Quest of the Seventh Carrier

by Peter Albano

  Fujita returned to the chart, tapped it with the rubber tip of a pointer. “The two DD’s and the Mabruk and Al Hamra could sortie from Vladivostok in two days.” He slid the pointer down to a point in the East China Sea south of Korea and west of Kyushu. “We can patrol here and intercept them there.” He stabbed the Korean Straits and licked his thin lips. “Then we can find our vengeance.”

  Waving fists, men rose and “Banzai!” filled the room. Brent added his voice. Mark Allen remained silent. Fujita quieted the voices and turned to Captain John “Slugger” Fite.

  “Seven Fletchers in mint condition ready for sea,” the burly, white-haired escort commander said, coming out of his chair. But there was trouble on his face and he spoke to it immediately. “We have air search and surface search radar, but, according to the agreements reached at Geneva, no fire control radar.” His intense blue eyes focused on the message tabled by Admiral Fujita. “Yet, according to that message from COMSUBPAC, the enemy DD’s targeted Trepang with fire control radar.” Silence and everyone looked at the escort commander expectantly as his eyes searched every face. “If my boys make torpedo runs against ships equipped with fire control radar, nothing can save them; not smoke, speed, tactics — nothing at all.”

  “Could this be an error?” Fujita asked, obviously upset and directing the question at Admiral Mark Allen.

  Allen deferred to Brent Ross with a nod. “Possible, sir. But a good operator will recognize a fire control lock,” Brent Ross said. “The frequency is higher than “J” and “S” band and the beam is on a narrow focus. I believe the report was accurate and Trepang was ranged by fire control radar.”

  “Then they’re cheating,” Fite said, bitterly.

  “I’ll file an immediate complaint,” Mark Allen said. Saiki and Okuma looked at each other and snickered.

  Fite pushed on into more trouble. “We’re equipped with the old Mark forty-six fish with contact fuses.” He stared at Mark Allen. “We need the new NT-37C. This is the finest torpedo in the world. It has the multiple attack capabilities we need — active and passive homing modes, a wire, and it is especially effective against high-speed, low acoustic silhouette subs. And it has twice the range of the Mark 46.”

  Mark Allen sighed and sagged back in his chair. “I know, John,” he said with a hopeless a look on his face. “But we’ve been over this before. The Russians won’t supply 'homers’ to the Arabs, either. It’s a trade-off and you know it.”

  Fite’s voice rumbled from deep in his throat, “I traded off Ogren, Warner, Fortino, Jackson, Philbin, Gilliland…”

  The roll of dead destroyer commanders brought a pained look to Admiral Mark Allen’s face. “That’s not fair, John,” he said heavily. “We’ve all taken casualties.”

  Fujita took over. “Contact your navy department — make the requests.”

  “I have sir! I have,” Mark Allen said.

  Fite spoke to Mark Allen. “Well make do with what we have, Mark. My skippers are Americans and all of them have had years of DD experience. In fact, all served in WW Two on cans.” His gaze fell on Admiral Fujita. “I request that you consider torpedo runs as a tactic of last resort, Admiral.”

  “Of course, Captain.” Fite returned to his chair and Fujita turned to Mark Allen, “Admiral, we have not had any new reports from the American nuclear submarine cruising off Vladivostok.”

  “No, sir,” Mark Allen answered. “They are not to transmit unless there is significant activity.”

  “Significant activity,” Okuma hooted. “Are they awake?” There were chuckles. Admiral Fujita’s narrow eyes, moved from man to man and Brent knew he would allow his subordinates to complete their exchange.

  “Yes, they are awake,” Mark Allen retorted hotly. And then disdainfully, “I shouldn’t have to explain to you, Commander, but, you should know enemy receivers ashore and afloat could pick up their signals and fix their position in seconds.”

  Admiral Fujita spoke before Okuma could respond, “This submarine has the best radar?”

  “Yes, sir. The finest. And the sub on station is the Ohio. Her captain is Commander Norman Veal — an old friend of mine.”

  “You have confidence in this man?”

  “Yes, sir. Norman Veal is a twenty-year veteran and, probably, the finest submarine skipper in the world.”

  “Good! Yonaga will get underway tomorrow morning at 0800.” Fujita pinked the chart with the rubber tip at a point one hundred miles east of Tokyo Bay. “Commander Matsuhara, you and your air group commanders note we will pick up our air groups here.” He turned to his executive officer, Commander Mitake Arai. “Commander Arai will prepare written orders with the longitude and latitude of the point of rendezvous and your point option data.”

  He turned to Admiral Mark Allen. “Let us hope your friend Norman Veal provides us with the exact time of sortie of our enemies. We could save fuel and time.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mark Allen smiled confidently. “You can depend on Norman Veal.”

  Chapter Ten

  Commander Norman Veal disliked his duty. On reconnaissance patrol forty miles southeast of Vladivostock, he had only thirty-eight fathoms of water under his keel. The same as all SSBN skippers, he preferred duty outside the one-hundred fathom curve. Nuclear subs were creatures of the deep, not the shallows. Life was found in the depths where a sub had room to maneuver; room to remain alive when the hounds came sniffing with their sonar and then bared their claws of bombs and torpedoes. They had been on this infernal duty for two months. For sixty-one days, he had drifted or moved at a bare three knots at a depth of forty to sixty feet, studying the Petra Velikogo Bay through his search scope. Occasional frigates, destroyers, tankers and freighters entered and exited the port, but there had been no sign of the Libyans, Mabruk and Al Hamra.

  Although Ohio was the biggest and finest submarine in the U.S. Fleet, she had her weaknesses. Sixteen thousand, six hundred tons surfaced and a gigantic eighteen thousand, seven hundred tons submerged. She was a great basking whale of a ship, slow going up, even slower going down. Capable of patrolling an incredible 14,000,000 square miles of sea-space, she required cubic miles of maneuvering area. Her S8G pressurized-water-cooled reactor could drive her through the water at speeds over forty knots. But her teeth had been pulled by the Chinese orbiting laser system; her 24 Trident 1 C-4 MIRV missiles useless, her vertical launch tubes empty. Her only offensive power now rested in her four amidships torpedo tubes and her Mark 48 torpedoes.

  Despite twenty years of sub duty, Veal had never completely adapted to the claustrophobic atmosphere of a submarine — especially the command and control center. He was surrounded with scopes, electronic plots, flashing lights, glowing cathode-ray tubes, computers, green-glowing digital displays, all bathed in the red flush of the submarine’s illuminating lamps. The room was jammed with men — unwashed men who often sweated the aroma of fear combined with the faint smell of cigarette smoke and diesel oil, the odor found in every submarine on earth. No air conditioning system ever built could ever remove that scent.

  In front of the captain, on separate pedestals, were two attack periscopes, a search scope, communications mast, ESM mast, and inertial navigation radar mast. Forward of the cluster of scopes and masts, were the three consoles of the command and control system where his executive officer, Lieutenant Jack Barr, stood behind three technicians in a slumped posture of complete boredom. Barr and his men controlled the ship’s Mark 98 digital computerized missile fire control system — now abandoned — the Mark 118 torpedo fire control computers, the BPS-15A surveillance radar and the WLR-8 electronic warfare system. Behind Veal were the consoles of the BQ£)-6 sonar suite, two operators and his attack officer, Lieutenant Lawrence “Larry” Martin. To his left was the console of the Mark 2 SINS (Ship Inertial Navigation System,) a complex system of gyroscopes and accelerometers that related movement of Ohio in all directions, true speed through the water and over the ocean floor. Its operator could provide the navigator with both opt
ical and electronic checks. It was accurate to two hundred yards anyplace on earth.

  Veal drummed his fingers against his thighs restlessly. In thirty seconds, he would have a look around. He sighed. The SSBN Michigan would relieve them in four days. Then back to Pearl Harbor where Ohio would undergo refitting. Finally, he would fly back to San Diego and his family, his wife Rachel and his two teenage daughters, Bernice and Sylvia. He squirmed with thoughts of Rachel. She still had the sleek body of a college freshman despite the birth of two daughters and the passage of twenty years. Like all men who carry the burden of lonely, boring duty, Norman Veal’s fantasies were almost real — had cruelly haunting substance. Not only did Rachel intrude during those long hours in his bunk when he hungered for her, when he could feel her nude body against his and he twisted and turned in the agony of unrequited arousal, but she appeared when he was at the scope, at chow or just sitting around the ward room listening to his officers shoot the breeze. He could feel her. Smell her.

  Veal’s thoughts were interrupted by his XO’s cough. Embarrassed, the skipper glanced at his watch. “Up scope,” he barked. A quartermaster released the search scope with a half-turn of the hydraulic ring control and the periscope slid upward from its well. “Stop scope!” Veal said, stooping at the conning station, the periscope’s lens halted below the surface. Almost doubled over, the captain unsnapped the handles and crabbed the scope in a full circle. A camera built into the scope flashed murky pictures on a monitor in front of the XO.

  “Nothing, Captain,” Barr said, staring at the monitor.

  “Very well,” Veal grunted. Nothing showed on the monitor. No hint of a lurking enemy. “Sonar?”

  “Nothing, sir,” came from a CPO at a console behind him.

  “Very well. Three more feet.” Veal felt the scope move under his hands and gratefully he straightened, grasping the handles, eyes to the rubber-lined eyepiece.

  Projecting above the periscope like a wet whip, an antenna array picked up high frequency signals and fed them to a receiver and two lights flickered on the ESM warning display.

  “Sir,” an ESM technician at the command center said, “I have two S-band search radars. Both have the pulse signatures of land-based sets. Not aircraft, sir, and not ship.”

  “Point Povorotny and Point Mys Gamova?”

  “Yes, sir. Same signature characteristics.”

  “Very well.” Veal was pleased. No ships and no aircraft and there was no chance the land-based sets could detect the periscope at such a great range. Although they were outside the recognized international twenty-four-mile limit, the Russians claimed all waters within a hundred miles of Vladivostok as “territorial.” Veal had seen a Kara class cruiser and a Sovremenny class destroyer exit and reenter the port several times during the patrol. Both ships carried highly sophisticated sonar, homing torpedoes and the new KA-27 Lab helicopter with reciprocating engines. The choppers had the capability of towing sonar arrays, dropping sonobuoys, torpedoes, and depth bombs and the Soviets had made it clear they would not tolerate violations of their territorial waters.

  Veal felt the deck shift downward to starboard. “Mind your trim, Mister T!” he shouted at the diving officer, a tall, slender lieutenant with the unpronounceable Polish name of Matheuze Tyszkiewicz who stood behind his planesmen. A New Yorker from the South Bronx, the crew called him “Mister T,” or “Mister Mat,” or sometimes, he answered to “Mister TZ.” With an easygoing demeanor, he was usually found with a smile on his face. He was not smiling now. He shouted an order to a planesman. Quickly, the man moved his controls, eyes glued to an electronically defined display. Within seconds, trim was restored.

  Veal made a beam to beam sweep. With a patrol north of the forty-second parallel, the lens of his search scope was usually greeted by mists and fog. However, there were breaks in the mists and the hills of Povorotny Point were visible off the starboard beam while Ostrov Russkiy Island jutted from the sea off the port bow only eight miles away. Mys Gamaova Point lay ten miles off his port beam, but was obscured by a heavy layer of gray mist that hulked down on the surface like lead dust.

  Turning the scope through 360 degrees, he spoke to Jack Barr, “No surface ships, no aircraft. Ten knot wind from the north, two-foot chop, visibility fair.” He snapped the handles back up against the tube and stepped back. “Down scope.” With a whir of an electric motor, the oiled tube slid quickly into its well. He glanced at his watch. The scope had only been above the surface for 8.2 seconds. “Very good. Very good, indeed,” he said to himself.

  Veal heard a tape rewinding. “Rerun, sir,” Barr said, gesturing at a monitor above the command center.

  “Instant replay?” Veal asked in a rare display of humor.

  Barr chuckled. “We didn’t score, sir.”

  “Nobody has for over two months,” Martin grumbled. Light laughter filled the crowded compartment.

  “Let her roll,” Veal said.

  Within seconds, a tape recorded by a camera mounted just below the periscope’s lens ran the search that Norman Veal had just made. Nothing changed and nothing was on the tape that Veal had not already studied. He yawned. “Take the deck, XO,” he said to Barr. And then with undisguised boredom, “Steaming as before.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Barr said. “Steaming as before.” Before Veal could turn to the door to the passageway that led to “officer country” and his cabin, Larry Martin’s voice halted him. “Payne has something, Captain.” A half-dozen strides brought Norman Veal to a position back of Chief Sonarman Bob Payne. The huge fifteen-foot, bow-mounted passive transducer array of the BQQ-6 sensor had picked up ship sounds. Transmitted to Payne’s computer, they were sifted for individual frequency bands of known Soviet vessels which had been programmed into the computer’s threat library. The signals were displayed visually oh a screen. With a hand over his single earphone, Payne stared at a monochromatic curtain of green with bright lines indicating sources of sounds.

  “No acoustical signatures of known vessels, sir,” Payne said. “Unknown ship or ships. Six, seven miles.”

  “Not a sub or a whale?”

  “No, sir.” Payne gestured at the jagged lines of the display. “Powerful engines moving at a high speed — one-eight-zero true.”

  “Christ, Captain,” Larry Martin said. “If that were an earthquake, it would be a ‘ten’ on the Richter Scale.” Grunting, Veal put on a headset. He heard the cavitation of churning screws. As he listened for several minutes, the chuga-chuga of the whirling blades grew rapidly. Gradually he detected a mixture of sounds on two different frequencies. And then slowly hissing sounds crept into the earphone. He looked anxiously at the green tube for the offset dots that warned of pinging and was relieved to find none.

  Payne said, “Two ships, sir. But not the signature of anything I’ve ever heard.”

  “Christ, they’re close,” Veal said.

  “Must’ve been shielded by a thermocline, sir,” Payne noted.

  Veal cursed. The sound conductivity of northern waters was terrible. Stratified by layers of varying temperatures, the sea settled into isothermal sheets much like a layered cake. The interface where discrete layers of warm surface water met cold depth water formed a semipermeable barrier which functioned as a reflecting shield — a protection against acoustic signals all submarine commanders welcomed. Now one had worked against them. Veal turned to Lieutenant Jack Barr, “We have two probable warships with high pressure boilers moving at a high speed.” He drummed the top of the console. “When did Trepang sight those DDs entering the Korean Straits?”

  Barr glanced at a log. “It’s been almost thirty-five hours, sir.” Barr stared at the captain. “Any sonar, Captain.”

  Veal shook his head and gestured at the tube. “No. At that speed they’re making too much noise to search.” And then thoughtfully, “Must be those Libyan DDs.”

  “Captain,” Chief Payne said. “Three miles and closing at thirty-one knots. They’ll pass four-thousand yards off our port side i
n six-minutes and ten seconds.”

  “Very well.” Moving to the scopes, Veal tapped the tube of the search scope with his knuckles uneasily. “Any sonar search, Chief?”

  “Nothing, sir. I’m getting a lot of engine and hull noises now, Captain.”

  Veal spoke to Barr, “Depth under keel?”

  “Forty fathoms, Captain.”

  “All stop!”

  Barr repeated the command to the control room crew. Veal felt the faint vibration of the sub’s single bronze screw vanish. Silently, Ohio lurked in the deep, her acoustic silhouette at a minimum.

  To Payne: “Range?”

  “Two miles, sir.”

  “Up scope!”

  The quartermaster turned the hydraulic locking ring. Veal held the lens just below the surface. Suddenly, he heard the frightening beeping sound of a radar sensor. “ESM?” he shouted.

  A technician stared at the blinking light on his threat receiver. “Two S-ban radars, sir,” the technician answered. “I’m getting the downside, Captain. They’re making long-range searches — locking and ranging on zero-eight-five, two-six-zero and three-five-five.”

  “They’re piloting, Captain,” Barr said.

  “Points of land?”

  “Roger, Captain. Povorotny Point, Gamova Point, and Russkiy Island,” Barr answered.

  “Very well. Up scope.”

  Bending and moving up with the tube, Veal’s eyes were glued to the eyepiece before the search scope had locked into place. A quick glance to port. That was all he wanted. He grunted with satisfaction when he found the two gray, charging destroyers precisely where they should have been. Boiling through the sea, great white bones of foaming seas sluicing back from their bows, scarring the surface astern white, each had two stacks, four gun houses and torpedo tubes amidships. Depth charges were on the sterns like rows of chocolate drops and their foretops were crowded with antennas. Five-inch guns pointed skyward and anti-aircraft machine guns crowded their decks and superstructures. Flipping the handle to fourteen-power, its highest magnification, Veal lost optical resolution but the picture zoomed in with startling details — even of the dark faces of gun crews huddled about ready guns and lookouts on the bridge and foretop. Many were smoking and they all looked bored.