Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  General Sir Robin Brenchley in person told the Prime Minister an 8,000-mile journey down the Atlantic, and perhaps a four-week battle for the islands, was the maximum stress this Task Force could take.

  “Prime Minister,” he said, “to leave us down there for several weeks, fighting the weather, waiting for your clearance for battle, would be suicide for us, and perfect for our land-based opponents. So you’d better get used to it. When we clear Portsmouth Dockyard we’re going to fight, and if you can’t cope with that, you’d better call the whole thing off. Because if we get there and you put us in a holding pattern, we’ll probably lose half of this aging fleet before we even start.

  “Try to remember,” he added, as if talking to a child, “all engineering problems, great and small, which would normally be carried out in a dockyard, will have to be completed at sea. I cannot condone any delay.

  “And if you try to achieve one, you’ll have the immediate resignations of both myself and the First Sea Lord, plus a dozen of the highest ranked commanders. Our reasons will be unanimous: the total incompetence of your government .”

  The Prime Minister was beaten and he knew it. “Very well, General,” he said. “I must agree. When the Task Force sails there will be no further delay. Your rules of engagement will be set out and not subject to change.”

  Which essentially boxed everyone into an even tighter corner. The days were running out, the American diplomats were making no progress whatsoever, and Argentina had nothing to say to anyone.

  At 0800, March 17, 2011, the Task Force sailed. The dockyard was packed with well-wishers. Families of the men on board the Royal Navy flotilla lined the jetties, many of them in tears. The band of the Royal Marines played “Rule Britannia” over and over as the warships cast their lines and headed out into the Solent, line astern.

  Great crowds lined the seafront at Southsea, watching the ships sail slowly out into the English Channel and then toward great waters, where devastating battles had been fought and won for centuries.

  Admiral Alan Holbrook’s flag flew from the mast of the Ark Royal , and the route they took was close to the shore, enabling the carrier to pass close to the naval stations along the south coast, Lee-on-Solent, Devonport, and Culdrose. And as they passed, a constant stream of helicopter deliveries were made from the shore. There were also stores and ammunitions being unloaded for other ships that had not been prepared in Portsmouth itself, but which were heading out later in the day.

  And all along the historic coastline the crowds were out watching the warships on their way, clapping and cheering them in the gusty offshore breeze that carried their hopes and best wishes out into the Channel.

  In the sprawling naval base in Devonport, where HMS Daring was preparing to depart, a naval chaplain was present to conduct a short service of hope and prayer for relatives of the ship’s company. And as the big Type-45 destroyer pushed out through the harbor, a Navy band played, poignantly, the hymn “Abide With Me,” a fragile shard from the past, the last sounds of England heard by Admiral Woodward off Gibraltar all those years ago.

  0900, MARCH 17, 71.00N 28.47E

  DEPTH 300, COURSE 225, SPEED 22

  She slipped swiftly through the cold deep waters off the most northerly coast of Norway: Viper K-157 , the 7,500-ton pride of Russia’s ever-dwindling attack submarine fleet. The old Soviet Navy was probably in terminal decline, but no expense had been spared in building this sleek, black underwater warrior, completed a dozen years earlier, lightly used and now “worked up” to its maximum efficiency.

  They built her right across the wide estuary of the Severnaya Dvina, opposite the port of Archangel, on the often hard-frozen shores of the near-landlocked White Sea. This is the location of that cradle of Russian maritime engineering, the shipyards of Severodvinsk, where even the attack submarines built in faraway Nizhniy Novgorod on the Volga are transported for their nuclear engineering.

  The Viper took four years to build, constructed with the meticulous care of the Severodvinsk nuclear engineers, many from the same families as the men who had built the enormous old Soviet Typhoon-class 26,000-ton ballistic missile submarines back in the 1980s.

  By general consensus Viper K-157 was the finest submarine ever built in Severodvinsk. She was nuclear-powered by a VM5 Pressurized Water Reactor, which thrust 47,600 horsepower into her two GT3A turbines. A member of the excellent Akula-class ships, she was 14 feet longer than the old Akula Is, and, at 360 feet overall, was the first of a new class of Akula IIs. The standard of engineering around her extra-long fin was unprecedented in Russian submarine building. She was comfortable dived to a remarkable 1,500 feet, where she would make a good twenty-five knots.

  Every possible radiated noise level had been notably reduced. She was virtually silent at seven knots and under. Her sonar system was the latest improved Shark Gill (SKAT MGK 53) passive/active search and attack. It functioned on low-medium frequency, hull-mounted.

  And she packed a serious wallop, with her batteries of submerged-launch cruise missiles, the Raduga SS-N-21s, which were also surface-to-surface weapons. She also carried Sampson (GRANAT) missiles, also fired from twenty-one-inch tubes, making Mach 0.7 for 1,600 miles, flying two hundred meters above the ground, carrying a 220-kiloton nuclear warhead, if required.

  She carried forty torpedoes, the twenty-five-foot-long TEST-7IME fired from tubes fifty-three centimeters wide. This is a Russian ship-killer that travels through the water at forty knots, up to thirteen miles, packing a 220-kilogram warhead—nearly five hundred pounds of pure dynamite. Two of these would probably level the principal buildings of the Smithsonian Institution.

  Viper had slipped her moorings in the Russian submarine base of Ara Guba shortly after midnight. Aside from the shore crew, just one lone Russian Navy Admiral stood on the north jetty to see them off. And a substantial figure it was, that of the giant greatcoated figure of Admiral Vitaly Rankov, who had been personally briefing the Captain and his senior officers for two days.

  Free of her lines, Viper ran north up the long bay, which by some geophysical freak was not frozen solid, and headed up the channel into the icy depths of the Bering Sea. She dived in twenty-five fathoms, turning west toward the North Atlantic, on a voyage during which her crew would not see daylight for possibly three months.

  The opening few hundred miles would see her running down the endless narrow coast of Norway, which sweeps 1,100 miles, from the southern city of Stavanger, straight past the western frontiers of Finland, Lapland, and Sweden to the Kola Peninsula, way up on the Russian border. It’s six hundred miles down to the Arctic Circle, and five hundred more south to Stavanger.

  Generally speaking, Viper could move pretty briskly during the first part of the journey, but would need to slow down measurably as she approached the narrowest point of the North Atlantic, the eight-hundred-mile wide electrically trembling waters of the GIUK Gap.

  This is the most sensitive submarine country in the world, the stark line that runs from Greenland, bisecting the island of Iceland, dead straight to the northern coast of Scotland. The waters between Iceland and Greenland, the Denmark Strait, are often used by submarines, despite the danger of ice floes, the trawl nets of local fishermen, and generally shocking weather.

  But it’s the stretch between Iceland and Scotland that matters. These are the waters through which every Russian submarine from the Northern Fleet must pass if they wish to join the rest of the world. These are the waters still patrolled assiduously by submarines from the United States Navy and the Royal Navy.

  During
the Cold War, the U.S./UK patrols were even more intense than they are today. It would not be stretching a point to claim, as the U.S. Navy does, that no Soviet submarine traversed those waters, running either south or north, between the 1960s and the 1980s, without being detected.

  In addition there is installed all through the GIUK the U.S. Navy’s ultrasecret Sound Surveillance System, a fixed undersea acoustic network of passive hydrophone arrays, sensitive listening equipment connected to operational shore sites, which collect, analyze, display, and report acoustic data, relayed back from the strings of hydrophones laid in the deep sound channels.

  These systems are laid in all of the key areas of the Pacific and North Atlantic, crisscrossed over the seabed, forming a giant underworld grid. Nowhere, repeat nowhere, is the system more vibrantly sensitive than in the waters of the GIUK Gap. They say if a whale farts, fifty American hearts skip a beat as the undersea sound waves ripple the SOSUS wires.

  It would be prudent, of course, to say this was a slight exaggeration. Except that it’s not. Little imagination is required to picture the total, steely eyed reaction in the U.S. Navy listening stations when the steady engine lines of a possibly hostile submarine are detected.

  The commanding officer of Viper K-157 , Captain Gregor Vanislav, one of Russia’s most senior submariners, knew that once he ran south across the Arctic Circle he would be treading on eggshells. Like all Russian COs, he was highly nervous of being picked up electronically by the Americans.

  He also knew no one would ever know precisely what had happened if his ship were sunk. Because the chances of a submarine being found in water two miles deep, somewhere in an area of several thousand square miles, was remote. It usually takes a couple of days for any command HQ even to realize one of their underwater ships has vanished, by which time it could be anywhere. Also, no one ever wants to admit the loss of a big nuclear ship, and certainly no one wishes to admit they destroyed it. Submarine losses are thus apt to remain very, very secret.

  Captain Vanislav would run underwater some fifty miles off the Norwegian coast, past the fabled Lofoten Isles, a windswept, hundred-mile-long cluster of islands that jut out from the mainland, forcing submarines out into the 4,000-feet-deep Voring Plateau.

  All through these waters, which were not particularly sensitive and were the regular exercise grounds for Russian ships, Viper would make almost five hundred miles a day. They would make a course change off the port of Namsos, swinging more westerly out into the Norwegian Sea, before running down to the Iceland–Faeroe Rise and the unseen line that marks the waters of the GIUK Gap.

  Making only seven knots, they reached this relatively shallow water, only 850 feet deep, on the morning of March 22. And now they really were moving on tiptoes above the electronic lines on the ocean floor, as lethal as cobras, just waiting to detect any significant underwater movement, before raising all hell in the American listening station.

  Captain Vanislav ordered their speed cut to five knots, and oh so slowly the most deadly attack submarine in the Russian Navy eased her way forward, her great turbines just a tad above idling speed as she slipped south into the Atlantic, with just three commands from Admiral Rankov in the mind of her commanding officer:

  1. Do not under any circumstances be detected anywhere along the route to the Falkland Islands.

  2. Locate the Royal Navy Task Force and hold your position until hostilities begin.

  3. Sink the Ark Royal.

  1130 (LOCAL), TUESDAY, MARCH 22

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  MARYLAND

  Lt. Commander Ramshawe was staring at the front covers of the major U.S. news magazines. Without exception they carried large photographs of the Royal Navy Task Force sailing for the South Atlantic. Most of them had shots from helicopters showing the decks of the aircraft carrier and the big assault ships, lined with the GR9s and helicopters.

  The British military’s ultimatum, that they would be unable to hang around in bad weather beating up the ships if not permitted to fight, had not been made public. However, the U.S. ambassador to London was in receipt of that knowledge and had informed President Bedford of the situation.

  The Pentagon had been alerted, as had the NSA and the CIA. Jimmy Ramshawe was among those who knew that when the Royal Navy Fleet cleared the English Channel, it was going to war with the Republic of Argentina.

  He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and continued to look at the U.S. coverage of the crisis. “Jeez,” he muttered. “These bastards are actually going to fight for those islands all over again.”

  And he realized that this time there was a lot more involved than was immediately apparent. For a start, the U.S. President was under enormous pressure from ExxonMobil to do something about the Falkland Islands oil fields, for which they had paid an arm and a leg to the British government for drilling rights, and for the massive investment in drilling-rig equipment, miles of pipeline, enormous pumps and transportation.

  ExxonMobil had $2 billion tied up in that operation, and all of their guys had been frog-marched, at gunpoint, off the island by Argentinian troops. The oil giant wanted action. In fact, the oil giant wanted President Bedford to get down there with a U.S. Carrier Battle Group and “roust these bastards back to where they came from…doesn’t seem right to let the Brits go it alone.”

  But President Bedford did not want to take his country into another war, especially with Argentina, which had always extended the hand of friendship to the USA. The problem was that when Uncle Sam picked up his musket, any ensuing war had to be won, and the High Command in the Pentagon knew how thoroughly the Argentinians were prepared for this conflict.

  The political ramifications of American boys fighting and dying in that godforsaken group of rocks, which anyway belonged to someone else, filled the President with horror, never mind the oil. And the Pentagon chiefs themselves were not mad about such an adventure either.

  The U.S. military was willing to assist Great Britain, willing to run the base at Ascension Island in a way that would make life much, much easier for the Task Force in terms of supplies and fueling, even assistance with missiles. But President Bedford, like President Reagan before him, would not commit American troops, and he would not commit U.S. Navy ships, and he would not commit any U.S. fighter attack aircraft.

  After two or three weeks of hard negotiating, he accepted that the Brits needed help, but it would need to be arm’s-length help, which did not entail one single death of an American serviceman.

  In truth, President Bedford felt somewhat guilty about the whole operation, because ExxonMobil was ultimately the biggest player in the Falklands oil business and would thus be the biggest benefactor of any victory achieved by the forces of Great Britain.

  And there was also the question of the massive natural gas strike on the island of South Georgia. President Bedford understood that the Task Force could only attend to that after recapturing the Falklands themselves. And he had a disturbing vision of the Union Flag once more fluttering above Port Stanley, with the battered remnants of the Royal Navy Fleet, with all of its burned and wounded sailors. Then turning southeast to South Georgia in order to save 10,000 British national penguins and to wrest 400 billion cubic feet of ExxonMobil’s natural gas holdings from the hands of Argentinian brigands.

  It was not at all fair. He knew that. But then nothing was, and the prospect of a couple of hundred body bags arriving back in the United States was more than he could risk. Because in the end it would cost him his Presidency. And, good guy or no, Paul Bedford was a politician, and ensuring his own survival came as natural to him as breathing.

&nbs
p; He would do damn near anything to help the Brits, except take his country to war, which would be tantamount to throwing himself on his sword.

  Jimmy Ramshawe understood the high stakes. He had read, over and over, the carefully constructed assessments of the forthcoming war by Ambassador Ryan Holland. He knew the heavy strength of the Argentinian fighter aircraft, the Mirage jets, the Skyhawks, and the Super-Etendards stationed at the newly active Rio Grande base.

  And he knew that when battle commenced, the Argentinians would launch everything at the Royal Navy Fleet. It would be an overwhelming aerial armada, and yes, the Brits would down several of them. But they would not down them all, and many bombers would get through and probably blast the British Task Force out of the game. Because the Brits had insufficient air power.

  And no one understood the real issues here more thoroughly than Admiral Arnold Morgan. Recalled from his winter vacation on the Caribbean island of Antigua he had arrived back in the States, on board Air Force One , and flatly refused to see the President until he had read the assessments by Ryan Holland and the summaries from the Pentagon.

  “There’s quite enough political assholes briefing you on subjects they do not understand,” he grated, “without me joining them. Gimme two days and we’ll talk.”

  That had been Friday, February 18, and since then the President and the former National Security Adviser had been in constant communication. And as ever, Arnold Morgan had brought a clarity to the situation, which the President simply could not ignore.