USS NIMITZ

"Admiral, we've just had a disturbing report from the Barents Sea." Toland read the dispatch from CINCLANTFLT.

"How many more subs can they throw at us now?"

"Perhaps as many as thirty additional boats, Admiral."

"Thirty?" Baker hadn't liked anything he'd been told for a week now. He especially didn't like this.

The NIMITZ battle group, in company with Sarotoga and the French carrier Foch, was escorting a marine amphibious unit, called a MAU, to reinforce the ground defenses on Iceland. A three-day run. If the war started soon after they made their delivery, their next mission would be to support the GIUK barrier defense plan, the critically important link that covered the ocean between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Carrier Task Force 21 was a powerful force. But would it be powerful enough? Doctrine required a four-carrier group to fight and survive up here, but the fleet had not yet been fully assembled. Toland was getting reports on frantic diplomatic activity aimed at averting the war that appeared about to start, much as everyone hoped it wouldn't. How would the Soviets react to four or more carriers in the Norwegian Sea? It seemed that no one in Washington wanted to find out, but Toland was wondering if it would matter at all. As it was, Iceland had approved the reinforcements they were escorting only twelve hours before, and this NATO outpost needed immediate reinforcement.

USS CHICAGO

McCafferty was thirty miles north of the entrance to the Kola Fjord. The crew was relatively happy to be here after a tense sixteen-hour run from Cape Svyatoy. Though the Barents Sea was alive with antisubmarine ships, immediately after making their report they had been withdrawn from the entrance to the White Sea for fear of fomenting a major incident. Here there was a hundred thirty fathoms of water and room to maneuver, and they were confident in their ability to keep out of trouble. There was supposed to be a pair of American subs within fifty miles of Chicago, plus a Brit and two Norwegian diesel boats. His sonarmen couldn't hear any of them, though they could hear a quartet of Grisha-class frigates pinging away at something to the southeast. The allied submarines here were assigned to watch and listen. It was a nearly ideal mission for them, since they only had to creep along, avoiding contact with surface ships, which they could detect from a good, long distance.

There was no hiding it now. McCafferty didn't even consider not telling his men the significance of what they had learned about the Russian boomers. Submarines have no long-lived secrets. It looked like they were about to fight a war. The politicians in Washington and the strategists in Norfolk and elsewhere might still have their doubts, but there, at the sharp end of the lance, the officers and men aboard Chicago discussed the way the Soviets were using their ships and came up with a single answer. The submarine's torpedo tubes were loaded with MK-48 torpedoes and Harpoon missiles. Her vertical missile tubes forward of the pressure hull held twelve Tomahawks, three nuclear-tipped land-attack missiles, and nine conventional antiship models. When a shipboard machine showed the first suggestion of a fault, a technician immediately tore it down to fix it. McCafferty was pleased and not a little surprised by his crew. So young they were-the average age on his submarine was twenty-one-to have to adapt to this.

He stood in the sonar room, forward and to starboard of the attack center. A few feet from him, a massive computer system sifted through an avalanche of waterborne sound, analyzing individual frequency bands known from experience to mark the acoustical signature of a Soviet vessel. The signals were displayed on a visual screen called a waterfall display, a monocolor curtain of yellow whose brighter lines indicated the bearing to a sound that might be a source of interest. Four lines indicated the Grishas, and offset dots marked the pings from their active sonars. McCafferty wondered what they were after. His interest was mainly academic. They weren't pinging his ship, but there was always something to learn from how the enemy did his job. A team of officers in the attack center was plotting the movement of the Soviet patrol ships, carefully noting their information patterns and hunting technique for later comparison with intelligence estimates.

A new series of dots appeared at the bottom of the screen. A sonarman punched a button for a more selective frequency setting, altering the display slightly, then plugged in a pair of microphones. The display was on fast-speed image generation, and McCafferty saw the dots grow to lines around bearing one-nine-eight, the direction to the Kola channel.

"Lots of confused noise, skipper," the sonarman reported. "I read Alfas and Charlies coming out, with other stuff behind them. Blade count on one Alfa is something like thirty knots. Lots of noise behind them, sir."

The visual display confirmed it a minute later. The frequency- or tonelines were in the areas known to depict specific classes of submarines, all moving at high speed to clear the harbor. The bearing-to-contact lines spread apart as the boats fanned out. The boats had already dived, he noted. Usually Soviet submarines didn't dive until they were well offshore.

"Ship count is over twenty, sir," the chief sonarman said quietly. "We have a major sortie here."

"Sure looks like it." McCafferty moved back to the attack center. His men were already entering the contact positions into the fire-control computer, and sketching paper tracks on the chart table. The war hadn't started yet, and though it appeared it could come at any time, McCafferty's orders were to keep clear of any Soviet formation until the Word came. He didn't like it-better to get his blows in quick-but Washington had made it clear they wanted no one to cause an incident that might prevent some kind of diplomatic settlement. That made sense, the captain admitted to himself. Maybe the lace-panty folks could still get things under control. A faint hope, but a real one. Real enough to overcome his tactical desire to hold an attack position.

He ordered his submarine moved farther offshore. In half an hour, things were clearer still, and the captain had a SLOT-buoy launched. The buoy was programmed to allow Chicago thirty minutes to clear the area, then it started sending a series of burst transmissions on a UHF satellite band. From ten miles away, he listened to Soviet ships going beserk around the radio buoy, doubtlessly thinking it was the location of the submarine. The game was becoming all too real.

The buoy operated for over an hour, continuously sending its data to a NATO communications satellite. By nightfall the data was being broadcast to all NATO units at sea. The Russians are coming.