Island Warriors c-18

by Keith Douglass

  “I’m the leading intelligence specialist here,” he said. “And ten days ago, I saw some very interesting pictures.” He caught himself, as though realizing he’d been presumptuous, and said, “Well, I’ll let you eat in peace and quiet. Like I said, give ’em hell. I figure a couple of days from now, I’ll know whether you did or not.”

  He left, with a victorious grin on his face.

  “There’s a lesson to be learned in this,” Tombstone said. “He caught what was going on and he wants to feel a part of the solution. He wants to see how his work fits into the larger picture, wants to know that what he does matters. He’s even willing to be a delivery boy to just get a look at us, and he’s risking a lot just letting us know who he is. You keep that in mind, Jason. That’s the sort of people we having backing us up, and with young men and women like that on our side, the Russians don’t stand a chance.”

  Tombstone saw the reflective look on the younger pilot’s face, and felt a rush of pride. His words had hit home — maybe, just maybe, Jason Greene would be a better man because Tombstone had reminded him about the little people in the world, the support troops that made everything else possible.

  Jason cleared his throat, then looked away.

  Touched — by damn, I got to him. His skipper in his squadron couldn’t convince him to stay in the Navy, but maybe I’ve made a difference.

  “What is it, son?” Tombstone asked gently, trying to encourage the younger man to voice his innermost thoughts. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, sir, I was just wondering…” Jason’s voice trailed off.

  “Go on,” Tombstone said encouragingly.

  “It’s just that…”

  “Whatever it is, I want to hear it.”

  “Are you going to eat your cinnamon roll?”

  After allowing an hour for their food to settle and for the necessary bathroom visits, Tombstone and Greene started their preflight. As Lawson had promised, the aircraft had been fueled, serviced, and was in perfect shape. They ran through the preflight, talked to the maintenance technician who’d checked her out, and then climbed up the boarding ladder, still in the heated hangar.

  “I don’t have to tell you, you don’t want to be hanging around down on the ground,” the plane captain said. “You can ice up here in a heartbeat.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re out of here.”

  Tombstone slid the canopy forward and shut it, then checked to make sure the heat was working. The de-icers and the windscreen heaters worked perfectly. The temperature was actually quite comfortable inside the cockpit.

  On signal, Tombstone started his engines, and then, after the doors slid back, commenced his taxi.

  Once they cleared the hangar, the wind buffeted them. He could feel a chill radiating off the windscreen and he double-checked the heater.

  “Tomcat, Tower, you’re cleared for takeoff at your discretion, runway seventy right. After departure, ascend to ten thousand feet and check in with — well, who wants to hear from you.” The controller continued with a quick weather brief, and then concluded with, “Good luck, gentlemen.”

  Even as the controller was speaking, Tombstone was taxiing to the staging area. As soon as he was released, he shoved the throttles forward into military power and felt the Tomcat surge underneath him. The cold air was exceptionally dense, and the Tomcat required only a small portion of the runway before they rotated and were airborne.

  Tombstone checked out with the Adak tower and follow their flight plan as briefed. He continued west for a while, and then rolled out to the south. As Jason completed their post-launch checklist, Tombstone studied the radar picture on his HUD.

  “Nothing around here now,” he said. “Let’s hope that doesn’t change.”

  “I’m getting LINK feed from the United States,” Jason announced. “Clear picture all around, Stoney. I think we might just pull this off.”

  “Keep an eye out for the tanker,” Tombstone ordered. “Four hours out and that’s only for the first one.”

  “Roger.” Just then, a voice spoke over tactical. “Tomcat triple nickel, this is Big Eye. Do not acknowledge this transmission. I’m holding you southbound at four hundred and twenty knots, at location,” and the voice reeled off lat and long coordinates. “Be advised I hold radar contact on both you and Texaco, and am available should you need a vector to the ten-yard line.” The ten-yard line was the code word given to their first refueling point.

  There was no more dangerous evolution, with the exception of perhaps a night carrier landing, than refueling. Refueling during short-notice operations with the Air Force in charge guaranteed that the pucker factor inside the cockpit was bound to be high.

  In Tombstone’s earliest days, coordination with the Air Force had not been particularly inspiring. There were misunderstandings, incompatible equipment, and a general morass of confusion surrounding the terminology. Over the decades that followed, the two services had finally managed to come to an accommodation, and refueling operations today were virtually seamless. Yet, in the back of his mind, Tombstone always retained the harsh early lessons.

  As the time for their first rendezvous approached, Tombstone felt his tension increase. Jason seemed to sense the senior pilot’s distraction and the flow of stories gradually trailed off.

  “If there’s a problem, the AWACS will let us know. I mean, hell, sir — it’s their bird, right?” Greene’s voice sounded distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of trying to reassure the more senior pilot. “He’ll be there — he has to be there.”

  “Yeah, of course they will. We got comms with the AWACS if we need it.”

  But the only reason we’d need it is if something goes bad wrong. And if we punch out over these waters, the odds of surviving are pretty much nonexistent. If we don’t freeze on the way down, we will within about thirty seconds of hitting the water.

  But Tombstone kept his thoughts to himself. Jason knew the dangers as well as he did. “Be nice to have radar contact on the tanker, though,” Tombstone said.

  As though his radar were reading his mind, a small, fuzzy lozenge resolved out of the backscatter on the screen. Jason let out a yelp of glee. “Looks to me like a tanker, boss.”

  “You get any IFF?”

  Jason fiddled with the IFF controls for a moment, then said, “Sure do. She’s breaking for an Air Force KC-135. And I got a mode four IFF.” Mode four was the encrypted mode signal that positively and indisputably identified an aircraft as a friendly military flight possessing the correct encryption gear for that particular day.

  Tombstone felt himself relax slightly, and warned himself not to. In another thirty minutes, after it was all over, sure. He laid his hands on the controls. “I’ve got the aircraft.”

  Jason held his hands up momentarily. “You have the aircraft, sir,” he said, acknowledging Tombstone’s assumption of the controls. He’d been flying for the last two hours, and Tombstone had no doubt about his ability to execute the refueling. But Jason was in the back seat and his visibility from there wasn’t nearly as good as it was up front.

  “Next time, you can take front,” Tombstone volunteered. “I don’t want you getting rusty.”

  “Maybe, sir, we should make some practice runs refueling from the back seat. I mean, they sent us out in a two-seater for a reason, right?”

  The reason is because we’re going on long flights, not because something might happen to the guy up front. But you’re right, kid. We got the capability, we need to train to it. Out loud, Tombstone said, “Put it on our list of things to do when we get back. Along with getting the name of that mess cook that made breakfast at Adak.”

  “Tomcat double nickel, this is Texaco. Do not acknowledge transmission unless there’s a problem, gentlemen. I am on base course, base speed, awaiting your approach. Unless otherwise directed, I intend to pass ten thousand pounds to you.” The cool, calm voice of the KC-135 pilot reassured them both.

  “Nobody wants to talk to us,” Jason muttere
d, although they both knew the reason for it. No transmissions meant they couldn’t be triangulated by any passive sensors monitoring this part of the sky. “Okay, let’s do it,” Tombstone said. He had a visual on the tanker’s lights now, and adjusted his altitude slightly. Tombstone always favored approaching from below, finding it somehow easier to control his attitude and altitude.

  It was so familiar, this process. How many times over the last decade had he plugged the back of a tanker? A thousand, perhaps? So familiar, yet each time was a new experience, fraught with all the danger of the first one.

  Time slowed as Tombstone made his approach slowly, carefully, until he had a perfect lineup on the basket. “Looking good, Tomcat. Come to Mama,” the refueling technician said over tactical.

  Tombstone nudged the power slightly, and slid forward for a perfect plug on the basket. The light on his enunciator panel lit up, indicating that the seal between the Tomcat probe and the tanker was airtight. “I got good flow,” Tombstone said, as he watched the digits on his fuel status indicator click over. “Good flow.”

  “Ten thousand should do us,” Jason said.

  “Looking at the numbers, I don’t think we could take more than one or two hundred more than that.”

  “Looking good on this end, folks,” the tanker’s voice said. “Speak up if you see any problems.”

  “You know, it occurs to me that there’s not much use in maintaining radio silence,” Jason said. “Any radar holding us knows that we’re here, and can guess what the tanker is. So what’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that it keeps them guessing. Up until now, we could be an intelligence bird. They might be suspicious and they might not like it, but they won’t get completely wound up unless they know this is a fighter.”

  “That’s why I let somebody else do the thinking,” Jason said.

  Before long, they were done. The flow of fuel cut off precisely at ten thousand pounds, and Tombstone found the estimates were indeed correct. The tanker said, “That’s it, folks. Disengage at will.”

  Tombstone eased back ever so slightly on the throttle and the Tomcat fell back gently from the tanker. He waited till he was well clear of the larger aircraft, then peeled off to the left, waggled his wings, and headed south.

  “Good luck,” the tanker said in parting.

  “Luck’s not what we need right now,” Greene observed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  USS Seawolf

  Due north of the carrier

  0730 local (GMT +8)

  “Solid firing solution, Captain,” Jacobs said. He held his finger poised over the button that would unleash their ADCAP torpedoes at the two contacts. “Request weapons free?”

  “Weapons free, fire when ready,” the captain ordered.

  Jacobs took one last look at his solutions, and pressed the button.

  There was a loud whish inside the submarine as well as a slight shudder and an ear-popping drop in interior pressure. The outer doors were already open, and the submarine’s torpedoes were now given permission to launch. Compressed air blew them out of the tubes, their motors kicked in for a straight run for a short time and then they both arced off down a bearing heading for the two contacts.

  Jacobs and Pencehaven maintained a continuous firing solution, double-checking their current contact information against the torpedoes’ progress. Jacobs made one small correction with his joystick to one — the other needed no assistance in locating, identifying, and designating its target. Finally, at the one thousand yard mark, the guidance wires snapped and the torpedoes were on their own.

  In addition to obscuring the enemy contacts, the U.S. torpedoes also dumped a substantial new amount of noise into the water, thus decreasing the other submarine’s overall detection capabilities. However, it was clearly not sufficient to degrade them completely. Within moments, the hard, high-pitched pinging of torpedoes inbound was clearly audible over the speaker and visible on the sonar screen.

  “Snapshot, Captain — they got us now,” Jacobs said. And indeed that was not unexpected — the first consequence of launching torpedoes was to immediately rip off the “cloak of visibility” from the firing platform. If the other submarine had not know they were in the area, they had no doubts about it now.

  “Officer of the deck, make your depth eighteen hundred feet,” the captain said.

  The officer of the deck repeated the order immediately, glancing at the captain to make sure that he had heard correctly.

  The captain nodded, reassuring him. Yes, it was a risk. The stress on a submarine hull from the last attack could not be completely evaluated, and there was a chance that her structural integrity was compromised. But in every other category, the submarine had far outperformed the operating capabilities ascribed to her by her builders, and he was pretty certain that she was fully capable of withstanding that depth even with some minor structural damage.

  Pretty sure. Confident enough, at least, to risk his life and that of his crew. Because from what they had seen of the Chinese torpedoes thus far, their best chance for evading it was to run below its operating depth. Like earlier Russian models, this torpedo could not go deep enough to catch her.

  Around them, the hull creaked and groaned as the submarine pitched bow down and headed for the depths. The pressure of the seawater as she dove increased all around her, increased to unimaginable levels, compressing the tensile steel hull. It was a normal sound, one they had all heard before, but when descending this quickly the noise took on an eerie rhythm that threatened to spook them.

  “She’s singing to us, men,” the captain said quietly. “Telling us how safe we are in her. You hear it?” He glanced around the control room and saw nods, a few expressions of relief.

  And why wouldn’t she sing? She talked to him in his dreams, didn’t she? And, in the end, there was nothing odder about her singing to them than there was about her talking.

  Everyone fell silent, straining to hear the first sounds of imminent danger. There wouldn’t be time to react to it, no, not at this depth. Even a pinhole leak would result in an ice pick of water under such pressure that it could slash through flesh as quickly as superheated steam. Were the submarine to implode, there wouldn’t be time to be frightened. There wouldn’t be time to be anything.

  All at once, the captain had an overwhelming, unbridled sense of safety. This submarine had brought him through too much already — there was no way she would let him down now. He patted the bulkhead next to him, almost absentmindedly, as though she were one of the horses on his ranch in Montana. “Come on, old girl. You know you got it in you,” he said quietly, and his voice carried to every corner of the compartment.

  “Range, five thousand yards and closing, Captain. Bearing constant, range decreasing,” Jacobs said, his voice calm. The captain shot off a momentary prayer, thankful for Jacobs’s tone of voice. To hear one of their own reacting so calmly was even more reassuring than hearing it from their captain. Because, after all, officers were supposed to be confident — everyone on the ship knew that. And although they trusted the captain with their lives, they trusted Jacobs to tell the truth.

  “Descending, sir,” Jacobs continued. “She has us, Captain.” Everyone in the control room could hear that that was true, as the active sonar pings from the Chinese torpedo increased in frequency and speed, blasting acoustic energy off their anechoic-coated hull to further pinpoint their location.

  “What do you think, Mannie?” the captain asked. “Wake homer or acoustic?”

  “Tough call, Captain,” Jacobs said, as though they were in a classroom discussing the latest advances in technology instead of putting it to a field test. “Could be a combination, since the wake homer is older technology. But then again, they have had some U.S. technology, haven’t they? So I’d expect them to have some acoustics capability in it, if not as good as ours. I bet they’re wishing right now they’d paid a little extra and gotten the right casing to hold it all.” Jacobs laughed quietly. “Penny-
wise and pound foolish, they say. They’re screwed if we make it to eighteen hundred feet.”

  The captain groaned silently, and Jacobs immediately recognized his error. “When, I mean,” he said, but the damage was already done. Everyone in the control room had heard Jacobs say “if.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” the captain said off-handedly. “That’s one thing we never skimp on, structural integrity. How’s she sounding, acoustically?”

  “Four thousand yards, Captain,” Otter Pencehaven said, taking up Jacobs’s duty of calling off the ranges.

  “Sounds as solid as ever, Captain,” Jacobs said. “The usual bitching as we descend, but nothing out of the ordinary. Heard it a thousand times already and I’ll hear it a thousand more before I retire.”

  There was a moment of silence, broken only by Pencehaven’s announcement. “Three thousand, Captain.”

  Just then the speaker picked up a new sound, and it took a moment for the captain, as focused as he was on incoming torpedoes, to realize what it was. It was just barely audible, as the submarine made her way down through the thermocline, decoys, noise makers and air bubble masses, corkscrewing violently.

  And just before he could speak the words, Jacobs confirmed it.

  “Torpedo, sir. But moving away from us. This one’s headed for the carrier.”

  USS United States

  TFCC

  0825 local (GMT +8)

  “United States, Lake Champlain—torpedo inbound! Recommend you commence evasive maneuvers immediately.” As the destroyer continued to reel off locating data as they waited for the contact to appear in the LINK, Coyote felt a thrill of horror. Ballistic missiles, torpedoes — all the threats that couldn’t be countered by the aircraft carrier herself, the ones that they had to depend on others to take care of. And the torpedo — if they were carrying the most advanced models, one exploding directly under the keel could crack a backbone of the carrier. Not only would thousands onboard the ship die, but all the aircraft airborne would have nowhere to land on the seriously damaged deck. And with Japan closed down, they would start running out of options fast.