by Tom Clancy
Beattie tore the page off and handed it to his air-operations officer. “That puts them on the ground in thirty-seven minutes. Assuming it’s the last group, and a fifteen-minute spread, the first bombers will be landing in twenty-two minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes from now, then?”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“Get the order out!”
In thirty seconds half a dozen separate satellite channels began transmitting the same message.
USS CHICAGO
The three American submarines had lain on the bottom of the Barents Sea near the Russian coastline—so near, it was only one hundred seventy-four feet of water—for what seemed like half a lifetime, before finally receiving the signal to move south. McCafferty smiled with relief. The three British submarines, including HMS Torbay, had already done their job. They had sneaked up on a Russian frigate and four patrol boats patrolling the Russian/Norwegian coastline and attacked with torpedoes. The Russians could only assume a major effort was under way to penetrate their patrol barrier, and had sent their antisub patrol force west to meet it.
Leaving the way clear for Chicago and her mates. He hoped.
As they closed in, his electronics technicians plotted and re-plotted their bearings. They had to be in exactly the right place when they fired their missiles.
“How long before we shoot?” the XO asked.
“They’ll let us know,” McCafferty said.
And then, with the chatter of the message from Northwood, they did know.
They would launch at 1602 Zulu Time.
“Up scope.” McCafferty spun the instrument around. A rainstorm overhead drove four-foot waves.
“Looks clear to me,” the XO said, watching the TV display.
The captain slapped the handles up on the scope. It headed down into its well. “ESM?”
“Lots of radar stuff, Cap’n,” the technician replied. “I show ten different transmitters in operation.”
McCafferty inspected the Tomahawk weapons status board on the starboard side of the attack center. His torpedo tubes were loaded with two Mark-48s and two Harpoon missiles. The clock ticked away toward 1602.
“Commence launch sequence.”
Toggle switches were thrown, and the weapons status lights blinked red; the captain and the weapons officer inserted their keys in the panel, and turned them; the petty officer on the weapons board turned the firing handle to the left—and the arming process was complete. Forward, in the bow of the submarine, the guidance systems of twelve Tomahawk cruise missiles were fully activated. On-board computers were told where their flight would begin. They already knew where it was supposed to end.
“Initiate launch,” McCafferty ordered.
Ametist was not part of the regular Soviet Navy. Principally concerned with security operations, this Grisha-class patrol frigate was manned by a KGB crew, and her captain had spent the last twelve hours sprinting and drifting, dipping his helicopter-type sonar and listening in the American fashion rather than the Russian. With her diesel engines shut down, she made no noise at all, and her short profile was hard to spot from more than a mile away. She had not heard the American submarines approach.
The first Tomahawk broke the surface of the Barents Sea at 16:01:58, two thousand yards from the Russian frigate. The lookout took a second or two to react. As he saw the cylindrical shape rise on its solid-rocket booster and arc southwest, an icy lead ball materialized in his stomach.
“Captain! Missile launch to starboard!”
The captain raced out onto the bridge wing and looked on in amazement as a second missile broke the surface, then he leaped back into the pilothouse.
“Battle stations! Radio room, call Fleet HQ, tell them enemy missiles launching from grid square 451/679—now! All ahead full! Rudder right!”
The frigate’s diesel engines roared into life.
“What in hell is that?” the sonar chief asked. His submarine shuddered every four seconds with the missile launches, but—“Conn, sonar, we have a contact bearing zero-nine-eight. Diesel—surface ship, sounds like a Grisha, and he’s close, sir!”
“Up scope!” McCafferty whirled the periscope around and snapped the handle to full power. He saw the Russian frigate turning hard. “Snap shot! Set it up! Surface target bearing zero-nine-seven, range”—he worked the stademeter control—“one six hundred, course, shit! he’s turning away. Call it zero-nine-zero, speed twenty.” Too close for a missile shot, they had to engage with torpedoes. “Down scope!”
The fire-control man tapped the numbers into the computer. The computer needed eleven seconds to digest the information. “Set! Ready for tubes one and three.”
“Flooding tubes, outer doors open—ready!” the XO said.
“Match generated bearings and shoot!”
“Fire one, fire three.” The executive officer struggled with his emotions and won. Where had that Grisha come from? “Reload with 48s!”
“Last bird away!” the missile technician announced. “Securing from launch.”
“Left full rudder!”
Ametist never saw the missiles launching behind her. The men were too busy racing to stations, while her captain rang up full power and the ship’s weapons officer ran up in his shorts to work the rocket launchers. They didn’t need sonar for this; they could see all too well where the submarine was—firing missiles at the Motherland!
“Fire when ready!” the captain yelled.
The lieutenant’s thumb came down on the firing key. Twelve antisubmarine rockets arched through the air.
“Ametist,” the radio squawked. “Repeat your message—what missiles? What kind of missiles!”
USS Providence discharged her last missile just as the frigate fired at her. The captain ordered flank speed and a radical turn even as the rockets tipped over and began to fall toward his submarine. They fell in a wide circular pattern designed to cover the maximum possible area, two exploding within one hundred yards, close enough to startle but not to damage. The last one hit the water directly over the submarine’s sail. A second later, the forty-six-pound warhead exploded.
Ametist’s captain ignored the radio while he tried to decide if his first salvo had hit the target or not. The last rocket had exploded faster than the others. He was about to give the order to fire again when the sonar officer reported two objects approaching from aft, and he shouted rudder orders. The ship was already at full speed as the radio speaker continued to scream at him.
“Both fish have acquired the target!”
“Up scope!” McCafferty let it go all the way up before pulling the handles down. At full magnification the Grisha nearly filled the lens, and then both fish hit her port side and the thousand-ton patrol frigate disintegrated before his eyes. He turned completely around, sweeping the horizon to check for additional enemy ships. “Okay, it’s clear.”
“That won’t last very long. He was shooting at Providence, sir.”
“Sonar, what do you have on zero-nine-zero?” McCafferty asked.
“Lotsa noise from the fish, sir, but I think we have blowing air at zero-nine-eight.”
“Get us over there.” McCafferty kept the periscope up as the XO conned the sub toward Providence. The Grisha was well and truly destroyed. Together the torpedoes carried nearly fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives. He saw two life rafts that had inflated automatically on hitting the water, but no men.
“Boston is calling on the gertrude, skipper. They want to know what the hell happened.”
“Tell ’em.” The captain adjusted the periscope slightly. “Okay, there she is, she’s surfacing—holy shit!”
The submarine’s sail was wrecked, the after third of it completely gone, and the rest shredded. One diving plane hung down like the wing of a crippled bird, and the periscopes and masts housed in the structure were bent into the shape of a modernistic sculpture.
“Try to raise Providence on the gertrude.”
Sixty Tomahawk missiles were now in the air.
On leaving the water, solid-fuel rockets had boosted them to an altitude of one thousand feet, where their wings and jet-engine air inlets had deployed. As soon as their jet engines had begun to function, the Tomahawks began a shallow descent that ended thirty feet above the ground. On-board radar systems scanned ahead to keep the missiles close to the ground, and to match the terrain with map coordinates stored in their computer memories. Six separate Soviet radars detected the missiles’ boost phase, then lost them as they went low.
The Russian technicians whose job it was to watch for a possible nuclear attack against their homeland were every bit as tense as their Western counterparts, and the weeks of sustained conventional conflict, coupled with continuous maximum-alert status, had frayed nerves to the breaking point. As soon as the Tomahawks had been detected rising from the sea, a ballistic-missile attack warning had flashed to Moscow. Ametist’s visual missile warning arrived at naval headquarters in Severomorsk almost as fast, and a THUNDERBOLT alert sent immediately, the code-word prefix guaranteeing instant passage to the Ministry of Defense. Launch authority for the antiballistic missiles deployed around Moscow was automatically released to the battery commanders, and though it was several minutes before radar officers were able to confirm to Moscow’s satisfaction that the missiles had dropped off their scopes and were not on ballistic trajectories, defense units stayed on alert, and all over northern Russia air-defense interceptors scrambled.
The missiles could not have cared about the furor they had caused. At this point, the Russian coast was composed of rocky bluffs and cliffs that gave way to tundra, the flat marsh of northern climes. It was ideal terrain for the cruise missiles, which settled down to a flight path scant feet over the grassy swamps at a speed of five hundred knots. Each flew over Lake Babozero, their first navigational reference point, and there their flight paths diverged.
The Soviet fighters now lifting off the ground had little idea what they were after. Radar information gave the course and speed of the targets, but if they were cruise missiles, they could reach as far as the Black Sea coast. They could even be targeted on Moscow and be flying a deceptive course far off the direct path to the Soviet capital. On orders from their ground controllers, the interceptors arrayed themselves south of the White Sea, and switched on their look-down radars to see if they could spot the missiles crossing the flat surface.
But they weren’t going to Moscow. Dodging between the occasional hills, the missiles flew on a bearing of two-one-three until they reached the scrub pine forest. One by one they banked hard to the right and changed course to two-nine-zero. One missile went out of control and fell to the earth, another failed to make the turn and went south. The rest continued to their targets.
SEA EAGLE TWO-SIX
The last Backfire bomber circled Umbozero-South, waiting to land. The pilot checked his fuel. About thirty minutes left, there was not that much of a hurry. For security reasons the three regiments were divided among four airfields clustered south of the mining city of Kirovsk. The tall hills around the town held powerful radars and mobile SAM batteries to stave off a NATO air attack. Most of the smelters were still operating, the pilot saw, the smoke rising from the many tall chimneys.
“Sea Eagle Two-Six, you are cleared to land,” the tower said finally.
“Who will it be tonight, Volodya?”
“Twenty degrees of flaps. Air speed two hundred. Landing gear is down and locked. Irina Petrovna, I think. The tall, skinny one at the telephone exchange.”
“What’s that?” the pilot asked. A small white object suddenly appeared over the runway in front of him.
The first of twelve Tomahawk missiles assigned to Umbozero-South cut across the runway at a shallow angle, then the blunt nose cover sprang off the airframe, and several hundred small bomblets began to sprinkle over the area. Seventeen Backfires were already on the ground. Ten were being refueled from trucks in the open, the others were armed and ready for another mission, dispersed in concrete revetments. Each bomblet was the equivalent of a mortar shell. The Tomahawk dropped its complete load, then climbed straight up, stalled, and crashed back to earth, adding its own fuel load to the destruction. A ready-force Backfire went first. Two bomblets fell on its wing and the bomber fireballed into the sky.
The pilot of Two-Six advanced his throttles and climbed out of the landing pattern, watching in horror as ten bombers exploded before his eyes and telltale puffs of smoke told him of less serious damage to many others. In two minutes, it was over. Crash trucks raced like toys along the concrete as men played fire hoses on the burning trucks and aircraft. The pilot headed north for his alternate field and saw smoke rising there also.
“Fifteen minutes’ fuel. You’d better find us a place fast,” Volodya warned. They turned left for Kirovsk-South and the same story was repeated. The attack had been timed for the missiles to hit all four targets simultaneously.
“Afrikanda, this is Sea Eagle Two-Six. We are low on fuel and need to land immediately. Can you take us?”
“Affirmative, Two-Six. Runway is clear. Wind is two-six-five at twenty.”
“Very well, we’re coming in. Out.” The pilot turned. “What the hell was that?” he asked Volodya.
USS CHICAGO
“Communications is gone, fire-control is gone, fairwater planes gone. We stopped the leaks. Engines are okay, we can steam,” the skipper of USS Providence said over the gertrude.
“Very well. Stand by.” Boston was also alongside. “Todd, this is Danny. What do you think?”
“She won’t make it out alone. I suggest we send the rest back out. You and me escort her.”
“Agreed. You follow ’em out. We’ll try to clear datum as quick as we can.”
“Good luck, Danny.” Boston raised her radio whip and made a quick transmission. A minute later Chicago’s sonar showed the noise of the other submarines racing north.
“Providence, recommend you come to course zero-one-five and go as fast as you can. We’ll cover your tail. Boston will rendezvous later and we’ll both escort you to the pack.”
“You can’t risk it, we can—”
“Move your fucking boat!” McCafferty shouted into the microphone. He was exactly three months senior in rank to his counterpart on Providence. Presently the wounded submarine dived and headed northeast at fifteen knots. Her damaged sail structure sounded like a junk wagon in the waterflow, but there was nothing they could do about it. If the submarines were to have any chance of survival, they had to put as much distance between themselves and the firing point as they could.
MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.
Mikhail Sergetov looked around at a group of men still pale at what might have been.
“Comrade Defense Minister,” the General Secretary said. “Can you tell us what has happened?”
“It would seem that submarines launched a number of cruise missiles at some of our northern airfields. Their aim was evidently to destroy a number of our Backfire bombers. How successful they were I do not yet know.”
“Where did they launch their missiles from?” Pyotr Bromkovskiy asked.
“East of Murmansk, less than thirty kilometers from our coast. A frigate saw and reported the launch, then went off the air. We have aircraft searching for him now.”
“How the hell did he get there! If that submarine had launched ballistic missiles at us,” Bromkovskiy demanded, “how much warning would we have had?”
“Six to seven minutes.”
“Wonderful! We cannot react that fast. How can you let them get so close!”
“They won’t get out, Petya, I promise you that!” the Defense Minister replied heatedly.
The General Secretary leaned forward. “You will see to it that this can never happen again!”
“While we are all here, Comrades,” Sergetov spoke up. “Can the Comrade Defense Minister review overnight developments on the German Front?”
“NATO forces are strained to the breaking point. As the KGB has told us, their supplies are criti
cally low, and with the diplomatic developments of the past few days, I think we may safely assume that NATO is on the verge of political disintegration. All we have to do is keep the pressure on, and they must collapse!”
“But we are running out of fuel also!” Bromkovskiy said. “The offer the Germans have given us is a reasonable one.”
“No.” The Foreign Minister shook his head emphatically. “This gives us nothing.”
“It gives us peace, Comrade,” Bromkovskiy said quietly. “If we continue—consider, my friends, consider what we were all thinking a few hours ago when the rocket warning came in.”
For the first time, Sergetov realized, the old man had made a point they all agreed with. After weeks and months of promises and plans and assurances on how things could be kept under control, that one false alarm had forced them to look at what lay over the edge of the abyss. For ten minutes they feared that control had been lost, and all the Defense Minister’s bluster could not make them forget that.
After a moment of consideration, the General Secretary spoke. “Our representatives are meeting with the Germans in a few hours. The Foreign Minister will report to us tomorrow on the substance of their new offer.”
On that note the session ended. Sergetov tucked his notes in his leather briefcase, left the room alone, and walked downstairs to his official car. A junior aide held the door open when a voice called.
“Mikhail Eduardovich, may I ride with you? My car has broken down.” It was Boris Kosov, chairman of the Committee for State Security, the KGB.
36
Shoot-out at 31 West!