Commander-In-Chief

by Mark Greaney

  The Kilo had been traveling astern of the Granite, not the best place from which to attack, but the massive oil-products vessel was cruising at only twelve knots. The Type 53-65, the captain of the Vyborg knew, would attack at forty-eight knots, and its acoustical homing equipment would have no trouble picking up the signature of the big and loud cargo vessel alone on this stretch of sea.

  This was the eleventh boat the Vyborg had tracked in the past two days. The captain’s orders had been to find a commercial vessel skirting the waters of Kaliningrad, ideally straying unequivocally inside, and to destroy the boat. If the boat was over one hundred meters in length, so much the better.

  The Granite was 185 meters, it was within two hundred sixty meters of the territorial waters of Russia, and the captain of the submarine knew once it lost its ability to maneuver, its wreckage would drift well within the maritime exclusion zone.

  So the Granite would die.

  He fired a single torpedo. If the surface vessel had posed any kind of a threat whatsoever, the captain would have launched a salvo of at least two torpedoes, but the ship five thousand meters off his bow was so much more helpless than a sitting duck, because a sitting duck could, if it came down to it, flap its wings and fly away.

  The torpedo was designed to defeat all manner of countermeasures, so this shot was akin to shooting fish in a barrel. It homed in on the unmistakable acoustic signature of its target, then as it got closer it began following the wake of the vessel, closed the distance between the submarine and the tanker, and neared the big vessel.

  In the last phase of the weapon’s attack, the torpedo dove from a depth of thirty feet to a depth of sixty feet and raced under the Granite to position itself directly under the hull, and then its electromagnetic fuse detonated.

  The explosion of the Granite was impressive. The Kilo did not watch it in real time. No, it had followed protocol and dove after firing, it was eighty meters below the surface and far out of periscope depth, but the Kilo’s sonar technicians listened to the detonation and the subsequent death of the vessel.

  No one on board knew why they did what they had just done. The specific orders to track and kill had come from the Baltic Fleet commander in Kaliningrad, and in typical fashion no explanation was given for the order. But a rumor passed among the sailors on board was that Russian intelligence had determined that the ship they attacked was an American electronic-intelligence spy vessel, stealing information about Russian naval personnel off wireless communications bouncing through the air this close to the coast of Kaliningrad.

  Others—not many, but a few—thought Valeri Volodin had gone insane and was begging the world for a fight.

  The Kilo followed its orders and headed to the south, leaving the burning wreckage of the Granite to sink with all hands, and then drift closer to Kaliningrad.

  63

  The USS James Greer (DDG-102) wasn’t looking for attention; in fact, the captain of the guided missile destroyer, Commander Scott Hagen, would have given a month’s pay to be lurking silently anywhere else in the Baltic but dead solid center, surrounded by civilian vessels, the aircraft of half a dozen nations, and even the rented helicopters of a dozen of the world’s biggest news outlets.

  But they were here, finishing their fourth day at the scene of the crash of Swedish Airlines Flight 44, and the big powerful destroyer retrieving wreckage in the center of a very crowded sea had made one hell of an impressive shot for the video crews.

  This would have been bad enough for Hagen, a realization of his worst fear of losing the element of surprise in an ocean full of very real threats, but now the officers’ mess of his ship had been turned into an impromptu location to hold a press conference. Right now twenty reporters, photographers, and audio technicians were crammed tight, while three young sonar technicians, two male and one female, sat wide-eyed and uncomfortable at a table.

  Three sailors—a petty officer 2nd class, a petty officer 1st class, and a senior STGC—had used a laptop computer and the ship’s towed array sonar to create a “Black Box Detector” to search the deep water for the flight data recorder of SA44. They did this by taking the acoustic signature created by the black box’s “ping” and sending it out to the towed array of the James Greer, telling it, in effect, to ignore every boat, fish, whale, and other sound in the sea, and to search for the telltale noise.

  It had taken two days of running patterns in the area, but the box had been found. A research vessel that had been working at the site of a World War II plane wreck off the coast of Finland had joined the hunt, and they used their submersible to bring up the flight data recorder, allowing the other salvage equipment on station to concentrate on the recovery of larger pieces of wreckage.

  And now the sailors involved in the successful search for the crucial equipment had their twenty-minute press conference to bask in their success to the world media, although all three of them looked like they’d rather be anywhere else in the world than here under the lights, carefully fielding questions without revealing one word of classified intelligence, all while their captain looked on from out in the passageway.

  And if the three sonar technicians weren’t exactly enjoying the moment, Commander Hagen was even more uncomfortable. He’d had to close off sections of his ship and position guards at doors in the bulkheads and hatches on the deck where they needed to be extra careful some intrepid reporter didn’t try to leave the pack, and he had to watch his three young sailors to make sure they didn’t drift into the no-man’s-land of classified information; hard to do when they had zero experience giving briefings to the media.

  But the Navy had ordered the event and the crew was doing their best to comply, while Commander Hagen just kept looking at his watch, wishing this day would end as soon as possible.

  The worst part of all this wasn’t the exposure, or the risk of losing a reporter down a ladderway, or the effort that had gone into finding the black box, taking his men and women away from their main mission here in the Baltic.

  No, it was the bodies that bothered Hagen the most now, and it was the bodies that would stay with him the longest. The Greer had recovered thirty-one intact bodies or body parts in the past week, even though that had not been their main task here. Time and time again, reports from lookouts indicated floating debris in the water that appeared to be human remains, and while many times they would send out launches to discover clothing, suitcases, or colorful seats from the aircraft, thirty-one times his sailors had to retrieve the dead. Men, women, children . . . unidentifiable human remains.

  Hagen knew this mission was important, he knew his boat was the right tool for the job, but the truth was . . . he hated this shit.

  A tap on his shoulder pulled him back to the moment, and he turned to find his XO standing with a blue folder in his hands and a serious look on his face. He leaned over to his captain. “Message from the CNO, sir.”

  Hagen hadn’t expected anything from the chief of naval operations, so he followed Lieutenant Commander Kincaid back to his own stateroom. Here he quickly opened the folder and began reading.

  After a full minute he looked up at his XO. “A Russian Kilo has hit a Maltese-flagged freighter, possibly traveling in Russian waters off Kaliningrad.”

  “Hit it, sir?”

  “Torpedoed. Sunk.”

  “Holy shit! On purpose?”

  Hagen stared back at his second-in-command without comment. The XO held his hands up.

  “Sorry, sir. You don’t accidentally fire a torpedo. I just . . . Why?”

  “Not a clue. We are to make best possible speed for Lithuanian waters. It’s a presence mission at the moment. Further orders to follow.”

  The XO said, “They have two Kilos in their Baltic Fleet, sir. I recommend we get the UH-60 Romeos far out ahead of us looking for them, erring on the side of caution.”

  “I agree. There is no reason for either
of those Kilos to head as far north as Lithuania, but there was no reason for them to sink a Maltese oil-products tanker, either. Let’s find them before they find us.”

  Hagen looked down the passageway at the media presence. “Phil, enough of the dog-and-pony show. I want those folks out of here, clear off the deck, within ten minutes. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  • • •

  Thirty minutes later the James Greer had begun its transit of the Baltic Sea, but no message had been given over the 1-MC public address system as to their new mission.

  Lieutenant Damon Hart, a thirty-year-old undersea-warfare weapons officer, noticed the change in the ship’s engines, even down in his officers’ quarters, several decks below the bridge. It was almost noon, but Hart had just climbed out of his bunk.

  He had been working “five and dimes” all week. Five hours on shift, then ten hours off. He’d been on duty throughout the nighttime hours; he ate alone in the mess before climbing into his bunk to catch a few hours.

  Now he was rested, but still coming out of his sleep. As he rubbed his eyes and sat down at the tiny desk he shared with another lieutenant, Hart heard running out in the passageway. He looked up at his door as it flew open.

  One of his roommates, a communications officer named Tim Matsui, all but shouted, “Weps, you are not going to believe this!”

  Because Hart was a weapons officer, everyone on the boat called him Weps, even the captain.

  Hart yawned. “Dude, I know. It’s Wednesday. Slider day. I can’t wait.” Wednesdays were especially big draws in the mess. The cook’s cheddar cheese sliders were legendary.

  The communications officer shook his head, a look on his face Hart had never seen from the man.

  “It’s not slider day?” Hart asked.

  Matsui sat down on the bunk next to Hart. “A Kilo torpedoed an oil tanker off the coast of Kaliningrad at oh seven hundred. Left it just a smoking oil slick.”

  Hart blinked hard in astonishment. “No shit? Are they sure?”

  “A Polish corvette was close by, it picked up the torpedo signature before it even hit the ship. ID’d it as a Fifty-three, Sixty-five. Had to have been one of the Russian Kilos. It was in international waters, no question about it. We’re heading to Lithuania to protect shipping at the border with Kaliningrad, and we might be sent into international waters to hunt the Kilo.”

  Hart had trained for this each and every day for the nine years he’d been in the Navy. But it occurred to him now that he never really expected it to happen.

  Matsui said, “Did you hear what I just said? Looks like shit is about to get real.”

  Hart still found it hard to believe for a second they were going to actually start hunting a Russian sub. He thought they’d probably just flex their muscle in the area. Almost to himself, he said, “I can kill a Kilo.”

  It was an affirmation, but his roommate responded.

  “You’re damn right you can, Weps! You didn’t get all those badges and shit for eating sliders.”

  The captain came over the 1-MC moments later, relaying his orders to move his ship toward Lithuania. He ended his briefing to the crew with a warning about operational security.

  “We are on commo lockdown as of right now. No information out to anyone about our location, our destination, or our mission. No one is to use social media at all for anything. Remember . . . Loose tweets sink fleets.”

  64

  The Situation Room conference room was full. Cabinet-level national security officials ringed the table, and behind them their aides and other military officers lined the walls. Another six men and women stood in the corners.

  Jack Ryan looked around at the crowd and thought he should be the President who finally had this room redesigned. It wasn’t that the world’s problems had grown past the ability of the physical dimensions of the room to deal with them since the Situation Room had been built in 1961; it was rather that the amount of information pouring into the room in times of crisis had become harder to manage. It took more people, more experts in more disciplines, more monitors, and more room for visual aids than did similar crises just twenty or thirty years ago.

  Ryan had thirty people in front of him, and he felt like a quarterback of a too-large and too-unwieldy football team trying to play on a field that was way too small.

  It was a stifling feeling.

  SecDef Bob Burgess had the floor now, and he was on Ryan’s direct left, speaking to the President, but careful to be loud enough to be heard all over the room. “The Russians are claiming the tanker sailed into Kaliningrad waters and refused to respond to radio hailing.”

  Ryan looked at the map on the monitor on the other side of the room. It was the only monitor he could see with the crowd against the walls. “What do the Russians say they thought the tanker’s intentions were?”

  “Terrorism. They are claiming they felt this was another attack on Russian forces in Kaliningrad, just like the attack in Vilnius.”

  “That’s asinine.”

  Mary Pat said, “It’s for domestic consumption. Volodin’s about to go to war, he knows it, and he is hammering home the same nationalistic ‘We’re all under attack’ line to his people he’s been using for the past year. But now he’s bolstering this assertion by claiming his people are literally under attack.”

  Burgess said, “Following your instructions, I’ve already directed the chief of naval operations to move the nearest surface assets toward Lithuania. First to arrive will be the James Greer, a guided missile destroyer.”

  Ryan said, “I saw the Greer on CNN this morning. It’s helping with the SA44 crash.”

  “It was. It’s already left the crash site, and now it’s moving as fast as possible into position. It will be on station by seven this evening. The captain is awaiting orders. He knows he’ll either protect Lithuanian waters or play a more active role in international waters.”

  Ryan nodded. He knew that decision was up to him, ultimately, but he wasn’t going to be rushed into it.

  Burgess said, “And there is news from DIA regarding the three generals we mentioned. Two from the Western Military District, and one in the Southern Military District.”

  Ryan said, “You told me DIA felt confident these men would be present in theater before an attack on Lithuania.”

  “Correct, and we’ve pinpointed all three. One of the generals is in Belarus, and one is in Kaliningrad.”

  “Where’s the third?”

  “He was in Belarus until the day before yesterday, then he left.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Believe it or not, he’s in Odessa on vacation.”

  “Vacation?”

  “He’s at a new resort hotel set up for military officers. There was a story about it on TV this morning on Channel Seven. He and a few other top military guys were mentioned.”

  At first glance, this made no sense to Ryan. “What would his role be in the invasion?”

  “Heavy artillery. That’s what he’s been involved with in all the other fights.”

  Jack smiled slowly now. It wasn’t a look of happiness, just marveling at the situation.

  “What is it?” Adler asked.

  “This general . . . he’s their Patton.”

  Burgess understood immediately. “A misdirection.”

  “Sorry,” Scott Adler said. “Patton?”

  Ryan filled him in. “Before the D-Day invasion, the Germans were keeping an eye on one man. America’s most audacious general. They took it as a given that he would be involved with the invasion.

  “Eisenhower understood this, so he sent George Patton up to the north of England, gave him a phantom army, used him as a complete misdirection. He wasn’t involved in D-Day, because Ike determined he could serve best by turning the enemy’s eyes away from the real attac
k.”

  Ryan said, “This Russian general is going to have capable senior staff under him who can do his job. The Russians send him off to ‘club mil’ in Odessa, make a big show about the fact he is nowhere near the theater, so we think nothing is about to happen.”

  Scott Adler understood the deeper ramifications of this news. He said, “In the past few weeks they’ve done everything in their power to telegraph the fact they were coming over the border. Now, suddenly, they apply some trickery.” He didn’t ask why, because he knew why. “The invasion is decided. The West caved like they thought we would, so they are going forward.”

  Jack Ryan agreed. “They have to go forward. They want us to let our guard down for a day or two while this old goat is sunning himself on the beach, which means that’s when they’ll come.”

  Burgess said, “I’ll alert our ambassador to NATO. He can push again for a deployment.”

  “No,” countered Ryan quickly. “NATO will only deploy when it’s too late. That ship has sailed. They will only act, if at all, when the Article Five violation is well under way.”

  Adler asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “We are going to deploy the Black Sea Rotational Force into Lithuania.” He turned to Burgess. “They need to be moving ten minutes ago. Also get the Marine units from Spain on the way, and give the regiment at Camp Lejeune the green light. You said they could be in Lithuania in ten days. That clock is now ticking.”

  Burgess turned to an aide, a uniformed colonel with a nameplate that read BROWN. “Brownie, go.” Burgess turned back to Ryan. “The MEU training in the North Sea?”

  Ryan nodded. “Push them to the east—toward the Baltic Sea. Obviously we’ve got some Russian subs to kill before I put two thousand American Marines in Russian waters. But it will take them days to get there.” He turned to the secretary of the Navy. “You need to make sure our ships looking for those subs have everything they need. If you want me on the phone with Sweden or Poland, or . . . or anybody, to pull more assistance from foreign nations, you just say the word.”