Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,231

helo began its search two miles from the grave of Andrea Doria. O'Malley halted his aircraft and hovered fifty feet above the rolling surface.

"Down dome, Willy."

In the back, the petty officer unlocked the hoist controls and lowered the dipping sonar transducer down a hole in the belly of the helicopter. The Seahawk carried over a thousand feet of cable, enough to reach below the deepest of thermocline layers. It was only two hundred feet to the bottom here, and they had to be careful not to let the transducer come near the bottom for risk of damage. The petty officer paid close attention to the cable and halted the winch when the transducer was a hundred feet down. As with surface ships, the sonar readout was both visual and aural. A TV-type tube began to show frequency lines while the sailor listened in on his headphones.

This was the hard part, O'Malley reminded himself. Hovering a helicopter in these wind conditions required constant attention--there was no autopilot--and hunting for a submarine was always an exercise in patience. It would take several minutes for the passive sonar to tell them anything, and they could not use their active sonar systems. The pinging would only serve to alert a target.

After five minutes they had detected nothing but random noise. They recovered the sonar and moved east. Again there was nothing. Patience, the pilot told himself. He hated being patient. Another move east and another wait.

"I got something at zero-four-eight. Not sure what it is, a whistle or something in the high-frequency range." They waited another two minutes to make sure it wasn't a spurious signal.

"Up dome." O'Malley brought the helicopter up and moved off northeast for three thousand yards. Three minutes later the sonar went down again. Nothing this time. O'Malley changed positions again. If I ever write a song about hunting submarines, he thought, I'll call it "Again, and Again, and AGAIN!" This time a signal came back--two signals, in fact.

"That's interesting," the ASW officer aboard Reuben James observed. "How close is this to the wreck?"

"Very close," Morris answered. "Just about the same bearing, too."

"Could be flow noise," Willy told O'Malley. "Very faint, just like the last time."

The pilot reached up to flip a switch to feed the sonar signal into his headset. We're looking for a very faint signal, O'Malley reminded himself. "Could be steam noise, too. Prepare to raise dome, I'm gonna go east to triangulate."

Two minutes later, the sonar transducer went into the water for a sixth time. The contact was now plotted on the helicopter's on-board tactical display that sat on the control panel between pilot and copilot.

"We got two signals here," Ralston said. "About six hundred yards apart."

"Looks that way to me. Let's go see the near one. Willy--"

"Cable within limits, ready to raise, skipper."

"Up dome. Romeo, Hammer. You got what we got?"

"Affirmative, Hammer," Morris answered. "Check out the southern one."

"Doing that right now. Stand by." O'Malley paid close attention to his instruments as he flew toward the nearer of the two contacts. Again he halted the aircraft. "Down dome."

"Contact!" the petty officer said a minute later. He examined the tone lines on his display and mentally compared them with data he had on Soviet submarines. "Evaluate this contact as steam and plant noises from a nuclear submarine, bearing two-six-two."

O'Malley listened for thirty seconds. His face broke into a slight smile. "That's a nuc boat all right! Romeo, Hammer, we have a probable submarine contact bearing two-six-two our position. Moving to firm that fix up right now."

Ten minutes later they had the contact locked in. O'Malley made directly for it and lowered his sonar right on top of the contact.

"It's a Victor-class," the sonarman aboard the frigate said. "See this frequency line? A Victor with his reactor plant turned down to minimum power output."

"Hammer," Morris called. "Romeo. Any suggestions?"

O'Malley was flying away from the contact, having left a smoke float to mark it. The submarine probably hadn't heard them because of the surface conditions, or if he had, he knew his safest bet was to sit on the bottom. The Americans carried only homing torpedoes, which couldn't detect a submarine on the bottom. Once launched, they'd either motor along in a circle until running out of fuel or drive straight into the bottom. He could go active and try to flush the submarine off the bottom, he thought, but active sonar wasn't all that effective in shallow water, and what if Ivan didn't move? The Seahawk was