Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,230

the after bulkhead. The official Navy term for it was bug juice.

"No coffee?" Morris asked. O'Malley shook his head.

"Too much makes me jumpy. You don't want shaky hands when you're landing a helo in the dark." He smiled. "I really am getting too old for this crap."

"Kids?"

"Three boys, and ain't none of them gonna be a sailor if I have anything to say about it. You?"

"Boy and a girl. They're back in Kansas with their mother." Morris went after his sandwich. The bread was a little stale and the cold cuts weren't cold, but he needed to eat. This was the first meal in three days he hadn't eaten alone. O'Malley pushed the potato chips over.

"Get all your carbohydrates, Captain."

"That bug juice'll kill you." Morris nodded at the fruit drink.

"It's been tried before. I flew two years over 'Nam. Mostly search-and-rescue stuff. Got shot down twice. Never got scratched, though. Just scared to death."

Was he that old? Morris wondered. He had to have been passed over for promotion a few times. The captain made a mental note to check O'Malley's date of rank.

"How come you were in CIC?" the captain asked.

"I wasn't very sleepy and I wanted to see how the towed array was working."

Morris was surprised. Aviators didn't generally show this much interest in the ship's equipment.

"The word is you did pretty well with Pharris."

"Not good enough."

"That happens, too." O'Malley watched his skipper very closely. The only man aboard with extended combat experience, O'Malley recognized something in Morris that he hadn't seen since Vietnam. The flyer shrugged. It wasn't his problem. He fished in his flight suit and came out with a pack of cigarettes. "Mind if I smoke?"

"I just restarted myself."

"Thank God!" O'Malley raised his voice. "With all these virtuous children in the wardroom, I thought I was the only dirty old man here!" The two young lieutenants smiled at that, without taking their eyes from the television screen.

"How much experience you have on figs?"

"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 far-away 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's 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 MAD 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