The Line bo-2

by Bob Mayer

  “Most tanker missions in this area of operation are flown by the Pacific Tanker Force of the 65th Strategic Squadron, which is located at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. That falls under the command of the Pacific Air Forces headquartered right here in sunny Oahu at Hickham.

  I’ve got a friend at PACAF who owed me,” she said with a smile that made Boomer wonder about the debt.

  “He checked and he found a KC-10 tanker departing Andersen at 0430 zulu on the first. It’s scheduled to do a mission at 0830 zulu, at coordinates 178 degrees, twelve minutes east longitude, and twenty-three degrees, fifteen minutes north latitude.”

  “Which is where?” Skibicki asked.

  She had an 8.5-by-11 Xeroxed map of the Pacific in her notebook and she unfolded it and placed it next to the paper.

  She drew a small circle on it.

  “Right here. Five hundred and fifty miles southeast of Midway.” She consulted her notes again.

  “The KC-10 is to remain on station to do another mission at the same spot at 1530 zulu. It’s scheduled to return to Andersen at 1930 zulu.”

  “A second mission?” Skibicki said.

  “Two aircraft?”

  Vasquez shook her head.

  “No. Same aircraft. Once going in and once coming out. I checked, using what you gave me, that it might be a Combat Talon that’s getting the gas. A 0830 Z refuel at this spot,” she tapped the mark, “given the Talon’s mission speed at altitude of 260 knots, puts the Talon here at Oahu at 1200 Z. Given that they come in low level the last fifty miles or so to get under radar.”

  Boomer nodded. Exactly the time for the drop on the message.

  “You weren’t able to find out anything about where the four Talons of the tst SOS are?” Boomer asked, referring to the 1st Special Operations Squadron which was stationed at Kadena in Japan.

  “No, sir. That stuff is tightly classified and my buddy doesn’t owe me time in Leavenworth.” Vasquez continued with what she had.

  “My figuring, though, has the same thing for the return of the mission aircraft. The second top off at 1530 Z gets the Talon on its way back to Kadena or wherever. I think it’s coming out of Japan or Okie because the refuel makes sense at that point. It’s just about 3,000 miles from those islands, which is the safe operational range of the Talon. Then they got a thousand miles in to here, a thousand back, another top off, and the 3,000 miles back to home base.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Boomermuttered looking at the map, impressed with Vasquez’s interpolations.

  “She’s good, ain’t she?” Skibicki said proudly.

  Boomer looked at his watch.

  “That means they’re in the air now. Hell, they’ll be refueling in three hours.” He looked around at all the people in uniform drinking beers and laughing together. He was only three days removed from lying in ambush above a road in the Ukraine. He felt the hard plastic edge of Stubbs’ ID card pressing into flesh through his thigh pocket.

  “We’re going to have to check out the jump. Get an idea of what they’re up to.”

  “Already thought of that,” Skibicki said.

  “I drew some gear out of the tunnel for us to use. We’ll get to that in a little bit.” He turned back to Vasquez.

  “You find out anything else?”

  Vasquez pocketed her papers and map.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?” Skibicki repeated.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Vasquez shrugged, used to the sergeant major’s gruff manner.

  “You told me to check for anything weird going on around the island, sergeant major. There’s some weird shit going on with SOS US and the imaging people over at Pearl.” She paused.

  “If I knew what was going on with you two, I might know what’s important and what’s not,” she added.

  SOS US Boomer asked.

  “What’s that?”

  Vasquez enjoyed showing off.

  “The sound surveillance system the Navy uses to track submarines. The first SOS US systems were put together in the fifties and the sixties and laid along the Atlantic Coast. Then they put in Colossus, which is along the Pacific Coast. Then the Navy boys got real smart.

  They moved it out to the Russians to catch their subs as they put to sea. The Navy put systems off the two major Russian sub ports at Polyamyy and Petropavlovsk.”

  “What’s that got to do with Hawaii?” Skibicki asked impatiently.

  “Those are over near Europe.”

  “Slow down, sergeant major, I was getting to that.”

  Vasquez leaned forward.

  “The Navy’s been adding to SOS US all along. We got a line not far off the coast of the islands. It’s some pretty wild shit. The system consists of groups of hydrophones inside large tanks — and I mean large.

  My buddy over at Naval Intel says each tank is as big as the oil storage tanks at Pearl. These things are sunk down to the bottom.

  They’re all connected by cable and the cable is buried. That’s to prevent the Russians from trailing cable cutters off their ships or subs and severing the lines.” Vasquez shook her head.

  “Man, there’s real shit going on out there under the waves all the time. It’s a whole’nother world.

  “Anyway,” she quickly said, noting Skibicki’s growing impatience, ‘what the Navy did not too long ago was really smart. The various systems could pick up subs, but they weren’t too exact in pinpointing location.

  Some whiz brain figured that since the hydrophones are real sensitive that if all the systems could be coordinated, they could get accurate fixes using triangulation from various SOS US systems.”

  She pointed down at the map.

  “Say the one off Hawaii picks up a sub. All they got is one direction and the sub is somewhere along the line. But if the one off the West Coast can pick up the same sub, then you got two directions.

  Draw a second line and bingo.

  “They hooked all the SOS US systems together using FLTS — that’s Fleet Satellite Communication System. The Navy’s got five satellites up there in fixed orbits. Well, my buddy is hooked into FLTS and when I discreetly inquired if there was any weird shit going on, he told me they picked up a bogey sub this morning on SOS US only it wasn’t a bogey, it was a friendly.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Boomer said, his head still spinning from all her acronyms.

  “Well, here’s the point,” Vasquez said.

  “Most Navy subs patrol at the discretion of their own skippers within a large designated area, particularly the boomers, the nuke firers That way no one can find them and no one can give up the secret of where they are since the only ones who know where they are are on board. But the Navy realized after hooking the SOS US system together that they had to be able to tell friendly subs from unfriendly. I mean, since our own Navy doesn’t know exactly where half its own subs are, and certainly doesn’t know where the Russkie subs plan to be, then when SOS US pinpoints a sub, there has to be a way to know whether it’s friendly or enemy.”

  Vasquez smiled.

  “After all the friendly-fire hoopla after the Gulf War, the Navy figured it would-be bad to sink one of their own subs if we ever fought the big one. So every U.S. and NATO sub has an ID code painted in special laser reflective paint on the upper deck.”

  “What good does painting a code on the deck do?” snorted Skibicki.

  “They stay submerged all the time.”

  Vasquez waved a finger under his nose.

  “Modern technology, sergeant major. The Navy can read the codes by pinpointing a sub’s location using the SOS US then using one of the FLTS satellites firing off a laser downlink. They use a high-intensity blue-green laser. It penetrates the ocean to submarine depth and gets reflected by the paint and the satellite picks it up and reads it. It’s not useful in finding subs without the SOS US because the ocean’s a damn big place and a sub is pretty small.

  “So now every friendly sub has this code. The satellite bea
ms down where SOS US says there’s a sub and they get no reflection, then they know they have a bad-guy sub.

  “Well, the computer dinks at Pearl had them an underwater vehicle on their SOS US about 400 miles off the coast, southwest. When they checked with FLTS and flashed the laser on it for an ID they got a hit and a friendly prefix, indicating it was one of ours, but the identifier code wasn’t in their book.”

  “Meaning?” Boomer asked.

  “Meaning that there’s a friendly sub off the coast, but it’s not one of the subs the Navy, or any of our allies, say they got.” Vasquez shrugged.

  “So, I’d call that kind of strange. My buddy says when he talked to his watch commander about it, he was told in no uncertain terms to forget about it.”

  Boomer glanced at Skibicki. “What do you think?”

  Skibicki looked like he had a bad headache.

  “I think we can’t do diddly squat about a sub 400 miles off-coast and I don’t have the slightest clue what it might have to do with all that’s going on. But we can go eyeball a parachute drop a mile off.” He tapped Vasquez on the shoulder.

  “Good job on the KC-10 stuff.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DALLAS-FT. WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  2 DECEMBER

  3:30 A.M.LOCAL 0930 ZULU.

  2 DEC Trace felt like she was the only one in the terminal other than the people cleaning the floor. She’d landed two hours ago and she had two and a half hours to go before continuing on the last leg of her journey. The runways outside the large windows were lit and there was activity as an occasional plane made its entrance or departure, from what she could see, mostly UPS and Federal Express cargo planes, but it was only a tenth of the traffic daylight would bring.

  Trace had slept on the flight in from Honolulu and she felt marginally refreshed. The departure from the island had been unusual. She felt that she and Boomer were entering new territory. He’d always seemed to be there in her life at important, turbulent junctures, but then he was gone when the sailing was smooth. She didn’t think it was deliberate, but she wondered how it would be if they could spend time together when circumstances were a bit more normal.

  She remembered the second time she’d run into him at West Point. It was two months after their first meeting on the ramp leading to New South Barracks. The first weeks of the academic year had passed in a tension-filled blur. As one of five female plebes assigned to I-1, Trace and her gender comrades had indeed been shit magnets as Boomer had predicted. She’d drawn duty as head mail carrier during Reorganization Week, the first week of the academic year.

  It was the harshest job a plebe could be assigned.

  Contrary to the federal law not allowing a third party to control mail, an interesting attitude for a school funded with federal dollars, cadet mail was delivered by the plebes of each company. The Cadet in Charge of Quarters (CQ) went to the cadet mail room and picked up the mail for all the cadets in the company. Bringing it back, he dumped it in the orderly room and waited for the head mail carrier to come back from class at 11:30 a.m.

  That first week Trace quickly learned one of West Point’s unwritten axioms: cooperate and graduate. She’d walked into the barracks, squaring corners and walking along the inside wall as required, to be handed the heavy bag of mail accumulated from a summer of mis routes and girlfriends already missing their boys.

  She’d staggered to her room with the precious cargo and dumped it open on her bed. She’d been given a listing of all room assignments by the company first sergeant when he’d briefed her. She began sorting, trying to get it organized as her two roommates scuttled about the company area, grabbing their classmates and corralling them into the room to help deliver. It all had to be dispensed prior to lunch formation and the clock began ticking almost immediately as the plebe minute caller outside her room sounded off:

  “Sir, there are ten minutes until lunch formation. The uniform is as for class. For lunch we are having hot dogs, trench fries, iced tea, and Martha Washington sheet cake.

  Ten minutes, sir!”

  Trace tried to ignore the echoing screams of upperclassmen hazing the minute callers for real or imagined mistakes as she thrust mail into her frightened classmates’ hands and told them which room to deliver it to. The fact that they weren’t supposed to be “gazing about” as they moved out at 120 steps per minute in the hallway made looking for room numbers a perilous proposition. God help the plebe who entered the wrong room or got caught looking around to make sure it was the right room.

  Trace wasn’t quite sure how she survived that first week.

  Those fifteen minutes each day before lunch twisted her gut and kept her awake at night with worry. She spent her evenings reporting around to upperclassmen rooms to explain every single screw-up in delivery. She also learned a lot about her classmates as she noted who was willing to put their neck on the line to help her in her duties and those who covered their own ass and made it out to formation ahead of the ten-minute bell in order to try and beat the “plebe chasers,” second-year cadets assigned to harass plebes not making it into formation on time.

  It was a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.

  And it was designed to be that way. Trace later realized once she was on the other side as an upperclassman.

  Plebes learned to be amazingly efficient. By the end of the academic year, they could get the mail out in less than two minutes. Also, those classmates who were dicks, heading out to formation trying to escape the hassle of getting hazed delivering mail, were hazed for not helping their classmates out.

  Cooperate and graduate was the rule, forged in the flames of verbal and mental abuse. It was such a strong rule, that in many cases the honor code stood a distant second as the occasional cheating scandals that rocked the Academy showed. It was the one thing the Academy didn’t display to the outside world, whenever a newspaper came around and wanted to know why so many cadets would get implicated in a scandal.

  And despite the scandals, the loyalty classmates showed each other had the potential to be a valuable trait, or it could be abused.

  Trace had survived that first week and the following ones, but there was no doubt that as a woman she was at a disadvantage. The secret to survival as a plebe was to become invisible, an impossibility for five women among thirty-four plebes in the company. And to make it worse, the senior class — called firsties — of 1979, was the last class to graduate West Point all-male and they had a particular hatred for the female gender. There were two women in I-1 from the class of 80, the first year group of women, but they hung low, having already endured an inhuman amount of abuse, simply biding their time for graduation.

  They didn’t offer any special solace to their younger comrades, feeling that acceptance among peers was more important than acceptance by gender.

  It was during a situation involving a fl? she and one of the females from the class of ‘80, that she ran into Boomer for a second time. It was a Tuesday evening in October and they were attending a lecture in the auditorium at Eisenhower Hall by the Army Chief of Staff, a former super intendant of the Academy.

  Seated by company. Trace found herself in the uncomfortable position of being between the company first sergeant, Cadet Frankel, a man with a reputation as a “flame,” and her platoon sergeant. Cadet Jean Woods.

  “Neck back, beanhead!” was Frankel’s first words to her as they settled into the seats in Eisenhower auditorium. “I want you back a fist distance away from the rear, of the chair.”

  The order wasn’t correct, since there was no requirement for plebes to sit braced at the lecture, but such reasoning was academic due to the reality of Frankel’s position as first sergeant. Trace figured an hour of sitting braced beat a week of hazing so she pressed her chin back, until she could feel the skin fold in on itself. She was disappointed that Woods didn’t say anything, but she also understood Woods’ position. Trace scooted forward in her seat the required distance, the same posture she had
to adopt in the mess hall for every meal.

  Frankel leaned over.

  “Do you know what my class’s motto is, smack?”

  “Yes sir”

  “Well?” Frankel waited.

  “Top of the line, ‘seventy-nine, sir.” Trace said, sensing Woods’ uncomfortable shifting to her right.

  “Yeah, that’s the official one,” Frankel said, “but do you know what every member of my class is putting on the inside of our rings?”

  “No, sir.”

  He pulled off his ring and waved it in front of her nose.

  “LCWB,” Frankel said.

  “Know what that stands for?”

  Woods turned the other way, and Trace gave the only answer she was allowed.

  “No, sir.”

  “Officially it stands for Loyalty, Courage, Wisdom, and Bravery,” Frankel said.

  “But in reality it stands for Last Class With Balls.”

  “Hey, Frankel, that’s enough,” Woods protested.

  “I don’t want any shit from you, you—” Frankel’s retort was interrupted by a familiar, deep voice cutting in behind her, as the next company took its seats.

  “Hey, smackhead, chill out.”

  Trace didn’t move, aware of the attention of Frankel, and also aware that Boomer was just a yearling, well below Frankel in the chain of command.

  “I said relax, chill out, sit back, take it easy,” Boomer said with a laugh, leaning forward from his place behind her.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Frankel snapped, twisting in his seat.

  “This is my company, yearling, so butt out.”

  Boomer laughed.

  “Hey, hero, you want the Army Chief of Staff to see a plebe sitting here in the fourth row braced?

  How come none of the other bean heads in your company are braced? You wanna be stupid, be my guest.”

  “Watch it, Watson,” Frankel growled.

  “Hey, Frankel, I know you’re an asshole, you know you’re an asshole, but do you have to show the whole world that you’re an asshole?” Boomer replied.

  “That’s it, Watson! I’m writing you up for insubordination!”