Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [437]
"Be nice to get back to Fort Stewart, sir," First Sergeant Vega observed.
"Spread on that sunblock and catch some rays on the beach."
"And miss all this beautiful snow and sleet, Oso?" At least the sky was clear now.
"Roge-o, Captain. But I got my fill o' this shit when I was a kid in Chicago." He paused, looking and listening around again. The noise-discipline of the other Rangers was excellent, and you had to look very closely indeed to see where the lookouts were standing.
"Ready for the walk out tonight?"
"Just so's our friend is waiting on the far side of that hill."
"I'm sure he will he," Checa lied.
"Yes, sir. I am, too." If one could do it, why not two? Vega thought. "Did all this stuff work?"
The killers in their midst were sleeping in their bags, in holes lined with pine branches and covered with more branches for additional warmth. In addition to guarding the pilots, the Rangers had to keep them healthy, like watching over infants, an odd mission for elite troops, but troops of that sort generally drew the oddest.
"So they say." Checa looked at his watch. "We shake them loose in another two hours."
Vega nodded, hoping that his legs weren't too stiff for the trek south.
The patrol pattern had been set in the mission briefing. The four boomers had thirty-mile sectors, and each sector was divided into three ten-mile segments. Each boat could patrol in the center slot, leaving the north and south slots empty for everything but weapons. The patrol patterns were left to the judgment of individual skippers, but they worked out the same way. Pennsylvania was on a northerly course, trolling along at a mere five knots, just as she'd done for her now-ended deterrence patrols carrying Trident missiles.
She was making so little noise that a whale might have come close to a collision, if it were the right time for whales in this part of the Pacific, which it wasn't. Behind her, at the end of a lengthy cable, was her towed-array sonar, and the two-hour north-south cycle allowed it to trail straight out in a line, with about ten minutes or so required for the turns at the end of the cycles to get it straight again for maximum performance.
Pennsylvania was at six hundred feet, the ideal sonar depth given today's water conditions. It was just sunset up on the roof when the first trace appeared on her sonar screens. It started as a series of dots, yellow on the video screen, trickling down slowly with time, and shifting a little to the south in bearing, but not much. Probably, the lead sonarman thought, the target had been running on battery for the past few hours, else he would have caught the louder signals of the diesels used to charge them, but there the contact was, on the expected 60Hz line. He reported the contact data to the fire-control tracking party.
Wasn't this something, the sonarman thought. He'd spent his entire career in missile boats, so often tracking contacts which his submarine would maneuver to avoid, even though the boomer fleet prided itself on having the best torpedomen in the fleet. Pennsylvania carried only fifteen weapons aboard—there was a shortage of the newest version of the ADCAP torpedo, and it had been decided not to bother carrying anything less capable under the circumstances. It also had three other torpedolike units, called LEMOSSs, for Long-Endurance Mobile Submarine Simulator. The skipper, another lifelong boomer sailor, had briefed the crew on his intended method of attack, and everyone aboard approved. The mission, in fact, was just about ideal. The Japanese had to move through their line. Then operational pattern was such that for them to pass undetected through the line of battle,