Their own house was in Groton, Connecticut, near the big US submarine base, New London. But she and their two daughters, Kathy, thirteen, and Jane, eleven, often came up to their grandparents’ Cape Cod house during the winter when it was empty. The whole family had been together here during the Thanksgiving holiday three weeks ago, and this particular weekend had been arranged for Jo to put the house in shape for Christmas next week. Now none of that would be necessary. Jo and the girls might as well stay in Groton, where there were other Naval families close by, old friends who would invite them to parties where no one would mention the absence of Commander Dunning. Special Ops were like that. They cast a cloak of secrecy over their participants, and all of those on the fringes. Jo knew she could be talking to a colleague of Boomer’s who had at least some vague idea of where Boomer was on Christmas Day, but that nothing would ever be mentioned between them. That was how it was, and she was not some skittish television actress anymore. She was the wife of a US Navy nuclear submarine commander, and she might one day be the wife of an Admiral.
Jo wandered outside to retrieve the stupid fishing rod and to work out a way to remove the Boston Whaler from the right-side garage wall without driving the Jeep into the other side. She stepped once more out into the cool bright December morning and gazed along the water, up the narrows and into North Bay. There was still some foliage left on the trees lining the opposite shore of Oyster Harbors, since it had been a warm and late fall. The reds and golds on the Cotuit side were brighter in the midmorning sunlight, and the flat, calm, empty channel out beyond the open harbor made her think, as she had many times before, that this place was indeed paradise.
The sailing boats and the fishing boats were almost all put away for the winter now, except for those that belonged to the Cotuit Oyster Company. The only sign of marine movement was the big Gillmore Marine tugboat Eileen G, now chugging quietly out of the Seapuit River, beneath the steady grip of the master dock-builder and waterman George Gillmore himself.
Soon the winter would set in here, and North Bay might freeze right over, and docks might move in the ice. George Gillmore would soon be working overtime to protect the waterfront bulkheads and piers all around these bays. The high winds would swing in from the Canadian northwest, and snow would cover the summer gardens, and the spring would be cold, and wet, and late coming. But the weather neither inspired nor depressed Jo Dunning. She considered this place to be paradise in wind, rain, or shine. And rarely a day went by without her thinking of the years she and Boomer would have here together when, finally, he retired from the Navy.
Jo stared out to the horizon, across Deadneck Island to the waters of Nantucket Sound. Her husband might well be driving Columbia in the near future out into what he cheerfully called his “beat,” the vastness of the North Atlantic and the terrible depths of an ocean that had petulantly swallowed the Titanic, and a thousand others, not so very far from these tranquil bays. She looked back out across the harbor and waved as the tugboat went by. George replied with a resounding, short, double blast on the horn, which scattered the cormorants along the docks. Basically, George Gillmore did not require that much of an excuse to make Eileen G sound like his own fighting ship. Boomer always said the tall, bearded Gillmore might have made a pretty good captain of a Naval warship.
As Jo reflected, Boomer himself was in private conference in a specially fitted and specially guarded Operations room, euphemistically called a “Limited Access Cell,” at SUBLANT HQ, which would serve as the command center for all the US dealings with the Chinese submarines.
Here the US Navy Black Ops team would finalize everything — their various positions on the ocean, their patrol areas, their cycle of operations, their dates, their orders, their rules of engagement, their overall targeting, their charts — everything required for the efficient management of a small force of submarines with a special tasking.
Even the signals left this room carefully encrypted. If you took papers in — any papers — you couldn’t take them out again without special signatures and meticulous logging. Armed guards stood before the doors. No one was allowed access without a special pass. And these were issued only on a need-to-know basis. Even executive officers and navigation officers were not permitted inside, except for prepatrol and postpatrol briefings. Four communications staff kept watch behind those doors at all times.
The successor to Admiral Mulligan, and now the new Commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force, was Admiral John F. Dixon, an austere and rather forbidding man with a narrow, serious face, renowned for his meticulous preparation. This severe appearance, however, shielded his subordinates from a reckless, youthful past, which had almost caused his removal from the US Naval Academy. There was something about a large bronze statue of a departed admiral, which had been, mysteriously, filled with water by an unknown expert with a small drill; the statue peed for three days from a tiny hole in the front of its dress trousers.
Admiral Mulligan always called Admiral Dixon “Johnny.” The statue incident was rarely, if ever, recalled, but there were those who felt that its distant, hysterical memory among those senior officers who were there might yet prevent the efficient submarine chief from making it to CNO.
Before the small meeting began, Commander Dunning was requesting that despite the long mission he was about to undertake, he still be guaranteed the one-month sabbatical he had been granted throughout the month of February. Admiral Dixon approved the request. Columbia was due in for maintenance that month anyway, and he knew that the Cape Cod commander would be away for four weeks. Should there be a foul-up in the North Atlantic it was unlikely that Columbia would be required to pursue its quarry around the world, and Admiral Dixon did not anticipate a foul-up.
“You going away with Jo?” he asked.
“Yessir. I’m sailing a sixty-five-foot ketch from Cape Town to Tasmania. We’ll probably have a couple of friends with us, and there’ll be a couple of deckhands and a cook to make it all bearable. We’re really looking forward to it. I’ve never been through those southern waters. And we haven’t had a good vacation for years.”
“Blows a bit, down there.”
“It’d better. I don’t have that long!”
Admiral Dixon smiled, and the two submariners walked over to the chart desk, a big, sloping, high, polished table, which had belonged to the Admiral’s grandfather. On the ledge below were sets of dividers, steel rulers, and a calculator. Spread upon the surface beneath the desk light was a detailed map of the northeastern Atlantic, placed on top of a large map of the world. He was a man who had given the subject a lot of thought.
“Okay, gentlemen,” Admiral Dixon began, “to bring us all up-to-date. Until a few days ago we expected the two Kilos to make their journey home to China on the surface. We now have reason to think that the submarines will dive close outside their workup base, then proceed west out of the Barents Sea along the Russian coastline. We expect them to run on down past the North Cape, off Norway, and straight down the northeast Atlantic.
“From there they might swing through the Gibraltar Strait, where we will be able to see them but unable to do much about it. They would then transit the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, which are also somewhat difficult areas for our purposes.
“They may of course head on south and skip Gibraltar. Though it’s longer, it’s a more straightforward route. They would then head around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Malacca or Sunda Straits. By then they may have acquired a close surface escort. We will concentrate on taking them out good and early, somewhere before they get through the GIUK Gap. If they choose to make a covert dived passage all the way to China, and we lose them, the search area becomes hopelessly large. We want them as they approach the GIUK Gap.”
The Admiral referred to one of the most important choke points on this planet — the great narrowing of the waters in the northern reaches of the Atlantic, the tightest point in the entire ocean, where Greenland, I
celand, and the UK’s northern coast form a direct northwest/southeast line 1,300 miles across. Situated directly on this line is the 500-mile-wide island of Iceland, which cuts the navigable waters considerably. This relatively small area — the deep, icy waters where commanding officers have been trained for generations — was the great hunting ground for US and UK submarine strike forces.
Throughout the Cold War all Russian submarines heading for the Atlantic traveled through the GIUK Gap under the watchful attention of their American and British adversaries, deep beneath the surface. Night and day, month after month, year after year, the two great Naval allies watched and waited. Few Soviet submarines ever made their way through the GIUK undetected.
There are three main routes through the Narrows: closest to the UK, east of the Faeroe Islands, which stand four hundred miles northwest of Scotland’s Cape Wrath; west of the Faeroes across the Aegir Ridge; and through the Denmark Strait, which runs between Iceland and Greenland’s Grunnbjørn ice mountain. These are lonely, haunted waters. Only four men survived when the giant forty-two-thousand-ton British battle cruiser HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismark in May 1941.
Admiral Dixon placed his steel ruler across the Gap and muttered, “Somewhere in here, Boomer. We’ll take ’em out just before they head into the Gap.”
“Yessir. And the sooner the better. Actually I had been considering the possibility of the Barents Sea, as soon as they clear the Murmansk area?”
“I don’t think so. It’s a bit too close to their starting point. Ideally, it would be perfect if we could catch them right off the North Cape, right here,” the Admiral said, pointing to the large map spread out before them. “It’s deep water, and it’s off Norway rather than Russia, and they could scarcely avoid it if the buggers are on their way home to China.
“Trouble is we don’t have the time. They’ll be off the North Cape two days after, which will almost certainly be a Monday morning. It might take us till Friday before we realize they’re not coming back. By which time they’ll be well down toward the UK. For our first contact we’ll have to rely on SOSUS.”
The Admiral was referring to the ultra-secret American underwater network of acoustic surveillance, which covers most of the world’s oceans, particularly sensitive areas like the GIUK Gap.
“Once we get a SOSUS fix on ’em, we can use Maritime Patrol Aircraft, MPA, to localize. This is going to take time and a bit of luck, but it’s all we’ve got.
“I think we should first look at a holding area, where you will await your prey. I was thinking of here.” The Admiral pointed to an area in a three-hundred-foot depth of water south of the Shetland Isles, 59.7N right on the two-degree line west, 180 miles due north of Scotland’s granite city of Aberdeen.
“This will put you around four thousand miles from New London, Boomer,” said Admiral Dixon. “If you run at around twenty-five knots across the Atlantic, it’ll take about six and a half days. Right now we think the Kilos will leave in the first week in January. You should be on station southwest of the Shetlands by December thirty-first.”
“Yessir. Hell of a way to spend New Year’s Eve. But before we begin a detailed plan, I should like to ask one question.”
As Boomer spoke, the door swung open and a guard let in the pugnacious figure of Admiral Morgan. “Hey, Johnny, Boomer. How we comin”?”
“Just started,” said the Admiral. “I have selected a holding pattern for Columbia, but Boomer has a question. Commander?”
“Sir, do we expect the Kilos to be armed?”
“Yes, you’ll have to assume they’ll be armed, Boomer. Fully armed,” Admiral Morgan answered. “And you can expect each of them to be equipped with its full complement of torpedoes — twenty-four each. These two hulls we are looking at are older than the remaining five, but I think we should assume they have been fitted with the newest Russian system. They probably have wire-guided torpedoes that can be fired in pairs, and engage two targets simultaneously.”
“Yessir. Got that, Admiral. Seems they’re catching us up all the time. I guess I need to plan for the worst case, like they’re both dived when we meet up. D’you think they’ll be on the surface, or will they make the whole journey dived?”
“We can’t be sure. The three Kilos the Chinese now have all went by freighter. Brand-new submarines are normally delivered on the surface because it’s much more fuel efficient, less wearing on machinery, and safer. But this is a bit different. We have two Chinese crews training in Russia for several months, and as we speak they are working the boats dived, out in the Barents Sea. I gotta hunch they might be planning to make this journey underwater.”
Boomer nodded. “Either way we have no options,” the Admiral continued thoughtfully. “I just spoke to the President again. He is very clear. We cannot allow ourselves to be shut out of the Taiwan Strait and permit another power to dominate the sea in that part of the world. Right here I’m thinking not only of Taiwan, where we have billions of dollars invested, but of our friends in South Korea, and our trading partners in Japan. They are more worried than we are. That Chinese Navy is a world-fucking nuisance. They have two hundred and fifty thousand people in it.
“The President thinks this issue is about the balance of power in those waters. If China gets a working submarine fleet, they will call the shots on every level. We would be impotent in the Taiwan Strait; the risk to our ships and people would be too great. We’re not going to let them have those submarines.
“Columbia will be lying in wait. It’s our ambush. You must strike fast and decisively. Take ’em out, and right there fourteen percent of a bitch of a problem will be over. There’ll be five left. And not all of them will be your problem. Maybe none.”
“Nossir. I guess the only real difficulty could be getting ’em both at once. Can’t loose off one weapon active too quick, or it’ll alert the other Kilo, which will then have time to go silent and fire back. Maybe even get away long enough to tell his base what’s happening. Still, my team is well trained, and unless the Chinese have the Kilos more than four or five miles apart, or less than five hundred yards apart, we should be okay. Just need to wait till they’re close enough to separate on the screen.”
“I’m assessing they’ll make their passage in loose company, Boomer — about two thousand yards apart — which they’ll know is good for low-power underwater telephone, but not so close they have to worry about running into each other. I just can’t see ’em having time to get one off themselves.”
“But I can’t count on that, sir. They got one off in the South Atlantic. Damn quick.”
“Yeah,” Admiral Dixon interjected. “But didn’t they have that Israeli commander on board?”
“Not according to Baldridge. He says the Russian captain got one away.”
“Hmmmm. We’ll have to trust you to get it right, Boomer. I do not want Columbia fired on,” said Admiral Dixon. “I do not want anyone even to know she is there. We’re looking for a silent, sudden, and deadly trap.”
“Meantime I think we ought to run through the broad outlines of the search phase,” said the Admiral. “We have Admiral Morgan right here, and I’ve a feeling we could use his help.
“For starters, we want one of our special-fit fishing trawlers in place, as near as they can get without being arrested, to the entrance to the bay. You know, the one which leads right down to Pol’arnyj, just in case the Kilos do, after all, stay on the surface. We also want the regular Barents Sea SSN on standby, though I don’t want to sink ’em right there. Too many ears in the water, right in the Russian backyard.
“The MPA boys will work out their own plan. But they cannot start too far east, or the Russians will see what they’re up to. And, we don’t want to start too far west, or south, or we might use up two years’ worth of sonobuoys in a week and still not get ’em. I guess we’re agreed, the GIUK Gap is the last resort.”
Arnold Morgan stared at the chart desk. “No alternative to those thoughts,” he said. “We have to get the
se guys as early as we can, without being caught. If they stay on the surface the Gap is the sensible place. If they dive, we want them as soon as we can, after they round the North Cape. The MPA boys can work there without being obvious, if, as I suspect it will, the Barents Sea SSN either misses or loses them.
“And Johnny, they’re gonna need a mass of support close to the op area. You have any idea yet where we’re gonna work from?”
“Well, it’ll be from the UK. I’ve penciled in my choice, a perfect spot, but we’ll need some clearance in Whitehall.”
“Don’t sweat it, Johnny. I’ll fix it.”
“Excellent. I’m looking at Machrihanish, an old disused former NATO air base. It’s stuck right down on the southwestern Atlantic corner of the Mull of Kintyre, opposite Campbeltown Loch, an old submarine haunt on the west coast of Scotland. But it’s a quiet place.
“I’m working on the theory that we’ll probably want six MPA for two weeks. More would be suspicious, and fewer wouldn’t cut it. They’ve gotta operate passive, without their radars. Keep Ivan in the dark, right?
“We’ll fly the aircraft in, Orion P-3C’s. They’ve got a pretty good long endurance, about fifteen hours. Then we’ll need a Galaxy transporter to bring in possibly as many as eight thousand sonobuoys, and all the support equipment. We’ll need a ton of fuel for the aircraft. But there are NATO stocks on the field. We ought to be able to rely on that, so long as we pay. The problem is, what do we tell the Brits? And what do we tell NATO?”
“Nothing we have to tell NATO. The Brits, they probably know too much already. But they might help us out on fuel.”
“Okay, Arnold. How do you suggest we move things forward?”
“I’ll get on to our London embassy and tell ’em to assign a Naval attaché to go directly to the Ministry of Defence. Meantime I’ll do some groundwork as high up as I dare to make sure it goes through quickly.”
“What’s our cover story?”
“Try this: we’re running a big exercise to show that we can still deploy MPA anywhere in the world, to vestigial support airfields, and operate for at least two weeks. It’s something we don’t do very often, but we’re deliberately conducting this training in Europe, in mid-winter, thousands of miles from a home base.”
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