Joint Operations c-16

by Keith Douglass

  “To hell with that,” she said forcefully. “The Navy has got nothing to do with it. It’s my country, too, Jack. And if there’s anything we can do to help that carrier out there, then you better count me in. Because you military types don’t have a monopoly on serving your country. You think you do, but you don’t.” She paused for a moment to let that sink in, then said, “Pick up that phone and get us some sailing orders, mister. Now!”

  USS Jefferson

  TFCC

  1004 local (GMT –10)

  The small boat inbound on the Jefferson had gone from being a minor issue to the primary focus of Bam-Bam’s attention. How many times had they run through this scenario in drills? Not exactly like this, of course. The usual scenario was a new helo flying in too close to forces in combat, and the checkpoint of the exercise was to see how close the TAO would let them get before they’d shoot them down. But always in the scenario, they’d had some way of talking to the inbound helo, of trying to warn them off. Not like now, where he had no way to tell the foolish — or was it treacherous? — skipper of the boat that Bam-Bam was prepared to have him blasted out of the water.

  Still, he had to know that, didn’t he? That to come barreling up on an aircraft carrier after everything that had happened ashore was a sure invitation to disaster.

  “Range?” Bam-Bam asked.

  “Seven thousand yards,” the watch officer said. “Still doing twenty-two knots. Less than a minute before she’s in range of the fifty-five cals.”

  Damn it! You’re going to make me do this, aren’t you? For just a moment, he wished that he could see the skipper right in front of him, right now. It would be far easier to strangle the guy himself than order what he was about to order.

  “Six thousand yards — no closer,” Bam-Bam said. He felt a cold sense of finality as he heard the order relayed to the aircraft overhead and the other ships around them.

  And yet if he’d learned anything at all in the Navy about responsibility and warfare, it was that once a decision was made, it was futile to keep second-guessing himself. There was too much danger that you’d get fixated on one small part of the problem and miss the larger threat developing, and right now he had more than enough on his plate.

  “The SEAL team — have we heard from them yet?” he asked.

  The watch officer shook his head. “The Marine detachment keeps trying, but they think the team may have secured their radios.”

  “And if they’ve done that, then that means they’re too busy to talk. Or it’s too dangerous. Have the Marines continue to monitor the assigned frequency, but cease all callups. We’ll wait for them to call us.” And with another decision on the table, he dismissed the SEAL team from his mind and moved on to the next problem.

  Signal Bridge

  1005 local (GMT –10)

  “Come on, hurry up,” the lookout said, his voice sharp with urgency. “What’s taking so long?”

  “You think you can do any better, you step up to the plate, asshole,” the signalman muttered. Binoculars were glued to his face as he stared at the incoming vessel. “Assuming I’ve got the right contact, then whoever’s running the signal light is about as ham-handed an operator as I’ve ever seen. I’m not entirely sure it’s not some kid playing with switches or a short in the circuit somewhere.”

  True, but not entirely true. Signalman Second Class Avery Hardin hadn’t read light since A school, and he was finding it damned difficult to keep up with whoever was on the other light. He ran through the letter combinations, wondering if he’d gotten it right, if the guy on the other end could even spell. If he’d been entirely certain of his read on the flashing lights, he’d have smacked the lookout to kingdom come for giving him a hard time.

  He could have called for help — any one of the signalmen would have been glad to come up and help him out. But admitting that he couldn’t do what he was supposed to be able to do was just a little more than Hardin was capable of doing. He was the signalman on watch — he would break the light.

  “They got the guns out,” the lookout reminded him. A pattern of bullets stitched the water alongside the carrier as one of the fifty-cal teams limbered up. “They got helos with guns. You take your sweet time, they’re going to kill that boat.”

  “I got it,” Hardin said finally. At least, I think I do. “Give me that.” He snatched the sound-powered phone from around the lookout’s neck. “Combat, this is Signal Bridge. Flashing light from unknown surface contact garbled on other end. Best translation reads as follows:

  PASS TO ADMIRAL WAYNE: CHINESE REQUEST PERMISSION TO APPROACH AND DEBARK PASSENGERS. TEN SOULS ON BOARD. SOMEONE SENDS.

  With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Hardin passed the message on to the watch officer, suspecting but not knowing for sure that he’d garbled it very badly.

  TFCC

  1006 local (GMT –10)

  “They wouldn’t dare,” Admiral Wayne shouted. “By god, I’ll fry in hell before I see one of them bastards on my ship!”

  “Sir, the signalman did say the transmission was broken and garbled,” Bam-Bam pointed out. “That might not be an accurate translation. It sounds like we’re supposed to understand what that means.”

  There was a brief pause, then Admiral Wayne said, “Ask the boat who Stony’s wife is.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, Bam-Bam,” the admiral said. “Tomboy told me Stony was going to try his best to get out here, and if that’s him, we need to find out pretty damned fast. Otherwise, we blow that piece of shit out of the water.”

  Signal Bridge

  1007 local (GMT –10)

  “Ask him who Stony’s wife is,” the lookout repeated. “You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Sure, sure — hold on a second.” Hardin shut his eyes, desperately dredging up his rusty signal skills. It was taking too long, too long. He made a silent vow to himself that if he just didn’t screw this up, if whatever god looked after sailors and fools let him do okay, he’d get right to work on his Morse code skills. Never again would he be caught so rusty in what he was supposed to know.

  Hesitantly, he flapped the shutter on the signal light, pumping out a series of dots and dashes that he was pretty sure made up the question the admiral had asked him to ask.

  “Dit-dah-dit. Not dit dit dah,” the lookout said suddenly. “You screwed it up.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “A striker. One who learned Morse code in four years of high school ham radio. Dit dah dit — trust me,” the lookout answered. He looked deep into Hardin’s eyes, saw the fear and uncertainty there, and felt a wave of power surge through him. It was his contact — his. He would make sure this was done right.

  The lookout put his hand over Hardin’s and clicked the shutter open and shut, moving precisely but faster as he picked up the feel of the mechanism. He blinked out the end transmission signal and then moved his hand away. Hardin said nothing.

  The lookout squinted out at the vessel, still difficult to make out in the water. He saw the first flash, puny and barely detectable.

  “Here.” Hardin pressed his binoculars into the lookout’s hands. “You talk — I’ll copy.” He held the grease-pencil board steady on the stand. “Go ahead. You’re better at this than I am and I don’t want to screw it up.” It hurt to admit it, but he knew immediately that it was the right thing to do.

  The lookout started echoing the blinks and flashing, mentally translating them into words as he did so. By the time the other vessel reached the end of the transmission, he’d already broken the code.

  “Tomboy,” he said confidently.

  Hardin nodded. “That’s what I got, too.” He picked up his sound-powered phone and relayed the message to CDC. Then he turned back to the lookout. “Thanks, man. You know what I mean. You ever need something, you come see me.” He paused for a moment, a look of shame on his face. “Everything that’s at stake — I mean — hell, we’re at war. I could have screwed it up big time, go
tten some people killed. Thanks. Like I said — you need anything, you come see me.”

  “Actually, I do need something,” the lookout said, still staring out at the contact — his contact — in the water so as not to miss any more transmissions. “I got to get someone to sign off on my watchstanding qualifications so I can take the signalman third class exam. But with the four on four off schedule, I haven’t had time, and the deadline is tomorrow.”

  “Consider it done.” Hardin smiled. “On the condition that you never screw up and get out of shape on flashing light like I did.”

  ELEVEN

  Heaven Can Wait

  1015 local (GMT –10)

  Jack kept up a constant scan of the water around them as he sat on hold, scribbled numbers down, and then redialed the cell phone, but it was Adele who saw it first. It was an odd streak of white water moving at a direction different from the whitecaps, and at first she couldn’t figure out what was causing it. A whale immediately below the surface? A reef that wasn’t on the charts?

  Then it hit her, and she turned immediately to tug on Jack’s arm. “Look,” she said, pointing to the east. “That water.”

  Before he could answer her, a thin black metal pipe poked up from the surface of the water, swiveled about, catching the sun in a quick flash as it faced them, and then disappeared. It was followed shortly by the entire upper deck of the submarine emerging from the water, then quickly disappearing. Jack’s mouth dropped open for a minute, then he resumed dialing even more desperately.

  “Submarine,” Adele said, awed. It gave her a creepy feeling, knowing that it was cruising through the water below them, silent, deadly, and could surface underneath them at any moment. “Ours?” she asked.

  “No. Not ours. And if they don’t know it’s here, they’ve got to be told immediately.” He snorted in frustration as he encountered another busy signal on the eleventh number he’d dialed. “If only I can find a way to get a message to them.”

  As he continued dialing, Adele kept her gaze on the sea around them.

  USS Centurion

  1018 local (GMT –10)

  “Conn, Sonar, regain of contact on Sierra two,” Jacobs said. After an hour of slowly quartering the strip of ocean assigned to them, he’d finally caught the first hint of the other boat.

  Captain Tran leaned over Jacob’s shoulder, studying the signature coursing down the waterfall display. The submarine had just executed a turn to starboard and was proceeding slowly back toward them.

  “Clearing her baffles, I’d say,” the chief remarked. “Just making sure no one’s following her.”

  “Always a good idea,” the captain said. “It just doesn’t work if the boat following you is a lot quieter than you are.”

  “We might know more about her if she’d put some knots on,” Jacobs said. Even with the familiarity the crew and officers developed living in close quarters, he still was uneasy venturing his opinion. “If I could get a propeller count, maybe some main propulsion, it might refine the classification.”

  The captain smiled, a faintly wolfish expression on his face. “When in doubt, take the offensive. One ping.”

  Pencehaven toggled over to the active mode and considered his options. Ranging or targeting? The long, slow ping that they used for open area search, or the short, tight burst that would tell the other boat that someone was getting ready to shoot a torpedo up her ass? He glanced up at the captain.

  “Targeting, I believe,” the captain said softly. “We want her to move, that’s the fastest way to get her attention.”

  “One ping, targeting mode,” the sonarman said happily. He selected the mode then depressed the button that activated the transmitter. “Next thing we hear will be the crappers flushing as they start shitting their pants.”

  A hard, short burst of acoustic energy rattled the speaker overhead. It was pure tone, as solid as slamming on the hull of the other boat with a two-by-four.

  The reaction from the other boat was immediate and dramatic. A low frequency line snaked up the spectrum, evidence of the diesel’s increasing speed. A host of other lines appeared on the display as she started maneuvering, the up and down Dopplers gyrating wildly on the screen.

  “Bet she dives,” the chief said. “Try to get the layer working against us.”

  “Five bucks,” Pencehaven said promptly, his earlier reluctance gone completely. “She’s been down a long time. She’s headed for the surface to recharge her battery. She might take a little excursion descending, but she’s got to head for the surface real soon.”

  The skipper nodded. “Let’s put the hurt on her for a while. Drop the tail down below the layer, but keep us shallow. I want to be waiting for her when she comes up to light off. We’ll take her out then.”

  “What’s to keep her from taking a shot at us now?” the chief asked, already reaching for his wallet.

  “Because she’s going to need targeting data on us,” the skipper said. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t think her skipper is going to risk going active, not now. Not low on batteries with a hostile on his tail. He’ll try to clear the area, get up to the surface and snorkel quickly, then come back after us.” He clapped the sonarman on the shoulder. “Good job. Now be ready for her when she comes shallow. They may have taken the first shot in this war, but as far as that boat’s concerned, we’re going to take the last.”

  The chief tweaked up the volume on the speaker in the sonar shack. Underneath the sea noise, the discrete frequencies of the biologics and other ship, the random noise generated by undersea wave action and oil rigs, he could hear it. A faint rub-rub-rub sound, accompanied by a slight hiss. Classic propeller noises, moving higher in pitch and frequency as he listened, indicating that the contact was picking up speed.

  “You’re certain it’s the sub?” the chief asked.

  Jacobs nodded. “It’s got this hiss-whoosh you always hear off diesels — something about the way their propellers are configured. There’s nothing surface about that noise at all. And listen — there! A slight rattle, like a baby’s toy shaken underwater.”

  The look on the chief’s face confirmed the sonarman’s classification. He reached for his wallet and extracted a five-dollar bill. “Periscope rattling in the shaft,” he confirmed. “She’s getting ready to come shallow and take a look around.”

  “Flood tubes,” the skipper said. “Let’s finish this now.”

  Just then, a faint serpentine line traced its way down the screen. “Shit,” the sonarman said. “It’s aircraft — sir, I think the carrier’s somewhere nearby. That’s one of her SAR helos.”

  “That’s what she’s after,” the skipper said, his voice deadly. “The carrier. And she’s just tracked out of our area. We can’t follow or we’ll risk bringing down one of the helos on us. OOD, come to communications depth. I’ll let the carrier know that they’ve got company.”

  Heaven Can Wait

  1019 local (GMT –10)

  It took Jack Simpson another ten phone calls, but he finally extracted the telephone number he needed from a bored watch officer. He punched the numbers in and glanced over at Adele. “Hope they’re not tying up the line.” His eyes widened slightly as someone on the other end answered.

  “Hi. This is Jack Simpson, skipper of the Heaven Can Wait. We’re the small boat ten thousand yards off your port bow.”

  “What the — how the hell did you get this number,” the voice on the other end asked.

  “D.C. gave it to me,” Jack answered. “Ship-to-ship is clobbered, and I had to get in touch with you. I want to report a submarine sighting.”

  “Listen, mister, I don’t know who you are and what you want, but we’re a little busy right now,” the voice continued, clearly exasperated. “Now get the hell off this line and — ”

  “No, wait! You don’t understand! D.C. gave me the number — there’re no other comms right now, not secure. Listen, I saw a submarine out here. It’s headed for you.”

  Silence from the carr
ier for a moment, then, “Hold on. Just — just hold on for a moment.” Static crackled across the line. A new voice said, “Hello? This is Commander Busby, Jefferson’s intelligence officer. What’s this about a sighting report?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Simpson said.

  “We’re off the coast of Hawaii,” Busby said. “Not surprising.”

  “Not ours. A small diesel, Russian-built by the looks of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  Simpson briefly sketched in his background, then said, “I know the difference between a U.S. sub and a Russian diesel, Commander. This one started life as a Russian, but someone’s made a lot of modifications to it.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’m not saying I believe you, understand. But we’ll be on the lookout for it. In the meantime, if you’ve got any more information for us, call this number.” Busby hesitated for a moment, considering the possibility that the Simpsons weren’t who they claimed to be. But the circumstances were so dire that he had to take the chance. He rattled off a new telephone number, then added, “That’s my direct line.”

  “Hold on!” Simpson said, as he heard Adele shout from the aft of the ship. “Just — shit! You want to see a submarine, Commander, you look aft. I’ve got a snorkel mast just coming up out of the water. And from the looks of her periscope, she’s up for only one reason, sir. To take a final bearing on the carrier.”

  TWELVE

  Rising Sun

  1020 local (GMT –10)

  Communications Specialist Wang slid one long, delicate finger under the foam rubber earpiece and scratched. Cool air crept under the pad, reducing the heat generated by the close-fitting earpiece.

  He sat in front of a bank of advanced electronic equipment, most of it cobbled together from different pieces of U.S. gear. Thanks to the Clinton administration, they’d had no problem assembling the highly specialized equipment needed to detect and monitor a vast range of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The entire system was modeled on the U.S. Echelon program, a systematic way of monitoring every form of electromagnetic transmission for key code words and names.