Fortunes of War

by Stephen Coonts

  When Lacy went over to the colonel after his interview, he asked, still deadly serious, “How did I do, sir?”

  “Fine, Lacy. Fine. You are now the unit public affairs officer.”

  Aaron Hudek gave a performance that was the equal of Lacy’s, or perhaps even better. When asked why he had volunteered, he told Christine, “This is the only war we have.”

  “How do you think you will feel, killing a fellow human being?”

  “It’ll be glorious.” Hudek gave Christine a wolfish grin. “I can’t wait. I’ll blow those yellow Jap bastards to kingdom come so goddamn fast they’ll never know what hit ‘em. Just you watch.”

  Stunned, Christine recovered quickly. “How do you know that you won’t be the one who falls?”

  “Oh, it ain’t gonna be me, lady. I’m too good. I’m the best in the business. The F-22 Raptor is good iron. I can fly that fucking airplane. I’m gonna go through those goddamn Japs like shit through a fan. Can’t stand Japs. I guess it’s personal with me, something about Pearl Harbor and all that damned so-sorry fake politeness — but I won’t let that interfere with what I have to do. I’m going to stay cool and kill those polite little sons of bitches.”

  Christine didn’t know what to say. Hudek smiled at the camera, unhooked his vest mike, got up, and walked out, right by Dixie Elitch, who averted her gaze as he passed her. Dixie sat down in the interview chair and smiled sweetly as one of the technicians hooked up her mike. “Ms. Elitch,” Christine began. “Captain Elitch, please. That is my rank in the Russian Air Army. I am very proud of it.”

  She managed to say that with just the faintest hint of a Russian accent. Watching from behind the camera, Bob Cassidy covered his face with his hands. “Captain Elitch,” said Christine, smiling brittlely. “All my life I have loved Russian things— furs, vodka, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, Pavlov …” Dixie’s recall of things Russian failed her here. She waved airily and motored on: “I am so thrilled to have this opportunity to actually go to Russia, to succor her people in their hour of need, to serve this magnificent yet tragic nation in my own small way, and, just perhaps, make a contribution to the betterment of the downtrodden proletariat. And even — dare I say it? — the bourgeoisie.”

  “Are all of you people assholes?” Christine snarled. “Unfortunately, I believe so,” replied Dixie Elitch. She looked straight into the camera and flashed her absolute best “I’m available tonight” smile.

  When he went to bed that night, Bob Cassidy found himself thinking of Dixie. This annoyed him. He had ten thousand things on his mind, and now he was thinking about a woman, one who was off-limits to him. Oh, he knew the engraved-in-stone rule of the modern, sexually integrated armed forces: no fucking the troops. And no flirting, sighing, dating, kissing, marrying, or loving — none of that male-female stuff. In the brave new Air Force middle-aged colonels who got to thinking night thoughts about sweet young things were usually gone quickly. The “grab your hat, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out” kind of gone. Bob Cassidy had spent his adult life in uniform, around women now and then, and he had never before gone to bed thinking about one. Except Sweet Sabrina. He’d thought of her every night when she was alive, and many, many nights since she died. He often dreamed of her, dreamed of touching her again, of kissing her just once more, of somehow reaching across the great gulf that separated them. Robbie was sometimes in those dreams too, sitting on Sabrina’s lap, running across a lawn or through the house or laughing while diving into piles of fall leaves. These dreams used to wake him up, drive the sleep from him. He would walk the empty house, so utterly alone. Thinking of anyone but Sabrina seemed disloyal somehow. He tried to conjure up her image to replace the grinning face of Dixie Elitch. He was thinking of Sabrina — or was it Dixie his — when he finally drifted off.

  15

  Pavel Saratov knew there were a lot of ships anchored off Yokohama, but he didn’t know how many until he was within the anchorage, which extended for miles. Over a hundred, easily, he estimated. He reduced the boat’s speed to six knots. “The big freighter fifteen degrees right of the bow, about two thousand meters. Containers four deep on her deck. She is our first target.” Saratov was wearing the sound-powered headset. He had sent the talker below. The only other person on the bridge was the second officer, who was scanning behind and to both sides for enemy planes or warships. “We have her, sir.”

  Down below, they were using the radar. All the skipper had to do was designate a target. He had already given orders that they would shoot one torpedo at a time, at targets he picked. He wanted to do all the damage possible. The torpedoes were huge — twenty-one inches in diameter, twenty-seven feet long — and carried warheads containing 1,250 pounds of high explosive, enough to sink most ships. Twenty seconds later the first torpedo was on its way. A minute after that they fired another torpedo at a laden bulk carrier. The first one hit the container ship with a dull thud that carried well through the water and was clearly audible aboard the submarine. The bulk carrier and the third target, another container ship, were hit in turn. The fourth torpedo was expended on yet another container ship, a huge one festooned with lights. Still moving at six knots, the sub was deep inside the anchorage, completely surrounded by ships, when the crew fired the fifth torpedo at a monstrous freighter riding deep in the water. It was close, almost too close, but the torpedo warhead exploded with a boom that sounded quite satisfying to Pavel Saratov. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the freighter began to sag in the middle. The torpedo broke her back. Yes!

  Saratov turned to exit the anchorage to the east. One tube was still loaded. In the torpedo room the crew began the reloading process. It would take about an hour to get one of the huge torpedoes into a tube. Well, he had given the Japanese something to think about. No doubt they were alerting their antisubmarine forces right now. The sooner he got this boat out of Tokyo Bay, the better. “Flank speed,” he told the people below. “Give me every turn you’ve got.”

  Sushi called Toshihiko Ayukawa at home on the scrambled telephone. “Sir, I thought I should call you immediately. We intercepted a transmission from a Russian submarine. He says he is in Tokyo Bay.”

  “What?” Ayukawa sounded wide-awake now. “It’s right off the computer, sir. I thought you should be informed.”

  The raw, encrypted signal was picked up by a satellite and directed to a dish antenna on top of the building. From there, it went to a computer, which decoded it, translated the Russian into Japanese, and sent it to a printer. The whole sequence took thirty-five seconds — the paper took thirty seconds to go through the printer — if the Russians were using one of the four codes the Japanese had cracked, and if they had encoded their message properly. Sometimes they didn’t. “Read it to me,” Ayukawa said. Sushi did so. When he had finished Ayukawa spent several seconds digesting it, then asked, “Have you alerted the Self-Defense Force?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sushi said blandly, managing to hide his irritation. Ayu-kawa’s question implied that Sushi was incompetent. Apparently Ayu-kawa thought he had no time to be polite, to observe the simplest courtesies. In any event he didn’t try. “The explosive charges in the refinery mentioned in the message began exploding twenty minutes ago, sir. The Lotus Blossom refinery at Yokosuka. And a freighter in the Yokohama anchorage has just radioed in, saying it was torpedoed. “How long have we had the submarine’s message?”

  “It came in only minutes ago, sir. I called the Self-Defense Force, alerted harbor security and the Yokosuka Fire District. Then I telephoned you.”

  “Very well.” Ten seconds of silence. “A submarine!”

  Ayukawa was appalled. Those military fools told the prime minister that they had sunk all the operational Russian subs that were under way when the war broke out at Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island. They refused to tie up scarce military assets guarding ports in the home islands when every ship was needed to conquer an empire. After all, what could you expect of Russians?

  Exploding refi
neries and sinking ships would prove the military men miscalculated, embarrass everybody, cause the government to lose face. Another disaster caused by overweening pride and shortsightedness. Atsuko Abe, take note. “I had better call the minister,” Ayukawa said to no one in particular. He hung up the telephone without saying good-bye. Sushi cradled his instrument and made a face.

  The guided-missile destroyer Hatakaze was three hundred yards away from a berth at Yokosuka Naval Base pier when the communications officer buzzed the bridge on the squawk box. A flash-priority message from headquarters had just come out of the computer printer: “Russian submarine attacking ships Yokohama. Intercept.”

  Hatakaze’s captain was no slouch. He ordered his crew to general quarters, waved away the tug, and steamed out into the bay, working up speed as quickly as the engineering plant would allow. Hatakaze had been continuously at sea for two weeks. She participated in the destruction of the Russian fleet rusting in Golden Horn Bay and helped shell troops on the Vladivostok neck that were trying to impede advancing Japanese forces. During all that shooting, her forward 127-mm Mk-42 deck gun had overheated, which caused a round to explode prematurely, killing two men and injuring four more. Her aft gun was working just fine. As soon as she could be spared, the force commander sent Hatakaze home for repairs. Due to the shortage of ammunition, most of Hatakaze’s remaining 127-mm ammo was transferred to other ships, yet she still had a dozen rounds on the trays for the aft gun. Hatakaze was making twenty knots when the radar operators picked Admiral Kolchak from among the clutter of ships, small boats, and surface return. The Russian submarine was making fifteen knots southwestward toward the refinery. That merely made her a suspicious blip; her beaconing S-band radar made the identification certain. Although the submarine lacked the excellent radar of the Japanese destroyer, the destroyer was a bigger, easier target. The operator of the sub’s radar saw the blip of a possible warship — a fairly small high-speed surface target coming out of the Yokosuka Naval Base area — and reported it to Captain Saratov as such.

  Pavel Saratov pointed his binoculars to the south, the direction named by the radar operator below. The rain had stopped; visibility was up, maybe to ten miles. There was the destroyer, with its masthead and running lights illuminated. After all, these were Japanese home waters. Saratov pounded the bridge rail in frustration. The destroyer would soon open fire with its deck gun. If the sub submerged, the destroyer would pin it easily, kill it with antisubmarine rockets — ASROC. He had known it would end like this. Entering the bay had been a huge gamble right from the start. A suicidal gamble, really. He looked southwest, at the blazing refinery and the ING tanker moored at the end of the pier. He had been intending to use the sixth torpedo on that tanker. A maneuverable destroyer, bow-on, would be a difficult target. Another glance at the destroyer. “What is the range to the destroyer?” he demanded of the watch below. “Twelve thousand meters, Captain, and closing. He has turned toward us, speed a little over thirty knots.”

  “And the tanker?”

  “Two thousand five hundred meters, sir.”

  “Give me an attack solution on the destroyer. Set the torpedo for acoustic homing.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “And keep me informed of the ranges, goddamnit!”

  “Yes, captain.”

  Submerging in this shallow bay would be suicidal. Saratov dismissed that possibility. He looked longingly at the ING tanker, a target of a lifetime. She was low in the water, a fact he had noted as he entered the bay and steamed by her. She was full of the stuff. “We’ll run in against the tanker and cut our motors.” The Japanese destroyer captain wouldn’t be fool enough to risk putting a shell into that thing. With the tanker at our back, Saratov thought, maybe we have a chance. At least he could get his men off the sub and into the water. “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Come thirty degrees right, slow to all ahead two-thirds.”

  He heard the order being repeated in the control room, felt the bow of the sub swinging.

  “Destroyer at eleven thousand meters, sir.”

  Saratov looked back at the oncoming destroyer. Why doesn’t he shoot? The refinery was blazing merrily. At the base of the fire, he could just make out the silhouettes of fire trucks. The Spetsnaz divers certainly had done an excellent job. Saratov swung the glasses to the tanker pier. Several fire trucks with their flashing emergency lights were visible there. He wondered why they were on the pier; then his mind turned to other things. He checked the destroyer again. Why didn’t he shoot? They most certainly were in range. “Twelve hundred meters to the tanker, Captain.”

  The captain of the Hatakaze could see the burning refinery with his binoculars. He could not see the black sail of the Russian submarine that his radar people assured him was there, but he could see the blip on the radar repeater scope just in front of his chair on the bridge. And he could see the return of the tanker pier and the tankers moored to it. The range to the sub was about nine thousand meters. ASROC was out of the question, even though the target was well within range. The rocket would carry the Mk-46 torpedo out several kilometers and put it in the water, but the torpedo might home on one of the tankers. Captain Kama elected to engage the submarine with the stern 127-mm gun. Not that he had a lot of choice. He was already within gun range, but he would have to turn Hatakaze about seventy degrees away from the submarine to uncover the gun. Of course, if the gun overshot, one of the shells might hit a tanker. If the ING tanker went up, the results would be catastrophic. He decided to wait. Wait a few moments, and pray the submarine didn’t shoot a torpedo. “Prepare to fire the torpedo decoys,” he ordered. “And watch for small boats. Tell Sonar to listen carefully.” Listen for torpedoes, he meant. What a place to fight a war!

  The refinery fire was as bad as it looked. The conflagration lit up the clouds and illuminated the tanker pier with a ghastly flickering glow. Numerous small explosions sent fireballs puffing into the night sky. These explosions were caused when fire reached free pools or clouds of petroleum products that had leaked from ruptured tanks or pipes. The fire fighters had no chance. There was too much damage in too many places. As the fires grew hotter and larger, the glow cast even more light on the sea. The submarine approached the ING tanker, which was limned by the fire behind it. Saratov could see people moving about on the decks, probably trying desperately to get under way. He imagined the tanker skipper was beside himself. “All stop,” he told the control room. The submarine glided toward the tanker, losing way. Two hundred meters separated the two ships. “Left full rudder.”

  The nose began to swing. “Looks like another destroyer, sir. Coming out of Yokosuka. Bearing one nine five, range thirty-two thousand meters.”

  “Keep the boat moving, Chief, at about two knots.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Two knots.”

  The deck of the submarine was barely out of the water. He had never ordered the tanks completely blown. “Secure the diesels. Switch to battery power.”

  “Battery power, aye.”

  Saratov kept his binoculars focused on the Japanese destroyer, which was closing the range at about a kilometer per minute. The throb of the diesels died away. He could hear the rush of air and the crackling of the refinery fire. Somewhere, over the refinery probably, was a helicopter. He could hear the distinctive whopping of the rotors in the exhaust. “We have the first destroyer on sonar,” the XO reported. “Be ready to fire tube six at the destroyer at any time.”

  “Aye, Captain. We’re doing that now. Destroyer at seven thousand meters.”

  “How long until the first reload is ready?”

  “Another twenty minutes, Captain.”

  Terrific. We have exactly one shot. If we miss … He must have seen us! “You ready to shoot?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Saratov waited, his eyes on the destroyer. He wasn’t shooting, which Saratov thought was because the tanker lay just behind. He could hear voices, shouts, in a foreign language that Saratov thought might be English. It cert
ainly didn’t sound like Japanese, and it sure as hell wasn’t Russian. “Six thousand meters, and he’s slowing.”

  Saratov had been waiting for that. The Japanese skipper wouldn’t hear much on his sonar at thirty-two knots, yet the high speed was an edge in outmaneuvering the torpedo. “Tube Six, fire!”

  The boat jerked as the torpedo went out, expelled by compressed air.

  Aboard Hatakaze, the captain was watching the tiny radar blip that was the submarine’s sail. If only he would submerge, clear away from that tanker!

  The destroyer’s speed caused too much turbulence and noise for the bow-mounted sonar, so he had ordered the ship slowed. Way was falling off now. “Torpedo in the water!”

  The call from the sonar operator galvanized everyone. “Right full rudder, all ahead flank,” Captain Kama ordered. “Come to a new heading zero nine zero. Deploy the torpedo decoys. Have the after turret open fire when their gun bears.”

  The deck tilted steeply as the destroyer answered the helm.

  “He’s turning eastward, Captain,” the attack team told Saratov, who was still on the bridge, his binoculars glued to his eyes. “I see that, goddamnit. What’s his speed?”

  “Fourteen knots. His engines are really thrashing. I think he is accelerating.” The destroyer was almost beam-on now. Flashes from the gun on the afterdeck! Even with that tanker directly behind the submarine, he is shooting!

  “Dive, dive, dive. Let’s go down.”

  Saratov unplugged his headset. Hanecki was already going through the hatch. The deck was tilting. Saratov clamored through the hatch and pulled it down after him just as the first of the five-inch shells hit the water…, right beside the sail. “Periscope depth!”