Echo Class

by David E. Meadows

  “More of an Asian phenomenon than Western, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What? Losing face?” Green shook his head. “Face is very important even if we don’t use the term a lot in our own world. America is losing face in Vietnam. We can’t afford to lose face in the eyes of the world, which is why this incident on Monday will go into the U.S. Navy’s book of secrets, which the chief of naval operations keeps. Good-bye, Danny.”

  MacDonald shook the hand and stepped out. “Have fun, Admiral.”

  “At least I will have some good wine for my early dinner with the admiral. Enjoy your bug juice.”

  “See you later?” MacDonald asked.

  Green leaned down, his head visible to MacDonald. “We sail at midnight, Skipper. Talk to you later.”

  “UP periscope,” Bocharkov said.

  He rode the scope as it ascended, flipping down the handles and watching the water cascade from the lens. He stepped clockwise, feeling the slight vibration of the hydraulics helping the periscope turn in its tube as he searched the horizon. Off to the east, clouds marked the landmass outlining the Philippine coast.

  “Stream the wire,” he commanded.

  At the Christmas Tree, Lieutenant Kalugin, the underwater weapons officer, pushed the Boyevaya Chast’ 4 button and relayed the order to the communicators to start trailing the long wire.

  The wire was an antenna for both transmitting and receiving signals. Used primarily by the K-122 for receiving the continuous navy broadcast, right now Bocharkov was using it for his new mission. Lieutenant Dolinski would be in the radio compartment with Starshina Malenkov. The installation had yet to work, after three days on station, and no one knew why.

  Bocharkov leaned away from the periscope. “Periscope down. All clear.” He looked at Kalugin. “Sonar contacts?”

  “Sonar reports all clear, sir, with exception of the fishing fleet returning for the night.”

  Bocharkov patted the message in his shirt pocket. He thought he had escaped further contact with the Americans, but the K-122 had been less than a hundred kilometers from Subic Bay when Moscow ordered them back. His mission now was to monitor the telephone conversations inside Subic Bay so Moscow could determine if the original plan of the American battle group to head to Vietnam was the true plan, or if they were going to head toward the Middle East to help their ally Israel.

  Bocharkov did not want to think what the Americans would do if or when they detected the K-122. After all, even with no news being reported by the Americans, he knew he had at least damaged Contact One with his aft torpedoes. The Americans would not be so cautious in their next contact.

  “CAPTAIN Norton!” Chief Welcher shouted from the doorway.

  The marines patrolling the perimeter surrounding the telephone switching unit glanced toward the chief.

  Norton raised his hand from where he paced outside the building, his pipe puffing small clouds of smoke, marking his presence and path like the stack on an old coal-driven train.

  “You should come, sir.”

  Norton hurried toward the building. Welcher disappeared inside, and a moment later Norton crossed the threshold. Around the Soviet equipment a couple of sailors stood, monitoring meters on the face of a bay of equipment the operational deception team had installed late yesterday afternoon. Wires stretched from the system to the Soviet equipment, with several more multicolored wires running parallel to the thin antenna the adversary had run from the equipment through the wall of the building and up along the outside wires to the telephone pole. Then they had started their patient wait. Several small reel-to-reel tape recorders made up the remainder of the American OPDEC system. A system without a name, designed and put together by the technicians of OP-20G, the secretive technology department within the United States Navy.

  “It just came to life, sir,” Welcher said as Norton squeezed himself between the sailors and the chief.

  It had taken the communications technicians from San Miguel about forty-eight hours to figure out how the system worked. They could have done it in less time if they had been allowed to disconnect it.

  “Is it transmitting?”

  “Not yet, sir,” Welcher said, touching a small yellow bulb at the top of the system. “Someone is trying to get it to transmit, but we are still interrupting this every time in accordance with your orders, sir.”

  The first-class sitting on the floor of the building with headsets pressed against his ears shook his head. “I believe they are trying to run some sort of diagnostics program on the system, Captain.”

  “Are we ready?” Norton asked.

  The first-class looked up and smiled. Welcher nodded, winked at Norton, and said, “Two minutes after we do it, sir, we can have this system dismantled and on its way to our foreign technology exploitation bubbas at Naval Intelligence. They’re going to wet their pants when they get this.”

  “They are going have cataclysmic orgasms,” the first-class petty officer added.

  Norton took another puff. The sailor nearest him stepped away. Norton failed to see the man wince and fan away the smoke.

  “Okay, let’s do it, gents,” Norton said.

  “Hit it,” Welcher said, leaning down, his finger nearly hitting the button.

  The first-class pushed the forward button. The four reel-to-reel tapes began to roll. The whisper of the tape could be heard as everyone watched silently.

  Behind the deception system, another sailor with headsets raised his finger. “It’s on its way.”

  Norton pulled his pipe out of his mouth. “Great work, Chief. You, too, sailors.” He chuckled. “Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?”

  The fake conversations from the deception system rolled into the Soviet equipment, traveling up the lines to the antenna, and out into the airways, heading toward the Soviet operator who waited for the results of his work.

  “Captain, have you heard any news from Liberty?” Welcher asked.

  Everyone turned toward Norton.

  “They haven’t released any names of the dead or the wounded yet. They won’t until the next of kin are notified.”

  “I had friends on board the Liberty. I was on the Georgetown before being transferred to San Miguel. My shipmate on the Georgetown got follow-on orders to the Liberty. I just . . .” Welcher choked.

  Norton touched him on the shoulder. “We all have friends on the Liberty, Chief.”

  “Why in the hell did the Israelis attack us, sir?” the first-class asked.

  Norton shrugged. “Probably a mistake. Mistakes happen in the fog of war.”

  BOCH A RKOV looked at the watch. Hard to believe that a little over three days ago he was being fired upon by the Americans and now here he was less than fifty kilometers off Subic Bay watching them without being among them. Lot safer this way.

  Lieutenant Kalugin listened to the internal communications report and turned to Bocharkov. “They have what they want, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Dolinski, sir.”

  “What is it they wanted?”

  Kalugin looked confused. “I don’t know, sir.”

  Bocharkov grunted. “Makes two of us. Tell Lieutenant Dolinski to come to the control room.”

  Kalugin quickly relayed the order.

  Moments later the GRU Spetsnaz officer emerged through the forward hatch. His head was bandaged in the back. As he approached Bocharkov, he could see that the broken blood vessels in the man’s right eye were beginning to fade from the incident with the fire extinguisher.

  “How are you doing, Lieutenant?”

  Dolinski nodded. “I am beginning to lose my double vision, sir,” he said.

  The anger was not well hidden. When the K-122 returned to Kamchatka, there was no doubt in Bocharkov’s mind that he would be summoned to explain his actions before the Party officials. He was not too concerned. His record was sterling. On the other hand, he had little knowledge of how much political influence Dolinski welded. He knew the K-122 zampol
it Golovastov was thought a buffoon by those who had served with him, but being thought that by the fleet was not necessarily a bad thing when it came to what Party officials might think.

  “Have we gotten what we want?”

  Dolinski nodded and winced.

  “Got a nasty blow to the head, Lieutenant. It’ll go away in a few days.”

  “I was told I slipped and fell against the fire extinguisher someone was holding.”

  “Things like that happen on a submarine.” Bocharkov raised his hand out, palm down, and wriggled it back and forth, up and down. “Submarines are notorious for their sudden movements.” The hand fell back to his side.

  Dolinski’s eyes glared. “So I have been told, sir.”

  Bocharkov pulled the message from his pocket. “Our orders are to discover if this Beacon Torch operation is for Vietnam or if the Americans intend to redirect it to the Israeli war of aggression in the Sinai.”

  Dolinski gave a weak smile. “Lieutenant Golovastov and I are writing the message to pass along what we have learned to Moscow, sir. Our quick analysis shows the Kitty Hawk carrier battle group along with the American amphibious carrier Tripoli will not go to Vietnam. They are going to join another American carrier battle group sailing from America, around the tip of South Africa, somewhere near the Gulf of Aden. From there the warships will enter the Red Sea.”

  Bocharkov shook his head, grunted, and then said, “We got all that in the short time we have been here? I thought the system was malfunctioning.”

  “It was, sir, but the diagnostics circuits appear to have corrected whatever was wrong, because we are able to hear the Americans for several minutes before it malfunctioned again.”

  “Were we able to tell when they are getting under way to go west?”

  “Yes, sir. They are going to set sail tonight. Not sure what time.”

  “Does it seem strange to you that we just happened to find this information between bouts of malfunctions, Lieutenant?”

  Dolinski let out a deep sigh. “Sometimes we wait long periods to gain our intelligence, sir; other times it just lands in our laps. This was a blue bird. It flew in the proverbial window just as we needed it.”

  “I would think we would get bits and pieces—”

  Dolinski interrupted. “Sir, if they are leaving the American base tonight, if we can restore the system again, then for the next few hours we should get lots of information, from their ammo load out, to where their flag officers are going to be embarked . . .”

  “. . . even to what happened to the destroyer we hit Monday?”

  “Yes, sir, even to that.”

  “Very well, Lieutenant. I want to see the SITREP before it is transmitted.”

  Dolinski’s eyes widened, but before he could speak, Bocharkov added, “It is my boat, Lieutenant. I like to know what is being transmitted off it.”

  The Spetsnaz intelligence officer nodded once and stormed out of the control room, heading forward again to the radio compartment.

  “IT’S gone, sir,” Welcher said. “They are going to think we are massing forces to go help Israel.”

  Norton smiled. “I do truly love this work we do, Chief, even when we run the risks we do, such as what has happened to our shipmates on the USS Liberty.”

  He took a puff on his pipe, and then looked at the sailors. “For all of you, what we have done is given the Soviets information where they will think Beacon Torch is a secret American mission to provide military support to Israel. We were lucky to get Naval Security Group Command to approve it as soon as they did.”

  “What will the Soviets do, sir?” the first-class asked.

  “Most likely they will redeploy their submarines to the Indian Ocean to track us. That will pull some away from the Gulf of Tonkin. Then they will give the information to the Arabs. Might even hasten a peace agreement to bring this Middle East war to a close, until the next one. Then again, it could backfire on us and the Soviets start airlifting troops into Egypt and Syria while deploying their air force. Then this little deception activity of ours would become a self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of a self-licking ice cream cone.”

  “What is Beacon Torch, Captain?” the sailor in back with the headphones asked.

  Norton shrugged. “Right now, it’s an operation to land the marines behind the lines in South Vietnam. Trap some North Vietnamese regulars with their pants down. Giving the Soviets this misdirection will help the success of the mission because they should also tell their North Vietnamese ally to relax, the American battle group is going elsewhere. Meanwhile Soviet Navy elements are going to sortie out along where they believe we’ll transit and wait for us to pass. It’s going to cost them some operational tempo and assets to track our ghost battle groups.”

  “Wow!” the young sailor in back of the OPDEC system gasped. “I’m glad they have never done that to us.”

  Norton looked at the sailor for a few seconds before he laughed. “Son, what we just did is something that militaries have been doing for centuries. All we did was use modern telecommunications technology to send the adversary galloping over the wrong hill.”

  “Or at least we hope we did,” Welcher mumbled quietly.