Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [214]
Jones walked across the room and just took the receiver away. "Bart, this is Ron. Has Charlotte checked in?"
"We're trying to raise her now."
"I don't think you're going to, Skipper," the civilian said darkly.
"What do you mean?" The reply caught the meaning. The two men had always communicated on a nonverbal level.
"Bart, you better come over here. I'm not kidding, Cap'n."
"Ten minutes," Mancuso promised.
Jones stubbed his smoke out in a metal waste can and returned to the printouts. It was not an easy thing for him now, but he flipped to the pages where he'd stopped. The printouts were made with pencils that were located on metal shuttle-bars, marking received noises in discrete frequency ranges, and the marks were arranged with the low frequencies on the left, and the higher ones on the right. Location within the range columns denoted bearing. The tracks meandered, looking to all the world like aerial photographs of sand dunes in some trackless desert, but if you knew what to look for, every spidery trace and twist had meaning. Jones slowed his analysis, taking in every minute's record of reception and sweeping from left to right, making marks and notes as he went. The chiefs who'd been assisting him stood back now, knowing that a master was at work, that he saw things they should have seen, but had not, and knowing why a man younger than they called an admiral by his first name.
"Attention on deck," some voice called presently, "Submarine Force, Pacific, arriving." Mancuso came in, accompanied by Captain Chambers, his operations officer, and an aide who kept out of the way. The Admiral just looked at Jones's face.
"You raise Charlotte yet, Bart?"
"No."
"Come here."
"What are you telling me, Jonesy?"
Jones took the red pen to the bottom of the page. "There's the crush, that's the hull letting go."
Mancuso nodded, letting out a breath. "I know, Ron."
"Look here. That's high-speed maneuvering—"
"Something goes wrong, you go max power and try to drive her up to the roof," Captain Chambers observed, not seeing it yet, or more probably not wanting to, Jones thought. Well, Mr. Chambers had always been a pretty nice officer to work for.
"But she wasn't heading straight for the roof, Mr. Chambers. Aspect changes, here and here," Jones said, moving the pen upward on the printout page, backwards in time, marking where the width of the traces varied, and the bearings changed subtly. "She was turning, too, at max power on a speed screw. This is probably a decoy signature. And this"—his hand went all the way to the right—"is a fish. Quiet one, but look at the bearing rates. It was turning, too, chasing Asheville, and that gives these traces here, all the way back to this time-point here." Ron circled both traces, and though separated on the paper by fourteen inches, the shallow twists and turns were almost identical. The pen moved again, upwards on the sheet, then shot across to another frequency column. "To a launch transient. Right there."
"Fuck," Chambers breathed.
Mancuso leaned over the paper sheet, next to Jones, and he saw it all now. "And this one?"
"That's probably Charlotte, also maneuvering briefly. See, here and here, look like aspect changes on these traces to me. No transients because it was probably too far away, same reason we don't have a track on the fish." Jones moved the pen back to the track of USS Asheville. "Here. That Japanese diesel boat launched on her. Here. Asheville tried to evade and failed. Here's the first explosion from the torpedo warhead. Engine sounds stop here—she took the hit from aft. Here's the internal bulkheads letting go. Sir, Asheville was sunk by a torpedo, probably a Type 89, right