“That’s a good bet.” McCafferty nodded grimly. “How far are we from the point where the boomer rendezvoused with the Natya?”
The navigator examined the plot closely. “Stopped about four hundred yards short of it, sir.”
“All stop.”
“All stop, aye.” The helmsman dialed the annunciator handle. “Engine room answers all stop, sir. Passing left through one-eight-zero, sir.”
“Very well. We ought to be safe enough here. You have to figure the Delta’d rendezvous with the sweeper a few miles clear of the field, right? Anybody here think Ivan would gamble with a boomer?” It was a rhetorical question. Nobody ever gambled with boomers.
Everyone in the control room took a deep breath at the same moment. The
Chicago
slowed rapidly, her turn taking her broadside to her previous course.
“Rudder amidships.” McCafferty ordered one-third speed and lifted the phone for sonar. “The boomer doing anything different?”
“No, sir. Bearing is still constant at one-nine-zero. Speed still fifteen knots. We can still hear the Natya pinging, nearing one-eight-six, and her blade count is now about fifteen knots, too.”
“Navigator, start figuring a way for us to get out of here. We want to keep well clear of all those patrol boats and report this news in as quick as we can.”
“Aye. Three-five-eight looks pretty good for the moment, sir.” The navigator had been updating that course continuously for two hours.
“Sir, if Ivan really has laid out a minefield, part of it’s in international waters,” the exec noted. “Cute.”
“Yeah. Of course, to them it’s territorial waters, so anybody bumps into a mine, it’s just too damned bad—”
“And maybe an international incident?” Joe observed.
“But why did they ping at all?” the communications officer asked. “If they got a clear channel they can navigate visually.”
“What if there’s no channel at all?” the exec answered. “What if they set ground mines, and moored mines strung, say, at a uniform depth of fifty feet. You have to figure they’d be a little nervous that a mine or two might have too long a mooring cable. So they’re playing it safe, just like we’d do. What’s all that tell you?”
“Nobody can trail their boomers without surfacing . . .” the lieutenant understood.
“And we sure as hell aren’t going to do that. Nobody ever said that Ivan was dumb. They got a perfect system here. They’re putting all their missile boats where we can’t get at them,” McCafferty went on. “Even SUBROC can’t make it from where we are into the White Sea. Final point, if they have to scatter the boats, they don’t have to screw around in a single channel, they can all surface, spread out, and run for daylight.
“What this means, gentlemen, is that instead of detailing an attack boat to guard every boomer against somebody like us, they can put all the missile boats into one nice, safe basket and release their attack boats to other missions. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
NORTH ATLANTIC
“Ship in view, this is U.S. Navy aircraft on your port beam. Please identify, over.” Captain Kherov handed the bridge-to-bridge phone to a Red Army major.
“Navy, this is the
Doctor Lykes.
How are y’all?” Kherov spoke halting English. The major’s Mississippi accent might as well have been Kurdish for all he understood of it. They could barely make out the haze-gray patrol aircraft that was now circling their ship—circling, they noted, at a five-mile distance and certainly inspecting them through binoculars.
“Amplify,
Doctor Lykes,”
the voice ordered tersely.
“We’re out of New Orleans, bound for Oslo with general cargo, Navy. What’s the big deal?”
“You’re well north of a course to Norway. Please explain, over.”
“Y‘all read the damned papers, Navy? It’s liable to get dangerous out here, and this big ole ship costs money. We got orders from the home office to keep close to some friendly folks. Hell, we’re glad to see ya’, boy. Y’all want to escort us a ways?”
“Roger, copy.
Doctor Lykes,
be advised no submarines known to be in this area.”
“Y’all guarantee that?”
This drew a laugh. “Not hardly,
Doc.”
“That’s about what I thought, Navy. Well, if it’s all right with you, we’ll keep heading north a ways and try to stay under your air cover, over.”
“We can’t detail an aircraft to escort you.”
“Understood, but you will come if we call you—right?”
“That’s a roger,” agreed Penguin 8.
“Okay, we’ll continue north, then turn east for the Faroes. Will you warn us if any bad guys show up? Over.”
“If we find any,
Doc,
the idea is we’ll try an’ sink ’em first,” the pilot exaggerated.
“Fair enough. Good huntin’, boy. Out.”
PENGUIN 8
“God, do people really talk like that?” the pilot of the Orion wondered aloud.
“Never heard about Lykes Lines?” his copilot chuckled. “They used to say they wouldn’t hire a guy ’less he had a Southern accent. I never believed it until now. Nothing like tradition. He is kinda off the beaten track, though.”
“Yeah, but until the convoys form up, hell, I’d try to bounce from one protected area to another. Anyway, let’s finish the visual.” The pilot increased power and headed in closer while his copilot lifted the recognition book.
“Okay, we have an all-black hull with ‘Lykes Lines’ on the side, midships. White superstructure with black diamond, a block L inside the diamond.” He lifted his binoculars. “Lookout mast forward of the superstructure. Check. Superstructure is nicely raked. Electronics mast is not. Proper ensign and house flag. Black funnels. Winches aft by the barge elevator—doesn’t say how many winches. Damn, she’s carrying a full load of barges, isn’t she? Paintwork looks a little shabby. Anyway, it all checks with the book; that’s a friendly.”
“Okay, let’s give her a wave.” The pilot turned the yoke to the left, taking the Orion directly over the barge-carrier. He waggled his wings slightly as he passed overhead, and two men on the bridge waved back at them. The flyers couldn’t pick out the two men tracking them with hand-held SAMs. “Good luck, fella. You might need it.”
MV
JULIUS FUCIK
“The new paint scheme will make visual spotting difficult, Comrade General,” the air-defense officer said quietly. “I saw no air-to-surface missiles attached.”
“That will change quickly enough. As soon as our fleet puts to sea, they will load them. Besides, if they identify us as enemy, how far can we run while they call up other aircraft, or simply fly to their base to rearm?” The General watched the aircraft depart. His heart had been in his throat for the whole episode, but now he could walk out to where Kherov stood on the open bridge wing. Only the ship’s officers had been issued American-style khaki uniforms.
“My compliments to your language officer. I presume he was speaking English?”
Andreyev laughed jovially, now that the danger was past. “So I am told. The Navy requested a man with his particular skills. He’s an intelligence officer, served in America.”
“In any case, he succeeded. Now we may approach our objective safely,” Kherov said, using the last word relatively.
“It will be good to be on land again, Comrade Captain.” The General didn’t like being on such a large, unprotected target and would not feel safe until he had solid ground under his feet. At least as an infantryman you had a rifle with which to defend yourself, usually a hole to hide in, and always two legs to run away. Not so on a ship, he had learned. A ship was one large target, and this one was virtually unprotected. Amazing, he thought, that anything would feel worse than being on a transport aircraft. But there he had a parachute. He had no illusions about his ability to swim to land.
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
“There goes another one,” the chief master sergeant said.
It was almost boring now. Never in the colonel’s memory had the Soviets had more than six photographic reconnaissance satellites in orbit. There were now ten, plus ten electronic-intelligence gatherers, some launched from the Baikonor Cosmodrome outside Leninsk in the Kazakh S.S.R., the other half from Plesetsk in northern Russia.
“That’s an F-type booster, Colonel. Burn time is wrong for the A-type,” the sergeant said, looking up from his watch.
This Russian booster was a derivation of the old SS-9 ICBM, and it had only two functions—to launch radar ocean reconnaissance satellites, called RORSATS, that monitored ships at sea and to loft the Soviet antisatellite system. The Americans were watching the launch from a newly launched KH-11 reconnaissance satellite of their own, sweeping over the central region of the USSR. The colonel lifted the phone to Cheyenne Mountain.
USS
PHARRIS
I should be sleeping,
Morris told himself.
I should stockpile sleep, bank it away against the time when I can’t have any.
But he was too keyed up to sleep.
USS Pharris was steaming figure eights off the mouth of the Delaware River. Thirty miles north, at the piers of Philadelphia, Chester, and Camden, ships of the National Reserve Defense Fleet that had been held in readiness for years were getting ready to sail. Cargo holds were loading with tanks, guns, and crates of explosive ordnance. His air-search radar showed the tracks of numerous troop transports lifting out of Dover Air Force Base. The Military Airlift Command’s huge aircraft could ferry the troops across to Germany where they would be mated with their pre-positioned equipment, but when their unit loads of munitions ran out, the resupply would have to be ferried across the way it had always been, in ugly, fat, slow merchant ships—targets. Maybe the merchies weren’t so slow anymore, and were larger than before, but there were fewer of them. During his naval career, the American merchant fleet had fallen sharply, even supplemented by these federally funded vessels. Now a submarine could sink one ship and get the benefit it would have achieved in World War II by sinking four or five.
The merchant crews were another problem. Traditionally held in contempt by Navy sailors—a truism in the U.S. Navy was to steer well clear of any merchantman, lest he decide to liven up his day by ramming you—the average age of the crews running the ships was about fifty, more than double that in any American naval vessel. How would those grandfathers take the stress of combat operations? Morris wondered. They were quite well paid—some of the senior seamen made as much as he did—but would their comfortable, union-negotiated salaries devalue in the face of missiles and torpedoes? He had to erase the thought from his mind. These old men with kids in high school and college were his flock. He was the shepherd, and there were wolves hiding under the gray surface of the Atlantic.
Not a large flock. He had seen the figures only a year ago: the total number of privately owned cargo ships in operation under the American flag was 170 and averaged about eighteen thousand tons apiece. Of those, a mere 103 were routinely engaged in overseas trade. The supplemental National Defense Reserve Fleet consisted of only 172 cargo ships. To call the situation a disgrace was to describe gang rape as a mild social deviation.
They couldn’t allow even one to be lost.
Morris wandered over to the bridge radarscope and looked down into the rubber eyeshicld to watch the aircraft lifting out of Dover. Each blip contained three to five hundred men. What would happen when they ran out of shells?
“Another merchie, skipper.” The officer of the dock pointed to a dot on the horizon. “She’s a Dutch container boat. I expect she’s inbound for military cargo.”
Morris grunted. “We need all the help we can get.”
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
“It’s definite, sir,” the colonel said. “That’s a Soviet ASAT-bird, seventy-three nautical miles behind one of ours.”
The colonel had ordered his satellite to turn in space and point its cameras at its new companion. The light wasn’t all that good, but the shape of the Soviet killer satellite was unmistakable: a cylinder nearly a hundred feet long, with a rocket motor at one end and a radar seeker antenna at the other.
“What’s your recommendation, Colonel?”
“Sir, I am requesting unlimited authority to maneuver my birds at will. As soon as anything with a red star on it gets within fifty miles, I’m going to do a series of delta-V maneuvers to screw up their intercept solution.”
“That will cost you a lot of fuel, son,” CINC-NORAD warned.
“What we have here, General, is a binary solution set.” The colonel responded like a true mathematician. “Choice one, we maneuver the birds and risk the fuel loss. Choice two, we don’t maneuver the birds and risk having them taken out. Once they close to fifty miles, they can achieve intercept and negate our bird in as little as five minutes. Maybe faster. Five minutes is only the best we’ve observed them to do. Sir, you have my recommendation.” The colonel had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois, but that was not where he’d learned to back generals into corners.
“Okay. This one goes to Washington, but I’ll forward your recommendation with my endorsement.”
USS
NIMITZ
“Admiral, we’ve just had a disturbing report from the Barents Sea.” Toland read the dispatch from CINCLANTFLT.
“How many more subs can they throw at us now?”
“Perhaps as many as thirty additional boats, Admiral.”
“Thirty?”
Baker hadn’t liked anything he’d been told for a week now. He especially didn’t like this.
The
Nimitz
battle group, in company with
Sarotoga
and the French carrier
Foch,
was escorting a marine amphibious unit, called a MAU, to reinforce the ground defenses on Iceland. A three-day run. If the war started soon after they made their delivery, their next mission would be to support the GIUK barrier defense plan, the critically important link that covered the ocean between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Carrier Task Force 21 was a powerful force. But would it be powerful enough? Doctrine required a four-carrier group to fight and survive up here, but the fleet had not yet been fully assembled. Toland was getting reports on frantic diplomatic activity aimed at averting the war that appeared about to start, much as everyone hoped it wouldn’t. How would the Soviets react to four or more carriers in the Norwegian Sea? It seemed that no one in Washington wanted to find out, but Toland was wondering if it would matter at all. As it was, Iceland had approved the reinforcements they were escorting only twelve hours before, and this NATO outpost needed immediate reinforcement.