Cauldron

by Larry Bond

  “Because something’s in the wind. Something they don’t want us to know about. Maybe connected with Poland. Maybe not.” Banich turned to Kutner. “You saw my report on the airport clampdown. Not even Kaminov would throw that many security personnel around on a whim.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you can see what these bastards could have in mind. They must know we’ve got a network here in Moscow — one they haven’t been able to penetrate yet.” Banich nodded toward Erin. “Say they lure McKenna outside the embassy, pass her a few worthless state secrets, and then grab her red-handed. The FIS gets two big pluses from that. One, they disrupt our operations and force us to commit resources arranging a swap or a buy-back. Two, they can break her wide open under interrogation.”

  He lowered his voice. “She knows too much, Len. My name. My cover. The trading company. Everything. And the frigging Russians would get it all.”

  Erin flushed angrily at the implication that she would spill secrets so easily. But she had to admit that Banich was probably right. She was an analyst, not a field agent. She didn’t have the training to withstand prolonged questioning — whether under torture or drugs.

  Still, he seemed far too inclined to view only the worst-case situation. Would he have been as adamant if the Russian colonel had contacted Mike Hennessy instead of her? She doubted it. Maybe somebody should point out the possibility that this particular glass might be half-full, not half-empty. “What if Soloviev isn’t setting a trap? What if he does have vital information to give us? Look, Alex, you say yourself that there’s something big happening inside the Russian government. Have any of your sources been able to tell you what’s up?”

  He shook his head reluctantly.

  “Then isn’t it worth taking some risks to find out more?”

  Banich shook his head again, vehemently this time. “No, it’s not. I don’t care what the payoff seems to be. I don’t make sucker bets.”

  She turned to Kutner. “So that’s it? We just walk away from a man who could give us access to Kaminov’s inner circle? Can we really afford to pass up a chance like this?”

  The station chief didn’t answer her right away. Instead he studied the crumpled note in front of him one more time. When he looked up, he was looking at Banich, not at her. He grimaced. “I’m afraid Miss McKenna could be right, Alex. This may be one sucker bet we have to make.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Time on Target

  JUNE 25 — OVER ENGLAND

  Four delta-winged Mirage 2000s screamed north over the rolling, windswept Lambourn Downs, flying so low they nearly merged with the shadows rippling over long, green grass. Below them, strings of racehorses out for early morning schooling panicked, broke free from their stable lads, and scattered in a frenzied gallop — spraying across the barren landscape like pellets from a shotgun.

  The pilot of the lead Mirage eased back on his stick, pulling his jet up as the ground ahead rose steadily toward a line of low chalk hills stretching east and west. One hundred meters. Two hundred. Three hundred.

  Abruptly the landscape dropped away below them, falling into a wide, settled valley dotted with small villages and fields — the Vale of the White Horse.

  As he dove for the valley floor, a series of low, bass beeps sounded again in the lead pilot’s headphones. The sounds signaled an airborne search radar hunting for them. Either the Americans or the British had an AWACS plane orbiting over southern England. He checked the radar signal strength. High. Too high. They’d been detected.

  He shook his head. The AWACS was too late. The four French warplanes were just twenty kilometers and ninety seconds from their target. He rocked the Mirage from side to side as a signal to the others and accelerated.

  CNN HEADLINE NEWS, ON THE FLIGHT LINE, RAF BRIZE NORTON, NEAR OXFORD

  CNN’s viewers were being treated to live pictures of a massive military operation in progress. Huge U.S. Air Force C-5As, looking more like sections of gigantic pipeline than anything flyable, lumbered over the concrete tarmac. In the distance, other transports, C-141s and C-17s with their ramps extended, loaded trucks, missile launchers, and pallet after pallet of supplies. More colorful civilian airliners were intermixed with the green-painted military planes, pressed into service to carry troops. Long files of infantrymen shuffled forward to board the passenger aircraft, bowed down under rucksacks, weapons, and gear weighing up to 120 pounds.

  With its three-thousand-meter long main runway, the RAF base at Brize Norton was an important center for the airlift pouring men, equipment, and supplies into Poland.

  The reporter’s khaki pants, shirt, and bulky flak jacket gave him a martial air that fitted his surroundings. He had to shout into his mike to make himself heard over howling jet engines and rumbling machinery. “The British 1st Armored is only one of — ”

  A sudden, high-pitched wail stopped him in midsentence, rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

  “What’s that noise?” Alarm flashed across the reporter’s face as he recognized the base air raid siren. Still looking into the camera, he stammered, “Is this some kind of drill?” He turned to his left and repeated the question.

  The view shifted, showing an ashen-faced RAF lieutenant motioning frantically toward the ground. “Take cover! Take cover!”

  Explosions drowned out the siren.

  The camera image jarred, then tumbled to lie on its side, showing a cluster of buildings — aircraft hangars and living quarters. A mike picked up shocked voices in the background. “Are you all right?… Jesus, look at that! Where’s the camera?”

  The image spun and shook, then steadied on a transformed scene. A pall of smoke hung over the flight line, fed by masses of flames below it. The fires dwarfed everything in sight — solid sheets of flame that towered over the trucks and men scrambling to control them.

  Shaking again, the CNN cameraman panned left, then right, unable to capture the scope of this disaster in a single frame. The long, ordered lines of soldiers were gone, replaced by screaming clumps of wounded men and silent heaps of those who were dead. Secondary explosions threw mangled pieces of aircraft into the air as balls of orange-red flame mushroomed in the mass of wreckage.

  IN THE THAMES ESTUARY

  The German submarine commanded by Captain Theodor Ritter lay bottomed on the Thames Estuary, practically hugging an old wreck left over from the last war. She was just forty kilometers east of London.

  German submarines have never had names. This one was no exception. She was simply called U-32, the “U” standing for Unterseeboot, undersea boat. She was small, only one-fifth the size of a Los Angeles-class nuclear sub. Unlike America’s SSNs, Germany’s U-boats didn’t need a cruising range measured in tens of thousands of miles. They were built for coastal operations, close to their home ports.

  As a Type 212 boat, U-32 was also brand-new, and new technology gave her an edge over the enemy. Instead of a large, expensive nuclear reactor, she carried an “air-independent” propulsion plant. When their electric batteries ran low, older conventional submarines had to snorkel — drawing air from the surface for their diesel engines. But snorkeling makes noise, and making noise during wartime is a sure and certain way for a submarine to get itself killed.

  U-32 and the other boats in her class didn’t have to snorkel. Instead, a tank of liquid oxygen supplied an advanced engine, which replaced the diesel. That meant they could charge their batteries while submerged, and then proceed silently on electric motors. The combination of ultraquiet propulsion, a small, nonmagnetic hull shaped to help scatter sonar echoes, and a first-rate sonar and fire control system made U-32 and her sisters deadly opponents.

  Slipping this far through the Combined Forces ASW patrols had been difficult, but the German sub wasn’t looking for a fight.

  U-32’s submerged mobility, almost as good as a nuclear boat’s, had let her sidestep or backtrack if she found herself near a prowling adversary. Her skipper and crew knew there would be time to deal with isolated
enemy destroyers or frigates on the way out.

  Besides, the war was almost three weeks old now. Patterns had begun to emerge in the way the Americans and British patrolled — patterns that could be exploited.

  So now U-32 lay motionless in the mud. With her motors and even her air recirculation pumps shut down, she would be almost impossible to hear on passive sonar. Even normal active sonars couldn’t find her this close to the bottom — the mud and sediments blurred sound waves bouncing off it.

  But the Royal Navy was used to operating in shallow water. Many of its ships carried special high-frequency sonars that could provide almost picture-quality images of whatever lay on the bottom.

  The German submarine was relying on three things to safeguard her from such sonars. First, her small size — barely one thousand tons surfaced — and minimal sonar cross section. Second, her anechoic coating and special hull design should help absorb and scatter enemy sonar pulses. Last, and most important of all, U-32 lay close beside the old wreck, almost hull-to-hull — hiding in the sonar and magnetic shadow cast by the larger vessel.

  Ritter and his crew resigned themselves to a long stay on the bottom, breathing air that would grow fouler as the hours passed. Like a spider in its web, the U-32 lay in wait for her prey.

  HMS Brecon led the outbound convoy heading for Gdansk. Built with a glass-reinforced plastic hull, and equipped with a pair of unmanned submersibles and a high-frequency sonar, the Hunt-class minehunter had proven her worth after the Falklands war by sweeping Argentine minefields laid off Port Stanley.

  Now she plodded down the estuary at a sedate ten knots, sweeping back and forth. Behind her came two Type 22-class frigates, HMS Chatham and HMS London.

  Three merchant ships followed the warships. A third frigate, HMS Argyll, a Type 23, brought up the rear.

  Every warship was at action stations, expecting trouble. The three merchant ships, one bulk freighter and two container ships, held the better part of a British armored regiment, along with spare parts and ammunition.

  U-32’s crew, lazing at their own duty stations, sat up as the first chirp of the enemy’s sonar beams came over the attack center speaker.

  Ritter cocked his head toward the ceiling, listening as the British ships steaming overhead came closer.

  The high-frequency chirping swelled, backed by the low, dull thrum of the minehunter’s engines. New sounds over the speaker signaled another British ship moving in behind the first.

  Chatham’s active sonar made a deeper, duller noise than Brecon’s set.

  More crewmen tensed as the sounds grew steadily louder. In theory, they were reasonably safe from detection. But theory seemed a poor substitute for certainty when the sonar pulses lashing the U-32 could be heard pinging through the hull itself.

  Aboard Brecon, the senior petty officer manning the high-frequency sonar watched his screen carefully. He knew these waters well. The wreck, a coastal freighter sunk by Stukas in 1940, was a familiar landmark on his charts. He glanced at the digital clock above his display. They were right on time.

  The wreck appeared, crawling down the screen as Brecon steamed toward it. He studied the bottom area around the sunken freighter closely. Nothing. Just the usual jumble of green-white shapes. Anything shaped like a submarine should have stood out clearly.

  U-32’s sensitive sonar gear picked up machinery sounds emanating from the oncoming convoy and fed them to her fire control computers. By comparing the noises against prerecorded data sets, the computers were able to rapidly classify each ship. As always, information obtained during peacetime exercises was proving useful in war.

  Ritter hovered over the computer display, watching the results of this automated search appear. Moving blips indicated seven ships sailing east in line, centered in the channel. His fingers drummed against the console. The three warships were tempting targets, but his instructions were clear. The merchantmen were his first priority.

  “Prepare for an attack,” he ordered. “Two torpedoes at the lead merchant, three each at the other two.”

  Every man in the boat held his breath as the ships drew nearer. The swishing roar of the enemy minehunter’s screws passed overhead and began to fade.

  Ritter kept his eyes on the display, watching the six ships behind Brecon.

  Bearing, still steady. Range, decreasing. He looked up at his diving officer. “Lift off.”

  Valves opened, and a shot of compressed air entered U-32’s ballast tanks, changing her buoyancy from slightly negative to slightly positive. She lifted smoothly off the bottom. At the same time, her silent propellers spun up slowly, giving the submarine bare steerageway.

  Once depth and speed were stabilized, the diving officer nodded silently to Ritter. They were in position.

  The captain turned to the fire control officer. “Ready?”

  “Solutions checked and valid.”

  Ritter wrapped one hand around an overhead support and took a deep breath. Now. “Shoot!”

  One after another, eight Seal 3 torpedoes, pushed out of their tubes by a pulse of water, came to life and sped toward their targets. Dual-core wires connected each torpedo to the U-32 and her fire control computer. These wires carried guidance commands from the sub to its weapons. They also allowed the sub to see everything its torpedoes saw.

  With so many propellers thrashing the water, the British warships had failed to hear the German submarine as she vented her tanks and came off the bottom. But the high-pitched screw noises made by eight torpedoes screaming in at thirty-five knots were unmistakable.

  In seconds, sonar plots aboard all three frigates showed their bearing and probable origin point. But it was too late.

  The first torpedoes were already reaching their targets.

  Van Dyck, a bulk freighter of twenty thousand tons deadweight, took one torpedo in the bow and another in the engine room. Although each Seal 3 carried a quarter ton of PBX, the vessel was only crippled, not destroyed. Within seconds she was practically dead in the water, listing to starboard. She would have to be towed back for repairs in Great Britain’s already overtaxed shipyards.

  Three torpedoes slammed into Falmount Bay, a container ship of the same size. Without decoys, at slow speed, the large ship was an easy target. Three plumes of yellow-stained water and smoke fountained high into the air. Falmount Bay broke in half and sank.

  Behind her, only two of three incoming Seals plowed into the container ship St. Louis.

  The third missed and ran up the estuary until it ran out of fuel and drifted harmlessly into the mud. But she was smaller than the others and carried a flammable cargo. Internal explosions tore her apart in minutes — sending a huge plume of smoke high into the atmosphere.

  Chatham and London raced for the old wreck, sonars blasting, pounding the estuary in a frenzied search. Argyll, in the rear, turned to assist the stricken Van Dyck. She also launched one of her two Westland Lynx helicopters to assist in the hunt.

  Ritter didn’t waste time patting backs. Celebrating could come later — once he and his crew were safely back in port. “All ahead flank!”

  U-32 was not silent now. Her only hope of escape lay in speed, and she had a lot of it in reserve — twenty-three knots submerged. She darted out from the wreck, right under Chatham as it charged in. That meant risking an over-the-side shot by the British ship’s triple torpedo mounts, but the closing speeds were so high that the frigate didn’t get a solid fix on her until it was too late.

  The German sub skipper divided his attention between the sonar display and the plot. Every minute spent at full speed cost him five hours’ worth of battery charge. Like all conventional submarine captains, he had to constantly weigh the advantages of speed with the risks of running out of power.

  “All ahead two-thirds.”

  Ritter’s escape-and-evasion plan was simplicity itself. If he could break contact with these three warships, the rest of the estuary was clear all the way out into the North Sea. He had the endurance at medium speed t
o reach open water, where the British would have a very hard time finding him.

  Argyll’s helicopter was his undoing. The submarine’s high-speed burst, although only a minute long, created a wake in the shallow water — a wide vee shape streaming away from the fleeing U-boat. Even as U-32 slowed, the Lynx flashed over Chatham at masthead height and dropped two depth charges just in front of the point of the vee.

  The depth charges splashed into the water, sank rapidly, and detonated a fraction of a second later. One was just ten meters away from the German submarine’s hull, the other only five. Caught by two bubble pulses of explosive shock and gas,

  U-32 tumbled and shook. The twin shocks tore equipment loose from its mountings, bounced the crew off the bulkheads, and even deformed the pressure hull. She lost half her batteries and her AIP engine shut down — badly damaged. Even her fire control system went dead in a shower of sparks and fused circuit boards.

  Chatham, cued by the hovering Lynx, heeled over — coming round in a tight, high-speed turn to attack the crippled German submarine. Her active sonar found and fixed U-32 at almost point-blank range. A Stingray torpedo plunged into the water.

  Inside U-32, the crew worked desperately to restore her propulsion and her fire control systems. But the British frigate’s sonar pulses were already deafening and growing louder.

  Screee.

  Panicked faces turned aft, toward the new noise in the water.

  “Torpedo! Bearing two four five!” The sonarman’s shouted report was redundant.

  Ritter ran his eyes over the plot one last time and then looked at his haggard men. They were finished.

  U-32’s damage was too great, and the British ships were too close. There were only twenty-three men in U-32’s crew, but they were as close as brothers. He would save what he could by surrendering. “Blow all tanks! Emergency surface!”

  Chatham’s Stingray barely had time to steady up before its active sonar found U-32. The submarine, unable to dodge, lay right in its path.