December Ultimatum

by Michael Nicholson

‘I repeat, Misters Ginsberg and Vaduz. Article ten, section sixteen. United States Uniformed Code of Military Justice. The manuals are in my cabin. Now get to your stations. Vaduz, keep this ship sliding across the channel. We will not close below two thousand yards from the Soviets but we will not travel from them. That understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you will tell Navigation and Radar to keep an eye on both flanks. They have shallow draught frigates who might move around us. Watch.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Mr Ginsberg.’

  ‘Captain?’

  ‘Return to Gunnery Control and remain there. Maintain standby alert on two stations and wait for my orders. You will fire when I order you to. And you will ignore all else. Understood?’

  Lieutenant Ginsberg licked his dry lips.

  ‘You understand?’ the Captain shouted at him.

  ‘Yessir, I understand.’ Ginsberg tried to find the face hidden in the shadows. He could hear the Captain breathing, in the deep breaths that men sometimes use to control their own anxiety. Ginsberg saluted the shadow, turned on the ball of his foot and left the bridge for Gunnery Control.

  Captain Hanks was alone again. In normal times it would have pleased him to stand this way on the bridge, looking across his command. It would have relaxed him and on those soft evenings with the warmth of evening sunlight, he might even have hummed to himself and have touched the scars on his lower back and remembered the Midway.

  But not now. Not with the enemy a mile away and with the signal to engage in his pocket. Not with a ship half full of mutiny, an enemy beyond and within. But still he must wait. Since dusk the night before he had waited for the Russians to move, to initiate, to give him reason to fire. This was the chance. He knew it. If things went well, this morning he would die.

  And how would they mourn? What posthumous awards? Such paths of glory. No longer doomed to solitary retirement in Pittsburgh and the slow death of loneliness. He would go the way all Captains dreamed, in command of a fighting, dying ship in the service of his nation, as all men of the sea . . .

  ‘The men, Captain, would like a hearing.’

  Captain Hanks spun round. There had to be a proper ending, no one would spoil it. No one. ‘Damn your men, Daniels, damn every motherfucker of them. This ship will fight, God help me it will fight.’

  Commander Daniels closed the bridge door behind him. Softly, almost gently, he said, ‘The men may not, sir. They don’t see why. They don’t know why. You must understand.’

  Captain Hanks stayed in his dark corner. ‘Is this some kind of new navy, Daniels, some exceptional sea-going democracy? Does it go to the vote? How will you vote?’

  ‘I obey orders, sir, that’s how it was in our day. But things have changed.’

  ‘Changed, Daniels? Nothing changes at sea.’

  ‘Most of these men haven’t been under fire in their lives before, Captain. Few men in the entire US Navy under our age have. And it seems there’s a lot of them below who reckon this is not the time nor the reason.’

  ‘They want a hearing? I make a speech. I call for a vote and there’s a show of hands as if I was some fucking trucker or longshoreman out on East Side. Is that the way it is now in the US Navy? Is that how we went to war in the Pacific, Daniels? Is it?’

  ‘Captain . . . it’s simply that they don’t . . . they seem to work by a whole new set of rules . . . it’s a new . . . understanding.’

  ‘Fuck their new rules, Commander Daniels, just you stick to mine, which so happen to be the US Navy’s. I have a signal here from Admiral Holliwell to one Captain Hanks, USS Okinawa, authorizing another salvo at the Minsk at precisely 06h00 local or sooner if provoked. You’ve read it? Right! I have waited all night for them to move. They have not. In just under fifteen minutes it will be 06h00 local and I fire. I know what’s at stake. I seem to be alone on this ship but by Christ I do know. Suddenly in this little stretch of Arab water we represent everything . . . our country, our heritage, our freedom and every man who ever died at sea for it all. Our President is not prepared to forfeit any of it. Nor am I. I’m seeing it fresh as if I was a young man, like it was that Sunday morning in’41. The USS Okinawa will be defiant today and they’ll print our names in gold for it.’

  Commander Daniels waited. There was a sudden change in engine noise and vibration and the ship began to slow as the engines went into reverse. He saw how everything was grey, greyer than he could ever remember, the bridge, the decks below, the sky, even the air seemed grey and a still sea, grey all the way to the grey motionless hulks of the Soviet fleet a mile away.

  He had come up to the bridge with an ultimatum, or something very close to it. The men had not presented it to him as such, they had not been so unwise. They had been sensibly cautious, but their message was clear enough. There were enough men aboard, they said, to sabotage any sea action, men who were not prepared to fight under such orders from such a Captain for such a reason and the Captain should know it and take whatever action he thought necessary before any alarm was sounded. They owed their Captain such a warning. In return he had a duty to the men.

  ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘It’s a difficult and unique position.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, sir, I’m your second-in-command.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And I think you are doing it all wrong.’

  And only then did Captain Edward Hanks know what had to be done. It was like tearing out a cancer. There would be pain, there would be a wound, but once torn away there would be clean new flesh. And in that instant, like a divine signal of assent, the first rays of red morning sunlight touched the window of the bridge directly in front of Captain Hanks, spreading the glass crimson and he shielded his eyes with his right hand and saw the Soviet warships silhouetted. He turned slowly and faced Commander Daniels who saw a smile on his Captain’s face.

  ‘Thank you, Commander Daniels,’ the Captain said quietly and evenly. ‘Now you go tell the men to return to their stations and not to worry any more. I will do my duty by them the only way I know how!’

  Commander Daniels saluted. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Captain Hanks saluted back. ‘You made the decision easy,’ he said and he reached out and shook his second-in- command by the hand. ‘You tell them that.’

  He watched Daniels go down the ladder to the next deck and down the second to the flight deck. He watched him speak to the fifty or more men waiting there, saw them salute and quickly go their separate ways to their separate stations. Then Captain Hanks opened the side window of the bridge and threw out the black rubber squash ball, watched it bounce the one hundred feet on to the flight deck then shoot off and fall another hundred and twenty feet into the sea.

  He straightened his cap and glanced at the clock above him.

  ‘Coxswain, Bridge.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Reduce speed.’

  ‘Reducing revolutions, sir.’

  ‘Hold her steady centre of channel.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘Bridge to Radar.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Range?’

  ‘Constant two thousand yards, minus twenty, sir.’ ‘Bearings?’

  ‘Minsk 125 . . . Ivan Rogov 127, sir.’

  ‘Two thousand minus twenty on 125 and 127. Correct?’ ‘Affirmative, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Radar.’

  Captain Hanks looked again at the brass clock and checked it with his wristwatch. It was one minute before six o’clock. The sun was rising and the grey of the sky and the grey of the sea was turning salmon pink. Only the warships facing each other remained the same grey dullness, the colour of war at sea. He smoothed the short wiry tufts of hair over his ears and wiped his fingers across his lips and watched the thin red second hand sweeping upwards towards zero. How wonderfully final
it was, how complete, how superbly rounded off. Forty-two years service and this was the way he had always dreamed it would be.

  ‘Bridge to Gunnery. Mr Ginsberg, you on station?’ ‘Yessir.’

  ‘This is your Captain.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Twelve rounds. Immediate fire, range two thousand minus twenty on 125 and 127.’

  ‘Two thousand, sir, minus twenty?’

  ‘That’s the order, Mr Ginsberg. Go to it, boy. Your mama’s with you.’

  And Lieutenant Aubrey Ginsberg, twenty-two years old, hesitating for only an instant, flicked up the wire mesh above the Fail Safe switch and repeated, like automated secondary switchgear in a fast-moving machine, the fire order co-ordinates. ‘Immediate fire range two thousand minus twenty on 125 and 127 . . . repeating two thousand minus twenty on 125 and 127, immediate fire stations five and seven rounds each.’

  As the Yellowbeans approached their pop-up height, eight hundred feet up and three miles from the drop, the fifty aircraft split into five flights of ten. Four would drop on each of the major wells, the fifth would drop on Ras Tanura, the tanker-loading berth on the long spit of land jutting out into the Gulf. The biggest of all the refineries was on Ras Tanura and it was essential that all the major wells be taken intact, and the Ras Tanura refinery kept operational.

  Once the troops were despatched the aircraft were to disperse in separate directions southwards, the command C-130, Colonel Pringle’s Yellowbean 720, overflying the fields watching the operations from a thousand feet, relaying reports back to US Command in Adana. Once a ground satellite link had been established, and it would take about an hour, Colonel Pringle would then take his aircraft up to twenty-nine thousand feet, fly due west over the island of Bahrain across the Gulf to Dubai, across friendly Oman and into international airspace above the Arabian Sea. Then he would turn south-west towards Mombasa on the Kenyan coast for refuelling and on to the British- American military base, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

  ‘Fire behind, sir,’ said the flight engineer. ‘Port side.’

  Colonel Pringle turned quickly in his seat, tugging at his harness. Five aircraft back he could see one of the flankers two hundred yards to his left, its outside starboard engine in flames, smoke billowing so thick and so black that nothing of the rear fuselage could be seen.

  The flight engineer unstrapped himself, left his flight deck seat and jumped down the stairs into the hold to see better. The aircraft had already lost height, was now less than two hundred feet above ground, still dipping. Suddenly it banked away, its starboard wing lifted to the sky and—for an instant—the underneath of the wing was clear of smoke, showing the large white figures ‘728’ It was one of the five C-130s specially fitted with air-to-air missiles. Once the electrical firing circuits were damaged by the fire, the missiles would be released . . . missiles with a warhead and a guidance system dictated by its infrared surveillance mechanism to lock on to the nearest heat source. Which would be the nearest C-130 to it. The flight engineer knew then what the pilot of 728 was doing. The risk was too high and he had banked from the formation, flying at right angles to point his missiles away from it. Through the tiny window, the engineer watched the aircraft sink lower and grow smaller, the black smoke trailing from the wing and then the flash and the orange mushroom as it hit the sand.

  When the engineer got back to the flight deck, Colonel Pringle, the co-pilot and the navigator were drinking hot chocolate. He helped himself to some from the thermos container strapped to the back of the radio racks.

  ‘Three minutes to LZ.’ Colonel Pringle pulled the stick firmly back and Yellowbean 720 climbed to eight hundred feet and was steady again. At the back the dispatchers began checking the chute lines as the paratroopers each side of the aircraft stood in line, each checking the harness of the man in front of him. As they turned to face the rear of the aircraft, cold air filled the hold as the side doors opened. Then the air deflectors moved out either side of the aircraft’s fuselage and shielded them from the blast. They hung on to the steel line above their heads as the aircraft decelerated to its dropping speed and they shuffled forward, tightening up their lines, towards the doors. The Master- Sergeant dispatcher pulled himself along the centre aisle by the canvas cargo webbing and stood dead centre of the two open doors, watching for the red light. He held up his hands and the hundred men looked at him as, in a deliberately exaggerated movement, he slapped his chest and stomach. The hundred men did their final harness checks on main and secondary chutes.

  ‘Running in,’ said the navigator and Colonel Pringle’s right hand eased the throttles back a fraction until the air speed indicator read one hundred and twenty-seven knots.

  ‘No activity below. You’re clear,’ he said in his intercom to the dispatcher who, as the hundred men watched him, pointed below and then gave a thumbs-up to them. He moved to the starboard side door and beckoned the first man forward and held his shoulder. Below was the desert, grey and cold, in the morning’s first light.

  The aircraft banked and they saw what they had come for sprawling beneath them, the vast silver-brown complex of pipelines and tanks and labour camps and beyond that the shine of the Persian Gulf.

  Red light off, green on and the dispatcher slapped the man by him hard on the shoulder and they were away, jumping from both sides, spreading out like a stream of bright fluid streaking into the sky, the first brilliant rays of the dawn sun turning them red.

  ‘Hullo, Snowball control, hullo, Snowball control this is Yellowbean, this is Yellowbean. We are dispatched at this time minus one. Repeating, we are dispatched at this time minus one. And it’s looking fine. It’s looking real fine.’

  Captain Sergei Borgnev, Commander of the Soviet Seventh Fleet, stood on the bridge of the carrier Minsk, drank tea from a yellow plastic beaker, and watched the Okinawa split in two just aft of the control tower. The rear section sank immediately but the forward section, listing fifteen degrees to starboard, stayed afloat another four minutes— giving men time to jump though, as Commander Borgnev casually pointed out to those junior officers around him, few would survive from such a height. They would certain break their necks or backs, or both, as they hit the sea.

  It had been quickly done. He had known exactly the Okinawa’s firepower, just as he assumed the American Captain had known of the destructive capacity of the Soviet Seventh Fleet, which was enormous. The Minsk and the Ivan Rogov sailing together with such a support flotilla constituted the most invincible fleet of any nation on any sea, anywhere in the world.

  It had been an extraordinary act of bravery. But futile. Eleven missiles had ended it and the Okinawa’s initial salvo had caused only minor damage. If the American carrier’s Gunnery Officer had used every shell in his armoury and every one had been a direct hit, as his twelve had been, the Minsk and the Ivan Rogov would still be afloat and fighting. But it surprised Captain Borgnev that it should have been thought necessary, a US-Soviet sea action and an American vessel sunk by Soviet fire. But the signals had been clear enough. He had asked twice for reconfirmation and the same message quoting the same source had been returned immediately. The Admiral commanding the entire American Navy had signalled him via Odessa that the Okinawa was no longer under American control.

  He poured more tea for himself from the vacuum flask into the yellow plastic beaker. The sea a mile and a half ahead was on fire from the oil that had poured from the Okinawa’s fractured fuel tanks. Black smoke, a mile wide, belched into the air five thousand feet up, and he watched his frigates manoeuvring close by the edge of the oil spraying foam under pressure to contain it. Others just behind them were picking up survivors: the living, the half-living, the dying and the dead. He nodded acknowledgement as an officer by his side updated the count. Eighty-two, from a ship that had carried over six hundred. And why? It made no sense.

  He would wait another ten minutes until the centre channel had been cleare
d of burning oil and he would order his fleet forward, through the Straits of Hormuz and then turn due west at the end of the deep water channel into the Gulf for the final and most crucial phase of the operation. At coordinates 25 North—54 East, two thousand combat marines of the Soviet 12th Division would be airlifted by helicopter into the oilfields. They would be accompanied by Forger vertical take-off aircraft from both the Minsk and the Ivan Rogov. By 08h00 local time the men would be on the ground and in control, six hours behind the scheduled timing of the operation because of the Okinawa. But no matter, within two hours it would be done.

  Commander Sergei Borgnev ordered his twenty-two warships forward and, gathering speed, ignored the bodies below them: men waving, men screaming, men covered in oil, men still on fire, men floating face down, men without faces, men without arms, all suddenly swept inwards by the surge, broken into little pieces by the power of the water and the scythe of the giant propellers.

  But the forward frigates hadn’t gone more than a thousand yards when the alarms were sounded, and they broke from their tight formation and scattered left and right within the confines of the deep-water channel. Sonar on the forward tracking ships had detected massive underwater obstructions blocking the channel ahead. Quickly the sonar computerised the radio signals and translated them into picture outlines.

  Commander Sergei Borgnev took the pictures and asked for more tea as he examined the sonar silhouettes of the two submerged but still floating hulks of the Okinawa.

  Yellowbean 720 began its climb to twenty-nine thousand feet, twenty-two minutes after the first men of the Rapid Deployment Force had hit Saudi Arabian sand. The ground satellite station was now in direct contact with US Command in Adana in Turkey and Yellowbean’s pilot, Colonel James Pringle, heard the first transmission safely sent and quickly acknowledged. ‘THIS IS TWO. SNOWBALL FORCE RAPIDLY DEPLOYED AT THIS TIME. WE ARE ON THE GROUND AND SPREADING. REPEATING WE ARE SUCCESSFULLY DEPLOYED AT THIS TIME.’ And Adana had come back via the Indian Ocean satellite: ‘THAT’S HOW IT’S MEANT TO BE BULLY BOYS, THAT’S HOW IT’S MEANT TO BE. JUST KEEP IT MOVING OUT THERE.’ Colonel Pringle wondered, as he had done at other moments of American drama, why it was that distant anonymous controllers always used the language of the movies.