The Chase: One Courageous Skipper Battling The Perilous Evil Out To Destroy Him. (Sea Action & Adventure) Read Free Page A

0800 local time, the first sortie of the divers returned to the submarine as she floated motionless, her tower barely under the surface. The black intimidating rocks were on their port side ten miles south of Bodrum.
    The divers, still in their dripping rubber suits, turned to the Captain: “Half of the antenna mast is gone. The whole left side is missing”. The shaken gaze of their comrades stopped them from adding unnecessary details.
    The Captain was tense, visibly stressed. Yuri Kovak, the chief ELINT officer was pale and astounded. The antenna mounted on the left side of the tower was the latest addition to the Slavianka’s snooping equipment. It was a dual frequency antenna designed to operate on the millimeter wavelength. It incorporated the receiver front-end and was capable of tracking and monitoring signals on the 34 and 94 Gigahertz bands. The antenna, indeed, the whole system was top secret. The fact that the Soviet naval intelligence was listening on these extremely short wavelengths was an even greater secret.
    By 0800 hours, there were fifty-four extremely worried Russians inside the Slavianka. There were two essential reasons for their anxiety. Firstly, no one walks free from a Soviet court of investigation. Even light charges may carry a punishment of a few years in some extremely remote and cold place. The second, more immediate, problem was that of surfacing. There are two things submarine crews fear above all – uncontrolled diving and unscheduled surfacing. The first one is usually brief in nature, ending, as it does at two hundred fathoms, when a pressure of twenty tons stresses each square foot of the hull, and the structure crumples like a tin can.
    Surfacing, while not quite fatal, renders a submarine extremely vulnerable. Even a small gunboat can destroy a surfaced submarine, which would have the maneuverability of a pregnant guppy.
     
     
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    By 1600 local time, the Slavianka sailed slowly into Barylia Bay, confined within the tall, black walls of the Gulf of Mandalya, on the western coast of Turkey. The sheer cliffs made darkness fall early inside the narrow inlet and the Russians didn’t waste much time. The submarine navigated slowly left into the northern fjord at the end of the bay. It was a tight dead-ended inlet well suited for their task.
    She surfaced at 1640, very slowly and silently. Tension was high and their breathing inside was heavy. As soon as the hatch cleared the water, thirteen sailors scrambled out into the gray air. Eleven of them, dressed in dark fatigues, slipped silently into the water and swam ashore, holding their Kalashnikov assault rifles up above their heads. It took them some twenty minutes to climb up the rocks and hold positions in the countryside above. Everything was clear and they waved to the submarine below.
    The two sailors who stayed on the deck of the still rising submarine were busy covering all the hull markings with yards of canvas.
    The technicians on the antenna mast had to work silently, professionally and expediently. Some microwave components had to be replaced, a few waveguide sections were damaged and the whole millimetric down-channel had to be sealed and secured to prevent further damage.
    Shadows covered the deep cove as the sun arched to the west. The soldiers on the hill were still in bright sunlight and all was clear. Not a soul was in sight, not even a rodent in the heath or a bird in the sky.
    A faint sound of a distant motor got everyone to a standstill like living statues. Someone called the Captain and he was out on the deck within seconds.
    “Get ready to dive,” he whispered hoarsely, but it was too late. A small fishing boat glided in from behind the bend, heading into their cove. It was still some five hundred yards away, but this left no time for the Slavianka to dive. They would have been seen for sure.
    “Forget the dive. Get ready to fire, everyone, on my command”.
    The boat was edging closer. A fisherman