The Sovremenny he didn’t worry too greatly about, but the Udaloy was another thing entirely. The new Soviet destroyer carried a low-frequency sonar that could penetrate the layer under certain conditions, plus two helicopters and a long-range rocket-boosted torpedo weapon that was better than the American ASROC.
Ba-wah! The sound of a low-frequency sonar. It had hit them on the first shot. Would it report Chicago’s position to the Udaloy? Or would the submarine’s rubber coating prevent it?
“Target bearing three-five-one. Blade count is down, indicates speed of ten knots,” sonar reported.
“Okay, he’s slowed to search for us. Sonar, how strong was that ping?”
“Low edge of detection range, sir. Probably did not get a return off us. Contact is maneuvering, bearing now three-five-three. Continuing to ping, but his sonar is searchlighting west-to-east away from us. Another helo is pinging, sir, bearing zero-nine-eight. This one’s below the layer, but fairly weak.”
“XO, take us west. We’ll try to loop around them to seaward and approach their amphibs from the west.” McCafferty returned to the sonar room. He was tempted to engage the Udaloy, but could not launch a torpedo this deep without using a dangerously high amount of his reserve high-pressure air. Besides, his job was to kill the command ships, not the escorts. His fire-control team set up a solution anyway in case killing the Russian destroyer became a necessity.
“God, what a mess,” the chief breathed. “The depth-charging up north has tapered off some. Bearing is steadying down on these contacts here. Either they’ve resumed their base course or they’re heading away. Can’t tell which. Uh-oh, more sonobuoys are dropping down.” The chief’s finger traced the new dots, in a steady line—heading toward Chicago. “Next one’s going to be real close, sir.”
McCafferty stuck his head into the attack center. “Bring her around south, and go to two-thirds.”
The next sonobuoy splashed into the water directly overhead. Its cable deployed the transducer below the layer and began automatic pinging.
“They got us for sure, skipper!”
McCafferty ordered a course change to the west and again increased to full speed to clear the area. Three minutes later a torpedo dropped into the water, either dropped by the Bear or fired from the Udaloy, they couldn’t tell. The torpedo started searching for them from a mile off and turned away. Again their rubber anechoic coating had saved them. A helo’s dipping sonar was detected ahead of them. McCafferty went south to avoid it, knowing that he was being driven away from the Soviet fleet, but unable to do much about it at the moment. A pair of helicopters was now after him, and for a submarine to defeat two dipping sonars was no simple exercise. It was clear that their mission was not so much to find him as to drive him off, and he could not maneuver fast enough to get past them. After two hours of trying, he broke off for the last time. The Soviet force had moved beyond sonar range, their last reported course being southeast toward Andøya.
McCafferty swore to himself. He’d done everything right, gotten through the outer Soviet defenses, and had had a clear idea of how to duck under the destroyer screen. But someone had gotten there first, probably attacked Kirov—his target!—and messed everything up for his approach. His three Harpoons had probably found targets unless Ivan had shot them down—but he’d been unable even to monitor their impacts. If they had made impacts. The captain of USS Chicago wrote up his contact report for transmission to COMSUBLANT and wondered why things were going the way they were.
STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND
“A long way to go,” the fighter pilot said.
“Yeah,” Toland agreed. “Our last report had the group heading southeast to evade a submarine attack. We figure they’re back to a southerly course now, but we don’t know where they are. The Norwegians sent their last RF-5 in to look, and it disappeared. We have to hit them before they get to Bodø. To hit them, we need to know where they are.”
“No satellite intel?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. I go in with the reconnaissance pod, out and back . . . four hours. I’ll need a tanker to top me off about three hundred miles out.”
“No problem,” the RAF group captain agreed. “Do be careful, we need all your Tomcats to escort the strike tomorrow.”
“I’ll be ready in an hour.” The pilot left.
“Wish you luck, old boy,” the group captain said quietly. This was the third attempt to locate the Soviet invasion force by air. After the Norwegian reconnaissance aircraft had disappeared, the Brits had tried with a Jaguar. That, too, had vanished. The most obvious solution was to send a Hawkeye with the strike to conduct a radar search, but the Brits weren’t letting the E-2s stray too far from their shore. The U.K. radar stations had taken a fearful pounding, and the Hawkeyes were needed for local defense.
“It’s not supposed to be this hard,” Toland observed. Here was a golden opportunity to pound the Soviet fleet. Once located, they could strike the force at dawn tomorrow. The NATO aircraft would swoop in with their own air-to-surface missiles. But the extreme range of the mission gave no time for the strike force to loiter around looking. They had to have a target location before they took off. The Norwegians were supposed to have handled this, but NATO plans had not anticipated the virtual annihilation of the Royal Norwegian Air Force in a week’s time. The Soviets had enjoyed their only major tactical successes at sea, and they were successes indeed, Toland thought. While the land war in Germany was heading toward a high-technology stalemate, up to now the vaunted NATO navies had been outmancuvered and out-thought by their supposed dullard Soviet adversaries. Taking Iceland had been a masterpiece of an operation. NATO was still scrambling to reestablish the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom barrier with submarines that were supposed to have other missions. The Russian Backfires were ranging far into the North Atlantic, hitting one convoy a day, and the main Russian submarine force hadn’t even gotten there yet. The combination of the two might just close the Atlantic, Toland thought. Then the NATO armies would surely lose, for all their brilliant performance to date.
They had to stop the Soviets from taking Bodø in Norway. Once emplaced there, Russian aircraft could attack Scotland, draining resources from the German front and hampering efforts to interdict the bomber forces heading into the Atlantic. Toland shook his head. Once the Russian force was located, they’d pound hell out of it. They had the right weapons, the right doctrine. They could launch their missiles outside the Russian SAM envelopes, just as Ivan was doing to the convoys. It was about time things changed.
The tanker lifted off first, followed half an hour later by the fighter. Toland and his British counterpart sat in the intelligence center napping, oblivious to the teletype printer that chattered in the corner. If anything important came in, the junior watch officers would alert them, and senior officers needed their sleep, too.
“Huh?” Toland started when the man tapped his shoulder.
“Coming in, sir—your Tomcat is arriving, Commander.” The RAF sergeant handed Bob a cup of tea. “Fifteen minutes out. Thought you might wish to freshen up.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.” Toland ran a hand over his unshaven face and decided not to shave. The group captain did, mainly to preserve the look that went with an RAF mustache.
The F-14 came in gracefully, its engines idling and wings outstretched as though grateful for the chance for a landing on something larger than a carrier. The pilot taxied into a hard shelter and quickly dismounted. Technicians were already removing the film cartridge from the camera pod.
“Nothing on their fleet, guys,” he said at once. The radar-intercept officer came down behind him.
“God, there’s fighters up there!” the RIO said. “Haven’t seen so much activity since the last time we went through aggressor school.”
“And I got one of the bastards, too. But no joy on the fleet. We covered the coast from Orland to Skagen before we turned back, not one surface ship visible.”
“You’re certain?” th
e group captain asked.
“You can check my film, Captain. No visual sightings, nothing on infrared, no radar emissions but airborne stuff—nothing, but lots of fighters. We started finding those just south of Stokke and counted—what was it, Bill?”
“Seven flights, mainly MiG-23s, I think. We never got a visual, but we picked up a lot of High Lark radars. One guy got a little close and I had to pop him with a Sparrow. We saw the flash. That was a hard kill. In any case, guys, our friends ain’t coming to Bodø unless it’s by submarine.”
“You turned back at Skagen?”
“Ran out of film, and we were low on fuel. The fighter opposition really started picking up north of Bodø. If you want a guess, we need to check out Andøya, but we need something else to do it, SR-71 maybe. I don’t think I can get in and out of there except on burner. I’d have to tank right close to there even to try that, and—like I said, lots of fighters were operating there.”
“Hardly matters,” the group captain said. “Our aircraft haven’t the legs for a strike that far without massive tanker support, and most of our tankers are committed elsewhere.”
25
Treks
ICELAND
Once clear of the meadow, they were back in what the map called wasteland. It was level for the first kilometer, then the uphill effort began in earnest on the Glymsbrekkur, a seven-hundred-foot climb. So soon your legs forget, Edwards thought. The rain hadn’t let up, and the deep twilight they had to guide them forced a slow pace. Many of the rocks they tried to walk on were loose. The footing was treacherous, and a misstep could easily be fatal. Their ankles were sore from the constant twists on the uneven ground, and their tightly laced boots didn’t seem to help anymore.
After six days in the back country, Edwards and his Marines were beginning to understand what fatigue was. At each step their knees gave just an inch or so too much, making the next step that much more of an effort. Their pack straps cut cruelly into their shoulders. Their arms were tired from carrying their weapons and from constantly adjusting their gear. Necks sagged. It was an effort to look up and around, always having to be alert for a possible ambush.
Behind them the glow of the house fire disappeared behind a ridgeline, the first good thing that had happened. No helicopters yet, no vehicles investigating the fire. Good, but how long would that last? How soon would the patrol be missed? they all wondered.
All but Vigdis. Edwards walked a few yards in front of her, listening to her breathing, listening for sobs, wanting to say something to her, but not knowing what. Had he done the right thing? Was it murder? Was it expediency? Or was it justice? Did that matter? So many questions. He set them aside. They had to survive. That mattered.
“Take a break,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
Sergeant Smith checked to see where the others were, then sat down beside his officer.
“We done good, Lieutenant. I figure four, maybe five miles in the past two hours. I think we can ease up a little.”
Edwards smiled wanly. “Why not just stop and build a house here?”
Smith chuckled in the darkness. “I hear you, skipper.”
The lieutenant studied the map briefly, looking up to see how well it matched with what he could see. “What say we go left around this marsh? The map shows a waterfall here, the Skulafoss. Looks like a nice deep canyon. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a cave or something. If not, it’s deep. No choppers’ll come in there, and we’ll have shadows to hide in. Five hours?”
“ ’Bout that,” Smith agreed. “Roads to cross?”
“Nothing shows but foot trails.”
“I like it.” Smith turned to the girl, who watched them without a word as she sat with her back against a rock. “How do you feel, ma’am?” he inquired gently.
“Tired.” Her voice said more than that, Edwards thought. There was no emotion there, none at all. He wondered if this was good or bad. What was the right thing to do for the victims of serious crime? Her parents murdered before her eyes, her own body brutally violated, what kind of thoughts were going through that head? Get her mind off it, he decided.
“How well do you know this area?” the lieutenant asked.
“My father fish here. I come with him many times.” Her head leaned back into a shadow. Her voice cracked and dropped into quiet sobs.
Edwards wanted to wrap an arm around her, to tell her things were all right now, but he was afraid it might only make things worse. Besides, who would believe that things were all right now?
“How we fixed for food, Sarge?”
“I figure we got maybe four days’ worth of canned stuff. I went through the house pretty good, sir,” Smith whispered. “Got a pair of fishing rods and some lures. If we take our time, we ought to be able to feed ourselves. Lots of good fishin’ creeks around here, maybe at this place we’re goin’. Salmon and trout. Never could afford to do it myself, but I heard tell that the fishing’s really something. You said your daddy’s a fisherman, right?”
“Lobsterman—close enough. You said you couldn’t afford—”
“Lieutenant, they charge you like two hundred bucks a day to fish up here,” Smith explained. “Hard to afford on a sergeant’s pay, you know? But if they charge that much, there must be a shitload of fish in the water, right?”
“Sounds reasonable,” Edwards agreed. “Time to move. When we get to that mountain, we’ll belly-up for a while and get everybody rested.”
“I’ll drink to that, skipper. Might make us late getting to—”
“Screw it! Then we’re late. The rules just changed some. Ivan’s liable to be looking for us. We take it slow from now on. If our friends on the other end of this radio don’t like it, too damned bad. We’ll get there late, but we’ll get there.”
“You get it, skipper. Garcia! Take the point. Rodgers, cover the back door. Five more hours, Marines, then we sleep.”
USS PHARRIS
The spray stung his face, and Morris loved it. The convoy of ballasted ships was steaming into the teeth of a forty-knot gale. The sea was an ugly, foam-whipped shade of green, droplets of seawater tearing off the whitecaps to fly horizontally through the air. His frigate climbed up the steep face of endless twenty-foot swells, then crashed down again in a succession that had lasted six hours. The ship’s motion was brutal. Each time the bow nosed down it was as though the brakes had been slammed on a car. Men held on to stanchions and stood with their feet wide apart to compensate for the continuous motion. Those in the open like Morris wore life preservers and hooded jackets. A number of his young crewmen would be suffering from this, ordinarily—even professional sailormen wanted to avoid this sort of weather—but now mainly they slept. Pharris was back to normal Condition-3 steaming, and that allowed the men to catch up on their rest.
Weather like this made combat nearly impossible. Submarines were mainly a one-sensor platform. For the most part, they detected targets on sonar and the crashing sea noise tended to blanket the ship sounds submarines listened for. A really militant sub skipper could try running at periscope depth to operate his search radar, but that meant running the risk of broaching and momentarily losing control of his boat, not something a nuclear submarine officer looked kindly upon. A submarine would practically have to ram a ship to detect it, and the odds against that were slim. Nor did they have to worry about air attacks for the present. The sea’s crenellated surface would surely confuse the seeker head of a Russian missile.
For their own part, their bow-mounted sonar was useless, as it heaved up and down in a twenty-foot arc, sometimes rising completely clear of the water. Their towed-array sonar trailed in the placid waters a few hundred feet below the surface, and so could theoretically function fairly well, but in practice, a submarine had to be moving at high speed to stand out from the violent surface noise, and even then engaging a target under these conditions was no simple matter. His helicopter was grounded. Taking off might have been possible, but landing was a flat impossibility under these conditi
ons. A submarine would have to be within ASROC torpedo range—five miles—to be in danger from the frigate, but even that was a slim possibility. They could always call in a P-3 Orion—two were operating with the convoy at present—but Morris did not envy their crews a bit, as they buffeted through the clouds at under a thousand feet.
For everyone a storm meant time off from battle, for both sides to rest up for the next round. The Russians would have it easier. Their long-range aircraft would be down for needed maintenance, and their submarines, cruising four hundred feet down, could keep their sonar watches in comfort.
“Coffee, skipper?” Chief Clarke came out of the pilothouse, a cup in his hand with a saucer on top to keep the saltwater out.
“Thanks.” Morris took the cup and drained half of it. “How’s the crew doing?”
“Too tired to barf, sir.” Clarke laughed. “Sleeping like babies. How much longer this slop gonna last, Cap’n?”
“Twelve more hours, then it’s supposed to clear off. High-pressure system right behind this.” The long-range weather report had just come in from Norfolk. The storm track was moving farther north. Mostly clear weather for the next two weeks. Wonderful.
The chief leaned outboard to see how the forward deck fittings were taking the abuse. Every third or fourth wave, Pharris dug her nose in hard, occasionally taking green water over the bow. This water slammed into things, and the chief’s job was to get them fixed. Like most of the 1052s assigned to the stormy Atlantic, Pharris had been given spray strakes and higher bow plating on her last overhaul, which reduced but did not entirely eliminate the problem known to sailors since men first went to sea: the ocean will try very hard to kill you if you lack the respect she demands. Clarke’s trained eye took in a hundred details before he turned back.