Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [367]
The CNN report coincided with the local dawn. The shot, Ryan saw, was from across the harbor, with the female reporter holding up her microphone, and a "Live" caption in the lower-right corner of the screen. There was nothing new to report in Pearl Harbor, she said.
"As you can see behind me, USS Enterprise and John Stennis remain in dry dock. Two of the most expensive warships ever made now depend on an army of workers to make them whole again, an effort that will require…"
"Months," Ryan said, completing the statement. "Keep telling them that."
The other network news shows would soon give out the same information, but it was CNN that he was depending on. The source of record for the whole world.
Tennessee was just diving, having passed the sea buoy a few minutes earlier. Two ASW helicopters had followed her out, and a Spruance-class destroyer was also in view, conducting hurried workups and requesting by blinker light that the submarine pass her close aboard for a quick tracking exercise.
Five U.S. Army personnel had come aboard just before sailing. They were assigned space according to rank. The officer, a first lieutenant, got a berth that would have belonged to a missile officer, had the boomer carried any of those. The senior NCO, being an E-7, was titularly a chief petty officer and was given a space in the goat locker. The rest were berthed with the enlisted crewmen. The first order of business was to give them all new shoes with rubber soles along with a briefing on the importance of being quiet.
"Why? What's the big deal?" the senior NCO asked, looking at his bunk in the chiefs' spaces and wondering if a coffin would be any more comfortable if he lived long enough for one.
Ba-Wah!
"That's why," a chief electrician's mate replied. He didn't quite shiver, but added, "I never have gotten used to that sound."
"Jesus! What the hell was that?"
"That's an SQS-53 sonar on a tin can. And if you hear it that loud, it means that they know we're here. The Japs have 'em, too, Sarge."
"Just ignore it," the sonar chief said, forward at his duty station. He stood behind a new sonarman, looking at the display. Sure enough, the new software upgrade made Prairie/Masker a lot easier to pick up, especially if you knew there was a blue sky overhead and no reason to suspect a rainstorm pelting the surface.
"He's got us cold, Chief."
"Only 'cause the Cap'n said it was okay for him to track us for a little while. An' we ain't giving out any more freebies."
Verino was just one more former MiG base in an area with scores of them. Exactly whom the Russians had been worried about was up for grabs. From this place they could have struck at Japan or China, or defended against attacks from either place, depending on who was paranoid and who was pissed at any particular political moment, the pilot thought. He'd never been anywhere close to here before, and even with the changes in relations between the two countries hadn't expected to do much more than maybe make a friendly visit to European Russia, as the U.S. Air Force did periodically.
Now there was a Sukhoi-27 interceptor a thousand yards to his two o'clock, with real missiles hanging on the airframe, and probably a whimsical thought or two in the mind of the driver. My, what a huge target. The two disparate aircraft had linked up an hour before because there hadn't been time to get a Russian-speaking officer on the mission, and they didn't want to risk English chatter on the air-control