Seas of Crisis

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Book: Seas of Crisis Read Online Free PDF
Author: Joe Buff
was shallow and silty. Sound emanations bounced repeatedly between the surface and the sea floor, and signal strength was lost with every bounce, so detection ranges were short. “Surface contact, designate Sierra Eight-Four.”
    “Contact identification?” the officer of the deck asked.
    “Three-bladed shaft, dead-slow blade rate. Auxiliary machinery broadband, with intermittent transients. . . . Assess as American fishing trawler.” A factory ship. Salmon, pollack, and herring were plentiful here, unblemished by radioactivity because the war to date had spared the Pacific.
    “Very well, Sonar.” The OOD for this six-hour watch, a junior officer from Engineering, also had the conn, in charge of the course, speed, and depth of the ship.
    “Conn,” the leader of the contact tracking party called out, “Sierra Eight-Four appears to be making bare steerageway, conjecture to hold position against the half-knot current. Our projected closest point of approach crosses within five miles of possible deployed trawling net.” Too close for comfort.
    Bell glanced forward in concern.
    New lines and icon symbols appeared on the tactical plot.
    “Very well,” the officer of the deck responded. “Helm, left five degrees rudder, make your course zero-four-zero.”
    “Left five degrees rudder, aye,” the helmsman acknowledged. “Make my course zero-four-zero, aye.” He worked his joystick, then made more reports to the OOD at the conn.
    On the tactical plot, Challenger ’s projected track shifted to the left, further away from the trawler. Bell appeared satisfied.
    These interactions had been going on nonstop for hours. Jeffrey leaned his elbows on the edge of the horizontal navigation plotting table, and tried to tune them out. He followed along as Meltzer summarized Challenger ’s progress since crossing the Aleutian Islands volcanic chain, entering the southern Bering Sea through one of the deep-water inter-island gaps. The ship’s previous track was shown on the navigation display. This verbal summary was needed for clarity, to best establish a context for the next decisions they faced. It was a long-standing Silent Service tradition that every briefing was also, in part, an oral exam. Errors could be avoided, weaknesses identified and fixed, and continuing education maximized if seniors tested juniors—and themselves strove, before a keen audience, to meet the highest standards.
    Meltzer continued his first major briefing review. “After the change of command, we altered base course to zero-one-zero and came up to five hundred feet as we reached the Siberio-Alaskan rise. That let us avoid St. Matthew Island and then St. Lawrence Island, U.S.-owned in mid-Bering Sea, and we also bypassed the very shallow water stretching east of them to the Alaska mainland.” Meltzer gestured at the chart with his hands. “It did, however, bring us near to the treaty convention line defining American versus Russian waters.” That abstract line on nautical charts, during the Cold War, helped prevent U.S. and Soviet warships from coming too close together unintentionally, thus avoiding an accident or misunderstanding that could escalate. “We’ve gone progressively shallower, and reduced speed, as water depth decreased to its present one-hundred-eighty feet. We altered base course to zero-four-five when we rounded the western tip of St. Lawrence Island.” Northeast. “This put us moving parallel to the treaty line, fifteen, that is one-five, nautical miles on the U.S. side. . . . Excuse me, please, sirs.”
    Meltzer conferred with the Assistant Navigator, a senior chief, and pointed out that their most recent course diversion was slowly bringing them closer to the treaty line. The assistant navigator calculated when, and by how much, to turn back east, safely past Sierra Eight-Four, and before intersecting that line. The senior chief relayed this data to the officer of the deck, who acknowledged.
    “Well, then,”
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