Red Storm Rising

by Tom Clancy

  Her superstructure was an aesthetic embarrassment, with all the grace of a brick garage, topped with antenna whips and radar masts that looked like they had been built by a child’s erector set, but Morris saw the functional simplicity of the design. The frigate’s forty missiles were tucked away in circular racks forward. Her boxy after deckhouse contained enough room for a pair of deadly ASW helicopters. Her hull was sleek because speed required it. Her superstructure was boxy because it had to be. This was a warship, and whatever beauty Reuben James might have had was accidental.

  Sailors wearing blue shirts and jeans moved rapidly across three gangways, bringing supplies aboard for an immediate sailing. Morris walked briskly to the after gangway. A Marine guard saluted him at the foot of the brow and an officer on the frigate’s deck frantically ordered preparations to receive his new CO. The ship’s bell was struck four times, and Commander Ed Morris assumed his new identity.

  “Reuben James, arriving.”

  Morris saluted the colors, then the officer of the deck.

  “Sir, we didn’t expect you for another—” the lieutenant blurted.

  “How’s the work going?” Morris cut him off.

  “Two more hours, tops, sir.”

  “Fine.” Morris smiled. “We can worry about the Mickey Mouse later. Get back to work, Mister—”

  “Lyles, sir. Ship control officer.”

  And what the hell is that? Morris wondered. “Okay, Mr. Lyles. Where’s the XO?”

  “Right here, skipper.” The executive officer had grease on his shirt and a smudge on his cheek. “I was in the generator room. Pardon the way I look.”

  “What kind of shape are we in?”

  “It’ll do. Full load of fuel and weapons. The tail’s fully calibrated—”

  “How’d you do that so fast?”

  “It wasn’t easy, sir, but we got it done. How’s Captain Wilkens?”

  “The docs say he’ll be all right, but—well, he’s out of the business for a while. I’m Ed Morris.” Captain and executive officer shook hands.

  “Frank Ernst. First time I’ve operated in the Atlantic Fleet.” The lieutenant commander smiled crookedly. “Picked a great time for it. Anyway, we’re in good shape, skipper. Everything works. Our helo pilot’s up in the Combat Information Center with the tactical guys. We got Jerry the Hammer. I played ball with him at Annapolis, he’s good people. We got three real good chiefs. One’s a qualified officer of the deck. The crew’s on the young side, but I’d say we’re about as ready as you could ask. Ready to sail in two, three hours, tops. Where’s your personal gear, sir?”

  “It ought to be here in half an hour. What was the problem below?”

  “No sweat. An oil line let go on number-three diesel generator. Yard goof, wasn’t welded right. It’s fixed. You’ll love the engine room, skipper. On builder’s trials in five-foot seas we topped out at thirty-one-and-a-half knots.” Ernst raised his eyebrows. “Fast enough?”

  “And the stabilizers?” Morris asked.

  “They work just fine, skipper.”

  “What about the ASW troops?”

  “Let’s meet ’em.”

  Morris followed his XO into the superstructure. They proceeded forward between the two helicopter hangars, then to the left past officers’ country and up a ladder. The Combat Information Center was located one level below and just aft of the bridge, adjoining the commanding officer’s stateroom. Dark as a cave, it was newer than Pharris’s and larger, but no less crammed. Twenty or more people were at work running a simulation.

  “No, Goddammit!” howled a loud voice. “You have to react faster. This here’s a Victor, and he ain’t gonna wait for you to make up your damn mind!”

  “Attention on deck! Captain in Combat,” called Ernst.

  “As you were,” called Morris. “Who’s that loud sunuvabitch?”

  A barrel-chested man emerged from the shadows. His eyes were surrounded by crinkles from looking into too many low suns. So this was Jerry the Hammer O’Malley. He knew him only by a crackling voice on a UHF radio, and by his reputation as a sub-hunter who cared more for his trade than promotion boards.

  “I guess you mean me, Captain. O’Malley. I’m supposed to drive your Seahawk-Foxtrot.”

  “You’re right about the Victor. One of those bastards blew my first ship near in half.”

  “Sorry to hear that, but you oughta know that Ivan’s putting his best skippers in the Victors. She handles better than anything else they got, and that rewards a smart driver. So you were up against the varsity. Did you have him outside?”

  Morris shook his head. “We were late picking him up, just coming off a sprint, and acoustical conditions weren’t all that great, but we detected him, he couldn’t have been more than five miles out. We had the helo after him, just about had him localized, then he broke contact neat as you please and got inside on us.”

  “Yeah, the Victor’s good at that. Pump-fake, I call it. He starts going one way, then turns hard the other, leaves a knuckle in the water, and probably a noisemaker, too, right in the middle of it. Then he dives down under the layer and makes a quick sprint in. They’ve been refining that tactic for the past few years, and we’ve had trouble programming a reliable counter for it. You need a sharp crew in the helo, and you need good teamwork with these guys here.”

  “Unless you read my report, my friend, you must be a mind reader.”

  “Right, Captain. But all the minds I read think in Russian. The pump-fake’s what the Victor is best at, and you have to pay attention, what with his ability to accelerate and turn so quick. What I’ve been trying to teach people is when he shows turn to port, you start thinkin’ he’s really going to starboard, and you slide over maybe two thousand yards and wait a minute or two, then you hammer the bastard hard and pickle off the fish before he can react.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then you’re wrong, skipper. Mostly, though, Ivan’s predictable—if you think like a submariner and you look at his tactical situation instead of your own. You can’t keep him from running away, but his mission is to close on the target, and you can make life real hard for him if he does.”

  Morris looked O’Malley hard in the eyes. He didn’t like having the loss of his first command analyzed so glibly. But there was no time for these thoughts. O’Malley was a pro, and if there was a man to handle another Victor, this might be the one. “You all ready?”

  “The bird is at the air station. We’ll join up after you clear the capes. I wanted to talk things over with the ASW team while we had the time. We’re gonna play outside ASW picket?”

  “Probably. With a towed-array, it doesn’t figure that we’re going to be in close. And we might be teamed with a Brit for the convoy mission.”

  “Fair enough. If you want my opinion, we have a pretty solid ASW team here. We might just give the bad guys a hard time. Weren’t you on Rodgers a few years back?”

  “When you were working with the Moose. We worked together twice, but never met. I was ‘X-Ray Mike’ when we exercised against Skate.”

  “I thought I remembered you.” O’Malley came closer and dropped his voice. “How bad is it out there?”

  “Bad enough. We lost the G-I-UK line. We’re getting some pretty good SURTASS info, but you can bet Ivan’s going to be gunning for those tuna boats pretty soon. Between the air threat and the sub threat—I don’t know.” His face showed more than his voice did. Close friends dead or missing. His own first command blown in half. Morris was tired in a way that sleep alone would not cure.

  O’Malley nodded. “Skipper, we got us a shiny new frigate, a great new helo, and a tail. We can hold our end up.”

  “Well, we’ll have a shot soon enough. We sail for New York in two hours and take a convoy out on Wednesday.”

  “Alone?” O’Malley asked.

  “No, we’ll have Brit company for the New York run, HMS Battleaxe. The orders haven’t been confirmed yet, but it looks like we’ll be working
together all the way across.”

  “That’ll be useful,” Ernst agreed. “Come on aft, skipper, I’ll show you what we’re up to.” The sonar room was aft of CIC, closed off by a curtain. Here real lighting was on, as opposed to the darkened, red-light world of Combat.

  “Jeez, nobody ever tells me anything!” growled a young lieutenant commander. “Good morning, Captain. I’m Lenner, combat systems officer.”

  “How come you’re not at your scope?”

  “We froze the game, skipper, and I wanted to check out the display on playback.”

  “I brought the game tape myself,” O’Malley explained. “This is the track of a Victor-III that faked out one of our carriers in the eastern Med last year. See here? That’s the pump-fake. You’ll notice that the contact fades out, then brightens up. That’s the noisemaker inside the knuckle. At this point he ducked under the layer and sprinted inside the screen. Would’ve hit the carrier, too, because they didn’t get him for another ten minutes. That”—he jammed his finger at the display—“is what you look for. This tells you you’re up against a driver who knows his stuff, and he’s out for your ass.” Morris examined the screen closely enough to recognize the pattern. He’d seen it once before.

  “What if they use the maneuver to break clear?” Lenner asked.

  “Because if they can break contact, why not break contact toward the target?” Morris asked quietly, noting that he had a very young combat systems officer.

  “That’s right, skipper.” O’Malley nodded ruefully. “Like I said, this is a standard tactic for them, and it rewards a sharp driver. The aggressive ones will always bore in. The ones who break off—that’s effectively a kill. We have to reacquire, but so do they. With a twenty-knot speed of advance, once we get past them, they have to play catch-up. That means making noise. The guy who runs away probably won’t run the risk, or if he does, he’ll do it badly and we’ll get him. No, this tactic is for the guy who really wants to get in close. Question is, how many of their skippers are that aggressive?”

  “Enough.” Morris looked away for a moment. “How’s the helicopter complement?”

  “Only one flight crew for the bird. My copilot’s pretty green, but our on-board systems operator’s a first-class petty officer who’s been around the block a few times. The maintenance guys are a pickup bunch, mostly from the readiness group at Jax. I’ve talked to them, they should do just fine.”

  “We got berths for them all?” Morris asked.

  Ernst shook his head. “Not hardly. We’re packed pretty tight.”

  “O’Malley, is your copilot deck-qualified?”

  “Not on a frigate. I am—hell, I did some of the first systems trials back in ’78. We’ll have to do workups on the way to New York, both day and night to get my ensign in the groove. Scratch team, skipper. The bird doesn’t even belong to an operational squadron.”

  “You sounded confident a minute ago,” Morris objected.

  “I am fairly confident,” O’Malley said. “My people know how to use the tools they got. They’re sharp kids. They’ll learn fast. And we even get to make up our own call signs.” A wide grin. Certain things are important to aviators. There was one other unspoken message: when O’Malley referred to the aviation department as “my people,” he meant that he didn’t want any interference in how he ran his shop. Morris ignored it. He didn’t want an argument, not now.

  “Okay, XO, let’s look around. O’Malley, I expect we’ll rendezvous off the capes.”

  “The helo’s ready to launch right now, Captain. We’ll be there when you want us.”

  Morris nodded and went forward. The captain’s personal ladder to the bridge was a bare three feet from the CIC door, and his own. He trotted up—or tried to, his legs rubbery with exhaustion.

  “Captain on the bridge!” a petty officer announced.

  Morris was not impressed. He was appalled to see that the ship’s “wheel” was only a brass dial about the size of a telephone’s. The helmsman actually had a seat, offset from the centerline, and to his right was a clear plastic box containing the direct-control throttle to the ship’s jet-turbine engines. A metal rod suspended from the overhead ran completely from one side of the pilothouse to the other at a height that allowed it to be grabbed easily in heavy seas, an eloquent comment on this ship’s stability.

  “Have you served on a ‘fig’ before, sir?” the XO asked.

  “Never been aboard one,” Morris answered. The heads of the four men on bridge watch each turned a hair at that. “I know the weapons systems; I was part of the design team at NAVSEA back a few years ago, and I know more or less how she handles.”

  “She handles, sir. Like a sports car,” Ernst assured him. “You’ll especially like the way we can turn the engines off, drift as quiet as a log, then be up to thirty knots in two minutes flat.”

  “How quickly can we get under way?”

  “Ten minutes from your say-so, Captain. The engine lube oil is already warmed up. There’s a harbor tug standing by to assist us away from the dock.”

  “NAVSURFLANT, arriving,” boomed the announcing system. Two minutes later, the Admiral appeared in the pilothouse.

  “I have a man bringing your gear up. What do you think?”

  “XO, will you see to the provisioning?” Morris said to Ernst, then, “Shall we discover my stateroom together, Admiral?”

  A steward was waiting for them below with a tray of coffee and sandwiches. Morris poured himself a cup, another for the Admiral, and ignored the food.

  “Sir, I’ve never handled one of these before. I don’t know the engines—”

  “You’ve got a great chief engineer and she’s a dream to handle. Besides, you have your conning officers. You’re a weapons and tactics man, Ed. All your work is done in CIC. We need you out there.”

  “Fair enough, sir.”

  “XO, take her out,” Morris ordered two hours later. He watched Ernst’s every move, embarrassed that he had to depend on another to do it.

  But it was amazingly easy. The wind was off the pier, and the frigate had a huge sail area that invited help. As the mooring lines were slackened off, the wind and the auxiliary power units located on the hull directly under the bridge pushed James’s bow into the clear, then the gas-turbine engines moved her forward into the channel. Ernst took his time, though he was clearly capable of doing it faster. Morris took careful note of this, too. The man didn’t want to make his captain look bad.

  From there on it was easy, and Ed Morris watched his new crew at work. He’d heard stories about the California Navy—like, okay, man—but the quartermasters at the chart table updated the position with crisp assurance, despite the unfamiliar harbor. They glided noiselessly past the piers of the navy yard. He saw empty berths that would not soon be filled, and not a few ships whose sleek gray hulls were marred with scorched holes and twisted steel. Kidd was there, her forward superstructure wrecked by a Russian missile that had gotten past her multilayered defenses. One of his sailors was looking that way, too, a boy still in his teens, puffing on a cigarette which he flicked over the side. Morris wanted to ask what he was thinking, but could scarcely describe his own thoughts.

  It went quickly after that. They turned east at the empty carrier berthings, over the Hampton bridge-tunnel, then past the crowded amphibious basin at Little Creek. Now the sea beckoned them, forbiddingly gray under the cloudy sky.

  HMS Battleaxe was already out there, three miles ahead, a subtly different shade on her hull, and the White Ensign fluttering at her mast. A signal light started blinking at them.

  WHAT THE DEVIL IS A REUBEN JAMES, Battleaxe Wanted to know.

  “How do you want to answer that, sir?” a signalman asked.

  Morris laughed, the ominous spell broken. “Signal, ‘At least we don’t name warships for our mother-in-law. ’ ”

  “All right!” The petty officer loved it.

  STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND

  “The Blinder isn’t supposed to be able to
carry missiles,” Toland said, but what he saw gave the lie to that intelligence assessment. Six missiles had gotten through the defending fighters and landed inside the perimeter of the RAF base. Two aircraft were burning, half a mile away, and one of the base’s radars was wrecked.

  “Well, now we know why their activity has been light the past few days. They were refitting their bombers to deal with our new fighter force,” Group Captain Mallory said, surveying the damage to his base. “Action, reaction. We learn, they learn.”

  The fighters were returning. Toland counted them off in his head. He came up short by two Tornados and one Tomcat. As soon as the landing rolls were completed, each fighter taxied to its shelter. The RAF did not have enough permanent ones. Three of the American fighters ended up in sandbag revetments where ground crews immediately refueled and rearmed their aircraft. The crews climbed down their ladders to waiting jeeps and were driven off for debriefing.

  “Bastards used our own trick on us!” one Tomcat pilot exclaimed.

  “Okay, what did you run into?”

  “There were two groups, about ten miles apart. Lead group was MiG-23 Floggers with the Blinders behind them. The MiGs launched before we did. They really knocked our radars back with white noise, and some of their fighters were using something brand new, a deceptive jammer we haven’t run across yet. They must have been at the edge of their fuel, ’cause they didn’t try to mix it up with us. I guess they just wanted to keep us off the bombers until they launched. Damn near worked. A flight of Tornados came around them on the left and bagged four of the Blinders, I think. We got a pair of MiGs—no Blinders—and the boss vectored the rest of the Toms onto the missiles. I splashed two. Anyway, Ivan’s changed tactics on us. We lost one Tomcat, I don’t know what got him.”

  “Next time,” another pilot said. “We go up with some of our missiles pre-set to go after the jammers. We didn’t have enough time to set that up. If we can get the jammers first, it’ll be easier to handle the fighters.”