Yes, this was the place.

CHAPTER 19

Development

"Commodore, I have real trouble believing that." Ricks said as evenly as he could manage. He was tanned and refreshed from his trip to Hawaii. He'd stopped in at Pearl Harbor while there, of course, to look over the sub base and dream about having command of Submarine Squadron One. That was a fast-attack squadron, but if a fast-attack guy like Mancuso could take over a boomer squadron, then surely turn-about was fair play.

"Dr Jones is a really good man." Bart Mancuso replied.

"I don't doubt it, but our own people have been over the tapes." It was normal operating procedure and had been so for more than thirty years. Tapes from missile-sub patrols were always examined by a team of experts on shore as a back-check to the sub's crew. They wanted to make sure that no one might have been trailing a missile boat. "This Jones guy was one hell of a sonar operator, but now he's a contractor, and he has to justify his fees somehow, doesn't he? I'm not saying he's dishonest. It's his job to look for anomalies, and in this case what he did was to string a bunch of coincidences into a hypothesis. That's all there is here. The data is equivocal - hell, the data is almost entirely speculative - but the bottom line is that for this to be true, you have to assume that the same crewmen who tracked a 688 were unable to detect a Russian boat at all. Is that plausible?"

"That's a good point, Harry. Jones doesn't say that it's certain. He gives it a one-in-three chance."

Ricks shook his head. "I'd say one in a thousand, and that's being generous."

"For what it's worth, Group agrees with you, and I had some people from OP-02, here three days ago who said the same thing."

So, why are we having this conversation? Ricks wanted to ask, but couldn't. "The boat was checked for noise on the way out, right?"

Mancuso nodded. "Yep, by a 688 right out of overhaul, all the bells and whistles."

"And?"

"And she's still a black hole. The attack boat lost her at a range of three thousand yards at five knots."

"So how are we writing it up?" Ricks asked, as casually as he could manage. This was going into his record, and that made it important.

It was Mancuso's turn to squirm. He hadn't decided. The bureaucrat part of him said that he'd done everything right. He'd listened to the contractor, booted the data up the chain of command to Group, to Force, and to the Pentagon experts. Their analysis had all been negative: Dr Jones was being overly paranoid. The problem was that Mancuso had sailed with Jones for three very good years in USS Dallas, and had never known him to make a bad call. Never. Not once. That Akula had been somewhere out there in the Gulf of Alaska. From the time the P-3 patrol aircraft had lost her to the moment she'd appeared outside her base, the Admiral Lunin had just fallen off the planet. Where had she been? Well, if you drew speed/time circles, it was possible that she'd been in Maine’s patrol area, possible that she'd left Maine at the proper time and made homeport at the proper time. But it was also possible - and very damned likely - that she'd never been in the same area as the American missile sub. Maine hadn't detected her, and neither had Omaha. How likely was it that a Russian sub could have evaded detection by both top-of-the-line warships?