Sword of Shiva - Страница 28

The chief turned back to the array of sonar screens. “If you keep us in his baffles, sir, we can track this guy until the fat lady sings.”

Captain Patke nodded. “How about our Indian friends up above? Are their sonars good enough to sniff this guy out?”

The Sonar Chief frowned at the screen, and answered over his shoulder. “Hard to say for sure, skipper, but I doubt it. The primary tonal we’re tracking is not all that loud. We detected it, but we’re sticking to this contact’s butt like a barnacle. Also the contact is running below the layer, and so are we. We’re in the same water with him, which makes it easier for us to track him.”

The layer (also referred to as the sonic layer) was a barrier to sound energy caused by the transition from virtually constant water temperature near the surface of the ocean, to the thermocline, a zone of rapidly decreasing water temperature that extended down to about two thousand feet. This abrupt shift in temperature could reflect much of a submarine’s acoustic signal away from the hull-mounted sonar sensors of surface warships. This did not make submarines acoustically invisible to ships on the surface, but it created a tactical edge that all good sub commanders knew how to exploit.

Patke nodded again. If Chief Philips was right, contact Sierra One Five’s presence might go unnoticed by the Indian Navy ships above.

Patke was about to walk away when the Sonar Chief spoke again.

“That’s weird…”

Patke turned back. “What have you got, Chief?”

Chief Philips tilted his head to the side, and stared at one of the sonar waterfall displays. “Got a transient… It sounds like…”

The sonar man straightened up suddenly and keyed his headset’s microphone. “Conn — Sonar. Sierra One Five is flooding his tubes! I say again, contact is flooding his tubes!”

“Holy shit!” someone in the control room said. “He’s gonna shoot!”

Patke sprinted the half dozen steps back to the OOD platform. The unidentified author of that comment was correct. Sierra One Five was getting ready to launch weapons.

Damn! Patke had been sure that the Chinese sub had come on a mission of surveillance. He had not expected the crazy bastards to start shooting.

He raised his voice. “All stations, this is the captain. I have the Conn, belay your reports. Helm, right full rudder, new course one-niner-zero! Diving Officer, take us down! Make your new depth six hundred feet.”

He didn’t wait for acknowledgements before belting out his next set of orders. “Weapons Control, prep torpedo tubes one, three, and five. Do not flood tubes until I give the order. Countermeasures, stand by to launch decoys.”

The deck tilted under his feet as the California nosed down and heeled to starboard in response to the boat’s changing course and depth.

The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “Conn — Sonar. Sierra One Five is opening his outer doors.”

“Not yet,” Patke said softly. “Don’t shoot yet, you stupid son of a bitch. Just hang onto your torpedoes a little while longer…”

The California needed distance now, to separate herself as much as possible from the bearing of Sierra One Five before the Chinese sub started pumping out torpedoes. Because about thirty seconds after the launches were detected, the Indians were going to pounce on this stretch of water with every antisubmarine warfare asset they could scare up. The area would be swarming with frigates, helicopters, and those new Kamorta class ASW corvettes that the Indian Navy was so proud of. Every one of them would be firing torpedoes at anything bigger than a tuna. And the Chinese sub, Sierra One Five, would probably pump out a few reactionary weapons as it struggled to escape.

“Passing three hundred feet,” the Diving Officer said.

“Very well,” Patke said. Not deep enough yet, but there wasn’t any more time. If the California was going to get out of this alive, she needed speed. He would just have to accept the increased risk of detection. “Helm, all ahead full.”

The helmsman’s response was immediate. “All ahead full, aye!”

There were about ninety seconds of relative calm before the Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net again. “Conn — Sonar. Torpedoes in the water, bearing zero-four-zero! Looks like a pair of wake homers, headed for the Indian carrier.”

Patke glanced at the tactical display screen. The range to contact Sierra One Five was opening quickly, but not quickly enough.

“This is going to be just like when I was a kid,” the Officer of the Deck said softly.

“How do you figure?” Patke asked. He couldn’t imagine how anyone’s childhood could be at all similar to the situation unfolding now.

“My little brother would steal cookies from the cookie jar,” the OOD said. “But I was always the one who got in trouble for it. He ate the cookies, and I got the ass whuppin’.”

The OOD nodded toward the tactical display. “I recon that’s what’s happening right here, sir. Our Chinese pals reached into the Indian cookie jar and grabbed themselves a big handful of snickerdoodles. We didn’t touch those damned cookies, but we’re about to get our asses whupped for it, just the same.”

Patke looked at the continually-opening range on the tactical display. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky this time.”

Four or five minutes later, sonar began reporting torpedoes in the water, but subsequent evaluation located them all at a safe distance to the northeast.

The control room crew began to breathe easier.

“Well, we didn’t get any cookies,” Captain Patke said. “But at least we didn’t get an ass whipping that we don’t deserve.”

Perhaps it was the tempting of fate. Perhaps it was purest coincidence. Or perhaps it was simple bad luck. But the Sonar Supervisor’s next report came over the net less than ten seconds later. “Conn — Sonar. We have just been over-flown by a multi-engine turboprop aircraft. We have multiple active sonobouys in the water!”

“Launch two static noisemakers,” Patke said.

The Officer of the Deck turned to the Countermeasures Control Panel. “Aye-aye, sir. Launching static noisemakers now.”

A pair of pneumatic hisses and two muffled thumps announced the ejection of the countermeasures.

“That’ll give our friends upstairs something to ping on,” he said. “Now, let’s get a little bearing separation. Left standard rudder, come to new course one-five-zero.”

The helmsman acknowledged the command, and turned the control yoke to the left, beginning the California’s slow turn.

Patke looked up at the overhead of the control room, as though he could see through the intervening steel and seawater to the Indian ASW aircraft circling in the night sky above. “Give us a break here, guys. We didn’t shoot at your carrier, and we didn’t come to steal your fucking cookies.”

CHAPTER 30

21 SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER

ONIZUKA AIR FORCE STATION

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

SUNDAY; 30 NOVEMBER

0430 hours (4:30 AM)

TIME ZONE -8 ‘UNIFORM’

Technical Sergeant Jennifer Thaxton touched a soft-key to silence the alert on her SAWS console. The Satellite Analyst Workstation was monitoring real-time telemetry from GEO-3, a U.S. Air Force infrared detection and tracking satellite currently passing over northern China. The satellite had just triggered an alert, signaling a significant thermal bloom near the Chinese end of the Gobi desert.

Thaxton called up a GPS grid and superimposed it over the site of the bloom. She was ninety-percent sure that she knew the location of the sudden heat source, but she wanted to be absolutely certain. She ordered the software to fix a cursor point at the center of the infrared hot spot, and then read off the accompanying latitude and longitude. Yep. She’d been right.

A flurry of taps on the keyboard summoned up a schedule of known activities for the facility in question. Thaxton scanned it rapidly, and then called up yet another screen — pulling in ballistic tracking data from two Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites belonging to the Air Force, and an Onyx bird from the National Reconnaissance Office.

After a few seconds spent cross-referencing their respective readouts, Sergeant Thaxton swung the microphone boom of her comm-set to a position near her mouth and keyed the circuit. “Watch Officer, this is Operator Fourteen. GEO-3 has detected an unscheduled launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the southern Gobi Desert. Rapid assessment of the trajectory looks like a low orbit insertion.”

The Watch Officer, Major Saunders, acknowledged the report. He was standing at Thaxton’s elbow almost before she had released the mike button. “What’s your analysis, Sergeant?”

“Too early in the launch to know for sure, sir, but it’s definitely not a weapons trajectory. If I had to take a wild stab at it, I’d say the Chinese are fielding a low orbit surveillance satellite.”

She touched the display screen, and followed an arcing green line with her fingertip. When she reached the end of the arc, she continued moving her finger, extending the curve with her best mental projection of the arc’s final shape. “Could be they’re getting ready to hang an eye in the sky over their little trouble spot in the Bay of Bengal.”

The Watch Officer nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said. “I’m going to forward your assessment up the chain, along with the tracking data.”