Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

274 JEFF EDWARDS
down to Sick Bay.” She paused again before continuing. “Our Ship
Control Console is totally wrecked, but we’ve worked out a system of
steering from the bridge. The Conning Officer has to relay his course
orders to the Secondary Control Console in After Steering, and his speed
orders to Propulsion Control Console in CCS. It’s awkward, but it works.
The explosion blew out most of the windows, so the watch team is
constantly getting about twenty knots of hot desert wind right in the face.
Not pleasant, but they’re dealing with it.
“Let’s see …” she said. “What else?”
“The helo,” Lieutenant (jg) Sherman said softly.
“Right,” said Commander Vargas. “Thanks. Since Ingraham is down
for the count, we’ve borrowed their helo, Gunslinger Four-One. We don’t
have a helo hangar, but I figure that any aircraft that costs thirty million
dollars should be able to survive for a day or two strapped to our flight
deck.” She gave a tired smile. “Our flight deck crew wanted the air crew
to feel at home, so they went out and painted a welcoming sign on the door
to the helo control tower. It’s one of those big blue road signs, like the
ones you see near highway off-ramps. It’s got those three symbols on it
that mean gas, food, and lodging.” Her voice trailed off. “I think that’s
it.”
“Thank you, Commander,” the captain said. “I guess we’re ready for
the tactical part of the brief. Ready, Chief?”
Chief McPherson unrolled a navigational chart of the Arabian Gulf and
laid it on the table. “Yes, sir.” On the chart, in colored marker, she had
drawn a series of lines and symbols describing the current tactical
situation. The last known position of Gremlin Zero Four was marked by a
red datum symbol. The datum was now two and a half hours old, and a
black dashed circle enclosed it at a scaled range of fifty nautical miles.
Based on the submarine’s maximum submerged speed of twenty knots,
this dashed line—or farthest-on circle—represented the farthest that it
could have possibly traveled in two and a half hours.“This chart is already
time-late,” Chief McPherson said. “A contact moving at twenty knots will
travel two thousand yards in three minutes. Therefore, every three
minutes, the radius of the farthest-on circle increases by two thousand
yards, or one nautical mile. The piece of ocean that we have to search
grows by a corresponding amount. Our top speed is limited to eighteen
and a half knots. So, if the sub is running away at top speed, we’ll never
catch him. If he’s headed northwest toward Siraj at a dead run, every three
minutes he gets a hundred and fifty yards farther ahead of us. The longer
we chase him, the farther ahead he’s going to get.”