by Tom Clancy
USS Chicago was steaming at five hundred feet just north of the 69° parallel, about a hundred miles west of Norway’s rocky coastline. The Norwegians’ collection of diesel boats was inside of him, guarding their own coast. McCafferty understood that, but didn’t like it.
So far nothing had gone right, and McCafferty was worried. That was expected, and he could suppress it. He could fall back on his training. He knew what his submarine could do, and had a pretty good idea of what the Russian subs were capable of. He had the superior capabilities, but some Russian could always get lucky. This was war. A different sort of environment, not one judged by umpires and rule books. Mistakes now were not a matter of a written critique from his squadron commander. And so far luck seemed to be on the other side.
He looked around at his men. They had to be thinking the same thoughts, he was sure, but they all depended on him. The crewmen of his submarine were essentially the physical extensions of his own mind. He was the central control for the entire corporate entity known as USS Chicago, and for the first time the awesome responsibility struck him. If he messed up, all these men would die. And he, too, would die—with the knowledge that he had failed them.
You can’t think like this, the captain told himself. It will eat you up. Better to have a combat situation where I can limit my thinking to the immediate. He checked the clock. Good.
“Take her up to periscope depth,” he ordered. “It’s time to check for orders, and we’ll try an ESM sweep to see what’s happening.”
Not a simple procedure, that. The submarine came up slowly, cautiously, turning to allow her sonar to make certain that there was not a ship around.
“Raise the ESM.”
An electronics technician pressed the button to raise the mast for his broad-band receiver. The board lit up instantly.
“Numerous electronic sources, sir. Three J-band search sets, lots of other stuff. Lots of VHF and UHF chatter. The recorders are going.”
That figures, McCafferty thought. The odds against having anyone here after us are pretty low, though. “Up scope.”
The captain angled the search-scope lens upward to scan the sky for a nearby aircraft and made a quick turn around the horizon. He noticed something odd, and had to angle down the lens to see what it was.
There was a green smoke marker not two hundred yards away. McCafferty cringed and spun the instrument back around. A multi-engine aircraft was coming out of the haze—directly in at them.
The captain reached up and spun the periscope wheel, lowering the instrument. “Take her down! All ahead flank! Make your depth eight hundred feet!” Where the hell did he come from?
The submarine’s engines fairly exploded into action. A flurry of orders had the helmsmen push their controls to the stops.
“Torpedo in the water, starboard side!” a sonartnan screamed.
McCafferty reacted at once. “Left full rudder!”
“Left full rudder, aye!” The speed log was at ten knots and rising quickly. They passed below one hundred feet.
“Torpedo bearing one-seven-five relative. It’s pinging. Doesn’t have us yet.”
“Fire off a noisemaker.”
Seventy feet aft of the control room, a five-inch canister was ejected from a launcher. It immediately started making all kinds of noise for the torpedo to home in on.
“Noisemaker away!”
“Right fifteen degrees rudder.” McCafferty was calmer now. He’d played this game before. “Come to new course one-one-zero. Sonar, I want true bearings on that torpedo.”
“Aye. Torpedo bearing two-zero-six, coming port-to-starboard.”
Chicago passed through two hundred feet. The boat had a twenty-degree down angle. The planesmen and most of the technicians had seatbelts to hold them in place. The officers and a few others who had to circulate around grasped at rails and stanchions to keep from falling.
“Conn, sonar. The torpedo seems to be following a circular path. Now traveling starboard-to-port, bearing one-seven-five. Still pinging, but I don’t think it has us.”
“Very well. Keep those reports coming.” McCafferty climbed aft to the plot. “Looks like he made a bad drop.”
“Could be,” the navigator agreed. “But how in hell—”
“Had to be a MAD pass. The magnetic anomaly detector. Was the tape running? I didn’t have him long enough for an ID.” He checked the plot. They were now a mile and a half from where they’d been when the torpedo was dropped. “Sonar, tell me about the fish.”
“Bearing one-nine-zero, dead aft. Still circling, seems to be going down a little. I think maybe the noisemaker drew him in and he’s trying to hit it.”
“All ahead two-thirds.” Time to slow down, McCafferty thought. They’d cleared the initial datum point, and the aircraft’s crew would need a few minutes to evaluate their attack before beginning a new search. In that time they’d be two or three miles away, below the layer, and making little noise.
“All ahead two-thirds, aye. Leveling off at eight hundred feet.”
“We can start breathing again, people,” McCafferty said. His own voice was not as even as he would have preferred. For the first time, he noted a few shaky hands. Just like a car wreck, he thought. You only shake after you’re safe. “Left fifteen degrees rudder. Come left to two-eight-zero.” If the aircraft dropped again, no sense in traveling in a straight path. But they should be fairly safe now. The whole episode, he noted, had lasted less than ten minutes.
The captain walked to the forward bulkhead and rewound the videotape, then set it up to run. It showed the periscope breaking the surface, the first quick search . . . then the smoke marker. Next came the aircraft. McCafferty froze the frame.
The plane looked like a Lockheed P-3 Orion.
“That’s one of ours!” the duty electrician noted. The captain stepped forward into sonar.
“The fish is fading aft, Cap’n. Probably still trying to kill the noisemaker. I think when it hit the water it circled in the wrong direction, away from us, I mean.”
“What’s it sound like?”
“A lot like one of our Mark-46s”—the leading sonarman shuddered—“it really did sound like a forty-six!” He rewound his own tape and set it on speaker. The screeeing sound of the twin-screw fish was enough to raise the hairs on your neck. McCafferty nodded and went back aft.
“Okay, that might have been a Norwegian P-3. Then again it might have been a Russian May. They look pretty much alike, and they have exactly the same job. Well done, people. We’re going to clear the area.” The captain congratulated himself on his performance. He’d just evaded his first war shot—dropped by a friendly aircraft! But he had evaded it. Not all the luck was with the other side. Or was it?
USS PHARRIS
Morris was catnapping in his bridge chair, wondering what was missing from his life. It took a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t doing any paperwork, his normal afternoon pastime. He had to transmit position reports every four hours, contact reports when he had any—he hadn’t yet—but the routine paper-shuffling that ate up so much of his time was a thing of the past. A pity, he thought, that it took a war to relieve one of that! He could almost imagine himself starting to enjoy it.
The convoy was still twenty miles to his southeast. Pharris was the outlying sonar picket. Her mission was to detect, localize, and engage any submarine trying to close the convoy. To do that, the frigate was alternately dashing—“sprinting”—forward at maximum speed, then drifting briefly at slower speed to allow her sonar to work with maximum efficiency. Had the convoy proceeded at twenty knots on a straight course, it would have been nearly impossible. The three columns of merchantmen were zigzagging, however, making life a little easier on all concerned. Except on the merchant sailors, for whom stationkeeping was as foreign as marching.
Morris sipped at a Coke. It was a warm afternoon and he preferred his caffeine cold.
“Signal coming in from Talbot, sir,” the junior officer of the deck reported.
Morris rose and walked to the starboard bridge wing with his binoculars. He prided himself on being able to read Morse almost as quickly as his signalmen: REPORT ICELAND ATTACKED AND NEUTRALIZED BY SOVIET FORCES X EXPECT MORE SERIOUS AIR AND SUB THREAT X.
“More good news, skipper,” the OOD commented.
“Yeah.”
USS NIMITZ
“How did they do it?” Chip wondered aloud.
“How don’t matter a damn,” Toland replied. “We gotta get this to the boss.” He made a quick phone call and left for flag country.
He almost got lost. Nimitz had over two thousand compartments. The Admiral lived in only one of them, and Toland had only been there once. He found a Marine sentry at the door. The carrier’s commander, Captain Svenson, was already there.
“Sir, we have a Flash message that the Soviets have attacked and neutralized Iceland. They may have troops there.”
“Do they have aircraft there?” Svenson asked at once.
“We don’t know. They’re trying to get a recon bird to take a look, probably the Brits, but we won’t have any hard information for at least six hours. The last friendly satellite pass was two hours ago, and we won’t have another one of those for nine hours.”
“Okay, tell me what you have,” the Admiral ordered.
Toland went over the sketchy data that had come in the dispatch from Norfolk. “From what we know, it was a pretty off-the-wall plan, but it seems to have worked.”
“Nobody ever said Ivan was dumb,” Svenson commented sourly. “What about our orders?”
“Nothing yet.”
“How many troops on Iceland?” the Admiral asked.
“No word on that, sir. The P-3 crew watched two relays of four hovercraft. At a hundred men per load, that’s eight hundred men, at least a battalion, probably more like a regiment. The ship is large enough to carry the equipment load for a full brigade and then some. It’s in one of Gorshkov’s books that this sort of ship is uniquely useful for landing operations.”
“That’s too much for a MAU to take on, sir,” Svenson said. A Marine Amphibious Unit consisted of a reinforced battalion of troops.
“With three carriers backing them up?” Admiral Baker snorted, then adopted a more thoughtful pose. “You could be right at that. What does this do to the air threat to us?”
“Iceland had a squadron of F-15s and a couple AWACS birds. That’s a lot of protection for us—gone. We’ve lost raid warning, attrition, and raid-tracking capabilities.” Svenson didn’t like this at all. “We should be able to handle their Backfires ourselves, but it would have been a lot easier with those Eagles running interference.”
Baker sipped at his coffee. “Our orders haven’t changed.”
“What else is going on in the world?” Svenson asked.
“Norway is being hit hard, but no details yet. Same story in Germany. The Air Force is supposed to have gotten a heavy hit in on the Soviets, again no details. It’s still too early for any substantive intel assessments of what’s happening.”
“If Ivan was able to suppress the Norwegians and fully neutralize Iceland, the air threat against this battle group has at least doubled,” Svenson said. “I have to get talking with my air group.”
The captain left. Admiral Baker was silent for several minutes. Toland had to stay put. He hadn’t been dismissed yet. “They just hit Keflavik?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Find out what else is there and get back to me.”
“Yes, sir.” As Toland walked back to the intelligence shack, he pondered what he’d told his wife: The carrier is the best-protected ship in the fleet. But the captain was worried . . .
HILL 152, ICELAND
They were almost thinking of it as home. The position was at least easily defensible. No one could approach Hill 152 without being seen, and that meant crossing a lava field, then climbing up a steep, bare slope. Garcia found a small lake a kilometer away, evidently filled with water from the winter snows that had only lately melted. Sergeant Smith observed that it would have made a good mixer for bourbon, if they had any bourbon.
They were hungry, but all had four days of rations along, and they feasted on such delicacies as canned lima beans and ham. Edwards learned a new and indelicate name for this item.
“Anybody here know how to cook a sheep?” Rodgers asked. Several miles south of them was a large herd of the animals.
“Cook with what?” Edwards asked.
“Oh.” Rodgers looked around. There wasn’t a tree in sight. “How come there ain’t no trees?”
“Rodgers only been here a month,” Smith explained. “Prive, you ain’t never seen a windy day till you been here in the winter. The only way a tree can grow here is if you set her in concrete. I seen wind strong enough to blow a deuce-and-a-half right off the road.”
“Airplanes.” Garcia had the binoculars. He pointed northeast. “Lots.”
Edwards took the field glasses. They were just dots, but they grew rapidly into shapes. “I count six, big ones, look like C-141s . . . that makes them IL-76s, I think. Maybe some fighters, too. Sergeant, get a pad and a pencil—we have to do a count.”
It lasted for hours. The fighters landed first, rolling off to the refueling area at once, then taxiing to one of the shorter runways. One aircraft came in every three minutes, and Edwards couldn’t help be impressed. The IL-76, code-named the Candid by the NATO countries, was an awkward, ungainly design, like its American counterpart. The pilots landed, stopped, and rolled their aircraft onto the taxiway off the main north-south runway as though they had practiced for months—as Edwards rather suspected they had. They unloaded at the airport terminal building, then rolled to the refueling area and took off, coordinating neatly with the landing aircraft. Those lifting off came very close to their hill, close enough that Edwards was able to copy down a few tail numbers. When the count reached fifty, he set up his radio.
“This is Edwards transmitting from Hill 152. Do you copy, over.”
“Roger, copy,” the voice came back at once. “From now on, your code name is Beagle. We are Doghouse. Continue your report.”
“Roger, Doghouse. We have a Soviet airlift in progress. We have counted fifty—five-zero—Soviet transport aircraft, India-Lima-Seven-Six type. They are coming into Reykjavik, unloading, and rolling back out to the northeast.”
“Beagle, are you sure, repeat are you sure of your count?”
“That is affirmative, Doghouse. The takeoff run brings them right over our heads, and we got a paper record. No shit, mister, five-zero aircraft”—Smith held up his pad—“make that five-three aircraft, and the operation is continuing. We also have six single-seat aircraft sitting at the end of runway four. I can’t make out the type, but they sure as hell look like fighters. You copy that, Doghouse?”
“I copy five-three transports and six possible fighters. Okay, Beagle, we gotta get this information upstairs fast. Sit tight and we’ll keep to the regular transmission schedule. Is your position safe?”
That’s a good question, Edwards thought. “I hear you, Doghouse. We’re staying put. Out.” He took off the headset. “We safe, Sergeant’?”
“Sure, Lieutenant, I haven’t felt this safe since Beirut.”
HAFNARFJÖRDUR, ICELAND
“A beautiful operation, Comrade General.” The Ambassador beamed.
“Your support was most valuable,” the General lied through his teeth. The Soviet embassy to Iceland had over sixty members, almost all intelligence types of one sort or another. Instead of doing something useful, like seizing the telephone exchange, on donning their uniforms they had been rounding up local political figures. Most of the members of Iceland’s ancient Parliament, the Althing, had been arrested. Necessary, the General agreed, but too roughly done, with one of them killed in the process and two more shot. Better to be gentle with them, he thought. This was not Afghanistan. The Icelanders had no warrior tradition, and a gentler approach might have shown better returns. But
that aspect of the operation was under KGB control, its control team already in place with the embassy personnel. “With your permission, there is much yet to be done.”
The General went back up the jacob’s ladder onto the Fucik. Problems had developed in off-loading the division’s missile battalion. The barges that contained that equipment had been damaged by the missile strike. The newly installed landing doors had jammed solid and had to be torched free. He shrugged. Up to now, Polar Glory had been a near textbook operation. Not bad for a scratch crew. Most of his rolling equipment—two hundred armored vehicles and many trucks—had already been mated with their troops and dispersed. The SA-11 battalion was all that remained.
“Bad news, Comrade General,” the SAM commander reported.
“Must I wait for it?” the General asked testily. It had been a very long day.
“We have three usable rockets.”
“Three?”
“Both these barges were ruptured when the American missile hit us. The shock damage accounted for several. The main damage came from the water used to fight the fire.”
“Those are mobile missiles,” the General objected. “Surely the designers anticipated that they might get wet!”
“Not with saltwater, Comrade. This is the army version, not the naval, and it is not protected against saltwater corrosion. The men who fought the fire did so with great gusto, and most of the rockets were soaked. The exposed control wiring and the radar seeker heads on the missile noses were badly damaged. My men have run electronic tests of all the rockets. Three are fully functional. Four more we can probably clean off and repair. The rest are ruined. We have to fly more in.”
The General controlled his temper. So, a small thing that no one had thought of. Aboard ship, fires are fought with saltwater. They should have asked for the naval variant of this rocket. It was always the small things.
