by Ian Slater
Freeman restrained himself, tempted to ask her where God’s hand had been for the men who’d drowned in the attack on the USS Blaine — the first American warship to be hit in the war. But he didn’t bother. He believed God’s plan was a lot more complicated than that, that freedom meant the freedom to… But what the hell, he thought. Airheads like Marjorie also served Him — her task, no doubt, to talk the devil to death.
“Isn’t it nice out here?” she said, taking a deep breath of the cool, salty air. “I always find the pool so calming. Don’t you?”
Freeman grunted. Where Marjorie saw a translucent pool of ultramarine beneath the clearing sky — saw nature in harmony, insects happily skimming across the water’s mirrored surface, Freeman saw an unending battle, one insect pursuing another— a fight to the finish. Which made him think again of amphibious operations. They were undoubtedly the riskiest of all military undertakings. There Murphy’s Law was king.
No matter how much planning, how many rehearsals, disaster always lurked in the ever-changing sea. If the Siberian threat turned to war, the shortest distance was across the Bering Strait, which now would be a mass of ice floes. The moment he thought of ice he recalled two things simultaneously. The first was the English lord who, in the lounge of the Titanic as it struck the iceberg, had exclaimed imperturbably, “I sent for ice but this is ridiculous!” The second thing was the curious feet, filed away in his brain along with a thousand other apparently trivial yet vital pieces of logistical information, that at latitude sixty-five degrees, thirty minutes north the ice cakes forming in the dead of winter would be more dispersed, more loosely packed than in the warmer spring months when local currents and wind changed to shift ice northward — that is, packing it tighter together in spring than in the winter. It was precisely the opposite to what one would imagine, and this would make it much tougher for icebreakers or any other ship to negotiate. Also during the winter, unlike the spring and the fall, skies tended to be clearer, often with brilliant sunshine, bad news for close-support air cover when it would be possible for observers on Ratmanov, the Soviet name for Big Diomede, to see clear across the strait.
Anyway, you sure as hell couldn’t launch a sea invasion of Siberia or Diomede if you had to contend with pack ice. There was something else about the ice that he could not recall — was it that there was no ice south of the Pribilof Islands? But hell, that was over 650 miles south of Ratmanov. No, it was something else, but it wouldn’t come to him. Perhaps it was the note he’d made in his card index file — computer discs could be wiped clean by a big bomb’s electromagnetic pulse — that unless a ship wanted to risk being locked in the ice, or forced to move so slowly it would be like a dinosaur as a target, it would have to stand off the southern, protective side of the Pribilofs to launch any cruise missiles at Ratmanov. No, that meant it was some other detail about the ice buzzing around in his head, but it wouldn’t settle amid the constant patter of Marjorie’s antiaircraft fire. He wondered if the Pentagon’s contingency planners knew as much about the area as he did. He doubted it — not immodestly but from long experience. The trouble with the Pentagon was that there were too many desk jockeys — not enough people who had actually walked around and seen the places where they might have to fight a battle one day. Douglas Freeman had.
On his own money and time, he’d used every vacation and other time to visit every major battlefield in Europe before the war and had jotted down his observations on his three-by-five cards — operational plans for what he called potential “flash points.” One such plan had been for the Kuwait-Iraqi border, another for the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Freeman had also been to Alaska. He had trekked to see the lonely, windswept monument to Will Rogers eleven miles southwest of Barrow on the godforsaken tundra of Alaska’s North Slope and had seen more than thirty bald eagles at once, on the banks of the Chilkat River, their white throat fur above the black body and white tails giving them a nobility among the winter-stripped cottonwoods that he would never forget. He had also been to Cape Prince of Wales, where high up in the stunningly clear air at the westernmost tip of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula he had gazed out over the white strait, the cobalt blue line of Siberia on the horizon, and had seen the two specks that were the Diomede Islands. Perhaps it was there he had learned whatever it was about the ice that now he couldn’t recall. He would have to go down to his basement, go through the rotary card file. “Excuse me,” he told Marjorie. “Think I’ll take a nap.” He forced a smile. “Still not over my jet lag.”
“Yes. You poor thing, Douglas. Thank the Lord I’m not affected.”
“What — pardon?” asked Freeman as he stood up and pushed the chair back by the edge of the pool.
“Jet lag,” said Marjorie serenely. “Thank the Lord I don’t get it. I’m not affected.”
“You wouldn’t be,” said Freeman under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“You’re unaffected,” said the general.
“Yes. To tell you the truth, Douglas, I think it’s all in your head. If God had intended—”
Freeman wasn’t listening, his attention drawn momentarily to the wind-ruffled pool, and knew instantly what it was about the winter ice floes in the strait. Not only were they looser than summer ice, but they were wind sculptured to heights of twenty-five feet above the frozen surface of the sea. He remembered them now — the purest white, glistening like mirrors in the sunny, clear air and then, as night came, turning to extraordinary hues of blue, a forest of jumbled sharp ice that would spell the death knell of any marine or army hovercraft invasion against Ratmanov, the ice too jagged to permit the necessary air cushion for the troop-carrying hovercrafts. They’d be torn to pieces.
Immediately he rang General Grey at the Pentagon, using his personal scrambler code to get a secure line.
“May I ask who’s calling please?” said the secretary.
“General Douglas Freeman.”
“Hold on please, General.” Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” assaulted him at full volume before the receptionist’s voice came back on the line.
“Ah, Douglas,” came General Grey’s voice. “How’s your wife?”
“The same, thank you. Look, Jimmy, with this Siberian thing looming I thought you could do with some advice from an old soldier out here.” Freeman was waiting for a positive response but got none. He told Grey about the ice.
“Thanks, Douglas. Appreciate your interest. Really do. But to tell you the truth, we think this Novosibirsk thing is pretty much a bluff — to squeeze concessions out of us after the Moscow surrender. It’ll blow over.”
“What if it blows over Ratmanov?” asked Freeman.
“What?”
“Ratmanov. Big Diomede?”
“Oh — well, Douglas. CIA agrees with us that if we stand our ground, Novosibirsk’ll back off. Besides, air force figures it can handle Big Diomede if it comes to that. And the navy, of course. But look — it’s great to hear from you. You keep in touch, you hear? And Douglas — give my regards to your wife.”
“Yes, sir.”
Freeman put down the phone and cussed. He might be the commanding officer of Fort Ord, but he was effectively unemployed, out to pasture. The “No Help Wanted” sign up in Washington.
“Yoohoo! Douglas? Are you awake?”
“No,” said Freeman, as he walked over and spun the globe, arresting the spin, turning it to him like the end of a football so he could see the Arctic Circle. Goddamn Diomedes were so small they weren’t even marked. Like him, they were off the map. Get a goddamn grip on yourself, he muttered. Goddamn pity is for goddamn sissies. You a sniveller, Freeman? No. Then stop your goddamn whining.
“Yoohoo? Douglas?”
The general inhaled deeply, slowly, teeth gritted. Damn woman knew he was in his basement den. Why in hell did she have to—
“Yes? What is it?”
“It’s visiting time. The hospital. You coming along?”
“Yes,” said Freeman morosely. Then his con
science berated him, not only with what should have been concern for Doreen but because he’d caught himself at the shoreline of another sulk, the one thing he couldn’t stand in anyone, least of all himself. “Yes,” he said clearly, straightening up, grabbing his cap, “I’m coming.” Surely the man who had handled the raid on Pyongyang and broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and pierced the famed Minsk-Moscow defenses could handle the barrage of inanities and clichés launched by his mobile sister-in-law.
“You see, Douglas?” she said as they walked out to the general’s car.
“See what?” he asked as pleasantly as he could.
“How things work out for the best? I mean you coming home just when Dory needed you the most.”
“Goddamn it, Marjorie — she’s comatose!” said Douglas. “I can’t do a thing to help her.”
“But you’re nearby. And just think — if you’d still been on active duty you might have got caught up in all this terrible Siberian business.”
“Yes,” said Douglas. “I probably would have, Marjorie.”
“There, you see?” said Marjorie, slipping her arm through his and patting him. “It was meant to be.”
* * *
Off Canada’s west coast Captain Valery’s Saratov, one of the Soviet Union’s Pacific Fleet subs, out of radio contact with its home base of Vladivostok, was on silent running, listening on passive, rather than active, sonar. An active pulse, having to originate from the sub, would be too dangerous to use as the Saratov penetrated deeper into Allied ASW “microphoned” waters north of Vancouver Island. Sound from the ships it had been tracking for the last forty-eight hours was faint, yet discernible, the sound travelling at four times the speed it would in air, racing through the saline molecules of the sound layers.
Whether the contact was now fading because the ships his sub was shadowing had moved closer in to the coastline during the storm, further away from the Saratov, or whether they had in fact reduced speed, giving off less signature noise, Captain Valery couldn’t tell, but with his sub at the end of its OSP— operational safety perimeter — he’d soon have to decide. “Take her up,” he instructed the first officer. “Thirty meters.”
“Up to thirty meters,” confirmed the officer and planesman. “Rising… angle ten… steady at thirty meters, sir.”
“Up search scope.”
Valery flipped the beak of his cap about, his eyes glued to the column, and draped his arms on the scored grips, moving around with the scope as if he were one with it. Now hopefully he would see the actual shape of the ships his sub had been tracking so far only by noise. What he saw through the infrared-penetrated darkness puzzled him. In the grayish white circle of wave action, obscured now and then in the night’s dark curtain of spray, the Canadian coastline, rather than being visible as a low blur before the mountains, appeared to be missing. Only the sharp geometry of the snow-capped coastal range beyond was visible, as if the range rose straight out of the sea. He turned the scope another five degrees but still no trace of the coast. It was as if the diameter of the periscope’s gray infrared circle had been painted black. Then he realized what he was looking at, why turning the five degrees hadn’t made any difference: two great slabs, the two ships, had overlapped, obliterating the coastline. “Gospodi!”— “My God!” he called. “Ya ikh vizhu! Pryamo peredo mnoy!”— “I have them dead ahead. Bearing?”
“Zero eight two,” came the reply.
“Down scope!” ordered Valery. “Attack scope up.”
“Down search scope. Up attack,” confirmed the first officer. Above the wheeze of the scope’s column the tone signal of action stations gonged urgently, though softly, in Control, the pulsating red of the battle station’s alarm bleeding pink into the red of Control.
“Two of them,” the captain informed the control crew as the attack scope slid into position. “Both tankers. Enormous brutes.”
Eyes welded to the attack scope, Valery quickly picked the ships up again on the same bearing. The attack scope, its field of view not as wide as that of the search scope but higher, allowed the sub to go deeper for a shoot. The scope’s hair-crossed circle was completely blocked by the massive walls that were the tankers’ sides, the bridge and crew housing astern of one tanker etched silver in moonlight as the clouds broke and two small blobs — tugs — could be seen bobbing up and down in the swells.
“Prevoskkodno”— “It couldn’t be better,” said Valery. Not only had he made the right decision by venturing in closer to the coastline — now he was no more than three miles from them— but at this angle of attack he would in effect not be firing at two separate hulls but at one long cliff of steel, over seven hundred meters — almost half a mile long. For safety’s sake, the second tanker was sailing not directly behind the first where it could not hope to stop should anything happen to the tanker in front, but starboard aft of it in staggered convoy position. And the two tugs were all but obscured by the rising seas now. Even if they were armed with ASW depth bombs and sub-surface torpedoes Valery knew that they would be so busy with damage control if one or both tankers were hit that they would give him little cause for concern. In any event he ordered forward tubes two and four loaded with submarine simulator decoys of the kind that had been perfected after the cruiser Yumashev had been the victim of an American MOSS — a mobile submarine simulator — the cruiser dummied into positioning itself to be sunk by the U.S. nuclear sub Roosevelt in the early months of the war.
Now it was Valery’s chance for revenge. But he would try to save the decoys for later use if possible. Hopefully he’d have complete surprise and wouldn’t have to use them at all. He heard the officer of the deck confirming forward tubes one, three, five, and six were loaded with “live fish.”
“Bearing?”
“Zero eight three.”
“Mark!” Valery ordered. “Range?”
“Thirty-four hundred meters, sir.”
Valery could feel a movement — energy transmitted by under-the-surface wave oscillation, a slight down pitch. “Hold her steady!” he said without unlocking his eyes from the scope. “Forward tubes one, three, five, and six. Set the up angle.”
“Forward tubes one, three, five, and six — set up angle.”
The confirmation came from torpedo control. “Up angle set.”
The first officer was watching the relay screen showing the computerized, keyed-in angles that allowed for everything from the enemy’s speed, variable friction caused by differing salinity, and water temperatures, to surface turbulence. Next he checked that the “decoy fish”—the simulators — were in forward tubes two and four.
“Bearing?”
“Zero eight four.”
“Range?”
“Thirty-five hundred meters.”
“Bearing?”
“Steady. Zero eight four.”
“Shoot!” ordered Valery.
“Set,” came the firing officer’s reply.
“Fire one!”
“Fire one,” confirmed the firing officer.
“Fire three,” said Valery. A slight tremor passed through the sub as one was away and running.
“Fire three,” came the confirmation.
“Fire five… fire six.. down scope.”
“Down scope, sir.”
“Hold position.”
The first officer was reading out the count from 120 seconds as the four twenty-one-foot-long torpedoes sped, without visible wakes, toward their target.
“Two apiece,” announced the officer of the deck. Valery said nothing, his eyes on the computer clock. He knew he should hit both of them if all the computations were right, but with such a storm raging on the surface off the heavily timbered and logged coast there were bound to be deadheads, or floating logs, in the water. It would take only one torpedo to hit a piece of waterlogged timber and the remaining three torpedoes could all be blown off track. “Molis”— “Pray,” said Valery. “Sonar?”
“Sir?”
“Everyth
ing alright?”
“Humming, sir. Beautiful.”
“Pipe it to the PA but low on the volume.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now everyone throughout the sub, as if equipped with stethoscopes, could hear the fast, heavy heartbeats of the tankers and the steady hiss of the four torpedoes running for them.
“Get the book,” said Valery. The officer of the deck passed over the enemy ship silhouette recognition binder. The moment they blew — if they blew — it was Valery’s intention to surface for quick visual confirmation of type. Naval intelligence at Vladivostok would want to know. For a moment the surge of adrenaline in him stopped as he remembered the reason for HQ’s insistence on getting all possible information including sea conditions during attack. The scuttlebutt going the rounds of Vladivostok was that apparently some Jews from the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, or region, around the Sino/Soviet border along the Amur River had been sabotaging munitions. Valery hoped it had only been air force and army munitions that had been tampered with and that when they found the saboteurs they hanged them — slowly. Shooting was too quick for saboteurs.
“Nine seconds to go,” answered the first officer softly. Valery nodded, still leafing through the book, trying to identify the class of tankers he was attacking from the brief glimpse he’d had through the scope. He tried to suppress his excitement, but it was difficult. It was so easy — a dream of an attack. One thing he knew already — they were not VLCCs — very large crude carriers but ULCCs — ultra large crude carriers. “Ha,” he exclaimed to the first officer. “Give it to the Americans — they always do things big, eh?” Even if only one was hit there’d be a hell of a spill; and if the crude’s flash point was raised high enough and it started to burn, there would be no way the enemy crews could put it out. He could use the light to take his time on the second should any of the first four torpedoes miss.
* * *
On the first tanker, MV Sitka, captained by Jesus Llamos, assistant radio operator Sandra Thompson was taking her break. A shy, slim redhead, the subject of half the crew’s on- and off-duty fantasies — despite the fact that she was married and in the early stages of pregnancy — she stood on the quiet, semidarkened bridge of the enormous tanker watching the amber island of light that was the Marconi anticollision radar. She found the phosphorescent dance of its hypnotic sweep comforting. Nothing was showing west of them. Eastward the coastline ran crooked, the radar trace a knotted, amber-colored snake flanked by the salt-and-pepper dots of offshore islands.
