Daminski asked, not averse to bugging the proper Hillsworth. “Can I make the report?” Hillsworth nodded. Daminski pulled the boom microphone to his mouth.

“Conn, Sonar. New narrowband contact, designate Sierra Four, showing a double frequency at one five four hertz, approximate bearing one three zero. Contact is a submerged warship.”

“Sonar, Conn, aye. Captain to control.”

“On the way,” Daminski replied to his boom mike.

“Meanwhile designate Sierra Four as Target One. Launch the contact message radio buoy and man silent battle stations, spin up all four Mark 50s and open two torpedo tube outer doors.”

“Captain, Conn, aye.”

Daminski handed Hillsworth the earphones, stood up and clapped the chief on the shoulder, then left the sonar room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Chapter 10

Friday, 27 December

STRAIT OF SICILY

The baseball-bat-sized slot buoy rested inside a tight tube on the flank of the forward part of the ship. It had not waited long when the tube’s insides filled with seawater, the pressure increasing until it matched the outside sea pressure of the Mediterranean. A few seconds later the muzzle door opened; there was no more light in the tube than there had been before. Another moment, and the lower end of the tube pressurized with flowing seawater at a higher pressure than the seawater outside. The slot buoy was launched from the tube, the force of the ejection and its own buoyancy carrying it to the surface over 500 feet above. For several minutes the buoy rose in the dark seawater, the pressure around it easing as it drifted upward. The buoy breached the surface, the upper few inches of the unit drying out in the sea air, open-circuiting a sensor that eventually caused a whip antenna to flip up into the moonlit sky. The transmitter inside began sending Daminski’s contact message to the UHF communications satellite above, repeating the message over and over until an hour later the battery was exhausted and the buoy shut down, flooded, and sank back into the depths of the sea.

High overhead, in a geosynchronous orbit, the Navy’s Commstar communications satellite received the message the first time it was transmitted, logged in the time, and seeing the message priority as flash, interrupted its other tasks and retransmitted the message to the commsat in orbit in mid-Atlantic, which then relayed the message to the U.S. Navy communications facility deep inside the Pentagon. There in the special compartmented communications center, an annunciator alarm went off on a computer console, alerting the watchstander of the flash message. Immediately after the message printed out the senior chief radioman made a call on a top-secret cleared phone to the office of the commander in chief of naval forces Mediterranean, Admiral John Traeps. Traeps’s aide, a lieutenant commander, ordered the message taken to Flag Plot, where Traeps was conferring with the C.N.O. The printout was hand-carried to Admiral Traeps and Admiral Richard Donchez in Flag Plot. Traeps read it, initialed it, passed it to Donchez, who commanded the position be plotted on the electronic wall chart. Within thirty seconds a flashing blue dot appeared on the chart’s Strait of Sicily, the dot labeled uss augusta ssn—763 submerged operations; beside it a flashing orange dot’s label announced uif destiny unit one.

Traeps had called a radioman over to take a message.

Traeps handed him the message from the Augusta, with orders to copy the message to the VSST. Fhoenix, now on station guarding Gibraltar and the entrance to the Atlantic, to the Reagan’s ASW Viking jets, and to the Sigonella Orion ASW patrol turboprops.

Donchez looked up at the chart and nodded. Within the hour he should be calling Barczynski to tell him the good news.

USS AUGUSTA

In the control room, officer of the deck Mark Berghoffer looked expectantly at Daminski, who had just shouldered his way into control from the door to sonar. Daminski began giving orders faster than they could be acknowledged.

“Off’sa’deck, I have the conn. Helm, all ahead one third, turn for five knots, left ten degrees rudder, steady course two four zero. Dive, make your depth 1,000 feet. Give me tube status, off’sa’deck …”

The deck inclined downward as the helmsman pushed the control yoke for the stern planes to the full-dive position. As the deck leveled off, the room began to fill with men, all four consoles of the attack center manning up with officers on headsets, phone talkers backing up the ship-control station, plotters working manual plot tables to back up the computers, executive officer Danny Kristman arriving as firecontrol coordinator, Tim Turner taking over as battle stations officer of the deck, Kevin Skinnard manning the attack center’s Position Two, Jamie Fernandez beside him at Pos One, the weapons officer Ron Hackle at the firing panel.

Daminski checked his watch — battle stations had been fully manned within two minutes of his arrival at the conn. Not bad.