Red Storm Rising (1986) (49 page)

Dinner was awkward to say the least. The three Russian officers sat at the end of the table, mindful of the two armed guards ten feet away, and the cook in the wardroom pantry who kept a large knife conspicuously in view. The officers were served by a young seaman, a beardless boy of seventeen who scowled mightily at the Russians as he served the salad.

“So,” Morris said cordially, “do any of you speak English?”

“I do,” answered one. “I am instructed my captain to thank you for rescue our men.”

“Tell your captain that war has rules, and so does the sea. Please tell him also that he showed great skill in his approach.” Morris poured some Thousand Island dressing on his lettuce as the message was translated. His officers were keeping a close eye on their guests. Morris was careful to avert his gaze. His remark had the desired effect. A rapid exchange took place at the other end of the table.

“My captain ask how you find us. We—how you say—get away from your helicopters, no?”

“Yes, you did,” Morris answered. “We did not understand your operating pattern.”

“Then how you find us?”

“I knew you were attacked earlier by the Orion, and that you ran at high speed to catch up with us. The angle for your attack was predictable.”

The Russian shook his head. “What attack is this? Who attack us?” He turned to his commander and spoke for thirty seconds.

There’s another Charlie out there,
Morris thought,
if he’s not lying to us. We ought to get someone who speaks Russian to talk to the crewmen below. Damn, why don’t I have one of those?

“My captain says you are mistake in this. Our first contact with you was from helicopters. We did not expect your ship to be here. Is this new tactic?”

“No, we’ve practiced this for some years.”

“How you find us, then?”

“You know what a towed-array sonar is? We first detected you on that, about three hours before we shot at you.”

The Russian’s eyes went wide. “Your sonar so good as that?”

“Sometimes.” After this was translated the Russian captain spoke what seemed a terse order, and the conversation stopped. Morris wondered if his radio technicians had wired the microphone into the Russians’ quarters yet. Perhaps what they said among themselves would be useful to fleet intelligence. Until then he’d continue to make them comfortable. “How is the food aboard a Soviet submarine?”

“Not same as this,” the navigator answered after conferring with his boss. “Good, but not same. We eat different foods. More fish, less meat. We have tea, not coffee.”

Ed Morris saw that his prisoners were going after their plates with scarcely concealed gusto.
Even our sub guys don’t get enough fresh vegetables,
he reminded himself. An enlisted man entered the wardroom and stood by the door. It was his leading radioman. Morris waved him over.

The sailor handed the captain a message form. THE SPECIAL JOB IS DONE, it read, and Morris noted that the man had taken the time to print it up on a standard message format so that no one would suspect what it meant. The Russians’ accommodations were all bugged now. Morris dismissed his man with a nod and pocketed the form. His bosun had miraculously discovered two bottles of hard liquor—probably from the chiefs’ quarters, but Morris knew better than to inquire—and these would find their way to the Russians tonight. He hoped the liquor would loosen tongues.

Morris didn’t wave at the low-flying aircraft, but wanted to. The French Navy’s patrol plane signaled that they were within range of land-based air cover. It would take a very brave Russian sub skipper to want to play games here, with a screen of French diesel subs a few miles north of the convoy lane and several ASW patrol aircraft forming a tricolored umbrella over the convoy.

The French had also sent out a helicopter to collect the Russian submariners. They were being flown to Brest for a full interrogation by NATO intelligence types. Morris didn’t envy them the trip. They’d be held by the French, and he had no doubt that the French Navy was in an evil mood after the loss of one of its carriers. The tapes his crew had made of their conversations were also being sent. The Russians had talked among themselves, aided by the chiefs’ liquor, and perhaps their whispered conversations had some value.

They were about to turn the convoy over to a mixed British-French escort force and take over a group of forty merchantmen bound for America. Morris stood on the bridge wing, turning every five minutes or so to look at the two half and one full silhouettes that the bosun had painted on
both
sides of the pilothouse—“ No sense having some jerk on the wrong side of the ship missing them,” the bosun had pointed out seriously. Their ASW tactics had worked fairly well. With
Pharris
as outlying sonar picket, and heavy support from the Orions, they had intercepted all but one of the inbound Russian subs. There had been a lot of skepticism on this point, but the tactic had worked, by God. But it had to work better still.

Morris knew that things would be getting harder. For the first trip the Soviets had been able to put no more than a fraction of their submarines into action against them. Those submarines were now forcing their way down the Denmark Strait. The NATO sub force trying to block the passage no longer had the SOSUS line to give them intercept vectors, nor Orions to pounce on the contacts that submarines could not reach. They would score kills, but would they score enough? How much larger would the threat be this week? Morris could see from their return route to the States that they were adding nearly five hundred miles to the passage by looping far to the south—partially because of the Backfires, but more now to dilute the submarine threat. Two threats to worry about. His ship was equipped to deal with only one.

They’d lost a third of the convoy, mainly to aircraft. Could they sustain that? He wondered how the merchant crews were holding up.

They had closed in on the convoy, and he could see the northernmost line of merchies. On the horizon a big container ship was blinking a light at them. Morris raised his glasses to read the signal.

THANKS FOR NOTHING NAVY. One question answered.

“So, there they arc,” McCafferty said.

The trace showed almost white on the screen, a thick spoke of broadband noise bearing three-two-nine. It could only be the Soviet task force heading for Bodø.

“How far out?” McCafferty asked.

“At least two CZs, skipper, maybe three. The signal just increased in intensity four minutes ago.”

“Can you get a blade count on anything?”

“No, sir.” The sonarman shook his head. “Just a lot of undifferentiated noise for the moment. We’ve tried to isolate a few discrete frequencies, but even that’s all screwed up. Maybe later, but all we got now is a thundering herd.”

McCafferty nodded. The third convergence zone was a good hundred miles off. At such ranges acoustical signals lost definition, to the point that their bearing to target was only a rough estimate. The Russian formation could be several degrees left or right of where they thought, and at this range that was a difference measured in miles. He went aft to Control.

“Take her west five miles at twenty knots,” McCafferty ordered. It was a gamble, but a small one. On reaching station, they’d found unusually good water conditions, and the small move risked losing the contact temporarily. On the other hand, getting precise range information would give him a much better tactical picture and enable them to make a solid contact report—and make it by line-of-sight UHF radio before the Soviet formation got close enough that they could intercept the submarine’s transmission. As the boat raced west, McCafferty watched the bathythermograph trace. As long as the temperature didn’t change, he’d keep that good sound channel. It didn’t. The submarine slowed rapidly and McCafferty went back to sonar.

“Okay, where are they now?”

“Got ’em! Right there, bearing three-three-two.”

“XO, plot it and get a contact report made up.”

Ten minutes later the report was sent via satellite. The reply ordered
Chicago
in: GO FOR THE HEAVIES.

The farm was three miles away, thankfully downhill through tall, rough grass. On first sighting it through binoculars, Edwards called it the Gingerbread House. A typical Icelandic farmhouse, it had white stucco walls buttressed by heavy wooden beams, a contrasting red-painted trim, and a steeply pitched roof right out of the Brothers Grimm. The outlying barns were large, but low-slung with sod-covered roofs. The lower meadows by the stream were dotted with hundreds of large, odd-looking sheep with massively thick coats of wool, asleep in the grass half a mile beyond the house.

“Dead-end road,” Edwards said, folding up the map. “And we could use some food. Gentlemen, it’s worth the chance, but we approach
carefully.
We’ll follow this dip to the right and keep that ridgeline between us and the farm till we’re within half a mile or so.”

“Okay, sir,” Sergeant Smith agreed. The four men struggled into a sitting position to don their gear yet again. They’d been moving almost continuously for two and a half days, and were now about thirty-five miles northeast of Reykjavik. A modest pace on flat roads, it was a man-killing effort cross country, particularly while staying watchful for the helicopters that were now patrolling the countryside. They had consumed their last rations six hours before. The cool temperatures and hard physical effort conspired to drain the energy from their bodies as they picked their way around and over the two-thousand-foot hills that dotted the Icelandic coast like so many fence pickets.

Several things kept them moving. One was the fear that the Soviet division they had watched airlifted in would expand its perimeter and snap them up. No one relished the thought of captivity under the Russians. But worse than this was fear of failure. They had a mission, and no taskmaster is harsher than one’s own self-expectations. Then there was pride. Edwards had to set an example for his men, a principle remembered from Colorado Springs. The Marines, of course, could hardly let a “wing-wiper” outperform them. Thus, without thinking consciously about it, four men contrived to walk themselves into the ground, all in the name of pride.

“Gonna rain,” Smith said.

“Yeah, the cover will be nice,” Edwards said, still sitting back. “We’ll wait for it. Jesus, I never thought working in daylight would be so Goddamned tough. There’s just something weird about not having the friggin’ sun go down.”

“Tell me about it. And I ain’t even got a cigarette,” Smith growled.

“Rain
again?”
Private Garcia asked.

“Get used to it,” Edwards said. “It rains seventeen days in June, on average, and so far this’s been a wet year. How d’you think the grass got so tall?”

“You like this place?” Garcia asked, dumbfounded enough to forget the “sir.” Iceland had little in common with Puerto Rico.

“My dad’s a lobsterman working out of Eastpoint, Maine. When I was a kid I went out on the boat every time I could, and it was always like this.”

“What we gonna do when we get down to that house, sir?” Smith brought them back to things that mattered.

“Ask for food—”

“Ask?” Garcia was surprised.

“Ask. And pay for it, with cash. And smile. And say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ ” Edwards said. “Remember your manners, guys, unless you want him to phone Ivan ten minutes after we leave.” He looked around at his men. The thought sobered them all.

The rain started with a few sprinkles. Two minutes later it was falling heavily, cutting visibility down to a few hundred yards. Edwards wearily got to his feet, forcing his Marines to do likewise, and they all moved downhill as the sun above the clouds dipped in the northwestern sky and slid down behind a hill. The hill—since they’d probably have to climb it the next day, they thought of it as a mountain—had a name, but none of them could pronounce it. By the time they were a quarter mile from the farmhouse, it was as dark as it would get, and the rain had the visibility down to about eighty yards.

“Car coming.” Smith saw the glare of the lights first. All four men dropped and instinctively aimed their rifles at the dots on the horizon.

“Relax, guys. This road here breaks off the main road, and those lights could just be—
shit!”
Edwards cursed. The lights hadn’t taken the sweeping turn on the coastal highway. They were coming down the road to the farm. Was it a car or a track with its driving lights on? “Spread out and stay awake.” Smith stayed with Edwards, and the two privates moved downhill about fifty yards.

Edwards lay prone, his elbows propped up on the wet grass and binoculars to his eyes. He didn’t think they could be spotted. The Marine pattern camouflage made them nearly invisible in daylight as long as they didn’t move rapidly. In the dark they were transparent shadows.

“Looks like a pickup, four-by-four, something like that. Lights are pretty far off the ground, bouncing around too much to be a track,” Edwards thought aloud.

The lights came directly—but slowly—to the farmhouse and stopped. Its doors opened, men got out, and one stepped in front of the headlights before they were extinguished.

“Damn!” Smith snarled.

“Yep, looks like four or five Ivans. Get Garcia and Rodgers over here, Sergeant.”

“Right.”

Edwards kept his binoculars on the house. There were no electric lights lit. He guessed that this area got its power from Artun, and he’d watched the bombs wipe that plant off the map. There was some internal illumination, though, maybe from candies or a hurricane lamp. It really was a lot like home, Edwards told himself; our electricity went off often enough, from nor’east-em storms or ice on the wires. The people in that house had to be asleep.
Working farmers, early to bed, early to rise
—
wears you out and dulls the brain,
Edwards thought. Through the lenses he watched the Russians—he counted five—circle the house.
Like burglars,
he thought. They looking for . . . us? No. If they were looking for us, there’d be more than five guys in a four-by-four.
That’s interesting. They must be looting
—
but what if somebody
. . .
Jesus, we know that
somebody
lives there. Somebody lit that lamp. What are they up to?