The French had also sent out a helicopter to collect the Russian submariners. They were being flown to Brest for a full interrogation by NATO intelligence types. Morris didn’t envy them the trip. They’d be held by the French, and he had no doubt that the French Navy was in an evil mood after the loss of one of its carriers. The tapes his crew had made of their conversations were also being sent. The Russians had talked among themselves, aided by the chiefs’ liquor, and perhaps their whispered conversations had some value.
They were about to turn the convoy over to a mixed British-French escort force and take over a group of forty merchantmen bound for America. Morris stood on the bridge wing, turning every five minutes or so to look at the two half and one full silhouettes that the bosun had painted on both sides of the pilothouse- “No sense having some jerk on the wrong side of the ship missing them,” the bosun had pointed out seriously. Their ASW tactics had worked fairly well. With Pharris as outlying sonar picket, and heavy support from the Orions, they had intercepted all but one of the inbound Russian subs. There had been a lot of skepticism on this point, but the tactic had worked, by God. But it had to work better still.
Morris knew that things would be getting harder. For the first trip the Soviets had been able to put no more than a fraction of their submarines into action against them. Those submarines were now forcing their way down the Denmark Strait. The NATO sub force trying to block the passage no longer had the SOSUS line to give them intercept vectors, nor Orions to pounce on the contacts that submarines could not reach. They would score kills, but would they score enough? How much larger would the threat be this week? Morris could see from their return route to the States that they were adding nearly five hundred miles to the passage by looping far to the south-partially because of the Backfires, but more now to dilute the submarine threat. Two threats to worry about. His ship was equipped to deal with only one.
They’d lost a third of the convoy, mainly to aircraft. Could they sustain that? He wondered how the merchant crews were holding up.
They had closed in on the convoy, and he could see the northernmost line of merchies. On the horizon a big container ship was blinking a light at them. Morris raised his glasses to read the signal.
THANKS FOR NOTHING NAVY. One question answered.
USS CHICAGO
“So, there they are,” McCafferty said.
The trace showed almost white on the screen, a thick spoke of broadband noise bearing three-two-nine. It could only be the Soviet task force heading for Bodo.
“How far out?” McCafferty asked.
“At least two CZs, skipper, maybe three. The signal just increased in intensity four minutes ago.”
“Can you get a blade count on anything?”
“No, sir.” The sonarman shook his head. “Just a lot of undifferentiated noise for the moment. We’ve tried to isolate a few discrete frequencies, but even that’s all screwed up. Maybe later, but all we got now is a thundering herd.”
McCafferty nodded. The third convergence zone was a good hundred miles off. At such ranges acoustical signals lost definition, to the point that their bearing to target was only a rough estimate. The Russian formation could be several degrees left or right of where they thought, and at this range that was a difference measured in miles. He went aft to Control.
“Take her west five miles at twenty knots,” McCafferty ordered. It was a gamble, but a small one. On reaching station, they’d found unusually good water conditions, and the small move risked losing the contact temporarily. On the other hand, getting precise range information would give him a much better tactical picture and enable them to make a solid contact report-and make it by line-of-sight UHF radio before the Soviet formation got close enough that they could intercept the submarine’s transmission. As the boat raced west, McCafferty watched the bathythermograph trace. As long as the temperature didn’t change, he’d keep that good sound channel. It didn’t. The submarine slowed rapidly and McCafferty went back to sonar.
“Okay, where are they now?”
“Got ’em! Right there, bearing three-three-two.”
“XO, plot it and get a contact report made up.”
Ten minutes later the report was sent via satellite. The reply ordered Chicago in: GO FOR THE HEAVIES.
ICELAND
The farm was three miles away, thankfully downhill through tall, rough grass. On first sighting it through binoculars, Edwards called it the Gingerbread House. A typical Icelandic farmhouse, it had white stucco walls buttressed by heavy wooden beams, a contrasting red-painted trim, and a steeply pitched roof right out of the Brothers Grimm. The outlying barns were large, but low-slung with sod-covered roofs. The lower meadows by the stream were dotted with hundreds of large, odd-looking sheep with massively thick coats of wool, asleep in the grass half a mile beyond the house.
“Dead-end road,” Edwards said, folding up the map. “And we could use some food. Gentlemen, it’s worth the chance, but we approach carefully. We’ll follow this dip to the right and keep that ridgeline between us and the farm till we’re within half a mile or so.”
“Okay, sir,” Sergeant Smith agreed. The four men struggled into a sitting position to don their gear yet again. They’d been moving almost continuously for two and a half days, and were now about thirty-five miles northeast of Reykjavik. A modest pace on flat roads, it was a mankilling effort cross country, particularly while staying watchful for the helicopters that were now patrolling the countryside. They had consumed their last rations six hours before. The cool temperatures and hard physical effort conspired to drain the energy from their bodies as they picked their way around and over the two-thousand-foot hills that dotted the Icelandic coast like so many fence pickets.
Several things kept them moving. One was the fear that the Soviet division they had watched airlifted in would expand its perimeter and snap them up. No one relished the thought of captivity under the Russians. But worse than this was fear of failure. They had a mission, and no taskmaster is harsher than one’s own self-expectations. Then there was pride. Edwards had to set an example for his men, a principle remembered from Colorado Springs. The Marines, of course, could hardly let a “wing-wiper” outperform them. Thus, without thinking consciously about it, four men contrived to walk themselves into the ground, all in the name of pride.
“Gonna rain,” Smith said.
“Yeah, the cover will be nice,” Edwards said, still sitting back. “We’ll wait for it. Jesus, I never thought working in daylight would be so Goddamned tough. There’s just something weird about not having the friggin’ sun go down.”
“Tell me about it. And I ain’t even got a cigarette,” Smith growled.
“Rain again?” Private Garcia asked.
“Get used to it,” Edwards said. “It rains seventeen days in June, on average, and so far this’s been a wet year. How d’you think the grass got so tall?”
“You like this place?” Garcia asked, dumbfounded enough to forget the “sir.” Iceland had little in common with Puerto Rico.
“My dad’s a lobsterman working out of Eastpoint, Maine. When I was a kid I went out on the boat every time I could, and it was always like this.”
“What we gonna do when we get down to that house, sir?” Smith brought them back to things that mattered.
“Ask for food-”
“Ask?” Garcia was surprised.
“Ask. And pay for it, with cash. And smile. And say, ‘Thank you, sir’,” Edwards said. “Remember your manners, guys, unless you want him to phone Ivan ten minutes after we leave.” He looked around at his men. The thought sobered them all.
The rain started with a few sprinkles. Two minutes later it was falling heavily, cutting visibility down to a few hundred yards. Edwards wearily got to his feet, forcing his Marines to do likewise, and they all moved downhill as the sun above the clouds dipped in the northwestern sky and slid down behind a hill. The hill-since they’d probably have to climb it the next day, they thought of it as a mountain-had a name, but none of them could pronounce it. By the time they were a quarter mile from the farmhouse, it was as dark as it would get, and the rain had the visibility down to about eighty yards.
“Car coming.” Smith saw the glare of the lights first. All four men dropped and instinctively aimed their rifles at the dots on the horizon.
“Relax, guys. This road here breaks off the main road, and those lights could just be-shit!” Edwards cursed. The lights hadn’t taken the sweeping turn on the coastal highway. They were coming down the road to the farm. Was it a car or a track with its driving lights on? “Spread out and stay awake.” Smith stayed with Edwards, and the two privates moved downhill about fifty yards.