Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,96

and the sergeant directed a private to lead off. They took off their helmets and slung their rifles to appear as harmless as possible, each sure that a hundred pairs of eyes were locked on them from behind the curtained windows. What a way to start a war, he thought.

MV JULIUS FUCIK

"The fires are out, by God!" General Andreyev proclaimed. "There is much damage to our equipment, mainly from water, but the fires are out!" His expression changed when he saw Kherov.

The captain was ghostly pale. An Army medic had bandaged his wound, but there had to be internal bleeding. He struggled to hold himself erect over the chart table.

"Come right to zero-zero-three."

A junior officer was on the wheel. "Right to zero-zero-three, Comrade Captain."

"You must lie down, my captain," Andreyev said softly.

"I must get my ship to safe harbor first!"

The Fucik ran almost due north, the westerly wind and sea on her beam, and water was lapping at the missile wound. His earlier optimism was fading. Some seams in the lower hull had sprung from the missile impact, and water was entering the lower cargo deck, though so far the pumps were keeping up with it. There was twenty thousand tons of cargo to deliver.

"Captain, you must have medical attention," Andreyev persisted.

"After we round the point. When we have the damaged port side alee, then I shall be tended to. Tell your men to stay alert. One more successful attack could finish us. And tell them they have done well. I would be happy to sail with them again."

USS PHARRIS

"Sonar contact, possible submarine bearing three-five-three," the sonarman announced.

And so it begins, Morris said to himself. Pharris was at general quarters for the first leg of the trip away from the U.S. coast. The frigate's tactical towed-array sonar was trailed out in her wake. They were twenty miles north of the convoy, a hundred ten miles east of the coast, just crossing the continental shelf line into truly deep water at the Lindenkohl Canyon. A perfect place for a submarine to hide.

"Show me what you have," the ASW officer ordered. Morris kept his peace and just watched his men at work.

The sonarman pointed to the waterfall display. It showed as a series of small digital blocks, numerous shades of green on a black background. Six blocks in a row were different from the random background pattern. Then a seventh. The fact that they were in a vertical row meant that the noise was being generated at a constant bearing from the ship, just west of north. Up to now, all they had was a direction to a possible noise source. They had no way of knowing the distance nor any of determining if it were really a submarine, a fishing boat with an overly loud motor, or simply a disturbance in the water. The signal source did not repeat for a minute, then came back. Then it disappeared again.

Morris and his ASW officer looked at the bathythermograph reading. Every two hours they dropped an instrument that measured water temperature as it fell through the water, reporting back by wire until it was cut loose to fall free to the bottom. The trace showed an uneven line. The water temperature decreased with depth, but not in a uniform way.

"Could be anything," the ASW officer said quietly.

"Sure could," the captain agreed. He went back to the sonar scope. It was still there. The trace had remained fairly constant for nine minutes now.

But what was the range to it? Water was a fine medium for carrying sound energy, far more efficient at it than air, but it had its own rules. One hundred feet below the Pharris was "the layer," a fairly abrupt change in water temperature. Like an angled pane of glass, it allowed some sound to pass through, but reflected most of it. Some of the energy would be ducted between layers, retaining its intensity for an enormous distance. The signal source they were listening to could be as close as five miles or as distant as fifty. As they watched, the scope trace started leaning a bit to the left, which meant that they were pulling east of it ... or it was pulling west of them, as a submarine might slide aft of her target as part of her own hunting maneuver. Morris went forward to the plotting table.

"If it's a target, it's pretty far off, I think," the quartermaster said quietly. It was surprising how quiet people were during