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a secret objective and believed the answer was somewhere in the Minch Channel.”
    “You think they might have some idea how seriously the Americans are planning to reactivate SOSUS?”
    “I’m not sure even we know that,” replied the first sea lord. “But the Russkies might know something. And they might be out there trying to find out a lot more.”
    “Of course, they always hated it,” said Admiral Young. “For years it was the bane of their lives. Just imagine—they couldn’t move any big, secret submarine even hundreds of feet below the surface without getting caught. SOSUS virtually negated their whole underwater ballistic missile threat, and they never had a clue about ours, not the Vanguards, and certainly not Polaris.”
    The subject the two admirals now touched upon, SOSUS, was the simple acronym for Sound Surveillance System, the American deepwater, long-range detection network, consisting of high-gain, long, fixed arrays set in cavernous ocean basins and connected to shore-based listening stations. It was the secret weapon of undersea surveillance, an almost infallible early-warning asset against Soviet ballistic missile submarines.

    It utilized deep, horizontal sound channels far below the surface, which allowed low-frequency noise to travel across huge distances with extraordinary effectiveness. It started in quite a small way, but ended up as a multibillion-dollar network of hydrophone arrays, mounted on the seafloor throughout the oceans.
    One of the key areas for SOSUS was the somewhat sinister and stormy section of the North Atlantic known as the GIUK Gap—a navy acronym for Greenland-Iceland-UK—the choke point of the Atlantic through which every Russian submarine from the Northern Fleet shipyards must pass if it wishes to steam south into the Western world. Of course, ships of any nationality are at liberty to sail wherever they wish in international waters. But submarines are big, furtive creatures, whose watchword is secrecy. They dislike being observed or located, especially Russian ones.
    The GIUK Gap has been crisscrossed for years by US hydrophonic wires. No one can even enter those turbulent waters without the Americans knowing more or less what the crew had for breakfast. The system was invented during World War II and underwent a half century of improvements since right until the Cold War was over.
    During that time, SOSUS had some amazing triumphs: the electronic trap caught a Soviet submarine as it crossed the gap as early as 1962. Then it located the USS Thresher after it sank off Nantucket in the same year. It was SOSUS that loudly flagged the lurking Soviet Foxtrot Class submarine during the Cuban missile crisis—the fabled Charlie-20.
    And it found USS Scorpion after she went down off the Azores six years later. For years SOSUS was top secret, but such was its efficiency that it became almost common knowledge among Western allies. Most people, however, did not understand how it worked, and when the Russian empire caved in, the Americans declassified the system, at which point it slipped quietly into the background.
    But it was still there. And so were many of its listening stations, situated mostly on remote coastal sites. There was one on a steep headland on the southwest coast of Iceland, NAVFAC (Naval Facility) Kevlavic; one on the storm-swept coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia; another in Barbados, where they nailed Charlie-20.
    No one has ever officially revealed the full extent of the SOSUS network, but suffice it to say Great Britain played its part. There was an important US listening station in the remote military station of St. Mawgan,
North Cornwall, with a straight-line radar shot to the North Atlantic, and another on high ground above the Pembrokeshire coast at Brawdy, overlooking the Irish Sea.
    The Scottish stations were always secret, but the Americans had them placed in the best possible locations on the west coast, especially where the unseen beams of SOSUS