George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

Crawford was already out of his seat and heading down the short passageway to the control room before Schutte had finished. He found the OOD standing in front of the BQQ-10 sonar repeater surveying a picture that looked like the profile of a growing mountain range.

Crawford stopped beside him. “What do you have, Nav? More whales mating?”

Schutte smiled. He pointed at the picture. “Skipper, we just started getting these tonals. Most of these look like our library for Akulas, but we’re missing several in the fifteen- to forty-hertz range and this one at eleven hertz is brand-new. It’s not in the library at all. We don’t have any record of it that I can see.”

Crawford looked at the display. Whatever they were picking up was a sub, but it was not fitting the pattern for known Russian boats. The building peaks showed a time history of sound energy at each frequency. It was shaping up to be a very interesting picture.

Schutte was right, it did look somewhat like the display from an Akula-class boat, the best sub the Russians had ever built and one equal to Miami . Those boats had all been tied up for several years now. Intelligence reports confirmed that none of them were even operational anymore. Now, if one of those “sharks” had come out to play, it would be interesting to see what she was up to.

The picture wasn’t quite right. The major frequencies used to detect and track an Akula were gone, not showing up at all. There was the brand-new line, very low frequency and so quiet that even the TB-29’s hypersensitive ears had almost missed hearing it.

Both men were thinking the same thing. This could be a new boat, and that was worth taking a closer look.

Crawford turned to Schutte and winked. “Nav, I think our whale watching is over with for a bit. Station the fire control tracking party. We’re going shark hunting.”

Igor Serebnitskiv stared out the periscope of the Volk , but saw nothing. Even using the scope’s low-light capability, he could make out little more than various shades of gray. He had raced his old sub to the rendezvous point as fast as she would go, driving his crew to arrive five hours earlier than planned. A very careful search of the area found exactly what he expected—no one else was anywhere around. Now he would have ample opportunity to find himself a cozy place to hide and wait for the parade to pass by.

The craggy, mountainous underside of the Arctic-winter pack ice would serve his purposes. All he had to do was find a notch where he could tuck Volk in and hole up. The upward-looking underice sonar helped to map out the upside-down landscape over his head, but it was no substitute for seeing what he was searching for. That would take the periscope, but he would have to be very careful. A low-lying ice keel could shear the scope right off if he wasn’t watchful and careful.

Sergei Andropoyov and Gepard were due to arrive at their rendezvous point in little more than an hour, and Serebnitskiv wanted to find his hiding spot before they showed up and had a chance to detect his sub, which would be much easier with all of the K-475’s fancy new equipment. Serebnitskiv wanted to be invisible before the inevitable trailing American submarine came by, too. If the Americans had an inkling that Volk was there, his long-evolving mission was lost. They would have to start all over. That was one message he did not want to relay back to his uncle.

Once hidden and unmoving amid the thick ice, Volk would disappear from the sonar screens of both Andropoyov’s new boat and his American tail. The grinding and cracking noise of the frozen mass as it drifted southward would also conceal his presence.

Serebnitskiv stared through the eyepiece on the periscope, finally spying what he was looking for: an inverted valley that was wide and deep enough for Volk to fit her bulk into, but not so deep that it would mask her sonar hydrophones. The upside-down gorge’s main axis pointed directly at the rendezvous point, a kilometer away.

Perfect!

The Russian crew maneuvered the sub so that it came to a stop, hovering just a few meters below the ice valley. They pumped a few thousand kilos of water from the trim tanks so Volk was positively buoyant, and the old boat eased up into the concavity.

All the while, Serebnitskiv watched through the scope as the boat rose. Satisfied that he had lined everything up correctly and there were no hidden ice keels to ram into, he lowered the scope. Volk nestled into the little valley with the top of her sail resting hard against the overhead ice. They were firmly in place, held there by the positive buoyancy of the trim tanks.

Serebnitskiv had learned this trick from the old submarine masters of the Soviet fleet. Called an “ice pick,” the maneuver was used often when they ran up to these frozen wastelands to hide from the Americans during the Cold War.

It worked well then. It was working well today.

Now all Serebnitskiv and the Volk had to do was wait until that bastard, Andropoyov, and his shiny, new Gepard strolled by, with the Americans following behind, poking her in the ass.

The commander rubbed his hands together and ignored the odd stares of his crewmen. He had waited years for this, and he intended to enjoy every last second of it.

Aboard the Miami , Commander Brad Crawford watched the tactical picture develop on the screen in front of him. The new Akula sub they had just spotted was heading to the northeast, steadily steaming ahead, deep beneath the pack ice. The TB-29A array fed a continuous stream of information about the mystery sub into the BYG-1 fire control system. The fire control tracking party was extracting every bit of useful intelligence they could get and plotting it out on paper charts. This was sure a lot more interesting than trailing along behind a pod of whales.

Crawford steered the Miami back and forth across the Russian sub’s track, solving for her course and speed. She seemed to be heading a little east of due north, straight and true with no variation at all. The solution showed her on a course of zero-three-five, traveling at a speed of eight knots. The Akula didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry or to be the least bit suspicious that anyone might be trailing her. She hadn’t changed course or cleared baffles since Miami had detected her twenty-four hours before. That was a very long time for any submariner to go without turning around to try to catch anyone who might be trailing him. It seemed as if the Russian skipper expected someone to be following him.

The pair of boats had left the open water over two hundred miles back. Now there was a thick layer of ice above them, stretching for many miles in every direction. If they needed to go to the surface for any reason, they would have to search for a polynya, a thin place in the ice to break through. In the winter up here, these holes were few and far between.

Crawford grimaced as he rubbed his aching neck. The excitement of the chase had begun to wane hours ago. His blue poopie suit was wilted and sweat-stained and his face felt like coarse sandpaper. He stared into the dregs of his coffee. It had long since gone cold.

Glancing around the control room, Crawford confirmed that everyone else looked as tired as he felt. Andy Gerson sat slouched on a stool in front of one of the fire control computer screens. He was hunched over, talking to Bill Wittstrom. Tired or not, they were trying to refine the solution some more, learning all they could about the unidentified sub.

Bill Schutte looked up from the navigation chart he was using. “Skipper, looks like he’s heading for the north tip of Novaya Zemlya. You don’t think he’s making a transit around to the Pacific, do you?”