by Tom Clancy
“That’s a real good question, skipper. Pick our routes carefully, keep low, use dead ground—all the usual stuff. But the map shows a little bay that comes within four miles of them. We can’t detour around the far side without running into the main road—can’t hardly do that.”
“What’s the problem?” Sergeant Nichols arrived. Smith explained matters. Edwards got on the radio.
“You just know they’re on the hilltop, not strength or weapons, right?” Doghouse asked.
“Correct.”
“Damn. We wanted you on that hill.” Now there’s a surprise, Edwards thought. “No chance you can go up that hill?”
“None. Say again no chance at all. I can think of easier ways to commit suicide, mister. Let me think this one over and get back to you. Okay?”
“Very well, we’ll be waiting. Out.”
Edwards got his sergeants together and they started exploring the maps.
“Really a question of how many men they have there, and how alert they are,” Nichols thought. “If they have a platoon there, we can expect some patrol activity. Next question is how much? I wouldn’t be very keen on doing that hill twice a day myself.”
“How many men would you put there?” Edwards asked.
“Ivan has a whole paratroop division here, plus other attachments. Call it ten thousand men total. He can’t garrison the entire island, can he? So, would he have a rifle platoon on this or any other hilltop, or just a spotting team—artillery observers, that sort of mob. They’re looking for your invasion force, and from up there a man with a decent spyglass can cover all of this bay to our north, and probably see all the way to bloody Keflavik the other way. They’ll also be looking for aircraft.”
“You’re trying to make it sound easy?” Smith wondered.
“I think we can approach the hill safely enough, then wait for nightfall—what of it we have—and try to pass under them then. They will have the sun in their eyes, you know.”
“You’ve done this before?” Edwards asked.
Nichols nodded. “Falklands. We were there a week before the invasion to scout various things. Same thing we’re doing now.”
“They haven’t said anything on the radio about an invasion.”
“Leftenant, this is where your Marines are going to land. No one’s told me as much, but they didn’t send us here to find a football pitch, did they?” Nichols was in his mid-thirties, approaching twenty years of service. He was by far the oldest member of the party, and the past few days of serving under a rank amateur had chafed on him. The one nice thing about this young weatherman, however, was his willingness to listen.
“Okay, they wanted us on this hill to eyeball things, too. How about this smaller peak to the west of the main summit?”
“We’ll have to go far out of our way to be able to climb without being seen, but yes, we can establish ourselves there, I think. So long as they are not terribly alert, that is.”
“Okay, once we cross this road, we keep together in one group. You got the point, Sergeant Nichols. I’d suggest we rest up a bit. Looks like we’ll have to be on the move for quite a while once we get moving.”
“Eight miles to the foot of the hill. We will want to be there about sunset.”
Edwards checked his watch. “Okay, we start moving in an hour.” He walked over to Vigdis.
“So, Michael, what do we do now?” He explained the situation to her at length.
“We’re going to be close to some Russians. It might be dangerous.”
“You ask if I want to not go with you?”
Say yes and hurt her feelings. Say no and . . . shit!
“I don’t want to see you hurt any more.”
“I stay with you, Michael. I am safe with you.”
SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND
It took several hours to pump out the water that had given her the false list, an impression that had been reinforced by the ostentatious activities of divers. The powerful tugs Catcombe and Vecta moved her slowly aft into the Solent. Her flight deck had been fully repaired by the Vosper shipwrights though so much of the gray steel showed the slapdash bandage work of a job done more in haste than in consideration for the ship’s proud name. Two thousand men had done the job. New arresting gear had been flown in from America, along with electronic equipment that came nowhere near replacing what the Russian missiles had destroyed. The tugs escorted her to Calshot Castle, then she moved alone south to Thorn Channel, east by the yachts docked at Cowes. Escorts were waiting at Portsmouth, then the small formation turned south and west into the English Channel.
Flight operations began at once. The first aircraft to arrive were the Corsair attack bombers, then the heavier Intruders and the sub-hunting Vikings. USS Nimitz was back in business.
USS CHICAGO
“—and shoot!” Three hours of excruciating work distilled down to half a second. The now-familiar shudder of compressed air ejected a pair of torpedoes into the black water of the Barents Sea.
The Soviet commander had been just a little too eager to verify Chicago’s death and allowed his frigate to run in close behind his two remaining Grishas. All three ships were pinging at the bottom, looking for a dead submarine. You didn’t expect us to run south, did you? North or east, maybe, but not south. McCafferty had maneuvered his submarine wide around the Russian frigate, staying at the fringe of her sonar range, then closed up two thousand yards behind her. One fish for the Krivak and one running for the nearest patrol boat.
“No change in target course and speed, sir.” The torpedo raced after the Soviet frigate. “He’s still pinging the other way, sir.”
The waterfall display lit up, a bright dot on the contact’s tone line. Simultaneously the thundering explosion echoed through the hull.
“Up scope!” McCafferty met the eyepiece at deck level and worked it up slowly. “That’s a kill. We broke her back. Okay . . .” He turned to the bearing of the near Grisha. “Okay, target number two is turning—wow. there go his engines. Increasing speed and going left.”
“Skipper, the wire’s cut on the fish.”
“How long on the run?”
“Another four minutes, sir.” In four minutes at full speed the Grisha would be outside the torpedo’s acquisition radius.
“Damn, it’s going to miss. Down scope. Let’s get out of here. We’ll go east this time. Make your depth four hundred, all ahead two-thirds. Come right to zero-five-five.”
“Must have been the shock of the explosion, sir. Half a second later, the control wires let go on the number-two fish.” McCafferty and his weapons officer reexamined the plot.
“You’re right. I cut that one too close. Okay.” The captain stepped over to the chart table. “Where do you figure our friends are?”
“Right about here, sir. Twenty- to twenty-five miles.”
“I think we’ve taken enough heat off them. Let’s see if we can get back up there while Ivan tries to figure out what’s going on.”
“We’ve been lucky, skipper,” the exec observed.
“That’s true enough. I want to know where their submarines are. That Victor we got just walked across our sights. Where are the rest of ’em? They can’t just be chasing after us with these.” Of course not, McCafferty realized. The Russians set up hunting preserves, sectors limited to specific types of ships. Their surface ships and aircraft would be in one sector, and next to it their submarines would have exclusive hunting rights . . .
He told himself that he’d done well to date. Three patrol boats, a full-sized frigate, and a sub, quite a week in anybody’s book. But it wasn’t over. Not until they got Providence to the ice.
38
Stealth on the Rocks
ICELAND
The first leg of the trip was only eight miles in a straight line, but the line they traveled was straight in no dimension. The terrain here was volcanic also, littered with rocks large and small. The large ones made shadows, and whenever possible they stayed in them, but with every step the
y had also to detour, uphill and down, left and right, until every yard of forward travel was accompanied by a yard in another direction, and eight miles became sixteen.
For the first time, Edwards knew that he was under possible observation. Even when the hilltop they skirted was hidden by a ridge, who could say that the Russians did not have another scouting party out? Who could be sure that they were not being watched, that some Russian sergeant with binoculars had noticed their rifles and packs, then picked up his portable radio and sent out a call for an armed helicopter? The effort of the walk made their hearts beat fast. Fear made their hearts beat faster still, compounding their fatigue like interest on a usurer’s loan.
Sergeant Nichols proved an efficient leader, and a hard one. The oldest member of the party, his stamina—sore ankle and all—amazed Edwards. They all kept quiet, no one wanted to make noise, and Nichols was unable to growl at those too slow to keep up. His contemptuous look was enough. He’s ten years older than me, Edwards told himself, and I’m a track man. I can keep up with this bastard. Can’t I?
Nichols managed to keep them clear of the coast road for most of their journey, but there was one point where the road looped around a small cove to within a mile of their path. Here they faced a cruel choice: risk observation from the road, where the traffic was probably Russian, or from the mountaintop. They risked the road, slowly and gingerly as they watched traffic motor along every fifteen minutes or so. The sun was low in the northwestern sky as they crept up a ravine with steep walls. They found a rockpile to rest in before their dash below the observation post.
“Well, that was a nice day’s walk, wasn’t it?” the sergeant of Royal Marines asked. He wasn’t even sweating.
“You trying to prove something, Sergeant?” Edwards asked. He was.
“Sorry, Leftenant. Your friends told me you were in proper shape.”
“I don’t think I’ll have a heart attack just yet, if that’s what you mean. Now what?”
“I’d suggest that we wait an hour, until the sun sinks lower, then press on. Nine more miles. We’ll want to move as quick as we can.”
Sweet Jesus! Edwards thought. He kept his face impassive. “You sure they won’t see us?”
“Sure? No, I am not sure, Leftenant. Twilight is the hardest time to see, however. The eye cannot adjust from the bright sky to the dark ground.”
“Okay, you got us this far. I’m going to go and check on the lady.”
Nichols watched him walk off. “I would not mind seeing ‘the lady’ myself.”
“That wasn’t a good thing to say, Nick,” Smith observed quietly.
“Come on, you know what he’s—”
“Nick, talk nice about the lady,” Smith warned. He was tired, but not that tired. “She’s had a bad time, man. And the skipper’s a gentleman, y’dig? Hey, I thought he was a wimp, too. I was wrong. Anyway, Miss Vigdis, man, that’s one hell of a lady.”
Mike found her curled in a fetal position next to a rock. Rodgers was keeping an eye on her, and moved off when the lieutenant arrived.
“How are you?” Mike asked. She turned her head fractionally.
“Dead. Michael, I am so tired.”
“Me, too, babe.” Mike sat down beside her and stretched his legs out, wondering if the muscle tissue would just fall off the bones. He was strong enough to stroke her hair. It was matted with sweat, but Mike was past noticing such things. “Just a little while longer. Hey, you’re the one who wanted to stay with us, remember?”
“I am fool!” There was a note of humor in her voice. As long as you can laugh, Mike remembered his father saying, you are not defeated.
“Come on, you better stretch those legs out or they’re gonna knot up. Come on, roll over.” Edwards straightened her legs and massaged her calves briefly. “What we need is some bananas.”
“What?” Her head came up.
“Bananas have lots of potassium. Helps to prevent cramps.” Or was it calcium for pregnant women? he wondered.
“What do we do when we get to our new hill?”
“We wait for the good guys.”
“They come?” Her voice changed slightly.
“I think so.”
“And you leave then?” Mike was quiet for a moment, measuring his boldness against his shyness. What if she says—
“Not without you, I don’t.” He hesitated again. “I mean, if that’s—”
“Yes, Michael.”
He lay down beside her. Edwards was startled by the fact that he desired her now. She was no longer the victim of rape, or a girl pregnant by another man, or a strange person from another culture. He was awed by her inner strength and other things for which he had no names, and needed none.
“You’re right. I do love you.” Son of a bitch. He held her hand as both rested for the task ahead.
USS CHICAGO
“That’s one of ’em, sir. Providence, I think. I got some funny transients, like metal pieces beating against each other.”
They’d been tracking the target—every contact was a target—for two hours, closing very carefully as the possible noise source changed into a probable one. The overhead storm degraded their sonar performance measurably, and the target’s stealth prevented their developing a signature identification for an agonizing period. Might she be a Russian sub creeping in search of her own target? Finally the faint rattles from the damaged sail betrayed her. Mc-Caffcrty ordered his boat to close the target at eight knots.
Had Providence repaired her sonar systems? Certainly they’d try, McCafferty thought, and if they then detected a submarine approaching very cautiously from the rear, would they think this was their old friend Chicago, or another Victor-III? For that matter, how sure were they that their target was Providence? That was why American subs were trained to operate alone. Too many uncertainties attached to cooperative operations.
They’d left the Soviet surface forces behind. McCafferty’s hit-and-run maneuver had fooled them, and before the noise faded out, they listened to a spirited hunt involving aircraft and surface forces, now thirty miles astern. That was a positive development, but the absence of any surface ships in this area made McCafferty uneasy. He might now be in a submarine-dedicated sector, and submarines were by far the more dangerous opponents. His earlier success against the Victor had been pure luck. That Soviet skipper had been too interested in starting his own hunt to check his flanks. It was a mistake he did not expect to be repeated.
“Range?” McCafferty asked his tracking party.
“About two miles, sir.”
That was the fringe of gertrude range, but McCafferty wanted to get a lot closer than that. Patience, he told himself. Submarining was a continuous exercise in patience. You spent hours in preparation for a few seconds of activity. It’s a wonder we don’t all have ulcers. Twenty minutes later, they had closed to within a thousand yards of Providence. McCafferty lifted the gertrude phone.
“Chicago calling Providence, over.”
“You took your time about it, Danny.”
“Where’s Todd?”
“He went off west after something two hours ago. We lost him. No noise at all from that direction.”
“What’s your condition?”
“The tail works. Rest of our sonar’s shot. We can shoot fish from the torpedo-room control systems. Still raining in the control room, but we can live with it as long as we stay above three hundred feet.”
“Can you go any faster?”
“We tried going to eight knots. Found out we couldn’t keep it up. The sail’s coming apart. The noise just gets worse. I can give you six, that’s it.”
“Very well. If you got a working tail, we’ll try to take station a few miles ahead. Call it five miles.”
“Thanks, Danny.”
McCafferty hung up the phone. “Sonar, you got anything that even looks like it might be something?”
“No, sir, it’s clear right now.”
“All ahead two-thirds.” So, where the hell i
s Boston? the captain asked himself.
“Funny how quiet things have got,” the exec pointed out.
“Tell me about it. I know I’m acting paranoid, but am I acting paranoid enough!” McCafferty needed the laugh. “Okay. We sprint and drift north, fifteen minutes sprint, ten drift, until we’re five miles ahead of Providence. Then we settle down to six knots and continue the mission. I’m going to catch a nap. Wake me in two hours. Talk to the division officers and chiefs, make sure the troops are getting some rest. We’ve been pushing pretty hard. I don’t want anybody to fold up.” McCafferty grabbed half a sandwich as he walked forward. It was only eight steps to his stateroom. The food was swallowed by then.
“Captain to control!” It seemed he had only just closed his eyes when the speaker over his head went off. McCafferty checked his watch on the way out the door. He’d been asleep for ninety minutes. It would have to do.
“What do we got?” he asked the exec.
“Possible submarine contact on the port quarter. Just picked it up. We got a bearing change already—it’s close. No signature yet.”
“Boston?”
“Could be.”
I wish Todd hadn’t gone off like that, McCafferty told himself. He found himself wondering if they shouldn’t just tell Providence to go to her best speed and screw the noise. That was fatigue talking, he knew. Tired people make mistakes, especially judgmental errors. Captains can’t afford those, Danny.
Chicago was making six knots. No noise at all, the captain thought. Nobody can hear us . . . maybe, probably. You don’t really know anymore, do you? He went into the sonar room.
“How you feeling, Chief?”
“Hangin’ in there, skipper. This contact’s a beaut. See how he fades in and out. He’s there, all right, but it’s a cast-iron bitch to hold him.”
“Boston headed off west a few hours ago.”
“Could be him coming back, sir. Lord knows he’s quiet enough. Or it could be a Tango on batteries, sir. I don’t have enough signal to tell the difference. Sorry, sir. I just don’t know.” The chief rubbed raw eyes and let out a long breath.