Ian Slater - World in Flames

“Galley, Seaman Leach.”

“We’ve had a noise short — any of those mixers been on?”

“No, sir — ah, sir…”

“Yes?”

“Uh, sorry, sir. I dropped the coffeepot. Sort of busted against the bulkhead, I guess.”

“Busted! Must have exploded for sonar to pick it up on the passive. Now, tell me straight, sailor, and don’t frig around. Did it kind of bust or did it explode? Was it full or empty?”

“Uh…it was kind of full, sir.”

“Don’t you touch another thing. Stay right where you are.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry…”

Zeldman had already turned to the diving officer. “Take her to two thousand feet.” It was approaching their crush depth.

“Two thousand, sir,” said the officer of the deck, the order repeated again by the planesman, who gently pushed the control column forward as a pilot would in a shallow-angled dive. They’d been running near the surface, hiding in the ice clutter, and if the angle of dive was too acute, too fast, the stern of the 360-foot sub was in danger of slamming hard up against the ice, creating an even bigger noise short.

“Watch the bubble,” Zeldman heard the diving officer caution calmly in the background. Zeldman shot a quick glance at the chart, at the same time instructing the diving officer to call the depth.

“Three hundred feet… three fifty… four hundred…”

Zeldman quickly computed a new course away from their original tack, and the moment the diving officer informed him they were at two thousand, he ordered, “Change of course. Steer zero five two.”

“Change in course. Zero five two.”

“Speed ten knots.”

“Speed ten knots.”

“And if any other son of a bitch makes a noise, I’ll have his guts for garters.” No one spoke until Zeldman, leaving the redded-out Control, walked forward into the more comforting blue glow of the sonar room. But he knew the psychological effect of the color change was merely an illusion. “Pray to God, Emerson, no one heard us.”

“Yes, sir.”

But praying was no good. One point two two seven seconds was an age for someone whose digitized innards registered a noise lasting only milliseconds. The Russian Alfa had seen the ikota —”hiccup”—clearly on its sonar screen, and in any case, even if the operator had not actually seen it, a tone alarm on the console would have alerted him to the incoming noise short cutting into the otherwise steady pattern of incoming sine waves.

Captain Yanov ordered the Alfa to alter course, heading straight along the noise source bearing, and ordered all torpedo tubes, which were situated forward, ready for action. He did not want to switch on his active pinger, for this would alert the other sub, nor did he wish to increase speed too quickly, for even though his was the quietest class of Soviet submarine, his cooling pumps did not make him inaudible, and all they had was a heading, a bearing on the noise, no measure of distance. Yet he had no intention of losing the sub, whose distance, despite the lack of any accurate electronic means of measuring it without using an active pinger, was estimated by Yegor Petrov, his best sonar operator, purely on the basis of his long experience in the Arctic, as being probably plus or minus fifteen kilometers — nine miles — from them.

Yanov looked down at his chart overlay covering the Spitzbergen Fracture zone. “Any of our subs in the area?” he asked his OOD. “Apart from us, that is?”

Officer of the deck, Ivashko, had already anticipated the captain’s question, checking their position against the colored strips of the other Russian Hunter/Killer patrol routes. “Should be no interdiction with any of ours, Captain. Spitzbergen Trench is all ours.”

“Then he must be American or British,” said Yanov. “Could it be,” he asked Sonar Operator Petrov, “they’ve found a soft patch in the ice? Run out their trailing antenna and taken in a VLF signal from their headquarters? Or possibly a location check to headquarters? A transmit? Or a noise short from the surface. Maybe not a sub at all. One of their ASW choppers smashing through the ice to dunk a listening buoy?”

“No,” said the sonar operator, doing his best to contain his amusement at the captain’s hypothesizing. Yanov was undoubtedly a great captain — the sonar operator had no doubt of this, otherwise he would not be commander of an Alfa — but the control room officers never understood the nuances of the passive arrays. “No sir,” he repeated. “Nothing from the surface — besides, radio muster for all Allied ships is 0800 hours, sir. It’s 0500 now. Given the frequency, I think someone dropped a wrench or something.”

“What would he do?” mused the Soviet captain. “If he knows he’s given off a noise short?” He turned to the sonar operator. “Petrov, you think he knows?”

“If he doesn’t, Captain, his sonar man was asleep.”

“I’d go deep,” said OOD Ivashko.

“Yes, of course,” concurred Captain Yanov. “But will he hover? Or keep going? It’s too deep to sit on the bottom.”

“If he hovers, Captain,” answered the OOD, “and he thinks he might have been heard, then he must expect his pursuer to reach him sooner or later — if he stays on the same heading. If I were him, I’d keep moving, slowly, zigzagging, backtracking.”

“Which direction?” asked the captain.

“It’s an east-west trench,” said Ivashko, thinking aloud. “If he runs south or north, he’s going into shallow water. No one likes that.”

“Ah, but canyon walls would help him, eh, Number One? A lot of sound comes off canyon walls. Right, Sonar? Deep feeders, rock falls, noise from ice running down the cliff faces, scuttling, and bouncing off. A canyon wall can bury a lot of other sound.”

“Even so,” said Ivashko, “I’d shy away from the canyon walls, Captain. The racket from them could smother his passive arrays as well as hide him. He’d be running deafened by canyon noise.”

The captain conceded the point. “Yes. Personally I would go up closer to the ice, away from the canyon. There you have the ice noise, but can reel out your passive array well below you. You would still pick up the ice noise, but it’s much steadier than in a canyon. It’s a static you can recognize. Right, Petrov?”

Petrov gave a conditional nod, the kind that irritated Ivashko. Damn sonar men always thought they belonged to a higher priesthood to which mere mortals such as officers of the deck neither had access to, nor aptitude for.

“Then,” said Captain Yanov, “I think it’s time to release a Jonah.” This was a quiet, buoy-girded, tear-shaped container of approximately 156-liter capacity, about half the size of a 44-gallon drum but designed to create the least possible resistance as it quietly moved through the water. Inside, “Jonah” was intricately designed to contain microtape and speakers with a mechanical timer of ten minutes to two hours duration.

Once released from the hull, powered by a quiet battery-run plastic prop and preset to travel to a point approximately two-thirds along the bearing of a noise short, the tear-shaped container would rise until it was approximately three hundred feet below the surface. In this case, within three hundred feet of the ice.

Here, activated by its timer, it would emit a powerfully amplified sound — usually that of a whale. The sound waves racing out from the Jonah would deflect off the Russian submarine as well as off the American. But because the Alfa would be farther away from the Jonah, the noise source, Jonah’s sound, reflected off the American sub, would reach the Russian sub sooner than the sound from Jonah reflected off the Russian sub would reach the Americans. The Alfa would then not only have the American sub’s heading but also, because of the time lapse between the emission of the sound from the Jonah and its echoed return, the Alfa would now also know exactly how far away the American sub was.