were still overhead, still dropping sonobuoys, but something had gone wrong for them. They weren't coming very close now. He'd had to maneuver clear only four times. That would have been a lot in peacetime, but after the past few days it seemed like a vacation.
The captain had taken the chance to rest himself and his crew. Though they would all have gratefully accepted a month in bed, the four or six hours of sleep they'd all had were like a cup of water for a man in the desert, enough to get them a little farther. And there was only a little farther to go: exactly one hundred miles to the jagged edge of the arctic ice. Sixteen hours or so.
Chicago was about five miles ahead of her sisters. Every hour, McCafferty would maneuver his sub to an easterly course and allow his towed-array sonar to get a precise fix on them. That was hard enough: Boston and Providence were difficult to pick up even at this distance.
He wondered what the Russians were thinking. The mobbing tactics of the Krivak-Grisha teams had failed. They'd learned that it was one thing to use those ships for barrier operations against the Keypunch team, but something very different to rush after a submarine with long-range weapons and computerized fire-control. Their dependence on active sonobuoys had reduced the effectiveness of their ASW patrol aircraft, and the one thing that had nearly worked--placing a diesel sub between two sonobuoy lines, then spooking their target into moving with a randomly dropped torpedo--had failed also. Thank God they didn't know how close they came with that, McCafferty thought to himself. Their Tango-class subs were formidable opponents, quiet and hard to locate, but the Russians were still paying for their unsophisticated sonars. All in all, McCafferty was more confident now than he'd been in weeks.
"Well?" he asked his plotting officer. "Looks like they're steaming as before, sir, about ten thousand yards behind us. I think this one's Boston. She's maneuvering a lot more. Providence here is plodding along pretty straight. We got a good fix on her."
"Left ten degrees rudder, come to new course three-five-five," McCafferty ordered.
"Left ten degrees rudder, aye, coming to new course three-five-five. Sir, my rudder is left ten degrees."
"Very well." The captain sipped at a cup of hot cocoa. It made a nice change of pace from coffee. Chicago turned slowly north. In the engine spaces aft, the submarine's engineer crew kept watch on their instruments as the reactor plant turned out an even 10-percent power.
About the only bad news was the storm on the surface. For some reason a series of squalls was parading around the top of the world, and this one was a real growler. The sonar crew estimated fifteen-foot waves and forty-knot winds, unusual for the arctic summer. It knocked 10 to 20 percent off their sonar performance, but would make for ideal conditions as they approached the icepack. The sea conditions would be grinding acre-sized ice floes into ice chips, and that much noise would make the American subs very hard to detect in the ice. Sixteen hours, McCafferty told himself. Sixteen hours and we're out of here.
"Conn, sonar, we have a contact bearing three-four-zero. Not enough data to classify at this time."
McCafferty went forward to sonar.
"Show me."
"Right here, skipper." The chief tapped the display. "I can't give you a blade-count yet, too sketchy for anything, Well, it smells like a nuclear boat," the chief allowed.
"Put up your model."
The chief pushed a button and a secondary screen displayed the predicted sonar range, generated by computer from known local water conditions. Their direct-path sonar range was just over thirty thousand yards. The water was not deep enough yet for convergence zones, and they were beginning to get low-frequency background noise from the icepack. It would impede their ability to discriminate sonar contacts in the same way bright sunlight lessens the apparent intensity of an electric light.
"Getting a slow bearing change here. Going left-to-right, bearing to target is now three-four-two ... fading out a little bit. What's this?" The chief looked at a new fuzzy line on the bottom of the display. "Possible new contact bearing zero-zero-four." The line faded out and stayed out for two minutes, then came back on bearing zero-zero-six.
McCafferty debated whether to go to battle stations. On one hand he might need to engage a target very soon ... but probably not. Wouldn't it be better to give his crew a few more minutes' rest? He