Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,97

antisubmarine warfare exercises, Morris thought, as though a submarine might hear their voices.

"Sir," the ASW officer said after a moment. "With no perceptible change in bearing, the contact has to be a good fifteen miles off. That means it has to be a fairly noisy source, probably too far to be an immediate threat. If it's a nuclear sub, we can get a cross-bearing after a short sprint."

Morris looked to the CIC's after bulkhead. His frigate was steaming at four knots. He lifted a "growler" phone.

"Bridge, Combat."

"Bridge aye. XO speaking."

"Joe, let's bend on twenty knots for five minutes. See if we can get a cross-bearing on the target we're working."

"Aye, skipper."

A minute later, Morris could feel the change in his ship's motion as her steam plant drove the frigate hard through the six-foot seas. He waited thoughtfully, wishing his ship had one of the more sensitive 2X arrays being fitted to the Perry-class fast-frigates. It was a predictably long five minutes, but ASW was a game that demanded patience.

Power was reduced, and as the ship slowed, the pattern on the sonar screen changed from random flow noise to random ambient noise, something more easily perceived than described. The captain, his ASW officer, and the sonar operator watched the screen intently for ten minutes. The anomalous sound tracing did not reappear. In a peacetime exercise they would have decided that it was a pure anomaly, water-generated noise that had stopped as unpredictably as it had started, perhaps a minor eddy that subsided on the surface. But now everything they detected had a potential red star and a periscope attached.

My first dilemma, Morris thought. If he investigated by sending his own helicopter or one of the Orion patrol aircraft, he might be sending them after nothing at all, and away from a path that could end with a real contact. If he did nothing, he might not be prosecuting a real contact. Morris sometimes wondered if captains should be issued coins with YES and NO stamped on either side, perhaps called a "digital decision generator" in keeping with the Navy's love for electronic-sounding titles.

"Any reason to think it's real?" he asked the ASW officer.

"No, sir." The officer wondered by this time if he had been right to call it to his captain's attention. "Not now."

"Fair enough. It won't be the last one."

19

Journeys End / Journeys Begin

HAFNARFJORDUR, ICELAND

Sergeant James Smith was a company clerk, which meant that he carried his commander's maps, Edwards was grateful to learn. He would have been less happy to learn what Smith thought about what they were doing, and who was leading this party. A company clerk was also supposed to pack an ax with him, but since Iceland was almost entirely devoid of trees, his was still in the company headquarters, probably burned down to a charred axhead by now. They walked east in silence, their eyes punished by the low sun, past two kilometers of lava field that gave mute testimony to Iceland's volcanic birth.

They moved fast, without pausing for rest. The sea was at their back, and as long as they could see it, men on the coast might see them. Each puff of dust raised by their boots made them feel increasingly vulnerable, and Private Garcia, who brought up the rear of their small unit, periodically turned and walked backward for a few yards to be sure that no one was following them. The others looked ahead, to the sides, and up. They were sure that Ivan had thought to bring a helicopter or two along. Few things can make a man feel as naked as an aircraft filled with eyes.

The ground was almost totally barren. Here and there a few sprigs of grass fought their way through the rocks to sunlight, but for the most part the terrain was as barren as the surface of the moon--the Apollo astronauts had trained somewhere in Iceland for that very reason, Edwards remembered. The mild surface winds scoured up the slopes they were climbing, raising small quantities of dust that made the lieutenant sneeze periodically. He was already wondering what they would do when their rations ran out. This was no place to try living off the land. He'd been in Iceland only for a few months, and hadn't had a single chance to tour the countryside. Cross one bridge at a time, Edwards told himself. People grow their own food everywhere. There have to be farms around, and you'll be able to find them on