Or rather… an ear. Davies remained motionless, not straining to hear so much as he was losing himself in the hissing, churning cascade of sound coming through his headset.
“Davies?”
He looked up, startled. Commander Peter Lang was leaning against the entrance to the sonar shack. “Yes, Skipper?”
“You’re sure of that heading, son?”
He took a moment more before answering, listening to the churn of the Russian’s eight-bladed screw. Yes… the sound was definitely moving off to the right now as Orlando continued forward. “Yes, sir. I make it between one-seven-oh and one-seven-three. He’s on a straight heading now. It’s not a crazy Ivan.”
Lang ducked out of the compartment long enough to say, “Helm! Come right to one-seven-one. Gently, now!”
Davies heard the source of the noise drifting back to the left, until it was coming from directly ahead of Orlando’s bow. “That’s it, Skipper,” he said after a moment. “We’re still squarely in his baffles.”
That was where they wanted to be in this deadly game ― inside the cone-shaped area astern of the Russian sub where her own wake and propeller noise made detection of the American sub almost impossible.
“Think we can release a message buoy without him hearing?”
“With all the racket he’s making? Sure thing.”
Twice so far in the hunt, Orlando had dropped off astern of the contact, letting the Russian sub move on ahead so that they could quietly slip close to the surface in order to radio the carrier group, then reacquiring the contact later. Releasing a tiny buoy with a radio transmitter and a canned, coded message, however, would permit the Orlando to stay on the contact’s tail.
“I don’t want to lose this bastard,” Lang said quietly. “One-seven-one is going to put him right on the Jefferson.”
Davies looked up, startled. “No shit?”
“No shit,” Lang agreed. He looked up at a clock mounted on the bulkhead above the waterfall. “Your watch is up in fifteen.”
“Supposed to be.”
“You mind sticking around for a while, son? I want the best ears in the boat on this one.”
“Hey, no problem, Skipper. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
“Good man. If that son of a bitch even twitches toward a weapons release, I want to know about it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!”
Lang smiled and nodded. “Keep me posted.”
Davies exchanged glances with Brown after the captain left. “They’re going after the Jefferson?” the other sonarman said. “Shit!”
“Makes sense,” Davies replied. “They’re gonna want to keep assets close and ready, just in case another shootin’ war breaks out.”
“What about us?”
“I guess we’ve just got to be closer… and readier.”
He closed his eyes, losing himself once again in the dark, swirling roar of sound from ahead.
CHAPTER 3
Friday, 30 October
1710 hours (Zulu +3)
Bridge, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
The Black Sea
The clouds had closed in completely as Jefferson turned into a freshening wind out of the northeast, dropping a low, gray ceiling across the sky. The overcast increased the sense of claustrophobia Tombstone had been feeling since entering this landlocked sea.
South, some twenty miles away, the northern coast of Anatolia showed as a streak of green and brown between gray sea and gray sky. Turkey claimed a six-mile limit on their territorial waters in the Aegean, which they shared with Greece, but twelve miles in the Med and in the Black Sea. It had taken Jefferson less than thirty minutes to work her way north out of Turkish waters, after transferring their pilot to the Yavuz. They were on their own now, though Turkish naval units continued to shadow the American force to the south.
“Feeling better, Stoney?” Brandt asked with a chuckle.
“I’m not sure, Captain,” Tombstone replied. He thought a moment. “You know, sir, when you’re in an F-14 coming in for a trap, a carrier looks damned small, about the size of a postage stamp… especially at night or in rough weather. Out here, though, I feel just about as small and as inconspicuous as an elephant in a phone booth.”
“I know what you mean.” Brandt chuckled. “Ain’t hardly enough room out here to swing a Tomcat.”
Tombstone laughed. He nodded toward the flight deck, where the normal bustle and excitement of air ops had resumed. “Or a Hawkeye.”
Now that they were out of Turkish territorial waters, Jefferson was launching aircraft as fast as she could hurl them off her deck. Four F-14 Tomcats, her Combat Air Patrol, had been first aloft; now, a big E-2C Hawkeye was being readied on Cat One.
One of the carrier’s four E-2Cs of VAW-130, the gray, twin-engined turboprop aircraft seemed anachronistic among all of the sleek, high-powered jets… not to mention a bit exotic with its large, flat, flying-saucer radome mounted on its back. That radome, or rather the powerful APS-125 radar inside, truly made the Hawkeye the eyes of the fleet. Its sophisticated electronics were capable of keeping track of air and surface targets across a circle nearly five hundred nautical miles in diameter and could control up to twenty-five simultaneous intercepts, making it an AEW ― Airborne Early Warning aircraft ― of awesome sophistication and abilities. Once on station, it would be able to see everything on and over a good two-thirds of the entire Black Sea and be able to peer deep into Ukraine and Russia in order to alert the battle group of gathering hostile aircraft.
On the deck, the launch officer, identifiable by his bright yellow jersey and green-striped helmet, made a last check up and down the length of the aircraft, then snapped off a crisp salute to the pilot. Dropping to one knee, he pointed two fingers down the length of the deck, then jabbed his thumb to steel, signaling the catapult officer to punch it. The Hawkeye, its props already howling, rocketed forward on a trail of steam boiling from the catapult slot. In two seconds, it was traveling at over 150 miles per hour; flaps down for maximum lift, it sailed off the Jefferson’s bow, hung there in the wet air for a moment as though unsure whether to climb or fall… then began climbing.
“I’m sure glad to see him away,” Tombstone said with heartfelt relief.
“I hate being blind.”
“Amen to that, Stoney,” Brandt replied. “At least now we can see ‘em when they come after us.”
Tombstone knew that the claustrophobia he’d felt about this op ever since its inception three weeks earlier was as much psychological as anything else. With a surface area of over 175,000 square miles, the Black Sea was only twenty percent smaller than the North Sea. In places it was three times deeper; the greatest recorded depth was some 1226 fathoms ― better than 7300 feet, deep enough to be very black at the bottom indeed. There was enough water here for whole fleets of ships; certainly, Tombstone had never felt this hemmed in or restricted during his tours in the North Sea.
But throughout the years of the Cold War ― indeed, since long before America had had any national interests in this part of the world at all, the Black Sea had been, by virtue of its geography, virtually closed off to the Western world, a body of water owned ― dominated, rather, which was much the same thing ― by Russia, whatever Turks, Romanians, or Bulgarians might have had to say about the matter. American ships occasionally passed through those straits for a game of show-the-flag, but in a typical year the number of U.S. naval vessels entering the Black Sea was likely to number fifteen to twenty … while ten or twenty times that many Russian vessels made the passage.
A Russian lake…
That description had been floating about the wardrooms and squadron ready rooms a lot lately, along with other names like “Lakeski Russki” and “Red Sea North.” The Romanians, Tombstone reminded himself, still called it the “Friendly Sea,” as had the ancient Greeks, but those cold gray waters ahead would be anything but friendly for an American battle group.
Stupid… stupid… stupid…
Wh
at asinine, pencil-pushing, limp-dicked, shit-for-brains REMF, he wondered bitterly, had thought this bastard of an operation up?
Operation Sustain Hope was what the politicians and the news media were calling this mission Stateside, though the Jefferson’s men and officers had taken to calling it Operation Hopeless unofficially. The brainlessness of sending an aircraft carrier battle group into the Black Sea simply defied imagination.
There were all kinds of arguments against operating a CBG inside the Black Sea, arguments besides the painfully obvious one that, large as it was, the Black Sea was completely landlocked and ringed by hostile or potentially hostile nations. Carriers and their battle groups depended for their survival on mobility and on defense in depth; both of those factors would be severely limited once they were inside the Black Sea operational area.
Normally, in the open ocean, a carrier group was scattered across some forty thousand square miles, or nearly a quarter of the surface area of the entire Black Sea. An example often used to demonstrate the sheer scale of a battle group deployment imagined the carrier, the center of the CBG, located in Washington, D.C. Her escort ships, destroyers and frigates, would be as far afield as Norfolk, Virginia, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania; her combat air patrol defending the CBG’s airspace from enemy attack would be patrolling the skies over Bangor, Maine, and Charleston, South Carolina; while her attack submarines and her S-3 Viking ASW aircraft would be probing the waters ahead somewhere in the vicinity of Cleveland, searching for enemy subs.
And if she’d needed to launch an alpha strike with her A-6 Intruders, she could have delivered sizable force packages ― bombs, in non-Navy speak ― on Chicago or Nashville.
Transposing that one-to-one scale model to the Black Sea gave a rough idea of how crowded things were going to be here. With the Jefferson cruising in the western Black Sea just halfway between the Bosporus and the Crimean Peninsula, her screen of surface ships, at a radius from the carrier of 150 miles, would be entering the Crimean port of Sevastopol to the northeast, just exiting the Bosporus to the southwest, or hard aground on the coasts of Romania to port or Turkey to starboard. Her submarines would be hunting enemy subs in the Dnieper River somewhere near Nikopol, while her CAP orbited above Dnepropetrovsk over two hundred miles north of the Crimea.
And as for that alpha strike, it could be aimed at Kiev or Kharkov, deep inside Ukraine and two-thirds of the way to Moscow.
Obviously, CBG-14 was going to have to operate on a much smaller scale, pulling her escorting ships and her patrolling aircraft in close and tight. That would increase the group’s ability to maneuver somewhat, but it would sharply cut into its ability to defend in depth. Rather than intercepting a first wave of incoming enemy aircraft at a range of over five hundred miles, they might have to set an outer ring of defenses at, say, three hundred miles … which meant more “leakers” slipping through the outer ring of defenses and a correspondingly higher chance that the carrier’s innermost defenses, her Sea Sparrow missiles and CIWS high-speed guns, would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of incoming targets.
Arguably worse than being pinned down to such a small and landlocked AO was the fact that half of the encircling coastline belonged either to the Russian Federation or to former Soviet countries like Ukraine. Quite frankly, there was no help to be had in there if things got rough, no place to turn to, no source of supply or repair. Of the other three nations bordering the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, only Turkey could be described as anything like an ally… and relations with Ankara had been so strained of late that no one was counting on help from that quarter.
As just one example, a modern carrier like the Jefferson required at-sea replenishment of expendables every two to three weeks. She was nuclear-powered and didn’t require fuel herself, but her aircraft drank millions of gallons of the stuff. In combat, Jefferson’s onboard reserves of over three million gallons of JP-5 aviation gasoline wouldn’t last more than ten days ― less with a heavy flight schedule; a major alpha strike, or an extended, running battle like the one they’d fought months before off North Cape. Her only sources of resupply were the UNREP tankers that followed the battle group like a bride’s train across the sea; if things got tight, if an enemy wanted to pin or incapacitate the carrier short of actually sinking her, an obvious move was to hit the choke point on the Jefferson’s supply line, those two damned narrow slots of waterways, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus.
Hell, the only thing that made this deployment even remotely possible was the fact that the Russians weren’t likely to add Turkey to the list of nations that were mad at them right now. In fact, Russia needed Turkey’s help ― as Turkey needed Russia’s ― in coordinating operations against the Armenian nationalists who operated freely on both sides of the Turkish border. U.S. military intelligence thought that Moscow would be treading carefully around the Turks… and that ruled out provocations like air strikes against supply ships transiting the Hellespont.
They thought.
Tombstone loved it when the intelligence community made a definite and unambiguous statement like that. If the Russians decided they needed to bag a U.S. carrier battle group more than they needed to stop Armenian gun-runners in the Caucasus, well, Jefferson and her escorts were going to be flat damned out of luck.
Commander William Jeffries, the carrier’s ops officer, walked onto the bridge, a computer printout in his hand. “Captain?”
“Whatcha got, Bill?”
“Flash from the Orlando, sir.”
“Shiloh still has a tail, then, I take it?”
“Looks like they’re giving up on the Shiloh, sir, in favor of a fatter target.”
“Us,” Tombstone said.
“That’s about the size of it. But Orlando’s squat in their baffles, and the Russkis don’t even have a clue.”
Brandt grinned. Jeffries handed the printout to him and he glanced over it, then handed it to Tombstone. It was a terse and to-the-point message from Commander Lang, captain of the Los Angeles attack sub Orlando. Most of the message consisted of numbers and code groups, but the gist of the thing was that Orlando was still tracking the Russian sub that she’d picked up shortly after Shiloh had entered the Black Sea late yesterday. The data had been recorded an hour earlier and sent to the surface in a message buoy, which had waited its programmed twenty minutes for the Orlando to get well clear of the area before squirting its coded and compressed digitized warning to the Jefferson by way of one of the Aegis cruiser’s SH-3 helos.
The tail was inevitable, of course, and the discovery of the sub had come as no surprise. Orlando’s orders were to stick tight to the Victor, to report on its position occasionally. If the Victor made a hostile move, such as opening her torpedo tubes, Lang was under orders to kill her.
It was a damned precarious position to be in. The American battle group’s orders from both Washington and the UN officials in charge of Sustain Hope were explicit on at least one point: Under no circumstances were Russian units to be fired upon unless the Russians fired first. Further bloodshed, the politicians thought, would only make the peace process more difficult, and a unilateral, watchful truce by the Americans might convince the Russian factions to back down and let the UN step in with a negotiated settlement.
Those were tough orders to obey in modern warfare, however, where ship-killer weapons could be deployed in seconds, and where a mistake rarely permitted a second chance.
“So,” Tombstone said. “What are we going to do about friend Victor?”
“Do? Not a hell of a lot we can do. We keep track of him with Vikings and Sea Kings and trust Orlando to nail the bastard if he so much as looks hard at the Jeff. Other than that…” A shrug.
“Hell of a way to run a war.”
“It would be, if this was a real war. Who knows? Maybe the Russians just want to make sure we stay clear of their bases in the Crimea. And you know, that Victor could be a Ukrainian boat, too, out of Odessa.”
Tombstone nodded. “Russians
and Ukrainians, they’ve both got to be a bit nervous with us here. About the way we’d feel if a Russian battle group steamed into Chesapeake Bay.”
“Nah. There’s a difference. Chesapeake Bay is U.S. territory, right down to the last soft-shelled crab. The Black Sea is international waters, whatever the Russkis and Ukes might think about the matter.”
A telephone rang, and an enlisted rating picked it up.
After a moment, he looked at Brandt. “Captain?”
“Yes.”
“Commander Nelson, in Ops, sends his respects and says that all vessels are clear of the Bosporus now, and the battle group is in a standard port-heavy deployment.”
“Very well.”
Tombstone looked out the bridge windows. He could see two other ships, both very small and on the horizon. Decatur was to the north. Leslie was a gray smudge to the west, just off Jefferson’s starboard bow. The sea appeared empty otherwise. So long as the Jefferson was hugging the Turkish coast, the bulk of her screening ships could be thrown out to north, east, and west, giving an added layer of defense across the most likely direction of an enemy’s approach, a protective net that extended across the surface of the water, in a broad bubble in the air overhead, and beneath the waves as well.
Not that they ignored the southern flank. In these waters, the CBG had no friends, and no one else to trust.
“Wishing you were on a smaller target, Tombstone?” Brandt asked, twinkling.
“To tell you the truth, sir,” Tombstone said, jerking a thumb toward the overhead, “I’d feel better up there. With my people.”
“Now, now,” Brandt admonished. “When you grow up, you put away your toys. You’re a big boy now, Stoney. Time to stop playing with airplanes and take on some real responsibility, right?”
Tombstone wondered ― not for the first time ― whether he really wanted to go on to command a carrier like this one someday. He just wasn’t certain, and that bothered him. A man should want that next step in his career, want it enough to taste it, to be willing to fight for it, not to simply wait for it to be handed to him on a platter. Not that command of a CVN was something that could be disbursed that way; there were thousands of eager young aviators in the U.S. Navy, every one of them on a career track straight for command of an aircraft carrier. In the entire U.S. Navy, there were exactly twelve supercarriers, some nuclear powered, others, like the John F. Kennedy and the three Kitty Hawk-class carriers, powered by conventional steam boilers. Even throwing in the various Marine amphibious assault ships and helicopter carriers, there were only a couple of dozen carrier commands in the entire Navy, and thousands of eager would-be skippers. His chances of landing a carrier command were vanishingly slim.
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