The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [328]
"Okay, he's back I think," the sonarman added. "Bearing looks like three-zero-two now."
Ricks walked out to the plotting table. Ensign Shaw was doing his calculations along with a quartermaster. "Has to be a hundred-thousand-plus yards. I'm assuming a north-easterly course from the bearing drift, speed of less than ten. Has to be a hundred-K yards or more." That was good, fast work, Shaw and the petty officer thought.
Ricks nodded curtly and went back to sonar.
"Firming up, getting some stuff on the fifty-herz line now. Starting to smell like Mr Akula, maybe."
"You must have a pretty good channel."
"Right, Captain, pretty good and improving a little. That storm's gonna change it when the turbulence gets down to our depth, sir."
Ricks went into control again: "Mr Shaw?"
"Best estimate is one-one-five-K yards, course northeasterly, speed five knots, maybe one or two more, sir. If his speed's much higher than that, the range is awfully far."
"Okay, I want us to come around very gently, come right to zero-eight-zero."
"Aye aye, sir. Helm, right five degrees rudder, come to new course zero-eight-zero."
"Right five degrees rudder, aye. Sir, my rudder is right five degrees, coming to new course zero-eight-zero."
"Very well."
Slowly, so as not to make too great a bend in the towed array, USS Maine reversed course. It took three minutes before she settled down on the new course, doing something no US fleet ballistic-missile submarine had ever done before. Lieutenant-Commander Claggett appeared in the control room soon thereafter.
"How long you figure he's going to hold this course?" he asked Ricks.
"What would you do?"
"I think I'd troll along in a ladder pattern," Dutch answered, "and my drift would be south instead of north, reverse of how we do it in the Barents Sea, right? Interval between sweeps will be determined by the performance of his tail. That's one hard piece of intel we can develop, but depending on how that number looks, we'll have to be real careful how we trail him, won't we?"
"Well, I can't approach to less than thirty thousand yards under any circumstances. So we'll close to fifty-K until we have a better feel for him, then ease it in as circumstances permit. One of us should be in here at all times as long as he's in the neighborhood."
"Agreed." Claggett nodded. He paused for a beat before going on. "How the hell," the XO asked very quietly indeed, "did OP-02 ever agree to this?"
"Safer world now, isn't it?"
"I s'pose, sir."
"You're jealous that boomers can do a fast-attack job?"
"Sir, I think that OP-02 slipped a gear, either that or they're trying to impress some folks with our flexibility or something."
"You don't like this?"
"No, Captain, I don't. I know we can do it, but I don't think we should."
"Is that what you talked to Mancuso about?"
"What?" Claggett shook his head. "No, sir. Well, he did ask me that, and I said we could do it. Not my place to enter into that yet."
Then what did you talk to him about? Ricks wanted to ask. He couldn't, of course.
The Americans were a great disappointment to Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev. The whole reason they'd recruited him was to get good inside information on the Soviet government, and he'd delivered precisely that for years. He'd seen the sweeping political changes coming for his country, seen them early because he'd known Andrey Il'ych Narmonov for what he was. And for what he was not. The President of his country was a man of stunning political gifts. He had the courage of a lion and the tactical agility of a mongoose. It was a plan that he lacked. Narmonov had no idea where he was going, and that was his weakness. He had destroyed the old political order, eliminated the Warsaw Pact through inaction, merely by saying out loud, only once, that the Soviet Union would not interfere with the political integrity of other countries, and had done so in the knowledge that the only thing that kept Marxism in place was the threat of Soviet force. The Eastern European