Red Storm Rising

"If you mean inshore intelligence gathering, Dan, you ought to know that that electronic intelligence stuff you collect comes to my office. Hell, I probably know the people who originate a lot of the data requests that generate your op-orders. How's that for a revolting thought!" Bob laughed. He fought the urge to look around too obviously. He'd never been aboard a nuclear submarine before. It was cold-nuclear subs have nuclear-powered air conditioning-and the air was heavy with the smell of machine oil. Everything he could see sparkled both from being almost new, and from the fact that McCafferty had undoubtedly made sure that his crew had gotten things looking especially good for his friends. So, this was the billion-dollar machine that gathered all that ELINT data...

"Yeah, well, we were up in the Barents Sea, you know, northeast of the Kola Fjord, trailing a Russian sub-an Oscar-about, oh, ten miles back of her-and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of a friggin' live-fire exercise! Missiles were flying all over the damned place. They wasted three old hulks, and blasted hell out of a half-dozen target barges. "

"Just the Oscar" Morris asked.

"Turned out there was a Papa and a Mike out there, too. That's one problem with us being so quiet in these babies. If they don't know we're there, we can find ourselves in the middle of some really unpleasant shit! Anyway, sonar starts screaming 'Transients! Transients!' from all the missile tubes being flooded. No way we could be sure they weren't getting ready to put some real torpedoes in the water, but we stuck up the ESM and picked up their periscope radars, then I saw some of the things whipping over our heads. Damn, guys, for about three minutes there it was just a little hairy, y'know?" McCafferty shook his head. "Anyway, two hours after that, all three boats crack on twenty knots and head back to the barn. Your basic out-and-in live-fire. How's that for a lively first deployment?"

"You get the feeling that the Russians are doing anything out of the ordinary, Dan?"' Toland asked, suddenly interested.

"You didn't hear"

"Hear what"

"They've cut back their diesel sub patrols up north, quite a bit, too. I mean, normally they're pretty hard to hear, but mostly over the past two months they just ain't there. I heard one, just one. Wasn't like that the last time I was up north. There have been some satellite photos of them, a lot of diesel boats tied up alongside for some reason or another. In fact, their patrol activity up north is down across the board, with a lot of maintenance activity going on. The current guess is that they're changing their training cycle. This isn't the usual time of year for live-firing." McCafferty laughed. "Of course, it could be that they finally got tired of chippin' and paintin' those old 'cans, and decided to use 'em up-best thing to do with a 'can anyway."

"Bubblehead," Morris snorted.

"Give me a reason you'd have a bunch of diesel boats out of service all at once," Toland said. He was wishing that he'd passed on the second and third rounds during Happy Hour. Something important was flashing lights inside his head, and the alcohol was slowing his thinking down.

"Shit," McCafferty observed. "There isn't any."

"So what are they doing with the diesel boats?"

"I haven't seen the satellite photos, Bob, just heard about them. No special activity in the drydocks, though, so it can't be too major."

The light bulb finally went off in Toland's head. "How hard is it to change batteries in a sub?"

"It's a nasty, heavy job. I mean, you don't need special machinery or anything. We do it with Tiger Teams, and it takes something like three or four weeks. Ivan's subs are designed with larger battery capacities than ours, and also for easier battery replacement-they're supposed to go through their batteries faster than Western subs, and they compensate for it by making replacement easier, hard-patches on the hull, things like that. So for them it's probably an all-hands evolution. What exactly are you getting at, Bob?"

Toland related the story about the four Soviet colonels who had been shot, and why. "Then I bear this story about how the supply of batteries in Russia has dried up. No batteries for cars and trucks. The car batteries I can understand, but the trucks-hey, every truck in Russia is government-owned. They all have mobilization uses. Same sort of batteries, right?"

"Yeah, they all use lead-acid batteries. The factory burn down?" Commander Morris asked. "I know Ivan likes One Big Factory rather than a bunch of little ones."

"It's working three shifts."

McCafferty sat back, away from the table.

"So, what uses batteries?" Morris asked rhetorically.