Peter Sasgen - War Plan Red

“Thank you, Captain. I’m only sorry we couldn’t snatch a longer segment to analyze.”

“Couldn't pick her up again?”

“I tried but she was gone and I couldn't reacquire. I’ve run the tapes from Sectors Five through Eight, even into the Göteborg area, but heard nothing.”

“Any chance the Russian turned back?”

“I'd have heard him if he had.”

“In that case we'll see what our Swedish colleagues have to say.”

“I have the message traffic you wanted from Captain Bayer, sir,” the watch commander said. “We’ve also seen an increase in U.S. P-З overflights.”

“Thank you.” Jacobsen scratched his cheek. “Seven knots. The Russian’s a creeper, and in littorals at that. He’s definitely trying to avoid us. What’s he up to?”

Jacobsen flipped through Bayer's reports on recent contacts in the north with an elusive target. “What it means,” Jacobsen said, answering his own question, “is that earlier, Bayer made contact with this same Russian. Have you run those tapes for matches, Chief?”

“Yes, sir. Thermocline degrades. No positives.”

Jacobsen nodded his understanding. “That Russki’s been hugging the coast all the way south. Up to no good, I'd say.” He turned to the map on the wall. “Show me where you think he is now, Chief.”

Horve got up and pointed to a spot on the Norwegian coast near Bergendal. “Right here.”

“Very well. Put a twenty-four-hour watch on Sectors Five through Eight. Feed what you have directly to me.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Meanwhile we'll get Bayer and his group down here. What else is available that I can recommend to ComlnC?”

The watch commander said, “We have two new Norsk-class frigates on training standby in Stavanger. They could be activated.”

“Very well.” Jacobsen, dismayed, shook his head slowly. “The damned Russians. The Cold War’s over and we still can’t trust them. But maybe we can blow them to the surface and teach them a lesson.”

“How is he?” said Scott.

Botkin’s skin had blistered badly and the edema had spread. His face was so swollen that he was almost unrecognizable.

“Not good,” Alex said hoarsely. “He’s not going to make it.”

Scott refused to feel guilty. “He’s on an IV. That’ll help some. And he’s doped up so he’s not in pain.”

Alex slumped forward against the upper bunk in which Botkin lay. She lowered her forehead to the back of both hands gripping the bunk's side rails. She stood like that for a long moment until Scott touched her and she lifted her head. She looked exhausted.

“Let Doc spell you.”

“No, I’m all right,” Alex said. Though it wasn’t necessary, she adjusted the blanket covering Botkin and checked his IV.

“We’ve been picking up Norwegian and Swedish signals activity on ESM. Some not too far away. Thought you'd want to know.”

“They’re looking for us?”

“They know a submarine’s in the area. They may not know there’s two of us. Not yet, anyway.”

Alex turned around and leaned against the bunk, a thumb hooked in the pocket of her coveralls. She looked at Scott, then looked away. With her free hand she tried to do something with her hair. “I’m sorry I look so awful.”

“I like the way you look.”

“Like this? Please. When this is over, I’m going to sit in a banya for a week.” She meant the steam bath favored by Russians. “Do all submarines smell as bad as this one?”

“Did you ever hear the term pigboat?”

“I think so.”

“In the early days of submarines it was an apt description of what sailors endured. It went out of favor during World War II, but I suppose it describes our present situation.”

“I’d say so.” She picked at her coveralls and wrinkled her nose.

He wanted to touch her again, but the moment for it seemed to have passed.

“How’s Yuri holding up?” she asked.

“Just fine, now that the oxygenerator is back on line. He’s in the CCP, taking a trick at the diving station.”

“He is?”

“The starpom’s coaching him on the diving planes. He caught on quick. He’s a natural.”

“Something to tell his kids when he gets back.” She caught herself. “If we get back.”

“I thought you'd also want to know that heavy weather has moved in. It'll mask our movements, the K- 363’s too. Things may get a little dicey soon.”

“I know that.”

He pushed away from the bunk and made to go, but Alex put a hand on his arm. “When we get back…” “We’ll get back.”

She kissed his streaked face. “Thanks.”

“Look after Botkin,” he said, and departed.

Scott stuck the point of a pair of navigation dividers into Gotland, off the eastern coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea.

“Gotland is good cover for a submarine operating in the Baltic. Believe me, I know, because I’ve been there and used it to hide from Russian naval units.”

The starpom looked up from the chart and gave Scott a nod of grudging admiration. “We were told, sir, that American submarines conducted intelligence-gathering operations in the Baltic. I didn't believe it, but now I do.”

“At the same time,” Scott said, “we'll be operating in a littoral zone and the limitations it imposes on sub hunting.”

“Shallow coastal water,” Abakov said.

“Right. Turbulence, littoral marine life, bars and channels, turbidity, and pollution. They pose risks to underwater navigation and degrade sonar. So we have to go where we expect the K-363 to go, but try to get there first.”

“And lay a trap,” Abakov said.

“Not so easy to do, Kapitan,” said one of the senior warrant officers.

“No. I expect they’ll continue to hug the coast, which will make it hard to find them, much less head them off. If we hug the coast, we’ll never catch them. Instead, I’m proposing we make a full-out dash across the Skagerrak, cut around the northern coast of Denmark at Skagen, then see if we can’t pick them up as they work south, somewhere near the island of Anholt.”

“But Kapitan, the Danes and Swedes will hear us, no?” said the starpom.

“It’s a risk we have to take.” Scott looked around at the eager faces of the submariners. “Very well, up periscope. Raise the ESM mast.”

The mast rose; the collection panel lit up.

“Various contacts, Kapitan. Sea and shore-based radars, VHF, UHF, commercial mostly.”

Even at full dark and with a gale building, traffic was still heavy, the Skag and the Katt forming a funnel for ships heading for ports in Denmark, Sweden, and the Baltic. That same traffic could pose a hazard to submerged running if enough ship captains grew cautious and decided to anchor in the roadstead north of The Sound to ride out the storm.

“Sonar, report.”

“Many contacts, Kapitan. Too numerous to differentiate. None close aboard.”

Scott raised the scope to its full height to get above the heavy swells riding over the scope’s head, cutting off his view. He walked the scope around and saw only an impenetrable curtain of rain beating on the heaving sea, which registered on sonar as a steady hiss like interference on a radio. He switched to infrared and saw heat blooms from the power plants of two monstrous freighters heading west.

“Down scope. Come to course zero-seven-zero. Make your depth one hundred meters. Both engines ahead full.”

Scott gambled that the racket made by rain and wind on the sea would mask their turbines and passage through the water at high speed. He waited as the K-480 nosed down and accelerated to twenty-five knots.

He stood in the CCP pitying Botkin, not feeling comfortable in his role as skipper of a Russian Akula, but nevertheless relishing the power it conferred. There was nothing that compared with the utter sense of freedom and responsibility that came with command of a submarine, even a Russian one.