Authors: Joe Buff
“Phone Talker,” Harley said crisply, “inform Colonel Kurzin that nonessential personnel may go below.”
“Colonel Kurzin acknowledges, sir.”
“Very well,” Harley said. “Helm, Bridge. Right five degrees additional rudder, use auxiliary maneuvering units to aid the course change, make your course one-five-five. Make turns for four knots.”
The helmsman acknowledged. Nyurba glanced aft. The white rudder shifted slightly, ropes creaked and ice groaned, and the floe began to rotate compared to those around it. Their heading steadied, south-southeast.
“We’re leaving a bit of a wake,” Nyurba said to Harley.
“Pump jet’s cavitating too. Can’t be helped. It’ll die down somewhat when the floe gets up to speed.”
“Understood, Captain. But what if an aircraft comes close?”
“I’ll order all stop till it’s gone. If a wake-anomaly ASW satellite’s watching, even if they can pick us out from all this environmental clutter, they might think they’re seeing turbulence from a misshapen part of an ice keel. Right now my biggest worry is the sea ice gets too crowded and we hit something big, or need to nudge our way through with force to keep going.”
“Would the mooring lines hold if that happened?”
“Depends. We hit too much warm air, the mooring spikes could melt free on their own.”
Nyurba grunted. There wasn’t much he could say. He just hoped that this stunt was so reckless and offbeat that the Russians would never guess at the truth. In a few hours at four knots, with
Carter
’s surfaced draft displacing over thirty feet, her keel would almost be brushing the bottom. Even if the Russian Navy drove them off by nonlethal means, the mission would end in embarrassing failure—raising questions in Kremlin minds that would preclude a similar mission attempt in the future. The catastrophic result, Nyurba knew, as Commodore Fuller had put it succinctly, would be Apocalypse Soon or Apocalypse Later.
W
eps, Bridge,” Harley said blandly, “deploy Seahorse III unit from tube six to examine our projected track for obstructions or mines.” This was the probe that had studied the undersides of floes, while the units from tubes seven and eight listened in for Russian signals. Harley waited a beat. “Very well, Weps.” He turned to Nyurba. “Mines are doubtful in these parts, I think, but you never know. And an uncharted wreck could ruin our whole day.”
“Yep.”
“You can stay up here or not, Commander,” Harley said. “Your choice, but please don’t feel you have to keep up with me. You need your sleep before we make landfall. I rather doubt I’ll get much myself for a while. ESM room says we’re being tickled by Bear-F radars, now and again. So far, just intermittent routine search sweeps, but it could get exciting later.”
“Captain, is that your way of telling me to sleep well?”
Harley grinned broadly, enjoying himself. “Take a nice nap. We’ll be fine.”
Nyurba turned away.
“ESM, Bridge, aye,” he heard Harley say into his lip mike. “ESM, Bridge, wait one.”
The change in Harley’s tone caught Nyurba’s attention.
“Commander, the NSA boys say they have something for you.”
“What?”
“Here. Talk to them.” Harley handed Nyurba his headset.
“Where’s Colonel Kurzin?” Nyurba asked the phone talker.
The young crewman used his microphone. “Sir, Colonel Kurzin is topside, aft.”
Nyurba pulled the headset on, and spoke to one of the NSA signals analysts. The Seahorses had overheard what was encoded as a routine administrative supply requisition, but the context—once flagged and decoded by the supercomputer—revealed the schedule of the next shift change for the silo crews at the missile field that was the special ops squadron’s ultimate destination and target. The analyst gave Nyurba the information.
“Captain,” Nyurba asked with sudden impatience, “can the phone talker by the colonel be patched into this intercom?”
“Negative. The circuits are incompatible.”
“Phone Talker,” Nyurba said, “inform Colonel Kurzin that . . .” He tried to choose how to phrase it. Intel reports had amply confirmed that silo crews rotated every three days. But because of deception tactics such as dummy activity at Russian missile fields, no one could be positive when real shift changes took place. Satellite imagery analysts in the U.S. had, with care, formulated a best estimate. Now, too late, it was realized they’d been wrong. “Next shift change is in four to six hours.”
The phone talker repeated this stark fact into his mike, verbatim, then waited for an answer.
“Colonel Kurzin says, excuse me, sir, he says ‘Shit.’ ”
“Your boss is nothing if not pithy,” Harley said.
“I need your rig,” Nyurba told the phone talker. He returned Harley’s intercom headset and donned the sound-powered phones. “This is Commander Nyurba,” he told the crewman at the other end. “Have Colonel Kurzin put on your rig.” He waited.
“Kurzin.”
“Nyurba here, sir.”
“If the next change is in only two days, then the one after that is in five days, not six like we were told.”
“I know, sir,” Nyurba said. “It’s either that or wait for the following one, in eight days.”
“We can’t afford to loiter or dawdle! I won’t add three extra days in-country, with thirty times the risk! We’d destroy our coordination with
Challenger
too!”
“Then we have to make the approach march over four days, sir, not five. The men will arrive exhausted, going straight into the assault.”
“
Don’t you think I know that?
We have no choice. . . . All right. So be it. At least now we know what we needed to know.” Kurzin sighed. “Meet me in the command center in ten minutes. . . . We’ve got to rework our entire schedule and the whole damn duty roster among eighty men. Find different route waypoints and encampments, change everybody’s man-packed loads, less food and more ammo. Christ.”
“Sir, we have almost a full day before we reach shore.”
“We’ll need every minute of it.” He paused as if he wanted to say something else, but didn’t. “Out,” Kurzin ended testily.
Nyurba gave back the sound-powered rig.
“More time pressure?” Harley asked.
“To put it mildly, Captain.”
Before going below, Nyurba looked around one last time, at the austere yet beautiful scenery. Local time was midnight. But the sun, a misshapen golden orb softened by mist and fog in the distance, kissed the horizon in full view, glinting off intervening spots of open water. Kurzin for a moment felt disoriented and slightly depressed, in the same way he’d get from extreme jet lag. Something was wrong, something that made the vista seem like a landscape on an alien planet. Then he put his finger on it: the sun was due north. For days yet, until summer aged more past the solstice, the sun at this latitude would circle round and round the entire horizon and never set.
It seemed unnatural, although he understood astronomically why it happened. He took his leave of Captain Harley, and climbed down the ladder. As he reached the second of the two open watertight hatches in
Carter
’s sail trunk, he had a disturbing thought. All too soon, if things went as planned, he’d be unleashing new suns that were horribly more unnatural.
For a day, the strange little flotilla moved south.
Carter
steamed at four knots, moored to the ice floe. The minisub, small enough to stay submerged even in such shallows, followed beside, getting good fuel economy at such a low cruising speed. The Seahorse IIIs probed ahead and to both flanks, checking the bottom and airwaves for threats or new information. The special ops squadron leadership cadre, Kurzin and Nyurba especially, used the Multi-Mission Platform’s command center nonstop, to revise their logistics and land-travel arrangements, since the NSA experts’ signals intercept told them they’d lost a valuable day. The stay-behind support section, and the eighty commandos who’d go on the raid, ate and slept when they could, which was rarely.
The changes didn’t just involve computer and console work. Most of over a hundred hermetically sealed heavy backpacks and equipment bags, already combat-loaded in the U.S., had to be opened, spread out, reloaded with a different mix of contents, and checked and sealed again, one by one. This needed to be performed in the cable-tapping clean-room chamber, under antiseptic conditions, to avoid leaving the slightest forensic trace—particulates, lubricants, lint—that would reveal that the packs and bags had ever been aboard a U.S. Navy submarine. The process was an annoying, exhausting chore.
Twice near the start of the passage south through the East Siberian Sea, men in dry suits had to cross to the floe, hiding under the tented camouflage cloth, and emplace new mooring spikes as previous ones came loose. Other men, in parkas and ski pants, stationed on
Carter
’s hull, often needed to take up the slack on the lines while the floe slowly shrank from melting, as by the hour both air and sea grew ever slightly warmer. Nyurba and Kurzin took turns overseeing this work. When free, Nyurba would climb down a hatch and go into the command center, to note the broader situation status on the displays.
Coastal sea surveillance radars swept over
Carter
wearing her disguise. Their signal strengths were gradually rising, coming from directions that—thanks to Commodore Fuller’s trick with his decoy and
K-335
—presented few surprises and so far posed no risk of counterdetection as anything other than an ice floe. But Nyurba was experienced enough at combat to understand how radars would play cat-and-mouse. Some were mobile, driving quickly elsewhere after they’d given themselves away, to peek again from a bearing and range that might be a lot more dangerous. Not all installations would radiate during a single alert, to be able to electronically bushwhack the enemy later. That steadily approaching hostile shore held many unknown risks.
Nyurba increasingly felt as if Rear Admiral Meredov was watching for him and his team in a personal way.
Patrol boats with antiship cruise missiles more than once crossed
Carter
’s path. Were these patrols routine, or were they sneaking into position to get
Carter
surrounded where they knew she couldn’t possibly dive? Three times
Carter
’s lookouts saw merchant ships go by much closer than the horizon; their navigation radars, once detected, could be tracked, and Harley made very sure that none were collision dangers. But the Russians sometimes used merchant ships for spying or counterespionage. Did these have concealed sonar rooms and passive arrays below their waterlines, recording every whiff of tonals and broadband that
Carter
gave off?
The closer the floe drifted toward the nuclear-waste dumping ground—with
Carter
surreptitiously pushing—the less Russian forces of any type came within visual range. The continental shelf continued rising. When the bottom of his ship got too near the bottom of the sea, Harley ordered that several variable ballast tanks be pumped dry, to raise
Carter
’s hull slightly higher out of the water. Soon, Nyurba knew, even that wouldn’t be enough.
Kurzin told Nyurba to go forward into
Carter
’s control room, to liaise there with Captain Harley during the next step needed to get the commandos toward shore.
When Nyurba got there Harley greeted him, pointing at the tactical plot. “We’re already in the bay, Commander.” The Ularovskaya Guba. “See? The nav chart and the gravimeter show you the Indigirka delta, and the Alazeja mouth.” Harley tapped keys on his command console, and the gravimeter changed from its bird’s-eye-view display mode into look-forward mode.
Now the arrangement of seafloor and coastal geography appeared to Nyurba as if he were seeing through the windshield of a car. He noted the big navigable channels into the Indigirka River, and, to his left on the screen, the two much smaller channels where the Alazeja River forked five miles before its outlet, creating a thin, low-lying island in midstream. The tactical plot showed the island was unoccupied—Nyurba knew it was totally lifeless.
“Now we can’t avoid some noise,” Harley said. “I’m counting on chaotic thermal updrafts from heat sources on the bottom, and turbulent river outflows, to keep anybody from noticing.”
“Understood, Captain.” Nyurba shuddered to think of what made that heat.
“Sir,” the control room phone talker said, “Colonel Kurzin reports men are in position on superstructure.”
“Very well. Helm, all stop.”
They waited for the ship’s and the floe’s momentum to come off. This didn’t take long—the front of the floe made a lot of water resistance, like a barge.
“Phone Talker, tell Colonel Kurzin to stand by to adjust mooring lines as needed.”
“Colonel Kurzin acknowledges, sir.”
“Chief of the Watch, blow more air into all main ballast tank groups as needed to reduce ship’s draft by three feet.”
“More air, all groups, as needed, reduce draft by three feet, aye, sir,”
Carter
’s chief of the boat answered. Lanky and dour, he was quite a contrast to
Challenger
’s COB in both build and personality, Nyurba thought to himself.
He heard the hiss of high-pressure air. He knew that submarines could adjust their depth at the keel this way, to some extent; being surfaced wasn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. But the more their hulls were lifted up, especially at the stern, the more their propulsors would cavitate—a distinctive hissing sound—or even throb, called blade-rate. If the COB wasn’t careful and deft, extra air might leak out through the open bottoms of the ballast tanks, bubbling to the surface alongside the hull, the worst acoustic giveaway of all.
Harley’s previous jauntiness up on the bridge had deserted him. With the added effort of pushing the ice floe, starting from a dead stop could make
Carter
’s pump jet, bordering on the ocean-to-atmosphere interface, suck vacuum. The propulsion shaft would race, potentially causing permanent damage. The noise transient—a new one for the typical Russian sonar technician—would be impossible to miss. All the effort to convince Meredov that the floe was just a floe—by pushing it to the last place anyone in their right mind would want to approach—could be squandered in five seconds flat.
And no matter how quiet
Carter
could be, her ruse might not hold up forever. She still faced a long trip surfaced like this, as Nyurba and Harley well knew. After the commando dropoff,
Carter
and the floe would make their way back to the marginal ice zone—it having looked then like the floe had drifted in a giant U that trended from west to east with the prevailing current and the variable winds. Harley’s men would take in the camouflage cover, detach from the floe, and submerge.
Carter
would then begin a whole new series of difficult actions to get ready to pick up the surviving squadron members with maximum stealth, several days hence.
Carter
had eased in as close to the beach as she could. It was time for the commando team to switch to a smaller taxi. They were in a location meant to be the seemingly least likely point of covert entry that mission planners could possibly conceive of. Self-preservation alone should discourage Russian forces from searching this place. Satellite surveillance had appeared to confirm the fact. But that didn’t mean that Kurzin and his followers were safe—not by any stretch of the imagination.
Nyurba would lead the first ten-man group in their short underwater crossing to the minisub. From swim fins and scuba rebreathers, to dry suits and dive masks and weapons and everything else, what they wore or used or carried was Russian-made. Russia’s borders were porous, and a brisk underground bazaar of military equipment was constantly active. Nyurba knew that sometimes corrupt supply noncoms, or disaffected and demoralized soldier-draftees, often heroin addicts, would sell anything for hard cash, even to their enemies—especially on the steadily smoldering Chechen front, or along Russia’s newly tense border with China.