by Ian Slater
Glancing up from the radar for a moment, out through the darkness of the Sitka’s bridge, Sandra could see the moonlight bathing the sea’s turbulence in a deceptively soft light, the great, sliding, gray metallic swells momentarily robbed of their violence. Something hit her, like a strong, hot wind. As she reached for the radar’s console for support there was a flash from forward midships, an enormous crash, the ship shaking violently like a car at speed with a blowout, then a tremendous whoomp as the shock wave rebounded. In an ethereal moment of calm she saw Captain Llamos running toward the steering console, but his image shivered, and he looked as if he were moving in slow motion, hands outstretched for the auto-to-manual levers.
Then the ship listed to port. For a second Sandra thought the tanker had collided with one of the big tugs. The next moment the bridge shifted violently to port, and she was thrown hard in the darkness onto the cleated matting, glass shattering, its invisible hail all about her, alarm klaxons blaring, several lights on the wing tank monitor console blinking furiously, indicating at least five of the forward starboard wing tanks were ruptured, spilling their liquid cargo into the sea. Her face and hands soaking wet, she tried to get up, but the port list had increased to fifteen degrees, and she felt herself sliding down the incline. Suddenly lights came on.
“Put that damn switch off!” It was Llamos’s voice shouting at the starboard lookout, Llamos hunched, hanging onto the steering console in the middle of the bridge.
“We’re hit, aren’t we?” the lookout yelled defiantly.
“You don’t have to make it easier for them,” Llamos shouted. “Keep the damn light off.” Sandra could see him dimly against the shattered bridge glass as he flicked on the intercom to the radio room, ordering the operator to send an SOS. There was no reply. He gave the order again. Still no reply.”Thompson?” he called out. “Sandra?”
“Yes, sir, I’m here.”
“Go do it.”
“Yes, sir.” Pushing herself off the wet latticed decking she grabbed a flashlight from the port lookout’s rack, making her way downhill to the radio room. Within seconds she was drenched, the sprinkler system going full bore. In the gossamer spray, cut cleanly by the beam of her flashlight, she saw blood streaming down her arms, only now realizing that her face had been lacerated by glass shards from the bridge. There was another flash of light; momentarily night became day. The second tanker was hit, one of her tanks immediately catching fire, an overwhelming explosion of crimson flame curling in the blackest smoke she’d ever seen, the flames now spiralling and joining. In the corner of the radio room she saw the operator trying to get up, holding his head. Instinctively moving to help, she checked herself and instead issued the SOS. As she went into the third repeat, giving the tanker’s approximate position from the last fix, the computer readout dead, there was another sound like an enormous door creaking. The radio room began to move as if disembodied from the ship proper, and she knew that the Sitka was breaking, its spine snapped by either torpedoes or acoustic mines.
* * *
One of the Russian sub’s torpedoes hadn’t exploded. Valery entered it in the Saratov’s log as a possible dud, though he noted that given the sea’s condition it might have gone off course because of a sudden thermocline. In any case, all Valery was concerned with now was that he had sunk two tankers — the first, though not on fire, was doomed, its funnel and aft crew sections, each half a quarter-mile long, drifting apart and in toward the wild coastline of British Columbia. Meanwhile the inferno on the second tanker was spreading over the sea in huge, fiery fingers, riding up and down the swells in the fast current. Because of the lack of surf between the protective offshore islands, the fiery spill, fed by its enormous tar balls and mousse blankets of crude, was already washing up on the pristine shoreline. Fanned by the gale-force winds, the huge flames were licking the dense shoreline forests, setting the timber here in the dry cold several hundred feet below the coastal range’s snow line afire in what would be the biggest single blaze and ecological disaster since the oil spills and fires of the Iraqi war.
In the search scope Valery could easily identify the stricken tankers illuminated by the flames as ultrA-1arge carriers of the Globtik Tokyo class, both in excess of three hundred thousand dead weight tons. “Even better than I had hoped,” he informed the officer of the deck. “But I don’t understand why the first tanker isn’t burning.”
“The fires were probably doused by the flooding,” commented the OOD.
“Even so,” rejoined Valery, “the tanker’s own engine oil should—”
Suddenly Valery snapped the grips hard against the scope’s stainless steel column. “Down scope. Dive to five hundred.”
“Down scope… dive to five hundred!” repeated the OOD. The diving officer stood directly behind the two planesmen, hands gripping their two bucket seats, knuckles white as he watched the gauge of the sub. If they dove at too steep an angle, the sub’s stern would come clear out of the water before they were fully submerged.
“Podgotovit’ k vypusku torpedo — simyulatorpodvodnoy lodki. Zadnyaya truba. “—”Prepare to fire submarine simulator torpedo. Stern tube.”
As the torpedo officer confirmed the order, Valery explained the rush to the OOD. “A helicopter’s coming off the second tanker. Most likely for crew rescue but could be ASW.”
For a second Valery chastised himself for not having fired the submarine simulator before the attack, but it was an enormously expensive piece of equipment. Besides shooting out millions of rubles with each fish, its noise, while a decoy for any ASW aircraft or ship in the area, would have been picked up by the SOSUS, the underwater microphone arrays of the sound surveillance system, giving the sub’s general “area position” away. With the depth needle approaching five hundred meters, Valery decided he’d made the right decision, saving the simulator till now. True, he’d glimpsed the helicopter on the tanker’s deck for only a split second, but he was sure its rotors had been spinning, ready for takeoff, possibly with ASW munitions.
“Level at five hundred, sir.”
“Fire decoy!”
“Decoy fired, sir.”
“Silent running,” ordered Valery.
“Silent running, sir.”
From now on if any crew member made a mistake — dropped anything on the metal deck that might be picked up in the sound channel — it would cost the man three months’ pay plus a “zebra”—a black-striped demotion entry on his blue service sheet.
But Valery himself had made a serious error. The Bell 212 twin-turboshaft chopper rising aft off the second tanker’s stern housing pad was interested only in trying to rescue two crew members whose salt-activated vest lights were orange pinpoints in the raging cauldron about the stricken tankers. The spray-roiling beam that was the chopper’s searchlight turned rust-red above the blankets of burning oil. In the beam’s circle that was moving up and down the chaotic sea like an undulating sheet of blood, the two crewmen lay limp in the helo’s harness, having suffocated in the oil after having been concussed by the explosions of the torpedoes. Likewise, scores of seabirds were already smothered in the bunker “C” crude.
Sandra Thompson, Llamos, and the starboard lookout struggled on the slippery incline of the stern deck of the first tanker. The ship’s two halves continued drifting apart as the three survivors tossed over a white, drum-size Beaufort canister, its tether flying free of the ship like some long snake. The canister hit the water, instantly shedding its fiberglass shell and blossoming into a tent raft of vivid Day-Glo magenta highlighted by the fire on the second tanker aboard which small, toylike figures could be seen vainly manning a crisscross of hoses.
“Inflate your vest,” Llamos shouted to the starboard lookout. “Hold your breath as long as you can and—” Llamos’s voice was whipped away by the gale-force winds as he pointed toward the treacle-moated raft now about thirty feet away from the badly listing stern section. The lookout jumped.
Sandra pulled the C02 string on her
life vest, heard the sudden hiss of air, felt the Mae West swelling above her bosom as she tightened the waist straps and bent down to inflate the vest of the injured radio man whom she and Llamos had dragged precariously from the bridge. Llamos had taken a turn about the operator’s waist with a painter from one of the lifeboats to prevent the injured man from sliding down the deck that was now dangerously slick with the oil which had been blown skyward in towering black spumes before falling back on the tankers, drenching the four and fuelling the fires with a driving black rain. The radio man was so quiet, Sandra thought he was dead, but putting her finger on his carotid artery she thought she felt a faint pulse.
“Go!” Llamos yelled out to her. “Jimmy and I’ll look after him. You need to reach the raft. Transmit our—” He didn’t finish, his voice drowned in a gush of superheated steam, a boiler beneath them exploding, splitting the ship’s port after section, the stern heaving, the stack spewing boiling water swept forward for hundreds of yards in the gale force winds. The stern was now split and sliding back into the sea, rolling, revealing the flanges of its enormous prop blades. Llamos and the other three were toppling out of control down the cliff of the deck. A lifeboat wrenched from its davits swung upward like a trapeze, smashing itself to splinters. The hissing roar of the stern was so loud it could be heard above the gale by the few crewmen still battling the second tanker’s fires. Unable to save Sandra or the others, the two-man helo crew watched helplessly as the rear half of the MV Sitka disappeared. Then they turned their attention to the tiny frantic figures on the stern of the second tanker.
The chopper’s pilot had ordered his assistant to jettison the bodies of the two dead men they’d hauled up, lessening the chopper’s weight so the helo might try to pick up as many survivors as possible from the twenty-five-man crew on the second tanker and any others who, inconceivable as it appeared, might be alive on the forward section of the first tanker. Though still afloat, it was certain to go under within minutes.
The pilot shouted his instructions regarding excess weight into the throat mike, and his assistant, after having grabbed the auto-flash Canon and taking head shots of the two dead men for later identification, pushed the bodies out. The chopper banked in the darkness toward the stern of the second tanker, its fire now so fierce, there was no hope of the ship’s hoses extinguishing it. The hot air currents streaming up from the blazing ship were so powerful that the pilot knew there was no chance of getting anywhere close to the deck.
Cautiously he brought the chopper toward the stern, his visibility now reduced to zero because of the continuing oil smudge on his windscreen combining with the buildup of salt crust, a combination the wipers couldn’t handle. His assistant saw a crimson streak several hundred yards away to the east— a flare — and in its flickering light the Day-Glo of a Beaufort “Teepee.” Yelling at the pilot and gesturing eastward, the assistant guided them to the point seventy feet away. The chopper hovered above the raft and lowered the harness, swiveling in the C clip. But then seeing the raft was overcrowded with survivors from both tankers and that this could easily lead to a capsize should the chopper be suddenly caught in an updraft, the pilot shouted into the mike, “We’re only a few miles from shore. Best leave ‘em for Air Sea Rescue in the morning. Stand a better chance, I reckon.”
“I dunno,” yelled the assistant. “Could go belly-up anyway in the swells.” During the second of hesitation the Bell 212, which could not fly on one engine unless traveling in excess of one hundred miles per hour, gave a shudder. An engine coughed, then the other cut out, its air filter jammed solid with soot from the oil fire. The chopper plunged, its rotors chopping into the loaded raft. Then, catching a swell, the blades cartwheeled the chopper several hundred feet, splashing into the mousse of bunker “C,” parts of the main rotor whistling through the gale. Everyone aboard the tent raft was drowned, in effect suffocated by the oil, including Sandra Thompson and the two-month-old child she was carrying.
* * *
General Grey had thought nothing of Freeman’s call about the peculiar condition of winter ice in the Bering Strait. Surely the Pentagon planners would know this. Grey called downstairs to make sure. They didn’t know. This shocked Grey, but even so it wasn’t Freeman’s familiarity with the minutiae that now impressed him but rather the simple yet profound realization that for Freeman to think of such a detail in the midst of his wife’s catastrophic injury meant that the soldier in Freeman was not only alive and well, but there was only the soldier — that Freeman was straining at the leash. With his genius for logistical detail as well as strategic thought he was unquestionably the man for the job. America had never fought a sustained Arctic war, but now, with the Mideast oil wells afire and the Siberians having answered President Mayne with the sinking of the two American tankers, which by itself constituted an immediate threat to the U.S. oil supply from the Alaskan North Slope, the U.S. had no option. It was war.
Grey lifted his Pentagon scrambler phone, got the Joint Chiefs’ approval, including that of the CNO, Admiral Horton; then he rang the White House and suggested that General Douglas Freeman be appointed commander in chief, Operation Arctic Front, the moment he landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base Alaska. The president approved.
* * *
The call came through to Freeman in Monterey as Marjorie was watching a news flash cutting into “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno announcing that America was at war.
“My glory—” began Marjorie, in a state of shock, one hand clasped before her mouth as the other worked the remote to bring in CBN. “You hear that, Douglas?” she called out. “Russian submarines have attacked two of our ships. We’re at war again.”
Freeman had put the phone down and was already doing up his necktie in an old-fashioned Windsor knot, so old that it was now said to be back in style. He had already called Fort Ord to make transport arrangements and issued a series of orders marshalling elements of the marines’ rapid deployment force.
“My glory!” Marjorie repeated, slumped down in the recliner. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes,” Freeman agreed. “Sure as hell is.” It may have been the light of the TV flickering, but for a moment Marjorie could have sworn Douglas was smiling.
“Still, Marjorie,” he added, “must have been meant to be.” She suspected in a vague sort of way that it might be a jibe at her, but it was clear he also believed it.
“I hope it’ll be quick,” said Marjorie, “like Iraq.”
Freeman’s smile was devoid of condescension — one of those a parent gives when obliged to break a truth of life gently to his offspring, the truth that in life you couldn’t hope for nonstop, easy victories. He took nothing away from the men who had fought in Desert Storm, in which he himself had led part of the Seventh Armored in the decisive outflanking movement north that caught the Republican Guard with their pants down. But the Iraqi war, for all its moments of undeniable American and Coalition bravery, had been, when all was said and done, a hundred-hour ground war. Even the dimmest private would see that Siberia was a far different situation, that any comparison to Desert Storm was naive to say the least.
He spoke quietly. “Marjorie — Iraq is desert. Some high country to the north, but in the main, a desert. Siberia has everything, by which I mean every natural land, water, and ice barrier on God’s earth. And taiga — pine, birch, and fir forests — far as the eye can see. Wermacht used to talk of ‘distance illness,’ the endlessness of Russia. And Marjorie—” He was looking in the mirror, straightening the khaki tie. “—the Krauts didn’t even get to Siberia. They were in the small part of Russia.” He buttoned up his coat, the rows of campaign ribbons and decorations attesting to the battles he had fought for America from Southeast Asia to Iraq to the Minsk-Moscow line, his reflection in the mirror at once eager for and awed by his responsibility. “There is,” he said, pulling on his cap, “another minor detail.”
“What?” Marjorie asked, though her attention was distracted by a CBN broadcaster. Someho
w they’d got one of their cameras twenty-four miles across the strait from Alaska to Little Diomede Island and had it set up on the sloping but still steep western side of the small American outpost near the Eskimo village of Inalik. The CBN’s camera was filling the TV screen with the ice-covered basalt that was the bottom half of Big Diomede or, as CBN was calling it, “Ratmanov Island.”
Freeman shot a glance at the TV, and Marjorie had seldom seen such a look of outright contempt on his face as he watched the CBN announcer in a fur-lined Eskimo parka telling Americans how the U.S. Air Force were already assembling fighters and fighter bombers on the Alaskan Peninsula for what was “certain to be” an aerial bombardment of the 11.2-square-mile Ratmanov Island. The island was so heavily defended, the reporter continued, “that many military experts believe it to be the most heavily defended piece of real estate in the world whose troops, unlike the ill-supplied Republican Guard of the Iraqi war, are known to have months of supplies and ammunition deep within the granite fortress. Along with state-of-the-art air defenses that are bound to inflict heavy casualties upon the Americans if they try to take out the SAM sites on Ratmanov and which they must take out if they have any hope of…”
“It’s not Ratmanov Island,” shouted Freeman at the CBN announcer. “It’s Rat Island, and we’re going to exterminate the bastards! By the bushel!”
“Douglas!”
He flashed a winning smile. “Sorry, Marjorie.”
“Aren’t you going to tell the then?”