Ghost Force (57 page)

“Just get through the gap,” he muttered. “That’s all. And then we’re safe.”

SIX DAYS LATER, FRIDAY, MAY 27
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY

The U.S. Army’s latest Bell Super Cobra helicopter came clattering out of the sky above the long lawn alongside the main house at Hunter Valley Farm. It had traveled eighty miles from Fort Campbell Military Base on the Tennessee border, and it was carrying just two passengers.

Diana Hunter had been worried almost senseless for the past five weeks, because the rigid secrecy surrounding highly classified Special Forces operations had made it impossible for her to discover anything, not even whether her husband and brother were dead or alive.

She watched the Cobra land with her heart missing every other beat, half expecting to see Admiral John Bergstrom emerge personally to break the worst possible news to her. But the first person to disembark was the unmistakable Captain Douglas Jarvis, lean, athletic, hatless, wearing a short-sleeved U.S. Navy white shirt.

She saw him raise up his left arm to assist the second passenger down the steps, and she watched the mighty figure of her husband step carefully down onto the grass, betraying only the slightest limp. And then she literally ripped open the French doors, flew down the wide stone steps, and ran across the grass, hurling herself into the arms of Commander Hunter, tears streaming down her face.

She could manage no words except,
“Thank God, thank God!”
over and over. Until finally she turned to her beloved little brother, who was standing there grinning, a picture of health, his profession betrayed only by the bandage still covering his upper right arm.

Helplessly she shook her head, and asked lamely, “Are you both injured? Were you in the most terrible danger?”

“Nah,” replied Rick Hunter. “But I guess we had our moments.”

SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2011
NORTH ATLANTIC 62.40N 11.20W
SPEED 7, DEPTH 400, COURSE 53.00

Viper K-157
ran slowly northeasterly up through the GIUK Gap, heading stealthily for Mother Russia. At times Captain Gregor Vanislav cut the speed even more, to only five knots, which was just sufficient to make the surface on emergency propulsion, without wallowing, should the nuclear system fail. He was a very sound submarine CO.

And he understood fully the perils of the GIUK, where the U.S. and Royal Navy listening systems were so electrifyingly sensitive. He knew he might be detected, at whatever speed, and simply concentrated on trying to bend the odds in his favor.

They were west of the Faeroe Isles now, just east of the central dividing line between the UK and Iceland, heading into the Norwegian Sea. And Captain Vanislav did not consider they had been detected. But in this he was wrong. The U.S. listening stations on the east coast of Greenland and the one on the southeast coast of Iceland had both detected a transient contact moving slowly northeast.

They had each assessed the tiny paint on the screen as a submarine, and in Iceland they had sufficient data to list it,
“Russian nuclear, probably Akula class. Nothing else correlates on friendly or Russian nets.”
The clincher came from the British, from the ultrasecret surveillance station near Machrihanish on Scotland’s far western Atlantic shore of Kintyre.

The sonar operators there, positioned considerably nearer than their American colleagues, had picked up
Viper
two days ago and identified it immediately,
a Russian nuclear boat, running deep, slowly, almost certainly an Akula class, series II.

They immediately had the submarine positioned in a wide hundred-
mile square, but over the next forty-eight-hours, by process of elimination, and two further detections, they now had the submarine in a ten-mile square. The SOSUS system was on red alert for her predicted position the next time she crossed the undersea wire.

In the blackest of all possible Black Ops, two U.S. hunter-killer submarines, fifty miles apart, guided by the satellites, were patrolling the northern reaches of the GIUK, closing in as the
Viper
moved unsuspectingly forward.

1800, SATURDAY, MAY 28
ON BOARD USS
CHEYENNE
NORTH ATLANTIC

“Stand by, one.”

“Last bearing check.”

“Shoot!”

“Weapon under guidance, sir.”

“Arm the weapon.”

“Weapon armed, sir.”

Two minutes…

“Weapon two thousand yards from target.”

“Sonar…switch to active…single ping.”

“Aye, sir.”

1804, SATURDAY, MAY 28
ON BOARD
VIPER K-157

Captain—Sonar…one active transmission…loud…bearing Green one-three-five…United States SSN for certain…close…really close.

Captain Vanislav reacted instantly, attack, not defense…
Stand by, tube number two…set targets bearing Green one-three-five…Range three thousand meters…Depth one hundred…shoot as soon as you’re ready.

Hard right…steer zero-three-five…shut off for counterattack…full ahead…ten up…two hundred meters.

Captain—Sonar…Torpedo active transmission!!
…
Possibly in contact…right ahead interval nine hundred meters!!”

Captain Vanislav was going for the classic but reckless standard Russian defense of driving flat-out into the direct path of an incoming torpedo. But, too late, he shouted his last command,
“Decoys!!”
—just as the big wire-guided Gould Mk 48 American torpedo slammed into the bow of his ship just forward of the fin.

It blasted a massive hole in the pressure hull, and the thunderous force of the ocean smashed through the bulkheads as if they were made of cardboard. Along with his entire crew, Captain Vanislav died instantly, much as the crew of the
Ark Royal
had done forty-two days before.

She went down in 750 fathoms of ocean, just a few miles short of the Norwegian Basin, where the North Atlantic shelves down to a colossal depth of 12,000 feet, more than two miles.

FOUR WEEKS LATER
0900, SATURDAY, JUNE 25
CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

Admiral Arnold Morgan smiled a thin smile as he scanned the front page of the
New York Times
. The single-column story at the top left hand of the page announced the resignation of the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Basically, Arnold quietly rejoiced in the demise of any left-wing leader of a Western country. And, anyway, that particular PM was never going to survive the catastrophe of the Falkland Islands.

What caught his eye far more sharply was a front-page cross-reference to a story on page three, concerning the loss of a Russian nuclear submarine.

It was an agency story, credited to
Tass, Moscow, Friday;
the headline over two columns described it as “missing, believed lost.”

The Admiral read it carefully:

Admiral Morgan betrayed no emotion. He set the paper aside, just as Kathy came in bearing coffee and toast.

“Did you read about that Russian submarine?” she said. “I saw it on CNN just now.”

“I sure did,” he replied. “Took ’em long enough to admit they’d lost her.”

“You’re always so critical of the Russians,” she said, smiling. “Poor Admiral Rankov, he’s such a jolly man…and anyway you don’t know when she sank, any more than they do.”

“Don’t I?” grunted the Admiral, darkly.

PATRICK ROBINSON
is the author of seven international bestselling suspense thrillers, including
Nimitz Class
and
Hunter Killer,
as well as several nonfiction bestsellers. He divides his time between Ireland and Cape Cod.

www.patrickrobinson.com

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Front cover photograph © Gandee Vasan / Getty Images