By Dawn's Early Light (12 page)

0950 GMT
20°47'N 169°30'W

Frank Dillon, if anyone had stopped to look in on him in his quarters, appeared to be sound asleep sitting up in his desk chair. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He was in the middle of writing his daily letter to his wife and he was listening to a bit of poetry with her.

Actually, this was supposed to be day three of his original patrol, and according to the schedule they made together before each patrol, at this day and at this hour GMT, he was reading Vachel Lindsay's “The Leaden-Eyed.” Jill was reading the same poem at exactly the same time.

It was one of his favorites, so he knew it by heart.

The poem described a people who were the exact opposite of his crew. They were limp, hopeless, leaden-eyed. Jill knew how he felt, and it was why she had directed him to the poem. At first reading, he'd looked up at her and smiled. She knew exactly what it was like for him, being the CO of the
Seawolf
. She had given him a gift, and each time he read this poem, which always came within the first few days of a patrol, he could see her face in its every beautiful detail.

“Captain, this is the conn. We have a positive contact,” the OOD reported.

Dillon opened his eyes. Every day at sea he wrote a short letter to Jill. She did the same to him. When he came back from patrol they handed each other their letters, and in that way they knew what the other had done and thought and felt during those days apart.

He reached for the growler phone. “This is the captain. What do we have, Charlie?”

“We've got a Russian sub, about eighty thousand yards out and making a hell of a racket. Ski thinks it's Akula-seven. Makes her the
Brezhnev
.”

Dillon glanced at the multifunction display over his desk. They were making forty-seven knots on a course of 270° at a depth of six hundred feet. They'd come something over seven hundred nautical miles from Oahu. “Come to all stop. I want silence in the boat. I'm on my way to sonar. Start a fire control track on the target.”

“Aye, skipper.”

Lindsay was saying that young people would die like sheep. But not here, not aboard his boat, Dillon thought as he left his stateroom.

“Make a hole,” he ordered as he reached the stairs to the upper deck.

Crewmen in the passageway and two on the narrow, steep stairs flattened against the nearest bulkhead as Dillon hurried up one deck where sonar was located just forward of the control room.

The boat's twin turbines were spooling down and his XO was on the 1MC ordering
Seawolf
rigged for silent running.

His sonar officer, Lt. (jg) Chuck Pistole, leaned against a bulkhead just inside the sonar room, one cup of a set of headphones pressed against an ear.

“What's the situation?” Dillon asked.

“Ski picked up the target a couple of minutes ago, skipper. A long way out, maybe eighty thousand yards. But he's sure it's Akula-seven on about the same course we're on.”

“We were gaining on him, skipper, but he's pulling away now,” Chief Sonarman Zimenski said. He'd been on duty for the last eighteen hours. He often pulled four or even five watches back-to-back, especially at the beginning of their patrols and whenever something interesting started to happen. The long hours didn't seem to bother him. If anything, the more he worked the sharper he became.

Besides, he didn't want to miss anything cool. His all-time favorite character was Jonesy the sonarman in Tom Clancy's
Hunt for Red October
. Ski had modeled his life and career on the fictional character, and he always carried a dog-eared paperback edition of the novel in his back pocket. He could quote most of the book line-by-line. Jonesy never missed a thing.

“Still making a lot of noise?” Dillon asked.

“Yes, sir. He's moving out and he apparently doesn't care who hears him.”

“Same course as us?”

“Aye, skipper. Same course and same depth.” Zimenski looked over his shoulder, his eyes wide. His dark hair was short-cropped, his face was narrow, his nose large, his chin angular. He looked like the survivor of a Holocaust camp; his cheeks sunken, his uniform fitting him like a scarecrow. “It's like he knew that we'd be here and he was waiting for us to catch up to him. He wanted to make sure we found him.”

“If she's the
Brezhnev
that's exactly what I think they're doing,” Dillon said. He glanced up at the multi-function display. Their speed was already below twenty knots and dropping fast.

The
Seawolf
was equipped with an updated BQQ 5D sonar suite with its huge bow-mounted passive/active spherical array behind the fiberglass bows and the wide aperture passive flank arrays down the sides of the boat. She was also fitted with the TB-16 and TB-29 surveillance and tactical towed arrays, as well as the BQS 24 active sonar system for close-range work.

No other navy in the world had a better system. And yet all submarines, including the
Seawolf
, were effectively blind directly aft. In their baffles.

As long as the Akula was moving directly away from them, she could not know that she was being followed. But neither could
Seawolf
know if she in turn was being followed if she maintained a steady course.

Dillon stepped back out into the passageway. His XO was at the control room hatch. “Charlie, give me a slow three-sixty to port while we've still got steerage way. Load tubes one and three, come to battle stations torpedo, and stand by to get us out of here.”

“Aye, skipper.”

Dillon turned back. “We're going to clear our baffles, so look sharp,” he told Zimenski.

“Do you think that sierra sixteen is a decoy, Cap'n?” Pistole asked.

“The
Abe Lincoln
's battle group ran across an Akula out here yesterday. But she was the
V.I. Lenin
. I'd like to know where she is.”

Zimenski adjusted his controls as
Seawolf
began her slow turn to port.

“All hands, all hands. Battle stations torpedo. Battle stations torpedo. All sections report.”

The 1MC announcement from the conn was muted because
Seawolf
was operating in silent mode. Throughout the boat the crew was quickly and quietly coming to battle stations.

Tubes one and three were being loaded with HE versons of the Mark 48 ADCAP torpedoes, each carrying 650 pounds of PBXN-103 high explosive. The Mark 48s were wire-guided and could seek out and home in on targets out to fifty thousand yards, nearly thirty miles, at speeds of more than sixty knots. The Advanced Capability Mark 48, which was an improvement over the Mod 4s, was smart. It could defeat most enemy electronic and acoustic countermeasures, and could send back targeting data to the
Seawolf
even while she was running. It meant that the Mark 48 ADCAP could be launched and then guided to strike any part of the enemy ship the captain wanted to strike for the maximum effect.

After four minutes
Seawolf
was back on her original course. Zimenski shook his head.

“We're clear, skipper.”

Dillon cocked an ear as if he were trying to listen for sounds outside of his boat.

Zimenski suddenly held up a hand. “Wait.” He adjusted the gain and a broadband frequency control on his BSY-2 console. The green waterfall display sharpened up. “I have a sound line,” he said. “Faint.”

The other three technicians manning BSY-2 consoles each took a range of frequencies now that the hunt had begun.

Zimenski keyed his mike. “Conn, sonar. Possible new subsurface contact, designated sierra seventeen. Bearing one-six-five, range within two thousand yards and closing slowly.”

Dillon donned a headset and listened. At first he couldn't hear much beyond the mush of oceanic background noise. Possibly some biologics a long ways off.

Zimenski made a grease-pencil mark on his screen, which was definitely showing a frequency line now, though an extremely faint one.

Then Dillon had it. Buried in the noise. A rhythmic noise, like a bathroom fan slowly oscillating left, then right, as its blades turned at a constant rate. “It's an air handler of some kind,” he said.

“It's an AC fan, skipper,” Zimenski agreed. “But the shock absorbers on the motor are going bad. The Viktors and some of the early Mikes have the same problem.”

Dillon keyed his headset mike. “Conn, this is the captain. Start a TMA on sierra seventeen. I'm betting she's the other Akula. The
V.I. Lenin
.”

“Aye, Cap'n,” Bateman responded.

Dillon smiled. “Okay, the
Lenin
went fishing with the
Brezhnev
as bait. Let's see what he does now that he thinks he has us.” He gave the sonar crew a nod. “Good job, gentlemen.”

0955 GMT
V.I. LENIN

Sonarman First Rank Gennadi Markin was in trouble.

Each minute that went by in which he didn't report to the captain, he dug an even deeper hole for himself. He was already on the demerit list for failing to detect the American Sea King dipping buoys, which had bracketed them two days ago. Now this.

The other three sonarmen on shift were shooting him sideways glances. They knew enough to stay out of it, to protect their own asses. It was a Russian virtue.

Markin completed the diagnostic on his sonar set, which showed that the equipment was functioning well within its parameters.

Captain Savin was a tough bastard, but he was usually fair and he was always brilliant. He was the smartest man aboard the boat. Everyone had a great deal of respect for him. No one questioned a single order that he gave, no matter how seemingly strange it was at the time.

They had dropped out of sight eight hours ago, even from their sister boat the
Brezhnev
, which had circled around sniffing after their trail.

Then they'd heard the oncoming American submarine, making turns for flank speed, just as the captain had predicted, and almost on the precise course the captain had predicted. The only thing he had gotten wrong was the depth. The
Seawolf
was running at about two hundred meters, instead of the three hundred meters they'd expected.

Brezhnev
suddenly got the hell out of there, making a racket as she left. It made Markin wonder if
Brezhnev
had been playing some kind of a trick. First they'd tried to find the
Lenin
without luck, and then when the American submarine had appeared on the acoustic horizon they'd taken off with so much noise that a deaf man could have followed them.

The
Seawolf
passed within one thousand meters of the
Lenin
, which should have turned onto the Americans' course and followed in their baffles.

Markin was supposed to give the go-ahead when the
Seawolf
was safely past.

But the American submarine had simply disappeared four and a half minutes ago.

At first Markin was convinced that he was experiencing an equipment failure. The
Seawolf
was so close that he should have heard something. That was his first mistake, not informing the captain. And then he had compounded his initial error by continuing to look for a phantom electronic problem.

He girded himself, then keyed his headset. “Conn, sonar. Sierra nineteen has disappeared. I believe that he has gone to silent running.”

He'd screwed up twice, but there was no reason he couldn't redeem himself by finding the bastard American submarine.

In the control room, Capt. Second Rank Mikhail Savin was at the chart table working the three-sub problem on paper.

His XO, Lieutenant Yuri Sergeyev, was at the weapons control panel on the opposite side of the conn. He answered the sonar call.

“Sonar, conn, this is the
starpom
. What was his last range and bearing?”

Captain Savin looked up and caught Sergeyev's eye. His
starpom
shook his head. The
Seawolf
's going silent at this moment came as a surprise to him too.

“Range was sixteen hundred meters, bearing one-nine-five.”

“Sonar, were there any transients at all? Anything that would help you determine if his aspect was changing, or if he was maintaining his course?”

“Nothing yet, sir. But we're looking.”

“Is
Brezhnev
out of range?”

“
Da
, to us. But it's possible Sierra nineteen still has them. Their equipment is…very sensitive.”

“Keep looking.”

“
Da
.”

Sergeyev came over to the captain. “The trap was working, but now he knows we're here.”

“Or suspects,” Savin said. “We're making no noise.” Or at least no noise that a
Seawolf
-class submarine was supposed to detect, Savin finished the thought. They'd come through the
Abe Lincoln
's exercise intact, with only one of them being detected. To this point the intelligence information they were getting from fleet HQ at Vladivostok was spot-on. The
Abraham Lincoln
battle group had been exactly where it was predicted to be, and testing its new laser targeted system, as it was predicted.

The
Seawolf
had come charging out of Pearl Harbor, also as predicted. The trap had been set. The American submarine had approached, then passed, and finally disappeared.

Savin managed a fatalistic smile. Military intelligence was like an opinion. Everybody had something to contribute, but most of the time they didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

“What do you want to do, Captain?” Sergeyev asked. The
Lenin
was said to be the safest place in all of Russia no matter where the boat happened to be, because Savin knew what he was doing.

Savin glanced at the chart. It would have been a nice exercise, to pop up behind an American submarine and go sonar active. Boo! But Vladivostok was taking this exercise more seriously than normal for some reason. They'd come this far, there was no reason not to continue playing the game.

“Make turns for four knots, I want absolutely no pump noises from our reactor. Come left to two-six-zero and maintain our present depth.”

Sergeyev, who'd worked his way through four boats, and had given up a command of his own, to serve with Captain Savin, had the utmost respect for the man. But even masters made mistakes. “Sorry to disagree, Captain, but we cannot be certain
Seawolf
has not changed course. We could put ourselves in a collision situation.”

Savin nodded. “A good point, Yuri, and a valid one if Sonarman Markin wasn't lying to us.” The captain was a small man, less than a meter sixty, and less than seventy kilos. His slight build made his head seem too large for his body. Instead of making him look grotesque, however, his broad forehead and wide-spaced deep blue eyes made him seem infallible.

“Sir?”

Savin turned to the chart where he'd laid out the relative positions of the
Lenin
and the
Seawolf
at ten-minute intervals for the past hour, and the predicted track west. The
Seawolf
had come within one thousand meters of them, directly off their starboard side. He tapped a narrow finger on the chart where the
Seawolf
's last position had been marked.

“He can't be sixteen hundred meters away on that bearing,” Savin said. “It's simple trigonometry. Sonarman Markin lost him, but waited three maybe four minutes to tell us.”

“Why?”

Savin shrugged. “He's a good man. We'll find out without ruining him.” He smiled again, patiently as a father might with a son. “Four knots, Yuri. Two-six-zero, and quietly.”