by Ian Slater
* * *
In fact, the commanding officer was half-right about the Soviets using Blackjack bombers. Six of them, from the Kurile Islands base south of Kamchatka Peninsula, each replete with over thirty-five thousand pounds of bombs, the most sophisticated electronics in the Soviet Air Force, and with a range of over eight thousand miles, were now approaching the Salt Lake City battle group far to the south of the Aleutians. Their crews were in high spirits after having so badly mauled the Japanese “defense fleet” the day before and knowing that over half the Salt Lake City’s fighter screen was well away from them, flying combat patrols to cover possible attacks on Shemya.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Two hundred miles south of Ireland, a bulge suddenly appeared on the surface of the dark blue Celtic Sea. The next moment the bulge erupted in a phantasm of white, the “boomer,” in this case the USS Roosevelt, bursting through the surface, white smoke as well as spray pouring from her from a fire in her aft engine room, where the crew had been working on the MOSS. No one knew exactly where the electrical short had occurred as several of the monitoring circuits were themselves out of action following the severe concussion of the Yumashev’s depth charge attack.
It was the submariner’s worst nightmare, and Robert Brentwood knew that the acrid smoke pouring from the sub’s sail would alert the enemy for a hundred miles around. Yet he was the epitome of calm as he kept his men moving through Control up the sail, where he had posted his executive officer. If the fire was uncontainable, he had to get as many men as possible out and into the inflatables before setting the destructive charges that would be sure to destroy code-safe and disks along with the sub. In any event, with the carbon dioxide scrubber system out of action, the men had to get fresh air. Several off-watch crewmen, asleep when the fire had broken out, were unable to get their masks on in time and were asphyxiated by the highly toxic fumes. In the face of their loss, the thing Brentwood was most proud of, as he stood in Control, overseeing the evacuation through the dense smoke, was that there was no panic — he might have been a coach welcoming his team back to the dugout after a losing but hard-played game.
Up in the sail, Executive Officer Peter Zeldman saw men were also coming out of two of the six-foot-diameter hatches, one forward above Command and Control, the other leading up from the reactor room. But no one as yet was exiting the stern hatch above the turbine/drive space, and he reported this to Brentwood.
Brentwood knew there was a fifty-fifty chance that the fire-fighting party, having sealed themselves off in one of the forty-one cylinders that, welded together, formed the sub, might extinguish the flames if they could get in quickly enough behind the panels. But as captain, he couldn’t have taken the chance of staying submerged with the lives of over 100 men in his hands. He called up to Zeldman, “Officer of the deck, I want every available man on deck acting as a lookout. Don’t load the inflatables till you get my word.”
“Every man a lookout. Don’t load inflatables. Aye, sir.”
Next Brentwood called through to the chief of the boat in charge of battling the fire. “What are we looking at back there, Chief?”
A young voice came on, rising above the hollow roar of the fire. “Sir, this is electrician’s mate Richards. The chief’s—” Brentwood waited — either the circuit had gone or the seaman had also been overcome by the toxic fumes — a defective mask seal, the mask knocked askew by falling lagging — anything could happen.
Brentwood pulled a man out of the line of sailors waiting to go up to the sail and guided him toward the ladder. “Give me your mask, sailor.”
Brentwood informed Zeldman he was going aft so that should anything happen to him, Zeldman would take over. “Give me five minutes, Pete,” Brentwood instructed.
“Five minutes. Aye, sir. Mind how you go.”
Brentwood strapped on the mask, his throat already raw from the smoke, his voice nasal inside the mask as he entered the smoke-choked passageway. “On your left, make way. On your left…” As he walked through “Sherwood Forest,” the smoke was swirling thickly about the huge missiles like the set of some fantastic opera.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
By the time the bulk of Mount Moffett, the initial aiming point fifty miles away, started Dipping green in Sergei Marchenko’s head-up display, the Flogger D automatically started to climb in preparation for bomb release. Knowing he was going to be in full view of Adak’s radar as he gained altitude, Marchenko released his khlam, as did the other thirteen fighters in his wing.
The chaff, aluminized glass fiber strips cut to lengths corresponding to those of Adak’s radar band, immediately started sowing havoc with Adak’s radar, the screens a frantic dance of “fly shit.” As the fourteen Soviet fighters passed between Mount Moffett, massive but invisible on their right, and the two-thousand-foot Mount Adagdak to their left, Marchenko saw the snow-framed mirror of Andrew Lagoon racing toward him, and beyond it, the soft glow of the “marker” fire indicating the command and control center of the naval base.
Below, off to his left, he could see long arcs of red and white tracer disappearing eastward over the black void of Kulak Bay. Though Marchenko only glimpsed the trawler intermittently in flare light reflected off the snowy peaks surrounding the icy blue crescent of the bay, he was more aware than any of the other pilots of how much they owed the crew of the trawler for having set the bonfire marker and now firing Grail missiles at virtually point-blank range into the Kulak Bay defenses.
Despite his high state of tension, Marchenko was content to let the Flogger D have its head, trusting entirely to its contour-matching radar, its computer automatically selecting wavelengths to be different from those being jammed. It was at once exhilarating and frightening.
He saw the target growing on his infrared screen and took over the controls, Adak base directly ahead, its cluster of long huts, all the same in appearance, looking in the snow surprisingly like a camp he’d seen in the Gulag. Between the huts there were shimmering figures — people running for cover.
The computer had already selected the Flogger’s “exit” trajectory, the shortest vector away from the point of bomb release, as the large sub base, its pens outlined now on the infrared TV screen above the main instrument panel, came in on the “zoom” frame immediately below the larger screen. He felt the shock wave bumps of antiaircraft fire but ignored them, releasing only when he heard the bip.
Bombs released, turning hard right, he heard the chatter of American voices on the radio, spotted an American Tomcat in his HUD, and went air-to-air. The American passed out of sight above the sudden light of the exploding inferno beneath them that had been Adak Naval Station. Marchenko turned left, rolled hard right, trying to center another Tomcat. A wing edge slipped into his HUD. He fired a missile, but the American had gone down and now was probably going around, trying to get into the Flogger’s cone, to take him out from behind. He saw another Tomcat on his radar coming for him, then breaking off, down, for a stern conversion. He went to afterburner and climbed high.
* * *
Shirer’s Tomcat was on warning yellow — weapons hold status — fourteen miles from Adak, having been halfway to Shemya before they heard Adak’s call for assistance. “Master arm on,” he told his RIO in the backseat. “Centering the T. Bogeys ten miles. Centering the dot.”
“Bingo!” It was his wingman on the halfway fuel mark, breaking off to head back to the carrier.
There was a rush of static, then the RIO’s voice came through, “You got the tone?” to confirm whether the Tomcat’s Sparrow missile was ready.
“Got it,” answered Shirer. “Centering the dot… Fox 1.” Shirer felt the twelve-foot Sparrow release.
“Bogey at three o’clock,” called the RIO. “Bogey…” Shirer hit the afterburner. The RIO felt the sudden G, like steel against his chest.
Shirer saw another Bogey climbing fast, crossing his HUD’s green lines. He centered. “Fox 2.” This time a Sidewinder took off from the Tomcat, hea
ding for the Flogger’s exhaust.
“Angels 2,” said the RIO, telling Shirer they were at two thousand feet. Shirer hit the afterburner again; the steep wall of fire that was Adak base slipped downhill from him into the darkness. He was in cloud. He glimpsed the flames again — they were making tiny shadows on the fading patch of snow as he entered more cloud. The Flogger D had exploded, its orange ball curling to black.
“Outstanding!” the RIO yelled. “That’ll—”
There was a ragged crimson streak in front of them — a Flogger D’s six-barreled rotary cannon spitting out twenty-three-millimeter tracer, a Tomcat exploding to Shirer’s left. The Flogger D passed into Shirer’s HUD for only a millisecond, but Shirer’s reaction was automatic, the Tomcat slid, its rotary cannon in the port side erupting in a long, blue-white flash, the reflection dancing madly in the cockpit. A sound like tearing canvas. Then the Tomcat went crazy, Shirer doing everything he could but realizing he was quickly slipping into an inverted spin.
“Eject!” he shouted to the RIO through his mike as he tried every trick he knew, released the break chute — nothing worked as the plane continued yawing, pitching, and rolling simultaneously, its engine flamed out, the blood roaring from feet to head. “Eject!” he yelled again.
Elbows in, head tucked, he pulled the release, felt the kick of the rocket assist, then blacked out.
An F-16 and Flogger collided over Andrew Lagoon as the four F-16s that Adak had scrambled tried to beat off the surprise low-level Soviet attack. Two of the remaining three F-16s in the flight were destroyed on the Davis runway. The other one was destroyed by one of the Tomcats’ Sidewinder missiles after having been mistaken for a Sukhoi Fitter C, which, like the F-16, was also a single-engined fighter.
The engagement, involving all planes, had lasted 4.73 minutes, the Adak base by Kulak Bay gutted, rendered ineffective. In the light of the fires from the oil and food stores, those among the two thousand civilian and military personnel still alive saw the shoreline around the C-shaped bay littered with the bodies of hundreds of dead fish and gannets, some of the birds coated with the sheen of high-octane from the ruptured storage tanks, but most of the wildlife killed by the concussion of several off-target bombs exploding in the bay.
The commanding officer of Adak was trying to contact Shemya, four hundred miles to the west, and Dutch Harbor about five hundred miles to the east, but could reach neither. Meanwhile the duty officer was informing him that the SOSUS, the underwater hydrophone sound surveillance system, was out. Whether the underwater arrays themselves about the island had been damaged by depth bombs or whether it was the connection between shore and the arrays that was the problem, there was nothing but “garbage” coming in. Adak was on its own.
“Then our first priority is to get those fires out,” replied the CO. “Unless we do, we’ll all die of exposure in this weather. Contact our Wave contingent and see what they can rig up if the hospital huts are gone, and make sure every available pump hose is—”
“Sir?”
There was a crackling noise in the distance, above the noise of the nearby fires. “What’s that?” demanded the CO.
“Probably the Aleut shacks that are—”
“By God,” said the CO, “that sounds like small-arms fire to me.”
It was the first sign they had that Soviet paratroops were descending on Adak.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Robert Brentwood and the chief of the boat collided outside Roosevelt’s galley, the smoke so thick, they couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of them. But the fire was out, and a six-inch coil suction hose was rigged to the hatches to vent the smoke.
“Am I glad to see—” the chief began, but couldn’t continue, his coughing going into a dry retch.
“Come on, Chief,” said Brentwood. “Let’s get topside with everyone else.”
As the chief and his fire-fighting party emerged from the forward hatch, there was a smattering of clapping on the deck and the sound of several sailors being violently seasick in the heavy swells that were slopping over the Roosevelt’s deck. The moment his gas mask was off, Brentwood looked skyward and at the whitish silver of horizon between the sea and cumulonimbus that was piling up like bruised ice cream, heading farther away from them in the direction of the Bay of Biscay. “Officer of the deck.”
“Sir?” responded Zeldman.
“Soon as we clear this smoke, get everyone below. I’m going down to assess damage. Chief says our automatic scrubbers have had it, but we can break out crystals — run a few days on those. Even at three and a half knots, we should get to Holy Loch in another seven days. I think the water supply will—”
At the same time as the Roosevelt’s lookouts spotted them, Brentwood also saw the long line of more than thirty ships southeast of them, the sub’s surface radar not having picked them up because its circuit, like that for the passive underwater sonar receivers, had been shut down due to the fire. Once they got under way, the consoles would be operational.
Brentwood felt strangely calm yet vulnerable, the rolling deck twenty-five feet below him more than ever looking like some great whale pushed back and forth by the gray swells. On the other hand, there was the disadvantage that the sub’s position was almost certainly known now by satellite bounce-off, for even without infrared, their smoke trail had now spiraled thousands of feet above the Celtic Sea. It was an “unenviable situation,” as his father would have said wryly. Knowing that now he would almost certainly come under attack, Brentwood decided to rule out any thoughts of reaching home port at Holy Loch.
“We’ll set course for Falmouth,” he instructed Zeldman. “Even with our present drag-ass three and a half knots, we should make it in plus or minus fifty-five hours — a hell of a lot sooner than if we tried Holy Loch now we’ve been spotted.”
“Maybe no one’s picked us up yet,” said Zeldman.
“Right, Pete. And elephants fly.”
“Well,” said Zeldman, indicating the line of ships on the horizon, “we’ve received no fire from them.”
“Which is why we know they’re ours. They’re not the ones I’m worried about, Pete. It’s what we haven’t seen that concerns me.”
The lookout was reporting two Sheffield-class British destroyers in the horizon line, confirming Brentwood’s hunch.
“Very well,” responded Brentwood, and for a moment, seeing as their smoke was undoubtedly being picked up above cloud level by satellite, Brentwood elected to use the above-water high-frequency antenna for a quick transmit to SACLANT — Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic — via ACCHAN — Allied Commander Channel — to arrange for a tow as soon as possible to reduce their transit time to Falmouth.
For a moment it struck Brentwood that it was possible the war had ended between the time Roosevelt had been attacked by the Yumashev and now. The reply from SACLANT, decoded in seconds, immediately disabused him of any such notion. A tow could not be sent for at least four days, and Roosevelt was instructed by SACLANT, via sat bounce from Norfolk, Virginia, that she was to maintain her position and provide a defensive umbrella in the area for the convoy — now only seventeen hours from the port of Brest in the Bay of Biscay.
The war message stressed the DB pocket was so critically short of supplies that several squadrons of NATO’s Thunderbolts were waiting at Brest, unable to fly effective missions against the Russian armor because of the lack of thirty-millimeter depleted uranium ammunition. The message ended, “Imperative you give max assist to convoy. Convoy notified.”
“I thought,” said Zeldman, “the Royal Navy would have the Channel approaches bottled up.”
“Obviously not, old boy,” said Brentwood in a bad imitation of an upper-class English accent.
“Course,” added Zeldman, “the Russians will have come out from Kola, around the top.”
“Captain?” It was the chief. “We have three casualties aft. Lost ‘em in the smoke coming out.”
“All right, Chief. Take the tags, have
a deck party put them by the hatches. Then back quick as you can.”
“Deck party to put casualties by the hatches. Aye, sir.” The chief didn’t hesitate. It might seem to others a cruel decision, but Roosevelt’s job was to fight, and she needed all tubes free for firing to help make up for her lack of speed and helm response time.
Zeldman was on constant lookout as the deck party heaved the body bags up through the hatches and laid them on the deck. They were in what the NATO sub captains called “Sarancha Gulch,” Saranchas being the fast, small missile boats operating from “Milch Cow” auxiliary mother ships. Highly maneuverable and bristling with surface-to-surface sixty-mile-range N-9 missiles and surface-to-air N-4 missiles, the boats were perfectly suited for this kind of last-minute attack around the Bay of Biscay and the other western approaches before the convoys reached Brest, or the relative safety of Land’s End, Falmouth, and the Channel.
* * *
As Zeldman came down the ladder into Control, he heard the hatch close behind him, a seaman beginning the holy litany of the dive. “Officer of the deck — last man down. Hatch secured.”
Zeldman took up his position as officer of the deck. “Last man down. Hatch secured, aye. Captain, the ship is rigged for dive, current depth one ten fathoms. Checks with the chart. Request permission to submerge the ship.”
“Very well, officer of the deck,” said Brentwood. “Submerge the ship.”
“Submerge the ship, aye, sir.” Zeldman turned to the diving console. “Diving officer, submerge the ship.”
“Submerge the ship, aye, sir. Dive — two blasts on the dive alarm. Dive, dive.” The wheezing sound of the alarm followed, loud enough for the crew in Control to hear but not powerful enough to resonate through the hull. A seaman shut all the main ballast tanks. “All vents are shut.”
