“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 e
nough? 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.
USS CHICAGO
McCafferty was thirty miles north of the entrance to the Kola Fjord. The crew was relatively happy to be here after a tense sixteen-hour run from Cape Svyatoy. Though the Barents Sea was alive with antisubmarine ships, immediately after making their report they had been withdrawn from the entrance to the White Sea for fear of fomenting a major incident. Here there was a hundred thirty fathoms of water and room to maneuver, and they were confident in their ability to keep out of trouble. There was supposed to be a pair of American subs within fifty miles of Chicago, plus a Brit and two Norwegian diesel boats. His sonarmen couldn’t hear any of them, though they could hear a quartet of Grisha-class frigates pinging away at something to the southeast. The allied submarines here were assigned to watch and listen. It was a nearly ideal mission for them, since they only had to creep along, avoiding contact with surface ships, which they could detect from a good, long distance.
There was no hiding it now. McCafferty didn’t even consider not telling his men the significance of what they had learned about the Russian boomers. Submarines have no long-lived secrets. It looked like they were about to fight a war. The politicians in Washington and the strategists in Norfolk and elsewhere might still have their doubts, but there, at the sharp end of the lance, the officers and men aboard Chicago discussed the way the Soviets were using their ships and came up with a single answer. The submarine’s torpedo tubes were loaded with MK-48 torpedoes and Harpoon missiles. Her vertical missile tubes forward of the pressure hull held twelve Tomahawks, three nuclear-tipped land-attack missiles, and nine conventional antiship models. When a shipboard machine showed the first suggestion of a fault, a technician immediately tore it down to fix it. McCafferty was pleased and not a little surprised by his crew. So young they were—the average age on his submarine was twenty-one—to have to adapt to this.
He stood in the sonar room, forward and to starboard of the attack center. A few feet from him, a massive computer system sifted through an avalanche of waterborne sound, analyzing individual frequency bands known from experience to mark the acoustical signature of a Soviet vessel. The signals were displayed on a visual screen called a waterfall display, a monocolor curtain of yellow whose brighter lines indicated the bearing to a sound that might be a source of interest. Four lines indicated the Grishas, and offset dots marked the pings from their active sonars. McCafferty wondered what they were after. His interest was mainly academic. They weren’t pinging his ship, but there was always something to learn from how the enemy did his job. A team of officers in the attack center was plotting the movement of the Soviet patrol ships, carefully noting their formation patterns and hunting technique for later comparison with intelligence estimates.
A new series of dots appeared at the bottom of the screen. A sonarman punched a button for a more selective frequency setting, altering the display slightly, then plugged in a pair of microphones. The display was on fast-speed image generation, and McCafferty saw the dots grow to lines around bearing one-nine-eight, the direction to the Kola channel.
“Lots of confused noise, skipper,” the sonarman reported. “I read Alfas and Charlies coming out, with other stuff behind them. Blade count on one Alfa is something like thirty knots. Lots of noise behind them, sir.”
The visual display confirmed it a minute later. The frequency-or tone-lines were in the areas known to depict specific classes of submarines, all moving at high speed to clear the harbor. The bearing-to-contact lines spread apart as the boats fanned out. The boats had already dived, he noted. Usually Soviet submarines didn’t dive until they were well offshore.
“Ship count is over twenty, sir,” the chief sonarman said quietly. “We have a major sortie here.”
“Sure looks like it.” McCafferty moved back to the attack center. His men were already entering the contact positions into the fire-control computer, and sketching paper tracks on the chart table. The war hadn’t started yet, and though it appeared it could come at any time, McCafferty’s orders were to keep clear of any Soviet formation until the Word came. He didn’t like it—better to get his blows in quick—but Washington had made it clear they wanted no one to cause an incident that might prevent some kind of diplomatic settlement. That made sense, the captain admitted to himself. Maybe the lace-panty folks could still get things under control. A faint hope, but a real one. Real enough to overcome his tactical desire to hold an attack position.
He ordered his submarine moved farther offshore. In half an hour, things were clearer still, and the captain had a SLOT-buoy launched. The buoy was programmed to allow Chicago thirty minutes to clear the area, then it started sending a series of burst transmissions on a UHF satellite band. From ten miles away, he listened to Soviet ships going berserk around the radio buoy, doubtlessly thinking it was the location of the submarine. The game was becoming all too real.
The buoy operated for over an hour, continuously sending its data to a NATO communications satellite. By nightfall the data was being broadcast to all NATO units at sea. The Russians are coming.
16
Last Moves/First Moves
USS NIMITZ
The speaker had announced sunset two hours before, but Bob had to finish his work. Sunsets at sea far away from the polluted city air, with a sharp horizon for the sun to slide under, were always something he enjoyed watching. What he saw now was almost as good. He stood with his hands on the rail, first looking down at the foam alongside the carrier’s sleek hull, then after a brief moment of preparation, up. Born and raised in Boston, Toland hadn’t known what the Milky Way was until joining the Navy, and the discovery of the wide, bright belt of stars overhead was always a source of wonder to him. There were the stars he’d learned to navigate by, with sextant and trigonometric tables—largely replaced now by electronic aids like Omega and Loran—but they were still beautiful to behold. Arcturus, and Vega, and Altair, all blinking at him with their own colors, their own unique characteristics that made them benchmarks in the night sky.
A door opened, and a sailor dressed in what looked like a purple plane-fueler’s shirt joined him on the flight deck catwalk.
“Darkened ship, sailor. I’d dump that cigarette,” Toland said sharply, more annoyed to have his precious solitude destroyed.
“Sorry, sir.” The butt sailed over the side. The man was silent for a few minutes, then looked at Toland. “You know about the stars, sir?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is my first cruise, sir, an’ I grew up in New York. Never saw the stars like this, but I don’t even know what they are—the names, I mean. You officers know all that stuff, right?”
Toland laughed quietly. “I know what you mean. Same with my first time out. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. What’s that one?” The boy’s voice sounded tired. Small wonder, Toland thought, with all the flight operations they’ve been through today. The youngster pointed to the brightest dot in the eastern sky, and Bob had to think for a few seconds.
“That’s Jupiter. A planet, not a star. With the quartermaster’s spyglass, you can pick out her moons—some of them anyway.” He went on to point out some of the stars used for navigation.
“How do you use ’em, sir?” the sailor asked.
“You take a sextant and plot their height above the horizon—sounds harder than it is, just takes some practice—and you check that against a book of star positions.”
“Who does that, sir
?”
“The book? Standard stuff. I imagine the book we use comes from the Naval Observatory in D.C., but people have been measuring the tracks of the stars and planets for three or four thousand years, long before telescopes were invented. Anyway, if you know the exact time, and you know where a particular star is, you can plot out where you are on the globe pretty accurately, within a few hundred yards if you really know your stuff. Same thing with the sun and the moon. That knowledge has been around for hundreds of years. The tricky part was inventing a clock that kept good time. That happened about two hundred and some years ago.”
“I thought they used satellites and stuff like that.”
“We do now, but the stars are just as pretty.”
“Yeah.” The sailor sat down, his head leaning way back to watch the curtain of white points. Beneath them the ship’s hull churned the water to foam with the whispering sound of a continuously breaking wave. Somehow the sound and the sky matched each other perfectly. “Well, at least I learned something about the stars. When’s it gonna start, sir?”
Toland looked up at the constellation of Sagittarius. The center of the galaxy was behind it. Some astrophysicists said there was a black hole in there. The most destructive force known to physics, it made the forces under man’s control appear puny by comparison. But men were a lot easier to destroy.