by Ian Slater
At a thousand feet, the Roosevelt sat listening, her tow array hydrophones weighted for three thousand feet, an optimum sound channel depth according to computer readout of Gulf Stream salinity, temperature, and current strength. In ideal conditions, sound could travel through this layer for over four thousand miles. Roosevelt was also quietly leaking cold water from its ASREC, antisatellite recognition emission control, the cold water neutralizing the radiant heat from the sub’s machinery, which would otherwise produce a “hot” spot on the sea surface recognized by satellites’ infrared cameras. The problem for the Roosevelt now was for its operators to separate the noise of the convoy, which, according to Brentwood’s calculations, it should pass near the halfway mark between Newfoundland and Scotland.
The sonar operator informed Brentwood that he could hear no “hostiles.”
“Very well,” said Brentwood. “Phones in.”
“Phones in,” confirmed the OOD, Peter Zeldman, and Brentwood could hear the faint, soft sound of the big spool hauling in the two-inch-diameter oil-filled hose, a long, pale yellow snake containing the series of tiny wristwatch-size black microphones.
* * *
Two thousand miles northeast of Roosevelt, the sonar operator aboard the Trafalgar suddenly threw his headphones down, hands clutching his head in pain. The six Norwegian-flagged trawlers were on the port beam of the convoy when a mine exploded beneath a merchantman, the rapid expansion of carbon dioxide and methane gases combining with vaporized water to buckle a starboard plate of the MV Clyde, creating a jagged four-meteR-1ong hole below the ship’s waterline. Next to go was the MV Bahrain, the explosion directly beneath her bow. As the cold waters of the Atlantic rushed in over red-hot steel and stiffener beams, they produced plumes of high, hissing steam mistaken by some among the twenty-five escort ships for smoke of the kind expected after a skimmer or air-to-ship missile had hit. It was an assumption that sent the escorts’ crews to their antiaircraft missile consoles.
However, Admiral Woodall, who, as a very young midshipman, saw action in the Falklands War, immediately noticed that neither of the two merchantmen that were hit and sinking had seemed buffeted sharply to one side in the telltale manner of a missile, whose blast wave punched its target with such high speed that it usually crumpled much of the upper deck or superstructure.
One of the British frigate’s tracking radar operators picked up a blip coming in abaft, on the starboard beam. In a millisecond the signal flashed from the tracker’s office to command center in the ship’s middle, then through the computer to the swing six-rocket Sea Wolf launcher on the weather deck forward of the bridge. One of the console’s hinged jaw flaps opened, and out streaked one of the Sea Wolf’s antimissile missiles, which in 1.2 seconds blew a Sea King helicopter out of the air. The helo’s fiery debris further cluttered the radar screens of the NATO escorts, whose firing of chaff, or aluminum foil, deception rockets caused further disaster as some foil, due to moisture absorption in one of the rockets, stuck together in a ball, its size causing overanxious radar operators to report, “Incoming missile.”
In seconds the confusion of antimissile missiles and radar jumble, including a spray of high-speed depleted uranium coming from the Dutch minesweeper’s in-close weapons system, added to the chaos. Two heat-homing Sea King rockets wiped out a destroyer’s launcher, stripping the ship’s missile consoles’ fuses in the process so that soon more missiles on the automatic feed stack below began exploding. From the Sea Kings miles ahead on forward screen high above the white-flecked blue of the sea, it looked like a daytime fireworks display gone wrong. But no one was laughing as men from the two merchantmen were calling for help, desperately trying to swim out of the wash of oil and flotsam bubbling up from their sunken ships. Nearby, a Dutch destroyer’s broadband filters and circuits were reported so severely damaged by “friendly fire” that a HERO warning-hazard of electromagnetic radiation to ordnance — was flashed through the ship for technicians to take appropriate action before unprotected circuits could prematurely detonate all depth charges aboard.
One of the trawlers was three miles to port, already burning fiercely from a Sea King air-to-ship missile. As its crew and the men from the merchantmen struggled for their lives in the burning slick, the merchant sailors screaming and waving for help, Admiral Woodall, aboard HMS Newcastle, his helo/VSTOL— vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — cruiser, issued orders for the entire convoy to turn about and to withdraw, as near as conditions would allow, along the same course as that on which they had entered the minefield. Strict orders were given that no ship was to stop to pick up survivors, for if Russian subs were in the area, the covering noise generated by the convoy to mask each ship’s exact position would be imperiled by any ship slacking off from the convoy. And if enough ships stopped, they would be picked off one by one. All Sea King helos and the advance Grumans on screen were ordered to return and form a closer-in protective perimeter about the convoy as soon as possible.
On the bridge of HMS Newcastle, the officers and men didn’t have time to realize the full extent of the calamity that had befallen not only their convoy but the entire NATO convoy strategy, for now that radio silence had of necessity been broken, the air was filled with coded message bursts from R-1 to SACLANT in Norfolk, Virginia, and ACCHAN — Allied Commander in Chief Channel — forces in Northwood, U.K., only further confounding the post-World War II years of argument between proconvoy and anticonvoy tacticians. Those against convoys were now pointing at R-1 as stark evidence against convoy strategy and for IMS — independent merchant shipping — strategy, with smaller high-tech, high-speed boats assigned escort duty. This, they argued, would reduce risk both in terms of cost and men, and more important, would free subs and surface vessels from escort duty, giving them the freedom to spread out in search-and-destroy missions rather than being inhibited by an overconcentrated and slower convoy.
* * *
Even as the convoy was turning, there were two more thunderous explosions, mushroom plumes of oil and boiling water rising high into the sky, then collapsing in on themselves. Three more merchantmen were going down, and when Woodall saw one of them had been at least a mile to his port side, the other a mile or so starboard, he assumed for a moment that at least two Russians had joined the attack.
There was another explosion and the calm voice of a British captain aboard a Sheffield-class destroyer reporting to Woodall that he was “taking water abaft” the starboard beam. The trawlers’ mines, set for individual merchantmen’s signatures, now became obsolete, but there was still a question of whether “magnetic/pressure” mines reacting to water displacement and magnetic fields passing over them had been set for the heavier merchantmen, thus allowing the lighter escorts, including the Dutch minesweeper, to pass over before being triggered as, unlike most of the escorts, the merchantmen did not have “self-degaussing” or “magnetic wiping” systems that could give them anti-magnetic protection against such mines.
Woodall gave orders for the escorts to form a single line as the best hope of getting out of the minefield and to fire at will at the trawlers.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the captain of the command cruiser. “One of them’s on fire. I wouldn’t imagine—”
“Sink them, Mr. Rees!”
“Very good, sir.”
The Sheffield destroyer, holed abaft and sinking quickly, listing dangerously over, her pumps working overtime, led the attack, with her 115-milimeter forward gun pumping away at the first big ocean-going trawler, flecks of paint and rigging spitting up into the air above her. The fish boat turned tail, its stern now to the destroyer; the high-piled netting seemed to shrivel up and fall away. There was an orange wink. Two other trawlers were doing the same.
“Skimmer midships!” shouted the destroyer’s starboard lookout. A split second later the destroyer’s radar, which activated the close-in Phalanx system, began firing. The destroyer’s radar mast collapsed on the bridge as the Sea Dart roared off from its weather de
ck mount. But the list of the Sheffield was so acute that only the 115-milimeter gun could depress far enough to do any damage, the Gatling gun effectively raking only the trawler’s wheelhouse. The trawler suddenly bucked, its stem lifted clean out of the water by the force of a British destroyer’s Exocet — but not before the trawler and two of its sister craft had fired four fifty-five-hundred-pound Styx surface-to-surface missiles. Two of them missed, or rather were exploded by in-close Gatlings. The other two hit. The entire superstructure and bridge of the next ship in the line, a sleek Leander-class frigate, were engulfed in fire, her radar and radio masts collapsing into the hot maze of twisted steel like a long-legged insect, the crescent-shaped radar antenna aglow as it struck the water, and temperatures generated so high that the port side lifeboat was incinerated amid the reek of cordite, gasoline, and burning bodies, other men spilling into the sea, many of them afire. And methodically, above the sound of the screaming men, the steady pump-pump-pump of cannon fire pulverizing the remaining trawlers.
Several of the officers aboard the long line of British, Dutch, and German escorts had difficulty stopping their gunners even after it was obvious that the trawlers were well and truly done for. Among some men it had been an unwritten contract in a war that they knew would be waged with the speed and force of missiles. There would be no time for such old-fashioned notions as rescue. Better a bullet than to be left drowning in oil.
* * *
By now it was dusk, and as the convoy re-formed in squares, the Dutch minesweeper leading, Woodall ordered all ships to turn south again in a wide arc, avoiding the area where the trawlers had sown their deadly harvest. But only he, among the entire complement of the cruiser and all the other ships, knew that R-1 had been an experiment — with the empty container ships as decoys. As another admiral before him, Mountbatten, had sent the Canadian Corps to invade a beach in Normandy to test the theory for D-Day, to see if it could be done, Woodall was now seeing if “rollover” was feasible. And as Mountbatten had hoped to draw out the Luftwaffe during the Dieppe raid, now R-1 was to draw out the Russians for the killing. The Dieppe raid had been a terrible failure — more than two-thirds killed, the rest taken prisoner — but from it came the invaluable lessons of D-Day.
The men like Horton in charge of “rollover” had to know as quickly as possible whether the square base, fan-shaped screen convoy was workable in real combat. But the awful thing for Woodall was that now that it had been tried in actual battle conditions, the first time in modern missile warfare, he knew he could not give SACLANT or anyone else a definitive answer, other than to say that the Soviets had very effectively attacked the convoy by deception, using mines to devastating effect. Without question, it was a terrible loss for the convoy, eight of the container ships sunk, two escorts, a total of over four hundred men dead. But the Russian subs, the more telling test for the long-run strategy, had not appeared at all. So far.
Again Woodall wondered what was happening at the GIUK Gap, where NATO had laid its noise-signature-primed mines.
ACCHAN in Northwood, U.K., had replied that as yet no explosions had been picked up by the GUIK SOSUS network or by any towed sonar arrays.
The only good piece of news Woodall received was that Greenland’s ice sheet was farther out than usual for September, making the Greenland-Iceland Gap even narrower, so that if the Soviet subs were going to break out, it would most likely be through the Iceland-Faeroe gap as they rounded Norway’s north cape.
“That would narrow the field,” the cruiser’s captain commented to Woodall.
“Possibly,” answered the admiral, “unless they used the ice sheet as cover.”
“Then they’d have to bust through, sir. Make a hell of a din. Could hear it in Piccadilly.”
“No,” said Woodall, “they could use the sheet as cover until they’re well south of the main channel, then break out on their left flank at speed — into open water.”
“There’s still our mines,” said the cruiser’s captain.
“Then why haven’t our listening posts in Iceland heard them popping off?” pressed Woodall.
“Yes, unless—” The captain could see that the admiral had already thought of it, too — the possibility of it — the trawlers being the tip-off. “Bloody hell, sir. Special forces?”
“Yes,” replied Woodall. “Bastards might have wiped out the listening posts. Either that or been digging up the damned SOSUS lines.”
“Dragging them up would be tricky,” commented the captain. “Take an age, too.”
“I agree,” said Woodall, worriedly, his eyes roaming the leaden horizon as night began its descent. “I’d say we’re not hearing anything because the—”
“Lines have been closed,” put in the captain, as eager as Woodall for an explanation.
Woodall was pacing back and forth across the cruiser’s bridge, oblivious to the winking lights of the steering console and the phosphorescent sweep of the radar’s arm. “I’d say the posts are still operational but are being run by the SPETS. They’ve deactivated the mines from shore-control relay. We’re being fed silence.” He stopped walking, looking across at the cruiser’s captain. “Everything’s seeming normal to us — even a little static on the line.”
“How about the call-in code checks they’d have to answer?”
“Broken the code, old boy. Or more likely they’ve been sold the bloody things. Some pretty East German secretary in Bonn, no doubt — slipping her boss a bit more than rollover.”
“I don’t like that much,” said the captain.
“Neither do I. Those subs could be breaking out right now.”
They were both quite wrong. No listening stations had been overrun — NATO had given top priority to defending them — nor was the sub fleet that had come out of the Kara Sea and around the Kola Peninsula in the process of breaking out. They had already done so. Hours before.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Uijongbu
In the morning Tae had told the NKA interrogation officer, Major Rhee, albeit politely, that he would not cooperate. The NKA pulled two teeth with pliers. Tae blacked out for a second or two, but once conscious again, shook his head, refusing to tell them anything beyond his rank, name and ROK identification number. Rhee told him kŭsaramtŭl orarŭl chikae kŭchinkuhante sikanŭl nangpihae—they weren’t going to fuck around with him — and sent him back to the schoolhouse cell, his hands still bound behind his back. When they came for him later, it was late in the afternoon, the sun out briefly, making steam for the rice paddies. He was pushed roughly inside the bleak, musty-smelling interrogation tent, its hanging light bulb swinging slightly in the wind.
The moment he entered, seeing Major Rhee sitting behind a folding camp table, writing pad and pencil before him as he sat staring at Tae, Tae noticed another smell, something instantly familiar — the fragrance of plumeria.
It was Mi-Ja, standing quietly in the far corner of the tent to his left. The light was poor but not so dark that he could not see the tears streaming down her face.
“Appa”— “Daddy,” she began.
“Be quiet!” ordered Rhee without looking at her, then addressing Tae, a beefy NKA guard behind. “You will tell us,” instructed Rhee, “all the names of all underground counterespionage leaders in Taegu, Yosu, and Pusan. Otherwise we will give your daughter to our soldiers — to do with as they please.”
Tae shook his head, unable to speak, his head now bowed in shame. The NKA major walked over to Mi-Ja and took her long, dark hair, wrapping it around his wrist, jerking her head back sharply and tearing her bodice open with his other hand, her breasts naked in the dim yellow light as they rose and fell sharply in her panic.
Tae knew that if he gave them the names they wanted, not only would the chief underground counterinsurgency agents be rounded up and shot, but also their families and everyone who knew them. Hundreds. Rhee’s left hand flashed up and grabbed Mi-Ja’s breast, his finger and thumb squeezing at the nipple. She cried out and Tae
turned to help her only to be knocked down with the guard’s rifle butt onto the earthen floor, the taste of mud now mixing with the metallic taste of blood.
“The names!” yelled Rhee. “Now!”
Tae had intended giving them false names to buy time, the name “Kim,” for example, as common as “Smith” in English. The NKA major, the guard’s eyes popping out with surprised delight, moved his left hand down and began rubbing it hard between Mi-Ja’s legs.
“Leave her,” screamed Tae, frightening the guard, who stepped back from him before he retaliated, smashing Tae in the face with his rifle butt. Mi-Ja heard the bone crack and saw her father fall, unable to get up with his hands still bound behind his back, his foot slipping on the muddy floor even as he tried. Rhee let Mi-Ja go and she ran to Tae crying, pleading hysterically to tell them.
Tae, on his knees, was shaking his head in a way she had never seen before, like a stricken dog trying to rid himself of some internal noise which he couldn’t locate and for which all prior experience had not prepared him, stunned, and as full consciousness returned, wondering how they had found Mi-Ja. Perhaps through her boyfriend in the Reunification Party, which explained to Tae why they’d taken several days before deciding to interrogate him.