Echo Class (18 page)

“MAKE
our speed five knots,” Bocharkov said. “Bearing?”

“Bearing two-zero-zero, increasing noise.”

Bocharkov looked at Ignatova. “Seems this American never gives up.”

“With due respect, Captain, I do not think at this speed the American sonar can pick us up.”

Bocharkov grunted. “Maybe they put something on the hull of the boat other than those clappers. Something only they can pick up and track, something we do not know about.”

“Depth one hundred meters, course zero-four-zero, speed five knots,” Lieutenant Commander Orlov echoed from across the control room.

Ignatova leaned closer, nearly whispering. “While we have them at high speed now, this high speed disappears about every thirty minutes.”

“Is it every thirty minutes at a certain time, or every thirty minutes the noise of his high-speed revolutions in the water are putting out?”

Ignatova took a few seconds to answer. “I would say the loss of contact with the high-speed noise the destroyer's screws are putting into the water seems to be timed.”

“Then, they may well be tracking us, then leapfrogging ahead to try to catch up with us.”

“If the Americans are tracking us, Captain, then to continue onward with this mission will be a one-way trip; it will be suicide,” Ignatova cautioned in a low voice.

Bocharkov said nothing. Ignatova had only voiced what he was thinking. The question was, how was the American destroyer tracking them? It never occurred to Bocharkov, as it would never occur to MacDonald on the
Dale
, that serendipitous events centered on an Asian port would lead both captains to different interpretations.

 

 

MACDONALD
ambled onto the bridge, passing through the hatch from the combat information center. He patted his pocket. He'd read the unclassified message again from his chair.

“Captain on the bridge!” the boatswain mate of the watch shouted.

The quartermaster of the watch grabbed his pencil and notated the time the skipper had arrived. So it had been done since the U.S. Navy was formally established in 1789 by an act of Congress.

“Carry on,” MacDonald acknowledged as he crossed to the plotting table. “What time to Olongapo?” he asked.

“Sir, we are a few miles from Philippine national waters, then another hour to Subic Bay.”

“That's good, Petty Officer Pratt. What time?”

“I have been doing dead reasoning based on radar fixes with the shore, sir, and I estimate we will be at the harbor entrance at this speed in less than an hour.”

MacDonald grinned. “Pretty specific?”

Platt blushed and glanced at the black-rimmed navy clock mounted on the rear bulkhead. “Should be there by nineteen forty-five hours, sir.”

MacDonald did not say anything. At twenty knots they should have been inside and tied up pierside by this time, but Lieutenant Junior Grade Burkeet had argued successfully for the
Dale
to slow to ten knots every thirty or so minutes. The young whippersnapper was determined to regain contact on the submarine, which, by now, was probably halfway to Kamchatka to explain why it had been caught on the surface. This leapfrogging speed had added time to their trip.

The hatch from Combat opened and Joe Tucker walked onto the bridge, carrying a metal message board in one hand. Unlike when MacDonald entered, no one announced his arrival.

“XO, we have an answer from Subic Operations Center yet?”

“Sent the logistic request when we turned off station, sir. We have not received an answer yet, but I'm confident they will have a pilot and tug ready for our arrival. I have Combat trying to raise Subic to confirm.”

MacDonald nodded. Little was more frustrating to a sailor than to be able to see a liberty port and be unable to reach it because the logistics needed to tie up pierside were either late or nonexistent.

“We could take the
Dale
all the way pierside, Skipper. We've been in Olongapo before; isn't as if we're nicky new kids on the block.”

“We'll see,” he answered.

The boatswain mate walked up with MacDonald's cup filled with coffee. MacDonald's stomach rolled, but he took it with a thanks. He had been drinking coffee since five this morning.

“Have Burkeet and Oliver had any joy with their periodic searches?”

“Not yet, sir, but that does not keep them from searching.”

“And Chief Stalzer?”

“He's down there with them.”

MacDonald nodded.

“Officer of the Deck, let's bring the speed down to twelve knots when we cross into the territorial waters.”

“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Goldstein replied.

“What do we have ahead of us?”

Goldstein shifted from near the hatch to the port-side bridge wing to the navigation table. “Bunch of fishing boats still out at sea, sir. Suspect most will start heading back soon, if they are not already. I show a couple of larger vessels northwest of the harbor entrance. The off-going watch reported them a few minutes before I relieved Lieutenant Kelly. Their course and speed indicate they are heading into Subic also.”

“Probably merchants,” Joe Tucker added. “OPSO has the harbor activity list and it shows a steady stream of Maritime Sealift ships coming into and out of the harbor for the remainder of the week.”

MacDonald nodded. “What do you think the Tripoli Amphibious Task Group and our Carrier Battle Group are up to?”

“Whatever it is, sir, we both know it has to do with Vietnam.”

MacDonald wanted to voice his misgivings about the war, but to express anything less than a positive result would almost seem traitorous. If the politicians would take the hand-cuffs off the military and let them fight, this war could be over within months. North Vietnam would be a U.S. territory or a parking lot.

“Skipper?”

“Uh?”

“Sorry, sir. I was saying that right now we do not have a set-sail date from Subic.”

MacDonald pulled the message from his pocket and handed it to the XO. “Here. I'll trade you,” he said, taking the message board from Joe Tucker's hand. “I'm sure we'll find out more once we arrive and get our telephone lines up. Anything else going on?”

Joe Tucker nodded at the metal message board as he unfolded the message in his hand. “Nasser continues to saber-rattle about pushing Israel off the face of the earth—push them into the Mediterranean.”

MacDonald flipped open the metal cover. “Let's hope we stay out of this fight between the Jews and Arabs. Let them settle it among themselves.”

The red stamp of “TOP SECRET” stared back at MacDonald. He scanned the message; it was a two-pager. When would intelligence weenies ever learn that no one reads more than the first paragraph in a message? He sighed before he started reading. He hated intelligence messages that were punctuated with “probables” and “possibles” as if they were covering their asses.

When he reached the final paragraph, he pulled the first page back and read it fully. It was an encapsulation of the events up to yesterday: Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in May; the same month Gamal Abdel Nasser had ordered the United Nations peacekeepers out of the Sinai. In the last few weeks, the Egyptian Army had massed its armor along the Sinai border with Israel. This week the Syrian and Jordanian armies followed suit. He took a deep breath. As much as he disliked the idea of anything having to do with the Middle East, maybe this time the Arabs meant it. Maybe this time they truly would overrun a country with their combined military strength, which outnumbered the Israelis better than two to one.

He closed the message board. “Not much we can do,” he said.

Joe Tucker had already finished the message MacDonald had handed him. The XO refolded it and traded it for the message board.

“We could do a lot if we had the political will and our people recognized that this is not the world of our fathers; it is a nuclear age where shifting of powers—” Joe Tucker stopped. “Sorry about that. Sometimes when I see a nation founded by the outcasts of the world, survivors of a Western civilization's attempt to eradicate them, it makes me think that everyone in the world has a responsibility to see it succeed. Instead, everything points to America standing back and letting the Arabs do what the Germans failed to finish.”

There was silence on the bridge at the outburst. Joe Tucker was a man of strong opinions, so this was not unusual. The fact was no one really argued or debated with the XO. He usually won, and he had a way with words that left opponents mortally wounded and confused.

“You could be right, XO, but our job—
right now
—is on this side of the world with America's other war.” Then he added somberly, “Let's hope they let us win this one before we jump into another one.”

“Do we have any insight into ‘Beacon Torch'?” Joe Tucker asked.

MacDonald shook his head. “They have a meeting tomorrow morning at Subic Operations Center. Guess while you are seeing to the refueling and replenishing of the ship, I'll be trying to keep my eyes open during a three-hour briefing.”

“I see from the distribution on the message, you'll have plenty of company, to include Admiral Green.” Joe Tucker smiled. “Knowing the admiral, he will want to know why you lost the submarine after tracking it only for a couple of days.”

“That is his way of showering gratitude on his subordinates.”

“Then I would hate to see him upset with them.”

MacDonald chuckled. “It is not a pleasant sight.”

“Any special instructions for tomorrow?”

“After we tie up, let's sit down and go over what we need to accomplish in the next few days while in-port Subic.”

“Aye, sir.”

Joe Tucker turned to go.

“Joe, will you check on the status of our LOGREQ again, please? I want that tugboat and pilot at the harbor when we arrive.”

Joe Tucker saluted and was soon off the bridge. MacDonald looked up at Goldstein and saw the man staring at him. During the discussion, he had forgotten that the OOD was Jewish and his connection with events in the Middle East was probably stronger than that of a man named MacDonald. After all, England had given up trying to push Scotland into the ocean.

 

 

BOCHARKOV
had remained in the control room as the K-122 sonar team tracked the American destroyer closing on them. Sound, or noise as sonarmen preferred to call it, was a strange character. Unlike in the air where most times sound travels in a straight line, in the water it moves in two paths. Straight—as in the air—but over shorter distances; and also like an oscillating wave riding a series of hills and crests for longer distances. You could only hear the oscillating sound wave when you were on a hill or crest that made the sound seem to be a straight line. Made it hard to know if the contact generating the noise was only a few miles from you, or hundreds of miles, its sound riding the roller coaster of hills and crests created by the properties of water.

“It's slowing again,” Lieutenant Kalugin, the antisubmarine weapons officer, reported before pressing the intercom box and asking, “Signal strength?”

Bocharkov waited. On his left stood Ignatova, his XO's impatience nearly contagious. The K-122 had slowed to a crawl to reduce the chance of the Americans detecting him, but still the line of bearing remained constant. The increasing noise signature seemed to indicate a classic constant bearing, decreasing range situation. Everyone, including Bocharkov, was beginning to believe that something on the hull was giving away their position. He had gotten all the clappers, but what if the clappers were nothing more than a decoy from the real spy shit the Americans had put on the K-122?

“It is slowing down again, Captain,” Lieutenant Alexander Kalugin said.

The lieutenant was covered in sweat. His collar was matted to his neck. Beads ran from the man's forehead. Bocharkov tried nonchalantly to touch his own forehead as if in a casual movement. No sweat on his brow. Sweat on a brow of a navy captain was a no-no.

He turned to Ignatova. “Status?”

Ignatova turned to Yakovitch. “Officer of the Deck—status?”

“Course zero-niner-zero, speed five knots. Depth one hundred meters.”

Ignatova looked at Bocharkov.

“Distance to shore?”

Yakovitch heard Bocharkov's question and turned to the navigator sitting in the forward portion of the control room.

Uri Tverdokhleb raised his hand in acknowledgment before Yakovitch could ask him. He had heard the question through the unusual quiet of the compartment. Navigators were envied by their peers. Most ships had two of them. K-122 only had one. Navigators stood no duties other than their navigation watch, and they were excused from Party-political duties, which only increased the envy.

Tverdokhleb pushed his black-rim glasses off the tip of his nose and bent over the chart. He lifted a mechanical compass, placed it on the chart, and walked it out from what he calculated was the location of the K-122 to the nearest bit of shore jutting into the ocean. Only a few seconds passed before Tverdokhleb tossed the compass onto the chart and shouted, “Captain, we are thirty kilometers from shore. But we are less than ten kilometers from where the seabed starts to rise.”

Yakovitch—and most everyone else in the control room—glared at Tverdokhleb; they were under quieten ship orders and here the navigator was shouting.

“Very well,” Bocharkov replied.

Folks in the control room exchanged a few glances before returning to their work. If the captain was unconcerned, then they had no worries.