World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  Captain Yanov looked at his watch. The American could have increased speed, pulling away from the Jonah. He checked with Sonar. “Anything on screen?”

  “Nothing but shrimp and ice, Captain.”

  “Stand by to release the second Jonah,” ordered Yanov.

  “Standing by to release second Jonah.”

  “Release!”

  “Released, sir.”

  “Torpedo room ready?” said Yanov, bending low, his finger still on the intercom button.

  “Ready, sir.”

  It would be another fifteen to thirty minutes before the second Jonah would be far enough away from the Alfa. If the bait of the firing torpedo sound was taken by the Americans, the Alfa would be far enough back not to be caught in the pressure of the Americans’ exploding torpedoes, the Alfa nevertheless still in torpedo range itself. In any event, if the Americans fired, the Alfa would have an exact fix on them. Using the noise of the Americans’ torpedoes exploding around the torpedo-sounding Jonah, the Alfa would then race forward at full speed, approaching fifty miles an hour — slow, stop, fire its tubes. And wait.

  “If he fires,” instructed Captain Yanov, “It will likely be one or two of his forty-eights. Range forty-six kilometers, twenty-five meters a second. Wire trailing until it’s radar homing takes over. And so if he fires, we go immediately to attack. Flank speed. Understood?”

  “Understood,” confirmed the torpedo officer. “We’re ready, Captain.”

  “Good,” said Yanov. He then turned to the officer of the deck. “If we fire — we’ll wait five seconds to clear, then go to maximum depth. Understood?”

  “Understood, Captain.”

  “Good.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The white cottages of Scotland were tiny dots far below, the weather outside the Hercules fine but windy. Inside, however, all David Brentwood and the other twenty-seven SAS trainee finalists were aware of was the thunderous roaring and vibration of the engines.

  “Remember!” shouted the SAS sar’major. “You aren’t jumping to entertain the crowd at a county fair. Civilian jumpers don’t have full military kit on their back, so in order for you to maintain starfish posture, you must, I repeat must, control turns and cross tracking by keeping all extremities extended in starfish pattern until three thousand feet, when your chute will open automatically.

  “Do not, repeat do not ‘grab air’ unless as a last resort. Wait until you are positive something is wrong with your automatic altimeter release before you attempt to open it by hand under your belly.”

  The danger was that trying to grab air directly in front of the helmet in order to maintain stability while using the free hand to pull the reserve chute’s grip could send you into a “tumble,” like a plane out of control — during which arms and legs could become entangled by the chute’s cords.

  There was a loud whine and the ramp was going down, yawning over the purplish blue of Scotland’s western Highlands, the glens between the hills no larger than the size of a penny from eleven thousand feet.

  The red light went on.

  “Stand up!” shouted the sar’major. “Goggles on.”

  The stick of twenty-nine men, seven groups of four, the basic SAS unit, with Cheek-Dawson leading, was about to go out for their first HALO.

  For Brentwood, Lewis, Thelman, and Schwarzenegger, who were in the same four-man unit and who had stayed together through the grueling “three” and “four” phases of SAS training, the high-altitude, low-opening jump was almost a relief. Anything was a relief after phase two’s killing forty-mile, full-pack, cross-country march — each man alone, with full seventy-pound pack and weapon, having to complete the forty miles in under forty hours.

  “Thought Scotland’d be covered in snow in early January,” shouted Lewis.

  “Scottish people like being different, Aussie,” said the German. He pronounced “Aussie” with a slow deliberateness that belied his alertness and agility in training.

  “East Africa!” said Aussie, looking down at the wild folds of Scotland. “That’s where I’ve seen hills like that before.”

  “Thought we were going to Southeast Asia,” Thelman ribbed him.

  “Well, somewhere in the tropics,” said Lewis. “Wanna bet?”

  “No thanks.”

  The sar’major felt good about the group, as he’d seldom heard them talk with such easy banter before their first HALO, even when they’d done regular para jumps before. The camaraderie came from the special cohesiveness formed among the four men who were theoretically leaderless but who had a group confidence that had grown steadily after the exhausting “sorting out” hardships of the first few weeks.

  “Green light. Go!” called the NCO, tapping the first man as he went out, looking like a combination of some great bird of prey and a stuntman going for a belly flop. The difference was they were now in full battle kit and would reach 120 miles per hour in the first sixty seconds of the free fall until their chutes would open automatically — they hoped — at three thousand.

  Cheek-Dawson, the first out, immediately slid off to the left to avoid the possibility of midair collision with the men in the stick coming after him. He did not expect them to keep any kind of tight formation in this early jump but was mainly concerned with seeing that they kept their starfish stability as they dropped toward the purple smoke spiraling up wispily from around the landing zone. He saw the third man in trouble almost immediately, and going into a slip roll, gaining speed, he glided laterally; reaching the man, he kept four to six feet away from him, taking his left arm, the man almost in a tumble. His Bergen pack, though tight enough, had not prevented a dangerous shift of weight on his back. Once he had got the man’s starfish under control, Cheek-Dawson gestured to him to keep his arms fully extended.

  Cheek-Dawson moved on to the next man he saw wobbling, one of Brentwood’s group, he thought — the German. Twenty-six seconds had gone, and by the time he had assisted the German, it was forty-seven seconds — twelve seconds till the chutes would automatically open.

  He looked over the stick of men who now looked more like a scattered flock when be saw the first man he’d helped get steady going into a tumble. The man’s left hand shot out in front of his helmet to grab air in an effort to steady himself while pulling the manual release with his other hand. Two things happened simultaneously. The man’s chute opened and he tumbled into the cords, and Cheek-Dawson immediately went into a fast lateral slide with ten seconds to go.

  It was too late for Cheek-Dawson to help. Despite the express-trainlike roaring of the wind rushing past his ears, he nevertheless heard the crisp snap of his chute opening at three and a half thousand, suddenly stopping him, the other man’s chute a Roman candle, its black silk a streamer.

  Second on the ground was David Brentwood. He saw Cheek-Dawson swiftly and expertly folding his chute while he, David, released the parachute harness and ran over to the fallen man. The man had struck soft moorland, but his head had burst like a coconut, a hairy mash splattered on the turf, the man’s body strangely flat — an illusion created by the fact that hitting the ground at over one hundred miles per hour, his body had penetrated six inches into the turf, every bone broken.

  “Brentwood!” bawled out Cheek-Dawson.

  “Sir?”

  “Go and fold your chute, man. See it for bloody miles!”

  The only thing David could think of was that this was only their first HALO. There would be two more “daylights,” this same day, and then a night HALO, from twenty-five thousand feet. Full kit and oxygen masks.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  As the IX-44E sludge-removal vessel—”self-propelled”— putt-putted out of San Diego harbor, the carrier USS Salt Lake City towered above the tiny vessel like a skyscraper, and even the men on the hangar deck one story below the flight deck looked toy-sized to Brentwood, while the carrier’s anchor chain alone would have sunk his barge. One of the sailors high up on the hangar deck, holding a bucket, gazed d
own at the small slab of wood that was the barge’s deck and at the butter-box wheelhouse. Mockingly he saluted the tiny apparition. There was a roar of laughter from the carrier, made louder by its echoing off its enormous steel sides, as Ray Brentwood and his nine men — the other two of the crew of eleven in the engine room, or rather engine cubbyhole — returned the salute. Brentwood’s face was flushed — hot with embarrassment as more and more of the carrier’s sailors and yardbirds working on the great ship lined up stem to stern to watch the joke sail by. One of the Salt Lake City crewmen, part of the one-hundred-chef contingent aboard the five-thousand-man carrier, grabbed a loud-hailer, calling out, “Don’t you go bumpin’ into us, now!”

  “What is it?” hollered another man. “Smitty, you drop that garbage overboard?” It was light relief for the men on the carrier, who were in for refit after the Salt Lake City had been attacked a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands en route to launch carrier-based attacks against the Russian-held Aleutian Islands. More islands had fallen to the Russians as they drew ever closer to Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor. Two Blackjack Tupolev X bombers, swooping in low on afterburner at 1.4 Mach, had released their sixteen tons of ordnance, including a cluster of air-to-surface Kingfish 6 missiles.

  Two of the 10,600-pound missiles, coming in at the Salt Lake City at over 790 meters per second, had been shot out of the air by the carrier’s Phalanx radar-guided.50-millimeter-machine-gun batteries firing dense sprays of high-velocity depleted-uranium bullets. Two of the missiles were struck at three hundred meters from the ship, exploding, raining white-hot debris onto the sea; the fireball from one, streaming from a hundred-pound fragment of the missile’s midsection, kept going, hitting the carrier’s island, wiping out PRIFLY control and demolishing the backup “ops” board. Seven sailors had been killed outright, eight others badly burned.

  Of the remaining two Russian missiles, one was taken out a mile from the carrier by a five-thousand-pound Sea Sparrow, though it was the men on the.20-millimeter, fifty-round-per-second Vulcan antimissile gun batteries festooning the carrier’s side who claimed credit for downing the missile.

  The remaining Kingfish was a dud, but unstopped, did the most damage of all, its 10,600 pounds, traveling at seventeen hundred miles an hour, striking the carrier’s starboard side above the waterline on the starboard quarter with the impact of a heavy-haul locomotive hitting a metal garage door, the missile disintegrating, and though not exploding, tearing through ten bulkheads, the resulting shrapnel killing 117 men and injuring scores of others, leaving a gaping, jagged-toothed hole twenty feet long and fifteen feet high. The friction of the impact started several fires, one of which, its flames shooting up air-conditioning ducts, ignited three Grumman Intruder bombers. The resulting explosion killed fifteen men and destroyed over $170 million worth of airplanes and spare parts as well as scorching the forward starboard side of the hangar, the fumes from the paint downing several maintenance crews and getting into the pilots’ ready rooms sandwiched between hangar and flight deck.

  It was little wonder then that the crew, now safely back in port, thought that a little levity at the expense of IX-44E— sludge removal — was in order. But for Ray Brentwood and his hapless crew, it was a humiliation that not even the gregarious and convivial Seaman Jones could forget or forgive.

  Shortly, a deck officer aboard the carrier came down to the edge of one of the lower loading flight decks, ordering the jeering crew back to work, and when they had gone, in the worst humiliation of all, the officer cast a brief, pitying glance in Brentwood’s direction before disappearing from view.

  The IX-44E started to buck in a chop coming in from the direction of Point Loma, a chop that would not even be discernible to the dozens of warships and the carrier high above, flying the pennants of battle honors won.

  While the warships’ crews were readying again for war, Ray Brentwood had the decidedly dull and uninspiring task of plowing up the coast fifteen miles off the beach, where a hysterical member of the La Jolla chapter of “Environmental Watch” had reported another “massive” oil spill.

  When they got there, Seaman Jones estimated it was an “iddy biddy” spill of no more than a hundred gallons, probably burped out by one of the warships or one of the coast-plying cargo vessels. The barge nudged about in the increasing swell, its very motion seeming to Brentwood as resentful as the harsh coughing of its engine, while the flexible polyethylene hose that served as a boom trailed off the stern with all the enthusiasm of a sullen snake, flopping into the water to contain the rainbow-streaked chocolate-mousse oil that stained the cobalt blue of the sea.

  “Down with the hose!” ordered Brentwood, then seconds later, “Suck ‘er up!”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” murmured one of the crew.

  “What was that, sailor?” snapped Brentwood.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Then get to it. I want all of it.”

  “Oooohli—” groaned an oiler. “He wants all of it.”

  “C’mon,” said Jones. “Poor bastard’s already had the shit kicked out of him.”

  “Yeah — well, Jonesy, he’s still alive,” said the oiler.

  “Not sure I’d wanna be,” said the winch operator. “With that kisser.”

  “Yeah, he’s still kicking, ain’t he?” added the oiler. “Hell of a lot of guys from the Blaine were deep-sixed. He got off.”

  “Shut up,” said Jones. “He’ll hear you.”

  “So what!”

  “Come on!” called out Brentwood from the wheelhouse. “I want it up before it goes to a tar ball.” If the oil did coagulate and sink, it would be pushed up later on the beach by the tide, and over the next few days he’d have every retiree in La Jolla going into cardiac arrest and calling their congressman, never mind the poor bastards on the west coast of southern Alaska and British Columbia, where one of the Russian subs had sunk both a huge freshwater carrier and oil supertanker, spilling millions of gallons. They’d be cleaning that up for years.

  It was this thought that started Ray Brentwood wondering, as he knew they had been in Ottawa and Washington, how the hell the Russian subs had gotten in so close to the coast without detection. Sure, there had been a lot of surface interference, gale conditions, but still, the SOSUS hydrophone arrays on the sea bottom, monitored by the Canadian navy out of Esquimau on Vancouver Island, should have picked up a sine wave or two of the sub’s cooling pumps. Of course, once they’d sunk the tankers, the subs had had no trouble getting out under the cacophony of torpedoes exploding and ships going down, such noise completely overwhelming the SOSUS network, providing cover for the Russian subs to hightail it out of the area at maximum speed, the noise of their cooling pumps, racing flat out, lost in the death throes noise of the dying tankers.

  “There y’are, sir,” said Jones. “Got ‘er all in the tank.”

  “Very well. Up hose.”

  “Up hose!” mimicked the oiler. “Christ, think he was still captain of a missile frigate or something.”

  “Well, once a captain, always a captain, I guess,” said Jones.

  “Of this bucket?” sneered the oiler. “Shoot — he might as well’ve stayed home, played in his friggin’ bathtub. He’s not gonna impress anybody down here with all his orders.”

  “So why don’t you put in for a transfer?” asked Jones, though knowing that none of them would get it. IX-44E was the bottom of the barrel. To the navy, they were all losers on this barge.

  * * *

  Aboard the Roosevelt, sonar operator, Emerson, didn’t have to tell Zeldman about what he’d seen on the screen, as the listening sonar was on amplification in the control room— everybody hearing the telltale whoosh of a torpedo being fired.

  “Incoming!” shouted Emerson. “Submerged hostile, by nature of sound. Bearing zero four seven.”

  “Battle stations!” ordered Zeldman, the yellow chime alert already pushed, its soft-toned urgency filling the sub. “Speed?” asked Zeldman, pressing the captain’s cabi
n call button.

  “Forty-five knots,” replied Emerson.

  It was almost faster than the Roosevelt could run.

  “Hard right rudder to zero three five degrees,” ordered Zeldman.

  “Right rudder to zero three five degrees,” came the confirmation, even as the Roosevelt was turning, its rudder control and trim closely watched by the diving officer.

  “Bearing. Mark!”

  “Zero four seven,” came the response from the fire control party.

  “SA tube one, fire MOSS.”

  “SA tube, fire MOSS.”

  A light tremor passed through the Roosevelt as the mobile submarine simulator shot out from one of the two five-degree-angled starboard abaft tubes situated below and abaft the sail, the simulator traveling at over forty miles per hour on the same course as the attacking torpedo and emitting an identical noise signature to that of Roosevelt.

  “Forward tubes one, two, three, four, ready with warheads.” As he spoke, Zeldman could hear the easy, metallic slide and click as the Mark-28 wire-guided radar-homing torpedoes slipped from racks to tubes, the latter’s “lids” closed, the rope-hung “WARNING WARSHOT LOADED” signs now slung from the spin wheel lock on each tube.

  “Tubes one, two, three, four loaded, sir.”

  “Warheads armed.”

  “Warheads armed, sir.”

  “Very well. Stand by.”

  Three flights down, the torpedo room’s chief petty officer was watching the enlisted men carefully. Since the bigger and much heavier Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles had been put aboard, replacing the Trident I Cs, and upgraded Mark-48-C torpedoes had been introduced to Roosevelt, the firing orders were at times quite different from those of the old Sea Wolf routines, and this was no time for a mistake.