Seas of Crisis by Joe Buff

us?”
    “Presumably the SEALs would be standing guard against that, or they could have sensors specifically meant to watch for human intruders crossing the treaty line.”
    “So saturation diver SEALs defend our channel’s hydrophones, and can sabotage any Russian ones? The Russians don’t even try to compete for the low ground, they just use surface and airborne surveillance platforms instead? That didn’t even occur to me.”
    Bell summoned up a different type of display. The spikes and jiggles showed a graph of sound intensity versus frequency, which Bell had set to focus in on the relative bearings near one-eight-zero—rearward. Challenger hadn’t deployed a towed array, because it could drag or snag on the bottom, creating giveaway noise. He was using the sonar sphere at the bow, with its all-around coverage, to check on his own ship’s signature.
    Bell turned to Sessions and pointed to spikes on the display. “We need to quell our self-noise more.”
    “Concur, sir.”
    “Chief of the Watch,” Bell ordered in a stage whisper. “Stop portside auxiliary turbogenerator. On the sound-powered phones, rig ship for reduced electrical.”
    This would turn off more unnecessary equipment, large and small, making Challenger as silent as a church mouse.
    Jeffrey shimmied back to his console and sat. He cringed as his backside rubbed against the vinyl, squeaking. His brain told him this couldn’t possibly get through Challenger ’s state-of-the-art quieting technology, to be heard outside the ship. The sudden tightness in his gut showed that the rest of his body didn’t believe his brain.
    Bell ordered one more course change. Patel acknowledged, and Jeffrey’s displays shifted their pictures leftward. The maw of the strait was dead ahead. Bell had Patel reduce speed to three knots, about 3.5 miles per hour—a brisk pace for a person on a sidewalk. The current coming from behind, of about a half-knot, gave them a small extra push with no noise penalty.
    “Helm, rig for nap-of-sea-floor cruising mode.”
    Jeffrey’s repeat of the helm displays now showed a different type of information, with steering cues and warnings of gradual dips and rises in the bottom in front of the ship, as revealed by the gravimeter’s sharp resolution at very short range.
    “Helm, maintain clearance beneath the keel of one-five feet. Engage autopilot but be prepared to override.” Jeffrey knew Bell well enough to hear a subtle quiver in his voice; what he’d ordered was no easy task, with a ship as long as a football field including both end zones.
    Even with computer assistance from the ship control station’s autopilot, depth management by Patel and buoyancy and trim control by COB were critical now. The slightest mistake and the bow or stern would hit the sea floor. But Challenger needed every foot of distance from the surface that she could get: LASH worked best at the peak of daylight, and outside the ship it was noon. Every soul aboard was aware, based on horrible experience, of how deadly an antisubmarine weapon LASH was.
    Tension in the control room thickened palpably, becoming almost suffocating. Crewmen pulled off sweaters, or unzipped the tops of their jumpsuits. Others rolled up their sleeves, to stay fresh as the air grew increasingly stale. This was only the beginning of the ordeal of making it through the strait.
    Jeffrey shuffled his windowed displays, to give more room to the pictures from the hull’s photonic sensors. In passive image-intensification mode, he caught glimpses of fish swimming by, and watched the soft, silty bottom receding behind the ship as she moved forward. He saw rocks, transported over the centuries in icebergs calved off glaciers along the coast; as the bergs melted, their burden, released, fell through the sea.
    The tactical plot showed two Russian surface ships just past the northern end of the strait. One was a destroyer, of the type NATO gave the code name Udaloy. Though they tended to be