“Nimitz is still at Southampton,” his intelligence chief pointed out. “He came into port with a severe list, and there is no drydock large enough to accommodate him. He’s tied to the Ocean Dock; he’s not going anywhere. That gives the Americans three carriers: Coral Sea, America, and Independence. Saratoga is being used for convoy escorting duties. The rest of their Atlantic Fleet carriers are in the Indian Ocean.”
Novikov grunted. That was bad news for the Indian Ocean squadron, but they were part of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. Not his problem. He had enough of his own. For the first time he faced a dilemma that he’d inflicted on the NATO navies. He had more tasks than he had ships, and sending half of his dedicated ASW forces after submarines that were already retreating didn’t help matters!
NORTHWOOD, ENGLAND
“Hello again, Admiral,” Toland said.
Beattie looked much better. The blue eyes had the gleam of crystal now and the Admiral’s back was ramrod-straight as he stood in front of his wall-sized map with his arms folded.
“How are things in Scotland, Commander?”
“Good, sir. The last two raids got chewed up. May I ask how the Doolittle force made out? One of the boats is commanded by a friend of mine.”
Beattie turned. “Which?”
“Chicago, sir. Dan McCafferty.”
“Oh. It would seem that one of the boats was damaged. Chicago and one other are escorting her out. In fact, they are raising quite a rumpus in the eastern Barents. We have indications that the Soviets are sending a sizable force after them. In any case, you’re going back to your carrier fleet, and you’re to meet with my intelligence staff so that you can bring your chaps up to date when you get there. I wanted to see you personally to thank you for that telex you sent about trailing the Backfires to their doorstep. That idea was very useful to us. You’re a reservist, I understand. How on earth did they ever let you go?”
“I put my destroyer on a sandbar once.”
“I see. You have atoned for that error, Commander.” Beattie offered his hand.
WACHERSLEBEN, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
“Stop that Goddamned truck!” Alekseyev screamed. He stood in the middle of the road, daring the vehicle to run over him. It stopped and he ran around to the cab.
“Who the hell are you?” the corporal asked.
“I am General Colonel Alekseyev,” he answered agreeably. “Who might you be, Comrade?”
“I am Corporal Vladimir Ivan’ch Maryakhin.” He managed to say this despite a mouth that hung open on seeing the General’s shoulder boards.
“Since I appear to outrank you, Corporal, you will take me and my aide to the next traffic-control point as quickly as this truck will go. Move!”
Alekseyev and Sergetov got in the back. They found a solid mass of crates, but had enough room to sit on top of them.
The General swore. “Three wasted hours.”
“It could have been worse.”
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
“It’s a major attack, sir. They just started moving on what looks like a eighty-kilometer front.”
SACEUR looked at the map impassively. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t expected this. Intelligence had predicted it twelve hours earlier from Soviet traffic patterns. He had exactly four reserve brigades that he could use in this sector. Thank God, he thought, that I managed to persuade the Germans to shorten the line at Hannover. Half his reserves had come from that, and not a day too soon.
“Main axis of the attack?” the General asked his operations officer.
“None is apparent at the moment. It looks like a general attack—”
“Pushing hard to find a weak point,” SACEUR finished the statement. “Where’s their reserve force?”
“Sir, we’ve identified elements of three divisions here south of Fölziehausen. They appear to be A units. The attack now under way appears to be mainly B formations.”
“Have we hurt them that bad?” SACEUR asked rhetorically. His intelligence officers were working hard to establish just what enemy casualties were, and he got a report every evening. B-class reserve units had started appearing at the front five days before, which was puzzling. He knew the Soviets had at least six Category-A units in reserve in the southern Ukraine, but there were no indications they were moving. Why wasn’t this force being committed to the German front? Why were they sending reservists instead? He’d been asking that question for several days, only to get shrugs from his intelligence chief. Not that I’m complaining, he thought. Those two field armies might have been enough to rupture his front entirely.
“Where’s a good place to hit back?”
“Sir, we have these two German tank brigades at Springe. The Russian attack appears to have two reserve motor-rifle divisions, with a divisional border right here, ten kilometers from them. They’ve been off the line for two days now. I wouldn’t call them well rested, but—”
“Yeah.” SACEUR was given to cutting his officers off. “Get ’em moving.”
USS REUBEN JAMES
O’Malley circled the frigate after a long morning’s search for what turned out to be nothing. Three merchant ships had died in the past three hours, two to missiles that had leaked through the convoy’s SAM defenses and one to a torpedo. Both submarines had been prosecuted, one sunk by Gallery’s helo inside the convoy itself. They were about to come within ground-based air coverage from the European mainland, and it seemed to the pilot that they’d won this battle. The convoy was getting across with acceptable losses. Thirty-six more hours to landfall.
The landing was routine, and after a trip to the head, O’Malley went into the wardroom for a drink and a sandwich. He found Calloway waiting for him. The pilot had met the reporter briefly but not really spoken with him.
“Is landing your helicopter on this little toy ship as dangerous as it looks?”
“A carrier has a slightly larger deck. You’re not doing a story about me, are you?”
“Why not? You killed three submarines yesterday.”
O’Malley shook his head. “Two ships, two helos, plus some help from the rest of the screening force. I just go where they send me. There’s a lot to sub-hunting. All the parts have to work or the other guy wins.”
“Is that what happened last night?”
“Sometimes the other guy does something right, too. I just spent four hours looking and came away empty. Maybe that was a sub, maybe not. Yesterday was pretty lucky all the way around.”
“Does it bother you, sinking them?” Calloway asked.
“I’ve been in the Navy for seventeen years and I’ve never met anybody who likes killing people. We don’t even call it that, except maybe when we’re drunk. We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships—things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway. Hell, this is the first time I’ve actually done what my main job is supposed to be. Until now all my combat experience has been search-and-rescue stuff. I never even dropped a war-shot on a real sub until yesterday. I haven’t thought about it enough to know if I like it or not.” He paused. “It’s an awful sound. You hear rushing air. If you penetrate the hull at deep depth, the sudden pressure change inside the hull supposedly causes the air to ignite and everyone inside the boat incinerates. I don’t know if it’s true, but somebody told me that once. Anyway, you hear the rushing air, then you hear the screech—like a car throwing its brakes on hard. That’s the bulkheads letting go. Then comes the noise of the hull collapsing, hollow boom, sort of. And that’s it: a hundred people just died. No, I don’t much like it.
“The hell of it is, it’s exciting,” O’Malley went on. “You’re doing something extremely difficult. It requires concentration and practice and a lot of abstract thought. You have to get inside the other guy’s head, but at the same time you think of your mission as destroying an inanimate object. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? So, what you do is, you don’t think about that aspect of the job. Otherwise the job wouldn’t get done.”
/> “Are we going to win?”
“That’s up to the guys on land. All we do is support them. This convoy’s going to make it.”
FÖLZIEHAUSEN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
“They told me you were dead,” Beregovoy said.
“Not even scratched this time. It startled Vanya here out of a sound sleep, however. How does the attack go?”
“Initial signs arc promising. We have an advance of six kilometers here, and almost as much here at Springe. We might have Hannover surrounded by tomorrow.”
Alekseyev found himself wondering if his superior had been right. Perhaps NATO lines had been thinned so much they’d been forced to give ground.
“Comrade General.” It was the Army intelligence officer. “I have a report of German tanks at Eldagsen. He—he just went off the air.”
“Where the hell is Eldagsen?” Beregovoy peered down at the map. “That’s ten kilometers behind the line! Confirm that report!”
The ground shook under them, followed by the roar of jet engines and launching missiles.
“They just hit our radio transmitters,” the communications officer reported.
“Switch to the alternate!” Alekseyev shouted.
“That was the alternate. They took out the primary last night,” Beregovoy answered. “Another is being assembled now. So we use what we have here.”
“No,” Alekseyev said. “If we do that, we do it on the move.”
“I can’t coordinate well that way!”
“You can’t coordinate at all if you’re dead.”
USS CHICAGO
All hell was breaking loose. It was like a nightmare, except you woke up from those, McCafferty reminded himself. At least three Bear-F patrol aircraft were overhead, dropping sonobuoys all over the place, two Krivak-type frigates and six Grisha patrol boats had shown up on the sonar, and a Victor-III submarine had decided to come to the party.
Chicago had nibbled the odds down some. For the past few hours, fancy footwork had killed the Victor and a Grisha and damaged a Krivak, but the situation was deteriorating. The Russians were mobbing him, and he would not be able to keep them at arm’s length much longer. In the time it had taken him to localize and kill the Victor, the surface groups had closed five miles on him. Like a boxer against a puncher, he had the advantage only as long as he kept them away.
What McCafferty wanted and needed to do was talk with Todd Simms on Boston to coordinate their activities. He couldn’t, because the underwater telephone couldn’t reach that far and made too much noise. Even if he tried to make a radio broadcast, Boston would have to be near the surface, with her antenna up to hear him. He was sure Todd had his boat as deep as he could drive her. American submarine doctrine was for each boat to operate alone. The Soviets practiced cooperative tactics, but the Americans never felt the need. McCafferty needed some ideas now. The “book” solution to the tactical problem at hand was to maneuver and look for openings, but Chicago was essentially tied to a fixed position and could not stray too far from her sisters. As soon as the Russians understood that there was a cripple out there, they’d close in like a pack of dogs to finish Providence off, and he would not be able to stop them. Ivan would gladly exchange some of his small craft for a 688.
“Ideas, XO?” McCafferty asked.
“How about, ‘Scotty, beam us up!’ ” The executive officer tried to brighten things a bit. It didn’t work. So, okay, maybe the skipper wasn’t a Star Trek fan. “The only way I see to keep them off our friends is to get them to chase us awhile.”
“Go east and attack this group from the beam?”
“It’s a gamble,” the exec admitted. “But what isn’t?”
“You conn her. Two-thirds, and hug the bottom.”
Chicago turned southeast and increased speed to eighteen knots. This was a fine time to find out how accurate our charts are, McCafferty thought. Did Ivan have any minefields set here? He had to shut that thought out. If they hit one, he’d never know it. The executive officer kept the submarine within fifty feet of where the chart said the bottom was—actually he hedged, keeping fifty feet above the highest bottom marker within a mile. Even that would do no good if there was an uncharted wreck. McCafferty remembered his first trip into the Barents Sea. Somewhere close to here were those destroyers sunk as targets. If he hit one of those at eighteen knots . . . The run lasted forty minutes.
“All ahead one-third!” McCafferty ordered when he couldn’t stand it anymore. Chicago slowed to five knots. To the diving officer: “Take her up to periscope depth.”
The planesmen pulled back on their controls. There was some minor groaning from the hull as the outside water pressure relented, allowing the hull to expand an inch or so. On McCafferty’s order the ESM mast went up first. As before there were several radar sources. The search periscope went up next.
A weather front was moving in, with a rain squall to the west. Fabulous, McCafferty thought. There goes ten percent of our sonar performance.
“I got a mast at two-six-four—what is it?”
“No radar signals on that bearing,” a technician said.
“It’s broken—it’s the Krivak. We got a piece of her, let’s finish her off. I—” A shadow went across the lens. McCafferty angled the instrument up and saw the swept wings and propellers of a Bear.
“Conn, sonar, multiple sonobuoys aft!”
McCafferty slapped the scope handles up and lowered the scope. “Take her down! Make your depth four hundred feet, left full rudder, all ahead full.”
A sonobuoy deployed within two hundred yards of the submarine. The brassy sound of its pings reverberated through the hull.
How long for the Bear to turn and drop on us? On McCafferty’s order a noisemaker was ejected into the water. It didn’t work, and he fired off another. One minute passed. He’ll try to get a magnetic fix on us first.
“Rewind the tape.” The duty electrician was grateful to have something to do. The video record of his five-second periscope exposure showed what looked like the remains of a Krivak’s topsides.
“Passing three hundred feet. Speed twenty and increasing.”
“Scrape the bottom, Joe,” McCafferty said. He watched the tape rerun, but that was only to have something for his eyes to do.
“Torpedo in the water port quarter! Torpedo bearing zero-one-five.”
“Right fifteen degrees rudder! All ahead flank! Come to new course one-seven-five.” McCafferty put the torpedo on his stem. His mind went through the tactical situation automatically. Russian ASW torpedo: sixteen-inch diameter, speed about thirty-six knots, range four miles, runs about nine minutes. We’re doing—he looked—twenty-five knots. It’s behind us. So if he’s a mile behind us . . . seven minutes to cover the distance. It can get us. But we’re accelerating at ten knots per minute . . . No, it can’t.
“High-frequency pinging aft! Sounds like a torpedo sonar.”
“Settle down, people, I don’t think it can catch us.” Any Russian ship in the neighborhood can hear us, though.
“Passing through four hundred feet, starting level out.”
“Torpedo is closing, sir,” the sonar chief reported. “The pings sound a little funny, like—” The sub shook with a powerful explosion aft.
“All ahead one-third, right ten degrees rudder, come to new course two-six-five. What you just heard was their fish hitting the bottom. Sonar, start feeding me data.”
The Russians had a new line of sonobuoys north of Chicago, probably too far off to hear them. Bearings to the nearest Soviet ships were steadying down: they were heading right for Chicago.
“Well, that’ll keep them off our friends for a while, XO.”
“Super.”
“Let’s go south some more and see if we can get them to pass us. Then we’ll remind ’em what they’re up against.”
ICELAND
If I ever get off this rock alive, Edwards thought, I’ll move to Nebraska. He remembered flying over the state many times. It was so a
greeably flat. Even the counties were nice neat squares. Not so in Iceland. For all that, it was easier going than they had enjoyed since leaving Keflavik. Edwards and his party kept to the five-hundred-foot elevation line, which kept them at least two miles from the gravel coast road, with mountains at their backs and a good long field of view. Up to now they had seen nothing more than routine activity. They assumed that every vehicle on the move had Russians aboard. That probably was not true, but since the Soviet troops had appropriated so many civilian vehicles there was no way to tell the sheep from the goats. That made them all goats.
“Enjoying your rest, Sarge?” Edwards and his group caught up with Smith. There was a road half a mile farther ahead, the first they’d seen in two days.
“See that mountaintop?” Smith pointed. “A chopper landed on it twenty minutes ago.”
“Great.” Edwards unfolded his map and sat down. “Hill 1063—that’s thirty-five hundred feet.”
“Makes a nice lookout point, don’t it? You suppose they can see us from there?”
“Ten or eleven miles. Depends, skipper. I figure they’re using it to watch the water on both sides. If they have any brains, they’ll keep an eye on the rocks, too.”
“Any idea how many people they have there?” Edwards asked.
“No way. Maybe nobody—hell, they might have been making a pickup, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Maybe a squad, maybe a platoon. You gotta figure they have a good pair of spotting glasses and a radio.”
“And how do we get past them?” Edwards asked. The ground was mostly open, with only a few bushes in sight.