Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,103

to the attack center after a brief visit to his private head. Coffee would always keep you awake, he thought, either through the caffeine or the discomfort of an always-full bladder. Things were already not going well. Whatever genius had decided to order the American submarines out of the Barents Sea in the hope of avoiding an "incident" had neatly gotten them out of the way. Just in time for the war to start, the captain grumbled, forgetting that the idea hadn't seemed all that bad at the time.

Had they stuck to the plan, he might already have put a dent in the Soviet Navy. Instead, someone had panicked over the new Soviet missile sub dispositions, and so far as he could tell, the result was that no one had accomplished much of anything. The Soviet subs that had come storming out of the Kola Fjord had not come south into the Norwegian Sea as expected. His long-range sonar reported possible submarine noises far to his north, heading west before fading out. So, he thought, Ivan's sending his boats down the Denmark Strait? The SOSUS line between Iceland and Greenland could make that idea a costly one.

USS Chicago was steaming at five hundred feet just north of the 69deg parallel, about a hundred miles west of Norway's rocky coastline. The Norwegians' collection of diesel boats was inside of him, guarding their own coast. McCafferty understood that, but didn't like it.

So far nothing had gone right, and McCafferty was worried. That was expected, and he could suppress it. He could fall back on his training. He knew what his submarine could do, and had a pretty good idea of what the Russian subs were capable of. He had the superior capabilities, but some Russian could always get lucky. This was war. A different sort of environment, not one judged by umpires and rule books. Mistakes now were not a matter of a written critique from his squadron commander. And so far luck seemed to be on the other side.

He looked around at his men. They had to be thinking the same thoughts, he was sure, but they all depended on him. The crewmen of his submarine were essentially the physical extensions of his own mind. He was the central control for the entire corporate entity known as USS Chicago, and for the first time the awesome responsibility struck him. If he messed up, all these men would die. And he, too, would die--with the knowledge that he had failed them.

You can't think like this, the captain told himself. It will eat you up. Better to have a combat situation where I can limit my thinking to the immediate. He checked the clock. Good.

"Take her up to periscope depth," he ordered. "It's time to check for orders, and we'll try an ESM sweep to see what's happening."

Not a simple procedure, that. The submarine came up slowly, cautiously, turning to allow her sonar to make certain that there was not a ship around.

"Raise the ESM."

An electronics technician pressed the button to raise the mast for his broad-band receiver. The board lit up instantly.

"Numerous electronic sources, sir. Three J-band search sets, lots of other stuff. Lots of VHF and UHF chatter. The recorders are going."

That figures, McCafferty thought. The odds against having anyone here after us are pretty low, though. "Up scope."

The captain angled the search-scope lens upward to scan the sky for a nearby aircraft and made a quick turn around the horizon. He noticed something odd, and had to angle down the lens to see what it was.

There was a green smoke marker not two hundred yards away. McCafferty cringed and spun the instrument back around. A multi-engine aircraft was coming out of the haze--directly in at them.

The captain reached up and spun the periscope wheel, lowering the instrument. "Take her down! All ahead flank! Make your depth eight hundred feet!" Where the hell did he come from?

The submarine's engines fairly exploded into action. A flurry of orders had the helmsmen push their controls to the stops.

"Torpedo in the water, starboard side!" a sonartnan screamed.

McCafferty reacted at once. "Left full rudder!"

"Left full rudder, aye!" The speed log was at ten knots and rising quickly. They passed below one hundred feet.

"Torpedo bearing one-seven-five relative. It's pinging. Doesn't have us yet."

"Fire off a noisemaker."

Seventy feet aft of the control room, a five-inch canister was ejected from a launcher. It immediately started making all kinds of noise for the torpedo to home in on.

"Noisemaker away!"

"Right