Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (51 page)

“I don't understand.”

“There used to be a Strategic Air Command base on
Guam
. You know, nukes, all that big shit? In case the crap hit the fan, they were supposed to disperse off Andersen Air Force Base so one missile couldn't get them all. There's two big-bird runways on
Saipan
, the airport and Kobler, two more on
Tinian
, leftovers from World War Two, and two more on
Guam
.”

“They're still good to use?”

“No reason why not.” Oreza's head turned. “We don't get many hard freezes here to rip things up.” The next 747 came off Saipan International, and in the clear evening sky they could see yet another coming in from the eastern side of the island.

“This place always this busy?”

“No, most I've ever seen. Goddamned hotels must be packed solid.” Another shrug. “Well, that means the hotels'll be interested in buying that fish off ya.”

“How much?”

“Enough to cover the charter, Pete. That's one big fish you brought in. But tomorrow you have to get lucky again.”

“Hey, you find me another big boy like our friend down there, and I don't care what you charge.”

“I love it when people say that.” Oreza eased back on the throttles as he approached the marina. He aimed for the main dock. They needed the hoist to get the fish off. The albacore was the third-largest he'd ever brought in, and this Burroughs guy wasn't all that bad a charter.

“You make a living at this?”

Portagee nodded. “With my retirement pay, yeah, it's not a bad life. Thirty-some years I drove Uncle's boats, and now I get to drive me own—and she' s paid for.”

Burroughs was looking at the commercial ships now. He lifted the skipper's binoculars. “You mind?”

“Strap around your neck if you don't mind.” Amazing that people thought the strap was some sort of decoration.

“Sure.” Burroughs did that, adjusting the focus for his eyes and examining Orchid Ace. “Ugly damned things…”

“Not made to be pretty. Made to carry cars.” Oreza started the final turn in.

“That's no car. Looks like some kind of construction thing, bulldozer, like…”

“Oh?” Portagee called for his mate, a local kid, to come topside and work the lines. Good kid, fifteen, might try for the Coast Guard and spend a few years learning the trade properly. Oreza was working on that.

“The Army have a base here?”

“Nope. The Air Force and Navy still have some folks down on
Guam
, but not even much there anymore.” There. He killed his throttles, and the Springer drifted to a halt, just perfect. Again, Oreza thought, as always taking pleasure from doing a seaman’s job just so. A man on the dock turned the crank to swing the hoist over his fantail, giving a thumbs-up when he saw the size of the fish. Watching to see that the boat was tied up properly, Oreza sat back, killed his engines, and thought about the evening’s first beer.

“Here, take a look.” Burroughs handed the glasses over.

Portagee turned in his chair and readjusted the binoculars to his eyes before training them in on the car carrier down the coast. He knew how the ships were arranged. He’d done safety inspection on them while on shore duty with the Coast Guard. He’d inspected this very ship, in fact. one of the first built-for-the-purpose automobile ferries, designed to carry trucks and other cargo as well as private cars. Some of the decks had a lot of overhead . . .

“What?”

“You know what it is?”

“No.” It was a tracked vehicle. It was in shadows because the sun was low in the sky, but the paintwork was definitely dark, and it had a large box of some sort on the back. Then something clicked. It was some kind of missile launcher. He remembered seeing them on TV during the Persian Gulf War, just before his retirement. Oreza stood to get a slightly better angle. There were two others in the parking lot..

“Oh, okay,! got it, some sort of exercise,” Burroughs said, heading down the ladder to the main deck. “See, that’s a fighter plane over there. My cousin used to fly it before he went with American. It’s an F-15 Eagle, Air Force bird.”

Oreza turned the glasses and caught the fighter circling. Sure enough, there were two of them flying in a nice tight military formation, F- 15 Eagle fighters, circling the center of the island in a classic display of protection for one’s native soil . . . except for one thing. The national emblem on the wings was a solid red circle.

Again. Jones preferred the paper printouts to an electronic display. The latter was better for live-action, but on high-speed playback got the eyes tired too fast, and this was a job that demanded care. Lives might depend on it, he told himself, already thinking that was a lie. Two senior chief oceanographic technicians went through the pages with him. They started with
midnight
, and had to check carefully. The submarine-exercise area off
Kure
atoll had been chosen for its proximity to a series of hydrophones. part of the Pacific SOSUS system. The near array was one of the last ever implanted. and was the size of a garage of. small house. Actually part of a mega-array, it was electronically linked to another installation fifty nautical miles away. But that one was older, smaller, and less capable. A cable that linked them both, leading first to Kure, then to Midway, where there was a satellite uplink to back up the cable that led all the way to Pearl Harbor. The ocean was in fact crisscrossed with such cables. For quite some time during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had laid almost as much as Bell Telephone, occasionally chartering the latter’s ships for the task.

“Okay, there’s Kurushio snorting,” Jones said, circling the black marks in red.

“How the hell did you ever beat Masker?” one of the chiefs asked in surprise.

“Well, it is a good system, but you ever really listen to it?”

“I haven’t been at sea in ten years,” the senior chief replied.

“When I was on
Dallas
, we played games with Moosbrugger for a week, down at AUTEC in the
Bahamas
.”

“The Moose has a big rep.”

“And it’s a no-shit rep, too. We couldn’t hold her, she couldn’t hold us, it was a real mother,” Jones went on, speaking now not like a civilian contractor with a doctorate, but like the proud sonarman he’d been, and, he realized, still was. “They had a helicopter pilot who was giving us fits, too. Anyway’ ‘—he flipped another page—’ ‘then I figured it out. Masker sounds like rain hitting the surface, like a spring shower. Not real noisy, but the freqs are unique, you can get a good cut on ‘em. Then I realized all we had to do was see what the topside weather was like. If it’s blue sky, and you hear rain bearing zero-two-zero, that’s the guy. It was clear yesterday northwest of
Kure
. I checked with Fleet Weather before I came over."

The senior chief nodded and smiled. “I’ll remember that one, sir.”

“Okay, we have the Jap here at
midnight
. Now let’s see what else we can find. He flipped forward to the next fan-fold page. Had circumstances been different he might have seen it as a paper Slinky, one of his new son’s favorite toys. ”That’s gotta be
Asheville
, probably sprinting off to restart a scenario. She’s wearing a speed screw, isn’t she?"

“I don’t know.”

“I do. I don’t think we would have gotten this many hits on her with a patrol screw. Let’s plot this out.”

“Running a plot, already have some of it,” another chief reported. The process was largely computer-aided now. Once it had been a real black art.

“Posit?” Jones looked up.

“Position’s right about here, same as the beacon, almost. Sir,” the chief said patiently, making a black mark on the plastic-covered wall chart, “we know where she is, I mean, the rescue—”

“Ain’t gonna be no rescue.” Jones looked up and stole a cigarette from a passing seaman. There, I finally said it out loud.

“You can’t smoke in here,” one of the chiefs said. “We have to go outside—”

“Give me a light and follow me on this,” Jones ordered. He flipped another page, checking the 60Hz line. “Nothing…nothing. Those diesel boats are pretty good…but if they're quiet, they ain't snorting, and if they ain't snorting they ain't going very far…
Asheville
sprinted out this way, and probably then she came back in…” Another page.

“No rescue, sir?” It had taken fully thirty seconds for the question to be asked.

“How deep's the water?”

“I know that, but the escape trunks…I mean, I've seen it, there's three of them.”

Jones didn't even look up, taking a puff off his first smoke in years. “Yeah, the mom's hatch, that's what we called it on
Dallas
. 'See, mom, if anything goes wrong, we can get out right there.' Chief, you don't get off one of these things, okay? You don't. That ship is dead, and so's her crew. I want to see why.”

“But we already have the crush sounds.”

“I know. I also know that two of our carriers had a little accident today.” Those sounds were on the SOSUS printouts, too.

“What are you saying?”

“I'm not saying anything.” Another page. At the bottom of it was a large black blotch, the loud sound that marked the death of USS Asheville and all—“What the fuck is this?”

“We think it's a double-plot, sir. The bearing's almost the same as the
Asheville
sound, and we think the computer—”

“The time's off, goddamn it, a whole four minutes.” He flipped back three pages. “See, that's somebody else.”

“
Charlotte
?
”

It was then that Jones felt even colder. His head swam a little from the cigarette, and he remembered why he'd quit. The same signature on the paper, a diesel boat snorting, and, later, a 688-class sprinting. The sounds were so close, nearly identical, and the coincidence of the bearing from the new seafloor array could have made almost anyone think…

“Call Admiral Mancuso and find out if
Charlotte
has checked in.”

“But—”

“Right now, Senior Chief!”

Dr. Ron Jones stood up and looked around. It was the same as before, almost. The people were the same, doing the same work, displaying the same competence, but something was missing. The thing that wasn't the same was…what? The large room had a huge chart of the
Pacific Ocean
on its back wall. Once that chart had been marked with red silhouettes, the class shapes of Soviet submarines, boomers, and fast-attacks, often with black silhouettes in attendance, to show that Pacific SOSUS was tracking “enemy” subs, quarterbacking American fast-attacks onto them, vectoring P-3C Orion ASW birds in to follow them, and occasionally to pounce on and harry them, to let them know who owned the oceans of the world. Now the marks on the wall chart were of whales, some of them with names, just as with the Russian subs, but these names were things like “Moby and Mabel,” to denote a particular pod with a well-known alpha-pair to track by name. There wasn't an enemy now, and the urgency had gone. They weren't thinking the way he'd once thought, heading “up north” on
Dallas
, tracking people they might one day have to kill. Jones had never really expected that, not really-really, but the possibility was something he'd never allowed himself to forget. These men and women, however, had. He could see it, and now he could hear it from the way the chief was talking to SubPac on the phone.

Jones walked across the room and just took the receiver away. “Bart, this is Ron. Has
Charlotte
checked in?”

“We're trying to raise her now.”

“I don't think you're going to, Skipper,” the civilian said darkly.

“What do you mean?” The reply caught the meaning. The two men had always communicated on a nonverbal level.

“Bart, you better come over here. I'm not kidding, Cap'n.”

“Ten minutes,” Mancuso promised.

Jones stubbed his smoke out in a metal waste can and returned to the printouts. It was not an easy thing for him now, but he flipped to the pages where he'd stopped. The printouts were made with pencils that were located on metal shuttle-bars, marking received noises in discrete frequency ranges, and the marks were arranged with the low frequencies on the left, and the higher ones on the right. Location within the range columns denoted bearing. The tracks meandered, looking to all the world like aerial photographs of sand dunes in some trackless desert, but if you knew what to look for, every spidery trace and twist had meaning. Jones slowed his analysis, taking in every minute's record of reception and sweeping from left to right, making marks and notes as he went. The chiefs who'd been assisting him stood back now, knowing that a master was at work, that he saw things they should have seen, but had not, and knowing why a man younger than they called an admiral by his first name.

“Attention on deck,” some voice called presently, “Submarine Force, Pacific, arriving.” Mancuso came in, accompanied by Captain Chambers, his operations officer, and an aide who kept out of the way. The Admiral just looked at Jones's face.

“You raise
Charlotte
yet, Bart?”

“No.”

“Come here.”

“What are you telling me, Jonesy?”

Jones took the red pen to the bottom of the page. “There's the crush, that's the hull letting go.”

Mancuso nodded, letting out a breath. “I know, Ron.”

“Look here. That's high-speed maneuvering—”

“Something goes wrong, you go max power and try to drive her up to the roof,” Captain Chambers observed, not seeing it yet, or more probably not wanting to, Jones thought. Well, Mr. Chambers had always been a pretty nice officer to work for.

“But she wasn't heading straight for the roof, Mr. Chambers. Aspect changes, here and here,” Jones said, moving the pen upward on the printout page, backwards in time, marking where the width of the traces varied, and the bearings changed subtly. “She was turning, too, at max power on a speed screw. This is probably a decoy signature. And this”—his hand went all the way to the right—“is a fish. Quiet one, but look at the bearing rates. It was turning, too, chasing
Asheville
, and that gives these traces here, all the way back to this time-point here.” Ron circled both traces, and though separated on the paper by fourteen inches, the shallow twists and turns were almost identical. The pen moved again, upwards on the sheet, then shot across to another frequency column. “To a launch transient. Right there.”