Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [398]
"You take the time to work this gear and you get results. Boomer and me have been **fff^aHang the data all week. We started on the surface ships." Jones walked to the wall chart. "We've been plotting the position of the 'cans—"
"All the way from—" Captain Chambers interrupted, only to be cut off.
"Yes sir, all the way from mid-Pac. I've been playing broadband and narrow-band, and checking weather, and I've plotted them." Jones pointed at the silhouettes pinned to the map.
"That's fine, Ron, but we have satellite overheads for that," ComSubPac pointed out.
"So am I right?" the civilian asked.
"Pretty close," Mancuso admitted. Then he pointed to the other shapes pinned to the wall.
"Yeah that's right, Bart. Once I figured how to track the 'cans, then we started working on me submarines. And guess what? I can still bag the fuckers when they snort. Here's your picket line. We get them about a third of the time by my reckoning, and the bearings are fairly constant."
The wall chart showed six firm contacts. Those silhouettes were within circles between twenty and thirty miles in diameter. Two more were overlaid with question marks.
"That still leaves a few unaccounted for," Chambers noted.
Jones nodded. "True. But I got six for sure, maybe eight. We can't get good cuts off the Japanese coast. Just too far. I'm plotting merchantmen shuttling back and forth to the islands, but that's all," he admitted. "I'm also tracking a big two-screw contact heading west toward the Marshalls, and I kinda noticed that there's an empty dry dock across the way this morning."
"That's secret" Mancuso pointed out with a quiet smile.
"Well if I were you guys, I'd tell Stennis to watch out for this line of SSKs, gentlemen—You might want to let the subs head into the briarpatch first, to clean things out, like."
"We can do that, but I'm worried about the others," Chambers admitted.
"Conn, sonar."
"Conn, aye." Lieutenant Ken Shaw had the midwatch.
"Possihle sonar contact hearing zero-six-zero…probably a submerged contact. It's very faint, sir," the sonar chief reported.
The drill was automatic after all the practice they'd undergone on the trips from Bremerton and Pearl. The fire-control-tracking party immediately started a plot. A tech on the ray-path analyzer took data directly from the sonar instruments and from that tried to determine the probable range to the target The computer required only a second. "That's a direct-path signal, sir. Range is under twenty thousand yards."
Dutch Claggett hadn't really been asleep. In the way of captains, he'd been lying in his bunk, eyes closed, even dreaming something meaningless and confusing about a day fishing on the beach with the fish behind him on the sand and creeping closer to his back, when the call had gone out from sonar. Somehow he'd come completely awake, and was now in the attack center, standing barefoot in his underwear. He checked the room to determine depth, course, and speed, then headed into sonar to get his own look at the instruments.
"Talk to me, Chief."
"Right here on the sixty-hertz line." The chief tapped the screen with his grease pencil. It came and went and came and went, but kept coming back, just a series of dots trickling down the screen, all on the same frequency line. The bearing was changing slowly right to left.
"They've been at sea for more than three weeks…" Claggett thought aloud.
"Long time for a diesel boat," the chief agreed. "Maybe heading back in for refueling?"
Claggett leaned in closer, as though proximity to the screen would make a difference. "Could be. Or maybe he's just changing position. Makes sense that they'd have a patrol line offshore. Keep me posted."
"Aye, Cap'n."
"Well?" Claggett asked the tracking party.
"First cut on range is fourteen thousand yards, base course is westerly, speed about six knots."
The contact was easily within range of his ADCAP torpedoes, Claggett saw. But the mission didn't allow him to do anything about it. Wasn't that just great?
"Let's get two weapons warmed up," the Captain said. "When