Читать книгу End Game - Dale Brown - Страница 22

‘Tac, I’m clear of that freighter,’ said Starship, flying the Werewolf south. ‘Tanker is two miles off my nose, dead on. I’ll be over it in a heartbeat.’

‘Roger that.’

Starship whipped the little aircraft to the right of the poky tanker. He could see two silhouettes at the side of the superstructure near the bridge – crewmen looking at him.

His throat tightened a notch, and he waited for the launch warning – he had a premonition that one of the people aboard the ship was going to try shoving an SA-7 or even a Stinger up his backside. But his premonition was wrong; he cleared in front of the tanker and circled back, ramping down his speed to get a good look at the deck.

‘Take another run,’ said Tac as he passed the back end.

‘Roger that. Ship’s name is the Mitra,’ added Starship. The name was written at the stern.

‘Keep feeding us images.’

Storm had handpicked the crew for the ship, and the men who manned the sonar department were, if not the very best experts in the surface fleet, certainly among the top ten. So the fact that they now had four unknown underwater contacts eight miles away perplexed him considerably. As did their utter failure to match the sound profiles they had picked up with the extensive library in the ship’s computer.

And now they seemed to be losing contact.

‘Has to be some sort of bizarre glitch in the computer because of the shallow depth and the geometry of the sea bottom nearby,’ insisted Eyes. ‘Maybe it’s an echo.’

‘That’s impossible,’ said Storm.

‘I know.’

Eyes recognized the tone. It meant – not everything works in the real world the way it’s drawn up on the engineering charts, Captain.

Still, he was convinced his people were right.

So what did that mean?

That either he was looking at four submarines – four very quiet submarines – that no one else in the world had heard before, or that he was being suckered by some sort of camouflaging device.

Like an underwater robot trailing behind the submarine, throwing up a smoke screen.

The problem with that was that decoys normally made a lot more noise. These contacts were almost silent.

‘We have mechanical noises in the water,’ said Eyes. ‘We’re having some trouble picking up the sounds, though, because of that tanker.’

‘Explosion?’

‘Negative.’

‘Torpedoes?’

‘Negative. He may have some sort of problem. He may be using the tanker to turn around and check behind him, just as we theorized, Storm. He’s done everything we thought he would, just slower.’

‘We didn’t think he’d split himself into four equal parts.’

‘You really think we’re chasing four submarines?’

Storm folded his arms in front of his chest. The truth was, they’d had all sorts of glitches with their equipment from the moment they’d left port. It was to be expected – the gear was brand new and the bugs had to be worked out.

‘Airforce find anything on that tanker?’ asked Storm.

‘Negative. Tanker checks out. They do a run down to South Africa from Iran. Goes back and forth every couple of weeks.’

‘Let’s give the submariner a few more minutes to make a mistake,’ said Storm. ‘Then we’ll turn on the active sonar. At least we’ll find out how many of him we’re chasing.’

‘Aye aye, Captain.’