O’Malley shook his head. “Two ships, two helos, plus some help from the rest of the screening force. I just go where they send me. There’s a lot to sub-hunting. All the parts have to work or the other guy wins.”
“Is that what happened last night?”
“Sometimes the other guy does something right, too. I just spent four hours looking and came away empty. Maybe that was a sub, maybe not. Yesterday was pretty lucky all the way around.”
“Does it bother you, sinking them?” Calloway asked.
“I’ve been in the Navy for seventeen years and I’ve never met anybody who likes killing people. We don’t even call it that, except maybe when we’re drunk. We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships—things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway. Hell, this is the first time I’ve actually done what my main job is supposed to be. Until now all my combat experience has been search-and-rescue stuff. I never even dropped a war-shot on a real sub until yesterday. I haven’t thought about it enough to know if I like it or not.” He paused. “It’s an awful sound. You hear rushing air. If you penetrate the hull at deep depth, the sudden pressure change inside the hull supposedly causes the air to ignite and everyone inside the boat incinerates. I don’t know if it’s true, but somebody told me that once. Anyway, you hear the rushing air, then you hear the screech—like a car throwing its brakes on hard. That’s the bulkheads letting go. Then comes the noise of the hull collapsing, hollow boom, sort of. And that’s it: a hundred people just died. No, I don’t much like it.
“The hell of it is, it’s exciting,” O’Malley went on. “You’re doing something extremely difficult. It requires concentration and practice and a lot of abstract thought. You have to get inside the other guy’s head, but at the same time you think of your mission as destroying an inanimate object. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? So, what you do is, you don’t think about that aspect of the job. Otherwise the job wouldn’t get done.”
“Are we going to win?”
“That’s up to the guys on land. All we do is support them. This convoy’s going to make it.”
FÖLZIEHAUSEN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
“They told me you were dead,” Beregovoy said.
“Not even scratched this time. It startled Vanya here out of a sound sleep, however. How does the attack go?”
“Initial signs arc promising. We have an advance of six kilometers here, and almost as much here at Springe. We might have Hannover surrounded by tomorrow.”
Alekseyev found himself wondering if his superior had been right. Perhaps NATO lines had been thinned so much they’d been forced to give ground.
“Comrade General.” It was the Army intelligence officer. “I have a report of German tanks at Eldagsen. He—he just went off the air.”
“Where the hell is Eldagsen?” Beregovoy peered down at the map. “That’s ten kilometers behind the line! Confirm that report!”
The ground shook under them, followed by the roar of jet engines and launching missiles.
“They just hit our radio transmitters,” the communications officer reported.
“Switch to the alternate!” Alekseyev shouted.
“That was the alternate. They took out the primary last night,” Beregovoy answered. “Another is being assembled now. So we use what we have here.”
“No,” Alekseyev said. “If we do that, we do it on the move.”
“I can’t coordinate well that way!”
“You can’t coordinate at all if you’re dead.”
USS
CHICAGO
All hell was breaking loose. It was like a nightmare, except you woke up from those, McCafferty reminded himself. At least three Bear-F patrol aircraft were overhead, dropping sonobuoys all over the place, two Krivak-type frigates and six Grisha patrol boats had shown up on the sonar, and a Victor-III submarine had decided to come to the party.
Chicago
had nibbled the odds down some. For the past few hours, fancy footwork had killed the Victor and a Grisha and damaged a Krivak, but the situation was deteriorating. The Russians were mobbing him, and he would not be able to keep them at arm’s length much longer. In the time it had taken him to localize and kill the Victor, the surface groups had closed five miles on him. Like a boxer against a puncher, he had the advantage only as long as he kept them away.
What McCafferty wanted and needed to do was talk with Todd Simms on
Boston
to coordinate their activities. He couldn’t, because the underwater telephone couldn’t reach that far and made too much noise. Even if he tried to make a radio broadcast,
Boston
would have to be near the surface, with her antenna up to hear him. He was sure Todd had his boat as deep as he could drive her. American submarine doctrine was for each boat to operate alone. The Soviets practiced cooperative tactics, but the Americans never felt the need. McCafferty needed some ideas now. The “book” solution to the tactical problem at hand was to maneuver and look for openings, but
Chicago
was essentially tied to a fixed position and could not stray too far from her sisters. As soon as the Russians understood that there was a cripple out there, they’d close in like a pack of dogs to finish
Providence
off, and he would not be able to stop them. Ivan would gladly exchange some of his small craft for a 688.
“Ideas, XO?” McCafferty asked.
“How about, ‘Scotty, beam us up!’ ” The executive officer tried to brighten things a bit. It didn’t work. So, okay, maybe the skipper wasn’t a
Star Trek
fan. “The only way I see to keep them off our friends is to get them to chase us awhile.”
“Go east and attack this group from the beam?”
“It’s a gamble,” the exec admitted. “But what isn’t?”
“You conn her. Two-thirds, and hug the bottom.”
Chicago
turned southeast and increased speed to eighteen knots. This was a fine time to find out how accurate our charts are, McCafferty thought. Did Ivan have any minefields set here? He had to shut that thought out. If they hit one, he’d never know it. The executive officer kept the submarine within fifty feet of where the chart said the bottom was—actually he hedged, keeping fifty feet above the highest bottom marker within a mile. Even that would do no good if there was an uncharted wreck. McCafferty remembered his first trip into the Barents Sea. Somewhere close to here were those destroyers sunk as targets. If he hit one of those at eighteen knots . . . The run lasted forty minutes.
“All ahead one-third!” McCafferty ordered when he couldn’t stand it anymore.
Chicago
slowed to five knots. To the diving officer: “Take her up to periscope depth.”
The planesmen pulled back on their controls. There was some minor groaning from the hull as the outside water pressure relented, allowing the hull to expand an inch or so. On McCafferty’s order the ESM mast went up first. As before there were several radar sources. The search periscope went up next.
A weather front was moving in, with a rain squall to the west.
Fabulous,
McCafferty thought.
There goes ten percent of our sonar performance.
“I got a mast at two-six-four—what is it?”
“No radar signals on that bearing,” a technician said.
“It’s broken—it’s the Krivak. We got a piece of her, let’s finish her off. I—” A shadow went across the lens. McCafferty angled the instrument up and saw the swept wings and propellers of a Bear.
“Conn, sonar, multiple sonobuoys aft!”
McCafferty slapped the scope handles up and lowered the scope. “Take her down! Make your depth four hundred feet, left full rudder, all ahead full.”
A sonobuoy deployed within two hundred yards of the submarine. The brassy sound of its pings reverberated through the hull.
How long for the Bear to turn and drop on us?
On McCafferty’s order a noisemaker was ejected into the water. It didn’t work, and he fired off another. One minute passed.
He’ll try to get a magnetic fix on us first.
“Rewind the tape.” The duty electrician was grateful to have something to do. The video record of his five-second periscope exposure showed what looked like the remains of a Krivak’s topsides.
“Passing three hundred feet. Speed twenty and increasing.”
“Scrape the bottom, Joe,” McCafferty said. He watched the tape rerun, but that was only to have something for his eyes to do.
“Torpedo in the water port quarter! Torpedo bearing zero-one-five.”
“Right fifteen degrees rudder! All ahead flank! Come to new course one-seven-five.” McCafferty put the torpedo on his stem. His mind went through the tactical situation automatically.
Russian ASW torpedo: sixteen-inch diameter, speed about thirty-six knots, range four miles, runs about nine minutes. We’re doing—
he looked
—twenty-five knots. It’s behind us. So if he’s a mile behind us . . . seven minutes to cover the distance. It can get us. But we’re accelerating at ten knots per minute . . . No, it can’t.
“High-frequency pinging aft! Sounds like a torpedo sonar.”
“Settle down, people, I don’t think it can catch us.”
Any Russian ship in the neighborhood can hear us, though.
“Passing through four hundred feet, starting level out.”
“Torpedo is closing, sir,” the sonar chief reported. “The pings sound a little funny, like—” The sub shook with a powerful explosion aft.
“All ahead one-third, right ten degrees rudder, come to new course two-six-five. What you just heard was their fish hitting the bottom. Sonar, start feeding me data.”
The Russians had a new line of sonobuoys north of
Chicago,
probably too far off to hear them. Bearings to the nearest Soviet ships were steadying down: they were heading right for
Chicago.
“Well, that’ll keep them off our friends for a while, XO.”
“Super.”
“Let’s go south some more and see if we can get them to pass us. Then we’ll remind ’em what they’re up against.”
ICELAND
If I ever get off this rock alive, Edwards thought, I’ll move to Nebraska.
He remembered flying over the state many times. It was so agreeably flat. Even the counties were nice neat squares. Not so in Iceland. For all that, it was easier going than they had enjoyed since leaving Keflavik. Edwards and his party kept to the five-hundred-foot elevation line, which kept them at least two miles from the gravel coast road, with mountains at their backs and a good long field of view. Up to now they had seen nothing more than routine activity. They assumed that every vehicle on the move had Russians aboard. That probably was not true, but since the Soviet troops had appropriated so many civilian vehicles there was no way to tell the sheep from the goats. That made them all goats.
“Enjoying your rest, Sarge?” Edwards and his group caught up with Smith. There was a road half a mile farther ahead, the first they’d seen in two days.
“See that mountaintop?” Smith pointed. “A chopper landed on it twenty minutes ago.”
“Great.” Edwards unfolded his map and sat down. “Hill 1063—that’s thirty-five hundred feet.”
“Makes a nice lookout point, don’t it? You suppose they can see us from there?”
“Ten or eleven miles. Depends, skipper. I figure they’re using it to watch the water on both sides. If they have any brains, they’ll keep an eye on the rocks, too.”
“Any idea how many people they have there?” Edwards asked.
“No way. Maybe nobody—hell, they might have been making a pickup, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Maybe a squad, maybe a platoon. You gotta figure they have a good pair of spotting glasses and a radio.”
“And how do we get past them?” Edwards asked. The ground was mostly open, with only a few bushes in sight.
“That’s a real good question, skipper. Pick our routes carefully, keep low, use dead ground—all the usual stuff. But the map shows a little bay that comes within four miles of them. We can’t detour around the far side without running into the main road—can’t hardly do that.”
“What’s the problem?” Sergeant Nichols arrived. Smith explained matters. Edwards got on the radio.
“You just know they’re on the hilltop, not strength or weapons, right?” Doghouse asked.
“Correct.”
“Damn. We wanted you on that hill.” Now there’s
a surprise,
Edwards thought. “No chance you can go up that hill?”
“None. Say again no chance at all. I can think of easier ways to commit suicide, mister. Let me think this one over and get back to you. Okay?”
“Very well, we’ll be waiting. Out.”
Edwards got his sergeants together and they started exploring the maps.
“Really a question of how many men they have there, and how alert they are,” Nichols thought. “If they have a platoon there, we can expect some patrol activity. Next question is how much? I wouldn’t be very keen on doing that hill twice a day myself.”
“How many men would you put there?” Edwards asked.
“Ivan has a whole paratroop division here, plus other attachments. Call it ten thousand men total. He can’t garrison the entire island, can he? So, would he have a rifle platoon on this or any other hilltop, or just a spotting team—artillery observers, that sort of mob. They’re looking for your invasion force, and from up there a man with a decent spyglass can cover all of this bay to our north, and probably see all the way to bloody Keflavik the other way. They’ll also be looking for aircraft.”
“You’re trying to make it sound easy?” Smith wondered.
“I think we can approach the hill safely enough, then wait for nightfall—what of it we have—and try to pass under them then. They will have the sun in their eyes, you know.”
“You’ve done this before?” Edwards asked.
Nichols nodded. “Falklands. We were there a week before the invasion to scout various things. Same thing we’re doing now.”
“They haven’t said anything on the radio about an invasion.”
“
Lef
tenant, this is where your Marines are going to land. No one’s told me as much, but they didn’t send us here to find a football pitch, did they?” Nichols was in his mid-thirties, approaching twenty years of service. He was by far the oldest member of the party, and the past few days of serving under a rank amateur had chafed on him. The one nice thing about this young weatherman, however, was his willingness to listen.