

“Thank you.” Jacobsen scratched his cheek. “Seven knots. The Russian’s a creeper, and in littorals at that. He’s definitely trying to avoid us. What’s he up to?”

Jacobsen flipped through Bayer’s reports on recent contacts in the north with an elusive target. “What it means,” Jacobsen said, answering his own question, “is that earlier, Bayer made contact with this same Russian. Have you run those tapes for matches, Chief?”

“Yes, sir. Thermocline degrades. No positives.”

Jacobsen nodded his understanding. “That Russki’s been hugging the coast all the way south. Up to no good, I’d say.” He turned to the map on the wall. “Show me where you think he is now, Chief.”

Horve got up and pointed to a spot on the Norwegian coast near Bergendal. “Right here.”

“Very well. Put a twenty-four-hour watch on Sectors Five through Eight. Feed what you have directly to me.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Meanwhile we’ll get Bayer and his group down here. What else is available that I can recommend to ComInC?”

The watch commander said, “We have two new Norsk-class frigates on training standby in Stavanger.

They could be activated.”

“Very well.” Jacobsen, dismayed, shook his head slowly. “The damned Russians. The Cold War’s over and we still can’t trust them. But maybe we can blow them to the surface and teach them a lesson.”

15

East of Stavanger, Norway

“H ow is he?” said Scott.

Botkin’s skin had blistered badly and the edema had spread. His face was so swollen that he was almost unrecognizable.

“Not good,” Alex said hoarsely. “He’s not going to make it.”

Scott refused to feel guilty. “He’s on an IV. That’ll help some. And he’s doped up so he’s not in pain.”

Alex slumped forward against the upper bunk in which Botkin lay. She lowered her forehead to the back of both hands gripping the bunk’s side rails. She stood like that for a long moment until Scott touched her and she lifted her head. She looked exhausted.

“Let Doc spell you.”

“No, I’m all right,” Alex said. Though it wasn’t necessary, she adjusted the blanket covering Botkin and checked his IV.

“We’ve been picking up Norwegian and Swedish signals activity on ESM. Some not too far away.

Thought you’d want to know.”

“They’re looking for us?”

“They know a submarine’s in the area. They may not know there’s two of us. Not yet, anyway.”

Alex turned around and leaned against the bunk, a thumb hooked in the pocket of her coveralls. She looked at Scott, then looked away. With her free hand she tried to do something with her hair. “I’m sorry I look so awful.”

“I like the way you look.”

“Like this? Please. When this is over, I’m going to sit in a banya for a week.” She meant the steam bath favored by Russians. “Do all submarines smell as bad as this one?”

“Did you ever hear the term pigboat?”

“I think so.”

“In the early days of submarines it was an apt description of what sailors endured. It went out of favor during World War II, but I suppose it describes our present situation.”

“I’d say so.” She picked at her coveralls and wrinkled her nose.

He wanted to touch her again, but the moment for it seemed to have passed.

“How’s Yuri holding up?” she asked.

“Just fine, now that the oxygenerator is back on line. He’s in the CCP, taking a trick at the diving station.”

“He is?”

“The starpom’s coaching him on the diving planes. He caught on quick. He’s a natural.”

“Something to tell his kids when he gets back.” She caught herself. “If we get back.”

“I thought you’d also want to know that heavy weather has moved in. It’ll mask our movements, the K-363’s too. Things may get a little dicey soon.”

“I know that.”

He pushed away from the bunk and made to go, but Alex put a hand on his arm. “When we get back…”

“We’ll get back.”

She kissed his streaked face. “Thanks.”

“Look after Botkin,” he said, and departed.

Scott stuck the point of a pair of navigation dividers into Gotland, off the eastern coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea.

“Gotland is good cover for a submarine operating in the Baltic. Believe me, I know, because I’ve been there and used it to hide from Russian naval units.”

The starpom looked up from the chart and gave Scott a nod of grudging admiration. “We were told, sir, that American submarines conducted intelligence-gathering operations in the Baltic. I didn’t believe it, but now I do.”

“At the same time,” Scott said, “we’ll be operating in a littoral zone and the limitations it imposes on sub hunting.”

“Shallow coastal water,” Abakov said.

“Right. Turbulence, littoral marine life, bars and channels, turbidity, and pollution. They pose risks to underwater navigation and degrade sonar. So we have to go where we expect the K-363 to go, but try to get there first.”

“And lay a trap,” Abakov said.

“Not so easy to do, Kapitan,” said one of the senior warrant officers.

“No. I expect they’ll continue to hug the coast, which will make it hard to find them, much less head them off. If we hug the coast, we’ll never catch them. Instead, I’m proposing we make a full-out dash across the Skagerrak, cut around the northern coast of Denmark at Skagen, then see if we can’t pick them up as they work south, somewhere near the island of Anholt.”

“But Kapitan, the Danes and Swedes will hear us, no?” said the starpom.

“It’s a risk we have to take.” Scott looked around at the eager faces of the submariners. “Very well, up periscope. Raise the ESM mast.”

The mast rose; the collection panel lit up.

“Various contacts, Kapitan. Sea and shore-based radars, VHF, UHF, commercial mostly.”

Even at full dark and with a gale building, traffic was still heavy, the Skag and the Katt forming a funnel for ships heading for ports in Denmark, Sweden, and the Baltic. That same traffic could pose a hazard to submerged running if enough ship captains grew cautious and decided to anchor in the roadstead north of The Sound to ride out the storm.

“Sonar, report.”

“Many contacts, Kapitan. Too numerous to differentiate. None close aboard.”

Scott raised the scope to its full height to get above the heavy swells riding over the scope’s head, cutting off his view. He walked the scope around and saw only an impenetrable curtain of rain beating on the heaving sea, which registered on sonar as a steady hiss like interference on a radio. He switched to infrared and saw heat blooms from the power plants of two monstrous freighters heading west.

“Down scope. Come to course zero-seven-zero. Make your depth one hundred meters. Both engines ahead full.”

Scott gambled that the racket made by rain and wind on the sea would mask their turbines and passage through the water at high speed. He waited as the K-480 nosed down and accelerated to twenty-five knots.

He stood in the CCP pitying Botkin, not feeling comfortable in his role as skipper of a Russian Akula, but nevertheless relishing the power it conferred. There was nothing that compared with the utter sense of freedom and responsibility that came with command of a submarine, even a Russian one.

“New sonar contact, Kapitan,” pulled Scott from his reverie. “Faint but fast: a two-screw ship.”

“Maybe an ASW frigate. Can you identify him?”

“Aye, Kapitan, definitely a frigate, possible Norsk-class, but I can’t be sure.”

“One of their new ones. Bearing?”

“Rain and our speed through the water is degrading the signature…. Bearing…bearing…one-nine-five, now one-nine-four, one-nine-three…”

“Dropping abaft the port beam,” Scott observed.

“Gone, Kapitan.”

For a moment Scott considered slowing down to get a better read on the contact but decided not to.

“Let’s move it. Both engines ahead flank.”

“Aye, both engines ahead flank.”

Annunciators clinked ahead; the engine room pointer answered bells.

The turbines spooled up; Scott felt power surge to the screw. Any worries he’d had about possible damage to the reactor vanished as the K-480 accelerated to thirty knots.

“I swear to you, Kapitan, it was an Akula.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Litvanov said.

The sonarman removed his headphones, hung them around his neck, and looked up at his captain hovering over the sonar console. “I swear, Kapitan, on my mother’s grave. It was an Akula. I heard her pumps kick in. And here”—he pointed to the spikes on the screen—“I reconfigured the sonar aperture

for a Norwegian Ula-class or a German Type 207 diesel submarine, but it rejected both.”

“Not a Swedish boat? A Gotland- or Näcken-class? Or an American 6881?”

“No, sir, an Akula. Like us.”

Litvanov considered, then said, “Do you have a bearing? He’s been on a southeasterly course.”

“I think zero-three-two but not constant.”

“Is he closing?”

“I think so, Kapitan, but can’t confirm.”

“Then we’ll move southeast, too, and find him.” Litvanov patted the sonarman on the back. “Good, good.”

“So?” Zakayev said, when Litvanov returned to the CCP.

“We seem to have company. A Russian boat. An Akula.”

“How can you be sure?” the girl asked.

“I told you before that someone was after us. Moscow doesn’t just happen to have an Akula nosing around in the Skag and the Katt. No, someone is out there hunting for us.”

Litvanov, thinking, ran a hand over beard stubble.

“But who could be in command of the hunter?” he wondered out loud. “We have so few qualified commanders.” Stumped, he looked at Zakayev. “No matter. Now that we know he’s out there we can set a trap and kill him.”

“Set a trap where?”

“I think,” Litvanov said, “somewhere near The Sound. Submarine skippers are like cats: stealthy but curious. Do you know the old saying?”

“Yes. ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ ” said the girl.

“Then we’ll find us a cat,” Litvanov said.

Petty Officer Horve heard it but didn’t want to believe it: a second Akula, this one making a high-speed dash across the Skagerrak on a southeasterly track. He listened for several minutes to her thrumming machinery and churning prop. He’d never seen a real Akula, only pictures, but was impressed with their streamlined good looks and especially the way they sat low in the water when on the surface.

He’d once monitored an American Improved Los Angeles–class submarine and remembered thinking how quiet she was. But the Russian boat with her rafted machinery was quiet, too, perhaps even quieter than the American when she wanted to be. So why would this Russian be wailing away in the Skagerrak? He decided that not only couldn’t the Russians be trusted, they were also crazy.

Horve waited until he had an explicit sound profile match from the acoustic spectrum analyzer showing on his monitor, then reached for the phone.

Captain Thore Jacobsen didn’t like what he saw: two Akula profiles tagged A-1 and A-2.

“Not a peep from either of them in over two hours, Captain,” said Horve. “Lost them.”

Jacobsen massaged his nose. “Karlskrona also reports that they have no contacts,” he said, referring to the Swedish Navy’s headquarters. “Doesn’t surprise me. Their SOSUS net is old and very thin. They’ve agreed to deploy two patrol craft out of Hälsingborg. If the weather clears, they may be able to give us a HKP helo.”

Jacobsen turned to the wall map.

“According to our information, the tracks of both A-1 and A-2, if computed out, suggest a convergence in the vicinity of Göteborg. That’s where we should concentrate our efforts.”

“Commander Bayer is coming up from the south,” the watch commander said. “Those two new Norsk-class frigates from Stavanger should join Bayer’s group at about eighteen hundred.”

“Very well,” Jacobsen said. “I’ll brief ComInC. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can figure out what game the Russians are playing.”

Captain Bayer studied the decrypted message from Stavanger. “Two contacts. They have positive IDs on two Akulas.” He looked up at Executive Officer Dass, whose surprise mirrored his own. “We’ve been authorized to force them to surface.”

“One of them must be the sub we tracked down the west coast, sir.”

“Which means the bastard got by us.”

Dass said nothing. Bayer was still fuming over that.

“Let’s take a look,” Bayer said. He headed for the CIC, Dass in tow, careful of each step he took over the heaving deck.

He pushed aside the swaying blackout curtain and rapped on the door leading to CIC, which flew open immediately. Weapons Officer Mayan and Sonar Officer Garborg met the captain.

“Just received this,” said Bayer. He handed Mayan the message. Mayan read it and handed it off to Garborg.

Bayer drew a circle with his finger around the coastal area near Göteborg, Sweden. “Stavanger says this is the possible convergence area.”

“Big,” Dass observed.

“Indeed,” Bayer agreed. “Too big. But we’ll have help from Norsk and Kalix.”