Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,70

explosion of a falling depth-bomb. McCafferty considered all these things, and weighed the dangers against the priority of his Flash directive from COMSUBLANT:

Determine at once the operating areas of REDFLT SSBNs.

That sort of language gave him little leeway.

"How tight is the inertial fix?" McCafferty asked as casually as he could.

"Plus or minus two hundred yards." The navigator didn't even look up.

The captain grunted, knowing what the navigator was thinking. They should have gotten a NAVSTAR satellite fix a few hours ago, but the risk of detection was too high in an area crawling with Soviet surface craft. Two hundred yards, plus or minus, was fine accuracy by any rational standard--but not while submerged in shallow water off a hostile coast. How accurate were his charts? Were there unmarked wrecks out there? Even if his navigational data were completely accurate, quarters would be so tight in another few miles that a goof of two hundred yards could ground them, damaging the submarine ... and making noise. The captain shrugged to himself. The Chicago was the best platform in the world for this mission. He'd done this sort of thing before, and he couldn't worry about everything at the same time. McCafferty took a few steps forward and leaned into the sonar compartment.

"How's our friend doing?"

"Continuing as before, skipper. No changes at all in the target's radiated noise level. Just toolin' right along at fifteen knots, dead ahead, no more than two thousand yards off. Pleasure cruise, like," the sonar chief concluded with no small irony.

Pleasure cruise. The Soviets were sorticing their ballistic missile submarines at intervals of one sub every four hours. Already a majority of them were at sea. They had never done that before. And all seemed to be heading east--not north and northeast as they usually did to cruise in the Barents or Kara seas, or most recently under the arctic ice cap itself. SACLANT had learned that piece of information from Norwegian P-3 aircraft patrolling Checkpoint Charlie, the spot fifty miles offshore where Soviet submarines always submerged. Chicago, the nearest sub to the area, had been sent to investigate.

They'd soon detected and gotten into trail position behind a Delta-III, a modern Soviet "boomer," as missile subs were known. Trailing her, they'd stayed within the hundred-fathom curve the whole way ... until the target had turned southeast into shallow water toward Mys Svyatoy Nos, which led to the entrance to the White Sea--all of which was Soviet territorial water.

How far did they dare follow? And what was going on? McCafferty returned to control and went to the periscope pedestal.

"Look around," he said. "Up scope." A petty officer turned the hydraulic ring control and the portside search periscope slid upward from its well. "Hold!" McCafferty stooped at the conning station, catching the instrument as the quartermaster stopped it below the surface. From a position that was murderously uncomfortable, the skipper duck-walked the scope in a full circle. On the forward bulkhead was a television monitor which worked off a camera built into the scope. It was watched by the executive officer and a senior petty officer.

"No shadows," McCafferty said. Nothing to make him suspect that something was there.

"Concur, skipper," the XO agreed.

"Check with sonar."

Forward, the sonar watch listened carefully. Circling aircraft made noise, and there was about an even chance that they'd heard it. But now they heard nothing--which didn't mean that nothing was there, like maybe a high-flying chopper or another Grisha laying to, her diesels shut down as she drifted, listening for someone like Chicago.

"Sonar says they don't have anything, skipper," the XO reported.

"Two more feet," McCafferty ordered.

The quartermaster worked the lever again, bringing the periscope up by twenty-three inches, just barely out of the water in the troughs of the waves.

"Skipper!" It was the senior ESM technician. The highest item on Chicago's periscope was a miniature antenna array which fed signals to a broadband receiver. The instant it projected above the surface, three lights flickered on the ESM tactical warning board. "I read three--five, maybe six India-band search radars. Signature characteristics say ship and land-based search radars, sir, not, repeat not, aircraft sets. Nothing in the Juliet-band." The technician started reading off the bearings.

McCafferty allowed himself to relax. There was no way a radar could detect so small a target as his periscope in these waves. He turned the periscope in a complete circle. "I see no surface ships. No aircraft. Seas about five feet. Estimate the surface wind from the northwest at, oh, about twenty,