Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [159]
Though the Japanese submarines had their own version of the American Prairie-Masker systems, Jones's new software had gone a long way to defeat that countermeasure. Mancuso and the rest retired to the SubPac plotting room to examine the newest data.
"Okay, Jonesy, tell me what you see," Mancuso ordered, looking at the paper printouts from the underwater hydrophones that littered the bottom of the Pacific.
The data was displayed both electronically on TV-type displays and on fan-fold paper of the sort once used for computer printouts for more detailed analysis. For work like this, the latter was preferred, and there were two sets. One of them had already been marked up by the oceanographic technicians of the local SOSUS detachment. To make this a double-blind analysis, and to see if Jones still knew how, Mancuso kept separate the set already analyzed by his people.
Still short of forty, Jones had gray already in his thick dark hair, though he chewed gum now instead of smoking. The intensity was still there, Mancuso saw. Dr. Ron Jones flipped pages like an accountant on the trail of embezzlement, his finger tracing down the vertical lines on which frequencies were recorded.
"We assume that they'll snort every eight hours or so?" he asked.
"That's the smart thing, to keep their batteries fully charged," Chambers agreed with a nod.
"What time are they operating on?" Jones asked. Typically, American submarines at sea adjusted their clocks to Greenwich Mean Time—recently changed to "Universal Time" with the diminution of the Royal Navy, whose power had once allowed the prime meridian to be defined by the British.
"I presume Tokyo," Mancuso replied. "That's us minus five."
"So we start looking for patterns, midnight and even hours their time."
There were five of the wide-folded sheets. Jones flipped one complete set at a time, noting the time references in the margins. It took him ten minutes.
"Here's one, and here's another. These two are possible. This one's also possible, but I don't think so. I'll put money down on this one…and this one for starters." His fingers tapped on seemingly random lines of dots.
"Wally?"
Chambers turned to the other table and flipped the marked up sets to the proper time settings. "Jonesy, you fuckin' witch!" he breathed. It had taken a team of skilled technicians—experts all—over two hours to do what Jones had accomplished in a few minutes before their again-incredulous eyes.
The civilian contractor pulled a can of Coke from the nearby cooler and popped it open. "Gentlemen," he asked, "who's the all-time champ?"
That was only part of it, of course. The printouts merely gave bearing to a suspected noise source, but there were several of the bottom-sited SOSUS arrays, and triangulation had already been accomplished, nailing the datum points down to radii of ten to fifteen nautical miles. Even with Jones's improvements in the system, that still left a lot of ocean to search.
The phone rang. It was Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet. Mancuso took the call and made his recommendations for vectoring Charlotte and Asheville onto the suspected contacts. Jones observed the exchange and nodded approval.
"See what I mean, Skipper? You always did know how to listen."
Murray had been out discussing a few budgetary matters with the Assistant-Director-in-Charge of the Washington Field Office, therefore missing the phone call. The top-secret dispatch from the White House was tucked away in secure files, and then his secretary had been called out to bring a sick child home from school. As a result, the handwritten message from Ryan had been unconscionably late in coming to his attention.
"The Norton girl," he said, walking into Director Shaw's office.
"Bad?"
"Dead," Murray said, handing the paper over. Shaw scanned it quickly.
"Shit," the FBI Director whispered. "Did she have a prior history of drug