The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [332]
"Correct, Marvin," Qati replied.
"Can I help you with the painting?" Ghosn asked. He might get curious, Ibrahim thought, and they couldn't have that.
"I'd appreciate it."
"You must promise to turn the heat on," the engineer observed with a smile.
"Depend on it, man, or else the paint won't dry right. I guess this is kinda cold for ya."
"Your people must be very hard to live in such a place."
Russell reached for his coat and gloves. "Hey, man, it's our place, y'know?"
"Do you really expect to find him?" the Starpom asked.
"I think we have a fine chance," Dubinin replied, leaning over the chart. "He'll be somewhere in here, well away from the coastal waters - too many fishermen with nets there - and north of this area."
"Excellent, Captain, only two million square kilometers to search."
"And we will cover only two-thirds of that. I said a fine chance, not a certainty. In three or four more years, we'll have the RPV the designers are working on, and we can send our sonar receptors down into the deep sound channel." Dubinin referred to the next step in submarine technology, a robot mini-sub, which would be controlled from the mother ship by a fiber-optic cable. It would carry both sensors and weapons, and by diving very deep it could find out if sonar conditions in the thousand-to-two-thousand-meter regime were really as good as the theorists suggested. That would change the game radically.
"Anything on the turbulence sensors?"
"Negative, Captain," a lieutenant answered.
"I wonder if those things are worth the trouble " the executive officer groused.
"They worked the last time."
"We had calm seas overhead then. How often are the seas calm in the North Pacific in winter?"
"It could still tell us something. We must use every trick we have. Why are you not optimistic?"
"Even Ramius only tracked an Ohio once, and that was on builder's trials, when they had the shaft problem. And even then, he only held the contact for - what? Seventy minutes."
"We had this one before."
"True enough, Captain." The Starpom tapped a pencil on the chart.
Dubinin thought about his intelligence briefing on the enemy - old habits were hard to break. Harrison Sharpe Ricks, Captain, Naval Academy, in his second missile-submarine command, reportedly a brilliant engineer and technician, a likely candidate for higher command. A hard and demanding taskmaster, highly regarded in his navy. He'd made a mistake before, and was unlikely to make another, Dubinin told himself.
"Fifty thousand yards, exactly," Ensign Shaw reported.
"This guy's not doing any Crazy Ivans," Claggett thought for the first time.
"He's not expecting to be hunted himself, is he?" Ricks asked.
"I guess not, but his tail's not as good as he thinks it is." The Akula was doing a ladder-search pattern. The long legs were on a roughly south-west-to-north-east vector, and at the end of each he shifted down south-east to the next leg, with an interval between search legs of about fifty thousand yards, twenty-five nautical miles. That gave a notional range of about thirteen miles to the Russian's towed-array sonar. At least, Claggett thought, that's what the intelligence guys would have said.
"You know, I think we'll hold at fifty-K yards, just to play it on the safe side," Ricks announced, after a moment's reflection. "This guy is a lot quieter than I expected."
"Plant noises are down quite a bit, aren't they? If this guy was creeping instead of trying to cover ground "
Claggett was pleased that his Captain was speaking like his conservative-engineer self again. He wasn't especially surprised. When push came to shove, Ricks reverted to type, but that was all right with the XO, who didn't think it was especially prudent to play fast-attack with a billion-dollar boomer. "We could still hold him at forty, thirty-five tops."
"Think so? How much will his tail's