Admiral Sir Charles Beattie smiled. His intelligence chief had said almost exactly the same thing.
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, VIRGINIA
The F-15 interceptor streaked over the runway at a height of one hundred feet. As she passed the tower, Major Nakamura threw her fighter into a slow roll, then turned around for a more sedate landing. She was an Ace! Three Badger bombers and two satellites! The first female Ace in the history of the U.S. Air Force. The first Space Ace.
She rolled to a stop at the ready shelter, jumped off the ladder, and ran to the reception committee. The deputy commander of Tactical Air Command was red-faced with anger.
“Major, if you ever pull something like that again I’ll bust your ass back to doolie!”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” She grinned. Nothing was going to spoil today. “Won’t ever happen again, sir. You only make Ace once, sir.”
“Intelligence says Ivan has one more RORSAT ready to use. Probably they’ll think it over some before launching,” the General said, calming down somewhat.
“Have they put any more birds together?” Buns asked.
“They’re working on two, and we might have them by the end of the week. If we get them, your next target will be their real-time photo reconnaissance satellite. Until then the RORSATs have highest priority.” The General smiled briefly. “Don’t forget to paint that fifth star on the bird, Major.”
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
They would have sailed anyway. The destruction of the Soviet RORSAT merely made it safer. First came the destroyers and frigates, fanning out, looking for submarines under an umbrella of patrol aircraft. Then the cruisers and carriers. Last of all came the ships from Little Creek, Tarawa, Guam, Nassau, Inchon, and twenty more. Over sixty ships in all, they formed into three groups and steamed northeast at twenty knots. It would be a six-day trip.
USNS PREVAIL
Even at three knots she didn’t ride well. The ship was just over two hundred feet long, and she responded to every wave like a horse to a fence. She had a mixed crew, not really Navy, not really civilian. The civilians ran the ship. The naval personnel ran the electronics gear. The really amazing thing, everyone agreed, was that they were still alive.
Prevail was an adaptation of a blue-water fishing boat. Instead of a trawl, she pulled a sonar array at the end of a six-thousand-foot cable filled with sonar sensors. The signals received were pre-processed by onboard computers, then sent via satellite to Norfolk at a rate of thirty-two thousand bits of data per second. The ship was driven by quiet electric motors, and her hull had been installed with the Prairie/Masker system to eliminate even her tiny amount of machinery noise. Her topsides were made of fiberglass to reduce her radar signature. In a very real sense she was one of the first Stealth ships, and despite the fact that she carried no weapon other than a rifle for dealing with sharks, she was also the most dangerous antisubmarine platform ever made. Prevail and three sister ships were cruising the North Atlantic on the great circle route between Newfoundland and Ireland, listening for the telltale noise of a submarine in transit. Two already had kills painted up on their bridges since each had an Orion patrol aircraft in constant attendance, and Soviet submarines had twice had the misfortune to approach one of them. But their job was not to kill submarines. It was to warn others of them, far away.
In the midships operations center of Prevail, a team of oceanographic technicians watched a bank of TV-type display tubes, while others worked up tracks of anything that might be close enough to be a direct threat.
A petty officer ran his finger down a fuzzy line on the display. “That must be the convoy from New York.”
“Yeah,” said the technician next to him. “And there’re the folks who want to meet them.”
USS REUBEN JAMES
“At least we’re not going to be lonely,” O’Malley observed.
“You always have such a positive attitude?” Frank Ernst inquired.
“Our Russian friends must have excellent intelligence. I mean, your Air Force chaps did kill their satellite.” Captain Perrin set his coffee down on the table. The five officers conferred in Morris’s stateroom. Perrin had flown over by helicopter from Battleaxe.
“Yeah, so they know our composition,” Morris said. “And they’ll want to cut this bunch down to size.”
The message from Norfolk stated in clipped navalese that at least six Soviet submarines were believed to be heading for the convoy. Four would be on the north. That was their area of responsibility.
“We should be getting some data off the tail any time now,” Morris said. “Jerry, you up to three days of continuous ops?”
O’Malley laughed. “If I say no, will it matter?”
“I think we should remain close together,” Perrin said. “Five miles’ separation at most. The real trick will be timing our sprints. The convoy wants to make as straight a run as possible, right?”
“Yeah.” Morris nodded. “Hard to blame the Commodore for that. Zigzagging all those ships could create almost as much confusion as a real attack.”
“Hey, the good news is no more Backfires for a while,” O’Malley pointed out. “We’re back to a one-dimension threat.”
The ship’s motion changed as power was reduced. The frigate was ending a twenty-eight-knot sprint and would now drift for several minutes at five knots to allow her passive sonar to function.
USS CHICAGO
“Sonar contact, bearing three-four-six.”
Seven hundred miles to the icepack, McCafferty thought as he went forward. At five knots.
They were in deep water. It was a gamble, but a good one, to run away from the coast at fifteen knots despite the noise Providence made. It had taken four hours to reach the hundred-fathom curve, a period of constant tension as he had worried about the Russian reaction to their missile attack. The Russians had sent antisubmarine patrol aircraft first of all, the ubiquitous Bears dropping sonobuoys, but they’d been able to avoid them. Providence still had most of her sonar systems in operation, and though she could not defend herself, she could at least hear the danger coming.
Throughout the four-hour run the wounded submarine had sounded like a wagonload of pipes, and McCafferty didn’t want to think about how she had handled, with her fairwater planes hanging like laundry in a breeze. But that was behind them. Now they were in seven hundred feet of water. With their towed-array sonars deployed, they’d have an extra measure of warning for approaching danger. Boston and USS Chicago cruised three miles on either side of their wounded sister. Seven hundred miles at five knots, McCafferty thought. Almost six days . . .
“Okay, what do we have here, Chief?”
“Came in slowly, sir, so it’s probably direct path. We have a slow bearing change rate. My first guess would be a diesel boat on batteries, and close.” The sonar chief showed no emotion.
The captain leaned back into the attack center. “Come right to zero-two-five.”
The helmsman applied five degrees of right rudder, gently bringing the submarine to a northeasterly course. At five knots USS Chicago was “a hole in the ocean” that made almost no noise at all, but her contact was almost as quiet. McCafferty watched the line on the screen change shape ever so slightly over a period of several minutes.
“Okay, we have a bearing change to the contact. Bearing is now three-four-one.”
“Joe?” McCafferty asked his executive officer.
“I make the range eight thousand yards, plus or minus. He’s on a reciprocal heading, speed about four knots.”
Too close, the captain thought. He probably doesn’t hear us yet, though.
“Let’s get him.”
The Mark-48 torpedo fired at its slowest speed setting, turned forty degrees to the left on leaving the tube, then settled down to head for the contact, its guidance wires trailing back to the submarine. The sonarmen directed the fish toward its target while USS Chicago moved slowly away from the launch point. Suddenly the sonar chief’s head jerked up.
“He’s heard it! He just kicked his engines. I got a blade count-it’s a Foxtrot-class, doing turns for fifteen. Transient, transient, he just flooded tubes.”
The torpedo accelerated and switched on its homing sonar. The Foxtrot knew it had been found, and her captain reacted automatically, increasing speed and ordering a radical turn to starboard, then firing a homing torpedo back down the line of bearing at its attacker. Finally he dove deep, hoping to shake off the closing fish.
The hard turn left a knuckle in the water, an area of turbulence which confused the Mark-48 briefly, but then the torpedo charged right through it, and on coming back to undisturbed water, found its target again. The green-painted weapon dove after the Foxtrot and caught it at a depth of four hundred feet.
“Bearing is changing rapidly on the inbound,” the sonar chief said. “It’s going to pass well aft of us—hit, we got a hit on the target.” The sound echoed through the steel hull like distant thunder. McCafferty plugged in a set of phones in time to hear the Foxtrot’s frantic attempt to blow to the surface, and the screech of metal as the internal bulkheads gave way. He did not hear the captain’s last act. It was to deploy the rescue buoy located on the aft corner of the sail. The buoy floated to the surface and began transmitting a continuous message. All the men aboard the Foxtrot were already dead, but the rescue buoy told their fleet headquarters where they had died-and several submarines and surface ships immediately set off to that point.