“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.”
“Leftenant, 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.
“Okay, they wanted us on this hill to eyeball things, too. How about this smaller peak to the west of the main summit?”
“We’ll have to go far out of our way to be able to climb without being seen, but yes, we can establish ourselves there, I think. So long as they are not terribly alert, that is.”
“Okay, once we cross this road, we keep together in one group. You got the point, Sergeant Nichols. I’d suggest we rest up a bit. Looks like we’ll have to be on the move for quite a while once we get moving.”
“Eight miles to the foot of the hill. We will want to be there about sunset.”
Edwards checked his watch. “Okay, we start moving in an hour.” He walked over to Vigdis.
“So, Michael, what do we do now?” He explained the situation to her at length.
“We’re going to be close to some Russians. It might be dangerous.”
“You ask if I want to not go with you?”
Say yes and hurt her feelings. Say no and . . . shit!
“I don’t want to see you hurt any more.”
“I stay with you, Michael. I am safe with you.”
SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND
It took several hours to pump out the water that had given her the false list, an impression that had been reinforced by the ostentatious activities of divers. The powerful tugs Catcombe and Vecta moved her slowly aft into the Solent. Her flight deck had been fully repaired by the Vosper shipwrights though so much of the gray steel showed the slapdash bandage work of a job done more in haste than in consideration for the ship’s proud name. Two thousand men had done the job. New arresting gear had been flown in from America, along with electronic equipment that came nowhere near replacing what the Russian missiles had destroyed. The tugs escorted her to Calshot Castle, then she moved alone south to Thom Channel, east by the yachts docked at Cowes. Escorts were waiting at Portsmouth, then the small formation turned south and west into the English Channel.
Flight operations began at once. The first aircraft to arrive were the Corsair attack bombers, then the heavier Intruders and the sub-hunting Vikings. USS Nimitz was back in business.
USS CHICAGO
“-and shoot!” Three hours of excruciating work distilled down to half a second. The now-familiar shudder of compressed air ejected a pair of torpedoes into the black water of the Barents Sea.
The Soviet commander had been just a little too eager to verify Chicago’s death and allowed his frigate to run in close behind his two remaining Grishas. All three ships were pinging at the bottom, looking for a dead submarine. You didn’t expect us to run south, did you? North or east, maybe, but not south. McCafferty had maneuvered his submarine wide around the Russian frigate, staying at the fringe of her sonar range, then closed up two thousand yards behind her. One fish for the Krivak and one running for the nearest patrol boat.
“No change in target course and speed, sir.” The torpedo raced after the Soviet frigate. “He’s still pinging the other way, sir.”
The waterfall display lit up, a bright dot on the contact’s tone line. Simultaneously the thundering explosion echoed through the hull.
“Up scope!” McCafferty met the eyepiece at deck level and worked it up slowly. “That’s a kill. We broke her back. Okay . . .” He turned to the bearing of the near Grisha. Okay, target number two is turning-wow, there go his engines. Increasing speed and going left.”
“Skipper, the wire’s cut on the fish.”
“How long on the run?”
“Another four minutes, sir.” In four minutes at full speed the Grisha would be outside the torpedo’s acquisition radius.
“Damn, it’s going to miss. Down scope. Let’s get out of here. We’ll go east this time. Make your depth four hundred, all ahead two-thirds. Come right to zero-five-five.”
“Must have been the shock of the explosion, sir. Half a second later, the control wires let go on the number-two fish.” McCafferty and his weapons officer reexamined the plot.
“You’re right. I cut that one too close. Okay.” The captain stepped over to the chart table. “Where do you figure our friends are?”
“Right about here, sir. Twenty to twenty-five miles.”
“I think we’ve taken enough heat off them. Let’s see if we can get back up there while Ivan tries to figure out what’s going on.”
“We’ve been lucky, skipper,” the exec observed.
“That’s true enough. I want to know where their submarines are. That Victor we got just walked across our sights. Where are the rest of ’em? They can’t just be chasing after us with these.” Of course not, McCafferty realized. The Russians set up hunting preserves, sectors limited to specific types of ships. Their surface ships and aircraft would be in one sector, and next to it their submarines would have exclusive hunting rights . . .
He told himself that he’d done well to date. Three patrol boats, a fullsized frigate, and a sub, quite a week in anybody’s book. But it wasn’t over. Not until they got Providence to the ice.
38 – Stealth on the Rocks
ICELAND
The first leg of the trip was only eight miles in a straight line, but the line they traveled was straight in no dimension. The terrain here was volcanic also, littered with rocks large and small. The large ones made shadows, and whenever possible they stayed in them, but with every step they had also to detour, uphill and down, left and right, until every yard of forward travel was accompanied by a yard in another direction, and eight miles became sixteen.
For the first time, Edwards knew that he was under possible observation. Even when the hilltop they skirted was hidden by a ridge, who could say that the Russians did not have another scouting party out? Who could be sure that they were not being watched, that some Russian sergeant with binoculars had noticed their rifles and packs, then picked up his portable radio and sent out a call for an armed helicopter? The effort of the walk made their hearts beat fast. Fear made their hearts beat faster still, compounding their fatigue like interest on a usurer’s loan.
Sergeant Nichols proved an efficient leader, and a hard one. The oldest member of the party, his stamina-sore ankle and all-amazed Edwards.
They all kept quiet, no one wanted to make noise, and Nichols was unable to growl at those too slow to keep up. His contemptuous look was enough. He’s ten years older than me, Edwards told himself, and I’m a track man. I can keep up with this bastard. Can’t I?